Not Much

Your Sister did a lot of work on the yard. It already looks much better and less like “an abandoned lot” to use her words. A retired teacher is coming over while I’m at work to help her plan the front yard. All I ask is that we have some colorful flowers and a lack of those bushes with the big blue flower globes. I hate those things. We had Kathy and Travis over again to watch wrestling. They’ve become addicted. His dad is ashamed of them a little, saying it would be better if they took drugs. “At least people don’t laugh at you when they find out you’re on drugs.” Also, the new office coworker discovered I watch the stuff and offered a chipper “I don’t anyone with a rain who watches THAT.” I used to think she was just blithely inane. Now, I think she’s a snob. I’m used to that sentiment, but I’m always surprised by people who phrase it in such obviously condescending ways. I tired to explain to her what the appeal is, and she just chuckled and cackled as if I said “Hey, have you tried eating concrete?” Screw her.

Gas pries down here are inching up. Regular unleaded gasoline costs $2.85 a gallon. Your Sister sports car fuel goes for $3.05. We haven’t run the furnace in about a week, but we haven’t turned on the A/C either. W just open the front and back doors and let the ceiling fans throw the air around. Our A/C/ bills will be much, much lower than the furnace gas bills.

I had to exchange a t-shirt I got for donating to the local NPR station. The shirt they sent was a large, but as I’ve noticed over the past years larges are getting larger. I used to wear a men’s large back when I was puny. Now, with 20 more pounds, large shirts envelope me like a nightgown. I have to wear men’s medium sizes. I know this has happened in women’s clothing too, but I have yet to hear or see any coverage about men’s clothing changes in new reports about American obesity.

Picture of the Day
The annual WCQS NPR donation shirt is made up like a Scrabble board. I got the short-sleeve version.



In the news
Atlanta’s Mike Luckovich won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning. You can see his Pulitzer submissions here. The fiction award went to Geraldine Brooks for Marches, one of those ridiculous novels that spin off of a classic work of literature. Her book is about the father from Little Women, which Your Sister says is never in the book. If the has such a tenuous or nonexistent connection to the original, the link is there simply to garner publicity and sales by the curious fans of the original. And that’s astounding. I’ve seen a sequel for Gone with the Wind, a sequel for Wuthering Heights, a book starring the wife of Ahab from Moby Dick, and a detective thriller starring an adult Tiny Tim. It’s absurd. It’s been done in comics with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as Mr. Hyde, Dracula’s Mina, Captain Nemo, Alan Quartermain, and the Invisible Man team up to fight a world threat. But that’s a lark. That’s fun comics. It’s not a novelist piggybacking on dead authors’ works. The Pulitzer judges just validated the genre. I’m unnecessarily worked up. I need to lie down.