All in All, Very Entertaining

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Ah, July First.  The end of winter here in Dunwich and the season of heat and oppressive humidity.  Glorious!  All week the grandkids have been swimming around in the pool which mercifully opened this year without a leak in the liner.  Last year ended with two patches applied and a warning that when winter ended it might be time to replace the liner; a very expensive and difficult procedure that would tax the almost non-existent competence of our local pool professional (and I use this word extremely facetiously) to its limit and beyond.  I told Matt, the pool guy. that I would think about replacing it in September.  But I’m not sure.  I might roll the dice again in 2027.  We’ll see.

I’m off from work for the next week and a half and I’m almost as giddy as a school boy on the first day of summer.  I walked around and checked the milkweed to see if any monarch caterpillars were chewing on the leaves.  While I didn’t find any, I did see a monarch butterfly flitting around the yard and took that as a good sign.  I also haven’t seen any preying mantis egg sacs or baby mantids anywhere and am starting to believe that the mantids that I bought the last few years aren’t capable of surviving the Dunwich winter.  I’ll have to look into that.  I have seen them naturally occurring in the area but I was hoping that my seeding of the area with egg sacs would have made them more prevalent.

Camera Girl has now completely conditioned her pond fish to expect a feeding at about six in the evening after our dinner.  Tonight when she arrived at the pond the water was already in motion and when she tossed in the food pellets it reminded me of what used to happen on the old Addams Family television show when Morticia would toss a leg of lamb into the piranha tank and the fish would roil the water for a few moments and a glistening white bone would be ejected at high speed out of the tank stripped clean.  That’s kind of like what her pond looks like at feeding time.  The damn things actually make audible noise.  I wouldn’t want to be an innocent grasshopper or cricket that accidentally fell into that death trap at feeding time.  It’s slightly unnerving.

I’m currently using my push mower to cut the grass in the fields and it’s taking many hours.  I’ve been too unmotivated to change the oil on the riding mower so I’m paying for my laziness.  But I figure it’ll help me achieve my summer weight loss goal.  If nothing else I’m definitely sweating off an enormous amount of water which must be good exercise for my sweat glands.  I noticed that I was having to double cut the grass to get it right.  But then I discovered that pulling it backward over the grass did a much better job so I dragged the mower behind me backward all the time.  Of course, you can only use one arm when dragging it behind you, so I came up with a routine to alternate arms.  And that had its own subtleties.  All in all, hand mowing was very entertaining.  A good first day of summer.

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Ed Brault 

It looks like New England is getting even more heat than here in South Carolina. I do remember a few HOT summers up in Danvers, and sweltering near DC when I was in college. Here we just expect it, do the yardwork before the Sun clears the trees, and keep in the shade and A/C until dusk.
If you think your wife’s fish pond look like the Addams Family, you should see the Great Ocean Tank at the SC Aquarium. 50 species totaling 550 various sized critters from all levels of the Food Chain, roiling the waters as we toss sixty pounds of mackerel, squid, shrimp, and smelt on the surface. The sharks are polite, they know they will have a separate dining service an hour later. Our 240-pound sea turtle, on the other hand, is the Diva of the Tank, and even the feeding frenzy parts before her as she glides over for her smelt-cicles (she loves it frozen, nice and crunchy). We do NOT have divers in the water at feeding time, although we do occasionally have to go in to recover a Chum Bucket that got loose from its line.

 

TomD

So Much for My Reading of the Tea Leaves

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Well, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch tried to help their country but Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett

couldn’t or wouldn’t see how the 14th Amendment can’t apply to the children of illegal aliens.  So, we’re stuck with deporting their parents before they can birth them.  As time goes on, I see that government is bound to disappoint because the quality of most of our politicians and the way the system has been gamed precludes good governance.

And in a lot of ways, the citizens themselves have also become degraded.  They no longer want their freedom but instead crave bread and circuses.  Mamdani and his commie allies are straight up telling the mob that they will be given all the free stuff they want in exchange for their votes.  And if the commies take over the government that will be the end of this country as a first world nation.  They’ll quickly give us Brazil.  Well, what can you do?  Our leaders have been working at this for fifty years and if the younger generation is too stupid to know what’s planned for them then that’s what we’ll get.

Alright, I’m along for the ride.  But if this is the way it goes then it’s every man for himself.  We’ll need to set up our own survival networks to make up for what the government no longer has the competence or the will to provide; policing, other safety functions, reliable infrastructure (we’re already seeing the power grid fail much more frequently than even ten years ago), education, water, safe medicines and food supply.  And all this makes sense.  I knew a fellow who was an ex-pat German living in Venezuela and his family took all the things I mentioned into account.  He went to private schools for Germans and lived in an enclave outside the more dangerous parts of the city (Caracas?) and depended on a private security firm to patrol their neighborhood and pay off the local and federal officials to avoid the worst of the crime and bureaucracy.  So, we’ll have to become like Democrats talking about “our democracy” and “diversity” but hide in our bunkers and depend on armed guards to protect us from diverse democracy in the streets.

I shouldn’t paint too grim a picture.  Forewarned is forearmed as they say.  And being able to stop hoping that somehow, we’ll get everything just right and the Left will suddenly stop trying to kill us all is actually a relief.  We’ve been dealing with all of the same disappointment and worry since Lyndon Johnson and it’s just no way to live.  Just start living with the reality we have and don’t expect anyone to save you.  The only answer is to save yourself and the people around you that mean the most to you.  Sure, we’ll keep voting and all the other rituals but the effective actions are working around the anarcho-tyranny that the Left has set up and making sure you live your best life.