Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Raining buckets
I sit here undere a tornado warning wwith tropical torrential rains, and I live well above the Mason Dixon line. I think on the troubles of the world and ruminate about things like how dry i am in these dangerous elements. How the storm howls. Beats heavily on the skylights and thrusts lightning like thunder bolts right at my glass doors.
The rain is heavy, pounding, like we need more rain, really? June gave us nine in ches of rain. It looks like Chiang Rai here today.
I'm listening to the talking suits tell me and the rest of the general public what constitues a "living wage". Are they kidding? They don't know from a living wage. The going rate for jobs out there, hello part time!....is eight dollars an hour and no bennies where i live. Young folks out there with fresh new diplomas have no work. Old retired guys can't pay their bills with their eroded retirement savings. There's work for them, but it's killing labor and they need to resurrect their backs. And the Washington suits talk like this should be easy.
Listen, men who made perfectly good salaries, saved their pennies and served their employers well. They are tapped out. There is no reserve. Guys forced to retirement at the age of 58 or so, have to stretch that mmoney another 8 or nine years against their savings. Add inflation. We're all down to minimum wage whether we're spending our reserves or working to make up our losses. Which doesn't happen at eight bucks an hour. Understand this: the average American, earning decent wages to carry their simple bills and mortgages are now asked to support that with half their normal income. Before taxes. Who are we kidding?
You can't run your household, your business or your nation on half a loaf. I know that D.C. is a boom town currently and I resent it because the rest of us are doing without for govmint propp-up. It's us. We're having to pay ths freight for true fat cats who begin with us behind the eight ball.
Pay more aattention to who you send to represent you. And start asking why anyone stays a dozen years. For the love of the job? Hey, work two days, take off three, twelve weeks vacay and a stuffed paycheck, I would too. But you best understand why: it's for the money and the power. Not for Mrs. Senior Citizen's welfare. Not for the workig poor. Not for widows and children. For themselves/ You know it. You do. Send those people for only a little while. Or even less. They are among the least productive group in the nation. And they are living large at your expense. If you've figured out a way to justify that, please share.
Blogspot is pathetic
The reason few people blog on this system is, of course, that it sucks. If I felt I had anything more to say, I'd choose another venue. It took me a full hour on jerking myself around to get the compose button to function. it took another full hour to be able to publish: three times a blank page. Why in the world do i bother? I spent real time composing a very thoughtful prayer time and prayer for a young child having a stem cell trnsplant tody only to find that the save button was no functional. So I transferred the work to a microosoft wordpage and then promptly made my own error and deleted the whole thing. Didn't really matter; i still couldn't post anything here.
Publish? Dream on. The publish button works only when it feels like it.
Publish? Dream on. The publish button works only when it feels like it.
Monday, July 8, 2013
SAFARI
For the record, the setup for blogging here is the most irritating i have ever encountered. The tool bar is set up by an idiot.
The year was 1991. My friend called me long distance and said "Come"! I had not seen her in twenty years. I didn't miss a beat. I said yes.
So began one of the many adentures of my life. I have been countless wonderful places in the world since then but none of them....Russia, Hungary, Romania, England, Egypt, Israel, France, Mexico, the Ukraine, Jordan....touched the wonder of South Afrika.
From the beautiful presentation of a protea as a welcome to the beautiful mountainsides of planted tea, to the Indian Ocean's dolphins and whales, the tall Zulu warriors and the thundering wildebeest, the enormous elephants, wild cats, ostriches and hipppos, to say nothing of rhinos, enormous herds of impala,, cape buffalao and other exotics, Afrika was mind boggling. The scenery, the size, the night sounds, the amazing roads, the babboons on the car hood, the monkies, the dolphins and whales, the emus, the bird life, the LIFE of the place was overwhelming.
I fell deeply in love.
In Durham I learned the true meaning of Indian food, indulged and cooled my mouth with coconut. I ate impala in so many casseroles I hoped i could find impala in the meat market at home. I learned emu on the grill takes like steak and that alligator is not so bad.
We parked along the side of a medium sized lake where a huge variety of game on the hoof came to drink. Up the side of a grade at the top of the hill lay a young lioness trying to hide behind a fallen tree. She was crazy visible, but as she couldn't see down the hill, she assumed she was hidden. I could see the game ringed lake in my rear view mirror slightly behind us. Suddenly, in a flash, the lioness raced down the hill, her powerful shoulders fueling her enormous paws as her nails dug the dirt. She powered forward, her tail high and waving like a flag announcing her coming. She was running straight at us. I quickly put the window up, like that would protect me!...and she quarter-horsed on a dime and cut to the left of us, charging across the road in front of ecstatice National Geographic photographers and their huge telephoto lenses.
She raced around the water's edge and slammed into all that meat on the hoof, who were shocked and nervous but not running away. They seemed to know she was new at this, that this was practice time and that she wasn't even hungry. She stared up at them, then turned and trotted back across the road and up the incline to pretend-hide behind the fallen tree. My friend and I were franticaally shooting film the whole time, seeing this incredible sight through a lens.
The lioness made one more run before wandering off down the other side of the incline. This time we abandoned our cameras and just enjoyed her play, her well muscled body, her beauty in motion as she made her moves that would later mean she'd feed well, mate and have cubs. My friend and I felt we'd been let in on some life mystery as we watched this dance imprint on all her firing neurons. The memory is as alive in my mind today as it was 23 years ago. Gosh, was it really that long?
The year was 1991. My friend called me long distance and said "Come"! I had not seen her in twenty years. I didn't miss a beat. I said yes.
So began one of the many adentures of my life. I have been countless wonderful places in the world since then but none of them....Russia, Hungary, Romania, England, Egypt, Israel, France, Mexico, the Ukraine, Jordan....touched the wonder of South Afrika.
From the beautiful presentation of a protea as a welcome to the beautiful mountainsides of planted tea, to the Indian Ocean's dolphins and whales, the tall Zulu warriors and the thundering wildebeest, the enormous elephants, wild cats, ostriches and hipppos, to say nothing of rhinos, enormous herds of impala,, cape buffalao and other exotics, Afrika was mind boggling. The scenery, the size, the night sounds, the amazing roads, the babboons on the car hood, the monkies, the dolphins and whales, the emus, the bird life, the LIFE of the place was overwhelming.
I fell deeply in love.
In Durham I learned the true meaning of Indian food, indulged and cooled my mouth with coconut. I ate impala in so many casseroles I hoped i could find impala in the meat market at home. I learned emu on the grill takes like steak and that alligator is not so bad.
We parked along the side of a medium sized lake where a huge variety of game on the hoof came to drink. Up the side of a grade at the top of the hill lay a young lioness trying to hide behind a fallen tree. She was crazy visible, but as she couldn't see down the hill, she assumed she was hidden. I could see the game ringed lake in my rear view mirror slightly behind us. Suddenly, in a flash, the lioness raced down the hill, her powerful shoulders fueling her enormous paws as her nails dug the dirt. She powered forward, her tail high and waving like a flag announcing her coming. She was running straight at us. I quickly put the window up, like that would protect me!...and she quarter-horsed on a dime and cut to the left of us, charging across the road in front of ecstatice National Geographic photographers and their huge telephoto lenses.
She raced around the water's edge and slammed into all that meat on the hoof, who were shocked and nervous but not running away. They seemed to know she was new at this, that this was practice time and that she wasn't even hungry. She stared up at them, then turned and trotted back across the road and up the incline to pretend-hide behind the fallen tree. My friend and I were franticaally shooting film the whole time, seeing this incredible sight through a lens.
The lioness made one more run before wandering off down the other side of the incline. This time we abandoned our cameras and just enjoyed her play, her well muscled body, her beauty in motion as she made her moves that would later mean she'd feed well, mate and have cubs. My friend and I felt we'd been let in on some life mystery as we watched this dance imprint on all her firing neurons. The memory is as alive in my mind today as it was 23 years ago. Gosh, was it really that long?
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