Neanderpundit

Francis W Poretto has yet another post which just begs to be read. Day after day, he drags concepts to light which lie in all our minds. When I say the same things he says, it sounds like the 1812 overture being played on a kazoo. The Curmudgeon has the ability to put words to those thoughts in a way that few can equal, and I am always awed by his posts. Today, especially, he drags out a topic that has been the bane of our beleagured commander in chief for many months now, but he does so in a way you don’t expect. Go, read. I don’t care if you never come back here, but read what he says. It’s more important than anything I could say.

Came home tonight to a cascade of water off the gutters of the house. In the spring, the oak trees that surround my house drop about, oh, forty billion pounds of Catkins, which are brown, stringy things with the ideal properties for clogging gutters.

In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to make a more efficient method of clogging gutters without the benefit of portland cement; these suckers work WELL.

So, rain sodden and nasty, I crawl up ladders and slog through mud finding the little dams and removing them, finally getting the waterworks flowing just in time for the rain to stop.

Bastards.

The wife walked in the Chicago 3 mile race to fight breast cancer this morning. Not wanting to deal with parking etc. downtown, we took the South Shore to a station close to Grant Park (van buren) and walked to the race, where she checked in, got her shirt, etc.

We left the house around five. We spent the better part of the day in the city, then came home to clean house to have a mother’s day dinner here.

My task was that of pack mule. I carried the extra water, I took the daughter when the wife was walking, we sat in the Grant Park grass and ate bananas.

It felt good. Yeah, it was a kind of a pain lugging all the stuff around, but it was a cause past politics. There were the usual folk singers etc. there, but they weren’t annoying unless you got stuck in front of one of the huge speakers.

Next year I’ll walk too. And I’ll still carry all the stuff. Maybe we’ll have to have someone come along and sit in the grass with the daughter, or maybe she can spend the day with her cousin. It was nice doing something good for a good reason and not being surrounded by politics for once. It made for a good mother’s day.

Oh, yeah. Happy mother’s day. To My mom, my wife’s mum, to my grandmothers and those who stood in for them, for the mothers of all the people I know. We just don’t want to know what it’s like to be without you.