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Well, today was interesting….

February 16, 2021, by No comments yet

I grabbed a cup of cracked corn and went out the back door just before noon today to check on the chickens, because one of my three remaining birds is sick and I don’t expect her to live much longer.

When I stepped off the back porch slab onto a large flat stone we use as a step, I failed to notice that it was coated with glare ice, with predictable results. My feet flew out from under me and I landed HARD, slamming my lower back and upper hip bone against the edge of the stone I’d slipped on, and slamming my head against the edge of the concrete slab.

I let out a bellow of shock and pain you could probably hear two counties away, convinced I’d broken my hip, or worse, my spine. After waiting a few seconds, I cautiously moved my fingers, my toes, and then all four limbs. They all worked. Sofar, so good. I rolled over onto my side, not trusting my legs yet because I had wrenched my bad knee when I landed. As I got on my hands and knees and slowly tried to rise, I saw blood in the snow, on the porch slab, and dripping down my hands and neck. A lot of blood. My blood.

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This is why I live in the country.

May 7, 2011, by No comments yet

Oh, man… I just went out to lock up the feathered ones at the tail end of a light rain. The clouds had begun to disperse, yielding to end-of-day light from the setting sun, and the air smelled fresh and cool. As I locked the roosting chickens safely into their shed for the night and turned to go back to the house, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of an ENORMOUS rainbow, arcing from east to southeast, the colors vivid enough against the still-grey sky to glow through the electric greens of emerging foliage at the horizon.

I just stood and let the sight wash over me for several minutes as the last drops of rain from the departing clouds splashed about my shoulders and head like a Spring benediction.

That sight is going to stay with me for a while.

Catblogging no more. *sigh*

February 28, 2004, by No comments yet

Calpundit (aka Kevin Drum), terrific left-of-center blogger and the guy who started it all, has decided to discontinue his Friday Cat Blogging feature (in which he posts cute photos of his Jasmine and Inkblot at the end the week for all to enjoy).

It’s a bandwagon I fully intended to jump upon once I took the time to figure out how to use the digital camera my best beloved gave me for Christmas. But now it’ll seem but a pale reflection of the Master if I do.

Anyway, this depressing development has inspired one of my periodic Parody Spasms. The following is in Kevin Drum’s honor and should be sung to the Who’s classic “Pictures of Lily”:  Continued…

What I’m reading now.

January 6, 2004, by No comments yet

Commodify Your DissentCommodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland

I picked up this book not long after I saw students from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass working on a “marketing exercise” last fall on the lawn in front of the Student Union. They had split up into teams and were competing to see who could most successfully promote the new Honda Element (a squared-off minivan with a configurable, industrially tricked-out interior — sort of an SUV for slobs who have expensive pastimes involving significant amounts of equipment) to their fellow students on campus. Several of these cars (trucks?) were parked on the lawn, surrounded by small, frenetic groups of SOM students who were shoving promotional material at passersby, giving out pens and T-shirts, and recruiting people to sign up for “games” and raffles — in exchange for their personal demographic information, of course. Continued…

Summer’s over.

September 3, 2003, by No comments yet

Prayer at church Sunday: Oh, Lord, please restore my sense of humor. Too much concentration upon politics recently, like a steady diet of Romaine lettuce, has left me bitter and cynical. Time to switch gears.

Temperatures this past week have abruptly dipped into the low sixties in the evening and have hovered around seventy during the day. Compared to the unrelenting humidity and heat of these past three months it is as if we’ve been suddenly transported to a different hemisphere, house and all. School started again today, and I’m in the middle of the last-minute enrollment minuet. I didn’t get half the things done on my summer to-do list that I hoped to accomplish, and as usual I’m kicking myself for the ways I managed to waste time. Continued…

Perle: Finding Iraqi WMD may take 200 years

July 28, 2003, by No comments yet

Richard Perle

Dark Lord of the Neocons

From Middle East Online:

Perle added that “we are absolutely certain” that weapons of mass destruction are hidden in Iraq – Washington’s motive for launching the offensive against Baghdad – but that it may take dozens of years to find them.

“We don’t know where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them,” he admitted.

Asked by a reporter when he thought the evidence of those weapons may be found, Perle joked: “I hope this will take less than 200 years.”

Mother of God.

We have young men and women dying for a pack of lies, and this scum has the temerity to joke about it.

And meanwhile, all three networks lead tonight with “the death of a beloved figure in America”–Bob Hope. The press lionize a has-been “comedian” who was a willing tool for legitimizing another immoral war. This while families mourn their dead sons and daughters or fall apart with worry about their well-being. Continued…