Mixing metaphors can be fun or can be non-productive.
There’s some truth to the lead in line. Loki is recovering from her bite injury received yesterday.
Today, she has a sore and swollen muzzle, evident above, and is otherwise not at all chastened by the incident.
I’ll try to avoid writing continual harangues concerning the neighbor across the road. He’s our problem and other than filling the need to vent anger and disgust, such posts serve no purpose.
With that in mind, the word we received last night from a further downstream, across the road neighbor is that he plans to use land he has previously sworn to keep in his family, for his son, to open a trailer park on the field directly across the road from us. Should this actually become a working plan we will fight it on several grounds. It would be noisy and overload the road capacity. More problematic, he would have to provide a septic tank and field which could very well contaminate our well and render it useless. It could also contaminate the creek, which rises on Forest Service land. We’d have to insist, in court, that he pay to run county water to our land, pay the new meter and hookup fees, and pay the cost of any necessary plumbing on our side of the new water meter. Since it would have cost us at least $17,000 to have county water service brought to our property from downstream of his home, it is safe to assume that, if we won that contest, it would cost him at least $75,000 just for water to become available for his trailer park scheme. Still, stranger things have happened, so we’ll watch this closely.
The promised sunny day has failed to materialize. We slept with an open window last night and are both paying the price with sinus congestion and headaches.
Back to mixing metaphors.
We had hoped to host a friend next week as he travels from gig to gig on his southeastern tour. He had a MI last month and we lost track of his travel plans. We have had plans for two months to attend a dance in Asheville Thursday evening. The portion of the dance we are most concerned with is from 2000-2200 and then a bit afterward so that Gloria can catch up with old friends who make up the band. Today, we discovered that David Gans will be playing at a house party in Asheville on the 14th and with other musicians at an Asheville venue on the 15th before playing in GA on the 17th. Perhaps we’ll be able to see David, perhaps not. His performances and necessary travel time to arrive safely at each take precedence over everything else. Our need to minimize the number of trips to Asheville, along with the necessity of working in meals for each trip, and the need to care for animals restricts our freedom to travel as freely as we’d like. And there is also the need to not over tax Gloria and trigger a fibromyalgia flair-up. We’ll see what shakes out. David is a good friend and won’t be offended if we can’t connect this year. He played in Johnson City in 2006, two nights after we moved into this house. That’s when we last saw him perform. This is an unashamed plug for his work as a singer-songwriter and musician. If he plays in your neighborhood, go see him.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=160108871086&ref=nf
I’m hoping that it will dry up enough to allow me to grill some ground venison tonight. If not, I’ll pan sear it and serve it with a chili, chocolate, red wind reduction or with onions and mushrooms caramelized in red wine.
The poor get wet! Yes, they do. The unemployment figures keep rising, jobs keep being destroyed or shipped offshore to make a corporate bottom line show profit long enough for another CEO to be given an undeserved bonus for supposedly increasing profits and cutting expenses. This is Reagan’s “greed is good, government is bad,” carried to Bush/Cheney’s worst conclusion. The factory jobs, the blue collar jobs, construction jobs filled by citizens who belong to unions; those are never coming back. The stimulus funding should be having an effect, adding to infrastructure repair and replacement now. But the money, if it escapes the financial community, is not being used quickly or well enough to make a difference for the people who need it the most. Congress argues about extending unemployment benefits. They are working, as Wall Street knows and ignores, with flawed statistics. There are people who have not worked in years but who don’t get counted in the number of unemployed. When their benefits expire, when they roll off the monthly list of unemployed receiving benefits, they no longer exist. They don’t get included anymore. I read today that Georgia is now requiring the unemployed to provide uncompensated work for private employers while receiving unemployment benefits. They get some travel subsidy from the state as well as what benefits they are eligible for. But they are being used to fill vacancies for private employers and the jobs are not necessarily what the would-be worker is trained for or skilled in. This smacks of indentured servitude. I don’t like it at all. The unemployed person has to sacrifice job search time helping a private employer to avoid filling vacancies in his or her company’s structure. What can we expect next? Work houses? Debtors’ prisons?
You can read the article and form your own conclusions.
http://www.parade.com/news/intelligence-report/archive/091011-should-unemployed-people-work-for-free.html
It was a short night. I woke up feeling as if I could sleep another couple hours. Both shoulders and my neck are quite painful today. I rarely have anything of real consequence to post and perhaps even less today.
Stay well, the consequences of not doing so look increasingly unaffordable.
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