Tuesday

It is a beautifully cool day. Very humid, according to the weather folks, but as I sit here in the dining room, looking over to where the cat is sitting in the window, it's quite pleasant. In about an hour, I'll be outside, finishing the mowing which has been slowly creeping up on me. I have been startled by how quickly the grass has grown, this August. This is the month when the weather is supposed to be hot, and the grass dormant; instead, the weather's been, for the most part, decent, and the grass has partied like it's late spring.

I had someone refer to me as a Type A person, the other day. I was surprised by that. They were talking about how often I should check my blood sugar reading; they said that once a day was enough; when I said that I did it four or five times a day, they made that response. Now, as it happens, I don't have a lot of respect for the medical abilities of the person who said that (she's a nurse practicitioner, which is fine, but my sense is that she knows what she's seen, but doesn't really know the underlying physiology all that well), and now, with that Type A observation, I think that perhaps her sociological abilities could use some burnishing, too.

An article in the Economist spoke at some length about the economic doldrums that are affecting the United States. I don't have any respect for the people who say that 'clearly, the stimulus didn't work' because things are not back to normal; though I don't have a lot of theoretical underpinnings, it seems pretty obvious to me that the depth of this recession would take a long time to shake off. I think of it like the old analogy about turning around one of those big oil tankers. A lot of energy goes into just stopping the darn thing. The article mentions that the skills of people who are out of work may not be the skills that are needed now. That analogy works pretty well for education, too.