The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 40

What with all this global warming this year, the South End’s been inundated with snowstorms, monsoons, windstorms and bad craziness – all of it culminating in power outages that last for days.  The neighbors who didn’t snowbird it to Phoenix or Baja are about half deranged breathing generator fumes and cursing the PUD, the government, God and the day they retired to a backwash like South Camano. 

     I try to reassure em, being the Good Samaritan I am.  I tell em about the good old days where we lost the Grid for even longer, even more often.  I tell em how the missuz came to my love shack in ’81 in a raging storm.  Power out, trees down, tide lashing the beach, practically had to cut our way home to a dark shack she’d, fortunately, never set eyes on. 

     I tell em, think romantic.  Think oil lamps and candlelight, quiet conversation, flickering shadowplay and the haunting strains of a banjo gently weeping.  Think, this is how it once was.  The wind strumming the fir boughs and the world vibrant and pulsing in a way TV pretty much dulled.  Think of that old lovelight rekindled and warming like a cookstove, the dreams rising once again, yeasty and full of glutinous potential. 

     That’s how this old codger thinks of the South End.  And if I have to be reminded of it every storm, every power outage, every candled memory, well, it’s a welcome few days.  And Ma and Me, we think of em sort of as anniversaries.  Course, after 3 or 4 days, we’re ready for TV.  Or divorce.  Or maybe just a generator of our own.

Hits: 24

CLICK TO HEAR — global warming worries

Hits: 25

CLICK TO HEAR — fox weather channel

Hits: 40

     I know a lot of you are worried about Global Warming.  And I know some of you don’t believe it’s true.  I know some folks are worried about the next Ice Age.  And others think we’re still in it.

     We got El Nina years and La Nina years.  We got ozone depletion, greenhouse gas accretion, we got soft tundra and oozing glaciers, we got more hurricanes and record setting cold weather.  We got record setting hot weather and jet streams hopping north and south so fast it’s like a bi-polar meteorological condition.

     It’s getting hard to know how to dress.  Layers, I guess.  Gortex layers.  It’s that or Biospheric Domes.  Put the cities under Pyrex.  Big thermostat the City Council can fight over.  Yell at each other for forgetting to turn it down at night.

     Personally I think all this weather talk is good.  You can’t talk politics anymore everybody’s so polarized.  I just worry when we blame the other party for the weather.  What’re we gonna talk about then?  Republican caused monsoons?  Hurricane Cantor?  The Obama Blizzard of 2010?  The Democratic Killer Heat Wave? 

     I don’t know about all of you, but I think that will have some serious global consequences.  Shrinking dialogues, frozen conversations, stormy relationships and violent domestic ventings.  Fox Weather might predict calm sunny days every day of the week, but for the rest of us, it means no more conversational crutches.  No more, ‘Hot enuff for ya?’ instead of ‘How about that War in Libya?’  No more ‘I’m ready for it to quit raining any decade now’ instead of ‘You got an opinion on that Murdoch hacker scandal in the British tabloids?’

      So if you’re complacent about the global warming debate, imagine a Weather Channel that looks like Chechnya.  Maybe you’ll rethink it.

Hits: 35

Hits: 135

     I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that’s indescribable to my backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classinG up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.      Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t Discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.      Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.

Hits: 354

CLICK TO HEAR — peacock farming

Hits: 428

Hits: 137