On the 13th day of the Shutdown of our Country

Tom splitting wood

 Although his work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is piling up as Republicans refuse to fund our country to pay its bills as long as their extreme policy demands aren't met, Tom managed to get quite a bit of work done here at home. He made some headway into the huge chore of sawing up and then splitting the wood of the two water oaks downed on the south side of our property, and he started stacking split wood in the wood rack that he built yesterday. My job was to gather up wood in a wheelbarrow and tote it to the wood stack, where Tom could then stack the wood. He's the professional woodstacker; I just loaned my muscles for the grunt work.

After a few days of cool weather, warm weather had returned, with highs in the upper 80s. 

Tom's wood rack

One of the disappointments of the weekend was the cancellation of Wildthings, an event that thousands of people look forward to every fall; it takes place on the grounds of the Bayou Lacombe Centre, the headquarters of the Southeast Louisiana National Wildlife Refuges. Last year about 5,000 people attended, many of them children. The event includes a wildlife art contest, with participants from nearby schools, vendors, lots of activities for children, music, food, and opportunities for people to explore Bayou Lacombe on canoes that launch into the bayou from the Centre's grounds. Many people at the headquarters worked very hard for months to make this year's event the best ever: only the event was cancelled, as so many such events are being cancelled around the country.

We heard from our son that his research at a flagship university in Texas has also been affected by the shutdown. His grant is funded by a company that has a contract with the Air Force; he received a work stop-order on his research until this year's budget is approved by Congress. He cannot order any supplies with the designated grant money. Such halts on research are happening all over the country. James Fallows has been sharing readers' reports on just such issues: See "Weekend Shutdown Reader: Lest We Forget," and "Sunday Shutdown Reader: Harold Varmus on Self-Destruction in the Sciences," among others.

Hard work, however, helps keep us emotionally and mentally balanced here on our one acre of land in the middle of a small town in southeast Louisiana. I just worry about the many people even more vulnerable than we are to the vicissitudes of irresponsible, radical politics.

By late morning, Tom has almost filled the first tier of the wood rack. (I should add here that he didn't split all this wood in one day.)

By afternoon, the first tier of the wood rack is almost full.

By early evening, I've hauled cut wood from the front of the lot to the wood stack, and the second tier is beginning to fill.

But there was still time to play.

Final note: As James Fallows writes: "And the situation could have been solved at any point if John Boehner had only brought a budget measure for a vote in the House. "