Laboring amonst the beasts

When I thought I had lost my camera, I also thought I had lost all my great pig shots. The pig experience is integral to Fairgoing. It also factors into politics, health policy, and national security, but I digress.

This is still a pretty new camera and so these idle pigs made good subjects. No danger of any action shots here.

This particular pig was breathing. I checked.

It's Labor Day, when we stay home and mow our lawns and celebrate the demise of the labor union movement in the United States. The folks who gave us the 40 hour work week and health insurance at work are relegated to the political sidelines, for the most part, fighting to maintain fair labor standards that we once thought were immutable, and now are up for grabs. Speaking of pigs. Reagan killed the air traffic controller's union and gave us the deregulated airways we've come to love and fear. He and the Bushes made sure that labor unions were marginal participants in the national conversation. Right to work, indeed!

So we celebrate by lying around. I asked and this fella's actually healthy. This is not elephantiasis, but normal healthy boar anatomy. Ouch.

Robyn has ideas about labor. She has numerous projects in mind at any given time. She is a restless ponderer, considering how this or that thing might be improved, repaired, replaced. She invites sales people to visit us and talk about window film and three season porches. She seriously considers these things, and I think that soon it will be winter and we'll enjoy the sun heating up the house, and soon the kids will go off to college and we'll be fine with how big the house is and leave the basement alone. I'm just lying around, wondering if 1:00 p.m. on Labor Day is too early for beer. I have decisions to make, too!

I look forward to the next long weekend, the next little slice of our anticipated retirement. My plan is to have leisure be the direction of my life, relaxing, reading, lying around. Robyn looks forward to diving in to the next project.

I can see my next long weekend beginning like this. Then Robyn's momentum will carry me along.

Either that or I'll feel . . . sheepish.

Happy Labor Day!