Looking forward to warmer, better days

It’s probably cynical of me to think that a snowstorm forecast for Monday is very appropriate for President’s Day, right? What with 4 years of a Con man, followed by COVID for two years, rabid Conservatives trying to overthrow an election, banning books and voters, and now the prospect of Communists starting WW3 by invading Ukraine, I’ve reached my limit on putting up with crap that begins with C. Cynicism is my response to those C’s, plus the Corporatocracy that is now functioning as the  ruling class of what was once a democracy.

On what I hope will be a brighter side, I’m volunteering as a participant in a fund-raising team working to restore and rehabilitate a local trout stream. In the process, I hope to dust off some long unused professional skills and use participation as an excuse to learn my way around some new fishing spots. All of which presumes that at some point this year weather will warm, flowers will bloom, and a fly cast upon the waters won’t bounce on the ice. We’ll see.

when forced, nature is more reliable than computers

Photo by J. Harrington

This morning was spent in a sense of deja vu, since it was largely devoted to downloading, installing, removing and reinstalling versions of software that offers a potentially viable alternative to MS’s Office. I’ve been testing it for a few months now. A couple of days ago I learned that exporting a file so a Windows excel users could review it resulted in a corrupted file according to the person I shared it with. Unfortunately, the most recent version that supposedly solved the corrupted fille export problem persisted in crashing every time I changed anything in the spreadsheet. Trying to install an intermeddiate version over the newer one made my Apple’s operating system very upset. We think we’ve now corrected enough that we have a functioning system but won’t know until we actually try to do some real work. It all reminds me of the days in the  last millennium when the hardware folks would claim a malfunction was a software problem and vice versa. The more things change, the more they remain the same?

Many of today’s headaches look and feel much like a continuation of yesterday’s issues. Does anyone know if it’s possible to manually move Mercury out of retrograde? At least the forsythia are continuing to bloom and leaf out in the dining room.

Antisocial Media

Jennifer Militello

It’s easier to computer than to crash. It’s easier
to computer than to hold a hand or knit
a winter together from headlights on the highway.

It’s easier to computer and be a hybrid and
cross from bowels and eardrums into hours
lit and roaring by like freight. The chapters

there can tell you an octopus has three hearts,
that snails breathe through their feet. It is easier
to have no arms or breath, to position through

colors and jumps shoreless as steam. No
surfaces. No verbs to be. No mussels
or bellows or congestion or caffeine.

No lens to focus, no Rome to burn. Who can
do when the roots are so untidy and
the branches rack like antlers against other

branches. It’s easier to computer than
to guess at a savior. Than to whisper slips
of information to the flesh. Let language construct

mere dewdrops of light. Let the circuitry
gauge the need and make it clean and make it
so heady it is erected, a remedy, in its ease.

There is no destination. No grave in place of a person
loved in the past, no identity classified, factual, no glass
to break open in the fisted hand, no cracked windshield,

no hurricane. Or there is, but it is closed inside its box
smaller than the box for roses, dead and moldered
by the time they reach the door, delivered only once.

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