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winter dog walking
Thursday, January 29 2004
There's something about winter that makes any particular day seem an awful lot like all the others around it. Today was unusual mostly because I had nothing that I definitely needed to get done, and so the things I did were conducted indoors. For days - even weeks - temperatures haven't been anywhere near as high as the melting point of water.
The only day I walk the dogs is Wednesday (when Gretchen volunteers at the Ulster County SPCA), but in this weather it's rare that I go further down the Stick Trail than the Chamomile River, which has frozen completely silent. Eleanor has such a thin coat of fur that I fear she'll catch her death. Eleanor's gimpy heel has largely healed, but a couple weeks ago there was the additional concern that too much activity in the woods would delay her healing process. All these concerns have been about Eleanor, but the result has been less dog walking for both Sally and Eleanor. The downturn in the number of exercise opportunities has resulted in Sally gaining weight.
For the past few days I've been heartened by all the trouble suddenly faced by our president. It seems that chickens from multiple directions are relentless in their insistence on coming home to roost. Anybody who has followed the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has known for months that nobody was ever going to find any, but for some reason it took a statement by departing weapons inspector David Kay to turn this into conventional wisdom. The media is treating this revelation as if it is a sudden shocking discovery, and it seemed to wake up more than few people from their propaganda-induced cognitive comas. Similarly, people are just beginning to wake up to the fact that our government is starving itself and the future of the country for the short term benefit of a tiny minority of rich people and the winning of a single presidential election. Meanwhile, conditions in Iraq have proven unexpectedly incapable of coming to resemble those in Missouri.
While these free range chickens have just begun coming out of the fields and hopping up to their preferred sleeping spots on the roost, others are still out in the grass, pursuing their final grasshoppers before the sun goes down. These include the chicken of the 9/11 investigation, the chicken of anarcho-corporate deregulation, and that whole miserable flock from Bush's drunken youth. That last one didn't have much traction back when people were trying to get beyond the "politics of destruction," but once people wake up to what a mess Bush has made, I have feeling there will be more attention paid to his resumé. It's a normal thing for a Human Resources department to do so as to learn from its hiring mistakes.
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