We Go To Bed After Another Tragic Night Of News

6:00

7:00

I was up just about 6:00, a cloudy sky, 68º, as the radio continues to relay first person accounts of the monstrous attack on innocents last night in Nice, France.  Terrorists, through the ages, have always preyed on the innocent, inciting fear in the populace, hoping to bring about change.  But in today's modern world, with bombs, machine guns, and trucks, the results can be devastating.  And there's no easy answer, all of us are vulnerable.  It's easy to over react, to want to ban all Muslims or as Gingrich suggests, test every Muslim in America to see if they believe in Sharia law.  Ridiculous. This is America, not Nazi Germany.   We need to get at the cause, the root of this radicalization (mostly in the Middle East) and with the help of Muslim countries, work to remedy it.  It's racial, cultural and religious, so it won't be easy.  Mostly, we need the cooperation of all the Muslim nations and their people and they must  condemn this sort of action and work against it.  Having lived in Turkey, a Muslim country for seven years,  I know everyone of my friends would condemn any and all of these attacks and are just as horrified by them as we are.

Back to reality at Chautauqua Lake.  Yesterday began with breakfast with the guys at the Bemus Point Inn, always a good, gossipy way to start the day, as I get not only the local poop but that also of the Chautauqua Institution.  Afterwards, I drove to the Honda dealer in Erie, to get a simple oil change and two hours later, left with a car which they deemed might not pass the state safety check.  Much of the underbody is rusted, other things are in disrepair, so that they are not even sure it can be fixed.  A bummer because I really like having a SUV for transporting dirt, stones, gravel, weeds, things like that.  So now I will have to figure out what to do with it, whether I will  be able to sell or it or just junk it.

I stopped at Orton's Market in Northeast, PA, to pick up a half gallon of Pot of Gold milk and then to assuage my depression at the car news, I stopped at Plummer's Tavern, on Rt. 5 or Lake Road, just inside the New York State line, for lunch.  The bar was packed with workers, having lunch so I had to sit at a table.  I ordered the special, a crab cake sandwich with fries and a beer, noticing that all the workers were drinking cokes, not a beer like me.  Thirty years ago it would have been a beer.  I then drove home, along RT. 5 which skirts Lake Erie, with vineyards covering much of both sides of the road, some winding down to the lake's edge.  It's always a beautiful drive.

When I got home, Evie had been busy, defrosting and cleaning our freezer. And she was particularly happy because after she cleaned it out, stored all the frozen food in iced coolers, she plugged it in and it would not start up.  She tried a couple of times, hit the breaker twice before realizing she was plugging in the vacuum cleaner.  This was something I might do, not Evie.  Around 3:00, she headed off to the Mall to do some shopping, stopping at Wegman's, while I hunkered down in the house, avoiding the sun and humidity until Evie got home.  We quickly put away the groceries, put on our suits, cracked open a couple of beers, and got out some tortilla chips and salsa and enjoyed them on the dock until about 6:30. The lake and docks had settled down by the time we got out there, so it was a peaceful, quiet cocktail hour on the dock.  And a breeze picked up, cooling us.  We ended cocktail hour with a swim, and Evie then went in and heated up the Indian curry dinner she had made earlier in the day and sauteed a couple of bunches of chard which I had bought at Orton's in PA on my trip to Erie.

Late Afternoon Clouds

Dinner was great,  chicken curry with some naan, and we both loved the chard, wondering why we don't make it more often.  We started The Shipping News, an older movie but stopped after a half hour because we realized we had already seen it.  So we watched an episode of Bosch, as we needed relief from the terrible news of the attack in Nice.  It was hard to watch the coverage of the attack, knowing that women and children were run over. The thought of bed was comforting, knowing we could leave this violent world behind for a few hours.