Vive la liberté!

Today being Bastille Day, seems like having something French for our earworm would be appropriate.

In the past, I’ve given you the iconic sequence in Casablanca where the French patrons of Rick’s Café Américain where the non-Nazis drown out Major Strasser’s team (singing “Die Wacht am Rhein”) with “La Marseillaise”. But today I’m going with a different icon.

Here’s Edith Piaf owning “Non, Je ne regrette rien”. 

And I’m dedicating it to the sister of a friend, who has just been granted her freedom from her philandering husband after 15 years of marriage. It's amazing how absolutely fabulous you look when you drop 170 lbs of a bag of dicks that does nothing but drag you down.

I’m looking forward to her next book, chronicling her own personal 50 ways to leave your lover.

 

Incipient art

Some more sidewalk art today.

I have to say that it’s not the best I’ve seen. But everyone’s gotta start somewhere.

 

Shoot

Okay, a day later, Nature has revealed more to me about the neighbor’s hosta.

The shoots are not some sort of Alien-like creature, Which is a relief. No, they’re really like all the other hosta shoots, vehicles for flowers:

Although, in my defense, they’re really different from the ones I’m accustomed to.

 

 

Shooting match

My neighbor’s hosta has given me something else to enjoy; these shoots:

Usually, hostas’ shoots have flowers, like this variegated example:

But not my neighbor’s. I’ll be interested in seeing what emerges from these.  

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: UI & pizza

Two things to be grateful for today.

First: on Friday I finally—after trying since 22 May—got registered for unemployment with the Virginia Employment Commission. The actual process I’ll document in a different post, because there’s nothing gratitude-inducing about it; it’s working as designed, because the Commonwealth of the former capital of the Confederacy don’t want no truck with nobody who ain’t serving the needs of bidness. But I’ve made it into their system, although it remains to be seen whether I’ll actually get the $300/week. (Their list of disqualifiers is quite long.)

Second: I had my first pizza bianca insalata in six weeks.

 

 

Hotter than a match head

The news this week has been that Tuesday saw the highest recorded temperatures around the world. According to a story in WaPo, scientists calculate that the global average temperature on Monday, 62.92F, was the hottest it’s been in 125,000 years. Then Tuesday topped it.

You might at first think that 63 degrees is properly temperate, but consider that this figure rolls up everything, including the poles and highest mountains. We’re cooking ourselves, here, because this is totally self-inflicted.

So I think today’s earworm has to be The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City”. I confess that TLS are not my favorite pop group; they wouldn’t even make my top 500 list. But it seems appropriate to have a crappy band singing about this topic. 

Back when they released this, they could talk about evening respites. Not so much, any more.

 

Neighbor sighting

Even though it was 91F yesterday afternoon, I took my walk. This time, to add to my steps, I went through the corporate campus next door instead of just around the cluster.

Developers are fixing to vomit up 92 million-dollar townhouses on the 28-acre plot, ripping out established trees and doing who knows what to the three mini-lakes that provided so many people respite during the pandemic, so I reckoned I should get my enjoyment in while I could.

I was heading past the first lake in a kind of knee-discomfort fog when I realized that I’d disturbed a heron, who glided away before I could get a photo. I’ve seen this guy—or his relative—before and felt blessed that I caught him this time. They are such beauties, in the water or in flight.

Here’s one of them from a couple of years ago.

 

Clustered flowers

I’m trying to push my post-op steps count above 3000 per day, so yesterday I took a walk over to the next cluster. I haven’t been there in literally months.

First thing I saw was a ladybug on clematis:

Yellow roses:

An interesting double-bloomed fluffy daylily:

Which is different from the usual:

A two-story-tall white hibiscus:

And coneflowers:

Worth the extra steps.

 

 

Focusing on the arc

It’s so weird—Independence Day here and I’m feeling uncharacteristically meh about it. From the flag-waving antics of the Gravy SEALS crowd to the Christofascist majority on the Supreme Court cutting a swathe the size of Olduvai Gorge through the Constitution, I’m finding it hard to feel…celebratory this year.

For one thing, the ProudBoysOathKeepersMomsforLiberty set has so thoroughly co-opted the flag that every time I see it I think, “What fresh fuckery is going on now?” And I’m sorry about that.

I do believe that the ProudBoysOathKeepersMomsforLiberty set will die off—possibly from a combination of their congenital bile, unvaccinated status, appalling diet and heavy smoking. Not soon enough, but it’ll happen.

I’m also heartened that numbers of people claiming to be members of Christian sects are diminishing—primarily because these Bible-thumping ignoramuses have distorted the teachings of the Nazarene beyond recognition. I rather hope that, when they, too, die off, there’s some kind of “nooo, you kinda missed the point” announcement as they head to their well-earned eternal rest.

SCOTUS, now—damn. If the Founding Fathers could see those six venal and morally corrupt bastards, it would incinerate their powdered wigs. “Wait—we had to make provision for ethical standards for jurists? Because men [this was the Eighteenth Century, after all] who devoted their lives to the law might pervert it through bribery and ideology? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Yeah, Jay, Hamilton and Madison. While we’re on the subject, let me tell you about the Federalist Society. Your eyebrows will join your wigs.

On the plus side, there will be no display of military might on the National Mall this year. I can’t believe that’s a thing I even have to say. And the sitting president will not, under any circumstances, hold the nominating convention for his political party at the White House next summer. There’s that. But it’s weak sauce for celebration.

In past years, I’ve delved into the principles of the Founders—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This time, I’m just not feeling it. Those words seem hollow right now. So I’m going to go back not to 1776, but to 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the National Cathedral.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

We are not there yet. But I believe that we will arrive and all the mouth-foaming attempts to subvert it by the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, terrified bigots will, in the end, fail.

And I’ll bloody well drink to that.

 

Gratitude Monday: namaste

At last.

On Tuesday, I finally was able to get down on the floor (and back up again). It wasn’t pretty, but I did it. Which meant that Friday I had my first yoga lesson in four weeks.

That’s the longest break I’ve had from yoga since I started taking lessons in the first July of the pandemic.

Man, I’ve missed it.

(With my first knee replacement, I was up to yoga in two weeks after surgery. I’m somewhat disappointed and frustrated that it’s been twice that, but here we are.)

Normally, we hold the lessons via Zoom, but to ease my way back into it, my instructor came to my house, which was an extra treat.

Here’s the SITREP:

Table position, with a metric ton of padding.

Very slow and kinda clumsy sun salutes; downward dog, yay; lunges, boo.

Forward folds (such gooooood stretches!).

Not-quite-melted-heart.

None of that crossed-legged or figure four nonsense—maybe in two or three weeks.

Tree pose—couldn’t get the left leg above the right ankle, but my instructor says that the height of the foot doesn’t matter; the balance does. So I’m back to tree-pose-of-some-description every morning.

Bridge at the wall.

And my favorite (well, one of them): plough.

I am so, so grateful to have such a good instructor, and to be able to do some of the poses. Also—looking forward to getting better, stronger and more flexible.