Dancing in the dark
With the salt truck. As I slide-stepped out into the street, rattly-bang came the salt truck, causing me to chicken-walk over to the grass. (The salt truck is not very light on its feet so, if you decide to dance with it, you have to make sure it doesn’t run you over.) A pirouette onto a side street and rumbly-bump, there it was again. Quick! Scurry-slither up a driveway to the sidewalk. Promenade up the avenue with the the salt truck clunkity-chugging along behind. This little pas de deux went on for about 15 blocks. With a bit of digression by Garbage Woman, who insisted on stopping to pick up a bunch of flattened *unbundled* cardboard boxes that had blown off the top of someone’s recycle bin all over the street.
An interesting morning walk, to say the least. It really is shaping up to be a winter of ice here on the wild, wild western edge of the Planet Ann Arbor. It’s been a few years since we’ve had one of those, so I guess we’re due. Now, the rules state that if there’s a quarter inch or more of ice coating everything — sidewalks, streets, grass/snow — I don’t take my morning walk. But today, the ice was randomly distributed along the streets and sidewalks. Little patches or big sheets of ice or none at all. Here, there, but not quite everywhere. I can handle random ice. It’s a fun little challenge to be constantly figuring out where to take your next step. I didn’t take my little baggie of stealth salt with me this morning. There was no point. With ice [not quite] everywhere, *nobody*, including yours truly, had gotten out to salt their sidewalk yet. I have since salted my sidewalk and those of the elderly neighbors on either side. And then I went over and salted the heck out of the entrance to the schoolyard. It is an impassable mass of ice and frozen mud over there — again. I wasn’t a bit stealthy about it. I didn’t care who saw me. Runners or dogwalkers or schoolchildren. I didn’t care. Actually, I was hoping maybe a few of the school district’s minor suzerains would be on hand. Not. No one was there and I scattered my salt alone in the desolate schoolyard. I suppose if I were a minor school district suzerain, I’d be sitting in front of a delightful fire sipping a hot toddy. Or maybe I’d jet off to Tahiti. I dunno. But it’s gonna be a long, slippery winter here on the Planet Ann Arbor. And that’s okay, because we’re tough around here.
Love, Kayak Woman
P.S. Just now, my iPhone chimed with a text message from Mouse, to let me know that she has safely reached the casamance. I’m not exactly where that is, haven’t managed to look it up yet. Actually, maybe the GG will. But she took a boat there yesterday from Dakar, so obviously it’s in Africa. Where’s it’s hot. And there’s no blasted ice. Love you, Mouse.
December 29th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Kee-reist! Dancing with a salt truck! What next? There was serious business to take care of with those boxes this morning and Kayak Woman was off dancing with a truck!
People, when you have cardboard boxes to recycle, break them up, flatten them and BUNDLE them, either with string or put them in a paper grocery bag. Small boxes can be put right into the paper recycling bin. If you just throw them out there and the wind comes up, like it did last night, they’ll end up all over everywhere.
Sincerely yours, Garbage Woman.
December 29th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
You have succeeded in expanding my vocabulary! “suzerain”, according to Wikipedia:
Suzerainty (pronounced /ˈsjuËzÉ™rÉ™nti/ or /ˈsjuËzÉ™reɪnti/) is a situation in which a region or people is a tributary to a more powerful entity which allows the tributary some limited domestic autonomy to control its foreign affairs. The more powerful entity in the suzerainty relationship, or the head of state of that more powerful entity, is called a suzerain. The term suzerainty was originally used to describe the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its surrounding regions. It differs from sovereignty in that the tributary has some (limited) self-rule. A suzerain can also mean a feudal lord, to whom vassals must pay tribute.
Although it is a concept which has existed in a number of historical empires, it is a concept that is very difficult to describe using 20th- or 21st-century theories of international law, in which sovereignty either exists or does not. While a sovereign nation can agree by treaty to become a protectorate of a stronger power, modern international law does not recognize any way of making this relationship theoretically irrevocable by the weaker power.
I’m impressed!! A term that I doubt my high school social studies teachers could have even pronounced, much less ever known the meaning… 🙄
December 30th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Grok grok. Don’t be fooled. Ol’ Batty, er I mean Ol’ Baggy got that soozerain werd strate outta sum crummy ol’ sciens fickshun book. grok grok