Friday, May 27, 2022
A Tale of Two Women
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Thursday Thirteen
Here are 13 facts about my locality, based on the 2020 Census.
Total Population - 34,747 (100%)
Population in Households - 34,460 (99.2%)
Population in Families - 29,603 (85.2%)
Population in Group Quarters - 287 ( 0.8%) (this includes nursing home facilities)
Population Density - 64
Diversity Index - 16 (different races and ethnic groups. The lower the number, the less diverse. We are not diverse.)
Total HU (Housing Units) - 15,534 (100%)
Owner Occupied HU - 11,771 (75.8%)
Renter Occupied HU - 2,011 (12.9%)
Vacant Housing Units - 1,752 (11.3%)
Median Home Value - $274,781
Average Home Value - $312,146
Housing Affordability Index - 152 (above 100 means increased affordability)
We do not have a lot of affordable housing here, although that may be improving with the addition of apartment complexes on the southern end. Appearances and actual data are not always the same. That housing affordability index number surprised me the most.
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
He Did Not Act Alone
He did not act alone, this shooter who, at last count, had taken 19 lives and wounded countless others during a massacre in an elementary school in Uvalde, TX yesterday.
Nor did the shooter who took 10 lives at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14.
And neither did the male (they are almost always male) who killed 13 people in Virginia Beach, VA on May 31, 2019, or man who killed 12 people on November 7, 2018, in Oakland, CA.
The man who killed 17 students in Parkland, FL, in 2018 did not act alone, nor did the man who killed 61 people in Las Vegas, NV on October 1, 2017. Neither did the fellow who killed 50 people in Orlando, FL in 2016, or the guy who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Or the man who killed 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007.
We all have blood on our hands because we sit back and offer "thoughts and prayers" as if that is going to stop this grotesque mindset that Americans have, this horrific, terrible thought that "owning my gun" is more important than the life of, well, anybody.
Our senators do nothing. This falls mostly on the Republican side, but the Democrats are proving so useless and spineless that I have come to the conclusion they are complicit, not merely complacent, in all of this, or else they'd find a work-around the stupid rules in the Senate and the House. Those are rules, not laws, and rules are meant to be broken from time to time.
Sometimes even laws need to be broken, and sometimes a perceived right is not a right. I am being inundated by opinion pieces telling me women do not have the right to have an abortion under the US Constitution, but everyone (especially men, apparently), has the right to carry a gun, even though when the US Constitution was written "bearing arms" did not mean carrying a gun. It meant being in the damn military. One can't pick and choose "rights" from that dusty document.
We have to be the most gruesome, gory, heartless, warlike bunch of people to ever live on this planet.
The blood running down the street belongs to all of us, because we accept this as the way of life in the USA. This doesn't happen in other countries. Only here. Anybody want to take a guess as to why that is?
I am all for gun reform. I am for background checks, for making people who own guns carry appropriate insurance, for taking them away from people who shouldn't have them. I am a gun owner - I live on a farm and occasionally they're necessary, when a coyote is killing a calf, or a rabid groundhog goes after a dog. My husband hunts. He pays a fee to get a license every year.
We both have had gun training. I treat guns with the utmost respect; they are locked up.
But I've blood on my hands, too. I haven't called my legislator every day demanding something be done. I've written a few letters from time to time, but it's not a constant drumbeat.
Why is it acceptable that young children have to have lock down drills in case of a massive shooting incident in this country? Why must we thrive on fear - not only of other countries, but of our own people? I do not believe any of this has to be because "it is what it is." Acceptance indicates lack of desire to change.
I do not accept this.
Isn't it time that we the people, the ones who are really supposed to run this government, stand up and say, no more?
Isn't it time we the people bring the country back to some semblance of sanity? Wasn't one million dead from Covid enough for two years?
My god, how much death do we need to prove our points? How many more elementary school children have to die to prove that certain segments of the population only care about youth when they're in a woman's uterus? Those elementary school children had heartbeats too.
Out, damn spot! Out I say! . . . What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?
Take back our power, people. Wash the blood from our hands, remove the idiots in office, find our footing, and regain our sense of society as a whole. We are all one. We are not islands unto ourselves. We're a society. We're supposed to look out for one another. We're supposed to be brothers and sisters.
It's way past time we act like it.
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Monday, May 23, 2022
Three Cheers!
Last week, I finished up my last bottle of Cheer Free & Gentle. I've used this detergent since before I married. My mother used it.
Yes, there's a note on the bottle reminding my husband not to use this detergent. |
But even before the pandemic, it had become hard to find.
After the pandemic, it was nigh impossible, unless I wanted to pay $30.00 for a 64 oz bottle on Amazon.
I did not.
So, I used it only on my personal intimate clothes, and squeezed about a year out of this bottle.
I tossed it into the recycling bin with much sorrow.
Then, on a whim, I checked for it again on Amazon. Still $30 a bottle. A comment, though, suggested it was now available at Walmart again.
I checked there and hit the jackpot!
I could get Cheer Free & Gentle for $8.08 for a 64 oz bottle! Yes!
It arrived over the weekend, and I am so pleased.
For my other clothes, I use All Free. I have been asked in the past why I don't simply use All Free for everything.
The answer?
Because I suspect I can use All Free on my intimates and not break out, but I know for certain I can use Cheer Free on them and not have any issues.
Hurray for Cheer Free!
Sunday, May 22, 2022
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, May 21, 2022
Saturday 9: River of No Return
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Thursday Thirteen
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
New(ish) Gnome
This firefighter gnome came to live with us years ago. Maybe 15 years ago or more, I don't remember. I don't know where I bought him or what I paid for him.
The gnome |
He was looking his age, though. All the color was gone from his hat, and his boots were all scraped up. Otherwise, he was in good shape.
I brought him inside and washed him off, scrubbing him with one of those smiling scrubby things, which took off even more paint.
I sat him aside, but over the last week, I've been repainting him.
Now he looks like this:
The gnome repainted! |
Side/rear shot of Mr. Firefighter Gnome |
Ta dah!
Now to find some clear coat paint to finish him off, and then he'll go back out into what used to be the rose garden, but which now is a rock garden.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Lady Cardinal
Monday, May 16, 2022
Lunar Eclipse
We had mostly cloud cover last night during the lunar eclipse, but I caught these shots between 11:50 p.m. and 12:05 a.m. when there was a small break in the clouds. I took 50 photos but most of them were slightly shaky. (I guess I am not steady at that hour.) Then there was nothing but clouds as far as I could see, and I went back to bed.
That last photo shows how small the moon looked during this eclipse. The last time I took photos of a lunar eclipse, the moon looked bigger. If you study the last photo closely, you can see a few stars and a faint tree line at the bottom, but you have to look hard to make out those details.
I was using a Nikon Coolpix B700 camera to take these photos.
Sunday, May 15, 2022
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, May 14, 2022
Saturday 9: Give A Little Love
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Thursday Thirteen #755
Alexa tells me today is "limerick" day. So without further ado -
(I didn't write these.)
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
The Madness of Crowds
This is going to be mixed up, because I have a lot of mixing up in my head at the moment. I just finished listening to the audio version of The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny,* and this, along with the (very loud and frustrating) conversation on Roe v Wade has my head spinning.
So spoilers for the Louise Penny book - you've been warned. As for the rest, well, I like to use the word "fuck" a lot so you've been warned there, too.
In the book, Penny deals with life post-pandemic, but she takes on multiple heady topics, including, kind of, abortion.
The story is about a statistician who has determined that because of the decline in resources, statistics indicate that it should be mandatory to kill off the elderly at a certain age, and to kill off disabled people, including children. Only the healthy (whatever that is) should be allowed to live.
The inspector is asked to protect the statistician when she has a talk near his home, someone tries to shoot her, someone else is murdered, he has to find the murderer, blah blah.
The underlining themes of this book are troubling and troublesome. We had people in the United States saying that grandmas should take one for the team and just die of Covid. These were Republican members of various state legislatures, if I remember correctly. I find the idea morally reprehensible, although I think if Grandma knows she has uncurable cancer and wants to take an early out, she should have the right to do that. But it shouldn't be forced on her.
This story is about the government forcing early death. That's the statistician's premise.
It gets mixed up even more because the inspector's second in command, Jean-Guy, has, in the previous book All the Devils Are Here, had a second child, one born with Down's Syndrome.
The reader (or listener, in my case), sees Jean-Guy's angst over his child in this latest book. At one point he calls her a burden and he is totally floored by his own words. He can't believe he called his daughter that. He loves his daughter - but.
There is talk about why Jean-Guy and Annie didn't abort early on when they learned the child had Down's Syndrome. He said he and his wife discussed it but decided against it. But, he also admits they weren't prepared for what raising a disabled child means. He questions the decision, but ultimately decides they made the choice appropriate for them, and he loves his daughter (without the "but"). He finds the statistician abhorrent because she would have his child "dismissed" from life.
So here we are with a fictional story that is hitting hard emotionally on all sorts of topics, from ridding the world of the elderly to disabled children and quality of life, and abortion. When is killing good? When is it bad? What constitutes a legitimate killing? Is a fetus a person?
And all around me I see fucking morons who have no idea what they're talking about trying to lay claim to the authority of women's bodies. Until a fetus is out of its mother's body, it's a parasite. It can't exist without the womb.
This is a decision that's nobody's business but the woman's and possibly the man she is involved with, but I have noticed men have simply taken three steps backwards and are out of this conversation, except for the big high-powered white assholes who are making the decisions for the little women anyway.
Over on Facebook, I'm involved in a discussion where two people who were unwanted wish they'd never been born, and being unwanted meant that they had severely crappy childhoods (sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, etc.), another who was adopted who thinks we're all saying she shouldn't have been born, when no one is saying that at all, another who survived an ectopic pregnancy thanks to Roe v Wade (I wrote about a similar situation for myself last week), and a lawyer who's chimed in about bodily autonomy and how forcing a woman into pregnancy is similar to slavery.
This is a group of well-educated highly informed women discussing a very emotional and highly complex topic. We are doing it without name-calling, without yelling, without calling one another names, or being overly upset (except for the adoptee, although I think she understands that we're all glad her mother chose to have her and give her up. We're glad she had that choice.).
And the questions we're really asking are these: if Roe v Wade is abolished, who is going to take care of all of these unwanted children? Who is going to see that the mothers receive appropriate prenatal care? Are we going to revive orphanages? Are we going to throw more money at a foster care system that doesn't work? What about the children with disabilities? Who is going to care for them? The Republicans already are working to undo all the social networks we have in place to keep people from dying of starvation. What are they going to do for these children they want to force women to have?
Are we going to look at the racism that is really behind this? If one traces the issues of abortion and current discussion back to its beginnings, we find the KKK and white nationalism and racism behind it. Nobody cares if there are black babies being aborted. It's the white women they're after here, and everyone knows that. It really is The Handmaid's Tale.
The poor and minorities are going to be the ones suffering because some powerful white male and his wife want to adopt a sweet little white kid and they can't get one from Ukraine at the moment, because, you know, fucking fascists are over there bombing the place while the fucking fascists here in the US are undermining the Constitution at every turn and have made a mockery out of what once was a legitimate government. (Thanks a lot, GQP.)
In the meantime, we have these anti-human fuckers who really wouldn't care if certain people already living died. They want a war and they want blood. They're ready to shoot me because they think I'm a Democrat (I'm not, really, I'm what a Republican used to be, a very long time ago). They're ready to shoot me because I couldn't have children. They'll shoot me because I'm fat. They'll shoot me because I'm old. They'll shoot me because I used to be a journalist. They'll shoot me because they can because we're too fucking stupid to understand what the Second Amendment of the Constitution really says, because the fucking Supreme Court conveniently overlooked the "well-armed militia" part of the amendment.
I have a niece and a great-niece. Roe v Wade doesn't affect me personally, but it affects young people I care about. I don't want my niece to have to have a child if she should become pregnant before she's ready to raise that baby. I don't want my tiny little great-niece growing up thinking she is a second-class citizen simply because she is a girl. I want her to grow up thinking she's Wonder Woman and she can do whatever the hell she wants with her life (within reason, of course). If she wants to wait until she's 40 years old to have her first child because she wants to build up a law career and be a partner in a law firm, then I want her to be able to do that. I sure don't want her to have to have a child because some asshole convinces her to have sex when she's 14.
Mostly I want people to stop and think, use logic, and take emotions out of the law. Law is about thinking and rationality. Rational people believe murdering the elderly or disabled children is wrong. That isn't a liberal point of view (as someone said in the reviews of Penny's book on Amazon). That's a humanistic point of view. That's a moral point of view.
And as for Roe v Wade, we're not gods, and if women have to give up the right to abortion and their bodily autonomy, then I want a chastity belt slapped around the pelvis of every man on this dying, decaying, morally bankrupt planet, and the keys left on the wall of some female judge who lives 500 miles away. Because without that damn penis, we wouldn't be having this discussion. That's where the problem lies, so let's fix the problem that way, instead of placing it all on the woman.
*Also, I did not like this book as well as the others in the Three Pines series.*
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Traitors Who Profit
Or maybe I should be grateful to Steve Schmidt, a former Republican and founder of the Lincoln Project, for just now pointing out links between the McCain campaign and Russia.
The threads weave in and out, a tapestry of lies, deceit, deception, and corruption. An afghan throw knitted so deep and so tightly that it would smother the flames of Hell, if I believed in Hell.
But I am not grateful. The people who need to read these words, the people who need to see these connections, will either (a) not read them, or (b) find them entirely appropriate.
And these writers are profiting off of words that should have been said long ago.
Here's a list of some of the books:
Bob Woodward’s Fear
Katy Tur’s Unbelievable
Sinking in the Swamp, by reporters Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng
Other books by aides like Cliff Sims, Sean Spicer, and John Bolton
Nightmare Scenario, by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta
The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender published Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, which includes information that the former guy wanted the military to “beat the f***” out of Americans protesting last summer for racial justice, and to “crack their skulls.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, from Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. They also wrote A Very Stable Genius.
Michael Wolff authored Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency. He also wrote Fire and Fury, which the former guy tried to suppress. He'd also written Siege: Trump Under Fire in 2019.
Then there's Jonathan Karl’s Betrayal, a tell-all about the final weeks of the Trump presidency.
And more.
The thing is, while much of this information was reported in tiny little stories in newspapers that no one reads anymore, the public missed it. This information was there and available even as the nation was being flushed down the proverbial toilet.
No one paid attention.
And frankly, it is frustrating to the nth degree that these threads and weaves were not made more public.
And it is even more frustrating that the public is still not paying attention, is still running rampage under some fuming crowd sickness, a fugue state that has gripped at least a third of the nation and turned them into cult zombies who cannot think for themselves. They do not realize that not only are they jeopardizing their own futures, but they are also totally demolishing any hope their children might have had of living a decent and tolerable life.
I'm not talking about the Republican Party. The Republican Party that I knew - the one my father and my brother still think they belong to as businessmen - does not exist any longer. It has been taken over by a rabid wave of fascist evangelical lunatics who are, at the least, the equivalent of an American Taliban. A group of people who think things are fine so long as what one does is something they agree with. And if you're different, or don't agree with them, then you become other, as if it were you (the Democrat, the LBGQT, the teacher, the firefighter, the police officer, the black person, the Native American, whoever, really) who had turned into some frothing werewolf, when the reality is, they are the ones living now in an alternate world, a world that doesn't recognize reality and doesn't know it when it hits them upside the head with a voting machine.
While so many are busy trying to redo the 2020 election - STILL - I want someone to investigate the 2016 election.
Because I think that one was the one that was rigged. That one was the one that gave us Putin's puppet, and let the hounds of hell loose, leaving the rest of us to sit and try to furiously crochet our way out of the fires of hell on earth.
And as for these assholes who are profiting off of knowledge that should have been shouted from rooftops and made public years ago, even a decade ago, if not longer, shame on you. You are no American.
You're a fucking traitor.
Sunday, May 08, 2022
Sunday Stealing
1. Do you like your handwriting?
A. Oh no. My handwriting is horrible. I am the only person who can read it, and sometimes even I can't read it. My mother had beautiful handwriting. Mine is small and cramped.
2. Do you like roller coasters?
A. Not anymore. I didn't mind them when I was younger, but after I turned 30 all of those rides made my body ache.
3. Do you like scary movies?
A. Not really.
4. Do you like shopping?
A. I used to, but it has become more chore than joy since the pandemic.
5. Do you like to talk on the phone?
A. Yes. I prefer that to texting. Texting has its place, but it doesn't replace hearing the sound of a loved one's voice.
6. Do you sleep with the lights on or off?
A. Off, but we have motion lights that turn on if one of us rises in the night.
7. Do you use headphones or earphones?
A. I do not use either. They bother my ears.
8. Do you have tattoos? Do you want any?
A. I have no tattoos, nor do I want any.
9. Do you wear glasses?
A. Yes.
10. What is your strangest talent?
A. I can roll my tongue.
11. Have you ever been in the hospital?
A. Many times.
12. What color mostly dominates your wardrobe?
A. Blue.
13. What’s your most expensive piece of clothing?
A. Probably my coat.
14. Have you ever had braces?
A. I had braces when I was a tween.
15. Have you ever been on TV?
A. I have, yes.
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.