The Dog Days . . .

What do I do in semi-lockdown when I'm not witnessing the demise of our formerly great democracy live on cable news every day?  I used to walk three times a week for three or four miles but now it s too hot for that.  Besides, I still don't feel right from the virulent respiratory ailment I had the last half of February, and my spells of shortness of breath come and go (with, fortunately, no accompanying debilitating cough as happened in February) and the past few days, I'm in a short period.

I have thrown over Facebook posting, which I formerly did once a day, for the month of July in protest of the unAmerican posture of its founder and Chief Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who wittingly or unwittingly allowed the Russkies to throw our close 2016 election to Putin's Puppet by spreading misinformation and verifiably untrue bot posts (but fully believed by Trump's cult followers--like the Pizzagate conspiracy nonsense which brought an armed gunman into the Comet Pizzeria in the District looking for supposed children sex slaves kept in the basement there (no basement) by Hillary Rodham-Clinton) on Zuckerberg's platform.  He still won't fix the problem dangerous conspiracy theories flourishing on his platform, hiding behind the First Amendment while both our democracy and greatness goes down the drain.  Perhaps I'll go back in August, or perhaps not.

I haven't even been to Westover, a flourishing two-block commercial area, with free parking, only four miles away in Arlington that has plenty of free parking, a library, an old-style hardware store and several popular restaurants with outdoor seating, not even to return a library book I took put in early March.  A friend comes over once a week and we have bagels on my porch, or perhaps a pizza or a salad on my porch along with some appropriate beverage.   She started throwing small balls of bagel dough to the birds who cluster in my yard and make a godawful racket all day long; now they're all my "friends" and even come up onto the porch looking for scraps whenever I am out there.

I nap sometimes in my bedroom as it is the only relatively cool place in the house because it has a decrepit window A/C unit, and I retire there to read while lying on the bad.  Daytime dreams are different from nighttime dreams which often are nightmares, and I dreamed recently of my middle child (seen below at age two, now the lad is in his thirties) that he had stopped by my house recently.  As I haven't heard from the lad in a decade and a half, ever since he wrote to me and asked me to provide for payment of his full tuition and fees at his four-year university, which I did gladly; but his silence since then indicates his otherwise loathing for me and all Lambertons, who he hasn't contacted in two decades; I guess that was a teasing, taunting daymare.