Been getting hits from searches for that phrase, as well variations like “freedom of assemble” etc. I’m honored.

For anyone who stumbles across this site looking for serious information, here’s a short excerpt from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of special privileges for pre-assembled furniture and quasi-furniture products, from Sweden or any other country either within Scandinavia or outside, nor prohibiting the free assembly thereof; or abridging the freedom to include nonsensical diagrams and instructions or schematic drawings inside the packing materials, possibly sealed closed with heavy-duty packing tape so that said instructions or diagrams are torn irretrievably upon unpacking, or requiring that all items required for assembly actually really be included in the little plastic bag of screws inside the box, said bag which may or may not be composed of Kevlar or similar impenetrable material; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances except where prohibited by law or for stock sold at a discount.

Haven’t been consuming a whole lot of meat or alcohol lately, so when we visited friends this weekend, and ate really, really good Japanese barbecue (he is Japanese, and the best cook I know) and drank Budweiser (from Budweis, he buys his beer across the border in the Czech Republic) and wine (he has some righteous wines), I got really sleepy. So much for conversation.

Which was just as well, because I sometimes have a bad time understanding them, as they mix English, German and Japanese when they speak (not such a problem on its own, we do that too) but the style of communication is one that takes time to adjust to; I don’t want to seem ungrateful, it’s just that a fundamentally different conversational strategy from ours seems to underpin their communication. Then, when we were all sitting outside enjoying the food, their neighbor the stammering computer programmer visited. I’d spoken to him on the telephone once, a five minute call about computer problems I was having; the call took half an hour to complete. I stammer too, sometimes, when under stress etc., but wow. He turns out to be young and good-looking, so my wife was flirting with him somewhat, which didn’t help with the stammer at all.

I was still sleepy driving home the next day, but luckily didn’t pile the Dobl

The fog this time of year is something else. It covers the fields in sheets four feet off the ground. Driving my daughter to the train in the morning, I can see over the top of the fog, and underneath. Over the top are hills with a big orange sun rising. Underneath are fields and deer.

And then a deer, um, bounded across the road directly in front of the van in front of us, bounded from the stubble of the corn field on the left, or West, to another field on the right, which was East; so abruptly that the van’s brake lights didn’t even come on.

We watched it run off. Pretty reddish-brown doe.

Have you ever seen a wild deer up close? Well, wild. How wild can you be coexisting with the suburbs like that, coming down from the hills to the fringes of human settlement, nibbling hay and corn hunters lay out at the bases of their blinds in winter. Freerange deer. Have you ever seen one up close? Those guys are in shape, I’m not fooling. Talk about lean. Like that nervous skinny kid you went to school with who was so good at track and wanted to be a drummer. Only with more fog.