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Up & at ’em: my Saturday morning motto. My weekly outdoor chores\u00a0include poop patrol, replenishing wild bird feeders, checking the pool, and just generally looking around the property (describing our yard as “the property” makes us\u00a0feel prosperous & successful).<\/p>\n
Dog poop can be tricky. You clear\u00a0one area and move to the next, glance back at the first area from a different angle, and there’s some you missed. And this: Schatzi likes to help, and her idea of helping is to follow behind\u00a0and make more poops for me to rake up.<\/p>\n
This morning I expanded my patrol into parts of the back yard\u00a0our dogs never visit\u00a0and\u00a0found some strange scat, possibly coyote. I know they can jump high walls and fences, but I didn’t think they were jumping ours. And what if it was a bobcat? Oh, well, the dogs have been pooping in the back yard for years, and I’ll just have to trust they know when danger is about.<\/p>\n
I saw a spider web in time to avoid walking through it with my bare legs. That made me happy, and I hope the spider too. Our pool guy backwashed the filter yesterday. When he does that, he runs a hose over the cinderblock wall by where we keep\u00a0our garbage bins. I usually find\u00a0javelina tracks when it’s muddy, but didn’t see any today. It’s been two weeks since their last visit; two weeks since they last tipped over the\u00a0bins and spread trash\u00a0everywhere. When we have especially stinky garbage, I drag the bins inside the fence. Javelina, thank goodness, can’t jump an eight-foot cinderblock wall.<\/p>\n
The chores are done and\u00a0I’m back indoors, enjoying my first cup of coffee and watching the bird feeders through\u00a0the window. The pigeons are always the first to arrive, and then word spreads.\u00a0Casa Thing\u00a0is ready\u00a0for another week.<\/p>\n
What else is in Saturday’s special bag?<\/p>\n
This election. On Twitter a guy\u00a0observed\u00a0it’s like unexpected guests drop by after work\u00a0and you’re discussing dinner\u00a0options: some want to call for pizza, some want to\u00a0kill and eat the others.\u00a0Even if\u00a0pizza wins, there’s a problem.<\/p>\n
The Olympics. My gosh, NBC’s coverage is horrible, and every night it gets worse. More commercials than Superbowl, puff pieces on\u00a0popular\u00a0athletes in place of actual\u00a0events, a\u00a0relentless\u00a0focus on\u00a0certain events to the exclusion of others, the constant\u00a0grubbing\u00a0for ratings. It’s like a visit to a\u00a0dentist’s office\u00a0where the only magazines in the waiting room are People and Us.<\/p>\n
Simone Manuel. Please don’t misinterpret, but I\u00a0think\u00a0the\u00a0deluge of\u00a0social media posts about America’s\u00a0horrible history of segregated swimming pools and beaches is\u00a0an awfully negative\u00a0way to celebrate her\u00a0great accomplishment. Yes, absolutely, we should cheer her success in breaking a barrier, and yes, we must acknowledge our\u00a0racism\u00a0…\u00a0but has it occurred to anyone that\u00a0all these posts about how things were in the\u00a0Jim Crow and\u00a0segregation\u00a0days are\u00a0coming\u00a0across as fun\u00a0nostalgia\u00a0to the dinner guests who want\u00a0to kill and eat the rest of us?<\/p>\n
Facebook. All of a sudden the advertisements once\u00a0confined to the right sidebar are\u00a0now in\u00a0the\u00a0newsfeed, in the form of\u00a0“suggested posts.” And there are a lot of them, more than what used to appear\u00a0in the sidebar. Whenever I complain about unwanted advertising, some goody-two-shoes will remind me commercials are what pay for “free” services like Facebook. I have an all-purpose response to that: fuck off. I’ve said for years it would take a lot to drive people (me included) away from Facebook, this wonderful tool that\u00a0puts us in daily contact with friends, relatives, and family. But this might do it.<\/p>\n
Necessary entry-ending uplift.\u00a0There are three books under “Reading Now” on the left sidebar, and for a change I’m literally reading all three at once. Usually I get wrapped up in one to the exclusion of the other two, but not this time. Sarah Vowell’s “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” is a collection of short columns, ideal for dipping into between other books.\u00a0I’m continuing my education on the\u00a0Vietnam air war with a book about the Misty FAC pilots, “Bury Us Upside Down” (a line from a toast every fighter pilot knows). After a break of several years, I’m re-engaging with David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” The first time around, Wallace’s suicide was still fresh, and there’s a suicidal character in this novel who is so sympathetic and\u00a0real I quit reading out of fear it might be contagious. Time heals, as they say, and I’m now ready to finish what I started, including re-reading the parts I read before. Oh, here’s the uplifting part: there’s still enough class-action lawsuit settlement money in my Barnes & Noble account for two more books! To tell the truth, I agonize more over what books to buy with this free money than I ever do when it comes out of my own pocket.<\/p>\n
It’s the weekend! Even as a retired person, weekends are still different somehow. I hope that never changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This election. Someone observed it’s like unexpected guests drop by after work and you’re discussing dinner options. Some want to call for pizza, some want to kill and eat the others. Even if pizza wins, there’s a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,250,10,16,2,8,827],"tags":[2157,2155,2156,2024],"class_list":["post-19124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-media","category-personal","category-politics","category-social-media","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-olympics","tag-poop","tag-trump"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19124"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19146,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19124\/revisions\/19146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}