With beef, onions, and cauliflower.

Earworms, that is. Cracklin’ Rosie. My brain rebels at it, but apparently can’t get enough. Duke of Earl. The Name Game.

For several hours now, I’ve been slow-roasting a pork butt. It will ready when the meat shreds with a fork. Doused with homemade barbecue sauce, it will make juicy and tender sandwiches.

I forgot that I can’t have the buns that I bought. Since the only vegetable that goes on barbecued pork sandwiches is coleslaw, I shudder to think how to grasp this mix in my hands.

With the oatmeal at breakfast, the beef rib at lunch, and the pork for dinner, I will have a warm shower for dessert.

But the weekend calls, kids coming home from Berkeley. Oscar night means tv-friendly food. More on this later.

There are leftover ribs and egg rolls, that if heated and eaten here at the keyboard, will make an even worse mess than the earlier oatmeal fiasco. My day job ends, technically speaking, in about seven minutes. I will wait.

The impressively fat buds are much preferred by Argentine ants in their ever-advancing quest for aphid-farming territories.

A mountain lion, I can understand, but a tiger is something else entirely.

In parts of the garden, there is a stirring and a fragrance.

My foray to Clement St. in SF Monday yielded lots at a great price. Excellent in a stirfry, or steamed, served with a dip or leftover sausage gravy.

Mostly a viscous one. Oatmeal and vegetable juice make for a filling breakfast, although one must be free of distractions for this to be a success.

I bought a new bowl, white with sweet peas around the rim. Sadly, I have been varying the proportion of oatmeal to liquid, and not taking into account the smaller size of the bowl. Result: oatmeal overflow in the microwave with large, sticky dollops on my sleeve and the floor. Since there is so little actually left inside the bowl, I make another serving in the old, clean bowl. So here I sit with a very generous amount that probably should count toward my lunch. Forgot about the stuff on the sleeve, therefore getting more oatmeal on my desk.

Mrs. Jones being quite insistent, I turn now to smoothjazz.com. Jazz purists may sneer, but it goes well with my workday, and wipes away annoying remnants of ads and unwanted songs. Uh-oh. Their promotional jingle is a catchy, Brazilian-influenced ditty.

Making gravy is not difficult, but when I am distracted by a)hunger, and b)fatigue, and c)the fact that I really can’t have any of the biscuits I made, then I will err. Eyeballing the amount of flour needed is not such a great idea either. As I added the flour to the sausage drippings, then whisked in a cup of whipping cream, the mass that resulted looked more like mashed potatoes (which everyone knows is forbidden on a low-carb diet). The rest of the carton of cream went in, but dilution seemed impossible. However, the ‘gravy’ worked exceedingly well as a dip. The bulk of my supper plate was gravy, flanked by a few nicely browned sausage links, salad on the side. There are no pictures of this gravy because I ate most of it.

Normally, I don’t start the morning with music, but this is getting ridiculous. This song is okay, not something I’d listen to over and over, the culprit being the oldies station I sometimes turn on when work is really intense, and I don’t have time to go through the CDs. What’s worse is when Sly and the Family Stone’s Dance to the Music starts up. So why are we plagued by music we don’t like? (Careful, site contains vicious earworm candidates.)

And don’t even think about jingles. Mattress Discounters, anyone? Copywriters would be thrilled to know that decades later, people would be singing, ‘Tap, Tap Plastics,” as they went about their daily routine. To vary the pain, the cheery singing of a long-defunct radio station’s call letters can pop to the forefront of an earworm attack, resulting in what I would call the ‘deranged and relentless mix’. I really should get an iPod.

Cowboy music, for example, the Marty Stuart soundtrack for All the Pretty Horses. Buttermilk Sky is from a very old western, Canyon Passage.

Brushing my teeth at 6 a.m. the other morning, I Got You, Babe switched on in my head , and I turned on the radio in desperation. All those rainy morning commute reports of overturned vehicles finally wiped the song away. Sonny & Cher songs are particularly tenacious. More on earworms soon.

Making drop biscuits for supper, I innocently picked up the buttermilk carton. Now, hours later, Hoagy Carmichael sings to me from the depths of my childhood, Buttermilk Sky Only the first few words are looping through my head, which makes it all the more irritating. I’m sure I must have asked back then, but no one could tell me just what a buttermilk sky was. Of course, Google knows. Watch a buttermilk/mackerel sky form with the Lawrence Hall of Science camera.

My dad had quite a collection of music when I was growing up - lots of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Mills Brothers, Nat King Cole, and Hoagy.

Another view, this one from Roger Brown