Miss Mia Sopaipilla toasts her tummy on one of our new backyard walls.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla may find her daily backyard promenade going on hiatus for a while.
The weather wizards say a “potent cold front” is hooking up with a “fast-moving storm system” and we may be compelled to endure a short stretch of weather that is something other than 65° and sunny.
O, the agony. Still, if whatever we’re served comes with free water I’m all for it.
Expectations are that this first taste of winter weather will have a short shelf life here. Our readers to the north seem to be in for some heavy shoveling, however. Be judicious; give some thought to the lower back.
Speaking of shoveling, Mike Ha’pence just got tossed onto the growing pile of GOP Pestilential Candidates Who Are Not Orange and Under Indictment. Gosh, Mother, it makes a man’s eyes damp, for sure.
We’re slowly easing into the fall routine around here.
Arise, make coffee, scan the news, shriek, “Jesus Christ!” and run away. Maybe play with the cat for a while. She doesn’t know what to make of it all either.
“Cold, cruel world, isn’t it?” she murmurs.
“Well, not that cold,” I reply. “The weather widget says 52°, which is not bad for 7:50 a.m. on Oct. 11 in The Duck! City. Still, I take your point.”
We should spend more time talking to the other animals. I’m guessing you could walk into any primate house in the world, and if you understood the language you might hear something like: “You hear what the hairless ones did this time? And yet we’re the ones in the cages. Go figure.”
Hm. Hard to hide from Tōnatiuh with pissant cloud cover like that.
Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime. …
Funny how it just kinda sneaks up on us every year. Maybe not.
One minute we’re enjoying a refreshing 65-degree spin on the old bikey bike; the next, Tōnatiuh has cranked up his celestial broiler and is basting us with our own sweat.
“Can you crank up the a/c? Some of us can’t peel down to nylon shorts and wife-beaters.”
The sun god called in sick for the last day of spring. I went out for a short trail run 8-ish and the cool temps and overcast skies made for a most enjoyable outing, if running — even at my casual pace — can ever be termed “enjoyable.”
But yesterday he was back to stoking the furnace and it looks like highs in the mid- to upper 90s for as far as the weatherperson’s instruments can see. Ninety-four yesterday, and b’gosh and b’golly it looks like more of the same today, only more so.
I was just scratching Miss Mia Sopaipilla behind the ears while watching a ladder-backed woodpecker tend to his knothole in the backyard maple and thinking how fortunate I am to have been blessed with zero offspring.
That I am aware of, anyway.
My mother laid a powerful curse on me early on. You know the one.
“I hope that someday you have a son and he’s just like you.”
Ouch. I knew I’d get dealt one of those, too, straight from the bottom of the Devil’s deck.
And by “just like you” Mom didn’t mean a smartass beer-addled dope-fiend college-dropout hippie layabout. No, she meant the exact opposite of whatever it was I had been hoping for, sprinkled with a hefty pinch of my own least attractive qualities, which were numerous.
For openers: A son? No, thank you, please. Smelly little dick-twiddlers who hide nose boogers under every horizontal surface when they’re not busy lighting fires in the crawl space.
Plus you know you’re gonna have to fight him one day, and if you pull your punches the best you can hope for is a draw. Then you have that to think about for the next few years as you try to lay down the law while he mumbles into his plate across the dinner table.
A daughter? Cuter, maybe, at first, but still a hard no. A daughter might not punch your dentures down your windpipe — she’ll be savvy enough to hit you where it doesn’t show — but she’ll have other ways to put you in the hurt locker, and I’ve seen a few of them.
Anyway, boy, girl, they, them, whatever. You feed and water them for a couple decades, try to teach them not to stick their tongues in an electrical outlet or have sex with the vacuum cleaner or just coax them out of the basement and into the sunlight, and one day they turn into Seventh-Day Opportunists or Realtors or born-again vegans or just hack your 401(k) for the down payment on a survivalist bunker outside Road of Bones, Idaho, from which they sell secondhand Chinese-made cargo pants to the Patriot Front.
Whoa. Did I say “you?” I meant “me.” My mom didn’t have anything against you. Though if she’d met you I’m sure she’d have come up with something.
You’re probably doing just fine with your kids. Probably. So happy Father’s Day, you poor, miserable bastards. Miss Mia sends her regards.
O, Lord, sometimes a fella feels like he’s barefoot navigating a carpet spotted with hairballs in the dark.
Warner-Discovery bollixed its big switch from HBO Max to Max, forcing subscribers like Your Humble Narrator to dash hither and yon across the Internets, trying to figure out how we could enjoy “content” we were paying for but suddenly not receiving. Handy Household Hint to W-D execs: As error messages go, “Something went wrong” is just a wee bit vague.
E. Lawn Mulch stepped on his own dingus (yet again) with a rapid unscheduled disassembly of Ronald DeSadist’s pestilential campaign on Twatter Spaces. I expect various minions, varlets, and knaves (if any remain) were promptly laid off and escorted from the Twatter offices (for which rent is not being paid). Look for DeSadist to ban Twatter in Florida.
At Verizon, which is shedding customers, employees in “customer experience, loyalty, and technology positions” have been advised to prepare for “transition to the next stage of your career journey.” Your call is important to us. Or not.
Meanwhile, in the vast retail/services landscape, there is at least one happy customer. Miss Mia Sopaipilla got an A++ in her most recent visit to the vet and gives the chef’s kiss — muah! — to her bedcave.
Is there a Meow as well as a Yelp? I’m looking forward to a glowing review.
Mad Blog Media 