I’ll be leaving shortly on a midsummer road trip to visit some of my relatives. I’ll be gone overnight, so there will be no news feed tonight. However, I should be home early enough to be able to post one tomorrow night.
Make sure you behave yourselves while I’m gone. Dymphna’s spirit will be here to keep an eye on you, just like the old days. I haven’t figured out a way for her to moderate comments, though, so that will have to wait until I come back.
I’m going to enjoy this fine late-summer weather while it lasts. I’m off to visit family, and will be gone overnight. I plan to dine alfresco this evening and listen to some live music.
There will be no news feed this evening, but I plan to be back early enough to post one tomorrow night.
Keep on rollin’!
I woke up this morning and learned that an attempted coup was underway against Vladimir Putin, staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. Since I have no expertise whatsoever on internal Russian politics, I won’t be commenting on the situation myself (Putin’s speech is here).
I don’t generally post photos of myself, but I’ll make an exception in this case, due to the t-shirt I was wearing at the beach the day before yesterday:
The rain finally quit for a while, and the sun came out (sort of), enough for me to go down and put my feet into the surf.
That’s Matteo Salvini on my shirt, which was marketed back when he was Interior Minister, before he was betrayed by Giuseppe Conte and the 5-Star Movement. Dymphna gave me the shirt for Christmas in 2018 (her last Christmas). It’s the first time I’ve worn it to the beach. Actually, it’s the first time I’ve been to the beach in seventeen years. It was good to feel the sand between my toes.
I doubt that one American in 10,000 would recognize the image of Matteo Salvini. When someone asks who that is on my shirt, and I tell them, they’ve never even heard of him. So I launch into an explanation, but by the time I get to phrases such as “interior minister” and “coalition government” and “closed the ports to migrant-rescue vessels”, their eyes glaze over and I can tell they are only pretending to pay attention, just to be polite.
Mine is a specialized line of work.
I’ll be leaving shortly on a little road trip, and will be away for a couple of days.
This is a “planned outage”, not like what happened last weekend, when the stinkin’ phone company forced me to endure three days of idleness.
Mind you, I plan to be fairly idle during my time away, but it’s a planned, structured idleness. Relaxing for a little while, away from all the horror in the news. The weather looks like it’s going to be pretty crappy, but I plan to have a good time anyway.
There will be no news feed until after I get back.
Wish me happy motoring!
As I reported yesterday, my phone and Internet went out for most of the day, leaving me without enough time to post anything but the news feed last evening. Then today — Wednesday — I went to the retinal specialist’s office to get a periodic injection in my left eye to treat wet macular degeneration. When I got home (a little worse for the wear and tear) I discovered that the phone and Internet had gone out again during my absence.
So I ate dinner and watched DVDs gleaned from Dymphna’s collection (I’m not much of a DVD person, but she has left me a few). Right after I finished watching a movie, the Internet came back on, although the phone is still out.
So here we are. It’s almost midnight, and I haven’t even begun to look at the email. My eye is still sore, and I can see the dancing bubble, as usual. I’ve approved the backlog of comments, but this post is all that I’ll put up before tomorrow (Thursday) — when I’ll be even further behind.
If the Internet stays on, I’ll try to start catching up. And if the phone comes back on, I’ll call the @#%^&!@?$#! phone company and demand a credit for all these hours that I’ve been without service.
I’m sick of this [solid waste].
Actually, the place I’m going to has more or less the same climate as Schloss Bodissey, so I should be OK.
I’ll be leaving shortly on an overnight trip to visit some old friends that I haven’t seen in a long time. There will be no news feed tonight, but I expect to get back in time to post one tomorrow night.
Back in the good old days, whenever I went away overnight I would warn commenters to be on their best behavior while I was gone, because Dymphna would be watching them closely, ready to smack anyone who got out of line. She would moderate comments until I returned, and would sometimes post her own stuff while I was away, especially in the earlier years when her health was better.
Now, alas, all I can do is lock the door, pull down the shade, and hang up a “Gone Fishing” sign in the window. Everything has to be put on hold till I get back.
Later!
I’ll be leaving shortly on an overnight trip to visit some of my relatives. There will be no news feed tonight, but I should be back in time to post one tomorrow, because I hate driving after dark.
The logistics of traveling this time of year can be tricky if you don’t want to drive after dark. In late June you have fourteen or fifteen hours of daylight to work with at this latitude (about 38°N), and your schedule can be flexible. But in mid-December there’s only about nine hours of well-lit travel time.
I can remember that when I lived in the North of England (latitude about 54°N), during the Christmas season it got light at roughly 9 o’clock in the morning. School let out at 3:30pm, and by the time I walked home, it was dark. The flip side, of course, was that at midsummer there was still faint twilight at 11pm, and the sun came up at about 4am — those endless summer days!
I’ll be leaving shortly on an overnight trip to visit family. I plan to partake of adult beverages this evening while listening to live music, if all goes well.
There will be no news feed tonight, but I should be back early enough to be able to put one up tomorrow night.
Ciao!
I’ll be leaving home shortly to visit an old friend of mine in another part of the Old Dominion.
I haven’t been out-of-state since the plague arrived. During the height of the “pandemic”, the Coronamadness was much worse in Maryland than it was here in Virginia. Indoor dining was shut down there months after things had opened up here. The governor of Maryland decreed a mask mandate in all public places, which, bad as things got, never happened here.
The news from Maryland just made me want to stay this side of the Potomac. I suppose the situation must have improved by now, but my aversion persists — I’d rather limit my travels to Virginia, and to the more rural parts of the state at that, where people are relatively sane.
North Carolina would probably also be OK, but I don’t have any kin or friends that live down there.
I was at the dentist’s office the other day, and much to my delight they had lifted their mask requirement for patients (the staff still had them on). I guess that means the “pandemic” is officially over.
I’ll be gone overnight, so there will be no news feed tonight. But I should be back in time to post one tomorrow night. See you then!
I’m leaving in a little while to attend a birthday dinner for a friend who just turned 70. It’s a right good ways from here, so I’ll stay overnight and return to Schloss Bodissey sometime tomorrow.
There will be no news feed tonight, but I shouldn’t have any problem putting one together for tomorrow night.
Auf wiedersehen!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
I’m about to depart to visit some of my relatives, who very kindly invited me to eat dinner with them, even though I’m not vaxed.
I’ll be home sometime this evening, so there will be a news feed, but possibly not much else.
I hope y’all have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner. Don’t forget to social distance at the table, and keep your masks on between bites.
I’m going away overnight to visit some of my relatives — different ones this time; I don’t want to wear out my welcome.
There will be no news feed tonight, but I should be back early enough tomorrow to post one.
While I’m gone, I recommend visiting WRSA, Conservative Tree House, and Power Line to keep up with all the political shenanigans and read analyses of last night’s elections in various states and cities.
Sayonara!
I’ll be heading out shortly to visit relatives in another part of the state where cold rain is coming down, just like it is here. I don’t think I’ll be seeing any good weather this trip.
I’ll be gone for two nights, so there will be no news feed tonight or tomorrow night. I’ll be returning sometime on Friday, so you can expect a news feed that night.
The practice of demanding vaccine passports hasn’t yet come to this part of Virginia, so I don’t anticipate a problem gaining entry to any restaurants or watering holes.
Y’all have a gonzo time while I’m away.