Oops

     I had meant to post yesterday.  I even had a topic picked out.  ...I think.  Today, Tam and I plan to vote, despite a cold that may be in motion from one of us to the other: she's had it for a couple of days and says it's on the wane, and my throat is feeling a little irritated.*

     Maybe I'll dodge it, maybe I won't, but I'm going to do my best to go vote anyway.  If you haven't voted yet, I encourage you to do the same.  You probably spend every other day of the year annoyed the politicians won't do things the way you want them to, and today's your chance to give 'em the what-for.  I wish those office-holders would spend a little less time slinging hollow mud, and a little more time worrying about actual wrongdoing and the long, ugly trip down from the Tarpeian Rock.  Today's the day we can remind 'em of the ancient truth, Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima: what goes up must, in the fullness of time, come crashing back down.

     Or as they say on building sites, "Headache!"  Here's hoping the right people wake up with one tomorrow.
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* Even after I served chicken soup with hot, honey-sweetened limeade for dinner last night!  Alas, it's more of a treatment than a preventative, which explains why it apparently did her more good than me.

A Sad Halloween

     Friday night, while Tam and I were watching television (an episode per night of the current season of Slow Horses), a fire truck siren got steadily louder and then came to a stop outside.

     This was worrisome -- the tree-smashed house next door remains wrenched open, walls leaning and propped up, while insurance companies, the homeowner and the city wrangle over what's next.  There's a lot of broken wood in there, along with plumbing and wiring.  If some enterprising urban salvager got into trouble....

     I peeked out the front window.  There was a police car in addition to the fire truck, and as I looked, two more black-and-whites showed up.  The police and firemen converged on a house across the street that has been ill-starred.  The present owner spent a few years running some kind of used-vehicle operation out of it, which had resulted in semi-decrepit cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats and so on being parked all over the neighborhood, often with expired tags.  That had lead to less than congenial feelings, especially when he had scruffy guys living in his residential-sized garage and working on the cars (etc.).  (No, I am not making this up.)  But that enterprise had faded out, and an older woman had been living there for several months, waving and saying hello and radiating goodwill.

     Over the next hour, Animal Control arrived, and a car and a van from the Coroner's office.  Yes, we were Gladys-Kravitzing from time to time, as we heard the coming and goings.  Tam saw Animal Control taking a lovely setter-type dog to their truck, and eventually all of the public safety personnel and vehicles left.  Checking the usual sources didn't turn up anything and it wasn't until an encounter with another neighbor today that I learned the current resident had come to grief in the privacy-fenced back yard, and was found by a welfare check.  Nothing that will make the news other than an obit.  She was a pleasant neighbor and I will miss her. 

     Then on Saturday night, a late-night text let me know that another neighbor had passed.  I knew her, and had taken care of her cats from time to time.  She'd been on a long, hard health journey with an unavoidable outcome, and had chosen to spend as much time as possible at home with her cats instead of pursing radical intervention.  It was a situation with no good answers; she picked her path and stuck to it.  She had been in the hospital for several weeks and some of her cats had already been adopted out.  I'm told the rest have foster homes while awaiting permanent adoption.  This is another neighbor I'll miss; she lived here long before I moved in, and was one of several kind souls who look after our neighborhood ferals.

     We're only here for a little while and there's no telling when we'll depart.  Smile and say hello; be kind to animals.

At Least I Painted

     Voting, not so much.  Too many people.  I was never very good around people -- shyness, I liked to claim.  I'm the retiring type, happier behind a keyboard or a radio microphone.

     The truth is, I've always been a little bit scared of people.  I used to believe my fellow humans were basically good, just a little bit too loud, too heedless, moving too quickly.  Since 2016, since the pandemic, since January 6, I've stopped believing in human goodness.  Oh, I'm still not quite convinced most people are evil.  They're just indifferent, often easily led, unwilling to do the math.

     They are, in fact, the brutes and louts I always feared they were.  I don't trust them a bit and I find it more than merely difficult to be around people, especially in crowds.

     Tam plans to vote on Election Day and will chivvy me along.

     And hey, the heavy-duty primer goes on quickly and dries well.  I covered the worst worn and missing paint on the windows.  The maker says it can be applied right down to 35°F, so I might make more progress with it yet this year.

Took The Day Off

     The paint has come off the window frames around the living room windows, especially the sills.  Those windows are original to the house, so the wood's over a century old, and it holds paint...badly.  There's time enough this Fall to slap some modern white primer on them and I was planning to do so this weekend, until the weather service predicted rain.  So here goes, and while it won't be pretty, the bare wood is even less so.

     I'll also be trying to vote.  The line at the early voting site was at least a half hour long Tuesday, and I couldn't spare the time.  Today, I can.  If it doesn't work out, I'll go to the regular polling place with Tam on  Tuesday.  I can show exactly why I have become enthusiastic about voting, too -- these guys, who are delighted by Donald Trump's Republican party and see our present moment as their chance to press even more in that direction.  I'd like to tell you they're a joke, cartoonish figures from a Margaret Atwood novel, but it has never been safe to ignore their kind: at one time Afghanistan was one of the more forward-looking and egalitarian of Muslim nations; at one time, Germany, humbled and staggering, was nevertheless a leader in freedom of thought and intellectual pursuits at all levels.  It didn't last.  Decency and fairness are fragile states which require looking after.  If people don't maintain them, authoritarianism and hierarchy is ever ready to fill any gap, ooze through any crack, stamp on the weak and woo the powerful.  If civilization is only a coat of paint, it's the paint that preserves the essential structure underneath; lose it, and the whole thing is threatened.

     So I'm voting.  It's just one vote, but I've got it and I'm gonna use it. 

It Always Does, But...

     The last week or so before an election is always pretty wild, but the candidates and politicians campaigning for them are crazier than ever this year.  The TV ads here in Indiana -- usually a sure thing for Republicans, outside of a couple of U.S. House districts and city offices in the larger ones -- are just batty.  And the wildest so far are attack ads on the Democrats who, almost to a man, are the kind of Dems you get in Indiana: military vets who went to a name-brand university and have held smaller office, running the American cursus honorum in due order. And yet, somehow, their Republican opposite numbers, following much the same path, paint them as wilder than any coastal megapolitan firebrand, out to collectivize our kitchens in the light of blazing bonfires of brassieres and tax dollars.

     The actual difference between Indiana Democrats and Republicans used to be the color of their tie and if they were going to raise your income and property taxes, or sales taxes and license fees.  Presently, our GOP pols range from wild-eyed Christian Nationalists to lukewarm X-Nats to hoping they don't get primaried by one, while the Dems cover a spectrum from 1970s-style liberalism to nth-generation scions of political dynasties who live like wealthy Republicans, but wouldn't think of stepping outside family tradition.  We're lucky most of them are politicians first and foremost, with the exception of a handful of wild-eyed state office-holders in the mold of Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, bearded fanatics who differ from the Taliban only in their choice of wardrobe and which direction the writing runs in their holy book.

     But if all you saw were the mailers, billboards and TV ads, you'd be pretty sure we're about to be overrun by a horde of gay transsexual communists aiming to tax everyone into poverty while running employers out of the state on a rail* and/or bought-and-sold apparatchiks snuggled in the pockets of big business and/or cynical grifters whose parents and grandparents are their only qualification for office.

     While Indiana has its fair share of losers, flakes and crooks in and running for office, we do not, in fact, have any more than is sadly normal for that line of work, and once next Tuesday has come and gone, we still won't.  I'm hoping we'll have a few more Democrats in office and a few less Republicans, for the simple reason that the Republican politicians as a group are presently a whole lot crazier than the Democrat ones, and far less inclined to respect the rule of law.  Play. By. The. Rules.  Stop trying to create second- and third-class citizens.  Stay out of people's bedrooms and doctor's offices.  C'mon, this isn't that difficult; just nib out.
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* I'm still trying to figure out how they're going to be able to tax people who won't have jobs.  My goodness, you don't suppose those ads are supposed to induce unreasoning panic instead of cool reflection?

"Be Seeing You"

    Walter Koenig passed away earlier this week.  We're down to Kirk and Sulu from original Star Trek cast.  Koenig was an interesting guy -- gentle, kind, opinionated, a little geeky.  He was fun in Star Trek, but I came to appreciate his talents as the psi-cop "Bester" in Babylon 5.  Bester -- named after SF writer Alfred Bester, who dreamed up one of the first psi-cops in fiction -- was a truly chilling character, a guy with considerable power and authority who radiated menace and who, over time, proved to be an example of the principle that "hurt people hurt (other) people."

     And he was about as unlike Walter Koenig as could be.  Nevertheless, the character was unmistakable, as real-feeling as anyone you ever met, and not someone you'd ever want to get on the wrong side of.  (And he inevitably said "Be seeing you" in parting, an allusion to The Prisoner.)

     Koenig was 90.  In addition to acting, he directed and wrote screenplays and novels.  He lived a long life and did good work.  I'll miss him. 

Newspaper Stew

      It came to me as email spam from The New York Times -- second only to the NRA for desperate pen pal behavior -- and I decided to give it a try, a fairly conventional beef stew with an easy approach to making a roux, one I have used before.

     It's not a cheat; you flour the meat and brown it in butter or oil.  This naturally forms the basis of a meaty roux, some in (mostly stuck to) the bottom of the stewpot, some on the meat.  Comments to the article complained of blandness, so I added pepper, a pinch of salt and a little dried garlic to the flour -- and I used Wondra, pre-cooked flour that is almost impossible to turn into lumps (and it never tastes "raw").

     Shaken up in a big Ziploc bag with the flour mixture, browned in extra-virgin olive oil a little at a time and set aside in a bowl, the stew beef looked like a good start.  I sauteed about half a (leftover) white onion, chopped (another deviation from the recipe, since they add the vegetables much later) before deglazing the pot with a mixture of mostly red wine and a little bit of vinegar (at this point, I discovered I didn't have any red wine vinegar -- so an equal amount of balsamic vinegar with a touch of white vinegar for acidity filled in for it).

     Deglazed, the roux dissolving into the wine, the meat goes back in, with about twice as much beef broth as wine added.  The whole thing gets bay leaves and is brought to boil, then turned down to simmer for an hour and a half.  I sprinkled in a little Herbes de Provence and went away to do laundry.

     The recipe calls for adding carrots and onion after the hour and a half is up.  I thought that was a great idea and had a small red onion and baby carrots, but it needed celery, so I added some.  (Onion, carrot and celery is one of the "trinities" of cooking.  Watch for these; they can be counted on to work well and they're what our palate expects.)  That gets covered and boiled gently for ten minutes, then a potato is cut up and added -- they called for two, but I went with just one.  That gets another half hour, with done-ness of the potato as a guide.  I added three Shishito peppers, sliced into rings, about halfway through that time, as a hedge against blandness.

     The end result was an opaque, flavorful broth with nice vegetables.  It needed a dash of salt at most, and not even that if you mopped it up with crusty bread.  Well worth the fairly low effort required -- I like any dish I can let simmer and just look in on from time to time while I get other things done.  I froze the leftovers in two batches, and there's a couple of weekday suppers, ready to go.

Unexpected Physics

      Oldies TV network Me-TV has been running The Wizard of Oz film most of this month, along with various (old) behind-the-scenes shows about it.  And they've run The Wiz, the much later reinterpretation of the first Oz story (and one that correctly puts Dorothy in silver shoes -- the ruby slippers in the classic film were substituted because the red stands out wonderfully in Technicolor).

     The Wiz was playing this afternoon while I did my various chores, and I'd watch for a bit whenever I took a break.  I was doing just that when Dorothy (Diana Ross) and Toto (some nice stage dog) encountered an unrecognizable Micheal Jackson as The Scarecrow, being hounded by crows who were singing--  They were singing--  Oh, wow!

     What they were singing was social commentary, expressed in the informal or joking version of the laws of thermodynamics:
     1. You can't win.
     2. You can't break even.
     3. You can't quit the game. 
     Economics is known as "the dismal science," but let me tell you, thermodynamics is pretty dour, too.  In The Wiz, the Scarecrow is as crab-bucketed a character as ever was, literally pulling quotes by great thinkers out of his head while the crows caper around him, eating the products of the garden he's supposedly protecting and chortling about how stuck he is, unable to get ahead, unable to walk away.  I hope this isn't a spoiler for anyone: Dorothy eventually shoos them off and gets the scarecrow to walking, in a dance number that shows off Jackson's remarkable abilities.  And in the meantime, audiences have had one of the fundamental truths of the universe sung at them.

     Of course, humans are localized entropy-reversers.  We may not win at thermodymanics, but we can cheat a little.  We can push back, and that's what Dorothy does for the Scarecrow: helps him stand up and start pushing back.

     I am far from the first person to notice this.  One of the others is a huge physics geek, and dug into the history of the plain-language version of the three laws.  It's worth watching!

Vacuum Of Nope

      So, week before last, I dropped the motor unit of my "Amazon Basics" rechargeable, HEPA-rated stick vacuum by not realizing that I was holding on to the wrong part when I unlatched it from an accessory.  Bang! Down it went from waist height, striking the floor with the hinge over the dust receptacle cover and leaving me holding the business-end widget.  Of course hinge broke and the cover came off, leaving me with a nasty splash of hairballs and dust on the floor and a useless vacuum.

     Solvent glue didn't work -- wrong kind of plastic.  There's no way to build up tooth enough for epoxy to get a grip.  I might be able to use 2mm nuts and bolts to fasten a piece of aluminum across the break, but the size of the hardware is a clue to the scale of the thing: it was only strong and large enough to keep a small plastic cover in place.

     I liked that little vacuum a lot.  It was relatively light and didn't strain my back, plus it was quiet enough that Holden the big baby tomcat could (barely) tolerate it.  (My old upright sent him cowering behind the couch.) So I went looking for another one.  It was an inexpensive import and surely the big retailer still offered--  No.  There were some similar models from companies with imaginary names, some with good reviews, some not so good, none of which looked to use the same filters as my defunct Amazon.  After a couple of days spending spare time looking, I gave up and bought a name-brand, well-reviewed, line-powered stick vac.

     The box was pretty heavy.  I unpacked it today, put the big stick vac together, gave the floors a once-over and it's a nope.  Oh, it'll replace my ancient upright, which is overdue.  The roller design on the carpet attachment is great, and doesn't build up hair at all.  But it's too loud (Holden just reappeared as I started this paragraph, looking around for the dire howling Thing) and it's too darned heavy.  It can't be my daily driver.  And it turns out I dislike managing the cord.

     Back to the internets, I guess.

"You Should Smile More. You're Prettier When You Smile."

     You should walk a mile in my ears.  Men (especially) say things to women that they think of as well-intentioned -- but which communicate something quite different.

     For instance, looking pretty to the men around me is, in fact, not one of my goals.  I hope I'm neat, clean and reasonably well-groomed in the eyes of everyone who sees me, but the choices I make in attire, grooming and even facial expression are for me and nobody else.

     Another aspect of it is the assumption of an avuncular relationship.  Wrong, buddy.  I've been walking around on this planet for a long, long time, and I have outlived all my real uncles, of whom there were many.  At 68, I do not need any new ones.  Friends, acquaintances?  Sure!  That's fine.

     This my blog.  You get whatever I have been thinking of, most often the parts that I believe will be of more general interest, or that I am worrying about, or I'm enthused over.  Including politics.  Don't like it?  Go read something else.  Come back later, if you wish; there will probably be something else at the top of my blog.

     Just understand that I'm not your niece.  I'm a mean old lady, and I have a few things I can do very well indeed, and many more that I can muddle through with.  Sometimes I write about them.

Tired

     I have spent the entire work day -- 9:30 in the morning through 8:00 at night -- working with a very sharp factory support engineer to get a vital piece of equipment (okay, a small TV transmitter) functioning normally again.

     We succeeded.  Ten and a half hours of geekery in the constant roar of cold air and noise with no lunch, just a few snacks and sips of water and tea, is tiring.  I'm going to take the victory, however impermanent it might be, and go to bed.

Falling Behind, Catching Up

      I find it difficult to write these days, mostly due to politics and business.

     One one level, a lot of the GOP seems be adopting an apocalyptic "victory or ruin" approach to elections, and an increasingly authoritarian style when they do win.  This is not a viable long-term approach in a democratic republic -- or in any other kind of democracy.  It is one reason I have put off retirement; a fixed income is perilous if there are major disruptions.

     More immediately, my line of work is undergoing a series of consolidations and adjustments that mean more and more work is being done by fewer and fewer people, and to step out of the game of musical chairs at all means losing your place.  The big owners are more and more remote, the pay gap between the corporate bosses and the clock-punchers is getting larger and larger, and as far as they're concerned, "artificial intelligence" is probably going to make most of us redundant before too long anyway.  There's a lot of incentive to keep on getting while the getting is at least adequate, because tomorrow it may all go away.

     But all of this (and plenty more) is not at all conducive to calm reflection.  I'm running as fast as I can to stay caught up, knowing the music will stop and at that point, the question will be not if things are bad but how bad they are, and how quickly will they get worse.

     I was hoping to retire in more or less genteel poverty, under a largely stable national and local government, in a world that wasn't notably more screwed up than the one I grew up in (which had an ample supply of problems, many without clear solutions, but people were at least trying).  That's not what we've got and navigating the present makes me feel like a drunk on a highwire.