The Perfect Summer: August in New York

Beautiful fluffy clouds, after a recent, brief summer rain. So normal!

We've had a cooler than average summer this year, which has made me extremely happy. First of all, there's no power outages, outrageously high utility bills, or constantly running air conditioning that's smells moldy from old filters; a huge break indeed. 

A symphony of beautiful weather set in the skies.

But more importantly, this crucial respite from insanely high temperatures gives the Earth a chance to cool down after many years of escalating global warming, temperatures so high from human waste, that we have melted polar ice caps and destroyed entire coral reefs from artificially warm waters, as well as displacing human populations from their sea level homes.

Ah! Another gorgeous sunset behind a stand of large trees.

It comes as no surprise to me that it's been one of the best summers I've had in a long, long time. I sleep comfortably every night with a fan blowing and open windows. I wake up happy and refreshed from actual cooled air that I can comfortably breathe in when I open the curtains to let in the beautiful morning daylight. 

The  glow of an orange sunset; a New York summer's day.

This is the kind of summer I remember from my youth: warm, sunny days with cool, breezy nights. It's also no coincidence that these are optimal growing conditions for this area, as one recent broadcast on local news suggested. A berry farmer in New Jersey said this was by far the best bumper crop they've ever seen, with the longer season extending the harvest to December.

The daylight's music fades, as the night chimes in.

Still, true to a human's ridiculously selfish nature, many an idiot talking head has loudly grumbled on-air, like some grade-school fuck-up on summer break, that all this "horrible" cool air is wrecking their friggin' beach time, to which I say this: go fuck yourself. I mean it!

A cloud adds punctuation, a single note at the end of the day.

If your spoiled bitch ass is bothered by the planet cooling itself back into good health, then go buy yourself a stupid fucking tanning bed and burn yourself into a compulsively fried oblivion, because we've had enough of your stupid fucking bullshit.

The perfect light.

Or, go buy a cheapo ticket to Boca in Florida, where you can bake your brains out (what's left of them, anyway) in some generically bland condo, you short-sighted, evil, corporate-owned cunt. I hate you! 
This is war >:o(

The music winds down, and the light grows softer.

For the rest of the decent Americans and other people like me, I raise my glass of freshly squeezed organic lemonade in your direction, as I put my feet up on the wood railing of an old house somewhere in the Hudson River Valley region, watching another spectacular light show that's delivered free of charge by Mother Nature herself. 

Perfect pink and orange lighting.

It's some of the best light I've ever seen in our skies, which is also not a surprise to me, a long-time watcher of weather and clouds. I'm rooting for Planet Earth all the way, (which we are just a small part of, despite the blown up arrogance and tiny penis insecurity of some fucking on-air tool), every single day, with every seemingly "small" choice I make, many of them at the grocery store, when I choose local and fresh organic foods, higher priced as they may be than the high fructose shit on sale for a rip-off $.79, now that word has spread about food and beverage company's poison profits, the shit that also seeps into our groundwater and land with every acid rainfall we have, with yet another weirdo tropical storm that we endure. Who do you want to see win? I know my choice (and my conscience) is clear. Asshat.

Wow...

...pink and purple clouds say "goodnight"...

...to another perfect day in the Hudson Valley.

A Tale of Two Kitties

The bird hunter at his afternoon post.

I noticed early on that a certain tomcat living on the second floor of a particular old house in a small Hudson River town likes to watch small sparrows cavorting among two large bushes planted in the front yard. 
I loved his hunters' intensity, watching his little head spin around to catch the birds' quick-flighted movements. Does he see me? 
I catcalled out to him from the lawn, waving my hands around. Yes, there's his head moving my way. He definitely sees me. Nice as the cat is, he didn't interest me much. I'm the type who prefers a furry snow dog by my side, but C'est la vie. I love animals, especially cute lil' house pets.

Tomcat on his windowsill. Wait, is that another cat?!

Then, one day....there she was! A second shyer kitty, hiding behind the smaller boy cat at his hunting post on the windowsill. She was harder to attract with my calls for attention, but I finally got her to look at me before she left for the quiet corners of the apartment she shares with her Tomcat. My neighbor told me their story one dark night while I watched the sun set, under the decorative eaves on the lit porch. 
They are indeed brother and sister like I thought, two rescue kitties that were part of an abandoned litter his friend found in a cardboard box by the side of the road. At first he collected one, then he went back for the sibling, and I'm glad he did. They form a perfect match set: he, the smaller wiry hunter; she, the quiet but bigger, gentler girl.

 

Oh! I see a second kitty! Looks like the girl sister!

We talked about a lot of things that night, touching on subjects lightly and quickly, like people born to the same clan. And just like my innate sense about animals, so are my gut instincts about humans: his people also come from Maritime Canada, off an island called Newfoundland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_%28island%29), 
like my Acadie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Scotia). How did I know? 
By their names, Cassidy and Evangeline. 


Read it here: http://www.bartleby.com/42/791.html.

An Illuminator's Bible

My first "real" Bible.

My parents gave me a New American Bible (St. Joseph's Edition) by the Catholic Book Publishing Company of New York, printed in 1972, as a gift for receiving my first Holy Communion. My mom hand wrote my personal information on the presentation page in her perfect Catholic schoolgirl script, a relic from both of our youths: I was just a little girl, and she was a very young and relatively inexperienced mother by today's standards, way before my history presented itself to me in the form of a vocation, and her Multiple Sclerosis set in to give her hand bad tremors. Years later, my Malamute puppy would pick out a few of my books off the lowest bookshelves to mouth on while I was away at work, cutting his puppy teeth on them by soothing himself with my oldest and strongest scents. 

I'd come home for lunch in the middle of the day on my little purple motor scooter, to walk him so he could go to the bathroom while he was potty training, changing his wee wee pads, steam vacuuming up doggie doo doo, and picking up books strewn about the living room floor, or piled up in his doggie bed rat's nest, along with chew toys and my oldest clothing items, like a sweatshirt from college days he got out of the bedroom closet's laundry basket: "Doing a little bit of light reading, eh, Ted?" He had pulled out the oldest books I had in my collection by the corners that stuck out from the shelf, like my high school yearbook and this red bound bible, dogeared time capsules of my life up until now. Life; it goes by so quickly.  

Enjoy it as much as you can.

Nature: Red Berries and a Hornet's Nest

Nightshade berries and a small paper wasp's nest.

My Week in Gaming: Fighting Since Day One

I feel so alone!

Yes! Teeny Phoenix helps me smite my Mega Foes.

Moss and Wall

A moss-covered stone wall becomes a lesson about 

man and nature living together in perfect harmony.

Clouds and Landscapes

Walking, bright summer days, potentially rainy afternoons, 

thunder clouds, the sky above, and the land underneath.

Crazy Ass Sugar High

Time to "power up" with cereal crack!

Lately I've been buying cereal when it's on sale, because I'm on a tight budget. I haven't eaten it regularly for many, many years, not even during my broke college days, because it was way more expensive than other simple foods, like eggs, bread, cheese, butter, and milk. 
But recently I've been buying a small box when it's on sale for $1.99, and it contains ingredients I can easily pronounce. So, I've been sitting at a table in the morning, looking at a box decorated for kid's, while I eat from a bowl filled with milk and cereal, just like in childhood.

Of course I noticed right away the wild colors, designs, and graphics. It's hard not to, and that's the point. Art for children, as it relates to impulse buys in a grocery store by the continued, tearful haranguing at a harried parent by an impatient, cranky toddler, has to be as instantly addictive as its' highly sugared contents. Marketing to children despite their best interests is a hard dance at that, too.

Cigarette manufacturers learned the hard way: Joe Camel was rendered too kid-friendly, as was the brightly colored promotional material posted child high at stores, to catch their lowered eye heights and attention spans. I recently interacted with a very young couple's child, and as I watched her bounce frenetically from thing to another without absorbing any of it, I knew her diet was part of the problem.

This is your kids' brain on legal drugs. Enjoy!

And so it was: a few days later, another neighbor, who acts as a sometimes surrogate parent and free babysitter, came over to tell me that the little girl was being weaned off sugar because of her hyperactivity, which was obvious to observe. She was running at full, frenetic speed well after 9:30 p.m. at night, a time period when I would have been so sleepy as a kid, I would not have been able to keep my eyes open, even if I wanted to. She was that wound up.

We know now that the highly processed and refined sugars add to an enormous list of health problems for people, but here's the missing part of the puzzle that's more hidden and actively suppressed by food and beverage companies through their lobbyists in Washington, the ones who cater to, and pay off, FDA officials: a growing link between certain foods and their negative impact upon our brains, (which are part of our bodies), and if not addressed quickly, develop into long-term (and incurable) mental illness. That hyperactive douche bag sales rep who pounds coffee crack all day from the nearest chain store, regularly snapping out inappropriately at meetings and passive-aggressively via email? He was the crazy kid next door who tried to bite you on the arm all the time, now grown up and working in your office. Stay safe.

http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/sugar-addiction-health-illness-0122135 

http://www.transparencynow.com/mental-illness-overview.htm

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/12/22/How-Eating-Sugar-Can-Cause-Mental-Illness.aspx

www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA351136/Combating-Cravings.html

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/addiction-medical-and-mental-health-perspective

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/salt-sugar-and-fat-could-you-be-addicted

Warrior in Disguise: The Shield Bug

Holy sh#t!! What is that?! It's massive, man...

At first I thought this prime specimen was a big tick that thankfully 
died it's last days on the porch, (I had a bout with bad sickness during college because of a tick bite, but more on that some other time), because of the flatness that's typically associated with the bug. 
But it had these large wings that had settled askew and out from 
the body, with colors that just didn't add up to a regular ole tick. 

I got a piece of wood from a bamboo stalk that I had I cut down with my trusty pen knife on my key chain, during another one of my walks around town on a hot, lazy afternoon that had revealed a stand of thick, hearty bamboo grown by a homeowner to obscure their backyard from a parking lot in town, and then I did when any self-respecting country person would do: I flipped that bitch over to get a closer look at it. 

Wow! I'd never seen markings like these before, and now I know why: the shield bug feeds only on certain types of trees and wood, the kind that's preferably been cured through time and the rain of many humid summers. I hope it took out some mighty foes before dying flat on it's back, like a true warrior would want. 

To learn more, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatomoidea.

Bart Discovers MMA

Forgotten at school, again.

"Where's your brother?"

Uh oh. Police Mom Marge is here.

Bart's caught fighting in the playground...

...with Homer's support. Ooops.

So Marge takes on the head of a fight league in order to protest violence, and its effect on kids...

...and kicks his ass. Margie likey!

But, what effect does it have on little Lisa and her brother Bart?

A new generation of fighters! Tune in to the very end to see who wins.

Dedicated to me and my bro Bernie, fighting since we were babies in the late 60s, now celebrating a great sport that finally matches the dreams (and scuffles) of our youth. Special "shout out" to all you "crazy" kids and silly, little dreamers. Here. We. Go.

Wild Calico Kitty

At the beginning of the summer, I saw two little kitties wandering around the basement of a white house, on a street I always walk down. One was black and white, and the other calico. I still see them occasionally during the daytime, but they're a lot better at hiding from prying human eyes, which makes them really hard to spot. 

Sometimes I wonder if they live in one of the big, old houses on the block, so they can be tended to by one of the kindly retirees who like to garden, maybe leaving them saucers of milk outside by the back door, but I also like the idea of them running around town as a kitty dynamic duo, killing small birds, chipmunks, and other small animals that burrow in among the wood piles.  Fare thee well, hunter.

A Thunderstorm Rolls In

Rain Clouds

 A slow, sleepy, summertime afternoon in the lower Hudson Valley.