Okay, my lovely wife, Karen, had mentioned to me that she would like to have some corn stalks to help decorate the front of the house for the Thanksgiving/Halloween season.

Corn stalks ? Decorate ? Okay. So on the way home from the golf course yesterday....

I stopped by a farmer's field. The corn stalks all a lovely golden brown color. Now I could see the decorate part. So I plunged through a ditch (didn't see that), got a little muddy and started tugging at a corn stalk.

Crap, it didn't move. I tugged harder and ripped it out of the ground, roots and all, almost falling backwards into the ditch. I tried another. Same thing. Inbedded in the ground. Why wouldn't it be, I thought. I needed a machete, for crying out loud.

As cars passed by and people stared at me out their windows, like I was a wild man from Borneo ripping at these corn stalks (not that there's anything wrong from being from Borneo...), I looked up at the farm house and noticed someone also watching me out their window.

Time to leave and quickly. So I grabbed the half dozen corn stalks I'd managed to excavate from the ground, threw them in the trunk and scooted away.

When I got home and proudly showed my corn stalks to my wife, she said, "These still have corn cobs on them". You're kidding. Oops. "Bonus", I said.

So that's my corn stalk story.

strato-stalk