Neanderpundit

it’s painful to think of this, but today was a slack day, I had almnost no responsibilities. All I had to do was trim the grass, mow the lawn, wash four cars, change the brakes on the wife’s work truck, and clean the garage. It dawns on me that my concept of “slacking” and other people’s could be a bit different.

Been dry here for a month. Rain all around, but hardly a drop on my yard.

At the low end of the yard, there’s a broad ditch, home to small catfish and more than a few mosquitoes. Sprayed some Roundup on the weeds on the shore, and it seems that someone mixed the Roundup with some Miracle Grow.

That is a dandelion. It’s about 6′ tall.

My grass is dead, and in it’s place grows some tall weed that make the lawn look as if it has hair. Thinning hair. The only thing that seems to be thriving are the weeds, and in a few minutes, I’m gonna go outside and thrash the weeds down, mow the lawn’s hair. I’m gonna try not to dehydrate as I do. I know, I’ll blame it all on “global warming” and get a gummint grant to pay to have my lawn watered!

Update -For Jim:
No, it’s not a dandelion. I just went out and grabbed a couple heads off:

Tell me what it is. The top is an unopened bud, the middle a partially opened bud, and the bottom a bud gone to seed. Sorry not to have a better picture of that, it doesn’t contrast well against the white.

A dear friend recommended this book to me, and I have enjoyed it a great deal. It’s not a book I’ll go back to read over and over, like Rendezvous with Rama,(soon to be a major motion picture starring Morgan Freeman) but it is a good book. It has some good laugh out loud moments (well, it did for me) and worth the read.

We start out by learning about Ignatious. He’s a bit odd, but lovable. Well, no, actually, he’s not very lovable. In fact, he’s an annoying gigantic tub of lard. Soon, you want to kill him. Then, you meet his mother, and you sympathise for her plight in having had to raise such a meatsack. At some point Ignatious seems to be masturbating while fantasizing about a family pet. You begin to hate his mother. Other players (including a cop and a stripper) enter the picture, and you start to hate them too. Ignatious needs a job, so he starts to sell hotdogs, at which he is horrible. He then goes to work for a small manufacturer, and you start to like him just because he’s got to put up with ignatious, and his wife is a parboiled pain in the ass, but then, you start to hate him as well. Sooner or later, you hate everyone in the book, so you begin to know how Cliff Yablonski feels. You don’t want to go back and re-read it, not too soon, anyway, because the characters, while extremely well written, annoy you so much.

Do yourself a favor, check out the book at the library. Not worth buying. Shamefully, John Kennedy Toole, who wrote it, never published it, his mother did after he committed suicide. So: if you’ve ever wanted to read a horribly well written book about people you will relish hating, laugh about them on the way, and be tolerably happy to return the book to the library, this is it.