Sunday in General

The sun never really came up. It was dreary, and strangely warm. I wasn’t interested enough to find out that I went to Wunderground to look at the weather map to find out why.
It was pleasant enough , both inside and outside.

Finally all the chores are done, and the week begins again.

A couple of times last week I practiced what a work day would look like. Plan being long walk first thing, coffee, breakfast, shower, short drive to work.

Looks like I am going to have to get up earlier. Once I get walking I get walking.

Come Wednesday I’ll email Liz again and ask if there is any movement.

Funny thing is, I applied to Walmart, and was working the next day.

These guys are hiring a project manager, and I see their dilemma. They don’t want to pay me too much, and they don’t want to low ball me. I really should dumb down my resume, because just like last time I applied to GD they look at my resume and think “We can’t afford this guy.”

When my dad was in Viet Nam we lived right down the road from where I live now.

The Bath road had substantially less traffic back then. The cross street was Harding. Up Harding behind our apartment the road climbed up to a power line crossing, then turned into a dirt road, then a path, and finally teed with route 1. We would sit up on the rocks and watch the cars go by.

There were fields and woods everywhere, interspersed with houses. It is nothing but houses now.

One fall the field where we played baseball was crawling with Praying Mantis’. Being boys, we did what boys do and caught a bunch of them.

Strange little space alien things, and oddly the only insect I don’t have the urge to kill immediately. Them and spiders. I let spiders do that spidey thing and catch pesky smaller bugs.

Praying Mantis though, I could play with for hours. They and dragonflies do this weird cock-their-head thing that makes you think they are listening to you.

So we collected a bunch of Mantis’ and put them in a terrarium. Then thought we should feed them. So we caught a bunch of crickets.

Inside, crickets are hard to catch. Outside not so much.

We caught a couple hundred crickets and put them in the terrarium with the Mantis’ (Mantii?)

The next day we learned that crickets are much more rapacious than Mantis’

The crickets were all still alive. And the mantis’ had been broken down to their component parts.

The floor of the terrarium was littered with Mantis heads, mantis wings, mantis legs, mantis pincers. It was a fucking slaughter.

Those freaking crickets dismantled every mantis.

We didn’t feel very good about it.

But to us the Mantis’ were more important than the crickets, so the crickets had to be punished.

So we drown them. Took the terrarium into the back yard, unrolled the ubiquitous early 70s garden hose and filled that thing right up with water.

Then went stomping around in the woods, looking for our next adventure.

Strangely, I don’t remember any adult ever asking us what we were doing. EVER.