I can’t say it any better than what I said 10 years ago.
May this New Year be filled with health, happiness,
and sweet times together for you and your loved ones.
My head tilts slightly as it does when I’m confused, and no, that never actually helps.
These days I’m methodically whacking my way through a large weeding project: an extended community garden that I neglected for an even more-annoying project for too many months this spring/summer. Tackling the mess in the morning to avoid the worst heat of these days with heat warnings, I fill a large composting bag a day and yet am uncertain whether I’m removing weeds and cutting back invasive plants faster than they’re growing.
Today, though, I woke up to rain, sorely needed but not entirely welcome in this dreary incarnation, even so.
Cold, grey rain pounds down
Wrecking planned fun, but off’ring
Day pass from weeding.
As someone here tends to say, nothing is all good or all bad.
We don’t get out much. We didn’t get out that much even in the Before Time, and we almost never got into a Tim Horton’s in the usual run of things. I don’t ever drink coffee and I need a doughnut once every 4.347826 years.
But on our used-to-be-annual lake trip we always stopped en route at a Timmy’s for a bathroom break and a box of Timbits® for our host, and so it was that a few weeks ago we crossed a Tim Horton’s threshold for the first time in a looong time. This floor decal greeted us.
In the sense of “doing/undoing” we can pay and re-pay, fund and re-fund, call (as to elected office) and re-call (from it), perhaps even act and re-act. In the sense of “doing again” we can use and re-use, set and re-set, boot and re-boot. But no one peals what a reformer seeks to re-peal; no one has ever peated before re-peating, nor nounced before re-nouncing. Nor can I gress, pugn, cline, or volve, although I can re- them all.
Perhaps you have not marked on it, perhaps mine is the first port you have seen, but re- words have spread silently, nigh insidiously through the language. It is now time to trieve our position, to pair the damage by sisting or, at least, gulating the use of a treacherously misleading syllable that wrongly suggests counter or petitive action. I believe the sult will flect or veal an earlier, more pristine form: a turn to simpler times.
It’s a big world, and it isn’t fixable. Sometimes — many times — it seems that I can’t do anything at all about its problems. But that’s not true.
Kayaking is the closest you can get to the water if you want to stay mostly dry, but kayaks (at least as paddled by me) make a lousy platform for photos. Too unsteady at the best of times; too damp at the worst of times; too prone to floating past what I’m trying to photograph at all times.
XXX is a legitimate firm that doubles cryptocurrency and helps you to earn money instantly in bitcoin for it’s [simple sic and change in point of view] many customers on a daily basis and it is one of the hottest new trend [sic] within the finance world through digital currencies which has [sic] been around for a few years.
I know we’ve had this conversation (or convo as the merely middle-aged are now saying. Goodness knows what the actual young are saying.) Anyway, I know I’ve commented on blog spam before, but it never fails to surprise/annoy/amuse, usually all at once.
John Robson is a professor of history, a documentary film maker, and a fan of the Magna Carta’s limits on the power of the executive branch of government whether that takes the form of a British hereditary monarch or the Canadian PMO (Prime Minister’s Office). I agree with his analysis that we have drifted far from the Westminster form of parliamentary government. I have no idea how we make our way back. Maybe thinking about it is the place to start.
Robson has a good piece in the Epoch Times this week, which I subscribe to solely for the purpose of reading his op-eds. I’ve copied the last several paragraphs below, changed formatting for readability, and added bolding for emphasis in a few places.
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