a lightshow

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Nathan Grohn

It was already past bedtime, but Dad asked if I wanted to go sit on the back porch and watch the lightshow. I asked what he meant, and he said that we were due for 15 minutes of rain in a week of dry, and that lightning storms were perking up in the middle of the valley.We went out back. After a few minutes, Dad asked if I had my camera. I did, but not the tripod. So I borrowed his. After about five more minutes, Dad asked if I wanted a glass of wine. He came back with that and two plates of Mom’s rhubarb torte.

After ten minutes of shooting 10 and 15 second exposures by hand, Dad said I should get one of those handheld remote buttons. I said I had one, and went inside to get it. After catching a few strikes, I settled on what I thought was a good combination of exposure time and aperture.

We were shooting from the porch over the barn, but the messengered electrical line that goes to the shop was in the middle of the frame. Dad asked if I wanted to go out to the pasture.The strikes were all a good number of miles away, but the energy and power on display that rarely happens so brilliantly or for so long had us exclaiming every couple minutes.

We ended up behind the barn shooting northwest over Albany and Jefferson, engaging the remote shutter button and letting the camera click away until the memory was full.

Out of 36 good exposures, this is the best shot of the night, a single 5 second exposure, aperture f/18, ISO-800.

Lighting over Albany and Jefferson Oregon

animals

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Nathan Grohn

Part I

I’m not much of a cat person. I’m not really much of a dog person either. They smell. They leave hair everywhere. They make noise and take continual maintenance. After you pet them, you have to wash your hands before you can eat because your cat was just in his litter box doing his thing, and just kicked up poop-laden dust which landed on his fur just before you petted him. Their food costs a lot – more than some of the food I eat, pound for pound. They may pee on your stuff, and then it will smell too. In the cost-benefit analysis, I don’t see where the second outweighs the first.

Don’t get me wrong. I like animals. I really like how they taste. In college I was known for having 17 different kinds of meat in my freezer. I was a legend in my prime rib.

I’m not eating meat just now, mostly because it is 3 in the morning and I can’t sleep, but also because it is Lent. It isn’t that I can’t eat meat during Lent, and on occasion I will, like if the fast might cause offense or be trouble to others. But animals are something I probably consume a bit excessively on a regular basis . . . like six brats for lunch excessively. This very modest Lenten fast doesn’t earn me anything, but serves to remind me of what I truly hunger for – the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, shed for me for the forgiveness of my sins. And I suppose I am also reminded to be a good steward of the animals and other blessings God bestows so freely and which I enjoy so much.

Because that’s what animals really are – a part of God’s creation over which humans have been given dominion. Animals serve us as beasts of burden, as clothing, as companion animals, and as food. We are told we may consume them, something that happened only after the Fall into sin. But that doesn’t mean we should do so frivolously. Neither does dominion mean we may be abusive to God’s First Article gifts.

But animals are definitely not people. Jim Gaffigan has a comedic bit about the tear-jerking ASPCA ad where a dog says to Sarah McLachlan something like, “That was a bit heavy-handed wasn’t it? I mean, come on, I’m only a dog!” The Christian Children’s Fund doesn’t even play on that level. And then there’s the bumper stickers. I saw one the other day that said “I love my granddogs.” How do you get a granddog? Is that your kid’s dog? Or is it your dog’s puppies, in which case wouldn’t they also be your plain old dogs with no grand-? And the decades-old “dog is my co-pilot.” At least dog isn’t your pilot. That would be really stupid. (Aside: This is obviously a turn on “God is my co-pilot” like the Darwin fish-with-legs stickers and such. And for the well meaning folks who would put a “God is my co-pilot” sticker on a visible part of their car I want to ask: So who the heck is your pilot? It better not be you. When I’m my own pilot, I usually get lost or even crash the plane. Even when I ask The Co-Pilot for input, I end up ignoring it and doing what I want anyway. Come to think of it, it might be best to stay out of the cockpit all-together. He’s got it all under control, doesn’t need my help, and He’ll get me where I need to go. And of course, by God, I’m talking about Father, Son & Holy Spirit – Athanasian Creed God. And if your pilot is a different god, then you’ve got a problem because nobody is flying your plane. End aside.)

Sure, we can get attached to them. Ask any 4-H’er who has had a market animal. It’s all well and good – up until the last night of the fair, up until the auction. You can tell the first-year juniors, especially the girls, because tears are streaming down their nine-year-old cheeks as the auctioneer is calling out the price of the steer or lamb or hog that they fed, raised, trained, washed, groomed, showed, and are now showing for the last time to the crowd of bidders – and it finally becomes real that this animal is meat. I cried. Especially when I put my lamb Gremlin (movie or car, it really was that long ago, and no, I didn’t name him) into the general market pen with eighty other sheep because the buyer didn’t actually want him. I knew Gremlin was going to slaughter with all the other sheep in that pen.

Seriously, people. Animals are not people. Animals are not humans. Why do we have pet cemeteries? We bury dead people and mark the place of it in the expectation that Christ will call them from their graves on Judgment Day. Please don’t mark the place where you buried your cat with a cross. Because I hope you didn’t also baptize your cat. (If you did, this is something that can be repented of and forgiven. And this would also be a good time to review what Baptism is, what God is doing in water and Word, and the promises he attaches to it.)

So in summary, animals are one of God’s gifts given freely to people for food, pets, and labor. They are things for us to be good stewards over. They are not people, children, grandchildren or pilots, and I don’t think all dogs go to heaven. Here ends my short treatise on human-animal relations.

Part II

I think I mentioned that I’m not really a cat person.

One snowy November day, there was a mewing outside. A kitten was on my front step. It ran away. It came back through the snowy lawn and mewed again under my light. It let me pick it up and bring it in. It had a bandaged wound on its neck and it kept scratching the spot. I bought a cone collar for dogs, the smallest size, and still had to cut it down to fit a kitten. It wanted to jump backward out of the cone on its neck.

There were no reports of a missing kitten in the neighborhood, or at the vet, or in the paper or online. No one wanted him. Being wholly opposed to cats, every day I said I would take him to the shelter, but was begged not to, and I finally asked the landlord for permission to keep a pet.

His name was Merlin. I didn’t name this one either . . . I championed for Gandalf and lost. And though I didn’t name him, I was his protector from the outside, his poop-box changer, veterinarian taker, claw-clipper, and very often his food-person. I had rescued him and held him even though he had worms. Having been abandoned, he feared being alone, feared the outdoors, and dogs, and cars. He didn’t like laps, but eventually stayed in mine for five minutes, then ten, then an hour, then two. Other laps were not equal.

He grew to 18 pounds, tall and deep, wide in shoulder, narrow in rump with turned-in hocks. If he were a sheep, he wouldn’t have shown particularly well – a red ribbon. He didn’t know he could jump as high as he really could. He was a motor-boater. Amazingly, he didn’t smell. He didn’t pee on my stuff. He never sprayed. He never pooped anywhere except where he should have. He loved to play and romp and wrestle. He was afraid of children because he didn’t know what they were. He cried whenever I went into the garage or left for work, as if I would never return.

This cat was different from all the other cats I knew – the ones that smelled, or whose noses dripped, or who clawed you to get attention, or who peed on your stuff. He was my little fuzzy buddy.

I had to give Merlin up. He was officially no longer mine a little less than 17 months ago. I had to leave him with the one I left, to whom Merlin was a comfort. Strange that this was the hardest thing.

Last night I received notice that Merlin died. Broken tooth, extraction, vomiting, ruptured trachea, dead, aged about 7-1/2 years.

Did I mention I’m not really a cat person? I’m not much interested in getting another. Besides, I already had the best cat . . . ever. 17 months and I still miss my little fuzzy buddy.

meet Red

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Nathan Grohn

On the telephone, my first question was, “Is it really pink, or is it actually red? The pictures look sort of pink.”

I wasn’t sure I was ready to drive a pink pickup truck. Otherwise, the pictures looked good, and the price was right.

For weeks I had combed internet classifieds looking for another old Mercedes diesel to replace my beloved Naidine, only to find that, at 30 years old, these cars have generally not been well cared-for at some point. Good ones are hard to come by, and I didn’t want to tackle the prospect of getting a neglected one back into shape. I had thought of going in a different direction and looking for a little pickup like Grandpa had. I haul more of things than people these days, and I thought a pickup might be useful.

When the title came, it said the color is maroon, but that sounds like “stranded” to me, so I am sticking with Red.

When I test-drove Red, I advised the seller that he might look for a white balance setting in his camera so that the color of the cars he was selling would come out closer to the real thing in his pictures.

Red came with less than 100,000 miles, air-conditioning already installed, good tires, alloy wheels, V6, automatic, and 4×4. The A/C blew hot because it had lost its charge. It blew especially hot because the blend door was broken and stuck directing all the air through the heater core, no matter the setting. The radio worked, but the display didn’t, so changing stations was tricky. Even though the seller did not know his camera settings, he apparently was skilled at resetting the On-Board Diagnostics. Just after I had paid for the pickup and it was mine, the very next time I turned it on, the check engine light lit up.

I went to get Red titled, and was told that I needed to get emissions tested first. I went to emissions, and they asked, “Did you know your check engine light is on?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, you failed because your check engine light is on.”

Based on the error code printed out on my failed test, I replaced a certain sensor, and by disconnecting the battery for a minute, I reset the check engine light. It stayed off. I got my emissions test the next day without a problem. The day after that, the check engine light came back on.

About the air conditioning which now works: Mom and Dad are avid garage-salers – mostly Mom. She found a sale where a box of R-134a refrigerant recharge cans would be sold. We went to the sale, and found another buyer haggling over one can, only wanting to pay $4 for it. The seller said “$25 for all six cans, or $5 for one.” While my competitor was thinking, I handed the seller $25. I then sold the man one can for $5. I had my air-conditioning tools with me this first weekend I owned Red, and we set to work pulling a vacuum and testing it the next morning. Wouldn’t you know, it held the charge.

The radio display was a simple fix, mainly because I repair electronics for a living. This pickup was made at that transition time between cassette tape and CD, so the stereo has both. This is very handy because I still have one of those cassette tape adapters from the 90’s, allowing me to play my Issues Etc. podcast from my smartphone, right on the stock stereo through the cassette well.

Overall, Red and I are getting along. Gasoline engines require a complicated electrical system to make the spark that fires the engine, and there is much more to go wrong than with an old diesel engine which only requires fuel and compression, but so far, so good. The check engine light is still on, but Red runs well, the mileage isn’t bad, and the light can stay on until I am physically able to do more work chasing down the problem. We’ve had a few chances to use the 4-wheel drive, like after the bed-liner blew out twice during a storm on the way to a funeral. The first time it lit in an orchard, the second in a corn field. I had installed the cam-locks that are supposed to hold the liner down, but apparently they were no match for the wind gusts as I was heading South. After the funeral I stopped to buy some rubber-snubbers. I think Red will be getting one of those spray-in liners someday.

I had to wait a few weeks for it to come in the mail, but I now have the most important accessory installed.

All I need now is to find a ~~maroon~~ red canopy . . . like the white one Grandpa had on his Ranger.

Rest In Pieces, Naidine, March 1984 – June 2013

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Nathan Grohn

Thirteen months ago I was taking one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips. It was nothing fancy, nothing overseas, nothing out of the country. It was the trip to my brother’s wedding in North Carolina. The first week was all the normal wedding things, being with family, the wedding itself, and seeing the newlyweds off. But while everyone else from the Grohn side of things flew home, I drove my brother’s ’78 Corvette back to Oregon. It was a storage situation, and having no garage where he would live with his wife, it seemed the best thing was to store it in Oregon for the time being.

A properly working Corvette is fun to drive. And this one was properly working. Sure, it dripped coolant and power steering fluid the whole way. Sure, the cruise control was completely disconnected. Sure, air conditioning was not working. In June. But Austin had gone over this machine, and with a new 350, I was out to cover more than 3000 miles in one week. I stopped along the way to take some pictures at landmarks and monuments, and since I was alone, the car was my proxy.

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This car was fun to drive. Maybe I’ve said that before. The carburetor was new, and hadn’t been adjusted all the way. It was after-firing a little under some accelerating conditions, and we didn’t know yet what octane to use. But by the time I got to South Dakota, most of this was sorted out, and I was able to chirp the tires on the shifts. My longest day of travel was 820 miles in 20 hours from Clemmons, NC, to Saint Louis, MO.

Now, when I say fun to drive, I mean for the first 200 miles the first day, or the first 100 any day thereafter. The floorboards get hot, the car is LOUD, and the bucket seats kind of ride up on your hips (i’m not particularly wide either), and after a few hours, I shifted back and forth in the seat periodically. You can’t take much with you in this car – there are two seats, and a little spot under the back window that can hold a suitcase, maybe a suitcase and a half.

The last day of travel was over 700 miles from Grand Teton National Park to my folk’s house in the Mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon, by which point, I thought I’d driven the car enough, a total of 3500 miles. But this was a time of major transition in my life, and 3500 miles of open road in a sweet car was good medicine.

At this point, I realized, this car I’d spent a week in, this car I’d crossed the North American continent in, this car my brother had spent so much time working on, didn’t have a name.

A couple days later, I prepared to return to my home in order to go to work. I got in my own car that had been parked for almost three weeks, turned it on, put it in drive, and touched the accelerator. Nothing happened. I pushed the pedal a little more. It started to heave, but didn’t roll. I put it almost all the way to the floor . . . and then it moved. But this is all very normal, because it is a Mercedes diesel, and that’s how they are when they’re cold. My car is nothing like a ’78 Corvette. I don’t get many looks about it, not so often do people say “hey, nice car!”, and I can’t do 0 to 60 in less than 20 seconds, unless I’ve driven off a cliff. I can, however, haul things in the trunk, mainly because it has one, and more than two people can sit in it comfortably. I don’t know that this stately four-door sedan is more my style than the flashy Corvette. I don’t really know what my style is for that matter, but the 300SD is my car, I know it well, and it has served me in the same way for almost ten years.

Her turbocharged 5-cylinder diesel motor sounds like that of a tractor. She smells like a tractor too. She had 280,000 miles when I got her, and she came with a name: Naidine. Naidine was so named because her license plate was 203 NAI, and the previous owner, or his wife, thought it was right, even if misspelled. In Washington State, they make you replace the plates every seven years, whether they need it or not, so the NAI plates are gone, but the name stuck. When I went to pick her up, the previous owner showed me how the glow-plugs worked, how the seat switches worked, and how short the turning radius is (surprisingly short for a full-size sedan). The seat switches are not toggles like most other cars, they are shaped like the seat cushion, and you simply push the model cushion in the direction you want that part of the seat to go. “Hey, it’s a Mercedes! What do you expect!” said Bruce, the previous owner.

Original plates 203 NAI

The engineering in her is something else. There are only two design flaws I know of, both relate to accessories bolted onto the engine, and I made workarounds for both of them in time. I got to know the car pretty well. I replaced the engine when it developed a loud knock (never put starter fluid in one of these engines, as tempting as it is when your glow plugs aren’t working). The hood (bonnet in Mercedes-speak) not just goes up, but has a second position where it is straight up in the air. This is useful when you take the engine or transmission out, because both must be done together through the engine compartment. There isn’t too much I haven’t worked on on that car. If you have one of these cars, or one like it, and the battery doesn’t want to stay charged, there is a way you can modify your stock alternator regulator by adding a diode, and this will boost charging voltage by about .5V, and make your modern battery happier. I never had to rebuild the transmission. I never rebuilt the steering box or injector pump. I never had to mess with the differential. Otherwise, I pretty much know how it works, because I kept it that way. I keep a thermometer in the A/C vent to be sure that the service I did on the system is holding. The only time I paid someone to work on Naidine was to have the rust under the rear window (windscreen in Mercedes-speak) repaired and repainted, and to have the glass reset. I guess I also had someone else install ball joints and do the front-end alignment.

Hunting

I would have driven her anywhere, and often did. I took her hunting in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. As a Washingtonian, I didn’t want to pay for the non-resident permit, so I was only shooting with a camera. When I got to camp at an elevation of about 10000 feet, I asked my uncle if he had seen any other Mercedes diesels up there. He said, “not too many, less than twenty.” She has never left me stranded, except one time when the alternator/water pump belt tension bolt broke. She couldn’t stay cool enough to drive on the freeway, so I limped back home, tensioned it by brute force, bolted the alternator down, and got to work two hours late. I later invented my own bolt, since the one from the parts-house cost over $141 and kept breaking (one of the two known flaws), and it has never been a problem again. That was the only time I couldn’t get somewhere on time on account of trouble with Naidine – all the other failures were minor, or detected and dealt with ahead of time.

Camping

As I drove away in my slow ’84 300SD, I realized how nice my old car really was. The input jack on the radio wasn’t intermittent. The dash clock kept perfect time. The ride was smooth and quiet. She drips a little oil (what Mercedes diesel doesn’t?) but I don’t have to check the fluids every time I fill up the tank. Good ol’ Naidine.

Naidine in fine form

This Saturday past, I was stopped in a line of traffic, and someone ran into the back of Naidine. I don’t know exactly what size truck it was, but it something like a 1- or 2-ton flatbed. I didn’t get out of the car at the scene, but a couple days later I got to see Naidine where she’s locked up at the tow yard. It’s ugly. Naidine is done for. Mercedes gives grille badges at 250K, 500K, and 1M kilometers. Naidine had already passed the first two marks, but I figured I’d just wait and go in to get them when the last one had been passed too. But we’re 250,000 miles short of that, and it would have taken at least 25 more years at the current rate.

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I thought I had taken more pictures of my car, but apparently not. This is all of them, and most of them only once she got crunched. Strange I should take over 1000 pictures of my brother’s car in 3500 miles, but only a handful of my own in almost 90,000 miles.

Final Odometer reading

And which car got driven in the Strawberry Parade this year?

Going to the Strawberry Parade

Not Naidine. She was left behind in the driveway. Sorry Dad, you missed your chance on that one. And Naidine had air conditioning.

But lets face it – Naidine is just a car, and will be replaced with another car, or maybe a pickup truck. And I’m already working on the most important part: getting another bumper sticker.

Issues, Etc. – Christ-Centered Cross-Focused Talk Radio – www.issuesetc.org

Russ and Helen’s

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Nathan Grohn

There is a bend in Highway 20 between where I grew up and the freeway. At this bend there stood the Cottonwood Ballroom. Grandpa said that Harry James played there, back in the day, but I remember it as being dilapidated and unused. At that same bend is an intersection, and the road that goes off to the East is the way to Russ and Helen’s.

Every Friday night, the Grohn’s would go there, often stopping at the Cottonwoods convenience store where Dad would pick up a two-liter bottle of soda. In the fall and winter, we got there in the dark, and as we reached the end of the gravel driveway, Dad would swing the car wide so the high-beams would scan across the empty field and we might see the glow of deer eyes looking back at us.

It was an old two-story farmhouse, painted white, built on a high foundation because in the years before the dams were built, it would flood every year. Just inside the back door, the wood stove was burning full tilt.

This was Quartet practice. The Quartet was Mom and Dad, and Doug and Sandie, another couple from church. They sang four-part harmony on many Sundays in church. Helen was the organist at Bethlehem Lutheran, and she played organ for the Quartet too. From her Hammond and the four voices practicing in her living room, I learned the sounds of harmony. This is one of the three things in my childhood to which I attribute my musical affinity for harmony.

I grew up out in the country, outside of town a few miles, but this was farther out. It was quieter at night, farther from the highway. The big white barn no longer sheltered livestock, but there was still some mouldering hay in the loft. Bats and owls were the occupants of the space, evidenced by the piles of guano and some owl pellets. While the guano was bat droppings, the owl pellets were something else altogether. The undigestable remains of the rodents the owls had dined on became smooth round balls of hair and bone which the owls then horked up and left for us to find. Gross? No – awesome! By disassembling these dried out pellets the skeletons of owl food could be recovered. This was much easier than getting skeletons in other ways that involved a live or recently deceased animal, but relied on the great fortune of finding owl pellets in the first place. (Have I mentioned that Dad was a science teacher?)

At Quartet practice, us kids would play while the grown-ups sang. There were a couple tins of classic Tinkertoys, the pieces skinnier than the ones made today. There were matchbox cars and children’s books. I read about the Pilgrims, and how Squanto taught them to plant corn.

Russ was Helen’s husband and a man of few words. There was a joke about one of his phrases being “dad-gommit!” He had his special chair in the living room. One Friday night, Dad said that Russ wanted to show me something, so I went to Russ who was sitting in his chair. It was a BB gun, the plastic stock slightly melted, probably from being too close to the blistering heat of the stove. He showed me how the BBs were loaded into it, how to pump it, and how to use the safety switch. He gave me that BB gun to share with my sister and brother, and seemed very pleased about it.

In the bathroom at Russ and Helen’s were funny clear soaps in lots of colors. There was a bathroom scale with a big lens under which the numbers spun and finally came to rest under a red line. And the toilet had a funny carpet-like cover on the lid. This cover and the u-shaped rug around the base of the toilet changed periodically. At Christmas, the toilet lid cover had Santa’s face on it. When the toilet lid was lifted, the cover on the underside had Santa covering his eyes with his mitted hands.

When the practicing was done, it was time for snacks, sometimes followed by dessert. Snacks and dessert – no actual meal, just good stuff. Snacks might be Russ’s pickled herring, which I am reported to have eaten enough to turn my lips white, or it might be Sandie’s cheese fondue, or something else good. The bottle of pop Dad got on the way was for us kids to have with the snacks. The grown-ups got various grown-up beverages, but we pretended that our soda-pop was beer. Snacks were the best part of Quartet practice.

When snacks were done, the cards came out, and it was time for us kids to go to bed. The stairs were very skinny, and very steep, the narrow steps covered with black rubber treads. Jugs of Russ’s homemade wine were perched on the lower steps, off to the side as out-of-the-way as they could get. Rhubarb, raspberry, currant – wine made from fruit grown behind the house. While my house only had an attic at the top of a folding ladder, this house had bedrooms at the top of this skinny staircase, one on each side at the top of the landing. The ceilings were at funny angles with the roof of the house. The three of us were tucked into one bed, and expected to go to sleep while everyone else played Pinochile downstairs.

The bed had an electric blanket. The only other electric blanket I had ever seen was at Grandma and Grandpa’s. But this electric blanket was better – it had a controller with a dial at the head of the bed. When you turned the dial, a different number would light orange. We turned this glowing orange dial in the dark, counting the various numbers as they clicked by. What a marvelous toy!

At some point we must have fallen asleep. Magically, we woke Saturday morning back in our own beds at home. In later years, when I was a little older, I was woken up and walked out of the house under my own power down the long sidewalk to the car. I looked up and saw Dad carrying one of my slumbering siblings. I watched out the front window of the car from the back seat as we went home, the voices of those awake muted. As we approached the intersection at Cottonwoods and then made that hard left turn back toward home, it was like crossing the threshold between the world of Russ and Helen’s, and the world of my own home.

Just before Russ and Helen’s 50th anniversary, Russ wasn’t doing too well. One night, the mustard colored rotary phone on our kitchen wall rang. I was at the kitchen table. Mom picked up the phone, said “Thank you,” to the caller, and hung up. She called across the bar to Dad who was in the other room, “Honey? – Russ died.” A few days later, there was Russ, asleep in his casket, at his funeral at Bethlehem. We went to the graveside service. I saw the vault lowered into the earth at the Oddfellows Cemetery. I saw the earth filled in, and the little metal frame holding a typed marker pressed into the ground. Dad explained that it took some time for a proper stone marker to be made.

Helen said it meant a lot to her that my sister, brother, and I were at the funeral. I don’t know if we had the choice to go or not, but at the time it seemed right to be there. We had spent most of our Friday nights in his home, and did a good bit of our growing up there. We still went to Helen’s on Friday nights for practice. It was hard to stop calling the place Russ’s too. Russ’s chair was empty. I didn’t want to sit in it because it was Russ’s. It was still his chair.

Tonight I drove down Highway 20 in the dark, away from Mom and Dad’s and toward the freeway. In the daytime it wouldn’t cross my mind as I rounded that corner where the Cottonwoods Ballroom once stood. But in the dark on a cool spring night, I can’t help remembering the right turn off the highway and over the threshold into the world of Russ and Helen’s. Passing by the intersection I remember a blazing wood stove, pickled herring, a Hammond organ, four-part harmony, homemade wine, Tinkertoys, a glowing numbered dial, cards, merriment, and sweet dreams . . .

A Tasty Savings Account

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Nathan Grohn

A few years ago I was looking for a piggy bank to give to my year-old nephew for Christmas. I found all sorts of piggy banks. Red, blue, green, pink, polka-dots, stripes, solids, furry, football pigs, soccer pigs, bicycle pigs, baseball pigs, sports team pigs, ceramic, cast iron, plastic, clay, leather, brass, wooden, chrome, clear, large, small, flowery, psychedelic, seasonal, electronic, musical, talking, oinking, fat pigs, skinny pigs, and pigs dressed as other animals. I ended up settling on a blue ceramic piggy bank with red polka dots, or something like that.

But I never found the piggy bank I was looking for. It seems so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this particular pig yet?

So I think someone should combine the following two pictures:

Here is my rendering of what it should look like:

The shape should be like a real pig I think, not like a blimp with snout, feet, and ears as an afterthought, you know . . . for accuracy.

So if anyone decides to make this and can make any profit at it, I think that’s great. But I want a cut . . . something I can have for breakfast. Ham or bacon. Either is fine with me.

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