Archives for 2010

On June 22, 2009 I was in Rome Italy. I had a good day. I woke up early, wandered down to the garden behind the hotel, and wrote some morning pages while I had a cup of tea.  Then there was breakfast and a wander over to the Vittorio Emanuele monument. Then there was some lunch at a fabulous restaurant, you know the kind hidden up an alley, which had been recommened to me by a friend.  In the afternoon, a little wander around and stumbling on a random, 1000+ year-old ruin just right in the middle of the sidewalk.

On June 22, 2009 in Washington, DC nine people died in the worst crash in Metro rail’s history not five minutes outside “my” Metro stop.

Some things have changed in the past year, most notably that Metro has gone to full manual control on the trains which means that instead of a smooth ride with predictable motion I’m often forced to wonder “Does the person driving this train drive his car like that too?” and “Did we just run over something or is one of the wheels on this car square?”

One of the things that I’ve noticed change in the past year is boarding patterns. Right after I got home from my vacation I noticed something odd in the morning commute: virtually no one was getting on the first or the last car of the train. During the evening commute, mostly those two cars were filled with tourists, and trust me they are easy to spot. Given the way the two trains involved in the June 2009 crash smashed together, and given where the fatalities were, this boarding pattern did not surprise. But gradually over the last year it has subsided out of necessity; even the most fearful commuter would rather have a seat than sway in the aisle every single day in both directions on the off chance a train might crash. Take a careful look at photo number 41 in this gallery and then read the caption to get a better picture of just how overloaded Metro really is.

So I found myself on the 22nd of June 2010 staring out the back door of the last car on the train as we made our way along the tracks to “my” Metro station wondering what I would do if I saw another train come up behind us looking like it wasn’t going to stop.  And all I could think about was how to balance being prepared to exit life at a moment’s notice with the reality of having to live life on a daily basis.

Maybe it’s because I’m sitting smack in the middle of my life and I realize that every day, every single minute even, is a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Maybe it’s because I am a student of human nature and I realize that it isn’t in us inherently to look around, pay attention, and understand that you can’t rely on your future self to do what your current self is to lazy, preoccupied, or just unwilling to do no matter how much you say whatever it is you aren’t doing is something you value. Or maybe it’s just that my priorities are shifting again and so I think about these things, about what’s important and what’s not.

The only thing I know for sure is that the bulk of us are totally unprepared for the one absolute certainty about life.

I don’t care what the chart says about sunrise time; we had enough light at 05:36 to read comfortably outside…and given the fact that these days I need a lot of light to read comfortably, that’s saying something.

Chart courtesy Weatherunderground.com

Happy Midsummer, folks!

Not bad for a couple of  bushs I paid $11.99 for at K-mart (yes, long ago enough that they still had the dash in their logo).

Of the people I have met in my life I have never met two who needed a dog less than my next door neighbors. Three years ago they “adopted” a Cocker Spaniel puppy. I say “adopted” because what happened is that the man’s adult daughter got this puppy, couldn’t train it, and foisted it off onto her step-mother, who is known for “rescuing” dogs. The quotation marks may seem twee but based on how these people treat this dog, they’re required.

Cocker spaniels aren’t exactly known for their even temperaments. Like a lot of small breed dogs, they’re nervous and yappy, and they’re particularly nervous and yappy when they aren’t properly socialized.

My neighbors both spend a horrible amount of time out of the house. They both travel for work which is fine. The problem is when she travels for work, which she does for 5-7 days at a time every six weeks.

He can’t stand to have the dog in the house. So when his wife goes out of town he leaves the dog outside for days at a time – yes, she does have shade and adequate water; at least he does that right – letting her in only briefly to feed her and never bothering to clean up the poo from the yard which is especially pleasant during Washington’s typical summer weather of 90+degF and 90% humidity.

And this dog barks, and barks, and barks, and barks. She barks at cars. She barks at people walking through the alley next to their house. She barks at people across the alley who are using their backyard. She barks when the wind blows or when a squirrel runs across our yard.

It’s really not her fault she barks. For one thing, it’s all she can say: she’s a dog. It’s also not her fault that her people don’t understand that dogs are a pack animal and without another dog around they are her pack. None of that alleviates the annoyance of having a barking dog as a constant companion for a week.

I’ve talked to the woman in the couple about him leaving the dog out. I’ve even gone next door when he’s been home and the dog has been barking for an hour or more at a time. It gets better for a while but there’s no real change in either their behavior or in the dog’s. She still barks constantly and my deck and back yard rapidly become unusable because of the flies attracted to the poo. There isn’t really much more I can do. Except, today delivered to me an opportunity for minor revenge.

The letter carriers at our local post office are notoriously inept. It was so bad last year that my block regularly met in the middle of the street to exchange misdelivered mail and we were routinely getting other people’s outgoing mail with our incoming letters. In today’s mail I got both of my neighbor’s Blockbuster Video rentals.

I’m so tempted to open them to see if they’re anything I want to watch. Even if they aren’t something I want to watch, I’m tempted to open them and use the prepaid envelopes to send them back just for the sheer inconvenience factor.

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do but hey, whatever it is it won’t be worse than a dog that barks for four hours straight on a nice Saturday night when I have all my windows open. It can’t be any worse than the dog barking right now as I write this.