I can do no other

Those lapses in my memory would have been fine coming from the next bar stool, but writing to my esteemed colleagues (as it does Sleepy Joe) it behooves me to get my facts straight.  As I said I looked up the speech to make sure I heard the words right, and the most dramatic way I remember L'il George is in front of the gates so I put it in his mouth there, and Ole Miss, I knew better but was smitten by a more romantic place name.

I have always been bad about estimating time.  I am pretty good with a year, or even two but anything other than that is not in a neat accordion file with tabs for the years, but into a rumpled sack so that when I reach in I don't know what year it came from.  With increasing age there has been a pattern where I almost always think that something happened later than it actually did.  I've gotten in the habit of adding five or ten years unto everything, and still I often learn I should have added still more.

I've read about the no sparrows thing, there was also a no flies in China policy, a billion hands, a billion swatters, what could go wrong?  Maybe the dumbest was having people put blast furnaces in their backyards, the idea being everybody would be making steel but they ended up melting down their utensils to meet their quotas.

It's too late to turn back on my battle with the board, the die is cast, like Martin Luther here I stand,  I can do no other.  The thing is what I am fighting is not the whole board, just the consarn rules and regs committee, the board itself is fairly split on the old issue, or the old board was.  Lately two members stepped down and two new ones stepped in, but I don't know the allegiances of the ones who left or the ones who came.

I do worry about retaliation.  My garden looks magnificent to me, but from down in the street it may well look like a big weed patch, oh and I have seed socks out to feed birds and sometimes I take my cats out for a walk in the hallway.  The worst part of the battle is the toll it takes on me.  I get way too emotionally involved.  Maybe the dawgs remember how sometimes something at work would get you so pissed off that it was all you could think about for a couple days.  You'd be walking down the street happy as a clam and the next thing you'd be fuming.  You'd tell yourself to relax, it's a pleasant summer day, and you'd start whistling, back when you could whistle, but a block further down you would be fuming again.  That's how it is with this thing.  I don't plan on doing another battle after this one.

But speaking of ambling along on a summer day, I have to say that Maria has not left me.  I've fought back with other songs.  Help Me Rhonda is the most successful, it takes a dumb song to beat another bad song.  But somehow every now and then it worms it's way back in.  I'm walking along thinking my usual deep thoughts, and then there it is, like when one of my cats crawls into bed when i am half-asleep.  How did it get there?  Shut up I tell it, and then it pumps up the volume.

Damn you yet again Old Dog.