We decided to take the scenic route to the nearest Chinese take-away after work on Sunday. It was kinda grey and drizzly, but we brought the camera along anyway. From the bitter countryside of Pennsylvania:


Spring House


Llamas


Furnace


Pump


Cow


Tree

Tags: nature studies, photo/graphic
humour: bitter

So, yeah, there's been another hiatus in my journal updates. On the other hand, there was a minor spike in my posts to America's Debate. With work picking up - more like snowballing - it seems like my "recreational" internet time is at a premium.

Plus my typing has been slightly impaired for the last week or so - which brings me to the (rather obvious) life lesson: Never try to break up a cat fight with your bare hands. Even if they're your own cats.

A week or so ago, both cats were outside - they've taken to the great out of doors like a Republican takes to boysex - and there was a rare incursion into the territory by another cat from the village: much yowling, hissing, and screaming ensued outside our bedroom window. So, of course, we went out to the porch and called the beasties in.

They both came tearing into the house with enormous tails and arched backs and turned on each other - screaming around the house, bouncing off the walls, overturning furniture - so I attempted to come between them, finally grabbing Xerox(traditionally the more submissive cat) and tried to calm him down. Heh - stab-stab-stab-stab-stab-stab-crunch. All six claws (Xerox is polydactyl, which I should maybe have taken into consideration) on all four feet were raked across or sunk into various parts of my left hand, wrist, and forearm - followed by every possible tooth being sunk into my forefinger.

I washed the wound out pretty well, applied some hydrogen peroxide and so on and bandaged the worst of the punctures and scratches. The next morning (last Sunday), however, the finger was swollen up like a gnarled pink sausage and I couldn't bend it. So off I went to the emergency room for remarks from the receptionist - "You tried to break up a cat fight?" - the nurse - "You tried to break up a cat fight??" - and the doctor - "You tried to break up a cat fight?" - a tetanus booster, and a course of antibiotics.

Now, about a week later, my finger looks a bit more like a finger and I can finally make a fist again, so the infection seems to have cleared up. The wound is still sore and bits of the hand remain somewhat tender, but I can at least use all ten digits for typing. Hurrah.

Tags: cat kingdom, social and personal
humour: sore

The cave, I find, is always more interesting in the spring. Mostly, with more run-off from melting snow and ice on the mountains and heavier, more persistent rains, the cave is a lot wetter - the dripstone is dripping, the flowstone is flowing, the stream bed is streaming, the rimstone dams are damming, and the sound of dripping, trickling water is everywhere.

     

     

     
While I was in snapping some of teh wetness, I also did several portraits of the last of the bats (the hibernating bat population being another thing that makes the cave more interesting in the early spring - and late fall). There are only a few pipstrelles left - the little browns have finished hibernating and the last of them left the cave for the summer a few days ago. Here are a couple of them:
 

Tags: nature studies, photo/graphic, speleological
humour: impressed

It's official: Barry Obama and Jerry Wright are no longer BFFs.

I was really afraid that Obama might throw Rev. Wright under the bus, but no. All he said was that he was "outraged" and "saddened" over the "spectacle" of Wright's "performance" over the past few days, that Wright is "divisive and destructive," that he gives "comfort to those that prey on hate," and that there are now "no excuses" for the all the things Wright said prior to The Greatest Speech Tongue Has Ever Uttered (Obama's facile speech on race a few weeks ago, in case you missed the address that left Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglas, Henry Clay, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Chief Joseph, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Mother Jones, Woodrow Wilson, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Earl Warren, Adlai Stevenson, Barbara Jordan, Ronald Reagan, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Clinton, and Elie Weisel choking in St. Obama's dust).

So, no: Obama didn't throw Wright under the bus - he shoved him in front of a fucking subway train - and an express train at that.

But what we should all be asking ourselves is why? Why now? What has Rev. Wright said in the last three days that he hadn't said previously - and perhaps continuously - over the past twenty years? Easy. He's said one new thing - and one new thing only: Barack Obama is a politician. He "says what he has to say as a politician" and "does what politicians do" - or, as Obama paraphrased him, Wright suggested that the senator's "values and beliefs" - the lifetime that he has selflessly devoted to giving speeches - was nothing more than "political posturing". Now that is an unpardonable sin.

Tags: duly noted, politburo
humour: nauseated