Politicommentary

     You probably think I have something trenchant and/or pithy to say about Mr. Trump's picks or Mr. Biden's pardons, but here's the thing: it's all sideshow.

     These things don't have anything to do with the day to day running of the country right now, and even the parts that could affect it in the future are only possibilities.  I could probably start a nice helmet fire about all or part of it, but what good would that do?

     Time enough for the Senate to show me how they're going to react.  Time enough to find out who's going to pardon whom and how that's going to work out.

     Right now, the House needs to start looking under the Federal sofa cushions for spare change before the current piggy bank goes dry.  They've got to get it done before Christmas, or they're going to be sending out cards to their constituents in the dark.  I'm pretty sure the Pentagon has a back-up plan before they have to start working by candlelight, and I'm hoping the over-the-horizon radars and earth stations for the DOD spy satellites have all got fat UPSs on standby.  But you'd never know to watch the news: it's all clowns and animal acts.

Brunch Again

     Today was Brunch With Siblings day, and I'm pleased to report they are both as sibilant as ever.  We went to Good Morning Mama's, which for my money has better coffee and better service than where we'd been going, and a more interesting menu -- but I'm biased in favor of a place that serves home made corned beef hash.

     On the way home, I kept hearing what I'm pretty sure were cranes, a high-pitched, fluting, musical call, and could not spot them  Finally saw them in multiple vees and strings high, high overhead, so far up they were little more than dots.  But their song carries for miles, a marvel of the late Fall.

Historical Analysis

     An outsider's look at U. S. politics through the lens of history, and why the parties you remember aren't the parties we have now.

     I'm not saying the article is a hundred percent right -- but it's food for thought.

     I hate living in interesting times.  Make the government boring again!

The Chair

     My nice wooden office chair is nearly five years old and something has gone wrong.  It has a seat angle/leaning resistance adjustment, but the seat has picked up a slight forward tilt that cannot be corrected.  I'm going to have to flip it over and see what can be done.

     Short term, I can move the flat and lock washers on the bolts holding the front of the seat to the metal tilt and swivel gadget to between the seat and that part.  Long-term, I hate to replace it, but I will if I have to.

     The "skate wheel" casters I put on it have proven their worth.  Larger and a little more resilient than a standard office-chair wheel, they have resisted getting jammed-up with cat hair and roll well.  My other office-type chair, a more typical metal one with a padded seat and back at the desk/dressing table in my bedroom has the same kind of casters, which work as well on the rug in that room as they do on the chair mat in the office.

     Update: It's a broken weld, one that holds the collar for the top of the adjustable pneumatic vertical support to the metal cradle that does the leaning pivot.  The support's a force-fit into the collar, so this is chair-ending damage.

No Room For Pie

     It was a good Thanksgiving dinner -- even though we had it for supper.  (I slept in.)

     We have a favorite main dish and side.  A five-pound turducken roll, with a little spicy sausage inside the chicken, surrounded by duck and enveloped in turkey.  I put it on a rack in an oval roasting pan over a slow fire in the covered grill, and once it was up to temperature, added big chunks of turnip and parsnip and about a cup of chicken bone broth.  I topped the turducken roll with a sliced, peeled orange and a couple of pickled piparra peppers, and eventually added carrots, celery and a red onion.

     I did other things for an hour and a half.

     That left plenty of time to cut up some baking potatoes into medium-sized pieces (unpeeled; YMMV) and stack them on paper toweling to dry while I fried up six slices of lightly peppered applewood-smoked bacon, producing about a quarter-cup of fat.  I started microwaving the potatoes in a big Pyrex bowl.  With the bacon draining, I added a quarter-cup of flour and kept stirring while it got darker and darker.  When I thought it was ready, I added about two cups of mushroom-chicken bone broth* and kept stirring.  It got a little thicker than I wanted, so I used up the remainder of the plain chicken bone broth and kept stirring.  When I was happy with the consistency, I snipped all the bacon into it.  Made with the broth, it's a dark-brown gravy, rich and smoky.  I'd kept zapping and stirring the potatoes; I went after them with a sharp knife, added some butter, used a knife a little more, then added milk and switched to large dinner fork.  This is more work than a masher or a mixer but I like the results.  It took an entire container of UHT milk, call it one cup, to get them the way I liked.

     The turducken was nicely done by then; I brought it in and stashed it in the oven while Tam and I rounded up the cats and set up tray tables.  (We've been watching, of all things, a somewhat-debunking documentary on the Stanford Prison Experiment that may show a bit more about human nature -- and "permission structures" -- than it purports to.  Either way, it leaves rather a lot to be thankful for.)

     Potatoes, meat, vegetables and gravy: there was no room for dessert.  But it sure was good!
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* No, I have no idea how that works with mushrooms, either.  They sell the stuff in boxes.  The smallest size is just under two cups.  The chicken-mushroom version is ideal for bacon gravy.

Surprise!

     It was a surprise: a late-morning text from my boss, apologizing for having messed up the schedule this holiday week, when cut-and-pasting a month or more in advance.  (Like all the rest of us, he's doing three or four jobs these days.)

     "SO DOES THAT MEAN I'M WORKING?"  The automated holiday-and-vacation scheduler had confirmed my time off request last week, which usually means a Responsible Party has looked at it and given it the nod.

     "NO, YOU'RE OFF TODAY.  IT JUST WASN'T ON THE SCHEDULE SPREADSHEET."

     There's some reason, connected to the fixes put in place after a widely popular hours-recording app was hacked a year or two ago and down for months, why the time-off scheduler and the spreadsheet that shows upcoming hours and assignments can't be allowed to communicate.  It means extra busywork for the managers, and a degree of ambiguity in whether you're getting holidays and vacations off or working them.

     They used to scribble all this on a whiteboard.  You couldn't check it online -- but if we went back to the whiteboard, all we'd need to do to add that feature would be a webcam.

Breakfast By Expiration Date

      It is worth the extra effort to make a three-egg omelet with sliced cherry tomatoes, chopped black olives -- and the nice Provelone cheese and two kinds of salami you bought two days ago and need to use up before it expires?

     You sure bet it is!  One of the best omelets I have made.

     Our corner market occasionally puts together "sandwich packs" pairing meat and cheese, and they've usually a good combination.  If it'll work on rye bread, it'll work in an omelet.

Thankful

     It's hard not to be bitter.  I'm stumbling into my Golden Years and the first-wave Boomers are busy screwing over the economy again.  They keep doing it.  They keep finding new ways to do it.

     There are things I want to do -- write, mess with old radios, woodworking projects, gardening, and so on -- but little time to do them.  I've got to keep on scuffling, keep on working for other people to bring in money while getting less and less meaningful human contact in the doing.

     Maybe that last is for the best.  Maybe it's better to be at arm's length from everyone, where their virtues usually shine more brightly than their flaws and the surfaces hint at depths that are rarely there.

     Maybe.  What is certain is that in terms of material goods, freedom from hunger, protection from the cold, the rain, the snow, brigands, bandits and brutes, I am better off than 99.9999% of the human race has ever been.  Wealth -- real wealth, three square meals a day, a warm bed, the ability to banish darkness at the flip of a switch and hear from people halfway across the world on a whim -- is not a zero-sum game: every year, more and more people have access to it.  Things would be even better if even more of them did, and faster; but we're getting there.  Progress is lumpy and uneven.  It continues nevertheless.

     So there's reason to be thankful.  I'm personally pessimistic at present, but zoom out and, well, it's been worse in the past and there's every reason to expect it will be better in the future.

     Short-term?  Maybe not so much.  Time will tell, as it always does.

We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.

Library Work

     This evening, I worked my way backwards from Gibson though Bujold and into Brunner (including Shockwave Rider, a proto-cyberpunk future that almost happened), leaving room for the Octavia Butler books I own but have not yet shelved.  I started out with about fifteen feet of added shelf space, saved back three and now I'm down to five feet available, shelving additional books as I go.

     Along the way, I rediscovered some lost gems: Mildred Clingerman and Rosel George Brown, talented writers of SF and fantasy a bit out of the usual line.  Neither was especially prolific, but what they wrote is worth reading.

It's Their Expressions That Bug Me

     The current Congressional* tempest in a chamberpot is beneath notice and I wasn't going to notice it, until a certain U. S. Representative from South Carolina started showing up on every blamed screen, along with occasional appearances from the current and likely future Speaker of the House.  And every time, they had the smug little smiles of grade-school children who have found a context in which they can say a naughty word and get away with it.

     That bothers me.  Okay, the House is the "Junior Chamber," but I never thought it was that junior.  I have suggested in the past that we put up Congressthings in same accommodations as the military slaps together for unmarried junior officers, to spare the poor dears the worry of keeping up with the Washington social scene (and maybe teach 'em a little humility, like that's possible).  Now I'm realizing they're going to need supervised bathroom breaks while in session, with the Sergeant-at-Arms sorting them out into groups who won't get into fights with one another.

     Or not.  See, there's a new Representative from Delaware, who looks enough like her peer from the Palmetto State that I can't consistently tell them apart: low-maintenance straight brown hair, squarish reading glasses, well-practiced smile, understated politician skirt-and-jacket outfits with flag pins in the lapels.  But the Delawarian has a biography with details in common with musician Wendy Carlos, and their overlap isn't playing a keyboard synthesizer.

     The incoming House has a lot to deal with; after the 2024 election, there were 219 Republicans to 213 Democrats, with three seats still counting.  Now three Republicans have stepped down and until their seats are filled and the remaining counts finished, it's 216 - 213.  The GOP will be in the minority if four members get stuck in a card game -- or traffic.  There's a lot of unfinished business and plenty of new business -- and instead, they're fussing about which washrooms Delaware's sole Representative will be allowed to use.

     That Representative hasn't joined in the fray.  She knows something that any tourist could figure out: the U. S. Capitol building is riddled with single-occupancy washrooms, the result of efforts to make the very old and much-remodeled building ADA-compliant with the least amount of bother.  They put them in the areas the public can tour, and they put them in the parts that are normally limited to Congresscreatures, staff and people on official business.  No one is going to perish for lack of access to a washroom -- nor are they going to fade away if they don't get maximal face time on the various news networks and websites, despite what some of the incumbents appear to believe.

     House districts are entitled to the Representative they elect.  The rest of us don't get a veto and, barring truly egregious miscounduct, that's that.   Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's New York district picked her; Marjorie Taylor Greene's Georgia district selected her.  Delaware has sent Sarah McBride.  In 1870, South Carolina sent Joseph Hayne Rainey to the House, and somehow, the planet did not lurch to a stop in its tracks.  I've searched, but I can't find any mention of which washroom they made him use, or if the Representative from Delaware at that time objected and staged a series of indignant, preening news conferences about it.

     I'd suggest that some House members ought to try growing up, but I suppose I should just accept that their districts chose to send politicians in need of maturing.  I sure hope their time in the junior chamber helps.
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* Originally typoed as "Congrossional," which is about right.

Oops

     Yesterday at work about did in my legs.

     It should have been no big deal.  I've done it dozens of times: we change all the replaceable light bulbs on the tower in late Fall, breathing on the dice to shade the odds of having to send a rigger up there in the worst of winter to relamp a dead beacon.  The steady-burning sidelights are almost optional.  Each level has three of them and we don't even have to report them if they fail.  A single one out can safely be left for better weather.  But the flashing beacons are a different thing.  They're the brightest lights on the tower, each one with a pair of 640 Watt light bulbs the size of a child's head.  You can lose one of a pair and it's still okay, but if both go out, they've got to be replaced as soon as it is practical.

     So the workers go up with a big bag of new bubs and work their way down.  It takes a few minutes at each level, working in the chill wind, opening the red glass covers on the small side lights, unlatching and hinging open the big beacons, hundreds of feet in the air, careful to not drop anything, swapping the new for the old.

     The tower has an elevator, but the elevator doesn't have any controls in the car.  It's barely got a door, just a scissors gate that pulls across the open side like an old-time baby barrier.  Down at the base of the tower, in the big box that houses the 1950s relays that control the hoist, there's a narrow panel that opens to reveal a disconnect switch and three big push buttons with molded-in labels: UP, DOWN, STOP.  The crew carries radios and I get one of my own.

     Under normal circumstances, once the initial long ride to the highest light is done, I clip the radio to my belt and go on about my other work.  When it's time to move, they call me and I doubletime outside to the controls.  "Ready to move?"
     "Down!"
     "Heading down," and I push the button.
     There's a reason for all that back and forth: there aren't any second chances.  Clearance is tight, with the ladder zipping past a couple of feet from the scissors gate.  Any bit of kit sticking out, a big clip, a loop of rope, can become lethal.

     This time, the crew had three radios.  Two were charged up and ready to go.  One had a bad battery, or maybe it hadn't been seated quite right in the charger overnight.  It worked okay sitting in the charger, but it had to be in the charger or it was inert.  I needed to be within earshot of it.  Outdoors.

     The tower crew layered up before they climbed: long johns, work pants, T-shirt, a heavy shirt over it, coveralls and short jackets, knit caps, gloves.  I was dressed for the site, where the inside temperature runs 60 to 65°F, and I had a winter coat, about mid-thigh length.  My work pants are pretty good, but I haven't had nice heavy ones since Carhartt redesigned their women's double-fronts with lighter denim.  My legs got very cold and I dealt with it by ignoring it.  I was pretty creaky by the time the relamping was done.

     I wasn't in much better shape at the end of the day.  I limped through the grocery picking up stuff for supper.  Pain in my knees woke me up a couple of times overnight.

     This morning I limped my way through a quick shower and snack ahead of the online writing critique group, and had a nice brunch (a cheese, sausage and piparra pepper omelet) between it and the Zoom-session main meeting of the writer's club.  Stood up from my chair after the business meeting and ahead of the month's speaker -- and just about didn't get vertical.  I used the break to take acetaminophen.

     For the speaker, it's cameras and microphones off.  I adjourned to my bed and listened from there.  Dozed off afterwards, woke up pinned down by cats, had supper (Tam ordered in), and have not moved a whole lot.  The damp, chilly weather hasn't helped any.

     Tomorrow is supposed to be nicer.  I'll work on some projects involving motion and see if that helps.  Today, it's OTC painkillers and rest.