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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Feral hog apocalypse now


In between doom and gloom tweets about Crooked Donald, I've been seeing a great deal of stories about animals acting out of character. A bull escaped from a slaughterhouse and led police on a chase through New York. He was shot with multiple tranquilizers before he passed out (and eventually died).

I found it very sad.

Then a coyote in South Carolina followed a doctor into his office. The doctor panicked and led the aggressive coyote on a ten-foot chase before it got distracted by a squirrel. There is no information about whether or not he caught the squirrel.

Now Texas is launching a full-scale effort to stave off a "feral hog apocalypse." Apparently as many as 2.5 million feral hogs are roaming Texas helping themselves to what the Texas Agriculture Commission claims is $50 million worth of crops and Aunt Betty's petunias each year.


Monday, February 13, 2017

I had a dream


I think I dream a lot. But, most of the time I forget my dreams soon after I step into the shower. Sometimes though, the dreams are pretty vivid and stay with me.

Like the other morning, I had a dream that the neighbor had cut a door in my fence and built a play structure for his kids on my property. I only noticed it when I saw his kids building a snowman in my back yard.  So naturally I went outside to confront my neighbor. By this time the snow was gone and he seemed to be having a party in his backyard.

I asked him if he'd built the play structure in my yard after cutting a hole in the fence. He got belligerent when I threatened a law suit and said he wasn't the mortgage payer for where he was living. He was a renter. I told him he needed to remove the play structure at once or I'd call the police. Then I said I'd remove it myself with an axe.

At that point he picked up the main structure and wheeled it through the fence along with what seemed to be an endless amount of other crap that he'd dumped in my yard.

Then the dream got weird(er).

The guy starts up this huge construction machine and is lifting stuff out of the front of my yard with it. And he is carting stuff out of my garage that he'd placed there. I was yelling at him about what gave him the right to put his stuff in my garage (I think this portion of the dream was based on fact since our garage is full of all kinds of crap right now and none of it is a car).

Then I woke up.

The funny thing about the dream was that most of it took place at my mom's old house that was torn down several years ago. I don't have a yard with a fence that borders any neighbors. But I do have a garage full of crap as I mentioned.

Not sure what the point of the dream was. Maybe I feel as though my boundaries in life have been violated by Crooked Donald and his team.

Could be those spicy pistachio nuts I ate before going to bed, too.

We'll probably never know.

The north wind doth blow


I do not like snow. Oh, I'm okay with it if it snows Christmas Eve and looks pretty for a few hours. But then I want it to go away.

I will not bore you and rehash anecdotes of how people in Seattle haven't got a clue how to drive in the snow.  Truth be told, people in Seattle are pretty crappy driver's no matter what the weather. They just treat snow as an excuse to slide into each other and blame it on the weather rather than their own inadequate driving skills.

My children like snow because they rarely experience it here. I imagine if it rarely rained here, they would like the rain as well. I, on the other hand, grew up with snow on a fairly regular basis during the winter. There are only so many snowmen you can make before it loses its appeal.

I don't like to be cold. So naturally snow falls with an automatic strike against it in my book. It reminds me of learning to ski when I was 17 and having to get up at the crack of dawn every day for a week during my Christmas break to catch a bus to Bogus Basin Ski resort. There I'd stand in line at the rental place to get my skis and trudge to my beginner's class that lasted all day. I had secondhand boots that didn't fit right and absorbed water. So basically I was miserable the entire time.

Snow for my children inevitably means no school. When I was a kid they never shut the school down for snow. It was just a few blocks from my house anyway. Even then snow stressed me out because our school had a strict policy forbidding you to throw snowballs. The penalty was a spanking by the principal. And he was this sadistic bald guy who had this big wooden paddle on display in his office.

Now I wouldn't have thrown a snowball because I was deathly afraid of authority at that age, but for whatever reason, the snow still stressed me out since who knows whether I might have unintentional tried to wipe snow off my glove and have it perceived as throwing snow. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd been punished unjustly in grade school for crimes I didn't commit. Teachers in that era had a tendency to be judge and jury.

Oh well, since I started drafting this post the snow came and went. It was followed by torrential rain and winds. And now the snow if a mere melted memory.

Now I can go back to complaining about politics.

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Darkest before the dawn


Suffice it to say, it is not the best time to be an American. Not that I have ever overly identified myself with my country. I liked it when it kind of went off and did its thing and didn't bother me too much.

But now the inmates of the insane asylum have literally taken over Bedlam and social and pseudo media are abuzz with riveting stories about how Trump is deadly afraid of stairs and ramps and his press secretary chews and swallows two packs of gum before noon every day. And those stories seem normal in comparison to the flurry of Executive Orders the idiot has issued in his first week in office.

Meanwhile the protests go on and on. And I search my soul, wondering if it does any good. It's like a bad science fiction movie where the Nazi's won the war and America is part of the third or fourth Reich.  There's only so many times you can scream, "No fair, not right" before you realize the people in power don't care.

At first I thought all of the protests were a sign that a majority of the people in America realized Trump and his Toadies are pond scum. Then I started seeing the polls start popping up citing that 50 percent of the population supports his outrageous orders to build walls, ban Muslims and block immigration. But why should I be surprised. Almost 50 percent of the population voted for him. Why would I think they would wake up now?

It all comes down to what people choose to believe. Once they have ingrained something into their heads, it is almost impossible to dissuade them of it being the truth. Because they have made it their truth. And most people will go out of their way to constantly adjust their reality to hold onto their truth. No number of facts will change their minds. Because as we are discovering "alternative facts" are quickly becoming the norm.

I'm no different. Nothing anyone can tell me will ever make me think there is anything positive that can come from Trump running the country (into the ground). And even when he is gone, the Republicans will blame it all on the Democrats anyway.

I wish the sun would come out soon.