Potentially Harmful Side Effects of Gardening
Slugs.
Something can bite you and leave a big sore bump on your nose.
Earthworms.
Careless raking can behead perfectly innocuous (though overplanted, for sure) daffodils.
Pulling with a vengeance can unearth something unintended with the weeds, like candytuft.

Happy Easter. I walked out my back door at 5:51 this morning, to resume weeding, raking and transplanting that was interrupted by a long neighborly chat last night. It’s about 7:30 now, I’ve done good work. Now drinking coffee and watching Washington Journal. I usually listen to it on Sunday mornings, but since I’m in here where the tv is…well. It can be really funny. Not yet today though. Apparently reasonable people are calling and expressing perfectly cogent thoughts. The question right now is, “What would you do for a cause?”

Once I took a really circuitous route and made unnecessary connections for the cause of accumulating the requisite amount of miles for a free ticket to Europe in the waning hours of the limited time in which to do so. I only needed to go from DC to Raleigh, but I booked it so I had to connect in Pittsburgh, then Knoxville, and after my appointment, (the same day, of course), I flew back the same way.

Another time...well never mind.


Since September 11 though, and increasingly lately, now that Palestinians explode daily and Arafat’s surrounded and Bush is mute, it’s obvious that the apocalyptic question, along the lines of the one Peter got wrong, will be posed imminently. Belief, not a cause, per se, but that’s the only thing I can think of that I’d die for. My pumpkin, too, I guess. Again, not a cause; a kid.

Whatever this former General from the Iraqi Republican Army is saying is making his interpreter really uncomfortable. Wonder if he translated it correctly or completely? Oh yes, we should fear Saddam Hussein, “he’s a criminal with a bunch a chemical and biological weapons, that he won’t hesitate to use on anyone, especially the United States—he’s used them on his own people!”

Why aren’t people stocking water, and batteries and buying generators and kerosene lamps and military packs of freeze-dried food and all that shit people were doing for Y2K? The time is now.

Back to the world of discovery that is my yard.