The dog was asleep on a chair, Mr UD was stepping into the shower, La Kid was waking up in her room at the celebrity-packed Four Seasons Surfside Miami… In short, all was well, when UD spied this headline and anxiously stopped Mr UD in his tracks.
Space and time are warping, she said.
He did one of his patented haughty dismissive gestures that so annoy UD.
Space and time, he said, I’m sorry to tell you, have been warping for approximately thirteen billion years.
So why is it a big banner headline this time?
I don’t know. Don’t worry.
It won’t affect regular deliveries of my Harney and Sons Paris? I know this sounds like a provincial concern…
No.
Who knows what the rest of February will bring. Today, though, it’s spring.
La Kid‘s in Miami, at the Four Seasons Surfside, and just had lunch near Kanye West’s table.
We’re fierce. We both scored in the 400’s, and, despite a few points difference, we called it a tie.
A gift from my sister.
For a dead wintry garden, this doesn’t look half bad.
And it’s warm out there.
In an essay about how he’s downsizing, minimizing, buddhizing, living more modestly, happily, mindfully and meaningfully, Arthur Brooks writes this:
We’d moved two years before, from Bethesda, Maryland, a power suburb of Washington, D.C., to a small town outside Boston. I’d resigned from a chief-executive position to teach and write, trading away virtually all day-to-day contact with political and business elites—and was quickly forgotten by most. I hadn’t hidden the reason for the move, and my family was fully behind it: I was taking my own advice, published in these pages three years ago, to find a new kind of success and a deeper kind of happiness.
See how he starts with UD’s ‘thesda? See that? Good move, because nothing’s quicker shorthand for wealth, power, and prestige obsessed than ‘thesda.
And l’il ol’ Needham! (Needham’s where he lives now.) Thready needy little Needham, inelite downpowered Needham!
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The graphic ‘thesda/Needham contrast jumps out at you in the raw numbers, a disjunction in human fates that instantly brought to UD’s mind Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England:
Estimated 2007 median income for a family in Needham: $144,042
Estimated 2007 median income for a family in Bethesda: $168,385
And not only that!
Needham and Edgartown [will now] join Nantucket, Chilmark, Weston, Aquinnah, Wellesley, Dover, Newton, Vineyard Haven, Belmont, Brookline, Lexington, Winchester, and Lincoln [as places that] Zillow defines [as] “$1 million cities” [–] those with a typical home value of at least $1 million.
As he huddles in his Harvard office (Brooks is at Harvard), far from America’s elites, then shuffles back to his humble hamlet, Brooks can take comfort in the knowledge that he has decisively traded in grasping predatory ‘thesda for a kinder gentler world.
… attack, kill, and dine on a rabbit in my backyard.
Once again, yikes.
… a red fox and her kit came loping along the pavers.
I’ve never seen two foxes before. And in the snow. Quite a moment.
They knew all about it, because their neighbors took pictures and emailed them. Under wet, heavy snow, the main tree had fallen on some bundled wires, so there was a safety issue. PEPCO came out and pulled the wires back up, and then Asplundh came out and took away a lot of the big stuff.
Les UDs have been raking, lopping, hatcheting, and sawing the rest of it. Good honest work. We drag everything out to the front of the house and wait for the town maintenance guys to haul it away.
The next segment of the [Town Council] meeting is action items — those that require a vote of the Council. There was only one, but a big one: introduction of the mid-year changes in the town’s budget. Before the vote, the explanation and discussion went on for more than an hour. The big picture is that the budget adjustment deals with what to do with the unexpectedly large carry-over of funds from the previous fiscal year ($480,000 rather than the $70,000 forecast in the initial budget). Despite the large carryover, the mid-year adjustment includes no change in projected tax revenue. The other big item is that the town has now received over $500,000 as the first chunk of funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), to be expended on as yet undetermined town projects…
From this month’s Garrett Park Bugle.
[photo CNN]
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… the New-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o’erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon in her lap…
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But overspread with orange light!
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And now – 3:57 AM – it’s like this – the merest sliver of silver… And because it sheds so little light, and because it’s a clear winter night, the STARS are out like mad…
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4:57 and it’s brightening up again. 50/50 bright/dark. Didn’t expect that.