School begins for us, again, on Tuesday, 31 August.
This semester Gloria continues to study metal-smithing as applied to art and jewelry.
I’m taking a history course in Modern Warfare and a survey art-history course that may improve my cultural base a bit.
Tomorrow I have to put my parking sticker on the Pathfinder and Gloria has to sticker her Tucson. We can’t afford any parking violations.
We watched the series finale of “Pillars of the Earth” last night. I’m tempted to find the novel it was based upon and read it. I should have a book at the library on hold this coming week. So one more in the queue shouldn’t matter.
Pool maintenance today, added chlorine tabs, scooped bugs and am now adding water to bring the level up. The gas tank for the heater is full so we can run it another month. The solar blanket has been quite helpful this summer. There is some small benefit to this being a record-breaking summer. We’ve had only one night this month with a 60°F low. The rest have been in the middle 60’s to low 70’s. I’m looking forward to autumn.
When I began this blog a year, 366 posts ago I intended it as something that would force me to use some portion of my brain to connect to and relate to the world around me using language. I’ve written a lot of words, shot a few photographs, and linked to the work of established writers, pundits, and researchers. Some of what I linked to has amused me, some astounded me, and some has left me wondering when the sun is scheduled to go nova and clean the surface of the planet. Despite that frustration I’ not missed a day’s writing in the past year. That is its only benefit as far as I can see the steady mental exercise that took me nowhere but showed me a lot about other people and places.
I knew at the onset that I had absolutely no chance of changing the course of local, national, or world events. Despite that I’ve put a lot of words on virtual paper in the hope that someone, someone who can make a difference, might peripherally happen to intersect what I wrote and undergo a change in outlook. That hasn’t taken place and I am not surprised that it didn’t. Still, a twinge of regret lingers when I think back to how much I’ve written about the political idiocy that we have to deal with today.
Glen Beck, recovering drug addict, LDS fanatical convert, political commentator/used car salesman chose yesterday to try to lay claim to the civil rights struggle that took place before he was expelled into the world. Another oily, propaganda-spewing bigoted, hate-monger working for Fox News; he’s trying to add evangelical religion to racism, anti-intellectualism, anti-abortion, and other wedge issues that prime the sludge-filled blood streams of red state right-wingers and theocrats. Personally, I can think of nothing about the man that is socially redeeming. He’s the current male counterpart to Sarah Palin, feeding off the illiterate, spewing hatred and lies for a fee. In a nation that valued education more, these two would be quickly discovered for what they are and relegated to the also-ran pile before they had time to do any real harm. In the badly polarized America that exists today, they can make a career feeding the polarization, fanning the flames of hatred and bigotry, and contributing nothing positive to the political process.
I start this semester with less hope than the last. Let’s see how many words I add to the polarization while hoping for a shift to the positive in the midterm elections.
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