pancho lost his band, you know...somewhere down in mexico

While eating brunch today (Amana bacon, blueberry muffins, and fried potatoes -- my father's specialty), my brother called out my father over the real lyrics to this Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard duet called "Pancho and Lefty". I never knew that that was the name of the song or that it was by Willie Nelson, but for the past twenty years, my father has occasionally sung "Pancho lost his band, you know...somewhere down in Mexico" to himself without ever continuing the song. It turns out that the real lyric is "Pancho met his match you know, on the deserts down in Mexico", and that it had absolutely nothing to do with Pancho Villa as dad always claimed. Sadness!

We recovered, though, and played a game of hearts in the afternoon, which my brother unfortunately won. Then, I did some shooting -- both in the gun sense and in the camera sense. I shot at some pop cans (you might say 'soda cans') with a couple of different handguns. My brother laughed at me when he saw me shoot the first gun with my ear protection around my neck and my sunglasses on top of my head -- but I forgot to put the ear protection on, and I made a conscious decision that I didn't want to ruin my expensive Bulgari sunglasses, particularly since they likely wouldn't have saved my eyes anyway. However, despite my poor decision-making skills, I still hit the targets several times, which made me happy. Then, I wandered around the front yard and took some pictures of the ice-covered landscape.

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching some documentary on public television with my mom while she made delicious homemade chicken and noodles. The documentary followed a scientist tracing the exodus of early humans out of Africa to Australia, Asia, Europe, and the Americas in an attempt to document our 'family tree.' I should be barred from ever watching such shows; he was in the wilds of Arctic Circle Siberia with some miserable-looking nomadic reindeer herders, and all I could think was "I really want to go there!" While I had my doubts about some of his theories, I quite enjoyed it, although my brother came up with the title I would use if I filmed a similar show: "Cousin Fuckers: A Journey" (this came from a discussion about how the human population got down to a couple of bottlenecks of extremely limited population over the millennia, forcing us to go back to fucking our cousins until the population grew again, which we thought would be a good way to explain in layman's terms some of the theories currently on the table about evolution and migration).

I only have two more days left in Iowa, which makes me sad, so I will go to bed in an effort to make sure I wake up early enough tomorrow to enjoy it. Goodnight!