Spies Like Us
Hello World,
Happy August! Anyone who's been watching the weather reports for this area could see that the fabled "dog days of August" are well and truly upon us, with blistering temperatures and sweltering humidity for a solid week just suffocating the region, while the thunderstorms and cool front supposedly behind it remain stalled farther west, and oh so tantalizingly out of reach. I think the meteorologists kept promising us better weather, simply for the sake of preventing riots in the streets, and it turned into a long and dismal week that had little to recommend it. We never did get thunderstorms, although we did lose about 5-10 degrees in temperature, and Bill said that if it ever did drop to 75 degrees as predicted next week, people would think we were having a cold snap and break out their winter coats. Of course, we all know that it does no good to complain about the weather, although I did remark to a co-worker that people can say what they like about 100-degrees temperatures, but at least you don't have to shovel it.
Lately I've been taking a new supplement called Relacore, which you see on television, and it's supposed to reduce stress, give me more energy, and help me to remain calm and cheerful. (You couldn't prove this by the people I work with, who have seen much more of my evil twin lately than they ever wanted to, I'm sure.) I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but this year, I certainly finished up my camping laundry faster than I ever have in the past, and got it all packed away and ready for next year. Usually I find that weeks after coming home, I'm still washing beach towels, swimsuits, bedding and camp shirts, but not this time. Within two weeks, I had turned all of that stuff around, and just like magic, it was all washed, dried, folded, wrapped up in bags and back in the attic in the "camping corner." I'm thinking this is a good thing, and remaining calm and cheerful, although I admit that it doesn't really seem like I've been camping, without the piles of dirty laundry all over the place, and the smell of moldy beach towels everywhere.
Here's another story from camping. This seems to be a new development at Wildwood, or at least I don't remember it from when I was younger. Nowadays, it's not a bit unusual to find a campsite, or even several of them, that appear to be harboring spies engaged in some sort of covert operations. Like any campsite, they have a tent or two, plus chairs, and maybe a cook-stove or lantern. But unlike regular campsites, you never see anyone there, day or night, or any cars coming and going, no matter when you pass them. They also fail to exhibit any signs of a specialized interest, such as fishing rods, kayaks or backpacks, that might suggest activities that could take them away for long periods at odd hours. They simply seem to be abandoned, as if people drove all the way out to Wildwood, set up their campsite, and then fled, leaving everything behind them. And it's gotten to be such a routine sight there now, that the people in the neighboring campsites take no notice of it, and wouldn't think to report it to the registration building. At Wildwood, you can be a spy working on covert operations, and sneaking in and out of a seemingly abandoned campsite for whatever nefarious purposes, to your heart's content with no fear of exposure.
Of course, I realize that my campsite is one of those that occasionally has that same appearance of being abandoned, especially when we spend all day at the beach and then get in the car and stay overnight at a motel, and people must think that we're just another part of that whole big spy network they've got out there. But at least we come back, and settle into more regular habits, so we stop looking like some sinister hide-out for secret agents engaged in clandestine adventures of espionage skullduggery. I've had this happen at campsites right around mine, where I've sometimes heard voices in the middle of the night, but never clapped eyes on a single soul at the site for the entire week. I suppose there might be some less dramatic or glamorous explanation for this phenomenon, but I prefer to think of them as spies. Anyway, as I said, this is now so common as to become unremarkable at the park, where the sense of "spy confidentiality" runs at a very high level, and no one pries into anyone else's business. This reached a whole new extreme this year, when one of these campsites, complete with tent, kitchen, chairs and even a flag, and located in a highly visible spot directly across from the Camp Store, not only remained abandoned all week, but had the added attraction of the tent collapsing on Tuesday. It didn't blow over, or succumb to a storm, it simply lost its vertical integrity for whatever reason, and slowly sank down on itself in puffy billows of nylon and plastic. Since it's the campsite nearest the path to the beach, it entertained a steady stream of spectators for days, and by Thursday, had even managed to attract the attention of the Park Police, who seemed unwilling to violate the unwritten rule of spy etiquette by disturbing the status quo. It was still like that when I left, and makes me wonder about the safety of our undercover friend, especially if the organization he works for can't even give him a tent that will stand up by itself for a week.
I may as well say right up front that I am not one of these people who feel that reading instructions on things is only for wimps and losers, or that doing so would impugn my dignity and compromise the pioneer spirit that made this country great. I have a handy new hose reel caddy that is a sturdy model capable of holding a copious amount of garden hose in a neat and functional manner, and right at your fingertips. I very carefully read the directions for attaching the hose to the caddy, and the caddy tube to the faucet, even though it was printed in very tiny and faint type on a shiny background, making it almost impossible to see. All of this worked like a charm, and I was well on my way to being in garden hose paradise, with my previous tangled and disorderly nightmares behind me. Having said all that, however, I do not happen to be of the mind that every little thing, such as the hose reel handle, needs to have special instructions in order to be used. On the contrary, I would expect that something like a handle, by its very nature, would be self-explanatory, the use of which would be obvious to any moron without resorting to printed documentation. Apparently not! The handle on this hose reel is retractable, and must utilize some secret password, hidden latch, or God forbid, federally mandated safety switch in order to make it snap into position for winding up the hose. At this rate, I'll never know, since I was singularly unsuccessful in prying it open, in spite of much time and effort, plus a variety of colorful expressions that could not be printed in a family publication. In the end, I was reduced to winding up the hose by pushing the reel around by hand, which was tiresome and impractical for 100 feet of garden hose, but at least we can rest assured that the world was safe from runaway hose reel handles, if that was their intention.
As long as we're out in the garden, and communing with nature, at least in our mind's eye, I found another disturbing article among the natural wonders of the great outdoors. Last week when I was feeding the birds, I took a long hard look at the invasive weeds that I have growing through the cracks in my bird bath fountain, and was more than a little concerned to discover that these weeds seem to have no parallel anywhere else in the flower bed, or in fact, the whole yard that I've noticed. I find it odd that they seem to have sprouted just in the bird bath out of nowhere, and I see nothing else that looks like them, no matter where I turn. Even more alarming, and here I hate to be paranoid, but they have the same distinctive saw-tooth narrow leaves and stalky features as marijuana plants, which I recognize not from personal cultivation, but rather pictures in the newspapers. Of course, everyone realizes that our yard is over-run with juvenile delinquent squirrels of the worst stripe, but even I would be hard-pressed to accuse them of growing marijuana in my bird bath. In fact, the implications of that are so unnerving, on so many levels, that it would give the conspiracy theorists goose-bumps just thinking about it. Personally, I'm more inclined to chalk it up to the spies in the collapsed tent across the street, at least, that's what I'm planning to tell the Police if they show up to bust my bird bath, and the heck with spy etiquette.
Happy August! Anyone who's been watching the weather reports for this area could see that the fabled "dog days of August" are well and truly upon us, with blistering temperatures and sweltering humidity for a solid week just suffocating the region, while the thunderstorms and cool front supposedly behind it remain stalled farther west, and oh so tantalizingly out of reach. I think the meteorologists kept promising us better weather, simply for the sake of preventing riots in the streets, and it turned into a long and dismal week that had little to recommend it. We never did get thunderstorms, although we did lose about 5-10 degrees in temperature, and Bill said that if it ever did drop to 75 degrees as predicted next week, people would think we were having a cold snap and break out their winter coats. Of course, we all know that it does no good to complain about the weather, although I did remark to a co-worker that people can say what they like about 100-degrees temperatures, but at least you don't have to shovel it.
Lately I've been taking a new supplement called Relacore, which you see on television, and it's supposed to reduce stress, give me more energy, and help me to remain calm and cheerful. (You couldn't prove this by the people I work with, who have seen much more of my evil twin lately than they ever wanted to, I'm sure.) I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but this year, I certainly finished up my camping laundry faster than I ever have in the past, and got it all packed away and ready for next year. Usually I find that weeks after coming home, I'm still washing beach towels, swimsuits, bedding and camp shirts, but not this time. Within two weeks, I had turned all of that stuff around, and just like magic, it was all washed, dried, folded, wrapped up in bags and back in the attic in the "camping corner." I'm thinking this is a good thing, and remaining calm and cheerful, although I admit that it doesn't really seem like I've been camping, without the piles of dirty laundry all over the place, and the smell of moldy beach towels everywhere.
Here's another story from camping. This seems to be a new development at Wildwood, or at least I don't remember it from when I was younger. Nowadays, it's not a bit unusual to find a campsite, or even several of them, that appear to be harboring spies engaged in some sort of covert operations. Like any campsite, they have a tent or two, plus chairs, and maybe a cook-stove or lantern. But unlike regular campsites, you never see anyone there, day or night, or any cars coming and going, no matter when you pass them. They also fail to exhibit any signs of a specialized interest, such as fishing rods, kayaks or backpacks, that might suggest activities that could take them away for long periods at odd hours. They simply seem to be abandoned, as if people drove all the way out to Wildwood, set up their campsite, and then fled, leaving everything behind them. And it's gotten to be such a routine sight there now, that the people in the neighboring campsites take no notice of it, and wouldn't think to report it to the registration building. At Wildwood, you can be a spy working on covert operations, and sneaking in and out of a seemingly abandoned campsite for whatever nefarious purposes, to your heart's content with no fear of exposure.
Of course, I realize that my campsite is one of those that occasionally has that same appearance of being abandoned, especially when we spend all day at the beach and then get in the car and stay overnight at a motel, and people must think that we're just another part of that whole big spy network they've got out there. But at least we come back, and settle into more regular habits, so we stop looking like some sinister hide-out for secret agents engaged in clandestine adventures of espionage skullduggery. I've had this happen at campsites right around mine, where I've sometimes heard voices in the middle of the night, but never clapped eyes on a single soul at the site for the entire week. I suppose there might be some less dramatic or glamorous explanation for this phenomenon, but I prefer to think of them as spies. Anyway, as I said, this is now so common as to become unremarkable at the park, where the sense of "spy confidentiality" runs at a very high level, and no one pries into anyone else's business. This reached a whole new extreme this year, when one of these campsites, complete with tent, kitchen, chairs and even a flag, and located in a highly visible spot directly across from the Camp Store, not only remained abandoned all week, but had the added attraction of the tent collapsing on Tuesday. It didn't blow over, or succumb to a storm, it simply lost its vertical integrity for whatever reason, and slowly sank down on itself in puffy billows of nylon and plastic. Since it's the campsite nearest the path to the beach, it entertained a steady stream of spectators for days, and by Thursday, had even managed to attract the attention of the Park Police, who seemed unwilling to violate the unwritten rule of spy etiquette by disturbing the status quo. It was still like that when I left, and makes me wonder about the safety of our undercover friend, especially if the organization he works for can't even give him a tent that will stand up by itself for a week.
I may as well say right up front that I am not one of these people who feel that reading instructions on things is only for wimps and losers, or that doing so would impugn my dignity and compromise the pioneer spirit that made this country great. I have a handy new hose reel caddy that is a sturdy model capable of holding a copious amount of garden hose in a neat and functional manner, and right at your fingertips. I very carefully read the directions for attaching the hose to the caddy, and the caddy tube to the faucet, even though it was printed in very tiny and faint type on a shiny background, making it almost impossible to see. All of this worked like a charm, and I was well on my way to being in garden hose paradise, with my previous tangled and disorderly nightmares behind me. Having said all that, however, I do not happen to be of the mind that every little thing, such as the hose reel handle, needs to have special instructions in order to be used. On the contrary, I would expect that something like a handle, by its very nature, would be self-explanatory, the use of which would be obvious to any moron without resorting to printed documentation. Apparently not! The handle on this hose reel is retractable, and must utilize some secret password, hidden latch, or God forbid, federally mandated safety switch in order to make it snap into position for winding up the hose. At this rate, I'll never know, since I was singularly unsuccessful in prying it open, in spite of much time and effort, plus a variety of colorful expressions that could not be printed in a family publication. In the end, I was reduced to winding up the hose by pushing the reel around by hand, which was tiresome and impractical for 100 feet of garden hose, but at least we can rest assured that the world was safe from runaway hose reel handles, if that was their intention.
As long as we're out in the garden, and communing with nature, at least in our mind's eye, I found another disturbing article among the natural wonders of the great outdoors. Last week when I was feeding the birds, I took a long hard look at the invasive weeds that I have growing through the cracks in my bird bath fountain, and was more than a little concerned to discover that these weeds seem to have no parallel anywhere else in the flower bed, or in fact, the whole yard that I've noticed. I find it odd that they seem to have sprouted just in the bird bath out of nowhere, and I see nothing else that looks like them, no matter where I turn. Even more alarming, and here I hate to be paranoid, but they have the same distinctive saw-tooth narrow leaves and stalky features as marijuana plants, which I recognize not from personal cultivation, but rather pictures in the newspapers. Of course, everyone realizes that our yard is over-run with juvenile delinquent squirrels of the worst stripe, but even I would be hard-pressed to accuse them of growing marijuana in my bird bath. In fact, the implications of that are so unnerving, on so many levels, that it would give the conspiracy theorists goose-bumps just thinking about it. Personally, I'm more inclined to chalk it up to the spies in the collapsed tent across the street, at least, that's what I'm planning to tell the Police if they show up to bust my bird bath, and the heck with spy etiquette.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:56 PM
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