The State of the Union address seemed fine to me. If you hate the guy who delivered it, you can quibble with every comma but it seemed very reasonable and non-confrontational to me. My friend Roger described it in an e-mail as Obama declaring war on Congress and vowing to use executive orders to enact his agenda without their consent. But the only such actions I heard him announce was that he would raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 per hour, and enact this new kind of savings accounts for retirees — a plan which many Republicans have backed. Everything else being categorized today as tyranny was to either continue an existing program, some of which were started under Bush, or enact some studies of different problems.
On Facebook, a few right-wing "friends" of mine sent me a graphic that condemned Obama for reading his speech off a TelePrompter. Yeah, like every president before him — and everyone doing a rebuttal to him — didn't use a TelePrompter of some sort. Some of these people might just as well be screaming we need to impeach the guy because he was wearing a necktie.
I tweeted the other day, "If you need to kill a few hours, just go to your bank and tell them you need a cashier's check in Euros." In truth, it took about forty minutes but why should that take forty minutes? I got a teller who looked at me like I was asking her to turn Crystal Geyser water into Manischewitz wine. When I assured her that it could be done, she wandered off to find some other employee who knew how to do it. Turned out, there were none…but the Assistant Manager said, "I'll handle this." He then spent the next half-hour or so on the phone to other divisions of the bank, locating someone who could teach him.
Finally, he figured it out. The amount I needed the check to be in Euros turned out to be about $24 in American money…and there was a $30 fee for issuing the check. Somehow, the fee would have felt more unreasonable if it had taken them two minutes to issue me the check, as opposed to forty.
Lastly for now, folks keep writing to ask if I'm still feeding feral cats in my backyard. Yes, two of them: Lydia and Sylvia, both of whom have been around for years. You may remember how in 2008, I spent many days and nights trying to trap an animal I called The Kitten…a stray who seemed pregnant and, at the very least, in need of being fixed. (The tale started here and continued through many subsequent postings.) That was Lydia and she still spends most evenings in my yard and sometimes appears during the day. She's learned to trust me but Sylvia, after as many years, still acts like I'm just putting out all those bowls of food to fatten her up for a Cat Pot Pie I intend to make someday. Next time I see the two of them together, I'll try to snap a current photo and post it here…along with a good recipe for Cat Pot Pie.