I have to say, Gentle Reader, even by MY standards the past few days have been like a combination of Survivor, Godzilla, and a stampede of bison during a large size hail storm with the gong section of a Chinese Opera Orchestra playing along.
On the positive side: It was the Partner’s birthday. I made a cake and arroz con leche and game hens and shrimp cocktail. And cocktails, of course. And some really fantastic purple potatoes from the garden. We actually had a lot of fun AFTER we got past the non-positive sunrise wakeup call from the landlady’s dog. During which wakeup exercise said dog killed all my chile plants, dug the crap out of one raised bed and our compost heap, and attempted to dig several large and important plants out of their containers. I almost lost it altogether and may have murmured something about you won’t have to worry about who’s going to kill your dog if this happens again. Since this was the, oh, say FOURTH TIME. Each incursion has caused some significant damage and this dog does some very acrobatic things to get into our space. Apparently there is some mystery about what happens when you let a large, untrained ratting dog out the door at 5 am and don’t bother to go with it or check on it or anything like that. It’s a dicey proposition to let your dog out like that around here because everyone is fairly heavily armed. Country living and second amendment rights, after all. Just Friday night, for example, there was a long, REALLY long, volley of automatic weapons fire. It may have had something to do with the visit of a sizeable portion of the Sheriff’s Department the prior Friday elsewhere in the neighborhood. Or it may not have. Anyway. It seems, for better or worse, that no dogs were harmed in that incident.
We’ve also been preparing legal documents and digging out tax returns and all kinds of awful stuff like that. Sometimes I feel as though, really, no more. NOT ONE MORE THING. I get over that when I see the little wrens taking baths in the water seeping down into the plants as we water them in the mornings, flipping their wings and sending sprays of water into the air. We also have a gang of hummingbirds now who have been chasing each other around every morning with incredible feats of derring do, sneak attacks, and nyah nyah nyahs.
But then I see something like the picture of people waiting for food in a Syrian refugee camp. Thousands of people, as far as you can see, standing between ruined buildings about ten abreast. Even hummingbirds can’t quite get me past that. I find I’m at a point now where everything that gets said about what’s going on in the world sounds like a big, fat, lie. We abandoned the gold standard as the value base for our money, yes, and now use what? OIL. Yes indeedy. In fact, the same stuff that seems to be funding the Caliphate Bringers. Someone explain to me, please, just why it is we don’t have a huge effort moving to get things solar and methane energied, among other things, just to move us along and out of this gigantic sink hole filled with $#!^ that we appear to be jumping right back into the middle of. Still it is somewhat interesting to see such a funding source being used by opponents in a struggle. Or whatever it is. Then there was the young girl on Bill Moyers who spent several minutes saying that it was really OK and a good thing to use selfishness as a reason to be concerned with climate change. I must say things seem pretty extreme now, the lines are drawn and while there are many people, young and old, trying to do the right thing, there seem to be many, many more doing the wrong thing. Over and over. Unthinkingly. Selfishly. I find myself feeling real, actual fear about the future, and not just because my own situation is so weird, precarious, and somehow wonderful when I can keep breathing.
It really is important to stay with the awe we feel in life, but sometimes it is so hard to pick oneself up and carry on. Today’s motivation may just be cake.
Boozilla: learning to fly one room at a time 