We had a bit of a violent rainstorm last week. Made for an interesting Impressionist work.
DISTAL MUSE – OBSERVATIONS, OPINIONS, EPHEMERA, & VIEWS
So what do you do with a bare patch of backyard? Why, put a tree on it!
Donna wanted something for the front yard, which is admittedly rather plain and neglected. We spend most of our time in the back part of the house where the bay windows look out over an increasingly eclectic yard. (Donna keeps saying we need to simplify, get it more low maintenance, but…)
So we bought a Japanese Maple.
We both love Japanese Maples. We bought one shortly after moving into the house and it thrives to this day, but what we wanted was a red one and that first one, after an initial showing of red leaves, turned a lovely green and stayed that way. …
I don’t have a lot to say about this kerfluffle over the remarks of someone who, as it turns out, is not actually working for Obama regarding Ann Romney never having worked a day in her life. This kind of hyperbole ought to be treated as it deserves—ignored.
But we live in an age when the least thing can become a huge political Thing, so ignoring idiocy is not an option.
I remember back in the 1990s a brief flap over Robert Reich. I’m not certain but I believe it was Rush Limbaugh who started it by lampooning the Clinton Administration’s Secretary of Labor for “never having had a real job in his life.” …
I’ve been having a productive month. This morning I polished up and submitted the fifth short story in two weeks. Granted, most of them are rewrites, but a couple of them are such thorough redrafts that they might as well be all new, like the one I finished today.
Normally, I let a story sit for a while before sending it out, but right now I just want material in submission. It has been a long time since I’ve had this kind of productivity in short fiction and I want to take full advantage of it. Of course, it would be nice if some (or all) sold, especially to the markets they’ve been sent.…
We cleaned part of the garage today. Put up shelves, threw stuff out, made new room for more stuff. A chore, sure, but it was a pleasant day.
Oh, and it was our anniversary. Thirty-two years ago Donna and I went on our first date. We saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (which she had never seen before) and ate Chinese (which was new to her). At the end of the evening, she agreed to go out with me again. Little did she know. Or me, for that matter.
More about that later.…
I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.
At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American. Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.…
I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…
So, here’s a new look. I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well. I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.
I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.…
The last motion picture theater of my youth is gone.
For several years, The Avalon, sitting on Kingshighway, across the street from a mortuary that has now become a church, has been shuttered and slowly decaying and finally has met its inevitable fate.
In a way, good. It has been an eyesore for some time, a constant reminder of neglect and a ruin of a bygone era.
Hyperbole? Indeed, yes, but true nonetheless. As you can tell by what remained, it was an elegant, simple building, with a lovely facade. A symbol of an age thoroughly gone—the single-screen, stand-alone movie theater.…
So we survived the night. The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all. This morning we looked out at the devastation and counted ourselves among the fortunate survivors, nevertheless aware that this year—this year—is the one to fear most…
I never make resolutions and usually I don’t even make plans. Over the last many years I’ve found that all I accomplish is an increase in guilt when I fail to live up to my promises to myself. I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.…