Excavation Journal

From 8 until 11 this morning, work continued in the drawers of the former linen closet. Have managed to avoid booby-traps and have several promising specimens depicting life years ago. It is my hope I have not disturbed any unhealthy dust, nor incurred a curse.

I did it. I got up and put my laptop aside and did housework.

Of course, you only have my word for it, don’t you? It’s not like I took pictures of myself mopping, sweeping, replacing blinds, spraying sticky surfaces with cleaner. Maybe this is all a figment of my imagination . . . God knows I can’t let it become a habit.

Yesterday, after mowing the lawn early to avoid the 90+ degree heat and stomping trash for pick-up day, I entered a period of being bummed.  It happens.

This morning it is raining and the high is supposed to be 79. I don’t think it stormed last night, but then I sleep through storms. Normally, I would make a jokelet about needing GPS the morning after a tornado, but given this year’s season, I’ll pass. (Although, I think I just stuck it in that last sentence.  My secondary consciousness is incorrigible.)

I suppose I should continue on my cleaning binge  . . . my enthusiasm has waned, however, and I am whining. I need super hero cleaning powers – the point and ZAP technique. I couldn’t be trusted with them, of course: I’d ZAP everything and everyone. ZAP!  ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!

Say this is lifting my spirits. Oh, but it’s only pretend. Now that’s a bummer.

16 minutes. 51 seconds.  A lot of people sitting in front of computers today will kind of go “Awwww, almost 17 minutes; I don’t have time for 17 minutes of old man time.”

16 minutes and 51 seconds watching an old B-17 navigator remember. And if 16 minutes and 51 seconds is a long time in techno-today with things waiting to be checked with a finger click, then certainly the early 1940’s were a really long time ago, right?

Well, I have a link to a short film – 16 minutes and 51 seconds – made by Sleeping Dog Productions for The Disabled American Veterans. So many men fought in WWII – almost all of us have a link to one of those now old men . . . or to maybe some man who didn’t come home to get old.

Gary Sinise’s Uncle Jack was one of them and because of the former’s connection with the DAV, he was able to give his uncle a chance to share his thoughts and memories and blend them with the present in a ride in a restored B-17.

It is 16 minutes and 51 seconds . . . I suppose that could seem like a long time when you’re sitting in a bomber crippled over Germany that is losing gas and trying to make it back to England on a couple of engines. I wonder how many segments of 16 minutes and 51 seconds there were in that trip? How many in all the other missions he flew?

We all need to take that quarter of an hour – for all the fliers, soldiers and sailors from a long time ago and . . . and all the time since and to come.

Here’s the LINK.

A week ago when I was on the rider mower, I looked over and saw a rooster; I saw him while I was in my yard and he was too. It’s not as if I looked over the fence or over the hedge or over the road; I just glanced over about six feet from my mower seat and THERE HE WAS.

It was kind of surprising but, hey, once a big pig wandered over from a close farm and my mother had to hop right back into the car she had just gotten out of. I figured someone would round up the rooster guy sooner or later.

He was there today, just hanging around the yard close to the house. When I took an unexpected turn (as far as he was concerned) with the mower, he hopped quickly away with one of his  little chicken feet pulled up  under him. When he slowed down, he put both feet down and limped on slowly.

I just realized that was when I forgot about him. I don’t know if he was hovering in the background of my awareness or not after that. I may have started to take him for granted. Now, what kind of situation is that? Oh, yeah, there’s a rooster in my yard. How’s your rooster? If he is there the next time, I imagine he will become “the rooster”  – one step away from having a name.

I’ll bet Martha Stewart is jealous. Probably not. And come to think of it, she was a cooped up jailbird herself. Auuuugggghhh, that was so petty and mean. But, heck, I never liked her anyway. Well, I have to go chop my foldover into a semblance of a budding rose and put in on parsley.

Every year when news reporters are talking to the people who are putting the floats together for the Rose Bowl Parade, the workers stress that the very next day they will be starting to plan for the next year. I didn’t know it was that way with The Dandelion Brigade, but sources tell me that LZP was this very afternoon cultivating his dandelion crop to enhance next years . . . oh, shall we say, spread?

INVASION is more like it. I suppose I need to get my Intelligence Unit going, but first I need a name for it – some cool sounding.

I used to read all the time, every minute I could snatch . . . and then things got more hectic. And to tell you the absolute truth, the print in some of the paperbacks got a little smaller. The clutter increased greatly in most house and I couldn’t count on finding a book where I had left it and I certainly couldn’t have three or four books lying around just staying in one spot waiting for me to return and snack on a few pages.

Now there are several on my laptop and all I have to do is click, click and maybe click. I am in Nazi Germany, Down South in Mississippi in the late ’50’s, overseas being pursued by bad guys in Australia, in America’s heartland – both literally and literaturishly.

I feel more like me now. Yes indeedy.

(Rose is reading; Foo is reading in the Foo Bar; Lydia is reading a book about Scott Joplin. A lot of other regulars have their flat noses stuck in ebooks*; I think we’re going to have to hire some new help . . . like anyone gets paid, except in foldovers and drinks.)

* Oh, sorry about the “flat” remark. Good thing Sophie is at the Ohio Redoubt.

There are all sorts of online quizzes promise to tell you your IQ, Emotional Quotient, Personality traits and so forth; I don’t know if I have ever pop-up window that asks: How Crazy Are You? Considering I am sitting here thinking up questions for such a test in the back of my mind, I’d say I’d score high on the Crazy-O-Meter.

What non-edible objects have you considered eating? And have you done so?

Have you ever felt like you wanted to put your head in the microwave oven? And after standing there for three minutes with nothing happening, then seriously wondered how you could shut the door or rewire it so the door would not have to be shut? (Maybe this is more fitting for the IQ test.)

Have you ever worn snake-mating pheromones to a rattlesnake round-up? And leaned over the fence?

When  you talk to yourself, do you eavesdrop?

When was the last time you hired someone to run over your feet with a car?

When was the last time you hired someone to run over your cat?

Okay, I don’t know that we’re done here, but we probably should be.

One thing before I go off:  1) my rocker; 2) the deep end; 3) half-cocked; 4) on a wild goose chase; 5) none of the above. This thing – I once took an online IQ test and got a 76.

I have been boring myself here in these little entries. The weather.com people said we would have mucho days of sun; today it is cloudy and thunderstorms are predicted for this afternoon and tomorrow. GRASS FOOD – that’s what they are – GRASS FOOD!

See, I was boring then – with a little rev up at the end.

Fortunately, Rose is here and Sophie, the Comforter with the Sneaker, is at the Ohio Redoubt. Rose just told me she needs more assistants – something to do with the psychological climate of the place.  Soon she’ll be asking for Hardship Pay. I must remember that she doesn’t get paid if and we go into negotiations.