Last Day of March

By jesum, we made it. Went out this morning to admire the mud and goo that is becoming our driveway again, the temps were mid forties, and a south wind was blowing the fog away. A WARM south wind. yesssss.

And somewhere beyond our trees a flock of geese, traveling fierce and determined, toward what for them passes for south, apparently, but judging from the direction it was closer to due west. 

Toby the Reluctant was waiting to go out, first time he has actually showed the slightest interest in fresh air since last fall.  He is not an outdoor kitty, obviously.  He's back in now, sleeping it off.  That first 20 minutes of exposure can do a body in. 

Years ago we had a black cat, Shadow, who discovered Time.  Every morning he would wake me up most urgently, at 4 AM, whether I needed to wake up or not.  He would hook his claws under the bedroom door and pluck at it steadily until I gave in, and got up.  He even adjusted, somehow, for daylight savings time.  Toby is also a Time cat.  Every night he sits in the hall outside my husband's computer room, and waits. He watches, patiently, never moving, until the Mr. gives up and goes to bed at 10 PM.  Or thereabouts.  The minute he leaves the room, Toby whizzes by, and curls up in his chair. HIS chair.  He,  however, does not correct for Daylight Savings Time, and now he is sitting patiently from 9 PM on, waiting, waiting...

Open faced complaint department

The Endless Month--and a rant to go with

From beginning to end, this has seemed like the longest March in recorded history--one positive note, yesterday I decided it was time to do some serious shopping, and spent two hours walking across  Walmart and back (yes, yes, I know...) hunting for stuff I'd been putting off all winter, due to lack of enthusiasm--and then a terrifying ride across the open pathway to Hobby Lobby (one of my least favorite stores in the universe) to find what seems to be the impossible, firm but not solid chair seat molds. 
Ordinarily I'd have been exhausted, but this time the legs held up, and I felt fine.  Nice surprise.

Why an area like this needs three huge back-to-back shopping malls is beyond me. And you can drive across all of them and get thoroughly lost at either end.  And not far from there is yet another large mall, in case you go home that way and just hafta stop at Target...

And the downtown is now a parking lot, since most of the major stores in the middle are now what I call 'back street' businesses: tattoo parlors, a smoke shop, fortune tellers, at least four used furniture shops, three bars, two restauants, a fitness center;  and once a year the city council meets to discuss revitalizing the downtown. 'Tis a mess, and a joke.

13 (plus one) favorite pictures --T13

old barn foundation

back field 

 driveway, early summer

 apple trees in May

 what Pileated Woodpeckers can do to a tree

 beauty bush and one poppy

 August fawn

 milkweed

 Queen Anne's lace

 full summer garden

 hiking in the White Mountains

 day at the beach--Biddeford Pool, Maine

 blown thistle

budded poppy



http://newthursday13.blogspot.com/

Not sure how much more of this I can take

Mueller and the Terrible Awful Ugly day

I am listening to and trying not to hear it,  the exultation and finger pointing that Fox News and Trump are rolling in about how terribly he and his family have been treated and how righteous they all are about the suffering they have endured.

I swear, the words "the American People" should be stricken from the English language at this point. 

I am beyond words right now.

Yahoo the ravening beast

Sometimes I think it's a way of flexing their muscles, to Show Us who's really boss in this place...just tried to sign into my Yahoo account, and was told that my alternate signin had been removed, and if I had NOT authorized this, please sign in with your 'real' account password.  Which I did.  No no, they said, sternly.  Try again.  😵

This, or something similar, happens just about once every six months, and it reminds me strongly of the kind of teacher we would sometimes get in school, who loved pop quizzes about almost anything.  Sometimes they'd require far more math than I was capable of summoning up, sometimes they were 'name the capital of all the states' and sometimes they just wanted to know who the publisher of your english book was.  This one, by the way, was on a final in our Senior year,  and counted, god help us all, as 50% of the final test. 

What's nice, this computer has a 'way back' program which lets me travel back in time to a day when this never happened...

chasing the puppy's tail

tea pot

pot luck

luck of the Irish

Irish eyes

Eyes of Laura Mars

Mars Bar

Bar none

None But the Lonely

Lonely Hearts Club Band

band of merry men

men's department

department store

store front


http://newthursday13.

book binge

it has been forcibly brought to my attention that paperback books are no longer constructed to last beyond the second read, and my last foray into Pratchett had me feeding his first book to the stove as I read, since after the 6th read in ten years it was loose pages in a tatty old binder.  One other is about to share the same fate, so today we went shopping and I picked up two replacements, plus Mitch Albom's "Tuesdays with Morrie", a more recent edition of Billy Collins poetry, and joy of joys, Jenny Lawson's "Furiously Happy" which I had read excerpts of before, but now I have the whole book to work with. 

Life is good.  Tomorrow is the vernal equinox, (and no I no longer dance naked in the mud to celebrate) and it looks like we might string together three entire snowless days. 

updating things

After a way too eventful March I ended up having one of my kidneys removed four days ago.  I find it fascinating that all of this happened so recently, all done by robotics, and I'm home and finding out where all the stitches are and what chairs I can sit in, slowly, carefully.

Right now, stitches notwithstanding, I feel better than I have in years. 

b'gods there she is

been off on adventures, sorry.

Weather update.  8" of new snow to cover the last 6" of new snow from three days ago. Damn but I love March.  All promise, no delivery.

One of the game sites I frequent has been seriously down for about three days, and I finally found a page where people go to whine and complain--and I  noticed a  thread that's common to any site that's down due to internal errors:  half the people who arrive to complain have called their server, rebooted, reloaded software, and spent countless hours clicking and adjusting and fretting because it's somehow "their fault'.   Even though the site clearly states "internal error" in so many words, most people are convinced they did something wrong. 


It's the same mentality that religions feed on (it's your fault you didn't pray hard enough), that most marriages break up over --"it must be something I did wrong...", and  advertisers make money over, by selling overpriced products to germ-phobic customers...