Hagar's Head Lice

I got an extra hour of sleep out of the dog this morning! She woke up at 5 a.m. as usual but when she began giving me the paw, I just rolled over and darned if she didn't settle down and let me sleep until 6. I consider that a major victory.

The snowdrops have come up in our garden -- they're not quite open yet but they're already looking good. The daffodils, despite an early start, have slowed and we don't seem to have any that are near blooming. I think the recent cold weather has chilled their enthusiasm. We've had daffodils in January before, but not this year.

Speaking of gardening, the saga of our front garden continues. You may remember that our upstairs neighbors, the Russians, cooked up a plan to rip out some of the bushes. I opposed this plan and said so in an e-mail to our landlords, and they sided with me. (The Russians and our landlords jointly own the house where Dave and I rent the bottom flat, and under the terms of our lease they are jointly responsible for the front garden.) Well, Mrs. Russia wrote me yesterday complaining that her wishes have been "disregarded and misrepresented" and she pushed again for ripping out those bushes. She expressly asked that I not forward her message to our landlords. I don't know why she insists on coming to me with these issues because, to use George W. Bush's word, I AM NOT THE DECIDER. I told her to write the landlords.

Meanwhile, it looks like our garden won't be trimmed anytime soon. Pruning gridlock!

Honestly, is it any wonder the world is such a mess? We can't even get simple landscape maintenance done without instigating another Cold War.

I found this Viking hat (complete with braids!) on the ground on my walk home from work last night. Have we been invaded again?

Seeing that fake hair reminds me that we got a note the other day about cases of head lice being reported in the school. Fortunately this is not a problem I have to think about, having very minimal hair myself. I remember when I was a kid we would have lice checks in elementary school -- the nurses would come to our classrooms and go up and down the rows of students examining our heads. As I recall they used a pencil to look through our hair, and it felt great. If they found lice the kid got sent home right away, which must have been embarrassing. Do you think they used the same pencil to look through all of our hair? That seems problematic, doesn't it?

I was aghast at Trump's press conference following the Washington, D.C. plane crash. I don't think I've ever seen such a bizarre performance from a sitting president. My jaw was literally hanging open. To immediately use such a tragedy to make a political point about DEI programs, insulting all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved by implying they were unsuited for their jobs, basically blaming every minority group in the country for the crash, and providing no evidence to support any of those claims -- it was astonishing. The fact that the helicopter pilot has subsequently been shown to be a woman doesn't change any of that, because who knows who was doing what at the time? There's been no completed investigation. I cannot believe this man is the leader of the free world.

Also, why are Army helicopters flying so near the flight path of a major commercial airport? Is that part of the training? Are we now using innocent civilians as military training fodder without their consent?

Is it just me, or does Trump look terrible? Like, even worse than usual. He looks like a ghost with an Oompa-Loompa spray tan.