I hadn’t noticed until this morning that Karen DeCrow died on Friday. I don’t know if she was “famous” or not (though she probably should have been – especially to those of you of the female persuasion), but she was a fixture around here for what seems like forever, though I was kind of surprised that she was born in Chicago and didn’t get here until 1967 or so. She’ll certainly be missed.

And more sad news of course with Tracy Morgan in critical condition after a Wal-Mart tractor-trailer slammed into his limo bus, killing one guy and injuring a bunch more. Hopefully everybody who isn’t dead will get better.

Yesterday was a bad foot day for me – the first one in a while, and it came from nowhere. Bad “feet” day, more accurately. I got out of bed and, damn, both my feet were killing me. It was all I could do to hobble over the the dump and the gas station to buy diesel, and then come back and cut the grass. Even driving the tractor was painful (and that doesn’t require much more than sitting there – though there is the whole using the pedal-control thing. I’m not sure what you call the pedal on a diesel with a hydrostatic transmission, but I don’t think “gas pedal” would be correct).

Plus when I have to cut the grass, I constantly have to get off and move dog debris out of the way – bones, chew toys, sticks, and rocks. Yeah, rocks.

Every time I cut the grass (and this has actually been going on since before I started cutting the grass this year), I have to move rocks out of the way from around the sump pond, and yesterday was no exception as I had to move a bunch of rocks out of the way. And as I look out the window this morning, I see more damn rocks out there.

These aren’t small rocks, either (well, some of them are). Here’s one up close, and while there isn’t anything to give you scale, it’s more or less round, as thick as it is wide, and about the size of my head (and I’ve always been kind of a fat head). And the sucker is pretty damn heavy (I can pick it up with one hand, but it aint easy).

I haven’t caught anybody moving these rocks around (or, more importantly, how the hell they’re doing it – no way can they be getting their mouths around these thing, even if they could carry them, so I assume they’re using some kind of nose-roll technique lost to us since the days when the Pyramids were built). If you look at the picture above, though, you’ll notice a shitload of tooth marks on the thing. And I know who likes to sit and chew on rocks, so I’m pretty sure I know who the culprit is.

Now I just need to catch her in the act.

This is a particularly depressing Sunday for me, as not only do I not have tomorrow off, I have to work until five, too. That’s gonna suck.

Oh well, the feet are a bit better this morning, so I guess I should waddle into the Village and see about buying a couple ducks for this afternoon’s race (a five buck duck could net me a couple grand – hey, you never know).

It’s a big weekend here in our little town (or, more precisely, down in the Village). Yep, Olde Home Days are here again – a tradition that’s been going on since, well, I have no idea since when. Our town was founded in 1794 but the village is a newcomer, not incorporated until 1853 when they presumably decided town taxes weren’t high enough so they should add village taxes as well. Anyhow, suffice it to say, it’s been goign on for quite a while. In fact, in the olden days, Olde Home Days were called Old Home Days, but I reckon at some point “old” didn’t seem old enough so they went the universally accepted convention of adding an ‘e’ on the end to make it seem even older.

Anyhow, the weekend will be filled with bands, food, amusement rides, fireworks, a car and motorcycle show, tons-o-crap for sale, a parade, all, of course, culminating in the big Duck Race. All of which means there will be an ungodly amount of traffic in the Village – with cars at times no doubt backed up four or five deep at the traffic light. This means I’ll need to avoid the area between now (last night, actually) and Monday morning, which wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t need to get both diesel and beer (and drop a shitload of electronics-type shit off at the Town’s electronics shit dumping pile).

Now, you might think that it’s a bit too close to Memorial Day to be having yet another paradin’ type of event, but you have to understand that here in these parts, summer is all too short and every town needs to jump in there with what we (and I assume y’all do, too) call “Field Days” before Labor Day week (‘cuz you can’t compete with the State Fair, after all). So I guess our village said, “fuck it, let’s get ours out of the way first,” and even as it is, we conflict with the vaunted St. Sophia’s Greek Festival and the “Taste of Syracuse” (used to have a conflict with the Balloon Festival, too, until they realized they had a chance of better weather if they pushed it back to the end of June/beginning of July).

I reckon I can head to the next town over to get beer later on today, but I’ll be needing that diesel to cut the grass and I’m getting tired of the old electronics sitting in my garage, so I guess I’d better make a quick trip over there now before the crowds show up.

Have an A-One day.

Yes it’s “D” as in National Donut Day today. And that entitles you to a free donut at Dunkin’ Donuts (if you buy an overpriced beverage to go along with it). Apparently there’s some other celebration going on today as well.

Ah, yes, here it it: it was 70 years ago that the Allies stormed the beach at Normandy or, as I like to tell my wife, the when my people turned the tide of the war against her people – though, strictly speaking, “my” person was on the other side of the world in either China, Burma (which was most definitely not called Myanmar at the time), or India. Of course, the folks over in Europe got all the publicity. There are a few folks still around who fought in that war, but not very many (after all, if you were 18 70 years ago, you’re no spring chicken today).

I saw that the last Navajo “code talker” – Chester Nez – died a couple of days ago at 93. And of course my dad’s been gone for, shit, it’ll be 20 years in September. My how the years fly by when you’re spending most of them trying to get through one day at a time. One day you wake up and notice it’s just about over. How’s that for a happy thought? I blame my sunny outlook on things on my mother and Peggy Lee, since my mom loved that song “Is That All There Is?”

Anyhow, to those of you who are still around, thanks for all that saving us from the Nazis and the Nips and stuff. Sorry my generation turned out to be sort of lazy and useless, but, hey, you’re the ones who raised us.

On my way home last night, I saw a big dump truck about a mile from my house (not an unusual site, since we have a couple of quarries nearby) with the window down, and there’s a dog wandering around in the road by the truck so I kinda stop to make sure the dog isn’t gonna run in front of me. And she sees me stop so she runs over and jumps on my door, then comes around to the passenger side. So I open the door and in she jumps, all kinds of upset and wiggly and happy to see me.

I couldn’t exactly toss her out into the street, and I saw she had a Town dog tag on (but not one with her name and number on it, unfortunately) so I brought her home and gave her some food and water and let her run around my yard while I called the Town clerk, who was fortunately still in the office.

I read her the tag number and she was able to give me name, address, and phone number of the owner (plus the doggie’s name – Jemma). I gave them a call and left a message that I had Jemma and she was safe, and after a while the guy called me back and said he’d just gotten back from the store and found her leash broken, and then he came over and got her.

So I was thinking I did my good deed for the day, but then I thought what if she was being held prisoner and had escaped – relieved, thinking that I had brought her to freedom, only to be crushed to find out I was returning her to her captor? I could have been turning a downed Allied fighter pilot over to the Nazis!

Except I think this guy was Greek.

Well hopefully Jemma will stay put (or at least out of the road) from now on.

Time to get this week over, I guess, and next week’s gonna suck. Not only do I not have Monday off, but I also have to work late two nights to cover for a bunch of people who are in week-long training. And as if that wasn’t enough, if today’s Friday the 6th, then next week can only be one thing – Friday the 13th!

So I got an e-mail yesterday from Bill Lipton (director of the NYS Working Families Party), detailing the “…major win. Not for the Working Families Party, not for Governor Andrew Cuomo, but for the working families of the state of New York.” Basically, Andy supposedly said some shit that he may or may not have said before and promised to be a good boy and act like a progressive. Yep, that’s a victory.

There was link in the e-mail to “let us know what you think about the endorsement” and so I did. I basically said “bye-bye.” The output of the form of course went to a donation page where I attempted to donate $0.00, but they wouldn’t let me. I considered donating 2¢ saying “here’s my two cents, assholes,” but that seemed like too much trouble.

SPeaking of too much trouble, now I have to go about changing my voter registration. You can’t just switch parties in NY, you have to fill out a whole new registration form and mail it in. Yeah, mail. Well, I guess you can deliver it to the BOE personally if you want. Fortunately, since I don’t live on Shelter Island, I can just put it in my mailbox and raise the little red flag for the mail person to come and collect it (but she doesn’t walk door to door, she drives a truck ‘cuz it can be a long way between houses out here).

So now it’s time to choose a party to affiliate with. Democrats are out. We’re lucky to get one Democrat running for anything out here, so primary voting isn’t an issue for local elections, and who really gives a crap if I have the honor of voting for Hillary in 2016? Hell, I voted for her last time, so she’s probably better off without me.

I suppose I could register as a Republican and try to vote for whoever appears to be the least threatening when it comes to the general election, but I really just can’t see myself walking in to the firehouse in September and when they ask which party having to say “Republican” out loud.

The Conservative Party is out, too. I actually do consider myself conservative – just not the way those people define it. I think you should be able to do whatever you want to do as long as you don’t bother anybody else while you’re doing it, I think we have a responsibility to conserve our natural resources and treat the planet (and each other) with respect, and think that marriage should be between one person and another person (though if you want to three or more, what the hell, that’s your business – good luck if you can afford it, I guess), I think you should keep your religion to yourself (or you have no right getting all bent out of shape when I tell you what I think), I think that corporations are most definitely not people and have none of the rights imbued to them, I think that money does not equate to speech (free speech means you get to go stand on the corner and say whatever you want, it does not mean that you get to yell so loud that nobody else can be heard and it certainly doesn’t mean you get to buy more access to the people that run the country than poor folks get), I think we’re all in this world together and we’d better start fucking acting like it, I think there is an implicit social contract between the people and the government that requires the government to work for the benefit of all the people (and that includes providing healthcare and education – funded by income tax, not property taxes, plus school buses should have to stop for me, not the other way around), I think that the people should have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures (I think that one’s even written down somewhere) and I think that if you join a militia or have to kill shit to feed your family, you can have a fucking gun (preferably a muzzle loader) as long as you stay the hell away from me with the damn thing, ‘cuz if you shoot me or my dog I’m gonna beat you over the head with it.

And if they’d just go ahead and legalize pot already, I’m sure I could think up a few more things.

Anyhow, so I guess that leaves the Independence Party, the Green Party, the “Other” party, or the “No” party. So I guess I’ll have to go Green. They have almost zero local presence in the town councils and county legislature and all that. But at least I’ll never have to worry that they’ll endorse a weasel like Governor Snotball (and their actual candidate is a local guy – transplant from San Francisco – who’s a good lefty and a teamster who unload unloads trucks for UPS).

In a (sadly) typically cowardly act, the NY State Working Families Party decided to give Governor Snotball its ballot line in the November election, proving once and for all that it’s just shill and rubberstamp for the Democrats. So, no voting the WFP line for me anymore. And they aren’t getting any of my time or money. Not that they got much of that anyway, but still. I think I’ll have to change my registration back to “no preference” since there isn’t anybody worth voting for in the primaries anyway (least ways, not anybody who has a chance in hell of winning). I think I’ll just have to start writing myself in for everything – it does about as much good as anything else.