21 Aug
I never thought I’d be this person. Life catches you unawares. I’ve spent a week battling with unmovable insurance companies and uninterested doctors. I need a flamethrower.  Now I’ve released a breath I didn’t know I was holding. And if you know how much I hate that cliché phrase, you know that’s something. The doctor finally faxed what she was supposed to. Now we do battle with the insurance again in the a.m. Progress.

22 Aug
The main goal of medical insurance companies seems to be to exhaust you so you give up and stop bothering them.

26 Aug
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between making excuses for not doing something and facing the reality of the situation.

31 Aug
Never disappoint an old lady. She’ll not only rave like any disappointed child, she will tell you everything you’ve done wrong since birth.

2 Sep
After using red food coloring to mix four batches of hummingbird juice for our four feeders I now possess a Red Right Hand. This time of year we get them in epic numbers. “I’ve never seen so many hummingbirds!” people are wont to say. Every bird within a mile knows where the best juice is concocted.

2 Sep
The Nag Hammer may be a blunt instrument but that just makes it effective at chipping away resistance.

4 Sep
I am letting my puppy starve. That’s the message from last night’s dreaming.  As I do not have a puppy, I think this one was a Jungian puppy.

4 Sep
The Krusty the Clown bird is out in the tree again this morning. It’s a migrating bird that’s been hanging around the feeders for the past couple of weeks. Looks like a giant mourning dove with long fan-shaped tail, but as lovely as it looks it makes the strangest call. You know that noise Krusty makes when he’s upset or caught doing something he shouldn’t? Take that sound, raise the pitch a couple of notches, and you’ve got a fair approximation of this bird’s call.

4 Sep
The Krusty the Clown bird is identified: the Eurasian Collared Dove. To listen click here then click on “3.3 harsh calls.”

4 Sep
Michelle Obama is a rock star.

6 Sep
Yesterday while listening to a John Cage tribute on NPR I stopped my car at a light.  A fountain hissed and burbled on one side, the hum of a healthy engine droned on the other, and Cage’s “prepared piano” music played in the middle. “He’s right,” I thought.  “Music is everywhere around us.”

7 Sep
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

7 Sep
So much can’t in my vocabulary these days. But hopefully no cant.

8 Sep
Every day on the way to and from work I pass a section of land near the wetlands that has been stripped of the wild marguerites which perennially bloom there in the spring, then leave behind a wildwood tangle. Someone has done a couple of plantings here and there in the bare earth as if hoping something more acceptable will grow. These plantings have refused to spread out for some time now. One clump at first looked like white lilies as I sped by at 50 mph but I finally realized they were white morning glories. Lilies would have been appropriate. Surrounded by dirt, the patch had been planted in a bunch that resembled in shape and size the grave of a child.

Still morbid after all these years, folks.

8 Sep
There’s a million wild finches, sparrows, and the like singing their hearts out in the tree next door. Every evening at this time.

8 Sep
I have discovered something wonderful: Von’s market home delivery. Surprisingly affordable, but more important it saves me pain and exhaustion.