Journal
Merry Minuet
“Thou shalt write each and every day. The profound and the mundane, thou shalt write of it.”
If I took a picture of the view out my window this morning, you would think it was a spring picture full of bright greens and golds. But it is a deceptive fall view with the trees going through their second growth cycle. Most deciduous trees in this area go through two growth cycles, so stately looking live oaks and the scruffier burleson oaks grow twice as fast. But when you step outside, the fresh breeze sucks the delight right out of you as it merrily clips along at a chilly 52°.
I hesitantly scanned the newsfeeds today, and thankfully there were no new horrors, just the tragic aftermath of the old ones. All the bombings, wars, earthquakes, hurricanes and wild fires seem to indicate a world in distress. But it isn’t the first time in history that the world went mad. Things really can get worse.
So, with those cheery thoughts I sip my morning coffee and organize my thoughts for the day. I am unable to change those events, nor protect myself from them, and I must find my joy in the midst of woes, for such is the lot of mankind. The saga of the new A/C installation continues, so I shall call the installers again. And if necessary, again after that.
It has been a busy time for the dog rescue / transport community, and I have had to turn down several transports. I always feel bad when I do, but I am not the Mother Teresa of transporting. I cannot dedicate my entire life to it. I have one run on the docket for Friday, and a tentative one on Tuesday, and that is just about going to eat up my transport budget.
And the job jar overfloweth. I need to do some prioritizing on that.
But first things first. The coffeepot is not yet empty …
Good morning!
Plowing the Sod (סוֹד)
“Thou shalt write each and every day. The profound and the mundane, thou shalt write of it.”
And it was evening, and it was morning. The first day.
A quickly passing squall left the stoop to damp to sit in this morning, so I sit in my cozy but messy studio to sip coffee and consider the world through my PC monitor. I think we have flogged Harvey Weinstein sufficiently, but I doubt that our ever-vigilant press is done with him.
The Kurds are showing unusual strength in dealing with independence. Even Iran fears them. I can’t help but think it is because they do support Israel, though I do think their zeal is more politically driven than ideological. Still, Israel is the place to look when fighting a war when you are surrounded by the enemy.
So I turn from world events back to my usual self-absorbed musings. Soon Snooks will be wondering where her brunch is, and I am still in PJ’s. Enya plays in the background, mostly for Kippur da Budgie’s benefit. She needs noise, and I desire silence. Enya is soft enough that I can bear the intrusion into the cottony softness of my morning reverie.
I have gone back to the beginnings in my cerebral life. The beginnings of faith. The beginnings of Scripture. I want to hear once again that voice that quickened me those many long years ago. Knowledge is wonderful stuff, but experience is what secures truth.
So I thumb my nose at Saint Paul. I’ll return to a milk diet and a time when God moved mightily within me and demons ran from me. Of course, there were people who didn’t see the fire in me, just the obnoxiousness, but I have acquired a few manners since them.
Maybe after I am on this milk run awhile I will return to the Sod (סוֹד), the deep, the esoteric. But I am weary of digging for treasures. An old pragmatic sage I once knew used to say that if a mystical thought can’t get you to work on Monday morning, it is idle speculation and not contemplation. Well, you would have had to know him and been there.
And I have run out of time. I can stall no more. Time to mix up some waffle batter and drop it in the waffle iron.
Good morning!
Dog Bites, Disaster and Contentment.
“Thou shalt write each and every day. The great, and the mundane, thou shalt write of it”
The first crisp morning of the year greets me. It is 58° but sunny and clear. The weatherman says it will warm up to the mid 80’s later in the day. So, 2017 skips merrily along to its end.
My typing hand is a bit sore today. One of the ‘puppies’ I was transporting nipped me after it ran into a thicket dragging the poor handler behind it. I couldn’t just leave the dog to escape, so I went into the thicket to get it. It was scared to death, of course, and nipped the back of my hand. It was a warning nip, not a bite, but my paper thin old man’s hands don’t take much abuse, and it tore the surface skin back to a patch about the size of a quarter.
But I wasn’t going to let the dog escape, and we drug/drove the dog back to the other transporters car, got it in and tied down. None of the four pups was very well socialized, and that greatly concerns me. They were over 20lbs and cannot go to a family with children nor to an unskilled trainer. They will weigh 80lbs when they are grown. But Cap’n Rescue got them onboard, drove them to the next hand-off, and got them transferred, so my part in the saga has ended.
My understanding of the news is very shallow at this point. I spent much of my life trying to stay informed about the issues and mores of the world, but today I am just a headline junkie. The headlines float by like the thoughts of mad-man. A Hollywood mogul’s sexual predations are revealed. Shock, shock. A crazy dictator of a nation that should have been handled by Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barak Obama and Donald Trump, hasn’t been taken care of. Everyone has an opinion on what should have been done, but are a bit wobbly on what should be done.
California has devastating fires, and the eco-Nazi’s are saying they aren’t to blame. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose hit the USA, and others hit the Caribbean and Central America. Mexico is still cleaning up from a disastrous earthquake.
And l look out my window at the brightly lit fields and trees, robin’s egg blue skies, and mild temperatures. In the background, Kippur da Budgie burbles, and in the far reaches of the house I hear Snookums rattling pans and talking to dogs. The level of human misery is so very high in the world, and here I sit in beauty and prosperity as the clock ticks. The contrast is not lost on me.
Good morning!
On Metaphors and Old Men’s Musings
Thou shalt write each and every day. The great and the mundane, thou shalt write of it.
A muggy, somewhat cool morning greets me out on the stoop this Monday morning. I waited a bit before coming out here to write my five hundred or so words chronicling the day. It was a good decision this sleepy morning. Last evenings sleep was interrupted by Jenna, my huge white something-or the other, having a running seizure. They aren’t as frequent as they used to be, so we weren’t sure whether she was having a seizure, or simply heard something outside that needed barking.
But Tic, our recent addition came in the bedroom looking very distressed, so Snookums took the duty of checking it out. I didn’t return, so I finally got up to look for the two of them, and they were in my studio. For some reason, Jenna usually heads for that room when she is seizing.
Jenna recovers from seizures rapidly, however, and so we returned to bed, only to have indigestion wake me about an hour later. So up again, take a Tums, and go into the studio to wait for the magic. One of my home remedies for indigestion is a deep tissue massager and I keep it plugged in and ready by my $49 executive chair. While waiting for it to perform its magic, I answered a few posts from overseas friends and rude comments from my political sites. Politics is not conductive to sleep, unfortunately, so I was up two hours before the yawns caught up with me and I could return to bed.
So that is why you are getting less than my best writing this morning.
The morning has a feeling of sadness to it with the weaker sun and fall breezes rustling the leaves. A mourning dove coos its dirge from a distant field where cattle are still fattening up, and my babbling little waterfall adds to the hushed feeling by masking the traffic going by. The sadness is sort of an old friend of mine, usually settling into a deep gloom by Thanksgiving and staying with me until Easter time. It isn’t the type of depression where you want to kill yourself, but I do tend to spend a lot of time in navel gazing.
Most people aren’t even aware that I am in such a despondent state, and that is just fine. People naturally wish to fix things if they can, and I am in no mood to be fixed. I did try the medication route once, and learned a hard lesson from it. It is much better to just let the moods come and go, and let people feel a bit peeved that I don’t react to them as enthused as they expect I should. I have had to develop a thick skin.
It has been a profitable year in that many of the mysteries of man’s relationship to his creator have been revealed. Not that those answers are of much interest to those still building families and careers. They do well to handle the daily woes in a godlike manner.
But for me, the story of mankind’s separation from his God is an intriguing one that explains in the only comprehensible way a time when mankind was a very different creature and followed another god out of the garden created just for them. Of course the garden is a metaphor, as are the trees, the fruit of the trees, talking serpents, animal naming and man talking with God in the cool of the evening. I suspect that man is incapable of truly understanding that time in his evolution when he didn’t need to know how to choose the good from the evil.
Oddly, when I try to share that knowledge, I must resort to the same sort of tale telling, and I do it fare less well that the way God tells the story. Understanding comes from revelation, not study.
But again, I muse like an old man muses, and old men muse to themselves.
Good morning!
Country Lanes and Virtuous Deeds
Preparation day arrives comes around a
gain with robin’s egg blue skies and a mild 70° morning. I have my weekend groceries thanks to a new grocery delivery service that has started here and delivers out to rural areas. Snookums hasn’t started her Shabbat preparations yet. She has many morning chores, some we men and dogs observe, and some that are done out of our sight. But they all add up to the peace and security of the morning.
I sure do love the grocery service, and they make it like the grocery store in making sure you are also presented with many impulse items. They know me well. I am a sucker for new and exotic things, if they don’t have to be prepared before consuming them.
I see the bermudagrass is sending up seed awns. That means the nights have cooled off and the grass will go dormant. Each year I keep thinking I’ll buy a sack of field rye and sow it so we have green all winter if we get the moisture. But I usually forget, and the verges grow brown with the onset of winter.
It is a beautiful fall here, however. The leaves haven’t turned yet, and the rolling hills behind the trees block out most of the traces of civilization, reminding me of scenes from the movie “Lord of the Rings”. One neighbor has had cattle on his pastures all year. He had stopped raising cattle during the long drought, but this winter we will likely see a lot of calves as he has been taking trailer loads of heifers off to the inseminators. And I’ll stop my commentary on cattle with that little item.
We still aren’t attending services anywhere now, though we keep a membership in a local congregation. I hope to change that this winter with regular attendance. But as in all things, it seems my good intentions are one thing, and my virtuous deeds are another.
And the continuing struggle with the new air conditioner installation goes on. I think we finally solved the cooling problem, then the breaker problem, but now the heating portion doesn’t work. I think that one will be a simple fix, however. I hate being on a first name basis with repairmen.
The new development down the road must be entering its final phase. My country lane has returned to normal. Gone are the gravel trucks, cement mixers and flatbed trucks. But with the gentrification of the neighborhood comes the SUV’s and lawnmower haulers, so the original quiet during late mornings has vanished. Gone are the days when I could step out on the porch in my underwear. Ah! Sweet progress!
So’s … that’s the morning as it unfolds.
Hoping your morning is as peaceful
Good morning!
A few hundred words
It is overcast but warm this Tuesday morning. I woke later than usual, and Snookums had already drawn the coffeepot down so that there were only two cups. One quickly learns in this household that latecomers to the pot are on their own. But she does leave the brewer filled and ready, so it is just a quick flick of the switch if you feel that it is more than a two-cup morning.
So … I get my coffee, pad down to the studio to find Snook entertaining the bird. Kippur, named such when we took her home one Yom Kippur several years ago. I am not sure of just how many years since my awareness of time has gone. Perhaps it is preparation for eternity, however that arrives.
Snook and Kippur have an early morning routine where she tells Alexa, the ever-listening tool of Satan, to play music. Kippur needs noise. Some mornings she gets a bath in her cage, and once a week, she gets a new floor of ground corncobs and her cage vacuumed out.
I reluctantly turned to my morning newsfeeds, knowing full well that the anti-gun ghouls would not waste a tragedy like Las Vegas to mewl and cry about the evil NRA and guns. And they didn’t. I have fought the good fight for my right to be armed at least as well as the criminals and nut cases, but it is time to retire from the fight and let others resist the call to die on anti-gunner’s altar of non-violence.
*Taking a sip of coffee and letting gorge settle after reading Hillary’s bleating about evil guns and NRA*
Even though we don’t really get the cold nights here until late October or November, we still have a feeling of Autumn. The fields and meadows are quiet, with only the distant drone of tractors plowing for winter crops. Funny how I note that sound, then it fades from consciousness.
I didn’t take the laptop out for today’s exercise. I do intend to do most of these little missives out on the stoop. I have really enjoyed having a working laptop. I purchased an older machine that is almost the perfect size, but it never quite delivered the performance that I desired. This one is a bit more unwieldly, but it runs beautifully.
Speaking of writing exercises. I just re-read yesterday’s offering, and I am cringing. I am a bit more careless with the laptop because it is much harder to format text and copy/paste, and I posted an incomplete page. I think I’ll not correct it, just to remind me that I need to be a bit more careful when working with it.
And so this morning unfolds. If you see the little blurb “Thou shalt write each and every day. The profound and the mundane, thou shalt write of it ”, or see the little drawing of a sweating writer on your facebook newsfeed, you’ll know that it is a banal coffee post and you may safely go on to other items. I’ll likely post these each weekday morning. It is more to get my writing skills back up to speed, and to keep a few people who are interested in my day to day musings up to speed.
Good morning!
Berserkers and birds
“Thou shalt write each and every day. The great, and the mundane, thou shalt write of it”
As usual, I staggered out of bed when the smell of Snookums perfect coffee wafted into the bedroom and pulled on my nose. Before I do anything, I get a cup if it is brewed and stagger into the studio to look out my virtual world window, and let the days horrors assault my sensibilities.
This morning was not a disappointment. Another one of God’s little underachievers decided to go out in a blaze of glory by shooting up a convention in Las Vegas. Some initial reports from foreign sources mentioned that the shooter had converted to Islam recently. I tend to put more credence in overseas press than I do the American press, especially with sensational reports. But time will out this story as the press follows this new development, leaving that prophet of social injustice, Colin Kaepernick back in the dust somewhere in irrelevance.
Now that I have my new/used laptop, I can move the daily writing out to the stuth with their older comrades.
It helps to push an evil, self-destructive world into the background, leaving me with an old man’s dreams and visions. And I do have ‘em. Lots of ‘em. And I shan’t be sharing them.
So once again, the sun climbs it exorable self another 15° deasil into the sky, tempes is fugiting, and I must be off to a septuagenarian’s rounds.
Good morning!
Dripping
“Thou shalt write each and every day. The great, and the mundane, thou shalt write of it”
A rainy/drippy day saves me from the lawn mower, but it is a seasonal rain with 77° temps making them more palatable. We Texans add the obligatory disclaimer “but we don’t complain about rain down heah”. Yeah, I am a convert to Texas and have no difficulty in culturally appropriating Texican traditions.
I am a bit late with my chronicle this morning. The sleepies have landed upon me. Maybe it is the drippy weather. That and having to update a game I am playing on the PC. Well, it isn’t so much of a game as it is a simulation. It is a railroad simulation with about 300 railroader wannabes who can be selective in what jobs we do on the simulation. As one real-life railroader says, “Railroading is fun. The railroad isn’t”. It does seem odd that real-life engineers and dispatchers would play this sim, but we have several who treat the sim as a real job.
I have scaled back my puppy transports for a while. I gave most of my equipment to various pet rescue groups aiding Hurricane Harvey rescue, and will need to replace much of it before resuming transports. I do miss it when weeks go buy and I don’t aid in any transports, though.
I am still sniffing around two old writing projects of mine. Maybe I’ll pick them up again. A major flaw in my writer wannabe makeup is that once I get to know a character, I lose interest in them. I want to sit down at my computer and bang out a tale in a few hours, and novel writing just doesn’t seem to fit in with that desire. I want instant gratification. If I am ever going to get I Akashaic written, I am going need to prune it down, apply a formula, and get ‘er done. Unlikely, at this point.
So I sip the coffee, watch the leaves rustle in the brisk breezes outside, and let thoughts of distressed damsels, political ideologies and spiritual shortcomings drift across my mind.
Good morning!
A Long Good Morning
“Thou shalt write each and every day. The great, and the mundane, thou shalt write of it”
I am resuming my morning coffee posts with the cooler mornings. They give me a little cover for idling my life away, and an excuse to step out of the studio for a while. These morning posts also instill proper posture, and aid in clarity of thought. I have noticed the decline in clarity during this long hiatus from morning chronicling.
An old friend friended me on facebook this morning. I am a fickle friend who has always chased the next bright bauble that floated by, and I have been so very careless in friendships. Some abandonments were necessary when I moved on to new stages in life, but there were those who so wove themselves seamlessly into my fibers that a hole was left when they were removed. This was such a friend, and now I feel a little more whole with their return.
Life and the joys of home ownership continue on. The saga of the new air-conditioner may have been resolved with the addition of a more powerful fan. The fields are still unmowed, but I did get gas for the tractors, so that chore will soon be taken care of. After some writing and coffee sippin’, of course.
Many of you may be a little confused by my use of the nom-de-plume of Rusty Armor. When the internet was in its infancy, I adopted the name for my internet accounts. An internet service that I used at that time was CompuServe, sort of a bulletin board and news feed. They gave me the name of Muscle Armor as a username. Muscle armor is a name given for the leather breastplates that Grecian and many Romans wore that had huge pec’s and six-packs molded into it, giving the impression that the wearer was more buffed than he really was. But my damsel rescuing days were over, and I thought that Rusty Armor was a more appropriate name, and I still feel that way.
So, you may find over time that I use the name Rusty Armor, Russell Armor instead of George Fowler. I have tried unsuccessfully to kill off Rusty, but he is a persistent alter-ego who refuses to go away. Rusty is a bit more brash than George, so I guess the two will continue on for a time. Both Rusty and George have a facebook page, and share most posts. But Rusty can swear, talk about indelicate subjects and delve into mysticism while George is a bit more reserved in his comments.
Rusty usually writes these morning posts, and if they have too many vulgarisms and bile, George doesn’t link to them. Rusty has more of a secular audience while George’s tend to be more religious. There are a few times that I don’t link to Rusty’s facebook page as well. But very few.
Hopefully these posts will stave off the annual onset of SAD that visits me around Thanksgiving and doesn’t leave until Springtime. Some years do seem worse than others, but in the brief time I still left in this world, I don’t want to spend them in drippy depression.
So as the sun climbs another 15° into the sky, and gentle breezes create moving waves in the yet to be shorn grass, I wish you a very pleasant good morning.
Allah’s gimlet eyed gaze …
Friday. Preparation day.
Snooks had the coffee brewed when I arose, so I poured my cup and limped down to the studio, trying to not use my damaged toe, and settled into my $49 Executive chair to watch the sunrise and catch up on the fate of a mama dog and her weaned puppies that I drove to Waxahachie yesterday.
My bottom doesn’t fit a drivers seat like it used to, and I am pretty sore from the chest down to the knees. Add to that an injured toe from roughhousing with Jenna, our once cute furry puppy that is today a huge white moose. She’s a puppy that is almost as big as I am.
But it looks like a peaceful daybreak. Kippur da budgie helps me greets me with clicks and chirps and squawks. The cassock filter timer clicks on with a low hiss that masks the morning joy of the dogs as they romp around in morning play.
For some reason unexplained, I cannot bring myself to read beyond the headlines of the morning newsfeeds. They scream in bold fonts about Nigerian Muslims killing hundreds of Muslims in Nigeria, all for the greatness of Allah, and Muslims shooting news reporters in Pakistan all for the greatness of Allah. And Muslim sleeper cells throughout the world are plotting to kill infidels for the greatness of Allah.
I just hope Allah doesn’t set His restless gimlet eyed gaze in the direction of this insignificant part of the universe. I don’t think I can deal with that much of his greatness nor his peace.
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