{"id":7119,"date":"2012-07-09T05:26:15","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T10:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=7119"},"modified":"2012-07-09T06:04:25","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T11:04:25","slug":"vacation-apathy-metamorphosis-whatever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=7119","title":{"rendered":"Vacation, Apathy, Metamorphosis, Whatever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I suspect that my eight loyal readers are close to giving up on me. Every so often since I started this blog in 2006 I have to let it go on hiatus. Whether this is for my peace of mind or to keep things fresh or spare myself from embarrassment is hard to say. <\/p>\n<p>I think its all of the above plus a bit of all the things in the Title. I did have a Disney cruise to Alaska with my family that kept me busy but only for twelve days. Some of that time I was out at sea beyond cell phone contact and reluctant to use precious travel time to putz around on a computer. Then again that was only two weeks of the past seven or eight weeks of negligible posting.<\/p>\n<p>Apathy is part of it. That has been brought about by two successive construction projects. The first I mentioned earlier had to do with a two month replacement of 100% of the tuck pointing on my home. It started out innocently enough as the rebuilding of the stairs in our front yard and morphed into a loud, messy, dusty, lawn abusing project that it was very nice to stay away from. It was a big enough hassle to dissuade me from filing for Congress and pursuing another golden goose chase.<\/p>\n<p>I still managed to blog but then an even messier project developed. It too started small. I was tired of the water that seeped into our second house where our grandchildren live. Instead of a little waterproofing the foundation walls ended up being torn out and footings poured to lay new block walls. Fortunately the house didn&#8217;t slide down the hill during the June flooding and fortunately we were in sunny Alaska when the heavens poured fourth in Duluth. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve kept up my reading but I&#8217;ve kept my opinions to myself for the hiatus. The Duluth Schools, the Presidential campaign, the book I&#8217;ve been writing that has been put on hold&#8230;&#8230;these all are on my mind everyday. I just don&#8217;t feel like prattling on about them. Besides, since my daughter had to vacate her house I&#8217;ve been hosting two cute little boys all day, seven days a week. If I hadn&#8217;t woken up at 3:30 this AM I would have been hard pressed to write this minutiae.<\/p>\n<p>My daughter might get to move back to her home this week but since her yard is little more than a vast pit of slippery clay I suspect I&#8217;ll be spending an inordinate amount of July and August helping put it in a fit condition for my grandchildren to play in again. That doesn&#8217;t bode well for blogging either.<\/p>\n<p>I did read one very interesting book recently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkusreviews.com\/book-reviews\/stephen-greenblatt\/swerve\/\">the Swerve<\/a> and I just got the first hundred pages read of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/05\/06\/books\/review\/the-passage-of-power-robert-caros-new-lbj-book.html?pagewanted=all\">the latest book on LBJ<\/a> by Robert Caro. They account for the metamorphosis part of the title. They are helping me during this cocooning period to transform myself into a prettier little butterfly, like the one my grandchildren might pull the wings off of. Accidentally of course.<\/p>\n<p>Oh and I looked at the newly drawn districts for the Duluth School District. With all the expenses I&#8217;ve been stuck with lately the extra two thousand bucks a year the current school board gave itself as a pat on the back for the Red Plan looks mighty tempting. I wonder if I could speed my book writing up and get it out of the way before next year&#8217;s election?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I suspect that my eight loyal readers are close to giving up on me. Every so often since I started this blog in 2006&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-housekeeping","category-harrys-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7119"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7123,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7119\/revisions\/7123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}