The first few times a juvenile eagle lands on shore they stand around for several minutes (up to an hour). I always assume they are unhappy to be wet and to be forced to launch from flat sand.

Today, a walk creek to creek, a juvenile eagle, meditation on the value of lies, and a little brainstorming to prepare for Monday’s writing assignment. The best one is above, the lies below. So brainstorming.

Monday’s nonfiction writing assignment was a great favorite with my students, the assignment they completed early in the year and which they still loved by the end. It will be satirical and more than a little silly. It concerns a trivial annoyance.

List a few things you find personally irritating. World hunger and covid19 do not work here. People dying is not funny. People who smack their gum or take up two parking spaces or put the toilet paper roll on backwards are certainly deserving of punishment, but only if I were god and in a very bad mood. So that’s what you want. Trivial stuff only. Slammed doors, people reading your magazine before you get to it. People who will go on and on about sporting events . . . nothing deadly or illegal, just annoying to you personally. Eventually you will need to have a sense of humor about your own irritation—sometimes it’s not easy to reagin perspective on the sister who borrows your sweaters without asking, the mother who is still giving you advice you have not asked for (and you are in your 40s).

My list:

• dryer sheets
• smoldering beach fires
• porch lights left on all night
• people who are afraid of the dark
• not seeing the stars in the city because of the night glow
• people I do not know sitting on the log in front of my house
• cigarette butts dropped on the sand
• people who suggest I make “art” out of plastic beach trash
• “art” made out of plastic trash
• people who go on and on about sporting events (yeah, all the stuff above)
• the dried toothpaste that gathers on the handle of my husband’s toothbrush because he fails to adequately rinse the brush (I’ll pay for putting this one on the list)
• a sitcom pausing in the middle because the local internet signal is slow (there is no broadcast)
• stale crackers
• the tiniest crumbs in the bottom of the corn chip bag

You get the idea. Things that are annoying but not actually harmful (well, maybe the smoldering fires and cigarette butts). Try to come up with a list of three to ten. Come back and add more as they occur to you. They probably will.

A little covid-rant: I just went to the local grocery store. Most everything was gone, but of the seven customers parked in the lot, three were from out of state: the BForester from Marine County, the women with “Seattle Prep” on her Washington license frame, the guy who only bought take-out pastry and coffees with the pick-up which also had Washington plate. The many local people still cleaning rentals even though there are not supposed to be any rentals in our county. The fact that Jackson County has no deaths and only a handful of cases, but has completed more coronavirus tests than more populous and infected counties. So . . . it seems Medford and Ashland have some serious clout.

You will choose one from the list on Monday.

Near the beginning of my concern about protecting myself from “the virus” I began tracking statistics. Despite Mark Twain’s declaration—”There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”—I like numbers. And despite my previous belief, Twain did not originate the line. He thought it was from Disraeli, but we are both wrong. Twain said it in 1907, but:

An old jest runs to the effect that there are three degrees of comparison among liars. There are liars, there are outrageous liars, and there are scientific experts. This has lately been adapted to throw dirt upon statistics. There are three degrees of comparison, it is said, in lying. There are lies, there are outrageous lies, and there are statistics.—Robert Giffen (Scottish economist and statistician) in the Economic Journal in 1892

Anyway, there’s evidence right there that Giffen didn’t make it up either.

Anyway.

For a time I had links to four covid19 statistics pages bookmarked and generally open. Eventually I realized that everyone else was sourcing their date from Johns Hopkins:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html?utm_campaign=wp_to_your_health&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_tyh&wpmk=1

The eagle is near the middle of the photo. The woman in the red vest walked off the beach with her two yellow labs to avoid driving the juvenile eagle into the air.