Let it go

Back in high school, my pal Felix Zapata tried to get me to listen to Chopin, and I never did. I was not big on non-orchestral music. It was disappointing to him.

Well, let me just say that Felix was completely right and I was a dope. Chopin is extra primo good.

Given the completely whackadoodle month this has been, I rather feel like we could do with a bit of calm to close it out. And this is an extremely fascinating presentation of Nocturne in E-flat Major.

Let’s just let July go.

Baffled

Every once in a while one of the furry landsharks tries to see if there’s not some way through or around the steel torpedo baffle that blocks access to the bird feeders. Here’s the most recent one.

I confess that I take a certain amount of uncharitable pleasure in seeing the look of disappointment on the little toerag’s face.

Panic in the streets

It’s a sign of the times, I guess, that on one of my morning walks I came across these:

And all I could think of was, “Who’s wasting eggs by smashing them on the streets?”

P.S. If it were any day in the past week, those eggs would have been cooked through and through.

Good trouble

This weekend I watched deeply moving footage of Congressman John R. Lewis making his final trek across the bridge over the Alabama River in Selma. And I wept for the loss of a man who worked all his life for the promise of this country—liberty, equality, justice.

(The rose petals where the wagon paused were placed by the Congressman's family. They represent the blood that flowed from Lewis' head when Alabama State Police beat him in 1965 during the Selma to Montgomery march.)

Yesterday, on his journey to the Capitol Rotunda, he passed by the Lincoln Memorial (where he spoke at the 1963 March on Washington), Black Lives Matter Plaza and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History. Later today he will be carried to

the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta before burial.

That Lewis, whose blood fell on more than one place in his fight for civil rights, never succumbed to bitterness is one of the most astounding things about him. If ever there was the embodiment of the term “mensch”, it was John R. Lewis.

An example to us all of grace, courage, generosity, dedication and strength. His memory is indeed a blessing.

Gratitude Monday: home improvement

This photo may not mean much to you, but it’s the first time in probably six months that the floor next to the patio doors has been clear of curtain rod debris.

After three years of a kludged solution (hanging Target sheers from nails driven into the frame) I decided I should have an actual rod. But I gotta ease myself into this sort of thing, so the rod, hardware and box stayed right there for at least the first half of this year. (To be specific, it was two rods joined, with finials, and a third rod, which I was not sure about.)

I got the brackets in the wall, but then realized that the two rods weren’t long enough to span the doors, so I was clearly going to need the third one, but for the life of me, I could not figure out how they were meant to go together. So, of course I consulted Google. YouTube, which usually fills the bill, was not as helpful as I needed, but Houzz came to the rescue. Turns out that rather than the third rod going between the two rods, you’re supposed to take the finial off one of the ends and that rod becomes the middle piece.

For something as non-intuitive as that, you’d have thought the manufacturer would have provided instructions; on their website at the least. But you’d be wrong.

Anyhow, I got the thing together and now have proper window treatments for the patio doors. By way of celebration, I washed the sheers for the first time since I bought them.

Also this weekend, I received a rotating composter bin; the People’s Republic seems to have been built on clay, so I need to do a lot of soil amendment. A few months ago, I started a compost pile on the side of the yard, but that was attracting wasps. So I ordered the bin on Amazon on 14 May. That was coming from some place where Portuguese is spoken (Portugal? Brazil? Mozambique?), and delivery was supposed to be by 29 June. By the second week in July, they’d removed the UPS tracker, and when I contacted the seller on Amazon, they never replied. So I got a refund and ordered it from another seller (at nearly $100 less; the marketplace is bizarre).

Well, the instructions that came with it—English, Spanish, French—were less helpful than the usual IKEA instructions.

(Interestingly, only the French one called out slotting the sides of the center piece into the channel on the panels. If you only speak English or Spanish, you’re on your own.)

The guides did say there were complete assembly instructions on their website, so I repaired there. Uh—their idea of “complete” is risible, so again, I hied myself to Google. And YouTube saved my bacon. A woman and her son started out their video saying they’d just bought this composter from a DIY store, and it “has really bad instructions.” But they figured it out, so I drafted on their success.

(I confess that I’ve delayed putting any of my compost material in the bin because I’m hoping that one or more squirrels will try to jump on it, and I really look forward to seeing them flip off as it spins. I even considered putting some bird seed on the top to encourage them.)

Thus, today’s gratitude is for the crowd-sourced wisdom of Those Who Have Gone Before, both text and video. God bless the Interwebz.