Breakfast with friend Rod yesterday. Something we hadn’t done in some time. Two hours and entirely too many calories later, after we had solved most of the world’s problems and come up with cures for nearly all the discomforts of age, we returned to our respective homes. This had to be done to allow the food we’d engulfed to come to some sort of détente with our bodies. It was nip and tuck for a while, but I finally forced those hash browns into submission.
I had made the serious mistake of ordering a “slam,” which meant that I was served two of everything you could imagine, when one egg and a slice of toast is my usual meal. I did some calculations and if I can survive the next four days my cholesterol will have returned to normal and my chances of survival improved by 15%.
*******
******
******
These days ex-pres Cluck is telling such big, foolish, and easily disprovable lies that I have come to only two possible explanations that make any sense to me:
- He has completely lost his marbles
- He has grown tired of people coming forward to shoot at him and wants to be defeated in the election so they will stop, but to admit this to his supporters would be to lose too much face. His problem is that those same supporters seem to enjoy being lied to so much that as far as they are concerned, the bigger the whopper the better.
Can’t decide which is the case. Help me out here.
******
******
******
It was Willow’s turn to go to the veterinarian yesterday, and he was waiting for her with immunizations in hand. Last night she showed signs of not feeling well, and this morning she still doesn’t want to stir from the comfortable place she’s staked out. I have that “Dad” feeling of knowing that getting the shots was a necessary and good thing, but really hating to see the temporary suffering of the little animal for which I am responsible. (It was actually slightly easier with my children when they were small, since I could administer simple pain/fever relievers and could talk to them.)
Hopefully she will begin to feel better later today, but almost certainly tomorrow will bring improvement. In the meantime, soft words and touches along with offering food and water will have to do.
******
The ash trees in the back yard have turned their many shades ranging from gold to red, and they have upped their ante in how many leaves fall per day in the last two days. So far I have been “mulching” them with my lawn mower, but that tool will soon not be equal to the job. There are only so many inches of “mulch” that a lawn will tolerate.
I will do almost anything to avoid raking the leaves, since I have a congenital condition called achingus backus which begins to spasm at just the mention of using any tool that has tines (except for a fork at mealtimes, where I excel).
Enter the leaf blower. This is admittedly a clumsy way of bringing the leaves together into one big heap, but there is something satisfying about blasting away at the problem. Just a squeeze of the trigger and away you go, roaring about the yard until the battery runs down and you get to take a break while it recharges. I am quite fond of those breaks. I could skip them simply by having a spare battery to press into use, but where’s the fun in that?
If we lived in one of those areas of the country where fall rains keep the leaves wet and cause them to mat together, I would have to alter my approach. But in our semi-arid world the leaves remain dry and eminently blow-able for weeks. There is only one drawback to my approach, and that is the one year-old who lives next door. I never know when he is napping, and the noise created by the blower is incompatible with sound sleep.
So far I have been lucky in my timing, but make repeated errors here and I can expect that the mother of said infant might have something pointed to say about my practices. I know that way back in time when I had babies in the house I personally was not very tolerant of anything that stood between me and the serenity of a sleeping infant.
******
******
Van Morrison has had such a career! From a modest beginning with the great song “Brown Eyed Girl” to 45 studio albums and 7 live albums.
Released in 1967 on Van Morrison’s debut solo album, Blowin’ Your Mind!, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was swiftly associated with the “summer of love” which the singer despised.
… In 2009 he told Time magazine: “‘Brown Eyed Girl’ I didn’t perform for a long time because for me it was like a throwaway song. I’ve got about 300 other songs I think are better than that.”
Wikipedia
I never like to argue with my betters but if I could take only one Morrison song to the proverbial desert island it would be “Brown Eyed Eyed Girl.”
He made musical history with the album Astral Weeks.
Morrison’s first album for Warner Bros Records was Astral Weeks (which he had already performed in several clubs around Boston), a mystical song cycle, often considered to be his best work and one of the best albums of all time. Morrison has said, “When Astral Weeks came out, I was starving, literally.” Released in 1968, the album originally received an indifferent response from the public, but it eventually achieved critical acclaim.
The album is described by AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann as hypnotic, meditative, and as possessing a unique musical power. It has been compared to French Impressionism and mystical Celtic poetry. A 2004 Rolling Stone magazine review begins with the words: “This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description. Alan Light later described Astral Weeks as “like nothing he had done previously—and really, nothing anyone had done previously. Morrison sings of lost love, death, and nostalgia for childhood in the Celtic soul that would become his signature.” It has been placed on many lists of best albums of all time. In the 1995 Mojo list of 100 Best Albums, it was listed as number two and was number nineteen on the Rolling Stone magazine’s The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003. In December 2009, it was voted the top Irish album of all time by a poll of leading Irish musicians conducted by Hot Press magazine.
Wikipedia
******
Little Home In The Valley 