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And with this week, I have begun
Another trip around the sun.
The two days leading up to Monday's Roger Maris Day* were arguably even better than the day itself. Not working either of them helped. So did The Annunciation of St. Joe on Saturday afternoon after all major media outlets, even Fox News, had crunched the numbers and concluded that Joe Biden was indisputably on top. Not that the crazies have been put off: Roodles the Clown called a hastily arranged presser at Philadelphia's "Four Seasons," which turned out to be not the hotel of that name there but a landscape joint in a rough Philly neighborhood surrounded by a porn shop and a crematorium. Nobody dares tell the Emperor he has no votes. But we know- and the jubilation we heard around town here, and saw on screens from around the nation and world, confirmed it. As it happened, Emily was in DC with Cam and members of his family when the news came out. In her celebratory sightseeing, she met this guy:
Most of the Trumpernutters I still hear from are somewhere between bargaining and depression on the grief scale. Acceptance will come. Until then, they can enjoy being trolled. By a public library. In Canada.
----
We're trying to be relatively kind to them in our assessments- I have not hurled this song even once with specific mention of Former President Trump (we can now retire our asterisks and Cheeto references), but I did use it to serenade Betsy DeVos out the door. We also had an experience over the weekend which emphasized the true meaning of kindness. Anybody can be kind to their friends. Kindness as a virtue shows when it's extended to someone you are NOT already connected to. On Sunday, a Facebook friend from near here (who I've met IRL once, for about two seconds) shared a moment of kindness coming out of a random exchange with someone she met through a dog encounter. Here's ours from the day before:
Eleanor was on a bike ride, and saw what looked to be a small potted redwood left out at a curb, maybe a half mile from our house. I used my mad lawyer skillz to track down an owner name for the property address, then googled it to get the phone number for Eric and Julie, who by clerk records had moved there around the time we moved here.
I found it, but not before finding Julie's obituary from five years ago. "Suddenly." She was 44. There was a young daughter.
A profound sadness enveloped me over a family that, far as we know, neither of us ever knew well or even met. I knew we couldn't just call Eric, even though there's probably nothing significant about her passing at this moment in his life.
Instead, we drove over together. He was not home, but a neighbor was- a lovely man, who confirmed it was Eric's tree, that it had been out there in that pot for quite some time (we'd figured this out from it having rooted itself into the ground when we tried to gauge whether we could move it), and that it was a descendant of a much larger redwood on the side of his yard. The neighbor also told us about his own wife's fiber art business which we saw evidence of in their driveway.
In time, we will call Eric, to offer help with moving it if he doesn't want it or making it more secure if he does. And we will offer sympathies for his loss of someone we have never even met.
Because that's what kind people do.
Other people do less pretty things with their trees. This was around the corner from us; I presume it's free, but they won't deliver:
----
Sunday was a day to bask- in the continued glow of the victory, in the Bills coming out victorious against a Seattle team they'd not beaten since Obama's first triumph, and in the sun coming up and warming things to record highs on a beautiful day:
For morning walkies, I suggested a town-run dog park that's smaller and less crowded than the county one that's been invaded by maskless COVIDiots.
It was great for Pepper, who ran around with this seemingly perpetual motion machine of a Spaniel:
But the older dogs were a little slow to get on, and you can't really walk round it much, so we headed somewhere else where you can't really walk round, either:
Fortunately, dogs can't read.
This part of the town land used to be an Air Force base used for Nike missile silos in the Cold War. Several abandoned barracks remain-
- as does plenty of wildlife, including this milkweed pod hanging on:
Ursula got lost and eventually stuck in some of the weeds back there, so we cut things a little short. I later read that the town, then controlled by Republicans, wound up buying the entire parcel from the federal government with no real plan for all of it because of apparent competition to turn the barracks into a homeless shelter.
Compassionate conservatism was just as much bullshit back then as it is now.
----
That gets us to the day of celebration itself. My sister, BIL and office had sent on cards ahead, but I awoke to one from Eleanor, over 100 greetings on the Face, and plans for a lovely dinner which we were able to take outside to the greenhouse even after dark in this unseasonably warm weather.
Alas, work got in the way. My office laptop absorbed a humongous Windows update over the weekend, and when I turned on my email program, it SAW the 17 unread emails but wouldn't download them. Spectrum blamed Microsoft, Microsoft was totally unhelpful diagnosing the error, but eventually it proved to be a new variation on a common glitch with my relatively ancient versions of Office for word processing, spreadsheets and email/calendar, and I got it working by mid afternoon.
But wait- did someone say calendar?
I wished that Microsoft and Apple would die in adjacent fires, because now, with my email fixed, my calendar on the laptop wasn't syncing calendar events with my phone. Computer Police suspected that iCloud was involved. I spent more unproductive hours trying to get THAT resolved before finally finding the magic button that fixed it late this morning. I came home relatively grumpy, but there was a steak teriyaki dinner with all the trimmings, and homemade brownies. How could I stay grumpy after that?
Um, by dropping a huge pile of plates, silverware and a skillet top I stupidly tried bringing in from the greenhouse in one trip. The top survived, but one plate, one drinking glass and, worst, our ancient coffee carafe, still full from this morning, all bought it and the coffee leaked all about.
So this morning, after a decent sleep and a workout, I headed to BB&B (or as I call it, the International House of Potpourri), to replace the carafe. I also wound up replacing the unbroken, but still pretty aged, 12-inch skillet that went under that skillet top. Eleanor was happy with the haul, although in hindsight I might have waited until Friday, identified in the opening credits of the Odd Couple series as the anniversary of the day that Felix- along with his frypan-
was asked to remove himself from his place of residence.
Maybe by Friday, Former President Trump will finally have gotten the same message.
Another trip around the sun.
The two days leading up to Monday's Roger Maris Day* were arguably even better than the day itself. Not working either of them helped. So did The Annunciation of St. Joe on Saturday afternoon after all major media outlets, even Fox News, had crunched the numbers and concluded that Joe Biden was indisputably on top. Not that the crazies have been put off: Roodles the Clown called a hastily arranged presser at Philadelphia's "Four Seasons," which turned out to be not the hotel of that name there but a landscape joint in a rough Philly neighborhood surrounded by a porn shop and a crematorium. Nobody dares tell the Emperor he has no votes. But we know- and the jubilation we heard around town here, and saw on screens from around the nation and world, confirmed it. As it happened, Emily was in DC with Cam and members of his family when the news came out. In her celebratory sightseeing, she met this guy:
Most of the Trumpernutters I still hear from are somewhere between bargaining and depression on the grief scale. Acceptance will come. Until then, they can enjoy being trolled. By a public library. In Canada.
----
We're trying to be relatively kind to them in our assessments- I have not hurled this song even once with specific mention of Former President Trump (we can now retire our asterisks and Cheeto references), but I did use it to serenade Betsy DeVos out the door. We also had an experience over the weekend which emphasized the true meaning of kindness. Anybody can be kind to their friends. Kindness as a virtue shows when it's extended to someone you are NOT already connected to. On Sunday, a Facebook friend from near here (who I've met IRL once, for about two seconds) shared a moment of kindness coming out of a random exchange with someone she met through a dog encounter. Here's ours from the day before:
Eleanor was on a bike ride, and saw what looked to be a small potted redwood left out at a curb, maybe a half mile from our house. I used my mad lawyer skillz to track down an owner name for the property address, then googled it to get the phone number for Eric and Julie, who by clerk records had moved there around the time we moved here.
I found it, but not before finding Julie's obituary from five years ago. "Suddenly." She was 44. There was a young daughter.
A profound sadness enveloped me over a family that, far as we know, neither of us ever knew well or even met. I knew we couldn't just call Eric, even though there's probably nothing significant about her passing at this moment in his life.
Instead, we drove over together. He was not home, but a neighbor was- a lovely man, who confirmed it was Eric's tree, that it had been out there in that pot for quite some time (we'd figured this out from it having rooted itself into the ground when we tried to gauge whether we could move it), and that it was a descendant of a much larger redwood on the side of his yard. The neighbor also told us about his own wife's fiber art business which we saw evidence of in their driveway.
In time, we will call Eric, to offer help with moving it if he doesn't want it or making it more secure if he does. And we will offer sympathies for his loss of someone we have never even met.
Because that's what kind people do.
Other people do less pretty things with their trees. This was around the corner from us; I presume it's free, but they won't deliver:
----
Sunday was a day to bask- in the continued glow of the victory, in the Bills coming out victorious against a Seattle team they'd not beaten since Obama's first triumph, and in the sun coming up and warming things to record highs on a beautiful day:
For morning walkies, I suggested a town-run dog park that's smaller and less crowded than the county one that's been invaded by maskless COVIDiots.
It was great for Pepper, who ran around with this seemingly perpetual motion machine of a Spaniel:
But the older dogs were a little slow to get on, and you can't really walk round it much, so we headed somewhere else where you can't really walk round, either:
Fortunately, dogs can't read.
This part of the town land used to be an Air Force base used for Nike missile silos in the Cold War. Several abandoned barracks remain-
- as does plenty of wildlife, including this milkweed pod hanging on:
Ursula got lost and eventually stuck in some of the weeds back there, so we cut things a little short. I later read that the town, then controlled by Republicans, wound up buying the entire parcel from the federal government with no real plan for all of it because of apparent competition to turn the barracks into a homeless shelter.
Compassionate conservatism was just as much bullshit back then as it is now.
----
That gets us to the day of celebration itself. My sister, BIL and office had sent on cards ahead, but I awoke to one from Eleanor, over 100 greetings on the Face, and plans for a lovely dinner which we were able to take outside to the greenhouse even after dark in this unseasonably warm weather.
Alas, work got in the way. My office laptop absorbed a humongous Windows update over the weekend, and when I turned on my email program, it SAW the 17 unread emails but wouldn't download them. Spectrum blamed Microsoft, Microsoft was totally unhelpful diagnosing the error, but eventually it proved to be a new variation on a common glitch with my relatively ancient versions of Office for word processing, spreadsheets and email/calendar, and I got it working by mid afternoon.
But wait- did someone say calendar?
I wished that Microsoft and Apple would die in adjacent fires, because now, with my email fixed, my calendar on the laptop wasn't syncing calendar events with my phone. Computer Police suspected that iCloud was involved. I spent more unproductive hours trying to get THAT resolved before finally finding the magic button that fixed it late this morning. I came home relatively grumpy, but there was a steak teriyaki dinner with all the trimmings, and homemade brownies. How could I stay grumpy after that?
Um, by dropping a huge pile of plates, silverware and a skillet top I stupidly tried bringing in from the greenhouse in one trip. The top survived, but one plate, one drinking glass and, worst, our ancient coffee carafe, still full from this morning, all bought it and the coffee leaked all about.
So this morning, after a decent sleep and a workout, I headed to BB&B (or as I call it, the International House of Potpourri), to replace the carafe. I also wound up replacing the unbroken, but still pretty aged, 12-inch skillet that went under that skillet top. Eleanor was happy with the haul, although in hindsight I might have waited until Friday, identified in the opening credits of the Odd Couple series as the anniversary of the day that Felix- along with his frypan-
was asked to remove himself from his place of residence.
Maybe by Friday, Former President Trump will finally have gotten the same message.