Topsy-Turvy's®, and a before and after

I am up with the sun today.  It seems that going off of the Statin drugs for cholesterol is improving my mood.  It is difficult to pinpoint the causes of the mild depression, it is so subjective.  After consultations, the doc suggested that I stop taking them for two months and see if there is an improvement. But then the slowly lengthening days may have much to do with it too.  

It is a brisk 45° (7° C) outside, winter finally returned after a unseasonably warm January.  Snookums just came in all rosy cheeked from the morning dog walk, and departed again for her power walk around the loop.  But I sit here in a nice comfortable studio, though a slight chill touches me from the bright window. Kippur the parakeet is now my companion in the mornings.

We moved his cage to my studio because he wasn't getting enough stimulation.  Parakeets in the wild live in very noisy and active environments, and long quiet spells are depressing to them. They need noise.  So in the morning as I go through the videos and such, he fusses at me, trying to get me to play the one recording I have of parakeets feeding and responding to my talking to him.  My A.M. radio is on a timer, and at 10 am, talk radio comes on for three hours.  He chirps, sings and fusses happily in the noise.



Before ...



... and after

I am still irked with my neighbor setting up a single wide trailer house out my window.  I was sitting here minding my own business when this huge truck dragging the trailer slowly roared across the field and stopped right in front of the gap that frames an old one-room brick schoolhouse about half a mile down the road.  My ever-industrious Asian neighbor-lady had warned me a couple of years ago that she was going to put in a couple of rental units, so I wasn't totally taken off guard.  She is very ambitious and I am sure that when she is finished with it, it will look nice with plantings around it.  Still, I resent the ever-encroaching tentacles of civilization.  I am going to have to find some sort of planting to soften or block the view.

I am almost weaned from television now, getting my news off the internet.  It is easier to tell when the press is hyperventilating that way.  It really troubles me the way they use the same phrasing, the same buzz words, the same camera clips when they are presenting their stories.  

That tells me that there is some collusion in the news industry, and they spend way too much time shaping the news, and not enough time simply reporting it.  The internet at least allows me to filter the more egregious partisans and philosophies, and concentrate on the real pulse of the world.

Anyway, that sort of wraps up the morning here in my little crowded corner of the universe.

Good morning!

~r