4/13/12 BRINGING THE OUTSIDE IN; AND I KNOW WHAT AGNES WOULD HAVE SAID

A CALM AND HAZY MORNING

VIBURNUM AND LILACS BEING FORCED

Friday, 8:30 AM.  41 degrees F, wind SW, calm.  The sky is mostly cloudless but there is some haze in the atmosphere.  The channel is glassy calm. The barometer again predicts rain but I think not.
    Now is an ideal time to “bring the outside in” in the northland…to force trees and shrubs to bloom in a vase inside the house.  The earliest of spring blooming shrubs, the Forsythia, are of course already in bloom or through, but many others, such as Viburnums and dogwoods, have not bloomed, and brought in now will provide a week or more of bloom inside before the shrubs  bloom outside.
    I  am happy to report that the pacemaker procedure went just fine, it took about an hour and a half start to finish, and overnight in the hospital, but they wouldn't let me watch the operation on the monitor.. I now have arguably more computing power in a quarter-sized (but a little thicker) device tucked under the skin of my chest than that which took our astronauts to the moon and back.  These units have complicated biofeedback microchips that keep the resting heart at an acceptable rate and also allow the heart to speed up in a natural way according to one’s activity level.  I have been trying to remember when I first heard of pacemakers, and it can’t be much more than forty years ago, although they were around in t he late '50's, when the initial devices only set one “pace” for the heart.  Now they have all sorts of different capabilities, and every so often they are “tuned up” so that their internal programs provide peak efficiency.  I took Buddy for a careful walk this morning, just around the block and he seems to understand that he has to behave himself and not lunge and pull.  Nevertheless, I walked with my left hand (that arm of restricted use) in my pocket so that any inadvertent strain would be on my right arm.  I think tomorrow it will be back to my usual route, and I will actually give the pacemaker a chance to do its stuff.
    What about this whole “attack on women” business, and the “attack” on Romney’s wife for, essentially, not being a “working” mother because she doesn’t have a “job”?  I know what Agnes, my mother-in-law, who raised eight children on a truck driver’s salary, would have said; “follow me around for a day and tell me I am not a working mother.”  In our own family we have a full time working mother of two and a stay at home (while going to school) mom of one.  Such decisions are a matter of personal choice and individual situation;  please, let us at least assume that all women want the best for their children, and it is up to them to decide how they can provide it.  This latest, and similar eruptions from the left are basically attacks on freedom of choice and individual liberty.  Welcome to the ant colony.