Yesterday was perhaps the best day of this year – the best in recent memory – as far as the weather goes. Sunny, low humidity, about 85°. All on a holiday, even, which meant the parks were packed with happy smiling people having fun. Luckily, I didn’t have to be around any of them.

There was one thing that kinda bugged me, though. On the radio and teevee, it seemed that everybody was falling all over themselves, thanking the “troops” for keeping us free and all that. Not that I don’t appreciate them, of course (I only wish the people that stick them in all these crappy, dangerous places were actually concerned with our “freedom” instead of protecting corporate profits), but when did July 4th start being one of those “thank the troops” holidays? I thought it was about declaring independence from our tyrannical overlords, and rejecting things like quartering British troops in our homes and basically living under the thumb of a foreign power.

Not that there hasn’t been a long history of celebrating war and destruction associated with the holiday – the fireworks, the parading about, the Sousa marches and all that. But, well, am I the only person who finds it creepy that we’re kinda turning into 1930s Germany, here?

Oh well. I don’t have to go to work today, which was a good call on my part. Sadly, tomorrow looms on the horizon like a dark, soul-eating cloud. I should’ve taken the whole week off. But I guess I should just enjoy the day today.

I shoulda been one of those rich, fancy-pants elitist teachers the teabaggers are always whining about, who get paid millions of dollars to take the whole summer off. Of course, that would imply that I was responsible for my own life and what I did and/or didn’t do with it, which, as we all know, goes completely against the whole teabagger as victim of liberals and big government doctrine.

I wonder if there’s any money in hosta farming?