Another beautiful day here in the Hudson Valley. It’s getting warmer each day and it will hit 90 degrees by Monday, but I’m not complaining. It’s sunny, I hear the occasional bird, Lonesome Dove was sitting on one of the wires this morning singing his song, a noisy crow was out and about, and we just had our second cup of coffee on the porch.

I woke up at 4 am, so there’s that.

But I’m trying to keep on chugging as if I’ve had a good night’s sleep.

I’m awfully close to finishing The Paris Diversion  and then I’ll have to figure out what to read next. Most likely, it will be Knife  by Jo Nesbø. I have an “Uncorrected Bound Proof” that I won in a giveaway on IG. Always nice to win something!

I’m now number 4 in the queue for Big Sky  by Kate Atkinson. Given how the system works, I will most likely see it sometime next week.

I’ve got more weed whacking to do today and I’m going to do a little garden pruning and cleanup, maybe even a little mowing. We’ll see, that depends on my lack-of-sleep-energy-level. I do find that keeping busy when I’m sleep deprived helps. I’m less inclined to feel sorry for myself and I usually get a lot done.

Just one mini-rant: I’m so sick of the media judging everything by ‘the optics.’ They seem to think that hearings on the Hill should have fireworks and gasps from the gallery and that they should be a friggin’ reality show. They helped to create candidate Trump by constantly hyping everything he said, televising every hate-filled rally, giving him more air time than anyone.

You’d think they would have learned their lesson, but no, they haven’t. Mueller’s testimony was just what most informed and judicious analysts thought it would be. He stuck to his report, but he did give us some additional information. And if he seemed a bit tired, can you blame him? He’s worked non-stop for almost two years on the investigation. Instead of concentrating on the substance of the hearing on Wednesday, we got comments from people like Chuck Todd about the optics. He should know better, of course, but he doesn’t, as has been proven over and over again in the past few years. And he’s not the only guilty one. There are whole slew of them out there, including Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, who thinks of the news they same way he thought of entertainment when he was with NBC.

I am so sick of the need to hype everything. Everything has to be entertainment. What is happening in our country is as serious as it gets. Gravitas is what we should be seeing, both in the hearings and in the media.

Sometimes I hate what we as a society have become: addicted to 30 second sound bites, the attention spans of a gnat as a result of constant screen quick takes. For heaven’s sake, half of the members of Congress haven’t even read the Mueller Report. The head of the FBI said he hadn’t read it. Get it together; it’s your job!

I have learned to avoid most televised media – I no longer watch MSNBC, which was my favorite. If I really need to see something there, I can watch it the next day, which is what I did yesterday. I watched Rachel Maddow’s take on the Mueller hearings. Thank you for some semblance of sanity, Rachel,  something which is sadly lacking of late.

Okay. End of rant. I’m off to do some work outside after I have my bowl of oatmeal.

Happy Friday.