Marked safe

Woman: Was that a joke.
Man: Yes.
Woman: Try harder.

(We all react to catastrophes in our own way.)

So we’ve had a bit of flooding.
Short version: a Flood of the Century that was, where we live, considerably worse than the previous Flood of the Century 22 years ago.

Man (trying harder): We had everything packed and ready to go: documents, spare underwear, cats. My climbing gear bag. A siren went off and your mother said it was time to go so we did. Shortly before the official evacuation notice.
Woman: Ok.
Man: I suppose you could call it premature evacuation.
Woman: That was another joke right.

The cats are extremely well-behaved here at Beta’s place.
So are we.
When we woke up this morning the sky was blue (still is) but it’s still too early to go back to the house and check on damage and clean up and discard etc.
Some villages in the area are still in the process of being evacuated.
The cats are sleeping.
My wife is checking the news on her phone.
My daughter is working.
Now I will stand up from the comfortable chair to put my breakfast bowl into the dishwasher, and my wife will steal it.
Later we will get dressed and go for a walk.
There is a climbing gym in the neighborhood but I don’t know if i am up to it.
I woke up at 2 and thought about all those who have to flee on short notice, all around the world.
I hope they are doing ok.
But not all of them are.
I fed the cats at 4:30.
I woke up at 6:30 so I did fall asleep at some point.

Careers in Science: Batology

Comparatively few sciences start with the letter ‘B'; batology is one.

The batologist, he’s been sleeping half an hour longer lately than he used to, and would theoretically be feeling less addled and horrible except that he’s been staying up an hour longer at night for various reasons.

Eventually the pendulum will swing the other way.

The batologist is walking by the creek.

Everything is super green, except the water, which swirls muddy brown because it is flooding; and the ducks, which are all the colors of the duck rainbow.

Flooding, thinks the batologist. Humankind, when you gonna get your act together?

Just a little while ago, the batologist would have said, You can answer that question if you’re a pessimist.

Only a little while, but now he thinks, who knows? People, being an outcropping of the universe, have the same capacity to be surprising and wondrous as any other part of the universe.

The batologist could stand here all day, looking at all the green. But the waters are rising, so he heads home.

News from the crick

I went walking along the creek this morning because my shin and ankle hurt too much for me to run. The creek is high and muddy from the rain we’ve had (most excellent thunderstorm night before last) and there was a pair of swans. Then I saw a beaver swimming downstream. I jogged a little to catch up with him, then walked parallel with him for a while. This irritated the beaver and it dove and came up further downstream, and nearer the far bank. As we got closer to the swans, I saw that they had 6 cygnets and they saw us (noticing first me, then the beaver). One headed downstream with their young and the other swam first in my direction, then towards the beaver when it noticed him. The beaver dove again and resurfaced down stream from the swans and we all relaxed.

It was tense there for a minute.

Then I walked back home, where I picked some lettuce for the tortoise, and noticed that a horde of slugs had discovered our lettuce. They prefer the iceberg to the arugula, which is probably harder for a slug to pronounce. “Let’s eat the aru- arugu- oh, fuck, let’s have iceberg again.”

Then I cleaned litter boxes. One of our cats learned a life lesson last night, it seems, namely that it is easier to eat balloons and rubber bands than it is to keep them down.