Guy In Charge
Wednesday. Awoke this morning about three coughing, something having gotten stuck in my throat. OK (cough! cough!), what's this about? Closed all of the windows and the balcony door and turned on the big HEPA air filter I have sitting on the bedroom floor. Smoke getting inside the apartment? Those wildfires? Hard to say. Up later around eight, walking to breakfast, the morning not yet overly warm, but overly humid; just the faintest whiff of burning smoke in the air. Or was I imagining the smell of smoke? Easy to do, I would think. I took well over an hour to read the papers, eat breakfast, then stop to sit on a bench to watch a rowing crew out on the lake on the way home. It's supposed to be very warm through noon Friday (why noon Friday?), I think I may well stay inside. Cough!
Still, for all my carping, I spent yesterday afternoon working on my “100 Favorite Books” web page (the changes to which have yet to be posted). I'm embarrassed to say the impossibly clunky old frame coding done originally in the late 90's gets more hits in the summer than the journal, often comes in ahead of say Oprah's favorite books web site when people do a “Favorite Books” search on Google so I've finally changed some of the less than deathless prose and now what I have left is to scan the remaining book covers and I'm done. I've been putting this off since I first created the page, so I'm judging my progress yesterday a good sign. Now, scanning those covers. The books are at hand on their shelves, but how long before I actually start, let alone finish, the scanning of forty-one books? Today? This week? This life?
Later. So I stayed inside as the temperature got to two-hundred and thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit this afternoon which, as we all know, is warmer than one ever wants to become out in the sun. They are saying a couple of degrees cooler tomorrow, then a ten degree or so drop by Friday. We'll give ourself a bye until Friday.
Oh, they passed the “compromise” FISA bill today. Obama voted for it, Clinton voted against it, for whatever reason no one seems all that upset about it except old curmudgeons like me. Still, nothing new here. J. Edgar Hoover over the decades tapped the phones of just about anyone who got under his skin and believe me, the man had sensitive skin. For all I know there's a file with my name on it in a cabinet somewhere.
Nobody said boo to Hoover, of course, as Hoover kept files on the members of Congress. Watergate got people riled up after a while when it was learned what Nixon was doing and FISA was the result lasting for some thirty years. Well, nobody's excited about any of this today. Barbara Lee, my Congresswoman, voted against it; Barbara Boxer, one of my senators voted against it; Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat in name only voted for it, otherwise the entire Republican party and many too many Democrats took us all for a ride. Now (ho! ho!) if I were the guy in charge....
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