Who Else Doesn't Want To Go?

     A slightly-overdue visit to the doctor for my regular physical is coming up tomorrow.  I'm not looking forward to it.  At my age, about the best you can expect to hear is that you're not declining as quickly as most people your age.

     To make matters worse, I have "white coat blood pressure:" my blood pressure is always higher than usual at the doctor's office.  None of them follow the correct procedure -- you're supposed to have been sitting quietly for five minutes first -- and that doesn't help.  Then there's the way the thresholds for hypertension and pre-hypertension keep getting lower and lower.  So I'll be doing my best to think soothing thoughts.

     Still -- I just don't see much reason in seeing a doctor unless I'm sick or injured.  Aging isn't a disease; it's a natural (if unwelcome) process.  Getting my sinuses cleared out last year?  Great use of doctorin'.  Being hectored about my blood pressure and two or three Reeses Peanut Butter Cups per workday, not so much.  They've never been able to do a darned thing about my migraines, after all, and the list of foods that are bad for you vs. good for you changes almost monthly.  I'll smile, be polite, get through it and keep my own council.

Well, I'm Not Seeing Any Wolverines

     I drink a glass of cranberry juice with my breakfast nearly every morning.  The reason why I started doing so is probably nonsense; to get the effect claimed, it would take a lot more than just one glass.  Still, it's tasty and has plenty of vitamins and besides, it keeps the wolverines away.

     What, you don't believe me?  When was the last time you heard of any wild wolverines around here outside of a zoo? 

Getting Ready For A Class

     It's a writing class.  It may be a challenge, as it meets weekly for five weeks and there are word-count goals.

     Writing fiction is fun when I'm in the mood; if I can get the bones of a story on the page before the feeling fades, it stands a good chance of getting finished.  Longer-form stuff is difficult; I get bogged down in fiddling with small stuff.

     "Prisoner Of War," has been in the works for a few years now.  Set in the early 1960s as the war pitting the United States (and NATO) against the loosely-organized forces of the Federation of Concerned Spacemen ("Far-Edgers") heats up, it covers some of the story of the discovery and claiming of Smitty's World, as well as a little of the life of applied-science whiz (and Steam Amish runaway) Pertaineth Apperson.*  And that's all tangential to the narrative, about a USSF reconnaissance crew who encounter...  Well, no point in giving the whole thing away.  Printed out about 4700 words last night and realized I have at least that many to go. Also that the outline needs more plot-twists.
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* Pert Apperson is over six feet tall, slender, a fair shot, uncommonly gifted at mathematics and a bit impatient with fools; she figures she knows what's best for you better than you do.  She's slightly based on one of my aunts, with a backstory based on another ancestor.

I'm Busy

     Trying to sort out the kitchen and get some laundry done.  Tam and I are both space-fillers, and horizontal surfaces do not remain clear for long.  This gets to be a problem.

Where's The James Bond Theme Music?

     There's supposed to be James Bond theme music and a splashy gun-barrel photomontage when a shaven-headed billionaire with his own space program tangles with a shady tabloid publisher who has possible ties to bloody petrodollar moguls, dammit.  And where's Bond?  I've been watching those movies for years now and even this early in the film, he's supposed to be right in the thick of the action.

     --Of course, one side was supposed to be quite visibly Simon-pure and true (not to mention hidebound), and as for the phrase, "below-the-waist-selfie," one can hardly imagine something more at odds with the straightforward bedroom athletics of 007.  It's starting to sound more like Harry Palmer than Ian Fleming's man of action and intrigue, only with less panache.

     There's probably not even going to be a secret base or inexplicably explosive computers, either.

Cooking

     I made kielbasa and cabbage the other day.  It was a good example of how I cook.  Along about lunchtime (peanut butter crackers and a cup of coffee), I was pondering what to make for dinner.  Sausage and cabbage sounded good -- it was rainy and chilly outside and its pretty much "comfort food."

     It had been a long time since I made the stuff, or the related noodle dish.  Looking up a few recipes on my Kindle gave me a better feel for the proportions and what else.  Most versions included onions and garlic, along with something to give it a little heat, typically paprika plus red-pepper flakes of the sort often provided for pizza.

     That gave me things to look for at the market.  Stopped there on my way home after work, thinking I might use a hot Fresno or cherry pepper.  Alas, they were out of Fresnos (and Serranos) and the cherry peppers didn't appeal, so I bought mild Poblano peppers instead.  We had red onions at home and the store had nice green cabbage and butcher-counter kielbasa.

     At home, I cut up and browned the sausage with a little black pepper for luck and a strip of bacon (included in several versions of the dish) to add more smokiness (and grease).  Cooked it, fished it out, and started cut up onions and a little garlic powder and paprika in the same big pan; cut up about half the head of cabbage and added it (with a little paprika) once the onions were underway.  Poblano got the same treatment once the cabbage was starting to get soft, along with more paprika, chipotle powder and black pepper.  Drained it (there's rather a lot of grease), added the meat back in, and warmed the whole dish together.

     Various versions cook the veggies anything from crisp-tender to mushy-soft.  This was stir-fried and darned good.  It fed two with enough left over for the next day.  The leftovers were a bit more conventional, with the cabbage good and soft.  It had a little bite, not too much, and could have been made more so with hot sauce to taste.

     It wasn't exactly any of the recipes I looked at.  I try to get a feel for the basic ingredients, cooking process and desired end result.  This was a visually appealing dish; the onion kept a bit of violet-red color and the dark-green Poblano and browned sausage made a nice contrast against the pale-green cabbage.  Prep and cooking overlapped, probably forty-five minutes from start to finish.

State Of The Union

     Last time I checked, the Second War Between The States had not started, so we're good.

     There was a speech last night.  I watched some of it.  It's mostly ritual -- a nod to current events, a nod to history, and a lot of pushing the President's agenda.  If you like him, you liked it.  If you don't like him, you didn't.

     There's not usually any tea-leaf reading to be done over a State of the Union speech and this one was especially that way.  We had all three branches of the Federal government in one room and they all got home okay afterward -- and that, in the broad sweep of things, really is an accomplishment.  A low bar?  Sure it is.  The Fed.gov is supposed to be a plowhorse, not a hedge-jumper.

Comment Unnecessary

     The shutdown-delayed  State of the Union address to Congress will be tonight, and TV network news tells me the theme will be "unity."  It think we can count on Congresspeople to be looking as if they are sucking lemons even more than usual.

     There's no requirement that the State of the Union be given live to a joint session of Congress with TV cameras, handshakes, fake smiles and mugging for the cameras; after Washington, most Presents just wrote it and sent the report up Capitol Hill for Congress to read.  Odious President Woodrow Wilson is the guy who changed that, turning it into an opportunity to promote his agenda.  So that's another bad thing you can blame him for.


     Meanwhile (and speaking of leaders with a high opinion of themselves) in Venezuela, the socialist government ran out of people to loot and shiny lies awhile back; now they have dueling Executives (with the incumbent warning of civil war and the challenging interim President scoffing at the notion, perhaps because he knows anyone with the price of a brickbat has already left the country or forted up as much as possible).  Yes, here it is running in real-time, an example of why top-down economic planning is a wretched idea, even in a country that started out with what certainly looked like legitimate beefs about exploitation by foreign enterprises and had plenty of natural resources.  I hope they can sort things out with a minimum of bloodshed and hunger; they've had an excess of both already.  Attempting any deep analysis in advance of the outcome of developing events is worse than futile; first-world countries are sending food and medicine and historians can pick over the meaning of it later.

Prohibitionists Gonna Prohibit

     So, recreational marijuana is increasingly legal at the state level,* Sunday liquor sales have come to Indiana, and in lovely, tropical Hawaii....

     In Hawaii, they're looking to ban cigarettes in a manner that would make the Volstead Act look like a polite suggestion: the minimum purchase age would rise to 30 next year, 50 in 2022 and by 2024, no one, no matter how old, would be allowed to purchase cigarettes.  Legally, that is, and what possible chance is there that a black market would arise for a prohibited product of that nature, especially one readily available elsewhere?

     Generations of bootleggers and drug dealers are laughing.

     The preamble to the bill states, “The cigarette is considered the deadliest artifact in human history,” though without telling reader by whom.  The simple club, edged weapons and nuclear weapons were unavailable for comment.

     Cigarettes will shorten your life.  They're not really much fun.  But an outright ban is not the best way to be rid of them.  The bill in Hawaii hasn't got much chance of becoming law -- and even lower chances of succeeding if it does.
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* There are only three (3) states where pot is entirely illegal; the remainder range from closely-controlled medical-use programs to complete legality -- at the state level.  The Feds are not impressed, but so far have been unwilling to press the issue.

Politics Feels Broken (or Pretty Noids All In A Row)

     Politics feels broken these days, at least it does to me.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't  -- but it feels that way.

     Politicians casually assert dire and ill-supported calumnies about one another as fact.  Parties and voters are drifting apart, from Republican never-Trumpers to the recent poll* that says fifty-four percent of Democrats believe their party is leaning too far to the left.

     I'd give you the Yeats line about, "The center cannot hold," except there is no center, only a propaganda-blasted no-man's land in which the hand of Man dare not set foot -- or at least, no politician-man.  Or -woman.

     On the other hand (or perhaps foot), and despite discovering that I've been blocked by yet another Facebooker for not disliking Mr. Trump with sufficient force, or perhaps for suggesting angry Marx-based online rants accomplish exactly as much as angry Rand-based online rants (nothing), civil society keeps on keepin' on.  Keeps on, but people are a little more irked, a little more convinced of the futility of our political and governmental institutions, and a little more likely to listen to politicians claiming to have The Answer.

     That's what worries me.  One of the greatest strengths of this country was that we didn't have a single answer; oh, sure, there are broad principles, most importantly the structure of the Federal and State governments as Constitutionally-limited republics, but it's fairly loose and gets looser the closer it gets to the individual citizen.  The United States has long been a great mass of people, churning in something like Brownian motion, innovating, growing and generally confounding and outproducing our enemies.    This country has been unpredictable.

     Any intelligence service will tell you that unpredictability makes their work more difficult.  One of the reasons the CIA liked strongmen better than popular uprisings was that it was a lot easier to figure out what the strongman would do.

     Americans burned out by politics, divided, looking to a Man (or Woman) On Horseback to solve their troubles -- drain the swamp, end economic inequality, control the violence in our cities, fix the border, etc. -- are predictable.

     This is a boon to our enemies and no favor to ourselves.  For that matter, it's a gift to our nominally-friendly competitors in world trade.

     Please bear it in mind.  Don't give up.  Don't give in to bitter rancor.  Whatever oddball notions you cherish, don't be stampeded away from them.  America is a mob, a rabble; a wonderful, creative mess with plenty of individual answers.  Let's keep it that way.
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* Cited on Meet The Press this morning.  Closest I can find is a CNN exit poll from the midterms, with 54% of Democrat voters describing themselves as "moderate" or "conservative."  As did about half the Democrats they voted into office.

Saturday: Mend And Maintain

     There's a rather long list of things to get done around the house -- after I have a nice nap.

And A Lovely Parting Gift!

     At least it's pretty.  The extreme cold is moving on.  It's all of 17°F (-8.3°C) right now, which is a huge improvement, and the temperature should reach 31 later today.

     But there's about three inches of powder snow on the ground, streets, sidewalks and cars parked outside in my neighborhood.  I'll have my own share of it to deal with and apparently, it's much slicker than you might expect; the morning TV news was a litany of car wrecks and slowed or stopped traffic.

     Let's all be very careful, whattaya say?

     This weekend and the early part of next week is supposed to remarkably warm for this time of year.  I won't like the mud but nicer temperatures will make a big difference!