How novel.

* The sun is out.  Then again, it was out for parts of each of the past three days, each of which also featured, at varying times, thunderstorms, torrential downpours, sticky humidity and outright chilliness.  The most lasting effect of all this, though, has been a backyard better suited for rice paddies than rhododendrons.  I swear I saw Robert Duvall being chased by a couple of Viet Cong guerrillas back there, and there may have been the smell of napalm in the morning.  Eleanor and I have each taken cracks at mowing in the back, which desperately needs it but which is still so saturated that it only results in pushing grooves into the dirt and mowing the grass down into the mud rather than into the blades.  Fortunately, there's only a cloud in front of Mister Golden Sun on my weather app today, so hopefully by tonight I can get back there with the mower, and possibly a giant suction hose, and make some progress.

* I'm awaiting a pre-publication book to read-and-react. Not only will this keep me reading on a regular schedule (and more accustomed to reading e-versions), I'm also going to try to turn it into more of a writing discipline, turning some of the dead hours in my life into time to write.  I've had a decent idea kicking around, but it needs some research, some working out of loose ends, and mostly some time to turn into something more than Yet Another Good Dead End.

Not today. Tuesday.

The oldsters here may remember this commercial:

Watch on YouTube

To the younguns, there's this version of it:

You can't stop the signal, Mal.

For everyone living relatively close to this corner of the 'verse, Tuesday is important. If you live in New York's 26th Congressional District (which you very well may, if you live in Erie, Niagara, Genesee, Orleans, Monroe, Ontario or Livingston county), you need to boost the signal.   The Democratic candidate is now leading in one of the reddest Republican districts in the Northeast, but her slimy Republicant opponent still has three days to pull some last-minute tricks. Best I can do is help in Get Out The Vote efforts. So.

Here's some help in a few quick steps if you're in Erie (I suspect other county election boards have similar stuff online.) Click this link.  Put in your address. Click "find polling place." This being a website run by a bunch of partisan political hacks, it will NOT display your polling place, but a click or two later, you'll get a link for "my elected officials." If it says your representative in Congress is "vacant," you're in NY26. Keep going. Three or four clicks of the "find polling place" link later, it will tell you. Go there on Tuesday. Vote Row A. Keep Calamity Jane and Crazy Jack out of Congress. Please. Then come back here Tuesday after 9 p.m. Eastern for the party.

Before then, though: tell two voters. And they'll tell two voters. And so on, and so on, and so on....

"¡No mas! ¡No mas!"

That is my response, not to being hit in the head by Sugar Ray Leonard, but to trying to cope with multilingual directions on packages.

Earlier today, our swamp still being too swampy for actual mowage, I headed forth to weedwhack a bit along the back of the house. In time, I got to most of the compost heap, as well as much of the wild berm back there, built up ages ago from dumping sod from our eventual front gardens, which runs about halfway along our lot line in the back between our yard and Sally's. Somewhere in there, the trimmer line finally petered out, and as I upended it to be sure of that (having very smartly bought an extra reel the last time), I somehow managed to screw up the single most important direction printed amongst the 25 square inches, in blinding 6-point black type, of instructions on the back of the replacement feed spool package, conveniently in three languages.

"Be careful not to lose the spring."

"No perdez pas le ressort."

"Tenga cuidado de no perder el resorte."

The spring goes over a half-inch-high, quarter-inch diameter, gizmo that the spool rests on. And it went to be with Jesus in the air mud at about 11:15 this morning.  I retraced steps to no avail, but then decided, meh, I'll just get another backup reel at our reliable neighborhood hardware store, where they'll surely be able to replace this silly 10-cent spring.

That's when I started taking this Apocalypse thing seriously: Ed Youngs couldn't help. An hour later, after a long walk through the bilingual corridors of El Deporte de Casa, there was STILL no spring in my step.  Annoyed and frustrated, I came home, and just for giggles, decided to load the replacement reel without the spring.

Which worked, if I may say so myself, feckin' fine. About the only thing you can't do is "bump" the reel forward by tapping it on the ground whild still in motion, but neither Eleanor nor I ever advanced it that way anyway. So the whole plate of agitas turned out to be much ado about nothing.

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There's plenty of the other kind of a-dew back there, though. Once finished with the whacking, I tried some more mowing after this completely dry day, and it's still nearly impossible to get anywhere with it on the west twenty of our back forty. The other half looks pretty rough from the divots dug by the mower wheels, but at least the grass is down to a dull roar in most of that part, and I'm going to give the rest another go tomorrow if the rain, rain goes away for one more day.

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Still half an hour to go, local time, on the appointed reunion in the clouds (90 minutes, more likely, since I'm sure Jesus thinks Daylight Savings Time is a Socialist Kenyan Obama thing). I do not think it's going to happen. However, while Christ doesn't seem to be appearing, I have heard that ER's all over the world are being inundated with a sudden uptick in admissions for hernias. Biblical scholars admitted to an error in the translation which now has been shown to have predicted today as the Rupture.

Badum ching.