Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Well, the day got off to an ugly start, but immediately got better. First, the ugly. Guess who woke me up this morning? John Frickin’ Kerry. Not personally, of course, as I just can’t imagine J-Frickin’-K ever lowering himself to enter El Casa Móvil de Pennington.

Permit me a short tangent. While I find it impossible to imagine J-Frickin’-K having a cup of coffee with me in my humble abode, I have no such trouble imagining Dubya doing the same. My imaginary discussion has Dubya saying something like “Why, this here’s cozy! Ya know, Laura’s cousin Billy has an RV a lot like this one and we had some fine times cruisin’ all over Texas in that dang thing!” Or something like that… But, J-Frickin’-K? No way, José!

Back to our tale. I fell asleep watching some sort of foreign policy discussion on C-SPAN last night and awoke to the anti-war speech Kerry gave yesterday on the 35^th anniversary of his anti-Viet Nam-war testimony to Congress back in ’71. I didn’t like the SOB back in ’71 and like him even less today. Much less, as a matter of fact. What a helluva way to wake up.

But, as I said, things almost immediately got better. The phone rang as I was pouring the water into the coffee pot reservoir. Son Number Two on the line…a good thing! He was out to breakfast with the family and there were question cards from the Trivial Pursuit Baby-Boomer Edition on the table in the restaurant. My grand-daughter Anastasia suggested that I would probably know all the answers, so Sam decided to test me. I failed. Question Number One: “What was Bob Dylan’s last Top 20 hit?” Answer: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” I had no clue. Q2: “Which Beatles album had ‘Across the Universe’ on it?” Answer: “Let It Be.” I got that one. One out of two: I failed. We had a short conversation and a couple of laughs and then Sam had to go…the waitress arrived with breakfast. Much better than J-Frickin’-K. Mood altered for the better.

It’s just gorgeous outside this morning. It’s 77 degrees as I write, with a gentle breeze (how unusual!), and a bright crystal-blue sky. My windows are wide open and it feels SO good! We got another thunder-boomer last evening along with about two hours or so of hard rain, so the neighborhood is fresh and sweet-smelling. Nothing better than a bright morning after a good rain, especially here on the parched High Plains of New Mexico.

That rain brought another internet outage last night, of unknown duration. I lost my connection around 8:00 p.m. or so last evening, but it was back when I woke up. I don’t know if these outages are because of my bad cabling or because of a flaky DNS server (domain name service, an essential name and address resolution mechanism that makes the internet possible…I won’t go further) at my ISP. I went outside and inspected my cable yesterday and found the varmints (gophers, in this case) have been chewing on the coax. The damned varmints chewed completely through the cable last year, and that was a bee-yotch of a problem to track down. The cable is still whole as of this writing, but there are breaks, and moisture in the cable will kill my connection. On the other hand, the service has been intermittent all week-end, rain or not. The first thing I’m gonna do tomorrow is call my ISP and see if I can get re-cabled, again. I suspect the bad cabling is the issue. So much for trouble shooting!

Play-off updates. The NHL is off to a great start! I watched the hated Avalanche simply destroy Dallas yesterday, in Dallas. The first period was all Stars, and they led 2-0 at the end of the first. But the Avs came out with blood in their eyes in the second and never looked back, scoring four unanswered goals in the second period and adding a fifth in the third period. The final was Colorado 5, Dallas 2. Dallas simply fell apart. I strongly suspect the second Dallas-Colorado game won’t be anything like the first. Son Number One and I are both hoping the Avs-Stars series goes to seven games, with lots and lots of hitting and physical play. Makes the next series easier for us, ya know! The Buffalo-Philadelphia game was another superb, nail-biting play-off game, going deep into the second overtime before Buffalo won it. All of the favored teams won their first round games, with the exceptions of the aforementioned Avs-Stars game and the Montreal-Carolina game.

And I gotta go now…the Wings are on in about two minutes!