Global Warming, Hah! Nothing an old light bulb won't fix!

Pot on the Patio

I never thought 'twould happen!

Yesterday, fighting valiantly
against a deep depression
brought on by cold weather--
so cold that, at night,
Jack Frost came tiptoeing in
on little cat feet--
I gathered together nearly
every root vegetable I could carry
and made a vegetable,
beef, barley soup.

It wasn't a very good soup, but there was a lot of it,
since I have not internalized that, in this marriage,
there are only two of us. Do not ask me what primal urge
lies beneath that observation: it is just a fact that
I always cook too much for too few of us.

Our refrigerator, like many refrigerators,
was not designed for convenience.
The freezer is up on top,
with the ice maker occupying one corner,
and the refrigerator space occupies the lower half,
so that the most used items are conveniently at hand
if you are three feet tall, and do not need
adjustable shelving. The vegetable bin
and the meat bin are lowest down, and one of them
is located so that when the door is opened only part-way--
as is necessitated by the kitchen counter--the bin opens
only part-way, too, which is not a problem
if you are three feet tall and left-handed.

So I did what we used to do in Minnesota:
I put the pot of soup outside at night where it could freeze.
In Minnesota, in wintertime, it froze so hard
that the pot melted before the contents did.
Here, a teeny little crust of ice formed on top: good enough!

We are coping.

We have fashioned two styrofoam ice chests
and two heat-producing, incandescent light bulbs
into igloos over the drip watering system controls
to prevent the pipes from freezing.

We can see that our neighbors have covered a tree,
probably to keep the oranges or lemons from freezing,
and the tree from wimpering toward frostbite.
I have declared to all of our plants that if
they want to live in Tucson, they will have to cope, too,
without benefit of insulated blankets and old light bulbs.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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