FODDER

Emmylou helps make the bed.

Waking up post-nightmare to grey, an idling truck, ...

There was another paragraph this morning but apparently I neglected to save at the appropriate time. Oh well, I suppose we will all live.

I made it out to the post office and grocery store today. I decided to drive as I wasn't sure how many groceries I was going to pick up. Driving to the post office can be harrowing as there is often a lot of jockeying for position and/or parking spaces along that strip of 9th Street. I must have picked the sweet spot, timewise, as there were parking spots aplenty. Interestingly, on the block before the post office, there were at least three meter maids walking up and down giving tickets.

New York City is replacing all of its parking meters with parking reciepts. The theory is that you put your money into one of these machines and get a reciept that you then display in your car window. There are a couple of annoying things about this. Often enough, the machine doesn't work. The whole process takes longer what with walking to a machine, sometimes more than one to find a working one, back to the car, lock the car, and then walk in the direction you wanted to go in the first place. Forget about your change, as this device uses credit cards, dollar coins (and we all carry them) or quarters. That's all.

I spent about 10 or 15 minutes trying to get a receipt out of a machine. I ended up moving the car and trying another machine and was ultimately successful. Was I frustrated? Damn right. Were others frustrated? Ditto on that.

But what really depressed me was the flotilla of eager meter maids (in this case all women) doggedly scurrying up and down the street, writing tickets left and right. They were the very soul of enterprise. I had a terrible feeling that the government/the authorities were feeding off of populace. It seems twisted to me that wrong-doing is a viable revenue generator. And there seemed to have been some (gleeful? pernicious?) planning to make the most of folks trying to adjust to a new system. The parking lot behind the grocery store and pharmacy was closed as if to force as many people as possible to park on the street.


I just feel like fodder or a farmed animal.

This mushroom is growing in the roots of a tree.

I thought it was a rind of a grapefruit or something.

 Some beautiful colors starting to happen out there.