Our long national nightmare is coming to an end. Or at least we are being briefly jerked awake by the possiblity of having intelligent adult supervision in Washington.

Thing is, Washington doesn't like intelligent adult supervision, and the lifers spit idealists out like barely chewed gum. That said, I am looking forward to a few days? Weeks? of daylight.

In which the intrepid blogger goes to Philadelphia

I do remember one thing...

I am roughly 1.5 inches from the right anmd .5 inches down from the top.

The mighty King Crimson laid waste to the Keswick Theatre in suburban Philly last week. It had been a long time since I went to a concert, and even longer since I went such a distance, but this was an Event not to be missed, as opportunities to see this band are rare and the future is always uncertain.

These pictures were nicked from Tlev's website; the sunroof cam has gone missing. I THINK it's somewhere in the car, as I used it to take a couple exterior shots of the Keswick before the show. I then went back to the car to store the camera, which was NOT allowed in, and I seem to remember tucking it...somewhere. How many places can there be to hide in a VW? There is one possibilty - I came out after the show, and saw that I had left my sunroof open. I MAY have been stupid enough to leave the camera in plain sight, and some contortionist may have been able to reach in and grab it, but I don't think so.

What else, it has been beautiful here the last week or so, clear, relatively rain-free, not too hot, not too cool. However, the eager trees at altitude are in the early stages of becoming Foliage.

I am largely ignoring the Olympics - the Summer Games bore me to tears, although I did stumble across Federer and co in the mens' doubles final. There was some pretty spectacular tennis going on there.
Really not a whole lot going on around here...

Rain, disaster, high prices, injury

I seem to remember hearing that you couldn't take photos off the TV. That must have been back in the Sputnik days, as here I am interviewing Rafa after his dismemberment of RF. Oh, maybe that's McEnroe. Surely it's one of us.

We've been getting a fair amount of rain this summer. Nothing like those poor Okies living in Missouri, charging barges for the right to traverse their living rooms, but enough to keep me from spray painting my patio furniture.

The Tweety Bird came for a brief visit a weekened or two ago. In the time it took Rosemary to retrieve a pair of jeans from her secret closet, Tweety took four full plunges into the pond.Here we are today with modestly threatening weather looming over the mystery building downtown. Some people say it's a health club (four stories!?!?!?) others say it's Social Services, some say the first floor is a health club and the top is Social Services. It all sounds too plausible to me, I say it's CIA.

A nasty and expensive summer is rendered all the more bleak by the absence of His Tigerness from the world's golf courses. I'm sorry. I get no ZANG!!! from Kenny Perry.

OK, done for now, have to post the pictures from home, can add more commentary from work tomorrow, assuming I have anything else to comment on...

The turmoil in the sports world requires me to make this confession. In the last few months, driven by the urge to understand what it is like to be Tiger Woods and inspired by an old Prisoner episode, I have been working on a device that can transport my mind into another body. I have made remarkable, but as you shall see, mixed, progress. This weekend I have made my first two trial runs. Yesterday, thinking I should first do some animal testing, I beamed my brain into Big Brown for the running of the Belmont Stakes. That went well for a minute or so, until I realized that I had no idea how I was supposed to be running so fast, and what the hell are these two extra feet all about? You all saw the results. So, I was up all last night tinkering, thought I had fixed a problem with the virtual transference induction filter, sufficiently so that I felt good about grabbing Roger Federer's body for the French Open final. That worked a lot better, but, the thing is Rafa is so good that you can't be even the teensiest bit off your game, or you get blown into the weeds. Well, I was so surprised to find myself thinking fluently in four languages, and Nadal's topspin being that much more of a distraction, that I rather embarrassed the worlds number one player. So, for Wimbleton, he's on his own.

OK, so y'all think this is preposterous? Anyone got a better explanation for BB running out of gas a half mile from immortality? For Federer, possibly the purest tennis player ever, looking almost like a weekend hacker dropped into Roland Garros at an inopportune moment? Yeah, I didn't think so. (Note: Rafa played awesome tennis and almost certainly would have won without my meddling. )

So, I've got three and a half days before Tiger tees off at Torrey Pines. He's coming back from knee surgery (I know that one!). Maybe no one will notice if I drop in for a few holes on the back nine on Friday... Let's talk ethical quandry...

Maybe I should try politics. I couldn't be more tone-deaf than Hillary, and although I'm older, (YIKES) I'm even more inexperienced than Barack Obama. I can do the podium thing. I know the names of several world leaders, and I feel your pain. A thousand points of light. Fear itself. I paid for this microphone. Tear down this wall. Put food on your family.

I don't know what's happened to John McCain - lately he's been looking, and sounding, like an anamatronic skeleton escaped from a Pirates of the Carribean set. Things are looking bleak. I don't thnk Obama can get elected without Hillary on the ticket, yet there's no way he could govern with Billary running the East Wing. McCain isn't a dreadful fellow; I have to believe that things would have gone much better if he had survived the Rove sliming in SC in 2000 and sent Shrubya packing back to his 'ranch' in Crawford. This decade certainly couldn't have been much worse for it. But, now, we simply have got to root out the Christo-Nazi-petro-military-industrio nitwits that have rained disaster after expensive disaster upon us for the last many years. For better or for worse, Obama is our only hope. I guess what I need to do is beam myself into McCain's body and be my usual tactless, profane, idealistic self for a couple of months (note to self, check program to see what happens if host body expires. Also, pay FrontierNet in advance).

Oh, flights of fancy. Anything to avoid recapitulating mundane day to day events, lived under the ominous bass notes of oil and food prices slipping the bonds of gravity. To the small number of people who have recognized the long-term insustainabilty of our urb/suburb/exurb organization (perhaps most urgently explained by James Howard Kunstler) this doesn't come as a surprise. But that it is happening NOW, damn, I thought we had at least another decade before realilty would kick in. And I don't believe that there is any way of convincing the Chinese and the Indians, who have managed, in their way, for centuries without them, that automobiles and highways are, at best, a mixed blessing.

The pictures above, in their blandness and fuzziness, capture the sense of my recent days. We've got a cloudscape from behind the Tompkins County Regional Airport, a brilliant sunroof (ok, driver's seat) cam shot of Ithaca Falls, and The Pond at about 7:00 am yesterday.

OK, it's 1pm time to get into my gas guzzler, and effectively spend four dollars in order to pick up a five dollar newspaper, and maybe some lunch, and listen to Click n' Clack, the Tappet Brothers.

Peckerhead

Well, me and technology, and life in general, have been having difficult weeks.

There was a lovely sunset when I returned from Guilford,CT to what I knew would be an empty home.

But I have noticed that spring has arrived in frosty Ithaca. I know that South Dakota got pounded by snow in the last week or so, but I believe that we are past that. There are lots of pink and purple trees in bloom, and IT SEEMS that winter is behind us.

Downtown is prettier, I haven't been as on top of the photos as I may once have been, but here is what the backyard (frontyard?) looks like. Notice that it is not white and grey.

Hmmmmm.... Ding Dong the Cardinal who used to 'tap' on the downstairs window early in the morning, hasn't been around for the last year or two. However, and you can't see him here (although he is present) I have now gained a new friend. He is a red-headed woodpecker who has decided that he needs to peck a hole in the TV antenna. He (I did see him yesterday, and he's got the red head and is surely a male) doesn't seem to realize that a) the antenna is made out of metal and b) I'm running off the cable satellite. He can't possilby make ABC come in worse; I only watch NBC on Sunday morning for Meet the Press and CBS when they're broadcastinging a meaningful golf tournament.

What else is going weird... In no particular order, my answering machine no longer allows me to set the time and only occasionly diegns to replay messages.

Yesterday, we had an odd occurance in the building where we work. I'm not sure how, but some fixture in the third floor washroom ran endlessly on Wednesday night, and the building was flooded. So I've been at home the last couple of days.

In other strange news, my computer, apparently, has somehow has decided to start calling 911. So I've had State Troopers on my doorstep at all hours of the night.They're nice fellas, but I really don't enjoy giving them a house tour at midnight, when I am at best half awake, on Sunday, for instance.

What else? My trip to Guilford was odd but I can't be bothered to type out the details. I've had problems with my Cornell passwords (and I use my computer many times every day), I had a situation where I paid $600 to have my car serviced, and it crapped out on my a half mile from the dealership (and after they fixed that problem, the "Fix Motor" light came back on and I gotta get a new catalytic converter.)

So, it seems like everything is going absolutely wrong (haven't mentioned the price of gas or groceries) but I gotta believe that things will turn around...sometime...

Sunrise a couple of weeks back

Contemplating the outdoors from the comfort of the indoors.

A snowstorm from sometime recently.

Late winter wonderland this morning. It's always good to be at the end of March. There's still another six weeks before we can be sure of not having snow, but, knock on wood, it seems like we're at the tail end of what has turned out to be a non-traumatic winter, but a nasty one nonetheless. We weren't under 2 feet of snow from Thanksgiving till now, and never really got a major fall, but we had a lot of sequences of snow, rain, sleet, freezing rain that have made the driveway rather slick.

Ellie is back to more or less smelling like a dog, at least when she's dry.

Two weeks until The Masters!!!

This is getting ridiculous

OOF!!!!!! Five to nine inches of freezing slush forecast for today! LET ME IN!!!!!!! (why won't they let me in? I have this new nickname, I think because I've been playing (only twice, honest) with my little black friend with the white stripe up in the forest. They've been calling me 'Sm-ellie' and they don't seem to pat me as much as they used to.

Anyhoo, LET ME IN!!!!

PLEASE?!?!

I mean look, I've just had a hard half hour barking at the black monster with the Christmas lights...

I don't know what all this artsy fartsy stuff is, let me ask The Blogger. OK, he says something about steam coming out of the drier and dissapating in the forest at sunset. The middle picture is his impression of a typical dreary winter day. Allegedly the last blur-fest is ME! He calls it 'SM-ellie in Abstract'. I don't get it. I don't think I like that nickname either. I'm going to go find my friend in the forest - people and animals tend to avoid him too, maybe he'll understand.