My laptop just burped and took out a post. Huh. Such is my ennui that I can’t be mad. As Siobhan often observes: computers are trying to kill us. It is their spiteful, computery nature. I pity you, though, denied my brilliance. I mean, crap.

Tonight in the dehydrator: zucchini and tomatoes from our garden. Our tomatoes, though plentiful, were often hollow or had black spots. The growing season was tough on tomato plants: dry, wet for two months, then dry again. We could have used two more rain barrels, which I guess we’ll pick up over the winter somehow. Tomorrow, I’ll take down the last three plants. Later this week, Pete and I have a leaf mulcher to play with. I can’t wait to dress up like goalies and shred some foliage. If this is as awesome as it seems like it might be I’m putting flame stickers on our gardening gloves.

Tomorrow, I’m really looking forward to warming up the chisels and the heat gun and stripping our bedroom door. Eons ago, someone painted the door using brown sand paint, which is a giant pain in the ass to remove without the heat gun. I could sand until I retire and never get a splinter and chemicals make a big mess without making much progress. So it’s the heat gun, the smooth movements, the careful concentration and kicking myself when I forget and burn my hands. But: my rewards are time to think, which I love, and that all doors on the second floor will be matching bright white, which meets my obsessive-compulsive needs. I like to be the most disorderly thing in every room.

I.

Miss Sasha: Mom, I’m working off a lot of kid karma.
Tata: What are you talking about, sweetheart?
Miss Sasha: I just spent the last hour scrubbing crayon off the TV.
Tata: Really? Didja use Brillo?
Miss Sasha: I think this makes up for some of the things I did as a kid.
Tata: As little kids go, you were very good, so it was a real surprise when you went totally bad later.
Miss Sasha: What about the time I wrote all over the walls?
Tata: You drew a city out of the letters of your name. That was how I knew you were smart.
Miss Sasha: Gotta go! Panky colored that TV in.

II.

Tata: I am stupendously fat. Hormonal eating is my job! What can I do?
Doctor: So, what medications are you taking daily?
Tata: None.
Doctor: Besides calcium, what medications do you take?
Tata: I can’t make me take pills so I eat lots of cheese and make my own yogurt, which is less personal than it sounds –

The doctor has known me a long time. He is trying to give me a way to break through my terrible lies.

Doctor: You were just in physical therapy. What drugs did they give you?
Tata: None. I refused. They looked at me just like you are. I told them exercise is always the answer.
Doctor: Exercise is the answer for – uh – lots of things.
Tata: Right, so about my being fat –
Doctor: Why are you here?
Tata: Because it’s been a year since my last hilarious pap smear.
Doctor: Already? How time flies.

III.

The unnamed university’s gym dot the landscape, and none is as dotty as the one across the street from the library where I work. At the end of physical therapy, I emailed the gym’s gatekeeper-dude about my fervent desire use the elliptical for fifteen minutes every day, but it was summer, the gym was closed and he was all like You wouldn’t want me to lose my job, would you? Well, now that you fucking mention it, I’m trying to decide what sport I can become world champion of so I can sidle up to a Sports Illustrated reporter and declare what a douchebag you are. So I waited. Summer passed. Th gym opened. I appeared in the gym and presented myself to the gatekeeper, who ushered me to his student assistant, who was very broad.

Tata: I need a Fitcheck sticker. Whaddo I gotta do?
Justin: Here is the form. Here is a pencil.
Tata: Name, department, phone, relationship to the university… no heart condition… no strokes… not a 55 year old man or – what?
Justin: We just want you to know the – um –
Tata: The risks? Your form has just reminded me that having had a hysterectomy makes me a sexual suspect.
Justin: You have to know how to use – um –
Tata: The equipment properly because I’m more than 20 lbs. above what the insurance indexes say I should be? Exactly. Are the machines free around 11?
Justin: It’s first come, first served.
Tata: At 11? Eleven thirty?
Justin: Between 1 and 3.
Tata: You can barely breathe, can you?
Justin: [coughs up a furball.]

Call it a hunch, but I suspect I might be his mom’s age, and he’d rather chew off his own foot before answering the question, “Should Mom spend a little more time on the stationary bike?”

What’s a comic to do when the humor writes itself?

The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message “entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.

But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.

Omigod, conservatives now respond to stuff that hasn’t happened yet, like they’ve just come back from the fuuuuuutuuuuuure armed with a pre-buttal.

Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said the speech is an effort to “spread President Obama’s socialist ideology” and “justify his positions” on health care, the economy and taxes. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin claimed that “the left has always used kids in public schools as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda.”

I KNOW! I had no idea CBS was writing satire!

Okay okay okay. Breathe, two, three, four. Okay, first: Presidents of the United States sometimes talk to the kids.

How’d that work out for us? Just another day at the office? No history-changing law-breaking by an American administration followed, right?

Okay, maybe Republican presidents shouldn’t talk to children.

This makes me SO HAPPY.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

As the Republicans openly advocate for armed insurrection and the assassination of the president, I wonder why the lack of response to Hurricane Katrina doesn’t disqualify them from leadership positions of any kind, and from discussion of the general welfare.

That degree of selfishness ought to be a black mark on a person ever after. There can be no redemption – not after corpses floated in the streets, not after the dying begged for help and none came. We talk about the message discipline of the noise machine, but we – by which I mean anyone and everyone else – can do it too.

Thug: ….healthcare is socialism scaaaaaaary –
You: Dude, Hurricane Katrina.
Thug: …national security bugaboo –
You: Sorry, Hurricane Katrina.
Thug: …gift certificate Black president –
You: Wanker, you lost me at Hurricane Katrina.
Thug: …forgetting 9/11 –
You: You forgot Hurricane Katrina. So forget you.

This is how you deal with failure and fools.

Working in an academic library, I see some exciting shit, like the current issue of Tax Notes.

Executive Compensation Under TARP:
Big Paydays Are Back!

Gimme strength! On a related theme, if nobody else has said this, let me be the first: I do not care one whit about health insurance reform, but I care a great deal about health care reform. Insurance companies are parasites. Insurance companies should be dismantled and their executives publicly shamed.

If necessary, we should be able to pay doctors with chickens again. Kids: ask your grandparents.

We have a new toy.

Mulcher and helpful friend.

Our house stands under very tall trees on a tree-lined avenue, all of which is lovely and keeps us cool in all but the highest temperatures but makes autumn a stone bitch. Pete estimates that each year he fills about thirty-five of those giant leaf bags that the tiny town then hauls off. The amount of fossil fuel we’re burning up for no good reason is appalling and our yard is too small for an annual composting job of this size. Thus, we are going to try out chopping up approximately thirty-five bags of leaves, turning them under the pulverized shale that passes for soil here and mulching on top to protect roots in winter. Our new toy is in for a workout; the dump truck: not so much.

Drusy says, “Talk to the paw.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pros and cons. I’d prefer to mulch – yes, we’re using that as a verb now – without using electricity. Georg suggested some time ago that we use the lawn mower, but our yard is so small Pete mows with the old fashioned kind of mower without an engine. That pretty much swoooshes! the leaves around the yard but chops up next to nothing. Online reviews of the new toy are all or nothing, love or hate. Everybody within twenty feet should wear bomb squad suits or It’s a frigging miracle! I’m for giving it a try. I mean, today I was picking tomatoes, spit out something wet and my upper lip swelled alarmingly for no reason I understood. Life is short. And next spring we could have better soil.

Blogger and my host site both hate me today. If I weren’t having a great hair day I’d worry my popularity might suffer.

Lovely Drusy, she of the glistening fur and loving disposition, yawns on a sunny afternoon, then naps. Thunk!

When I walk through the office with my helmet, bicycle seat and basket, co-workers who haven’t seen this ask, “Ta, did you just mug an undergrad?” While that would be amusing, I haven’t. Mostly. Today, the head of a different department on a cigarette break asked if I bicycle to work for necessity or fun. He meant did I get a DUI or plump up unpleasantly – or did I actually like it? I laughed. I actually like it. He asked a lot of questions. He seemed genuinely interested in the idea of bicycling to work. Not for himself, though: he lives ten miles from the library and has lungs like an octogenarian. Just generally interested. He also said the thing everyone says when they see me on a bicycle.

Dude: You have excellent posture.

In point of fact, I do. I also have abundant cleavage so if I did not have excellent posture every time I rode off a curb I’d risk a black eye. It’s polite of him to notice. Anyway, the more I thought about his questions as I rode away, the more I had to say about bicycling. You should at least pretend to be surprised.

In my two mile ride, there are five pretty dangerous spots, two of which will someday be covered with cut flowers and homemade crosses when some cyclist gets the tartare treatment. Pete and I last night worked out a detour I tried out this morning around another intersection so badly designed young lawyers should set up lawn chairs and tap their watches. These intersections are bad if you’re on foot, annoying in a car and positively life-threatening on a bike. People of all sorts walk across the bridge, but cyclists are usually students and Hispanic men; the people who aren’t finishing the bridge construction aggravating the arthritis of perambulating Jews give even less of a good goddamn about poor people on Schwinns skidding up a hill on gravel in oncoming traffic. Frankly, Siobhan’s got my lawyer in her five and if she doesn’t hear from me by 7:30 a.m., they plan for happy hour in the ICU.

The local gendarmerie is rumored to be very hostile toward bicyclists riding the sidewalks. I was specifically warned to steer clear, as tickets and frisking are a possibility. Last night – I don’t know if you heard – we had a badass electrical storm and this morning, debris lay everywhere. I rode down a small side street and found my path blocked by a huge fallen tree, upended sidewalk and jagged branches everywhere. Fortunately, I know the paths and malls; I wasn’t even late for work. It was even kind of exciting.

Despite all this, I really love bicycling to work. When I started walking to work in 2006, I also went whole months between visits to the gas station. I felt better being outdoors and getting some exercise before and after work, and spending the time alone improved the time I had to spend with – you know – people. Bicycling is even better. I recommend it completely, especially if you hate your office or have high blood pressure. I do not recommend bicycling if your wife has just taken out an unusually large life insurance policy. Because you know.

I have a thousand other things to say that’ll wait but I absolutely can’t wait to tell you this. Pete and I were driving to the Cape and I was taking pictures of my giant, thrashing hair. Just before the Bourne Bridge, I saw something I didn’t understand through the trees. I said to my brain, “Brain, you are full of crazy.” My brain was having none of it. “I am about to have a last laugh you will long remember,” said my brain. “Har har,” I laughed. Me? Remember? Then without my noticing, my hands picked up the camera again, turned it on and pointed it to that thing I was seeing and refusing to see through the trees.

At the dining room table at the Cape, I asked if anyone else had seen the giraffe. Everyone dropped a fork. What giraffe? The giraffe at the foot of Bourne Bridge. Where? On what side? On the other side. Where? At the foot of the bridge. I thought I was hallucinating it but then I took a picture. You have a picture of the giraffe? Yeah, I have a picture, maybe two. When I took the picture the sun was in the wrong place so I couldn’t tell if I was getting it. Point. Click. Point. Click. See?

I turned around the laptop at the dinner table and they saw. And the people who cross the bridge all the time saw the giraffe they’d never seen before.

Life Magazine, August 1944.

I travel like a hot house flower so I took today off from work. It’s been hot and sultry and sunny and cloudy and dry and humid, and after 2, I became One with the couch. This evening, rowing was like an out of body experience. Even the cats lay on the attic floor with their paws up, groaning, “Mama, you move too much.”

It’s possible I hallucinated that.

Tomorrow, I go back to work. We’re expecting the arrival of a heat wave. I’ve laid out clothes for cycling. I shall miss the couch.