Happy Birthday Andy

Andy Warhol would have been 86 years old two days ago.  Instead he died of a nosocomial infection after having relatively benign gall bladder surgery at New York Hospital in the late 80s.  He had checked into the hospital under the name of Bob Robert.

Which, in the spirt of Richard Parker, the tiger in Life of Pi (wildly overrated, both book and movie), would be a good name for a dog.  I think you would say it as one word -- BobRobert.

Me?  I think I'm going to die from eating the pickles I made yesterday.  More specifically, from eating the pickles in the mason jar on the left.  A kind of a version of Blanche DuBois' prediction that she would one day die from eating an unwashed grape.  I've always been theatrical.

The two on the right, in the plastic Chinese soup to go containers, are what's called refrigerator pickles.  That means no attempt to sterilize the container was made, nor were they processed to make them shelf-stable for long periods of time.  So you let them pickle for a week or two, then you eat them.

The jar on the left, however, was all of those things, although I'm not sure I got it right.  Something to do with the top sucking down to create a seal?  Anyway, the current plan is to tuck them in the back of the cupboard until, say, Thanksgiving.  At which point I will remove them, refrigerate them because who likes room-temperature pickles, put my papers in order, say good bye to my family and friends, then eat them and die, likely alone, in excruciating agony.

Thank God Irby, my redbone coonhound, is an imaginary dog.  So no worries about his wellbeing.

Update:  I've decided not to eat the pickles until February, 2015 in order to say hello, at least once, hopefully several times, to my grandson.