making up for lost time

It's been nearly three weeks since I last blogged. Jogging and blogging have this in common: Get out of the habit and it is easy not to do it again. But, blogging is much less painful.

Clearing the desk of a few items that deserved more space in a blog entry of their own:

I am now, without a doubt, a member of the bourgeoisie, the class my generation tried to rebel against in the Sixties. The earmarks were there all along but the final indicator, the litmus test, the ultimate badge, is that I am going to have a sprinkler system in my front yard with a new lawn to go with it. I've never had a sprinkler system before and my lawn really took a beating with the prolonged droughts that Florida has experienced over the years. The city finally came through with reclaimed water in our neighborhood and I ran out of excuses not to install a sprinkler system. It will be operational whenever the city gets around to inspecting it. My back yard will continue to have "native Florida groundcover," meaning an amazing variety of weeds that are impervious to drought. I'm going to chop some of that out and plant some actual plants, but more about that later.

I am sick to death of CNN, again. This time the cause of illness is the steady diet of Don Imus' ugly face and uglier voice apologizing for talking like a fool, his critics who want his ugly head on a pole, and now [news flash] the sperm donor for Anna Nicole Smith's baby has been identified. He is grinning and waving his arms like he's done something commendable, and this will keep CNN running full speed for the rest of the month.

The good news must be that there's nothing going on in Iraq or Afghanistan worth mentioning. Surely CNN would tell us, wouldn't they?

One of my motivations for getting the sprinkler system and new lawn installed is that we are having guests from out of town over Memorial Day weekend and I want to make our house look a little spiffier. The women will be here for a bridal shower for our daughter. The men, including her fiance, are going fishing. The story is that he has never caught a fish. I've spent many hours with the same result, but this trip promises to change our luck and I'm looking forward to it. Six hours of trolling with a little bottom fishing thrown in ought to give us something for dinner besides pizza.

We went to Savannah the end of March for our anniversary. My souvenir of the trip is a book of ghost stories written by a former journalist (I don't believe this is why she is a former journalist). They are like the better UFO stories in the sense that the people telling them don't really want to talk about them or gain any publicity from them. There's an amazing number of ghost stories out of Savannah, and if only ten percent have any truth to them, Savannah is one spooky city.

Not all ghost stories should be dismissed out of hand. My father, never the kind to make up such a story, once had an encounter with the "presence" (for lack of a better word) of a young man who had a reputation for being a roughneck, but he had been killed in an accident a year or two earlier. Dad was a teenager at the time. He was walking home - a hike for some distance along a country road - when he felt or detected this young man's presence. "Don't be afraid," the young man said. So Dad walked on home, not afraid but not willing to hang around either.

This has turned out longer than I expected, and it is past time to get that book and pick up where I left off, a perfect thing to do on a rainy evening.