Redefined

 

All I Got To Say Is...

 ...I have toilet paper.  Lots of toilet paper.  And I'm sort of regretting that I ruined my excuse for not mowing the lawn by having bought a battery powered mower to do my hills with a couple years ago.

Tanning

Caught a little bit of someone's YouTube or Tiktok or some other commentary this morning.  Or afternoon.  Maybe it was Grace Curley's show out of Boston.  Streaming radio can be even more confusing than catching the weather report for Buffolo, NY, on your AM radio when you are driving back to college in Morgantown, WV, in the 70s before US 68 was built.

Anyway, one of the Eternally Offended was making it clear that if you deliberately get a sun tan you are committing a heinous act of cultural appropriation.

Anyone want to give me odds on whether or not that same person believes that whacking off a weenie and putting on a dress changes a boy into a girl?

1:30 AM and GACK!

The bedroom smoke alarm went off.  Not an annoying beep: a full blown alarm.  Me, cats, dog - rocket a foot in the air.  No smoke, though.  None at all.  So my unsteady self climbed on stool and yanked the offending alarm out of the ceiling.  There are alarms in the other bedrooms and in the hall and once mine was was disconnected from electricity and the battery pulled out (the alarms are interconnected) there was blessed silence.  Alarm is less than a year old.  Battery is no older - I replaced all the alarms and batteries last summer.

Copper refused to come back to bed.  Once I got back to sort-of sleep I had bad dreams and drooled all over my pillow the rest of the night.

Haven't put the damn thing back yet.

Er...Was Heinlein a Pervert?

Once in a gazillion years my book cases actually get cleared off and everything is dusted and wiped down.  The reno work in the house produced about a ton of dust that got into everything so it was time.  And along the way I found old paperback books that I had forgotten about and wasn't sure why they were still there other than maybe sentimentality.  I know why I have Bradbury and Burroughs - I still actually read them and haven't found a complete compendium of them to take the place of the fragile paperbacks I bought in the 60s.  I was able to replace my Lovecraft with a single hardback volume but not John Connor of Mars or Ray Bradburys because, well Bradbury wrote I-don't-know-how-many books and I probably couldn't afford to replace him with hardbacks now even if they were all gathered together.  And the Mars compendiums only seem to have some of the books, not all of them. I've looked.

But I found some Asimov and some Heinlein and some other authors I couldn't remember on the shelves and decided to read them because, well, I couldn't remember them.

Heinlein was one of the  sci-fi gods of my era.  So The Door Into Summer, first published in 1956, was my first pick.

Um.  OK. It was interesting to see what he thought 1970 and 2000 would look like.  And he had a cat. But I kept thinking of "The Jetsons" robot Rosey.

Still OK, although his idea that Los Angeles would become a magnificent place has fallen a tad short in reality.

But partway through the book I started to get uncomfortable.  His partner has a small daughter that the main character, Danny, adores. He's Uncle Danny.  OK so far.  But in the midst of long cryo-sleeps and time travel you realize both that Danny only knows this child from age about 6 to age 11 AND that he's sexually attracted.  At an older age, sure, but he doesn't know her at an older age. And at age 11 she asks him to marry her and he excitedly agrees.  There's Long Sleeps in between, but WTHF!?

There's a happily-ever-after ending.  But for all that Heinlein brought me dreams of rockets and space travel I wouldn't let him around my granddaughter after reading this book.

I Should Be Putting Down Mulch

 

But I'm not.

Just a Refresher Course...

 ...for those like John Kerry who think we have to get all carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

I like plants and I like oxygen, so let's not do that, OK?

And I would also like to refer CA folks, whose governor has apparently banned new drilling/fracking in the state in the future, to the list of things manufactured out of petroleum that I posted here.