this is drivel

Friday, April 2, 2010

I was working in the yard after dinner last night with our new wood chipper, mulching my way through the pile of branches I amassed after I pruned the storm-damaged branches off the overgrown lilac bush next to the garden shed. My Darling B joined me about ten or fifteen minutes after I got at it, and together we filled up a gardening basket with mulched wood chips, leaves and twigs. Took us about an hour, and somehow the pile of branches didn’t appear to get much smaller.

It was so warm I worked in a t-shirt! There’s a first for the season. Temps were in the seventies yesterday, and my little foray into yard work was the first time I had a chance to get out and enjoy it, if "yard work" and "enjoy" are words that go together. Word of advice: When you’re shoving branches into a wood chipper, wear long sleeves, no matter how warm it is. Otherwise, you’re going to scratch your arms bloody no matter how careful you promise yourself you’re going to be.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Four or five Sundays in 2005, his own atheism notwithstanding, Dale McGowan took his family into the neo-Gothic grandeur of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis on a kind of skeptic’s field trip.
 
[He] went because he wanted his three young children to have “religious literacy.” He went because his mother-in-law, Barbara Maples, belonged to the congregation. He went because, as a college professor with a fondness for weekend sweatpants, church gave him the rare chance to wear the ties she invariably gave him for his birthday.
 
Something else began to strike Mr. McGowan on those visits. He listened to the vicar preach about ministering to the poor, and he learned that the cathedral helped to sponsor a weekly dinner for the homeless. Most importantly, he watched as the collection plate moved through the pews and as his mother-in-law, who volunteered at those dinners, dropped in her offering.
 
All those details added up to a nonbeliever’s revelation. The theology and the voluntarism and the philanthropy, Mr. McGowan came to realize, were part of a greater whole, a commitment to charity as part of religious practice.
 
... McGowan set out to emulate ... its culture of giving. He set out to, in effect, create the atheist’s collection plate. By now, five years later, that impulse has taken the form of a nonprofit foundation that solicits donations from atheists and bundles them into contributions to organizations in fields like public health, environmentalism, gay rights and refugee aid.
 
Within the next week or so, Mr. McGowan expects to cut checks for a total of $12,025, the first benefits collected and disbursed by the Foundation Beyond Belief. The foundation has 316 donors who each have committed to contributing $5 to $250 per month — a system of regular giving that is modeled on the Christian tradition of paying weekly tithes.

As of today when I signed up the Foundation had 343 members. I don’t doubt this story may move a few more to join.

link to NY Times article

Sleepy Bonkers

It was a day of yard work ...

After breakfast at the farmer’s market and a quick stop at the thrift store to see if there were any books I had to bring home (there weren’t, but My Darling B found a platter she absolutely had to have), we took time out to have one last cup of coffee before changing into our work clothes and heading into the yard to clean up the mess we made out there when we started our spring cleaning. It makes sense in a twisted kind of way.

I spent the better part of an hour hacking up branches with a bow saw and feeding them into a wood chipper before Tim stopped by, at his mother’s request, to help us tear down a retaining wall and rebuild it. The wall holding up her herb garden had shifted quite a bit during the winter until it looked as though it would fall over at the barest suggestion, so we took it apart, setting the hundred or so bricks to one side while we cut back the wall of dirt left behind, then re-stacked the bricks so they leaned into the dirt ever so slightly. With any luck at all, that should hold the herb garden back at least another year.

When we were done with that I asked Tim, "Wanna see our new power tool that can eat trees?" No guy can resist a suggestion like that. He followed me to the back yard like a lost puppy. I thought he would maybe say a few admiring words about the wood chipper, maybe play along and mulch a few branches, then take his leave, and when he disappeared into the house I was sure I was right, but he soon came back and said to me, "Mom told me I could use it, too." Damn kid did an end-run without even bothering to give me the courtesy of saying no first.

So for the next hour or so I cut up yard waste into easy-to-handle bits while he fed them into the chipper, and you know I think he really liked it. He said he might have to get one for himself, which would be kind of odd and maybe even a little scary for a guy who lives in an apartment but I sincerely understand the way he feels about it. You don’t really, until you’ve had your own chipper.

He had to take off at about three o’clock so I finished up the few branches he left behind, then stretched out on the sofa to rest my eyes a bit while My Darling B mulched some leaves. Everybody’s got to get a little time on the chipper or the day’s just not complete.

When I woke, B was beside me on the sofa, googling one thing or another on her laptop, probably food or gardening, maybe both. I put my shoes back on, got out our new power mower and tried it out on the front lawn, which has been looking a little bit shaggy the past few days.

Our new mower is electric because yes, we are a couple of tree-hugging hippie weirdo freaks. And I have to say that, even if it’s not saving the earth, an electric mower is one hell of a lot better than one powered by a two-stroke engine because first of all it doesn’t weigh more than Godzilla. I can turn it around with a finger but I don’t have to because it’s got a flip-over handle and why don’t gas mowers have that anyway? See, there’s two things I don’t miss about a gas mower and I’ve only cut the grass on the front lawn.

After mowing the front yard I called it quits. There’s just so much yard work a guy can tolerate in a day. After cleaning up I ran to Bongo Video to rent a movie and came back with Zombieland, maybe the best zombie movie ever made, and we watched it while finishing off the better part of two ten-inch pizzas from Glass Nickel Pizza Company. Tim even came back to join in the festivities. Almost a perfect day.

Sunday, March 4, 2010

It wasn’t supposed to rain today, so I figured I could do about two or three hours of work in the yard and, if I got through at least one of my tasks, I could take the rest of the afternoon off on the excuse that I got enough done for one weekend and I still hadn’t had a proper nap, dammit.

So I started cleaning up some more of the mess I made cutting down some trees (Will I ever finish? Doesn’t seem likely at this point.) and spent about an hour or so before lunch putting it through the chipper, then another half-hour, maybe forty-five minutes after lunch doing the same, before we were able to prove once and for all that the dorks at the National Weather Service make their forecasts by flipping a coin.

I didn’t hear the thunder approaching because I had plugs stuffed deep into my ears to save my delicate chochlear nerve endings from the howling of the wood chipper. However, I did get a tad bit wet now and again, and it was definitely not coming from My Darling B’s garden sprinkler, so when the sky was looking its darkest and I finished off the batch of branches I’d brought from the front yard, I switched off the chipper and pulled my earplugs ... and that’s when I heard rolling thunder.

B was already gathering up her gardening tools. She finished up quickly enough to help me wind up the extension cord and put away the rest of the wood-chipping gear, and we got into the house and buttoned up just before the rain came pouring down. B checked the NWS’s web side and it still said 20% chance of isolated T-storms. I guess we’re very isolated here.

Damn my creaky knees. I used to sit cross-legged all the time and now I can’t do it for more than thirty or forty minutes, and even keeping it that short they’re so stiff that as I uncurl them I have to fight the urge to groan, "Oil can! Oil can!" like the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz. I never feel old until my knees remind me just how long they’ve been bending and unbending under my weight.

And yet somehow I can’t relax with a book or the newspaper unless I curl my legs up under me. Even though I know it won’t last, I don’t feel as though I’m comfortable unless I’m sitting cross-legged.

I was sitting cross-legged on the sofa with the Sunday paper this afternoon. Bonkers was quietly curled up in my lap. After I finished the section I was looking at I felt like shutting my eyes for maybe a half-hour, so I got up slowly enough that Bonkers wouldn’t be too freaked out, and so I could unfold my rusty old knees. Then I hobbled over to the recliner and stretched out to rest my eyes.

But I didn’t close them right off the bat. Bonkers, never one to miss out on a warm lap when one’s available, was watching me from the sofa to see what I was up to, and when he saw me take a seat in the recliner he jumped down, crossed the living room floor and popped up on the arm rest before tentatively reaching out with a paw to test the waters, so to speak. I patted a thigh so he would know he had an invitation to nap with me and he settled in, sort of.

First, he had to lick his paws, every single digit, one at a time. When he does his paws he also likes to wash his ears because they sort of go together in the feline scheme of things, I guess.

Once everything was washed he tried to fold his legs up under himself, but he’s an older cat just like me and maybe his knees were bothering him after his nap on the sofa because he couldn’t get comfortable with his legs under him. He had to roll over and stretch his legs out over the top of one of my legs. That bugged him because one of his hind legs kept slipping a little further than he wanted it to. He’d pull it back to where he wanted it but it would slip as soon as he started to doze off and he’d jerk awake, pull his paw back to where he wanted it, doze off, slip, jerk awake, et cetera. This went on until he was too tired to jerk awake. Took about ten minutes. That’s about two hours in cat years.

When he was settled in, cleaned off, semi-sleeping and had stopped jerking, I myself began to finally drift off until he started snoring. Usually a quiet, soothing sound akin to a baby’s sigh, his snoring today had the volume and rattle of a tubercular asthmatic. I’ve never heard him snore so loudly before, and it was impossible to ignore. I laid there, wide awake with my eyes closed, stubbornly insisting on getting a few winks until the clock on the wall went bong at the half-hour, then sat up and said to hell with it. There would be no proper nap this afternoon.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Monday.

Bleh.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

We had a good old midwestern thunderstorm last night, the kind with the lightning coming so close together and the deep basso rolling thunder that would make you want to go hide in the closet, if you were about nine years old. But since I’m no where near nine years old I shambled across the living room and down the basement stairs to my lair to make sure the computer was unplugged. I pulled the power cord but forgot to cut the network connection, so let this be a lesson to you, kids: Don’t ever lose your fear of thunderstorms or you’ll do dumb shit like that.

If you could see the Northern Lights from above, this is what they would look like.

Because, as it turns out, you can see the Northern Lights from above, if only vicariously, through the camera of astronaut Soichi Noguchi who’s been tweeting photos from orbit almost non-stop since he got there. Kind of puts your twitter use into a whole different perspective, doesn’t it?

"Did you see the photo I tweeted this morning of my dog begging for a Scooby snack?"

"Yeah! And did you see the photo I tweeted from the space station as we flew through the Norther Lights?"

"Oh. Yeah."

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Time for a quick update before I jump in the car and head into town to apply my nose to the grindstone ...

Yesterday was Tuesday, as you may have noticed, and Tuesday is dance night, which you may have already noticed if you were here last week at about this time.

My Darling B and I were very bad this past week: I think we practiced our dance steps one night, maybe two. Not more than two nights. Very naughty. Lucky for us we didn’t forget anything, and that dance move we couldn’t remember two weeks ago came right back to us when Christopher asked us to do it this week. It was like riding a bike; we hardly had to think through the steps once he reminded us, just do them.

This week, Christopher introduced a radical new concept to how we dance the walz: Rotating the box! First, we turned the box ninety degrees on every back step. Then we turned ninety degrees on every forward step. Finally, he asked us to try it either way, and throw in a few of the other dance moves as we went — and I couldn’t do it! It was too much to think about and my brain exploded! I had to box, turn, rise & fall, and try to remember when to step aside to start the cross-body lead? BLAM!

As soon as we got home, we practiced the new steps we learned and the old steps we remembered so that maybe they would remain cemented in our brains for a few more hours this time around. Hardest part was trying to adjust to taking tiny little steps in our living room after having a whole dance studio to fly around in.

I thought this would probably fall under the heading of stuff I shouldn’t write about, but the longer I thought it over the more important I believed it was to share this with you: Before you call up your banker to bitch him out because you suspect last month’s interest payment on your loan is wrong, get out a pencil and paper and work out what you think the damned interest due ought to be, because if you don’t I can guarantee that, even if he doesn’t say it, he’s thinking that you’re not much better than a horse stomping out the answer to the question, “What’s two plus two?”

Did you pay more interest this month than you did last month? Why could that possibly be? Well maybe, just maybe, you pay daily interest, and last month you paid thirty days of interest, but this month you paid thirty-one days of interest. Your banker gets the most phone calls about this in April, when customers get their monthly bills and see way more interest due because in March they paid twenty-eight days worth of interest but in April they owe thirty-one days of interest. “Why’s my interest going up when before it was going down?” everybody grouses. “That doesn’t look right.”

“It doesn’t look right” doesn’t amount to much of a complaint. The interest you owe is very quantifiable. They don’t pick a number that looks right. It’s math. If you think an error has been made, work it out to the last decimal place, then bring it to someone’s attention. If you can’t work it out, or just plain don’t want to, then, believe me, you’re probably better off not mentioning it to anybody. If you do, your banker is going to be forced to do the math right before your eyes, or your ears if you call him on the phone during your break, because you’re backing him into a corner, pretty much accusing him of mismanaging your money, and he’s not going to let you do that if he can help it. Do you want him to demonstrate to you and everybody else within earshot that you can’t do simple multiplication? No? I didn’t think so.

Yet another signpost of the unfolding Apocalypse is revealed.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the DoubleDown: The "buns" are actually two pieces of fried chicken. The "meat" of the sandwich consists of bacon, cheese and some sort of magical space-age mayonnaise. Finally, a sandwich designed specifically for those morbidly obese people who have to have the wall of their bedroom removed so they can be transported to the hospital.

The quote from the Salon article KFC Hates You and Everything You Love, and here’s an emergency back-up article in the L.A. Times. Enjoy!

I missed something! Back to March, 2010   |    Occasionally Updated Index of 2010   |    Onward to May!  
 

© 2010 Dave Okonski.

drivel
Dave’s web disaster
o-broze.net