I forgot to show you this guy. Forget “How much wood?” and go to “How many ZZZZ’s?” I stopped and watched his belly move up and down before I was convinced he was just out. True belly breathing.

This morning was gray. There was no color in the sky at dawn, except for a small band of nearly red - to the north.

I slept 6 1/2 hours straight last night, and was silly and giddy all day because of it. I made sure I hadn’t offended this one guy, and I made many things cleaner than they were before. Nothing profound, just good.

I hope you had a really good day today, too.

We’re sort of rounding up all our best experiences around here into one last grand tour before we move all of 50 miles away. It’s good. We’re putting closure on a big chunk of our lives. So yeah, it’s weird and itchy and uncomfortable and bittersweet and good, all at one time.

We’ve gone to this wildlife zoo every year for fourteen years. It’s a good place. It used to belong to somebody, and it’s since sold out, but the animals seem to be healthy, and the employees or interns or whatever are consistently friendly, and young and healthy and fit. Young kids, young families, young pregnant women. A lot of health bounding around.

A lot of animals in cages, of course. A lot of pack animals by themselves, which makes me feel almost worse than the cages. It makes me sad for those animals who don’t have their peers to play with. (With whom to play. Shut up.)

Sorry. Veered off there a bit.

We stopped to see these guys right at the beginning.

This one pooped on me.

There were tigers.

And peafowl everywhere.

I didn’t see it at the time, but this one’s feathers are blurring into the branches behind him.

At one point, there were five males, all doing their dance thing. Whole lotta shaking going on.

Turtles.

And zebras.

And naps.

And then we stopped for chinese take-out, and went home.

(There’s a bunch of pictures that aren’t coming up. I’ll post, and see what happens. In the meantime, use your imaginations.)

I’ve been too tired and too preoccupied to really get into the summer season here. I haven’t had my camera out for a while. I’ve been very angry with it. The best lens has a big piece of hair stuck in it. I can’t find it, and it shows up big and ugly on those sky pictures I started obsessing over. So I’m working with a not-as-good lens. I like the focal lengths, but the optics aren’t so well coated, and it’s taken a lot of the fun out of it.

But we went to the local wild animal place yesterday, so I went out and blew through half a disc, so there will be animal pictures. But when I first opened the pictures to look through them, I ran into this…

It’s an hour drive into daylight every morning. The sun comes up now just as I’m leaving for work.

Today it was an odd dawn. The sky was somewhere between mineral lake and algae lake green, a golden blueish green. Most mornings are yellow, or orange, right from the get-go. This one had plans.

For a long ways I drive through a tunnel of trees, catching glimpses of the sun as it comes up. I was thinking about stuff; I was worrying about deer. I’d forgotten that I was supposed to be watching till I came up over a high point, and there was the morning. I’d turned just a bit to the east, and I realized that everything in front of me had turned orange, and everything in my mirrors was blue. I had to look back and forth a few times, just to make sure my eyes weren’t just playing tricks. Then I turned back to a true north heading, and the sky directly above was a beautiful pearly gray, with the orange and the blue staying respectfully apart. Then everything got darker, more intense, as I peered through breaks in the trees to see what was playing out. Finally, as I got to the highest point,  the clouds let go, making the eastern sky seem to be raining fire, while the thunderheads built up to a towering, flashing dark blue to my left. The sun finally came clear of the clouds and the horizon, and there - wait - a segment of rainbow, followed soon by the second arc, tree tips bursting into morning flame.

I was crying and laughing and waving wildly at the sky, thanking everything that had come before this moment, and a great blue heron flew overhead, east to west.

I finally have one, aside from the three thousand normal ones I have.

I do. I want to get to the Antarctic, and sail around the Ross sea. I will not jump in the water on New Year’s day, though. I have some common sense.

Aside from that, not much new. I slept for 12 hours, pretty much straight through except for that part where the storm threw my window fan across the room. Okay, only a couple of feet. It also slammed the door. I woke up for that.

And Daughter and I went up to look for hiking boots for her. Unfortunately, the store was crowded, and I think she got a little peeved at me for saying things like, “Close your eyes and tell me about your feet. How do the heels feel? Is, “They don’t bother me” the same as not rubbing or pinching? What about your toes? Do they have enough room? And the arches - are there any bumpy spots?” Daughter’s relationship with her feet is not quite as intense as mine with mine is. I suspect that if she can get her feet into the shoes, and they’re pretty, she’ll say they’re great, and buy them. But Mother insists that if you’re going on your first backpacking trip, you might want to think long and hard about how your boots, the ones that are going to carry you for miles while you carry a full pack, are fitting, and it better be pretty damn good.

I even graciously bought sock yarn and will make new socks for her.

And then we went to Wally World. I bought a CD. Radiohead. I feel so hip.

Life is good.

Or maybe it’s economically depleted. Whatever. We’re not doing so hot.

But we do have deer. Cute, entertaining little fawns, and stories of overcoming adversity, like my three-legged doe. Mighty stags, and the hunters that come up to drink beer and shoot things. Deer that run out onto the road and get whacked.

They used to just shove the whacked-on-the-road ones into the ditch, so that natural scavengers would have something to snack on, natural scavengers usually being German Shepherds so that you then had to worry about whacking a German Shepherd, but there were occasional eagles, and of course all the littler scavengers . At some point, somebody somewhere decided that there weren’t funds for sending somebody out to push the deer carcasses off the side of the road. It has its good side; you are now given a visual clue for when to hold your breath. Blowed-up carcasses stink. But if you travel the same roads day after day now you also get a graphic demonstration of the circle of life. Last year we were rewarded with the glorious spectacle of that mature bald eagle dragging the corpse off into the field,  20 feet or so a day. And the truly impressive display of raw power, watching the eagle rip gouts of flesh from the carcass and swallow them down. I stopped one day to watch, and having that huge bird turn that cold, cold eye on me was terrifying.

There’s one corpse that’s been in roughly the same spot now for three weeks or so. This display is not quite the same.

The doe was hit at night, probably by a semi. I’m guessing a semi because there weren’t pieces of broken car lying about, busted up fenders or shattered headlights. Semis don’t stop to clear the road, so I should be glad that this one was off on the shoulder. She was laying with her legs and belly towards the road, so that driving south, you got a chance to look into those big, dead eyes. (The worst ones are the fresh ones, at night, when you can still see the glow in your headlights. Ew.)

So, it lay there for a few days, flies, its belly swelling. Then the stink, and the collapse of the gut. But then it got icky.

At first, it was pulled a little out of position. I was thinking a dog or coyote getting it out of the public eye. But after that, it would move just a little bit, every day. And always the same way; the head being pulled a little bit farther down into the ditch. A small, but noticeable, difference. Every day. And then the carcass started…reducing…as if something were removing its innards. For the last week or so, it has been laying in the ditch up to the hips, just a bag of skin and bones.

But then again, maybe I’ve been watching too much Buffy.

Antarctic ice works best. Striped antarctic ice, thanks to Sideshow.

I got thinking about “bread and circuses.” From Wikipedia;

an ancient Roman metaphor for people choosing food and fun over freedom. It often appears in commentary that accuses people of giving up their civic duty and following whichever political leader offers to satisfy their decadent desires.

Of course, it’s getting to the point where people can’t afford bread any more, to say nothing of being able to get to a circus.

And then I got thinking about Obama’s comment about bitterness and guns and religion.

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Then there’s Obama’s support for the Supreme Court decision,  and for faith-based organizations.

There’s something there, but I can’t quite make it out. I suppose this makes me shrill, or something.

Glenn Greenwald is talking about FISA. He has to go get all historical, and drag that dead guy, Thomas Paine, into it;

that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America the law is King.

Whinging on and on about rule of law, and all those out-dated things.

He does go on and on, ending with;

And they are, in unity, spewing rank propaganda to the commoners — who continue to be subjected to the harsh punishment for violations of the law and one of the world’s most merciless justice systems — in order to convince them that granting license to our political and corporate elites to break the law is necessary for their own Good and for their Safety.

Go read. Greenwald is dense, but clear. Unlike me.

My daughter made me proud a couple of times this weekend. She can be a very silent person. Even I’m not sure what she’s thinking. But she can see what is what. In the child-rearing episode, she’s the one who came up with the dog-training analogy. And again, last night.

We went to A&W for hamburgers (Saturday is beef night). We were pretty well through our dinner when somebody put a buck in the juke box. Fine, it was way too loud, but whatever. The first song was some big-hair rock standard (no clue what it was) but the second song was something in that genre they call country-western that I loathe and detest so much.* The song was something about loooooonely women make good lovers. I put my head down, back into my book, but Daughter became visibly restless. I looked up at her, and she said, “This song is just - I don’t know,” and I said “ew-ey?” She said yes, and we left to continue in the car. “Why don’t they just say that lonely women are easy?” I quipped. (well, maybe not in so many words.) Daughter agreed that it was just icky.

I don’t know why we go there. The place always stands a good chance of decent into ickiness. Oh, wait, I know. Good burgers and good fried cheese curds. I think we’ll quit taking chances and get the food to go.

*And the country-western genre? I’m old. I remember when it wasn’t tight jeans and low-cut shirts, but actual music. This new stuff just seems like a rip-off. Bring me the Dixie Chicks! (Who only get air time at three in the morning around here.)

(Also, my daughter? I was told a long time ago that she wasn’t very empathetic. Ha! That person has since recanted. I have absolute faith in her now to read a situation, and respond. Weird. I was so scared for her, for so long.)