Wednesday, September 30, 2020

The Debate. And Other Equally Weird Incidents.

1.  I tried to watch the Biden-Trump debate last night but instead my television gave me a show where two kindergarten children were having temper tantrums with red faces, bulging eyes and a lot of fist-shaking, and the supervising teacher was a powerless ninny.  Well, one of the children threw most of the tantrums and refused to listen to the teacher/moderator*, so then the other child had to also yell and bellow, in order to get any attention at all.

Sadly, that was the debate in the presidential elections of the still most powerful country on earth.  I had to turn on closed captioning as I was unable to understand what was being said.  That could have been because I am not a native speaker of English but more likely it was because neither is really Donald Trump.

It was all a waste of time, as more time had to be spent reading what the two men had actually said and also counting all Trump lies.

2.  My keyboard is old and has given me lots of trouble, recently.  Pressing the h-key gives five h's and then I have to delete four of them, and pressing the comma-key gives three commas.  The reason, my friends lies deep behind the keys.  Years of muck.  Today the Command-key stopped functioning which made copying and pasting impossible.  So I took a corn cob fork to the keys.

That is not the recommended approach, mind you, but now my keyboard works again.  However, I also removed the space-bar and only then went to the website where they tell you that under no circumstances should you remove the space-bar as it is extremely difficult to put back.

Indeed, and even more difficult if the microscopic pieces of white plastic playing some role in the behind-part of the bar fly high into the air and then disappear into the darker corners of the room.  But I DID put the space-bar back, and although it looks drunken it works.

3.  What has kept me from turning even weirder than I already am, in these times of the horrible plague, is my garden.  The plot is not large but it is full of plant and animal life, including hundreds of bees and even quite a few butterflies.  Also robins which are so tame that when I have my breakfast sitting on the steps they try to steal my croissant.  

There is a wonderful beauty in the way the garden dies for the winter, and nothing smells as delicious as good soil in the autumn.  I love the combination of the scattered late flowers, bee-covered, with the yellowing ferns and the bright red dogwood leaves.

I also have a surprise late flowering from a plant with white lacy flowers.  I bought it at a plant sale a year ago as chives.  

The thing is:  It's not chives, and I am not at all sure that it even belongs to the alliums or is edible.  I didn't know that earlier so chopped the leaves up and put them in an omelet, though I did notice that they didn't seem to have any flavor.  This is called a natural experiment which establishes if a plant is poisonous or not (do not attempt at home).

The sad thing, of course, is that the plant was sold as chives.  But that Donald Trump is the leader of the so-called Free World is much, much sadder.


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*I kept sternly telling the moderator to mute his mics, but he didn't listen, either.