Rake

I was just outside, doing some more mowing, and a little raking. I am *not* a garden guy, and I don't have an intuitive feeling for 'what this lawn needs'. I just mow (electric mower, mulcher, set as high as it will go), and, today, rake. The raking is because there's lots -- and I mean, LOTS -- of pieces of dried, dead grass under the growing stuff, and I have this feeling that its not good. I seem to recall the concept of 'dethatching', but I don't really understand it. My image is that there ought to be two things underfoot -- growing grass (or just recently cut), and dirt. Dead grass, no. I thought this mulching thing was supposed to superfinely chop the grass so that it decomposed, but maybe I'm wrong, or expecting to0 much. I will say that the heavy rake I just used is not a lot of fun. It clearly needs some kind of grabber so that you can haul back on the rake without having your hands skitter along the shaft. But I did okay. Slow going, though. Took me about twenty minutes to rake an area about four feet by four feet. Hauled up a lot of dead grass, and its still got a goodly amount.

Thinking about rakes reminds me of that video I saw on YouTube about 'Garden Implements' and 'Immoral Pleasure Seekers'.

I'm really disappointed by the results, yesterday, of the Pennsylvania primaries. I really thought Obama would do better -- not necessarily win, but be closer. To me, a ten percentage point difference is pretty significant. The tendency is to do what the Clinton campaign has done when they've lost -- oh, its her family's home state, lots of blue collar folks that support them, and, of course, that infamous remark of Obama's. I don't know if its possible to have an intelligent conversation about why people voted as they did without slicing and dicing -- which is not to say such analysis isn't necessary, just that when you do it, I think its not helpful to get into the practice of segmenting the population fourteen different ways. But I'd like to know why. For that matter, I'd like to know why some of the people surveyed (on both the Clinton and Obama sides) say that if their person doesn't win, they'd vote for McCain. On what scale is McCain next to either of them?

This weekend's the party for my daughter, which she doesn't really want. Truth to tell, I think she does, but only for about an hour, and it'll go on longer than that. This is a Big Deal to her mother, which I wish it wasn't. I don't think she's living her life through her daughter, but a little bit, yeah, I guess I do.

I feel like baking something. Those cupcakes came out okay but they were a little dry. I may have overbaked. I'm tempted to make them again. Or cookies, that might be fun. And I want to read -- I picked up a book from the libe called Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. I saw it mentioned in an article about Iraq, and it looked interesting. I should give more money to the library, I think. I wonder if its possible to say 'You can have this if you promise not to buy more of those damn lame books you seem to like so much'. How do librarians pick what to buy, anyway? Not by asking me... and I'll bet, not by demographics, either....