Abstract Thursday : : Sunflower

We never know just what kind of sunflowers are going to bloom, or where, as the seeds get carried far and wide by the birds. But the row of them by the back fence are particularly pretty and well proportioned, so I decided to use one of them for the abstract challenge with the intriguing theme "eye twister". *

The following story is a bit, um, indelicate, but the irony of it appeals to me, so I will try to tell it as discreetly as possible. I took Ozzie for a walk this morning and picked up the newspaper at the bottom of our driveway. Not wanting to trudge back up the driveway with it, nor to make another trip down to get it after our walk, I stuck it in the back waistband of my jeans.

By the time we had stopped for Ozzie to sniff every rock, tree and hydrant in a two mile radius, I had forgotten all about the newspaper. He probably would have peed all over it if it had still been in the driveway, but I saved him the trouble. It fell into the loo while I was relieving myself of my first cup of coffee, and the inevitable happened. It seemed a fairly suitable comment on today's current events.

The Trump administration diverted $169 million dollars from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency which provides assistance to victims of natural disasters) to ICE (the controversial immigration service which is busy deporting and/or detaining people trying to escape persecution and war.) The timing of this announcement seemed particularly bad as a huge hurricane bears down on the SE coast of the US and thousands are fleeing.

Then Trump himself tweeted that the independent report, which set the number of people killed when hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico last year at 3,000 was "fake news" published by the Democrats "to make me look bad"... Many people are still without power almost a year later because the FEMA response was so mismanaged. Apparently he didn't notice that that makes him look bad. More likely, he doesn't care....

It was a little difficult to explain to OilMan why the newspaper was not available to him to check the sports pages. 

*See the whole sunflower in the extra