I apologize for not blogging yesterday, but I just discovered "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't," and I got really sucked into it. This is a guy with a potty mouth and an exaggerated Chicago gangster accent waxing botanical about plants he finds on his various trips. While this might not be everyone's cup of tea, I found it enormously entertaining and surprisingly educational too.
Our neighbor was going to help Travalon and me get our boat out tomorrow morning, but this morning I looked at the weather forecast, and tomorrow was all thunderstorms while today was beautiful. Our neighbor had no problem helping us this morning, and my boss was fine with me switching my day off, so we got the boat in the water this morning with no issues. Then as we were heading back to our dock, I heard a train coming, so we turned around and watched the train from the water. In all our years here, we have never been on the water when a train passed by! It could even pass right over us if we went under the bridge, but we weren't close enough for that. We also saw a blue heron. We went into the marsh, where we saw a canoe, a kayak, geese, and mallards. No pelicans, no scaups, and no mergansers - I guess they have migrated further north, or at least in the case of the pelicans, over to the Arboretum.
Scenes from our neighborhood: a purple scene with redbud, azalea, crabapple, and I think the blue stuff in the foreground is vinca.
For some reason I get a lot of trivia questions in my email, and sometimes when I get the right answer, they say, "You, sir, are correct!" I find this deeply offensive - I am not a "sir," nor have I ever wanted to be one. The people who always say, "But masculine is the default," are, if you notice, always masculine themselves. How would they feel if every fourth time they answered a question, they got a reply that said, "You, madame, are correct!"? Why should we women not feel just as offended to be addressed as male as they would to be addressed as female? This implies that being considered masculine is somehow a compliment, while being considered feminine is somehow an insult. I reject this line of thinking! And notice that there is not even any reason to throw gender into this reply, because they could just say, "You are correct!" or "Yes, you are correct!" The sir is extraneous as well as deeply offensive. Though I can't say I'm surprised, because these trivia questions seemed to be connected to some far right emails that I get, and one thing I've noticed about far right people is that they get very hostile if you questions their assumptions that the default is white male, and so they will purposely put it out there to see how you react. I consider the default "human," and other things are descriptors, but since approximately half of us are female, there's no reason to make the default male. It could just as easily go the other way.
Famous Hat
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