Saturday Night

Hard rain the last two days! So much that the trees couldn't drink it all up and the creek got high and muddy. It's back to its lime silt green now but it's still too high to harrass fish without explosives.

"Percussive sampling" is the scientific term, maybe?

Anyway, I ignored the news and just played...all day. Ate barbeque and brownies at the soccer picnic and explored new territory in geriatric volleyball. This morning, my body has mentioned the overused underused muscles about every time I've moved. I like doing enough things during the day to get really tired at night. I believe I managed.

Rewarding myself for living through another day, I took a glass of wine out onto the deck overlooking Lake Steve, which is not really large enough to support a respectable sized carp but is doing afine job as an amphibian singles bar. I wish I had recorded the symphony in the mud puddle.

Listening for a minute, I decided to share this with my son, who having vanquished his dad in the volleyball tournament earlier in the day, was about to take a victory nap in the chair in front of the tv. I could tell he didn't want to move. Too bad...This was one of those times I couldn't let him be.

Ok, ok...We walked out the door and he listened for a second and said, "Yeah, they sure are loud," Then he turned and tried to escape, but no way was I letting him get away.

"Let's go over there," I said, pushing him toward the corner of the deck overlooking Lake Steve. In his best teenager actually moving in the proper direction but oozing with the "this sucks" body language walk... he went.

It is like being in the sweet spot at an ampitheater. Trills and chirps and other calls filled us, and he became awake, leaning on the rail to hear all that was being said by a vernal pool after the storm.

"There's four different ones" he said.

"At least."

The ovewhelming majority of the song was coming from one type of frog. Hundreds of them, at least. Loud. But through that chorus came other calls, distinct and piercing the cacophony. We talked and told each other when we heard a new call, nodding "yep" each time. We had four, for sure, and one more that could be a cricket or something, but we were unsure if crickets were mature enough this early in the spring to be hunting a special friend.

"There sure are a lot of frogs looking for love out there." I said.

"Sure are," he laughed, and I let him go.

Peace,

Steve



*****



President George W. Bush says No more spending on weapons development!


``I have made very clear to the Congress that the use of taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life, I am against that,'' Bush told reporters in at the White House before meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. ``If the bill does that, I will veto it.''

Oh wait...he was talking about his culture of life and being against stem cell research...not against scientific research for weapons that promote science to kill people in order to save people...

Ok, I'm confused....

Digby has a similar take but somewhat more graphicly:

digby


Sigh...Odd that in all the discussion you hear about the Nuclear option our Senator Frist is trying to ram through, is how little you hear about the fact that the Judge he is trying to give a lifetime appointment to...is quite corrupt!

... Texans for Public Justice, which compared her judicial rulings to the companies that funded her political campaigns (Texas Supreme Court judges are elected), and found:

More than $500,000 (37 percent) of the $1.4 million that Owen raised for her two Supreme Court campaigns came from lawyers and litigants who had cases in her courtroom.

Owen ranks No. 2 on the court in the share of campaign money that she took from these docket donors.

Owen’s 11 biggest litigant-donors (including Enron Corp., Farmers Insurance and Dow Chemical) appeared in her courtroom 26 times.

While these big docket donors prevailed an enviable 77 percent of the time before the court as a whole, Owen was even kinder—favoring them 85 percent of the time.

Or Texas Watch, which found after reviewing the record:

Justice Priscilla Owen is an activist judge ... with biases towards corporate and insurance interests.