How many dead swine does it take to fill a Chinese river? That and other issues occupied my limited attention span as I padded out to the lap-top way too early. I can’t quite get the hang of the Daylight Savings change. It must be creeping fogey-ism. Thousands of pigs, apparently. A horrid thought.

Glad we are not in Shanghai this morning to find out. I looked at the calendar to see what mischief awaits the day. It is a week out from Spring. I think we are going to make it. The turn of the season will bring the Ninja Mexicans back, and perhaps the scaffolds and guy wires that drape the balcony will finally go away that keep the little black-clad men from falling to the concrete pool deck below.

It is nice to see something that has a prospective end, rather than the antics downtown, which while endlessly fascinating feed a feeling of general foreboding. I scrolled through the astonishing variety of alarming things in the morning mail.

There was a three-way shootout between the cartels and the Mexican Marines, the military force least touched by the endemic corruption of the state. It is quite mind-boggling that a firefight that may have killed fifty combatants and a few bystanders occurred a stone’s throw from the border with Laredo, TX, and that the Marines also rescued more than a hundred kidnapped villagers.

Mind-boggling. Immigration reform, anyone?

North Korea abrogated the Armistice that has uneasily held since 1954, and shut down the hot-line. What’s up with that? Is all this just a new and improved version of the patented Pyongyang bluster, or is this ominously a prelude to something really nasty?

(Diplomat Dennis Rodman).

Another note inquired if famed rebounder and eccentric Dennis Rodman really was a transvestite, and if recent visit to the DPRK was conducted in drag, adding a note of the surreal to something already bizarre.

(The Handsomest Man Alive, according to The Onion).

Are the nukes that Kim Jong Un is so proud of really real? Or is this all just another North Korea stunt? John-with-an-H claimed at the bar that the experts can’t prove the tests were real.

Jeeze. Cool off, Vic.

An alert reader out west has noticed the drift in recent Socotra publications and suggested it might be time to get out of town.

With Spring’s arrival, it will be almost a year to the day since the wrenching fall that ripped up the leg and turned the year quite upside down. It is nice to be able to navigate on two legs again. It is startling to have something so elementary wrenched away. Time to concentrate on completing the recovery, and time is the commodity I crave.

Do you think it is it time for something completely different? It is hard to stay away from contemplating the train-wreck, when it is all entwined in the working day, and the topic of endless bemused discussion at the bar when the day is done.

I glanced over at the accusing clock. First conference call of the day in eight minutes. Then complete the weekly report and budget some time after work not for fun, but to deal with the taxes. If I can get the estate closed, then I guess I can move on from that.

I was looking around the office at what I will have to move out of there. Some art work, including the large signed pencil sketch of Neil Armstrong and the proto-electro-optical image from the Ranger Lunar Lander, a sly reference to what my Uncle achieved at Kodak, and turned around to view the earth in near real-time.

I took the files from the estate and sorted them. Then I trundled down the hall and feed them through the scanner to convert to portable document files and then the originals went into the secured trash. Felt good.

Willow felt good as well, having received a phone call that an out-of-town colleague was around and desirous of a crisp Happy Hour White, but it extended into waiting for my son to arrive for a couple beers to wash down a lamb slider and fish taco.

Then I got home and did not make a call I wanted to and did make one I didn’t. Sitting in the brown chair, I looked around the place, marveling at the crap I have amassed and which needs to get moved somehow to someplace else. The farm is quite full, though perhaps I can stack this all up in the garage if I can get the time to digest the estate debris that currently occupies it.

Maybe a lower cost place somewhere else? It would have to mean retirement. And perhaps have to take another haircut on the condo.

This is better than worrying about the nation. I guess all that will sort itself out all by itself.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Renee Lasche Colorado springs