I Quit

Yesterday's blog post was sad enough that I decided to actually do something -- And doing things is against my personal policy.

I went to the house and scooped needles, as always. When I was finished, I gazed into the net at the tangle of needles and bugs and decided that the pool isn't the boss of me. I'd done a good job. There was a giant wad of dead plant in the net and no longer in the pool. Instead of digging it out of the net, I just dropped the whole thing there on the deck and walked away. Free.

I watched Batman: Gotham Knight, which is the animated feature chronologically set between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

While it is grittier than the animated series, some of the animation is a little weak. Well, maybe I just didn't like the artistic style of the work. Batman has a look, or actually several established looks, and an animated feature is not (in my opinion) the place to try a new one. So that bothered me.

I'd still recommended it simply because at the end of the day, Batman kicks ass. This is not a cartoon for children, though. 

I'm really looking forward to The Dark Knight in a couple of weeks. What I have seen of the movie so far looks incredible and the casting could not have been more appropriate.

But then the power went out due to a storm. There, in the dark, with the house gradually warming around me, I lapsed into sleep for a few hours. In total, the lights were out for about four hours.

When they came back, I woke up suddenly since the lights had been on and I didn't turn them off. The sensation of a flash bulb in the skull is rarely pleasant, and this stuck to the expected format.

I staggered out of the bedroom (can it be called that without a bed?) and out into the backyard to see what else was still dark. 

My eyes wandered to the pool, knowing that the wind had no doubt tumped a ton of needles in there.

It might have, but it also blew the net in there. The net I didn't clean. The empty net on the bottom of the pool under a thick mat of recently liberated needles, slowly spinning in their mocking dance through the recirculation stream. 

Screw that.

We are hiring someone.