Saturday, September 11, 2021
Remembering September 11
Saturday 9: Jose Cuervo
Friday, September 10, 2021
Thursday, September 09, 2021
Thursday Thirteen
Headlines today from my Bing newsfeed
1. Disgraceful: Former President Trump's niece reacts to what he's doing (why will this man not go away?
2. House panels starts writing $3.5 trillion social policy and climate bill
3. Hurricane Ida death toll jumps to 82
4. The Taliban is bringing back its feared ministry of 'vice' and 'virtue'
5. White House signals new Covid-19 measures for unvaccinated Americans
6. Wheel of Fortune announces changes
7. Feeling overwhelmed? Here's one thing that can help.
8. 70-Year-Old Woman Dies at Hospital Where Two-Thirds of Staff Left
9. There's a Correct Way to Use a Can Opener, and You Probably Don't Know It.
10. Photos from North Korea suggest Kim Jong Un's weight loss has continued
11. Golf World Reacts to Significant Tiger Woods News
12. Fox News host awkwardly spoils pregnancy announcement for her co-host
13. Taco Bell wants you to send back your used sauce packets so it can reuse them
And what struck me about all of these, other than the fact that I cannot get this newsfeed to give me stories I really want to read? The difference in how some headlines use all capitals for major words and others don't. That's what I got out of this.
Wednesday, September 08, 2021
Tuesday, September 07, 2021
Sturgeon Moon
Here I am on the night of the new moon, when darkness reigns and the starlight is all that lights the evening, posting a picture of the August Sturgeon Moon. I was trying to make it look like it was sitting atop the trees, but I didn't quite succeed in that. Close, I guess.
My mood matches the coming deep quiet of the long dark sigh that new moons bring. I have things I want to write, things I want to say, opinions I want to express, stories I wish to tell - and I keep my mouth shut. I do not respond to the things that disturb me on social media, I do not call people I want to talk to, I say nothing to upset the air, I try not to breathe, even, so that my breath will not disturb the path of some butterfly. It is as if I am full of fury and frustration, and yet I remain as silent as a thimble pushing a needle into a garment. Hush, my mind says. Speak not.
But here is my place to speak. This is my blog, the place I do, on occasion, allow myself voice. Sometimes it is a little voice . . . most times it is a little voice. Occasionally I will let loose with a very loud Fuck You, because that sums up all of the frustration and pain, in an odd sort of way. Just fuck you, fuck myself. Fuck it. That's such a great word, fuck. It sums up everything in one syllable.
The list of topics is long. I am angry that the abortion issue remains an issue. It has been an issue my entire life - literally since before I was born. When I was born, abortions were not legal. My mother told me (frequently) that she tried to abort me but backed out at the last minute. I don't know if this is true or simply words she said to hurt me, because she was more than capable of that. My mother should not have been a mother. Some women should not be mothers and mine was one of them. Maternal love is a myth we foist upon women simply to make them feel guilty when they don't want their children. It doesn't exist in every female. Maybe it doesn't exist at all.
When I was in high school, abortion also was an issue (late 1970s early 1980s). I remember feeling that I was a walking poster child for why abortion should be legal. I felt unwanted, always, and mostly unloved. I suffered terribly from depression that went overlooked and unchecked. I was moody and a troublemaker who made straight As. No one thought to address my mental health except for me and a few of my teachers, who sent me to see the school psychologist, which helped until my parents found out and put a stop to that.
That is not say that there weren't good times or that my parents didn't love me - I have come to terms with the fact that they did the best they could with the people that they were. They were barely adults themselves, after all. My mother was 18 when I was born. She was only 38 years old when I married. Some women are just starting families then. It would never have occurred to my father that there were better ways of raising children, or that his offspring might have been better off not being around their mother. He was busy being a businessman, making his money, and people didn't think that way then.
This all came to mind this morning while I was reading the comments on the abortion issue and the new vigilante laws in place in Texas that allow for bounties on the parties who assist a woman in obtaining an abortion. One woman noted that her mother had wanted to abort her, and she wished she had been successful. Many other women expressed astonishment: do you mean you wish you'd never been born? And I knew that yes, that was exactly what she meant. She wished she'd never been born. The gods know I have wished it myself often enough.
Sometimes I take that idea out and examine it, that ol' It's a Wonderful Life thing. Haven't I made positive impacts somewhere? Doesn't someone have a better life because I have existed? Generally speaking, no. I cost my husband his chance to be a father - his choice, I know, he could have divorced me and remarried but he loves me - and while I can think of good impacts some of my articles made - thousands of dollars raised for Angel Trees, funds pouring in for someone with some disease, because I was really good at writing those heartfelt articles that didn't actually sound like pleas for money but were - I think too that had I not written those stories, someone else would have. I helped save a few historical landmarks. I helped keep the local cement plant from burning tires back in the early 1990s. Everything I have done, someone else could have or would have done, maybe even better than I did. In the grand scheme of things, my existence is about as significant as that of an ant with a broken leg.
Another topic that frustrates me is the ongoing battle of masks and vaccines. As someone who has spent her entire life avoiding things to try to stay healthy, this makes me want to grab people who are unmasked in the stores and shake the life out of them. Long ago, it was cigarette smoke. I'm allergic to cigarette smoke. My grandfather smoked and I was always sick after visiting my grandparents. I'm also allergic to milk. Foods I can avoid, but I can't avoid the thin curl of smoke from the glowing end of a Marlboro.
Nor can I avoid the toxic wastes to my west that spewing out of the cement plant, which is my county's number one polluter, or the toxic wastes to my east that tumble from a truck manufacturing plant, the second largest polluter. I am caught in between them, living on a farm where chemicals are used constantly, Round Up© and other herbicides that settle in the body and transform DNA and does who knows what else to a person's internal chemicals.
So I spent my entire life avoiding cigarette smoke, which meant I didn't go to most restaurants, because they allowed smoking (or had a smoking area, which was always a joke - those vents to nowhere did nothing), and I sat in my car waiting for people to stop smoking in front of doors. I held my breath in mad dashes to my car if I had to wade through a cloud of cigarette smoke because I would be late returning to work if I didn't. I took (and still take) lots of showers to wash off the smoke smell. I didn't wear a mask because no one ever suggested it and I never thought of it. It's not our culture. I would have worn an astronaut suit if it would have kept me from being sick four months out of every year. I was sick so often I couldn't hold a job. I used to miss 35 days of school every year. Who does that and still makes As? Me.
Finally, back in the early 2000s Virginia wised up and implemented no smoking laws in restaurants. I could eat out without having a sinus infection afterwards! It was literally a breath of fresh air. A single law changed my life. It didn't help with other things - the smells of perfume that give me migraines, the colognes that send me into sneezing fits, the off-gassing of various carpets that ultimately make me ill. But it helped that I could go somewhere to eat without it being an anxiety-ridden event.
And now we're back to not being able to go places because people are assholes. They insist upon their right to make other people sick. These are stupid people, and if you're one of them and you're still reading this blog, I'm sorry, but I think you're an idiot if you haven't received the vaccine and/or you won't wear a mask. (You may have a medical reason not to take the vaccine, but anyone can wear a mask, I have asthma and I wear a mask, I know people on oxygen tanks who wear masks, so there really is no excuse, it doesn't cut your airflow or do anything dangerous like the dummies try to say on youtube or FAUX or wherever this shit fucking comes from. You just don't like it, is all. Grow up.)
These very same people think it's horrific that we left 100 Americans in Afghanistan, but they don't care that 650,000 Americans have died of Covid or that they might kill their own grandma if they won't wear a surgical mask. What kind of lopsided logic is that? Don't these people realize how hypocritical they sound? Why is one ok and not the other?
So yes, I am pro-choice. I would not have had an abortion myself unless the child was going to kill me and not live. If I were to die but the child were to live, that would have been a decent trade-off, I guess. But in any event, it's a woman's choice and not something the government should have any say in. It's certainly none of my business what you or you or you or anyone else does. I try hard to mind my own business, thank you.
I am pro-vaccine and pro-mask. I'm also pro stay-the-fuck-out-of-other-nations' business, cut the army in half, and spend the dollars on the children that have been forced to be born who could use a hand up instead of another kick in the ass.
This is what life is like on the dark side of the moon. I'm pretty sure no one wants to join me here. That's why I worship it when it is full and bright.
Monday, September 06, 2021
Sunday, September 05, 2021
Sunday Stealing
I encourage you to visit other participants in Sunday Stealing posts and leave a comment. Cheers to all us thieves who love memes, however we come by them.
Saturday, September 04, 2021
A Hard Day's Night
Friday, September 03, 2021
Night Moves
Venus above the tree line. |
No idea how I ended up with these straight lines, but they're pretty cool. |
A 15-minute star trail capture, aimed at the Milky Way. |
The Big Dipper |
Me playing around with lighting. If you look closely you will see the Big Dipper above the green space. I was shining a flashlight on a tree just to see what would happen. I think it's neat. |
Thursday, September 02, 2021
Thursday Thirteen
1. No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body. ~ Margaret Sanger
2. Seventy-seven percent of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant. ~ Planned Parenthood advertisement
3. The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg
4. If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. ~ Florynce Kennedy
5. It’s real easy to say you’re 100% against abortion when you’ll never have to make that decision. ~ Anonymous
6. Decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions. Or, they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all-out assault on women’s health, pushing bills to limit access to vital services, we had to ask: Why is the GOP trying to send women back . . . to the back alley? ~ Lisa Edelstein
7. Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion. ~ Ayelet Waldman
8. Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family. ~ Peter Kreeft
9. You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion. ~ Hillary Clinton
10. If we lived in a culture that valued women’s autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot. ~ Christiane Northrup
11. My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive. ~ Camille Paglia
12. The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do. ~ Howard Dean
13. What is this ban on abortion—it is a survival of the veiled face, of the barred window and the locked door, burning, branding, mutilation, stoning, of all the grip of ownership and superstition come down on woman, thousands of years ago. ~ Stella Brown
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
August 31 Happiness Challenge
Monday, August 30, 2021
August 30 Happiness Challenge
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Sunday Stealing
I encourage you to visit other participants in Sunday Stealing posts and leave a comment. Cheers to all us thieves who love memes, however we come by them.
Saturday, August 28, 2021
So I Had This Dream
Saturday 9: Friends in Low Places
Unfamiliar with this week's song? Hear it here.
1) In this song, Garth Brooks tells us he wore boots to a black-tie affair. When did you most recently get dressed up? What did you wear?
5) Before he sang about having friends in low places, Garth hung around in some. When he was as a struggling performer, he supported himself as a bouncer. What's the most physically taxing job you've ever had?
7) Garth and singer Trisha Yearwood have been happily married for 15 years now. Trisha says that as much as she loves her husband, his whistling drives her crazy. Come clean: what's your most annoying habit?
8) In 1990, when this song was a hit, Soviet President Gorbachev traveled first to Ottawa to meet Prime Minister Mulroney and then to Washington DC to meet President Bush. Do you have any travel plans? We want to hear about them, even if you aren't meeting any politicians or heads of state.
9) Random question: Your dear friend spends weeks planning a party. After just 30 minutes, you find yourself having a terrible time. Would you leave at the earliest (polite) opportunity? Or would you stay till the bitter end out of loyalty?
Friday, August 27, 2021
August 27 Happiness Challenge
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Thursday Thirteen #720
1. I consider myself fortunate that I've had no immediate family members pass away from the corona virus. I've had distant relations and friends die from it, though. It has not missed me. Globally, 3.9 million people have died from this "hoax" of a virus. Over 629,000 of those were in the United States. It is no hoax.
2. The thing I am writing about is first world inconvenience, to be sure. I realize things are worse in many other countries. I am writing from a place of privilege. I know that.
3. Of the many things I worried about having a shortage of, underwear was not one of them. Yet here I am having underwear issues.
4. I wear my underdrawers, as my husband calls them, until they need to be replaced. As in, there is no more cloth around the elastic, they barely stay up, and they wouldn't even make a good dust rag. I hadn't bought any new ones in several years. Of course I need some now.
5. I'm on my third attempt to purchase underwear that actually fits. Apparently, Hanes and Fruit of the Loom both have changed their manufacturers from those in China to industries in Guatemala. (Why they couldn't have brought those jobs to the USA is beyond me, but I don't own the corporations.)
6. The new underwear are smaller. Flimsier. They are cut differently in the legs.
7. They also cost double what they did pre-pandemic. If the reason for the manufacturing change was to keep from paying the tariffs the former guy imposed on China to keep prices low, well that didn't work.
8. I do not have a small butt. I am a big girl. I'm fat. I know this. But in years past, buying underwear has not been a problem.
9. First I bought the size I had been wearing in the Fruit of the Loom Fit for Me brand. Too small now. Apparently butt sizes are different in other countries.
10. Then I bought the size the chart said to purchase in the JMS Hanes brand. Too big. One pair was smaller than the others - what was up with that? Why didn't they fit? Was the chart wrong? Did I misread it? Who knows?
11. Today I ordered a larger size of the Fit for Me because they seem to be better made than the JMS, although from the comments online they are certainly not the quality we the consumer had become used to and expected from these companies.
12. I know in the grand scheme of thing that having your underwear fit is a non-thing. It pales in comparison to most of the ills of the world.
13. But damn, it's been a burr up my butt for four months now!