Help me

Having spent more than two hours on support lines for Comcast and Netgear, I’m thinking that today’s earworm should be from fairly early Beatles.

The fact that you’re reading this post means the calls were—eventually—successful.

 

 

Brooding

It occurs to me that this blog may disseminate a lot of Brood X content in the form of photos and videos. On yesterday’s walk, it seemed like every few steps I was capturing more of 2021’s crop.

Viz: this tree was evidently the place of choice for quite a few of them to shed last season’s shell:

Here's another mass-exfoliation site:

And it might have been indelicate of me to record this guy as he was slipping out of something less comfortable. But if he’d wanted privacy, he shouldn’t have done it in the road right there in front of me:

Also, these guys:

And here’s well, I think of it as a memento mori; also a reminder of the beauty of Nature's design capabilities:

 

 

Issues

I was taking my shopping empty cart to the cart pergola on Saturday when I noticed the clear sign of someone with a lot of compensation issues:

I'm sure that the extra high suspension is completely necessary. Also the "Black Widow" on the windscreen.

Way to take up four parking spaces, putz.

 

 

They're BAAAAACK

Still haven’t heard any of them, but yesterday I saw my first evidence that Brood X is among us.

I know I do not have enough windscreen wiper fluid.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: After

A few weeks ago, I was settling down to an evening of online jigsaw puzzles when I got a text from a colleague. She was in town for a special project but unexpectedly had the evening work-free; did I fancy coming out for a drink?

Did I ever!

There was a bit of a kerfuffle, as I had to get out of my sweats, and then it occurred to me that I prolly didn’t want to show up at a high-end hotel in Crocs, which is all I’ve been wearing for a year, when I wasn’t actually barefoot. So I had to dig out some trainers.

But I made it and we spent a couple of hours just chatting, sat at a table and not across three router hops.

You know—like the Before Times.

I confess that it felt odd, after more than a year of always being separated—by electrons, by plastic barriers, by a lion's length. To chat, to laugh, to look directly into a friend’s face. To hug (we were masked up for that). And to be surrounded (at a distance) by besuited people talking business or other friends just having a gab.

Now that CDC is telling us fully vaccinated that we can begin to congregate carefully, without masks, I’m looking forward to my first breakfast with a friend. Maybe a trip to the nursery to browse plants without my eyeglasses steaming up from the mask in humid weather. To hugs.

And that’s my gratitude for today. It’s not the Before Times—we’ll never have that again. But it’s beginning to be the After Times, and I am so here for that.