Just a couple notes from this past weekend, where upon we did not do much.

First, the wife ended up watching a Discover channel show about poisonous critters. And I stopped in for the section on brown recluse spiders.

Now, remember, wife's roommate in the Central City hospital was there for treatment of a brown recluse bite. And a friend from the youth group was bitten here in our community.

And this show had the usual description of the violin on the brown recluse head and thorax. Never seen that on a spider, that I know of. And have always assumed (knowing I could be wrong) that all my fellow denison's here in the basement were house spiders. But this show had video of the brown recluse critter. Skittering away, in a peculiar spider gait.

I've seen that gait. Here. In this room.

On this keyboard.

And I sometimes sit here in pajamas, barefooted.

So, yesterday (or actually, the day before, now), I launched a pre-emptive chemical strike against the eight-legged (and six-legged, and multi-legged... yes, I accept that there will be some collateral damage) inhabitants of this dark domain.

And around the camping equipment and laundry area, too.

Yes, I grew up sharing my bedroom with black widows, but they were predictable. They set up camp and stayed put. Easy to find, easy to see.

Not these little brown bitches.

And we watched the rescue of the nine coal miners in Pennsylvania, live. I was on Yahoo, reading mail, when the headline changed.

Apparently I, and everybody else on Yahoo, knew they had broken through to the mine before Giraldo did, since he still hadn't mentioned it by the time I went up to tell the wife.

At first, we were quite impressed with that state's Governor. Easy going guy to interview, always keeping the families informed, ahead of the rest of the world.

Then came the rescues. And after the 8th miner was out, and they were bringing the cage back up with #9, this bozo governor is trotting through the crowd of rescuers, chanting a cheer like it was some dumb football game. Grandstanding for the cameras.

And I noticed none of the real workers there wanted to stand next to him. They all just sidled away at the first opportunity. Nobody else cheered. They had jobs to do, and a man's life depended upon it. Cheering would come when the job was done.

When they brought the stretcher down the slope to the hole, the blue-helmeted governor charged up the hill and helped carry it to the hole. Making sure he was on the front left corner.

Why?

So that when they brought out the last miner and carried him past the media pool video camera, there was the governor, right up front on the stretcher, on the camera side, grandstanding for the world to see.

I don't like him now, at all.