Climate Change

Oh, this climate can’t change fast enough for me! Over the past 72 days, since the beginning of August, it’s rained 60 times here in northern New Jersey. It’s like south Vietnam up here. All the shrubbery in my backyard is twice as tall, trespassing onto the deck and throughout the yard. We’ve been infested with aggressive giant mosquitos nonstop, so bad that letting the dog out back for a five minute walk entails half a dozen bug bites. Acorns the size of golf balls in the road. Moss has carpeted my porch and garlanded the house’s foundation, and the land is so watersoaked I’m fearful that big oak tree in the south east corner is going to tip over into Patch’s bedroom.

Not to mention I’m starting to get sad. I mean, SAD. You know, that disease where the weather pisses you off. Er, depresses you.

That fall nip in the air, when any trace of humidity dissipates with the greens of the foliage, that’s what I want in lieu of this rain forest that’s straddled my state these three months now. That’s one of the things I enjoy best in life. I want to go apple and pumpkin picking with the girls this weekend but don’t want to get drenched like I’ve ran a half-marathon.

Now, New Jersey basically has a six-week fall and a six-week spring. Summers last four months and winters five. After fifty-one years, I’ve reconciled myself to that. But not this endless shower of rain. Can I walk from my car in the driveway to the front door without expecting a Bengal tiger – or a Viet Cong – or the Predator that stalked Arnold and pals – to rip me to shreds from the steamy overgrown jungle that’s my front yard?

Thank god I put my foot down fifteen years ago when the wife wanted to put a deposit on a house that required mandatory flood insurance. As a kid I remember my basement periodically flooding, remember my mother twisting water-drenched towels into buckets, remember fishing out my G.I. Joe dolls (salvageable) and the few comic books I ever owned (unsalvageable). And I thought, never again. I now live in a house on the middle of the hill, and in all the rain – probably 500 rainstorms or so over the years – it’s never once let a single drop into the basement.

[knocking furiously on the closest piece of wood he finds]

So the constant rain has given me a pounding headache. I’m grabbing something cheap and trashy to read and will be avoiding human contact for the rest of the night.

Carry on. And please, bring on the climate change!

Government Schools (Sigh)

Handout in my 5th grade daughter’s Friday Folder.

Notes:

(1) Always check spelling, guys.

(2) When we don’t send our children to school on December 25, it’s because it’s Christmas Day, not an opportunity to develop professionally. Now, what are we celebrating every second Monday in October?

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Argh. Every time I tap on the laptop keyboard the screen goes black. With a little prodding, i.e., further tapping and/or lowering and raising the screen part in tandem, it comes back to life. Sometimes. Then, two weeks ago, it stopped coming back to life. Frustrated and busy with other things, I let it lie like an ancient antique artifact * on my desk.

Today, with some time on my hands, I took it apart, pulled out the battery, blew all the dust and debris from the interior guttage, and re-assembled. It seems to be behaving itself right now, though I am typing this very, very gently. Perhaps there’s a lose connection somewhere inside I can’t see or get to. Who knows? Well, I guess a computer tech would, but I don’t want to drop a couple hundred bucks to find out. Let’s just see how the laptop responds over the next couple of days.

With that in mind, expect some posts over the next couple of days. I am overflowing with ideas, though I haven’t actually written anything. Plan on being busy tomorrow despite having Columbus Day off, so maybe I’ll take finger to keyboard and see what magic, if any, happens. And hope that this friggin’ Dell – only three years old – performs to expectation, i.e., normally.

* = Remember OOPART, from a blog post back in August of 2016? Coined by cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson, it stands for Out Of Place ARTifact. It refers to such anachronisms as the Baghdad Battery, but could apply to my laptop if, say, it was discovered in the year 800 A.D., when Charlemagne was crowned king of half of medieval Europe.