Stupid is as stupid does

© harrington

Hi! This should have been yesterday's posting. The record of 253 consecutive daily posts was broken because Verizon, our DSL provider, had a service outage that lasted at least most of the evening. I'm reminded of the Middle Eastern(?) practice of making small imperfections in rugs (and things?) because only G d can make something perfect. Anyhow, as I was driving to work in the morning, listening to a weather forecast that said there would be no rain (at least in the forecast), I was watching these thunderheads build. I didn't hear of any rain so I guess the forecast was more accurate that what my very eyes thought they could see. Does that happen to you on occasion? You think you see something, you think you know what you see and what it means and, later, it turns out that what you saw wasn't what you thought or what it meant? Another example from the past few days. We have a hanging basket of begonias over the front stoop. Early one recent morning, as I was taking Si-Si for our morning walk, I turned on the front light and saw the begonia basket not hanging, but on the stoop. My immediate thought was "I didn't know that bears liked begonias. Wonder why s/he left some?" The reality was a heavily watered hanging basket exceeded the holding capacity of the screw holding it. There wasn't a bear involved at all. Having seen a few locally in the past few weeks, I was preconditioned to "presume facts not in evidence," as my lawyer friends would say. (I hope you don't think less of me having learned that I have lawyers as friends.) In fact, I think it may have been a lawyer, long ago, who taught me to "never attribute to maliciousness what can be accounted for by stupidity." That lesson has held up well (better than the begonia.) All in all, I've had a couple of lessons in the past week about limiting my projections from what I see to what it means (and even what caused it). Thanks for listening. Sorry I missed yesterday. Come again when you can. Rants, raves and reflections served daily.