Olgapalooza

Several Olga photos today. She and I have been taking short neighborhood walks and yesterday she even went on the loop through the nearby housing estate, which she hasn't done in months. As expected, she seems to have more energy than she did when she was going out daily with her dog walker.

Not that yesterday was a particularly energetic day. It got up to 87º F (31º C) and we mostly sat in the garden and tried to stay comfortable.

Olga found a bag of discarded bagels among the trash stacked on the corner. I let her have one. She was very excited. She's a freegan!

As usual when we walk through the housing estate, she looked for the cats. Her main nemesis has been gone for ages but there's still at least one other cat at this address, and she never passes the door without checking.

We walked up a street parallel to our own with this beautiful blooming rose arching over the pavement.

As usual in summer, when the sun comes up early, Olga is our alarm clock. She's been getting me up right at 5 a.m. pretty much daily. The sun is up even before that but I try to draw a pretty strict line at getting up before 5 a.m.! I love these long days right around the solstice but there is a drawback to an early sunrise -- an early dogrise.

Yesterday I used the cool early-morning hours to do some gardening. I dug up a kniphofia, or red-hot poker, that had become buried in overgrowth from surrounding plants. It's been struggling for a couple of years, not getting enough sun, and I finally decided to put it in a big pot and move it to a sunnier location.

This is what it looked like ten years ago, and here it is now:

Hopefully we can get it thriving again.

During the heat of the day I sat out in the garden and read "All the President's Men." As you may remember, Alan Pakula's screen adaptation with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman is one of my favorite movies, and it even helped inspire me to pursue a journalism career. But believe it or not, I've never read the book, which obviously goes into much more detail about Watergate and the investigative processes of The Washington Post. It's pretty easy reading and quite compelling.

It's also interesting to read it now, in the Trump era, because it shows that many aspects of Republican politics just haven't changed that much. (Not surprising, considering Nixon's "dirty trickster" Roger Stone is still around advising the Trump camp.) For example, did you know that in the early '70s some Republicans insisted the 1960 election had been stolen by the Democrats? Sound familiar?

It goes back to that certain strain of paranoia that permeates American politics -- a fundamental distrust of government, of "tyranny," which many Republicans in particular feel. I think Democrats, by and large, don't think that way. We have more trust in the system and in our fellow human beings. We see government as beneficial, not oppressive. Even when the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore in the knife's-edge election of 2000, changing the course of the country forever, the Democrats went along with it. We were skeptical, but we relied on the system and we didn't storm the Capitol.

Anyway, it's making for interesting reading!