So, today is Monday 'n the sun is shining...

I know I talk a lot about politics but this nightmare in Paris isn’t something that I care to dwell on…it’s just too sad ’n there’s already too many people talking about it…’n watching Obama ’n his posse dance around the never-ending press conferences just adds to the insanity of it all...

So, today is Monday, the sun is shining ’n Millyrose is due back at the Olde Manor House on the morrow…I s’pect Willy ’n I had better clean up the mess we’ve made of things before she gets here...

I usually start the day off by putting two frozen biscuits in the toaster oven, set the timer for 22 minutes ’n wander off to other early morning chores…’n lately, I’ve been returning to the toaster oven, PLUGGING THE DARN THING IN ’n resetting the timer to the aforementioned 22 minutes…I find the biscuits not only bake a lot better in a hot oven , they taste better also…

So, as I stated earlier, it’s Monday and  a bright, sunshiny Monday at that, but there’s a cool north wind a-blowing…a more or less welcome return to what use’ta be considered  a ‘normal’ northern California winter...

In our ‘normal’ winter pattern, November would bring us a storm about every 7 to 10 days, a little rain on the valley, a little snow on the Sierra…by Christmas, not so much rain but instead that phenomenon known as ‘Tule Fog’…

I grew up in eastern Kentucky alongside the Ohio River so fog was not an unknown to me but the patchy fog of Kentucky, as dense as it could be, ain’t got a thing on the tule fog that can blanket the entire central valley of California…we’re talking a strip of fog filling the entire central valley…miles wide and 500 miles or thereabouts long…haven’t had so much of it the last few years but when I was hauling my tired butt up ’n down the 99 highway back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we would look to convoy behind the CHP (who couldn’t see any better than the rest of us but he kept us at a slower, safer speed)…

The tule fog of California is how and why that famous reindeer, Rudolph, came into being, but that’s a story that’s been often told ’n you can fill in all the blanks your own self….

It’s been said often ’n by a lot of people that the only constant in this old world is change itself...but Willy, like most dogs, doesn’t really care much for change…With Willy, the S&P morning tour is mandatory...he waits patiently while I have breakfast ’n while I mess around taking a shower ’n stuff but he tends to get agitated when I start pulling on my boots…raring to go then and has a difficult time restraining his enthusiam…

It’s a coolish day for northern California tho’ the sun is shining…a pleasant day for a walk in the park, or in our case, Willy and me, walking doesn’t quite describe what we do…we stroll, we amble, we stop and ‘smell the roses’  although the roses are pretty much gone for the season, it's more of a dry leaves skittering but Willy is a dog and dogs never pay any attention to the odor of roses or skittering leaves, for that matter…more like the odor of other dogs or food or whatever it is that occupies the doggy mind but I’m pretty sure, fairly certain, that for dogs in general, life ain't about stopping to smell the roses...

Some days, a body could really use a fireplace...

I wuz all set to make fun of the Dimocrat debate ’n it would’a been laughable, I guess, if it hadn’t been overshadowed by the Islamic Terrorist attack in Paris…kind’a takes the edge off coming up with smart-ass remarks about Hillary…’Course, she doesn’t really need my help, she seems to have her own feet in her own mouth almost as often as Uncle Joe…

So, on to the weather…the weather is an important and time-consuming subject here in ‘way too sunny California where we’ve been living in a drought situation since the late ‘70s…But, finally we’ve been getting some rain ’n things are greening up ‘round the old Manor House ’n more importantly, we’ve been getting snow on the Sierra...

I wuz told that the rain ‘ud be here about 2 in the A.M. ’n that if I slept it, I’d prob’ly wake to clearing skies…tee vee is boring without Millyrose so I turned it off ’n read a book…a ‘real’ book with pages ’n ever’thing ’n still managed to get to bed before !!:00 P.M.

And woke up to the rain in the middle of the nite…s’alright, I tho’t, ’n I went back to sleep expecting…well, it don’t matter what I might have been expecting this morning but what I got is rain, a cold rain, a steady, monotonous and cold rain ’n it’s still raining…Ah well, according to the song, That’s life ’n you can’t deny it….’n I quote that becuz there’s a Sinatra wanna-be doing a version of that for a commercial…you’d think since I remember it, it’s prob’ly working as a commercial ‘cept for the life of me, I haven’t the foggiest idea what the commercial is for….Ah well, that’s life….I guess…Have a nice Sunday….

Marco Rubio told the world that ‘welders earn more than philosphers.

…some of the liberal pundits were incensed at that statement but that is only becuz they haven’t a clue as to what actually defines a philospher…

Anyway, you hardly ever see a help wanted ad for philosphers ’n if you did, it ‘ud undoubtedly be a minimum wage job  which, if you’re inclined to such a position, I’m sure you’d be able to work out a rationale….sort’a like when you’re a boy ’n you seriously want to grow up to be a fisherman/philospher like Uncle Louie…

Uncle Louie wuz a philospher/fisherman who took a small nip now ’n then from a metal flask that he kept in his tackle box…he almost never caught any fish, he hardly ever dipped a line in the water and I never even knew a time when he actually took his boat to the river…he had a really great boat that set on blocks in front of the house…I think his rationale wuz that if he wuz to put the boat in the water, it ‘ud  require cleaning when he took it out…same rationale for his fishing gear…if he’d used it, he wuz gonna have to clean it so keeping it in the tackle box in the workshop seemed to work pretty well for him…

‘Course, that was just Uncle Louie philosphizing…Come to think on it, I never knew Uncle Louie to do any ‘real’ stuff at all, he mostly spent his time in his workshop tinkering and philosphizing ’n it seemed to work for him…I s’pect if he’d wanted any welding done, he wud have paid for it but I never knew him to make a dime philosphizing…don’t believe he gave that a lot of thought...

Now if those libeal pundits had simply known Uncle Louie, they wudn’t have made such a simple mistake becuz it’s pretty darn obvious that welding or most any similar job wud just have to pay more than philosphizing…even tho’ actual work doesn’t have quite the same cachet ’n you all know how important cachet is when it comes to living a satisfying life...

Evidently, those pundits think that a ‘philospher’ is someone who studied philosphy at an institution of ‘higher’ learning and got a degree that calls them a philospher.  Sort of like the Liberal Arts degrees that are so popular today…

I spoke with a young lady not too long ago who wuz majoring in ‘Black Studies’…I wuz a little surprised becuz in the first place, she wudn’t black or even African American altho’ when I think about it, I don’t suppose that’ud be a necessary requirement…

Way back in the middle of the last century, Black Studies wud have been the equivalent of ‘Underwater Basket Weaving’…which is what we simple folk in days of yore wud have called a degree in philosphy.  

You wudn’t gonna find those jobs in any Help Wanted section of the newspapers of that day…’course, I don’t think students of today search the ‘Help Wanted’ ads with the fervency of the youth of yesteryear…I’m not even sure if such a thing as Help Wanted’ ads still exist…if they do, they’re ‘online’ and way beyond my simple skills…

Anyway, one doesn’t become ‘A Philospher’ by studying philosphy, one becomes a philospher by living…if you live long enuff that you begin to wonder what in the name of Hell is keeping you alive when friends ’n family are all dying around you, then by the grace of God and fortune, you’ve become a philospher…

And there ain’t a damn thing you c’n do about it!

November, the way it use’ta be….rainy ’n cold ’n snow on the mountain…

I keep checking the thermostat, seems like it’s just gotta be sumthin’ wrong, it’s too darn cold in the old manor house…Willy keeps lookin’ at me, “Let’s go outside ’n play…” is what I believe he might be thinking but every time we step out the door, he stands on the porch looking puzzled, then turns around and wants to go back inside…he’s a smart dog…

Mark Finan has been having a rare old time, pontificating about the possibility of a tornado in Elk Grove, anticipating its path, he’s been positively gleeful about it…

‘Course, Folsom Lake is still at only about 15% of normal so the drought is still with us ’n likely t’be for some time….be a hoot if we wuz to get 40 or 50 feet of snowpack the way it wuz in the olden daze…Course, that kind’a typifies California, boom or bust…that’s the way it’s been since the great Gold Rush of 1849…some of the wealthiest people in the whole darn US of A reside here in California…well, not here in Olde Faire Oakes prezackly tho’ we do got some of the near wealthy or almost near wealthy…Why, not too far from here, up around Folsom Lake, there’s a sort of haven for basketball players ’n suchlike…

There really wealthy live down in The Bay Area or some of the fancier enclaves tucked away in So Cal…But, we also got some of the nations poorest people with about half the population living on some sort of welfare…if we get a change of regime in Washington, D.C. and they pull the Obama money out of California, we could make Greece look like a European success story…

Anyhow, the winter that we haven’t been having for several years now seems to have returned so let's give a big collective HURRAH for El Nino!

Once’t upon a time back in that great long ago,..

 I spent some months as the re-write guy in a small, satellite office of a military newspaper. I had never studied ‘journalism’ or, for that matter, never even worked on so much as a high school newspaper…(well, I had contributed some cartoons but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count)…

The USAF in their infinite bureaucratic wisdom had trained me to be a court stenographer at the same time they were phasing out court stenographers and replacing them with the much more accurate recorders, but that’s another story as M’sieu Moustache so ably phrased it from behind his bar in the movie Irma La Douce...

The Officer in charge, a Captain as I recall, in that little office had studied journalism in whatever State College he’d attended and he gave me ‘The Guideline’ to follow in making sense out of the garbled notes that our ‘reporter’ and our‘photographer’ turned over to me…I was responsible, not only for writing the story but also writing the captions for the photos…

I'm not saying I was good at my job (don't think that was ever entered in the equation) but I was the only one doing it and no one actually corrected anything I wrote before I sent it off to the Mother Ship…(when it appeared in print, if it appeared in print, it was pretty much the way I’d written it)...

According to the Captains Guideline, the first rule of journalism therefore is to answer the questions: What (happened) Where (it happened) When (it happened) and How (it happened) whatever ‘it’ actually was…and don’t dare use an adjective or an adverb and keep it concise and pithy...

The second rule of journalism is that readers have short memories,which is a really good thing for newspapers…sort’a like weather forecasters…or voters...

And speaking of voters since it is 'The Political Season' and since I’ve spoken with so many Democrats that claim they may have voted for Obama the first time around but they didn’t vote for him the second time, absolutely not,no way, didn’t happen…It's very puzzling how he got elected the second time when so many people didn’t vote for him…Chicago-style politics, I suppose...  

Many of the Democrats I spoke with insisted they sat the last election out and probably will sit the next one out as well because the Democrats haven’t given them anyone to vote for and the Republican slate is just too confusing and besides, they can’t bring themselves to vote for another Bush because the previous Bush lied to them about Iraq…

If you then happen to mention that Hillary lied about Benghazi, they insist that has not been proven, even going so far as to deny that she confessed to lying when she was being interviewed by the Benghazi Committee even though if any of them had bothered to watch, they could have seen and heard for themselves that she did indeed confess...

Of course, that would have taken time out of their busy day(s)…

I, on that proverbial other hand, watched a great deal of her testimony…what was especially interesting was when she testified that she sent an e-mail to her daughter the night of the ‘disturbance’ where she called it a terrorist attack by Al Quaida…she also testified that she told the Egyptians that it was a terrorist attack…it was only in the aftermath, possibly after a conversation (unasked, unanswered 'n unproven) with Obama campaign advisors when she discovered that it was really, actually, the fault of a video that no one ever saw…

C’mon people, she lied!  Obama lied. Susan Rice lied and was rewarded for her lying by being promoted to the Ambassador to the United Nations,,,

“And now is the winter of our discontent…”

I suspect, in the end and after all is said and done,that darn near everyone cheats at some point in their lives so, if Hillary lies and cheats her way through her life, it must have been okay for George Bush to lie us into a war in Iraq…except Democrats tend to take umbrage at that because it ‘isn’t the same thing at all!” 

Well,of course it isn’t the same thing at all…if the Democrats could have proven that Bush or Cheny lied about the intelligence that sent us into Iraq, they would have called for impeachment and they would have been right to do so…

Anyhow,while everyone lies or cheats at some point in their life, I believe it usually occurs in childhood…children are marvelous liars…most of us grow up and, not wanting to be lied to ourselves, we are as a general rule, mostly honest because, frankly, the truth is much easier to remember than a lie because…well, because it’s the truth!

And you don’t need the adjectives and adverbs…

I woke to the sound of raindrops…

The rain is nice when you’ve gone such a very long time without it…and it’s snowing on the mountain…that’s a good thing becuz that's where we need it most…

It’s different back in the States…rain is, well, rainier and snow is snowier, ot it seems like it anyway...I don't think I ever heard about virga until I came to California...Virga counts as rain out here even tho' it's more or less applicable to being misted...it can be pouring down virga 'n I can walk the dog around the block 'n never get a raindrop on me...kind'a like it'ud be to walk in a cloud, I'm thinking...

California likes to brag about being different, not sure what that says about us…I believe it may be an epic trancendental inferiority complex brought on by prolonged exposure to hidden chemicals in the soil…(we folk out here on the Left Coast love to talk in multi-sylabbic words)...

There was, and is, certainly something here that seems to halt or slow down the aging process…not that people here don’t get old and die, they just won’t admit it to themselves or each other…sort of an ‘It ain’t gonna happen to me’ mindset…

It’s most prevalent in southern California, of course, and  possibly is at least somewhat responsible for the rise of the movie industry, it being a make-believe, fairy tale type industry in the first place…the industry itself began, in all places, ‘way back east in New Jersey, of all places, ’n probably because NJ is adjacent to New York which everyone knows, is the beginning and ending of the entire world…the epicenter...or maybe epi-centre...

Well, according to New Yorkers (who all come from elsewhere but won’t admit it)…

In far-off fabled California, everyone comes from somewhere else, even those remnants of what we consider to be the ‘original’ visitors to these Golden Shores…the came and they stayed because, if you stop ’n think about it, you’re as far West as you can go without getting your feet really, really wet…I mean, Hawaii is out there somewhere but you can't see it so no one really cares…

Anyhow, we gather along the coast and stare at the blue Pacific Ocean…watch the waves roll in ’n watch ‘em roll out again…a mindless occupation but one that is necessary to understand if you wish to understand the California Mindset…

First, we filled up the coast, then the great central valley and then, with nowhere else to go, we began filling up the mountains, what we sun-seekers like to refer to in our smug and knowing way as The Sierra…a lot of us will say Sierras but most of us know that Sierra actually means mountain range and not mountain ranges…most of us know that, I’m not sure about television anchors who seem to be born here, fully grown and in makeup…

Anyway, we here on The Golden Coast have been enduring a drought situation for many, many years…you might not know that if you were only visiting here because Californians are very determined to keep their lawns and their golf courses green…Green is really  big in California under Governor Moonbeam but even he has faced up to the fact that we’re on the arid side, well, you never quite know with Jerry, since he faces up to everything more or less depending on whatever mood of the day thing he has going for him…

El Nino is coming to save us…or maybe finish us off…depends on which side of the petrie dish you happen to be standing, I guess…we had a record number of fires this past summer and burned up durn near all the trees ’n grasses and growing things that pretty much hold the dirt in place…if we get enuff water, y’know, Texas size rains, it’s gonna shift the topography around so that we’ll have valleys where we use’ta have mountains ’n maybe we’ll have plains where we use’ta have hills…We might even have lakes again...we use'ta have 'em 'til the sun burned 'em all away...

Course, on the bright side (’n Californians love the bright side) shifting all that dirt around just might lead us to a new Gold Rush, what with the hills ’n mountains coming down to the valley…that’ud be interesting…maybe….

This is not a political blog…

I know I keep telling everyone that but then I keep on talking about politics ’til I even begin to bore my own self…sort'a like NorCal weather that’s mainly  pretty much the same day after day, sunshine and blue skies, warm to hot, etcetera…

In our NorCal winters, the weather is much like Spring back in the States…rainy ’n cool here in the valley, snow in the Sierra…

I think it was Mark Twain that described the central valley of California as a place where summer came to spend the winters…Anyhow, I began this blog back in ’06 as a way to keep family informed of my tete a tete with the Big C and when that was finished, I couldn’t figure out a way to stop talking…

So, I don’t really just talk about politics tho’ it may seem that way at times…mainly, I just BS about whatever happens to wander through my tho’ts…which this morning happened to be focused on Sausage, biscuits ’n strawberry preserves….oh, and coffee…

I, (well, we) set all the clocks ahead last nite, jumped in bed, covered my head ’n waited for maybe two or three minutes before I fell asleep…I woke, of course, the prescribed number of times throughout the night as old guys are wont to do but, all in all, it was a pleasant night...

There’s a change in the weather this first day of the Autumnal time change…overcast ’n coolish this morning and a forecast of rain….the rain will be welcome, of course, but the forecast also claims that it’s gonna snow on the Sierra and that is really  good news…the more snow, the better because our progressive government hasn’t been progressive enough to come up with an idea of how to save rain water 

Well, to be fair, throughout most of our history (which ain’t that awful long as hist’ry goes) Mother Nature has saved up the water for us by lavishing snow on the top of our mountains through the winters and releasing it through the time-honored method of snow melt in our warmish summers…

Of course, that has never taken into account the drought situation that we’re in at the moment…that it’s a momentary thing, there is probably no doubt…weather, after all, tends to cycle (no matter what the Henny Penny’s among us claim…the sky isn’t falling)…according to our prognosticators, we are in the middle of an historic drought…it’s historic because we haven’t experienced this long of a drought in the several hundred years that we’ve inhabited California and kept records of the weather…

Our esteemed scientists (factual persons, everyone) have studied tree rings and rock formations, tea leaves and coffee grounds and have determined that we haven’t had such a drought here in millennia, or some such…it might even portend the end of the world as we know it…the heat is going to melt the glaciers at the poles, the sea is going to rise and inundate the land, lemmings are going to jump off the mountains (into the sea, I imagine), Nevada is going to be beachfront property, Idaho is to be the new Oregon…not sure what part Canada is going to play but I’m sure that the RCMP will have something to say about it...

And now, it seems, the rain has come...