Three Beautiful Things 05/21/18: Back to the Lilacs, Cover-up, Kellogg v Wallace

1.  For about four or five days, I've been avoiding a pile of lilac branches I created last week in the back yard. Today, I ended my procrastination. I sawed and clipped tributary branches off of main trunks, sawed long trunks into sections, and filled empty garbage cans with lilac branch waste so I can take them to the transfer station and toss them in the wood bin. I almost slowed way down when the sun started beating down, but found that if I just moved my labors into the shade of the lilac jungle, I could work longer. Now more branches need to be cut from the standing lilacs and I'll get to that. I've pencilled in the lilac jungle project as a long term one.

2. I returned to my reading of Nightmare and the history of the Nixon presidency. Much of what I read detailed the Nixon administration being consumed with covering up the connections between the burglary at the Watergate Complex and the Committee to Re-elect the President. Concurrent efforts were also underway to influence the grand jury prosecutors, discredit the investigations and investigators, and to keep the cash flow running between the Nixon administration and the burglars -- the burglars had been promised that they would be "taken care of", but paying their legal fees, giving them living expenses, and providing them with periodic stipends became more and more problematic for men like Charles Colson and Jeb Magruder and the methods by which the hush money was paid out became more and more byzantine. I'm at that point in the Watergate story where containment is beginning to wobble.

3.  Toward the end of March, I wrote three Sibling Assignment pieces, but my sisters and I agreed to hold off publication of our assignments until all three of us had completed them. Carol has had a lot going on and she took longer than Christy and me to get hers written. Today, she gave us the go ahead to publish what we wrote about our experiences with the rivalry between Shoshone County's two largest towns, Kellogg and Wallace. If you'd like to read about my failures as an athlete in this rivalry and my resistance to being a part of of it, just click here.  You'll find links to my sisters' pieces in mine.