Blue Herons Are Back

7:22

It's 7:30 and I have been up for an hour,  to a chilly morning, windy, with gray skies.  As I was sitting here, I was shocked to see a heron, standing on our dock, but reaching down with its long neck to the water.  He then plopped into the water and there was a fish in his beak.  I quickly got out my camera but waited too long as he then flew away.  Herons are part of our summers here at the lake so it was good to see they are back.

Yesterday was not much of a day for either of us.  We did little other than sit around, bemoaning the fact that we had no energy, that it was cloudy outside most of the day, that it had an occasional drizzle but never a real rain.  I did make it to breakfast, however, and we had four of us, the snow birds have returned.  It's interesting that we rarely talk politics although all of us, both liberal and conservative, are appalled by Trump's rise (actually, one of us may be a supporter but keeps quiet about it). Interestingly, I have heard that Trump stickers are just now starting to appear on cars, as if the embarrassment of supporting him is beginning to wane.  Scary stuff especially when Bobby Knight introduces Trump by talking about Harry Truman's courage for having dropped the A bomb.

While I was at yoga,  Evie drove to Westfield for her annual mammogram and a stop at Tops for groceries, the Lighthouse Grocery for a sub sandwich for my lunch.  A thoughtful wife.  By the time she got home, she had a phone call from the hospital telling her that her mammogram was fine. Modern medicine can be good.  I had half of a sub for lunch, watched another episode of Game of Thrones, confusing once again, as seemingly new characters, new tribes have appeared unless I forgot about them from the previous season.  I will marshall on.

Neither one of us did anything of note the rest of the afternoon until dinner time.  I read some, am getting bored with O'Hara's APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA.  I don't much like any of the characters which highlighted, for me, why I like crime novels.  We always seem to like the main character, usually a flawed cop or detective, but they are interesting and likable and that's why we keep reading.  Not so in O'Hara's satire of yuppies in the 1930's.

For dinner, Evie put together chicken and black bean enchiladas, got out the fixings and we had a tasty Mexican dinner, equal to Taco Hut, a local restaurant in Jamestown.  We watched a fairly new movie out on DVD, TRUMBO, the story of the blacklisted screen writer, Dalton Trumbo.  It started slowly but a third of the way through, we were hooked and ended up really liking it.  It's another look at the troubling 1950's, the Red Scare, which ruined thousands of peoples' lives for having been a Communist (it was not against the law), or turning in their friends.  Trumbo spent time in jail for his beliefs and ended up writing screen plays under other people's names.  I taught his antiwar novel JOHNY GET YOUR GUN a couple of times, a novel that was banned during the 1940's, most recently in the 1960's when we were in Vietnam because it was virulently anti war.  It took us awhile to buy into Brian Cranston (Breaking Bad) as Trumbo but once we did, it was smooth sailing.  I still remember loving and having been moved by SPARTACUS, with Kirk Douglas, a film based on a novel by a Communist, the screen play written by Trumbo.  I had also forgotten he film was directed by Stanley Kubrick, a giant of American film.