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The rota rotas
An update on all things:
Well, here it is this morning, the coffee post. We will have no Great American novel composing here, and if that is to be the zenith of my writing career, I should lower my expectations and apply myself to perfecting the coffee post. I find that if I do not write every day, my writing ability really suffers.
The world continues in my little corner of paradise, the sun rises the sun sets, and I still await that little tap on the left shoulder from Thanatos when it is my time. I am in no big hurry for that event, but I think I do feel his chill breath over my left shoulder at times.
I have three riding mowers and two push mowers that are not working, but my strength has deteriorated to the point that I can no longer repair them. Finding a mechanic who is willing to come out here has really been a hassle. With the virus scare, people oddly are not answering their phones. I am awaiting two call backs.
I waited too long to trap the feral cats and have them neutered, so I think our family has grown a bit larger than intended. It is hard to tell since there is a large space under the house where the cats have nested. I must get that population explosion taken care of.
My brother and niece have returned to Pueblo. It is a two-day drive from here and they left Tuesday. But since no one has told me whether they have arrived or not I don’t know for sure. Strong hint. They arrived the day before the big national lock-down and stayed with us a few weeks while everybody in the world went into full panic.
Everyone took turns preparing meals and mowing the grasslands, and we enjoyed their stay. Surprising, since I am not the most scintillating host you have ever had. I tend to need my naps and when dinner is finished, so am I.
Today is preparation day. Friday. So Snooks is about the house getting things ready for the Shabbat meal. The week went by unbelievably quickly and time seems to be getting away from me. I catch myself wishing things would slow down a little bit.
And so goes the rota of days. Good coffee in the morning. Sound, restful sleep in the evenings.
Good morning!
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
~Shakespere – Romeo & Juliette
I cannot think of a time in the nearly eight decades of my life when I so thoroughly mistrusted the press and the legislators. With every pronouncement their words advanced their political ideology rather than aid the citizens in a time of crisis.
In seeking to frame their political beliefs rather than inform, they completely failed the test of leadership. But we elected them, and in that, we have miserably failed the test as well. They are no more than we deserve.
May God be merciful and not grant us our just desserts when he judges …
Rota wrotas …
Thursday dawns cool and humid, but we have central heating and cooling, so who cares as long as there is coffee? So I pad on down to the studio with a handful of lemon cream cookies while balancing my cup to keep it from sloshing. I have grown very adept at that over the years.
The news is still a predictable spaghetti bowl of conflicting information on the virus. Never has the press been so irresponsible as it has in this instance. But my life changed very little out here on the Texas pampas in spite of the screaming of the Chicken Littles.
And the food fight between the press and Trump goes on. I think Trump is actually winning this one. In their effrontery they reveal more of their elitist disdain for conservatives than they would like the people to know, and it serves among most of us to let us know that the press hates conservatives. The liberals seem to think that the world is just fine if it wasn’t for that damned Fox News stirring up the peasants.
My brother and niece are still trapped here with Snooks and I. We are enjoying them though we have a tendency to treat them as hired help. I suspect they are getting antsy about going home, but they have kept that counsel to themselves.
And I still set and molder in my brand new $59 dollar executive chair. My $49 one bit the dust and was unceremoniously rolled out to the street for the trash man to haul off. Faux suede for my pampered bottom, padded armrests to sit back and ponder this miracle of miracles. A window into the world.
Behind me is a real window, and Kippur da bird lives in a cage to one side of it. Outside, three yellow feral cats reside. The pecan tree is in full leaf … the acacia tree has been hauled off, and a weedy front yard cries for some TLC. But all it will get is weed poison and a sharp mower blade. Some day.
So goes the rota of days. Coffee in the morning. Brunch. Dinner. Bedtime.
Good morning!
Ghosts of the old days
There it is again.
The notice of the annual all 1960’s class reunion.
A reminder of about the most unhappy year of my entire existence.
I don’t know how they tracked me down for the invite, but Connie whose name I do remember, but whose face I don’t, sent the notice, and all of the pain of that year flooded in on me as I remembered events that I had no control over overwhelmed and shamed me.
It isn’t like I had committed some unpardonable act or anything, but I just gave up on school and my hometown. All I had left was a bad attitude and an even worse reputation, and all I wanted was to be gone. Anywhere. And so a few short months before graduation, I quit. Just like that. Walked away.
Some time later I returned to Alamosa to go to college, but frankly, academia and I have no love for each other, so once again in my sophomore year I cut and ran, never to return.
I found peace much later in life in religion and a second marriage. But at odd moments like this the old days rise up to disturb my little utopia out in the Texas pampas …
Beauty with a little caution
It is bluebonnet season in Texas. But they are best viewed from the road …
… there was silence in heaven …
Late in the evening I gradually prepare for bed. The hearing aids are the first thing to come out, and a glorious hush settles in. Little things like fans on computers and air filters make a lot of noise that I somehow tune out. Then I am surrounded by a real silence. I am reminded of Revelations 8:1
“When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour …”
That must be an overwhelming half hour.
The Devil’s inside the can …
One treat I liked as a kid was deviled ham sandwiches. I suspect that it must have been inexpensive since we didn’t by expensive meats back then. But it was salty and hammy, and the little strings of desiccated ham got caught between your teeth and could only be removed with a toothpick and much sucking of the teeth. It was wonderful stuff.
But since I got religion, I don’t eat no ham, but I haven’t forgotten the taste. Bacon. Spiral cut, sugar cured ham. Ham bones in beans. I do miss it from time to time. Or I think I do, since I don’t eat it. So in looking for high protein/low carb snacks, I came across chicken deviled something-the-other. They said chicken on the can, so I bought a can and hid it in the pantry. I am surprised Snookums didn’t tell me I had to eat it outside since she keeps a pretty close eye on the larder and it is hard to hide stuff like that from her. She doesn’t approve this kind of gourmet. The woman doesn’t know what’s good.
Today I got carried away with breakfast, and served up a working man’s breakfast of runny eggs a-la bell peppers, hash-browns with onions, and turkey sausage links. It wasn’t bad, but we were still full when dinner rolled around and so a every working-man for himself day was declared. We do that ever so often when we find a good excuse to not prepare dinner. I don’t know what the upper limit is on those declarations would be, but we have never reached that high bar in spite of several each month.
So later, I got to thinking about that can in the pantry when my stomach started making suggestions. Yeah. That would be a gourmet supper for one! Spread on saltines paired with Château Diet Squirt, I sat back in my brand new $59 executive chair to enjoy this latest discovery in modern food technology.
Bleah! What some nasty carp that was! Grainy with some chunks hidden in a porridge looking matrix of mystery food, using the term food in its loosest sense. But my loyal dining companions ‘Becca da Beagle and her brother Tic were watching, and so I scrapped the grainy goo into their waiting maws until it was all gone. They seemed to like the stuff, but you can never taken my mutts assessment of food seriously. I have see what they will eat.
I saw an internet meme that went “I was hungry and looked in the cupboard for some food, and there was only ingredients.”. That’s me. When I go foraging on an every man for himself day, I want to open something and eat it. I don’t want to fry, mix, toast, cut, spread or plate anything. Just eat it. A spoon or fork is as far as I want to mess with it.
So I have been trying to stock stuff I can just eat, yet will last awhile just sitting in the pantry. The do make vienna sausages out of chicken that are bad.
Please stop with the clucking …. some day I’ll sneek a peek into YOUR cupboard …
They are about two for a dollar, and they kind of work, but I need more variety. And I have to really watch the label. My once favorite brand on close examinatons said it also contained pork and other meats beside chicken.
But down here we also get a lot of food from Mexico and I found a brand with just chicken. I can trust the Mexicans, right?
Yogurt works. But you have to use it up. Ice cream bars, but expensive. String cheese, but not very filling. Bakery goods give me heartburn so raiding the cookie jar in the evening is out.
I dunno. There has to be something that isn’t loaded with sugar that you can eat without dragging every damned put out of the cupboard just too cook it …
In Memoriam ~ Ellen Marie
Stand Aside!
While musing this morning I ran across a little piece from another elderly curmudgeon I sometimes read when he isn’t grumping about his miserly Social Security benefits. He caught himself slowing his pace at a big box store so that he didn’t arrive at the door before a liberal woman did. I don’t know how he knew she was liberal, but I have my guesses. They do tend to share a lot in common. But to continue, he didn’t want to have to hold the door for her and risk being berated for his sexism.
I have caught myself doing things like that. Changing my gait or direction of travel to avoid groups of people wearing their tribal clothes. I am still courteous of older women, at least those not mounted on mobility scooters. Those I avoid like smallpox. My bigotry isn’t confined to race and gender. Groups of youth, gatherings of disabled people and aged mall walkers are a short list of people I circle around when I am out amongst them.
I have had the compassion beat out of me by a lifetime of ill-mannered boors, social misfits and crusaders. You don’t dare stand holding an open door and smiling a good day at this bunch of aggrieved people.
So I have become aggrieved myself.
No longer will I circle around such people. I’ll wear my outrage where everyone can see it. Maybe I’ll carry a cane to threaten people who stand in my way or lollygag along the aisles of the supermarket. A friendly greeting will be met with a glowering scowl. Stand aside at my outrage!
*sip!*
Good morning!
Cedar flue, Boomerang Karma and Terrorists getting their virgins …
Cedar Pollen
I was reminded by Sherry Oermann this morning that cedar flu season is upon us. Now I know why I am so congested today. It would have been worse, but I run cassock filters with HEPA filters day and night. One by the bed, and one behind me in the studio. But with four dogs who go in and out at will through a doggie door, it is not likely that I will ever live completely pollen free.
I think it is boomerang karma. Most of my life I have looked at people with environmental allergies as … well … fakers. Yeah … damned elitist of me. But now it is payback time as I huddle indoors with the filters running, Albuterol inhaler at the ready, and brutal percussion massager plugged in and ready to thump my chest and help me cough up the phlegm.
Hate it.
Glad the first round of saber rattling is over after killing a terrorist mastermind, though now the anti-war coalition in Congress has grown surly because no one listens to their bleating, other than a few fringers, anyway. Don’t look for it to help much in the long term, but I prefer terrorists to live their lives furtively scanning the skies for the hellfire missile with their name on it.
Not much else going on in my rather small universe other than a litany of maladies brought on by bad habits and old age.
And the coffee is always good, the days and nights come and go unceasingly, and I muse.
Good morning!
Rusty's Armory 