Monday

This morning I happened to take a short drive to a hairdresser to pick up my mother. The hairdresser's is in a small shopping plaza next to a supermarket which sells gas. Yesterday morning, I filled up the tank on the van. The price was $2.99 a gallon, which I thought to be pretty good, verging on excellent. This morning, I glanced at it, and was startled to see that it was now twenty cents a gallon less.

I'm still reading Bob Schieffer's America. The book is a collection of short pieces, none more than two pages long, pieces which he had given as a coda to a news program over the years. I like it enough that when it comes out in paperback, I'll likely get it. The reason I like it is that these are snapshots of America past, yet some of it - much, even - sounds remarkably like current news - more than once I've glanced at the top of a piece to be sure it didn't say 2008 in the date. Other parts invoke nostalgia - gee, remember when that was a problem? I just read a piece about Monica Lewinsky which did something that nothing else I've ever read about that tawdry affair has done - it made me a little sorry for her.

Our lawnmower is dying, and I don't know why. It's an electric cordless one - Black and Decker CMM1000. The CMM stands for Cordless Mulching Mower. Its worked well for the two and a half years we've had it -- about the worst we can say is that their estimate of how much it would mow on a charge assumes that the grass was recently mown, and the ground is flat. Neither of those is usually true here, and so there are times when I have to break the mowing up into two sessions. Hey, if I have to stop before I wanted to, thats usually not a problem. But this is different. The mower will run well when it starts. If I take it slowly -- the grass is a little on the shaggy side -- it'll make one or two passes down the long dimension of wherever I'm mowing. And then, it'll die -- sound just like a gas mower running out of gas. Wait thirty seconds, and it'll fire right back up. Now, its done this when it was getting clogged with grass, so that was the first thing we checked, but it isn't. So, I'm thinking, there's two possibilities. One is that the battery is failing -- I said it's been two and a half years? The warranty is for two years -- and we just need to replace it. The other is that it is the dreaded something else -- and we can't figure out what that might be. This is not the LHC, for goodness sakes!

Time to go read again. Oh, for McCain supporters -- there's an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal (also in The Economist) on Obama vs McCain, specifically as related to their tax plans. I don't want to give aid and comfort to that group, but if you like McCain, you might like the articles.