Entry 418: Diaper and Crocs Weather

We are getting some yo-yo weather here in DC.  We went from chilly and blustery on Thursday to warm and delightful Friday and Saturday, back to chilly and blustery today.  I made the most of the nice weather, though.  Friday evening I went to the Nats game (that's baseball for you non-sportsball fans) with some friends.  It was an incredibly dull game from a watching-baseball perspective, but it was a good time when considered strictly as a social event, which is how all live baseball should consumed.  The game is just an excuse to sit outside and drink overpriced beer with chums.

Then, Saturday our neighbors came over for a little cookout.  They literally live a block and a half away, and we see them maybe three times a year.  They're really cool and they have three kids ranging in age from seven to one, so they're good people to hang out with.  I did up my cookout special -- sausages with grilled peppers and onions and grilled asparagus.  I realized I'm a halfway decent griller -- I mean it's not hard -- don't overcook the meat and time it so that everything is done at about the same time -- but I've definitely gone over to people's houses who've messed it up.  My one critique I have of myself this time is that I used a bit too much olive oil in preparing the veggies.  Their natural juices really get going in the hot foil, so you can get by with less oil than you might initial think.

Last year we totally re-landscaped our backyard, and it was glorious to finally sit outside and use it.  We did it toward the end of summer, and we laid down new sod, so we had to wait for a few weeks before it was ready, and then we went on vacation, and by the time we returned the weather had mostly turned cold.  Plus, in DC the mosquitoes can get out of control late in the summer and sometimes it's too hot to be outside for long periods of time.  There is a narrow range of good outside days, and you have to use 'em or lose 'em -- 80-degree April days are perfect.  Unfortunately, our nice dinner was somewhat abruptly ended because our friends' four-year-old son bit his tongue and opened it up pretty wide.  It was one of those things where our friends went from "maybe we should leave now" to "maybe we should call the doctor" to "maybe we should take him to urgent care" to "we spent 12 hours in the E.R., and he had to get eight stitches on his tongue."  Just about every parent with young kids has been there at some point.  It's awful.

In other news, lots of political stuff going on these days.  I'll touch on a few subjects briefly.

• Our egomaniac-in-chief remains as egotistical and maniacal as ever.  The office of his lawyer, Michael Cohen, was raided by the FBI, and it's apparently made him madder than usual.  I have no idea how this all ends.  I think Trump eventually forces Mueller out somehow, and then... who knows?  Republicans have been saying firing Mueller would cross some sort of line, but they've caved on just about everything else with Trump -- why would this be any different?
  
• Perhaps related to the point above Paul Ryan announced he won't be seeking reelection this fall.  This is a good thing for two big reasons: a) It makes his House seat more likely to be flipped by the Democratic candidate Randy Bryce (aka "Iron Stache"); b) Paul Ryan sucks, and I'm glad he won't be in Congress anymore.  Paul Krugman had Ryan figured out nearly a decade ago, and his analysis has proved truer and truer as the years went on.  The snarky thing liberals always say about libertarians is that they got into Ayn Rand as a freshman in high school and never grew out of it.  But this seems to really be what happened to Ryan.  Literally, the only thing he seems to care about as a public servant is depriving the poor of public goods and services in order to fund tax cuts for the super-rich.  (And when it was too politically difficult to limit goods and services to the poor, he cut taxes anyway and put it on the country's credit card.)  I dabbled briefly in the "makers and takers" ideology on my own when I was, like, 14 (I never read Rand) and thought it was something something new and profound, and then I got older and realized it was incredible trite and shallow.
  
• Apparently we are bombing Syria again.  That we will we bomb a country in the name of protecting their children, but will not take in these children as refugees is among the more hypocritical and morally reprehensible things we've done as a country in a long time -- and that's saying something.
  
• Speaking of reprehensible, read this story.  It's absolutely awful.  It encapsulates so much of what's wrong with our society -- racism, irrational fear toward "others," immediate escalation of a nothing situation, and of course guns.  As it turns out, a good guy with a gun who tries to kill a black teenager for knocking on his door is not a good guy at all.  The only heartening things about this story are a) the guy missed, b) the sheriff recommends throwing the book at this trigger-happy paranoiac.
  
• In terms, of racially motivated overreactions, this Starbucks one seems to be grabbing more headlines.  It's quite ridiculous.  I will say, however, that many a Starbucks located in the heart of big city will deny you bathroom use and ask you to leave if you don't buy anything, even if you're white.  I know from experience.  (In the suburbs, where space isn't at such a premium, they're much laid back about it.)  I seriously doubt that they would call the cops however.  Again this is somebody turning a nothing situation into a major incident for no reason.  And I don't totally let the cops off the hook either, under the "they were just doing their jobs" excuse.  From everything I've read, they absolutely could've resolved things without any arrests.  I bet what happened is the responding officers got chippy because the guys wouldn't leave immediate when asked (because they didn't really do anything wrong), and so they felt disrespected and weren't going to let the guys off scott free because of it.  In my experience, offers hate it when you don't jump when they tell you to, even if you're in the right.  They know that they can't do anything to serious to you, but they feel the need to do something, so they ruin your day and waste your time.  I've had it happen to me, and I'm white.  I cannot even imagine how much worse it would be if I was black. 

And on that note, it's now 9:30 pm Sunday evening, and I have a mountain of dishes in the sink to attend to.  Until next time...