many topics many comments

 My garden is indeed an oasis in the land of stone, glass, and steel.  Mostly what happens is a battle between the morning glories and the tomatoes.  The sunflowers can hold their own but because they grow only straight up they are not part of the fray.  The peppers and petunias cower but manage to survive.  I have photos but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

I have always been forgetful and not too good at names, but lately my writing has suffered.  You Dawgs may have noticed it in the way I sometimes use the wrong word.  I reread my posts before I send them and I always find mistakes like that, though sometimes I don't notice them even then.  One peculiar thing is homophones.  I will sometimes like say four instead of for, even though one word has nothing to do with the other.  One would think in that great dictionary in our brains we would have words with the same meaning stored together rather than with the same sound.  But we learn to talk before we learn to read.

When I first decided to post Catfish, I remembered that I had sent Old Dog the story, but there had been little response and I wondered a bit if he had read it at all, so I just started serializing it without saying anything about it.  Maybe it is best read in little pieces.  When I was writing it, it would be after a few beers, and I would never reread what I had read before, also I didn't do much planning ahead, later I would have to deal with inconsistencies and putting the stories together.  You have emails from four years ago?

Three things I remember about smelters; they had this fixed stare across the water and did not react with passersby much, even in the nastiest weather they had a can of beer in their hands, and that beer was always light beer.

Many years ago there were a few trees on the north bank of the river by the Merchandise Mart where now they are putting up the last of three steel and glass towers.  They were cleaning up the river even like thirty years ago and beavers began to show up on the banks and gnaw at those scraggly trees so that they had to encase them in wire cages.  River otters would be swell but maybe a simpler idea would be to give Canada geese a taste for those mussels.

Some Republicans have muttered nasty things about Greene, but nothing they couldn't take back or carpet over if The Great One should decide that she is the all American girl.  I find it passing strange that he has as yet said nothing about her.  But then you know he is the god of the republicans and god likes to test us, so maybe he is testing them before he thunders down his decision.

Puking Tammy is not out of the story yet.  I regret that I do not have enough time to post a chapter this morning, but Friday I will give you an adventure to chew on over the weekend.