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peak warmth of the false spring
Friday, March 26 2021
Today would be peak warmth of the ongoing "false spring." I didn't even wear a shirt when I took the dogs for a walk this afternoon (because Gretchen's knee was bothering her). As I approached the wetlands that run in a line just east of the Farm Road, I heard a sound that resembled a flock of grackles. But soon I realized it was frogs in the wetland. Normally one expects to hear spring peepers before any other frog, but there haven't been spring peepers yet, and these sounded like some bigger species of frog (or, perhaps, toad). The water they were partying in had been frozen a week or so ago, and I would've found it painfully cold.
The warm spell would be winding down soon, and heralding those changes were powerful winds. As I've noticed with winds like these in the past, they moved like rivers across the land, roaring in one place while leaving swaths on either side undisturbed. In the forest, you would hear this roaring and see the whipping around of distant trees while the wind around you would be fairly calm. Eventually, though, a current would find its way to me, and I'd hope the dead trees nearby wouldn't decide that then was the time to fall.
I'd take period breaks from my workday to continue repainting color patches on the laboratory floor. I think this is the first laboratory floor repainting where all the colors were staying exactly what they had been, and this has made the painting much easier. With one or two coats, I can completely cover up the tea stains and pigment deterioration, producing a patch with nearly-uniform hue and saturation. And much of the paint not in the main axis of the laboratory is still in fairly good shape, having been protrected by piles of stuff against foot traffic, spilling drinks, and whatever harm artificial photons can cause (direct sunlight can only reach a few feet into the laboratory through its north-facing window, and then only near the summer solstice).
Painting the floor is a meditative act, and its easy to focus intenntly on whatever audio I'm listening to as I do it. I still remember the rage I felt at Colin Powell when he lied to the United Nations about Saddam Hussein's interest in biological weapons, one of the things I listened to as I painted the laboratory floor for the first time in February of 2003. Similarly, today I was listening to a series of YouTube videos that somehow led to a segment where Rachel Maddow laid out the details of the absurd new voting restrictions and alterations to election law in Georgia, seeming engineered to suppress Black votes and make it so a future Donald Trump could successfully mount a pressure campaign to be declared a "winner" in an election he'd actually lost. There are many absurd new voting rules with this new legislation, now actually signed into law, the most absurd of which criminalizes giving food or water to voters waiting in line, something they disproportionately have to do in urban, Democratic-supporting areas.
This evening Gretchen made a noodle bake, to which Powerful contributed several sides: fried tofu and salad from The Garden Café and leftover week-old egg rolls. After dinner, the three of us played a record four games of Bananagrams. Gretchen won the first two, then I won one, and then Powerful won one. I was at a bit of a disadavantage because I'd eaten a fairly large nugget of cannabis about an hour and a half before. (Meanwhile, my alcohol fast continues. I've only drunk two alcholic beverages since January 25th, and those were both at Nancy's birthday dinner.)
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