Solid Currency Is the Hardest to Love

The calendar says for those of us in the Northeast and, at least theoretically, most of the rest of the nation, this winter of our discontent is drawing to a close. Next weekend is the start of Daylight Saving Time and in less than two weeks the swallows return to Capistrano. The Boys of Summer are already rounding into shape as the Guys of the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues, and not a moment too soon, so this should, I hope, be the start of better things.

I know it's been a rocky time for many of us for the last year or so and you have to look hard to find reasons to be cheerful (if you don't like baseball I'm not even sure it's possible, but to each her/his own, I suppose). 

I'm thinking one of the things that separate us from many of the other travelers here on the Big Blue Marble is our capability to make ourselves and one another happy and a willingness to do so. I cannot claim to have ever seen two ocelots doing knock-knock jokes, and can't recall seeing a robin red-breast do a pratfall to cheer up the other birds in a tree, and I've watched a lot of Animal Planet while staying at a Holiday Inn Express.

Dylan offered that it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. My mother, world-renowned mom of six of the most thick-headed and strong-willed children to ever walk the planet, demonstrated her smartness to us all when, without consulting the Internet (there was life before ether. Who knew?), she told us it took more muscles to frown than it did to smile. We believed her because she was our Mom and it didn't hurt that she was also right, but how did she know?

So we can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up faster. I always wear trousers with pockets so I have someplace to put all the fun. We can promise to not miss what we do not have and enjoy our now in the now and look towards tomorrow with hope and not dread. "I'm carving 'em up through the dust in your town. Crawling over rubble just to sound me out. Tend to wonder why?"
-bill kenny 

The Pump Don't Work

That whole March comes in like a lion thing has been way more than true in our neck of the woods so far with winds alternating between a roar and scream or at least it feels that way when you're out and about. 

But sometimes, others' words better capture a moment than my own. Even when they're not words but a picture or in this case, a cartoon.

 

'Cause the vandals took the handles. 
-bill kenny

National Day of Unplugging

In light of the last twelve months (or in my case since January 2017), today might be better spent away from electronics. Welcome to the National Day of Unplugging.

Let somebody else handle the doomscrolling for a couple of hours and break out one of the board games you put away after the kids moved out, try your hand at arts and crafts, or maybe go for a walk or a hike. If the latter, maybe I'll see you out there. 
-bill kenny

NOPE

"I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead.

I just need someplace where I can lay my head

'Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?'

He just grinned and shook my hand, 'No' was all he said."

Apparently, the correct answer was 'Q Sent Me.' Seriously.

"Catch a cannon ball now to take me down the line

My bag is sinkin' low and I do believe it's time

To get back to Miss Fanny, you know she's the only one

Who sent me here with her regards for everyone."
-bill kenny

New Tools for New Times

With precautions in combating COVID-19 we’re all taking I’ve discovered (now that I’ve sort of gotten the hang of it) technology like Zoom meetings can be integral and essential for furthering involvement and engagement in our city’s business. 

Admittedly, sometimes Zoom meetings can feel a little bit like seances because you’re not sure who’s there and who’s speaking, but the more of them you do, the better at them you get which is why you should give them a try. Especially since I think they’re here to stay at least for a while.

You probably already watch City Council meetings either on the city’s website or on public access but you’re missing out. If you check out the calendar at the bottom of the city’s webpage, hold your cursor over one of the meeting listings, and then follow the link, from the comfort of your favorite chair you can be as engaged in our city’s government as you choose to be. 

Last Wednesday I rode along on a meeting of the City Council and Board of Education Ad Hoc Committee. Created at the start of last year’s budget deliberations, the committee was a vehicle to further communication among members of the City Council and the Board of Education (with others) to create a consensus as the budget took form. 

The meetings moved online when COVID restrictions started last March. They have returned for this year’s budget work and all parties will, I believe, continue to strengthen the communication chains they forged last year.

My notes to myself from last Wednesday included ‘trust fall’ in that everyone responsible for public education in Norwich, from delivering it to paying for it, has to believe everyone else is being honest and that takes work as well as practice and lots of both. 

You can check out that meeting for yourself. I’m looking forward to the next one, via Zoom (of course) on Saint Patrick’s Day at half-past six (the dialing and connecting instructions are all part of the agenda).   

We all win with transparent, dialogue-driven decisions, and the more we get involved in understanding the budget creation process the better the results will be for all of us. That no one, either from the Board of Education or the City Council wasted one another’s time posturing. hand-wringing or talking AT one another, rather than WITH one another, was so much more than merely encouraging, it was absolutely essential. It’s NOT just the “schools” who have a budget problem, it’s ALL of us (and if it helps, it's not just here). And it’s going to take everyone, from elected, through appointed to residents of all kinds, to get this done. 

There are no easy answers, especially now with so many unknowns, both in terms of challenges and opportunities. We need to avail ourselves of every tool we have to develop strategies to define goals and the means to achieve them in every aspect of our budget, including paying for everything we decide we want to have. That means being active now as discussions begin and offering informed suggestions, ideas, and encouragement. 

With apologies to Timothy Leary, turn on, tune in, and speak up. 
-bill kenny

Schrödinger's Verbs

I have a lot on my plate, if not mind, this morning as my wife and I prepare for a jaunt to Middletown, Connecticut, to get our first COVID-19 vaccination. I don't know which one it is, and almost a year into this Masque of the Red Death, I don't care. We'll roll up our sleeves and await the jab. When we're told to come back for the second installment we shall and will. 

There's a show on television this afternoon that I like to watch while it's airing that I will have to tape today because I'll be underway and realized as I was setting the television stuff up to do the taping that I'm not actually taping at all even though I still call it that. 

We haven't had a videotape player/recorder for, I'm guessing now, about a decade or so. We used to not be able to live without them, remember? Struggling to learn how to program them and becoming frantic if a sporting or news event 'ran long' because it meant you'd lose part of what you had hoped to tape? Yeah, good times.

And then we all TiVoed (is that how that was spelled?), but and it seemed like only a matter of moments later we were all digital video recording, DVRing. There's a gerund for you, right? And I wrote TiVo as if it were a verb but in reality, like DVRing, it wasn't really a word though we used it like one and we all knew what it meant. 

Things that are things and yet not things all at the same time. Schrödinger's Verbs.

Donovan would be pleased (as would the Allmans) and unpleased, simultaneously.
-bill kenny

Golden (M)Oldie

If you think you've read this before, you're right; you have. Nostalgia is a big item these days. Just ask the Republican Party who are very keen to bring back the 19th Century. Anyway, a very long time ago I called this: 

Bustin' Broncos on the Mac & Cheese Ranch

Brushing my teeth yesterday morning, that turn of phrase popped into my head. I'm not sure where it came from and when these things happen, I get a little nervous. Has anyone ever said to you, 'what were you thinking?' and you struggled to recount the process that had resulted in your suggestion to drill a second hole in the boat in order to let the water out? No one has ever done that with me and I'm finally starting to understand why, and in this case, knowledge is not necessarily power.

I have a brain that's more like Captain Billy's Whizbang, a turn of phrase supposedly from "The Music Man" (I adore every Lullaby on Broadway (but prefer Hackett's Lamb to Charles') as my collection of Iron Maiden attests) with which I have no familiarity and to which I tend to add 'Closet' though I don't know why. 

The lobes are filled with badly-remembered snatches of melodies from decades of rock and roll songs, some of which went plywood in Indiana while others are anthems (C'mon! Let's all Do the Clam!) none of which are improved when I sing them aloud at the top of my lungs, along with film clips projected on the inside of my skull (I can see them when I close my eyes) in random order and with no reason and less rhyme.

I don't even like Mac and Cheese. Well, hardly. I did watch a recipe on TV the other day that added bacon to it and then it was baked, or maybe boiled (I didn't watch that much of it) and now in my head, it runs into a snippet of a TV commercial for a fast-food restaurant where somebody demands 'will somebody please make a bacon latte?' though the ad isn't for coffee.

I've been holding out for pony rides for my birthday for decades but I don't think I'd go out to the North Forty in search of a Chestnut Mare. Besides, my sister, Evan, is the equestrian; I'm more of a pedestrian (and the world is better for both of those choices), so there's not much danger I'll be moving to Montana soon(er or later). 

I think the only way this could turn out well would be if I end up riding Mr. Ed into the sunset-perhaps dueting like Dale and Roy, hopefully without ending up like Trigger.
-bill kenny