Great Mullein are a commanding presence in down there on the lawn. Phallic, certainly and appropriately fragile, four such protuberances shoot up to nearly my height, there at the end of our lawn, just before the brambles. A month or so ago, the long shafts were ablaze in yellow. Now there are only brown stalks, who’ve served their biannual reproductive purpose. Listing, they certainly won’t survive long into the fall. Down below me by the suet feeder there is a shorter pair and one of the sorry fellow’s staff is bent at a right angle, presumably the work of a bird or something more weighty like a raccoon.
Staring down there my eyes are drawn to a commanding spider on the window. If I were a mosquito sized mite or smaller this would be a terrifying creature. As it is, this little Shelob must be fretful about all the birds, down there searching for things to eat. It takes a while. All my app can tell me is that it is of the family “Jumping Spiders.” The camera focuses, and his agile body and his ridiculous beard are now in shape but then it fades. I waste many minutes trying to force my iPhone camera to zero in on him and avoid all that it senses behind there in the lawn. Finally. The i-Naturalist AI-lord has told me that I am viewing a Knobbled Orbweaver. Good-on-ya-mate, he or she is apparently native of Australia. Looking more closely at the photos they provide on the web, I wonder if I have put my faith in a false-god. My hirsute gentleman doesn’t look a thing like that nondescript yabbo they have displayed there on line.
Soon, I’ll need to drive my daughter over the Shawangunks to Accord. She is babysitting for a young couple over there. Yesterday we talked about how she is planning to take the pre-med curriculum. She is considering becoming a psychiatrist. My daughter the doctor. She seems so confident. I am tremendously proud of her. I’d taken pre-med bio, my freshman year at college and was woefully unprepared. Some things gained and other things lost, the Chinese education system certainly taught her and her sister how to memorize. I’m doing all I can to quietly encourage her.
They say they land of the free may ban Wechat sometime soon. What the hell does that mean? I don’t use Tik Tok, which will also be ‘banned.’ Wechat is, of course, a superior, remarkable, enviable thoroughbred among messaging universe. This is just tit-for-tat, beggar thy neighbor nonsense. Are they going to drive down my driveway and hand me a summons for sending photos on communist software? Are all the cloud providers who host server instances that support the app functioning here in God’s country, going to be ordered to cease and desist? What a load of horse shit. I watched that jackass Peter Navarro trying to explain why parents should be worried that their kid’s data might be captured and used by the Chinese Communist Party. Vipers at the helm. I’ll tell ya’. November can’t come fast enough. It’s like the monkey said when his tail got cut off by the train, Donald . . . can’t be long now.
Tuesday, 08/11/20
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