Sunday Funnies: Kingsolver, Diane, Nixon

Barbara Kingsolver, beloved novelist in this household, has an op-ed in the Wahington Post this morning. She's making plain the benefits of getting closer to our origins, of working with the soil to make life better. She says chemical farming, corporate farming, is not all it's cracked up to be; and that the move from the farm to the city really hasn't gotten us away from the task of feeding ourselves as so many people are working in jobs that have to do with food production and consumption (not to mention the health industry where so many people work to correct our not so smart eating habits). I know where she is coming from since Diane and I, and our four children, left the corporate 'rat' race and headed for the hills to engage in just the sort of thing Ms. Kingsolver is talking about: getting back to the land, growing our own food, raising our own livestock, living as simply as we could. Diane still gets dirt under her fingernails with her flower garden but the dirt on my hands most likely comes from the soil I've rubbed off of a golf call. Times do change? Probably not. Interests certainly.

All of which reminds me: Diane was out trimming and cutting and doing stuff around the outside of the house yesterday. I was busy watching the President's Cup and checking on football scores. At one point, she comes up behind me and tells me that maybe she cut something she shouldn't have. Oh oh, that doesn't sound good and I'm thinking she cut an antenna cable or something equally important. Nah, just a little black wire to the air conditioner. Easy enough to fix in a jiffy - turn off the power, strip the ends, reconnect, twist, wrap in electricians' tape, turn the power back on, try out the ac, go back to what you were doing before. It did occur to both of us that it could have been a live wire and that sometime later in the day I might have wondered where she was, it being awfully quiet around the place, and then going out and finding her laying amidst the vines with a pair of snips and a wire in her hands and a surprised look on her face... But it wasn't. And we laughed.

I should go eat breakfast and read a little more of The Final Days. Judge Sirica has the tapes and Nixon's handlers know that it won't be long before they are made public and the People will know that John Dean was telling the truth and that Tricky Dick is a crook, a guy deeply involved in a cover up of criminal activity. Bad time for Richard and it's only going to get worse.