Sometimes it’s hard to write. Nothing comes to mind. Where are the Muses to help me out when my mind is blank? So what to do until the Muses arrive?
Well there’s the day job. Not much fun but essential if we want to eat and put Molly through college. At least for the moment it isn’t a choice between the two. It’s an AND function, not an OR function in the logic world.
There’s the usual taking care of things around the house, like finally getting the dishwasher to stop leaking. Let me tell you, there are some mighty disgusting things living in the hidden areas of a dishwasher. We’re talking primordial soup kind of stuff.
Being the high heat of summer there’s the pleasure of just sitting on the patio with a gin and tonic. With a slice of lime in it we prevent both malaria and scurvy. I like the hot weather. It’s bunches nicer than -20 degrees. On a real special day we set up the hose for Fido to play in. Who would have thought a desert lizard enjoys swimming through puddles. The neighbors do their grandchild, we do the lizard. Toss-up over which is cuter.
Enjoying the water.
There’s watching the neighborhood wildlife, like the skunk family that visits each night. Or, the race of enormous groundhogs we seem to have produced. Fat Boy and his progeny have done well this year. I’m seeing an inverse relationship between two variables; garden productivity and groundhog size. One goes down and the other one goes up. Exponentially.
There’s reading, like Susan Cain’s “Quiet”. Where she blows away the myth of great big brainstorming sessions and group projects having any positive relationship to productivity. Just about every major scientific theory or technological achievement has come about from an individual working by themselves, not from GroupThink.
There’s doing Hunter’s senior pictures. He’s a lot easier to work with than Molly and Lindsay.
Hunter, pre-touchup.
There’s going to Espresso Royale in the evenings, having a coffee and watching people. Or getting the following text from Molly. “Did you hear about the chameleon that couldn’t change color? He had a reptile dysfunction.”
There’s entertaining Molly’s boyfriend Mitchell, A.K.A., HIM. He isn’t the rumored drug dealer word on the street would have you believing. Which is kind of a shame since I was hoping he could help me with something for my lower back.
There’s going to Binder Park Zoo. Which we used to do annually with Molly, but she couldn’t do because she’s at King’s Island with HIM.
Cute prairie dogs.
Cute red panda.
Not so cute cheetah.
There’s getting out for some odonating. Nothing major, just quick jaunts to a local park.
Arrow clubtail.
Calico pennant.
Immature meadowhawk.
Teneral (newly hatched) meadowhawk.
Violet dancer male.
Violet dancer female.
Mating violet dancers.
White-faced meadowhawk.
White-faced meadowhawk.
And finally, there’s updating to Windows 10. Says something about your life when updating a computer operating system is fun to do. But at least I’m helping cleanse the world of the Windows 8 scourge. I’m sure Windows 8 came out of a group project brainstorming session. Probably from some North Korean think tank. It says something when Microsoft, the Great Satan of the computer world, gives a free update from Windows 8. Because programmers like to use shortcuts, Microsoft had to jump the number 9 in their numbering system. Windows 9 could get confused with Windows 95 or Windows 98 e.g., sys==9*. So we have Windows 10 instead of Windows 9. The name isn’t that important to me, and it has got to be better than Windows 8. God knows it can’t be worse. Personally I would have named it something like Die8Die.
Anyway, if the Muses pay me a visit I’ll try to write something creative. On a computer that now runs WIndows 10.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 