One of the joys of dotage is that you can barely remember your name, to say nothing of the 87 berjillion passwords you have to memorize in order to operate your websites and cruise the Internet. But today….ohhh mirabilis! Today I managed to get in to Funny about Money‘s website…and with minimal hassle.
Dog and I charged around the ‘Hood at dawn. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s ugly. An altogether ugleee dawn.
Walked past the tragic wreck of a house on the southwest end of the park, once a pleasantly middle-class domicile for an apparently normal family. Now it’s a vacant slum property, having been abandoned after the family’s son got crosswise with the law and thereby bankrupted his parents.
One of the most alarming aspects of life in America — or maybe, more accurately, it’s an aspect of humanity — is the tendency for one to be unable to get out of trouble, once one gets into it. As a teenager, the young fella who lived in that house with his parents got up to some kind of mischief. I never knew exactly what his crime was: only that he was arrested and sent to prison. Once out of the slam, he couldn’t get a decent job — and his parents had about bankrupted themselves trying to rescue him.
So he started this laughable business: pruning trees.
No kidding. He took a class offered by the County for wannabe arborists, wherein he tried to learn how to trim and nurture trees.
Arborists here do charge a pretty penny for their services: that’s for sure. If he’d been halfway decent at the job, he probably could have found his way to supporting himself. Problem is: he wasn’t even halfway there!
He damn near killed one of my front-yard trees, so ridiculously did he butcher it. Eventually the tree did have to be taken out. Now a yellow oleander is growing in its place…and doing surprisingly well.
Hm. Wonder how that human oleander is doing, these days…
{sigh} Their place is actually a nice house, even though it needs to be practically rebuilt from the ground up.
It backs onto the park.
Now I wouldn’t consider that a desirable feature: just what everyone needs, right? A public park as a backyard. 😮 But apparently others relish it. The houses adjacent to the park are (except for that one) handsomely maintained and regarded as prime properties.
Sooo….it was around the park and up a couple of busy local thoroughfares, the dog in search of beloved GRASS to get under her paws, the human contemplating its upcoming breakfast.
Now we’re back at the Funny Farm, pursuing the highest and best goal of human life: loafing.