Day 3548 - 9/11

I'm still living in the same house, sitting at the same kitchen table, watching the same TV at breakfast as I was on this day eighteen years ago. I haven't forgotten. Memories fade though. With each passing year, more and more people will never remember this day as I do. They weren't here. There are young men and women serving in the military right now who weren't even born when the twin towers fell. I don't think these people and those who come after them will ever realize how much has changed.

When we were visiting The National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg recently, I remember thinking how little I really knew about World War II. This is understandable because I wasn't born until three years after the war ended. I never learned about all the sacrifices my Mom and Dad made. They didn't talk about those days much and high school history classes gloss over a lot of things. My Dad would have experienced this museum much differently. He was a Navy man and served in the Pacific during World War II.

I only have one picture of the World Trade Center. It was taken out of my hotel window at the UN Plaza. I used to stay at this hotel when I worked in New York. Although I have never lived in Manhattan, the city was frequently a destination during my ad agency days. I've walked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I've taken the express elevator to the top of the South Tower and looked out over the city from the rooftop observation deck. When I watched the towers fall while eating breakfast at our kitchen table I felt like the world I was familiar with was ending. In retrospect, this feeling was surprisingly accurate. The world hasn't been the same since.

I'd like to see a day when the country is unified again the way we were the day after September 11. We're a long way away from that now. When you look at the divided country we've become, it almost seems like the terrorists won. Hopefully, we will find our way again and discover a way to come together. Tribalism and petty bickering is slowly destroying us.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the state of the world. Day to day life is challenging enough for me. Today, Janet and I started to clean out the greenhouse so repairs can begin. What a lot of broken stuff I've managed to accumulate. Instead of fixing old lawn mowers, it was easier to just buy new ones. I kept the old mowers though, thinking that some day I might get the urge to fix them. This same perverse logic is why my storage warehouse is still full of old, obsolete computers. If I lived in the country and had a lot of acreage, there's a good chance that every old car I ever owned would be covered in rust out in the front yard.

The long awaited successor to the Land Rover Defender has finally arrived. What were they thinking? After Toyota completely botched the reintroduction of the iconic FJ40, its almost like Land Rover couldn't wait to say "hold my beer." I loved my old Defender. Not so sure about this complex, high-tech replacement.

I doubt that it matters. After we finish fixing up the house and yard, I won't be able to afford a new car anyway. At any rate, life goes on. I did my five mile walk this morning. I drank my fruit smoothie while watching TV pundits talk about 9/11 and then wrote a letter to my sister. Next year I'll probably do exactly the same thing.

Shadow is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3543

There was something new on the menu when I went to breakfast this morning. I ordered the Braised Short Rib Benedict basically because anything new on a hot Friday morning is a plus. The odd meaty concoction tasted more like a pot roast than ribs and the creamy sauce definitely wasn't Hollandaise. Hey, I'm easy to please when all I've got ahead of me is a long walk in the park.

I picked up something for dinner on the way home and got ready to walk. It's a little harder to leave the house now with a huge tree blocking the path to the back gate. This weather is really getting old. I'm encountering fewer joggers now and even the cyclists are starting to have second thoughts about a ride through the park. If the prairie grass gets much drier it's going to be a fire hazard. The city doesn't usually mow the areas designated as Native Prairie, but occasionally the risk of a grass fire becomes too great. I wouldn't be surprised to see mowers soon.

Doing all my walking at once definitely saves some time. It also saves me the trouble of taking two showers. After I cooled down for a bit and had a piece of cheese for lunch, I decided to finish my article. I'm pleased to say the first draft is done. I'll do some editing and check for typos over the weekend before sending it to the magazine on Monday. It's admittedly a long shot sending an article to an astronomy magazine about a rainy day at an observatory where I saw nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained I say. I made the trip and it definitely was an interesting experience. Maybe others will be interested as well.

I'm still used to being paid well to write very short advertisements. Often a day's work wouldn't even fill up a single sheet of paper. Writing much longer pieces where the prospect of any form of payment is often non-existent seems strange. Luckily, I'm retired and don't have anything better to do. I think this would be a stressful way of making a living if you depended on the income.

Janet wants to clean out the greenhouse so we can get the repairs started. Seems like a good idea. It also seems like a lot of work. The building is filled with materials for projects that never got off the ground. There are old bags of fertilizer, half empty bottles of weed killer, a bunch of rusty garden tools, a tiller that never worked in our rock hard soil, several lawn mowers that broke years ago, and lots of unidentified stuff. I should probably keep the live traps that have caught everything from rats to raccoons. We have a lot of critters in our yard.

Tomorrow, we need to transport some of the new Dalmatians from the vet back to the boarding kennel. There are several dogs, so there will be other people helping as well. The dogs have had a rough life so far and have spent most of their time outdoors. The challenge now is to help socialize them and make sure they are healthy. I'm confident that the second phase of their life will be a lot better than the first.

April is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day