Isolation

My wife's in there talking with the daughteroid about her room. As the offspring likes to point out, it's cleaner now than it was yesterday. Yes, I think; it's even cleaner than the slopes of Mt. St. Helens shortly after the eruption. We've learned to be sensitive to the words she uses. If we ask 'is the room clean', and she replies that she's picked up the clothes that were on the floor, that should not be taken to mean that she's hung them up or put them away. More likely, they're now dumped on the big furry pillow, or atop the guinea pig cages. This sometimes leads to being excruciatingly precise in what we want her to do. I usually try not to get into a battle of words, because I know she knows what we want; grinding out individual words won't help the process. I'm not a saint --usually, I use a combination of reason and guilt, and I have learned to accept what I can get.

I came across this image on the Pixdaus site this morning. I find that I really like their approach to imagery -- giving multiple ones per page, not small thumbnails but fairly large, and clickable to get a full-size version. Plus, somehow, what they have tends to feel fresher to me. I can't explain why. This image, for example -- I found myself thinking, yeah, guys with a flag, Iwo Jima - wait, what? And going back to look at it again. It reminded me of the delicious frisson of danger that I felt when the (really poor) movie Amerika came out, where the Russians have successfully conquered the United States, their troops are everywhere, and the US flag is replaced by the Soviet one. That could never happen, I'd think, but isn't it neat that even if it did, even in defeat, we'd still have gutsy people like Kristofferson leading the resistance. Which shows pretty much how old I was, at the time.

Today is Day Two of the preparation for the family reunion at my sister in law's house. I have to be very, very careful what I say about this, because my sister in law works for FEMA, and every time I hear of problems -- the tent was supposed to be delivered in the morning, it arrived in the afternoon, which meant they could not set up the tables, and so my wife's trip down there to assist in that was wasted -- I tend to grimace, thinking Another FEMA screwup. I don't, shall we say, have a strong image of them. Not as terrible as the people in N'awlins, of course.