December 02, 2022
Season’s Greetings! I hope this finds you well and staying warm (but not, you know, out-of-control, breaking-the-thermometer-and-killing-the-planet warm.) Anyway, ‘Tis the Season again already. Like the song says:
Another year has come and gone
Another circle ’round the sun…
—Steve Earle and Allison Moorer, “Days Aren’t Long Enough” (2007).
Or we could just play it safe and stick with “Auld Lang Syne”. But that one doesn’t feel quite the same unless we’re belting it out between episodes of champagne hiccups, y’know?
So anyway, where does the time go? Experiencing a shortness of days (do they ask you about that too, at the doctor’s office?) is an undeniable fact by early December at this latitude. I like the long nights. I mean, who doesn’t appreciate a good snooze, at our age? But it gets old needing a headlamp to check the mailbox or take the dog out.
Speaking of whom, my sweet old dawg Lulu kicked the bucket back in May. After moping all summer–I only felt like half of myself without her, y’know?–I got a foster dog a couple of months ago, from the shelter down the road in Burien. Shorty is a 5 ½ year old, 50-lb tiger-striped mix of some sort. 5 ½ going on 1, sometimes. She’s a little dog with a big spirit, which I greatly admire. This girl has a lean build but a broad chest, and her shoulders are kinda bulge-y. Whoever built this one gave her a broad head with jaw muscles like a drill sergeant, and she has a couple of prominent scars on her muzzle that she won’t talk about. She sounds like she means it when she growls in her sleep. Like that Otis Elevators guy, Shorty and I have some ups and downs. Her transgressions are frequent and occasionally severe, but there’s a sucker born every minute and she plays me like a thrift-store turntable. She gently reaches a paw up to check on me if I cuss at the newspaper, and she snores with her head on my shoulder when we nap on the living-room futon. Having a close associate who’s non-verbal can be really nice sometimes. Even when she does something rotten I can’t stay mad at her, which challenges my very Puckett-ness.
Shorty is the fastest, most agile dog I’ve ever known: part Tasmanian Tiger, part Flying Wallenda. She has an amazing leap with NBA-class hang time, and makes cat-like mid-air adjustments to land gracefully on her feet. But she’s not very well insulated. Seeing her shiver when the weather turned “cold” here, I finally broke down and got her a fleece dawg sweater from that Overpriced Pet Supply place. I would have sworn that the sweater was orange in the store but when I got it home and squeezed her into it the darn thing was undeniably a flaming pink. So was I. We go out in public and stuff, y’know. I can only imagine what the neighbors think. Shorty appears quite attached to the sweater, though. It softens the outlines of her sculpted torso so that she looks more like a well-fed church lady, and to my astonishment she’s sort of like a different dog with it on—calmer, more relaxed, easy-going in a way she never was a couple of weeks ago in the pre-sweater era. Yeah, I know—“N” of 1, and completely subjective observations on my part, but if she’s happy we both are. I peel the silly thing off of her for a while at least once a day, so all of us—including the neighbors—can catch our breath.
We’re told that there are now more than 8,000,000,000 of us humanoids here on Earth. Plus a small handful in orbit somewhere, but they’ll be back. Man, is it just me or does that seem like an awful lot of mouths? Seems like the perfect opportunity for a highly contagious human pathogen to print up some cards and go into business. Good thing that only happens in the movies, huh?
Our democracy has struggled in recent years and may not be out of the woods yet. But the 2022 mid-terms have given me hope, or something that feels like it—along with gratitude that I don’t live in Cochise County, Arizona. Some folks down there apparently still hold with the view that the Earth is flat, which I suppose may be understandable (ever driven I-10 between Tucson and Las Cruces?) We’ve even got a few of those Flat-Earth types up here—one just lost Washington’s Third Congressional District race and can’t seem to accept what’s happened. But, whatever—the rest of us can just keep moving and maybe he’ll catch up when he’s ready to deal with reality. Or not. Either way, y’know?
I’ll never understand economics, though. Inflation has taken a bite out of most of us this year, with no end in sight. So the Federal Reserve Board is raising interest rates in an effort to push wages down and drive unemployment up… I think that’s what they said. Thank goodness for those guys. But are wages really the problem? Ooh, it’s so confusing! The drive-unemployment up-so-wages-go-down approach to reducing inflation doesn’t seem to be reducing my grocery bill so far. But I’m sure those guys know what they’re doing, huh? And if what you’re doesn’t work, you probably just need to do more of that, I guess. Brings to mind the carpenter kicking his sawhorse in frustration as he mutters “Dang it–I’ve cut the darn thing twice and it’s still too short!” Like I said, I’ll never understand economics.
But Seattle gets lots of interesting birds to gawk at, which I appreciate. That stuff is more my speed. I was sad to learn recently that one of the Bald Eagles I’ve enjoyed watching over the past few years apparently contracted Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), though, which is pretty much always fatal. There’s a lot of HPAI going around, so I hear, and it’s affecting waterfowl like geese and swans, and predators that come into contact with them. It’s sad but seems like yet another thing that we can’t do much about, not at this point anyway.
The apparent demise of Twitter notwithstanding, we still have lots of songbirds in these parts—most of which are thankfully not affected by the HPAI epidemic as far as I can tell. I ran into a tiny tweedler that I didn’t recognize earlier this week and had to get out my Sibley’s book to look it up. Greenish little cutie about the size of my thumb, flitting around and hovering like a hummingbird just a couple of feet from the end of my nose. It turned out to be a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, which are not uncommon here even though I don’t see many. That was fun.
Climate change, global warming, They’re Making It All Up or whatever you prefer to call it, the darn stuff has been right up In our faces here these past couple of laps around the sun. This year we had a lovely, cool and wet spring that lasted past mid-June, before turning into another record-breaking hot and dry summer. September seemed to get lost in the shuffle as August weather persisted well into October—Augustober, as some of us took to calling it. Autumn rains finally showed up weeks past their usual arrival time, but after that we got still more uncharacteristically dry and sunny weather that hung on into November. I’d never seen that happen here before. A sunny day can lift the spirits, but a seemingly endless string of them when we know it’s not supposed to be like that begins to feel oppressive. Now winter has come early with a bunch of highway closures in the passes where I-90 and U.S. 2 cut East-West through the Cascades, and we’ve even had some early snow down here by the water. I think we broke the thermostat.
But yoga keeps me going, and Shorty has promised not to lick my face while I’m doing headstands anymore. We both eat well, for which we are grateful, and we have fun together. She likes to show off by motocrossing and barrel-racing around the back yard, which is more exciting than watching the World Cup. She changes shape when she runs, becoming round and compact with her ears pinned back and her tail tucked in, butt about an inch off the ground. I can only shake my head.
Then, of course, it’s time for a nap. Wishing you sweet dreams, safe holidays and all the best for 2023.
thepointedquillblog@wordpress.com 