Team spirit

I’m in the process of Kondoing my PC—I’ve got so many duplicate files and folders I may never get everything sorted. (And activities like this are when I really miss having two monitors to compare files. A laptop screen just does not feed the bulldog.)

Anyway, I came across these pix I shot of my former colleague’s office. LW is apparently a fan of the Washington Nationals. (Yeah, I don't know what the helmet is; pretty sure it's not a baseball thing, but I could be wrong.)

I don’t know how many of these little dolls he has, but they must have accounted for at least two cartons when we all had to move office a couple of months ago. (The latest being my sixth office in 3.5 years, I had a grand total of 1.5 cartons of stuff to move.)

In this he reminded me of another ex-colleague, the World’s Greatest Expert. Little pisher with compensation issues.

Anyway, now that I’ve shared LW’s idea of office décor, I’m tossing the files. Only about fifteen squillion left to check.

The scent of summer

We didn’t have air conditioning when I grew up in Los Angeles County. It was around, but our house didn’t have it. My mother would close all the windows during the summer days, and as long as you stayed downstairs it was relatively cool. Then we’d open the windows in the evening; temps fall off at night in California, not like here in the District They Call Columbia, so it was comfortable.

One of my most evocative memories of those summer nights is the scent of gardenia wafting up from the bushes in the back yard to my bedroom. So when I moved into my house in the People’s Republic, I got a gardenia bush, which I take inside in the winter and then put on the patio for spring through fall.

To tell you the truth, having to use AC here kind of vitiates that whole olfactory experience, but a couple of weeks ago I noticed the bush had sprung blooms, so I went out to take some pix.

It’s doing better than the dwarf lemon tree that hasn’t produced one single lemon in the two years I’ve had it. (In fact, it may be dying.) That’s very disappointing, because we also had a lemon tree in the back yard, and I never bought a lemon until I’d moved away from home and was appalled by how much they cost.

I’m probably going to have to replace the lemon tree, but I am glad the gardenia’s doing its bit.

Check your speed

You know, we are awash with individual and collective criminality, incompetence and downright dumbfuckery in our government, and I just can’t with it. So I’m digging into my archives and sharing a story told by Brian Shul, Maj. USAF (Ret), of his days as a pilot of the world’s fastest jet, the SR-71.

Shul flew 212 missions during the Vietnam War. He was shot down and crash-landed in the jungle, hid for days before he was rescued and suffered such severe burns that he was first told he wouldn’t survive, and then that he’d never fly again. After months in hospital, he passed his flight qualification and went on to fly a variety of aircraft until he retired in 1990.

Among those craft was the SR-71 Blackbird, which was in service from the 60s through the 80s; it was retired and briefly reactivated in the 90s. The SR stood for strategic reconnaissance, and the Blackbird was outfitted with a shedload of cool tech to accomplish that. In addition, it flew at speeds exceeding Mach 3, and could outrun just about everything, including missiles.

Shul’s story isn’t really about any of that, except for the speed. What it is about is that fighter-pilot willie-waving that I saw a lot of on the fringes of an F-14 Tomcat fighter squadron. It’s a great story, and Shul does it justice. Settle back and crank up the volume.

You’re welcome.

Sheltering in place

We had quite the deluge yesterday in the District They Call Columbia. It started in the People’s Republic around maybe 0630ish, and it went on for about four hours. It did not dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven, it poured steadily for all that time. It was like California during an El Niño year.

Moreover, it was so dark right until mid-morning that I had to turn on lights. In July, man.

We’ve been having afternoon-evening thunderstorms and showers for days now, but this was impressive. I saw a juvenile cardinal that was so soaked, I wanted to take him in and dry him off. I have never seen a bird look so miserably wet.

There were floods all over the region (including at the White House) and the morning commute was dreadful for both motorists and Metro riders. The parking lot I used every single day near the Wiehle station was under eight inches of water, which built up after people had left their cars there in the morning. So I was really happy that I was not among them.

Gratitude Monday: debugged

Today I’m grateful that last year I heeded the advice of Rodolfo, the guy who cuts my hair, and bought a bug zapper. Before I got it, every time I went out on my patio between mid-May and mid-September, I suffered multiple mosquito bites. Every. Single. Time.

Even in the time it took to dash out, grab the bird feeder and run back into the house to refill it—a matter of seconds—I was chewed on.

The first year I resorted to long sleeves and insect repellant, but that required washing it off again when I got back. Not a really elegant solution.

But the bug zapper—man, that’s Nobel-worthy technological advancement. This year I put it out before Memorial Day and it’s been working like a Trojan ever since. So much that I spent quite some time this weekend messing about in the garden (including scrupulously overturning every container that might catch and retain water), and returned indoors unscathed.

Trust me—this is huge. And I’m truly grateful for it.