Cut grass while the sun shines

There's cause for minor celebration here --- nearly all the grass got cut yesterday between the 11 a.m. shower and the 7 p.m. shower and well before the major 11:30 p.m. downpour. The neighbors were working, too --- so this quarter block can hold its head high going into a new week.

The latter woke me up, rain banging against the south side of the house.

As the weather map shows, more heavy rain is predicted for today --- but there's a square of blue on horizon for Tuesday and that would be good news for the historical society's "Peanut Day" open house that evening. Here's hoping.

Mowing the lawn this year has turned into a Sisyphean task --- roll that boulder up, then dodge as it roll back down. It'll be time to mow again by Friday.

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Another round of U.S. Supreme Court decisions will be announced today, but a ruling on same-sex marriage most likely won't be among them, or so the pundits say.

Consensus is, that will be the last ruling revealed during June --- those guys and gals in long black robes know how to play the drama card.

There's really no way of telling how the justices will rule, but consensus --- again consensus --- is that the court will extend marriage equality nationwide. We'll see.

Comments by Southern Baptist preacher Robert Jeffress (First Baptist, Dallas) attracted a little attention last week, and over the weekend --- he suggested that Christians in the United States are being treated now in the same way Jews were in Nazi Germany before the Holocaust.

Just a reminder of the rules for debate of contentious non-life-threatening issues --- he or she who tries to play the Holocaust card automatically loses.

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Also highly anticipated --- and definitely due out this week --- is Pope Francis's encyclical on stewardship of the earth and its resources, to be released Thursday.

"Laudato Si (Be Praised), on the Care of Our Common Home" is expected to suggest that environmentalism is a moral imperative for the world's 1.2 billion Catholics --- and by implication everyone else, to acknowledge by default if not explicitly the human role in climate change and to focus on inequalities in distribution of wealth and resources, too.

Good for him. 

I doubt the Pope would applaud a generous same-sex marriage endorsement by the U.S. Supreme Court, but you've got to give the guy credit. At least he's sane.