Centipede!

     They've got knees, you know, moving in a forest of long, scissoring legs like a busy assembly line of robots.  This one went zooming across the kitchen floor from sink to stove.  Tamara and both cats alerted on it, with Holden Wu expressing considerable interest in hunting the wriggly insect: a long-legged centipede, almost certainly the House Centipede, Scutigera coleoptrata, and probably lured by our small springtime invasion of "crazy ants."

     They are slightly venomous, with a bite that  can inflict bee-sting levels of pain.  So while Tam herded the cats to safety, I did what was necessary.  While I hate getting rid of a small creature that hunts ants, they're not safe toys for the the cats.

Canada, Ey?

     It looks like Canada has definitively rejected "Trumpisme érable," which should put an end to talk of Anschluss from the White House.  Should, but probably won't; and there's 2025 in a nutshell, with a particular emphasis on the nut trying to hold the controls.

A Little Light Math History

...
Oh
Oh
Fibo-
Fibona-
Oh, Fibonacci
Oh, Fibonacci chi chi chi
Yes, Fibonacci, Fibonacci, math whiz you are!
It's amazing, just amazing, your string of numbers, how it spirals up to the stars!

      (To the rough tune of "La Cucaracha" until it goes off the rails, after which you're on your own.)

      Zero and a one and a one and a two and a three and five and eight!

Pasta Porcini E Formaggi, Plus

     Think of it as mac & cheese on performance-enhancing drugs.  Alessi sells several versions of pasta and cheese: cheese and broccolini, black pepper and cheese, and porcini mushroom and cheese.  It's dehydrated, stays good on the shelf for a very long time, and it's quick to prepare.

     I wanted something a little different for breakfast today, a plan which would have worked better if I had gone to the grocery store yesterday.  But I had bacon, eggs and a packet of Pasta Porcini e Formaggi.  The cheese is Parmesan and Romano, and they've got the dehydrating thing all figured out.  I hard boiled three eggs, fried four strips of bacon, and made the pasta in the microwave, a simple matter of mixing it with water in a bowl, giving it eight minutes, stirring the result and letting it sit for two minutes before snipping in the bacon, peeling the eggs and running them through the slicer, adding a few shakes of truffle powder* and stirring the whole thing together.

     The pasta is curly but skinny, so it's not quite American mac & cheese.  I think it's better; the ingredients compliment one another well, the crunchy bacon and al dente pasta add interest and the flavor is wonderful.  I ate two small bowls and a couple of forkfuls more before realizing I'd eat all of if I didn't stop -- and it makes enough for four people.  You can vary the ingredients, and, depending on how you make the dehydrated mix and how hot it is, even add raw eggs and let them cook just enough from the heat of the dish (this is tricky and carries some risk from undercooked eggs; or, if the mix is too hot, you end up with scrambled eggs and not a silky sauce, though that's okay for brunch).

     It is dish heavy: a small saucepan for the eggs, a skillet for the bacon, a bowl for the pasta and cheese.  But it's worth the effort and the extra dishwashing.
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* A pure indulgence.  I bought the stuff quite a while ago and I will darned well use it up.

It Takes It Out Of Me

     Already flirting with fatigue, chairing the writer's critique group yesterday left me tired and out of sorts.  It's fun nevertheless; the group are interesting people who write interesting stories, and they have good insight into how well a piece of fiction is working.  It's worth the effort.

     The entire club meets after an hour's break and this time, the business portion went down a byway that I find annoying.

     Robert's Rules of Order is a great way* to run group of any size over a few people -- especially if you stay in the well-greased tracks.  Take a little-used siding, and you can hear the wheels screech: despite multiple revisions, RRO uses specialized and somewhat archaic language that often requires an arcane specialist -- a parliamentarian -- to work out how to apply the rules (or sometimes, just to explain what Brigadier General Robert actually meant, a topic on which he published two books himself).  That's fine, except for one little hitch: the parliamentarian ought not be taking part in the particular debate in which such clarifications are needed.

     In practice, it's always the other way around: the participants in the debate address not only the specific and particular issue, but the rules as well.†  This runs headlong into things as (presumably) simple as the difference between "calling into question," an ordinary bit of language inviting debate, and "putting (or calling) the question," the term describing how the chair ends debate and puts a motion up for vote.  If the debaters are trying to wring victory from the rules instead of the merits of their position -- or are perceived by others as trying to -- it starts to feel like cheating.

     One solution is to name one (or better, several) parliamentarians, and hope at least one of them won't have picked a side when matters become contentious.  Another -- and one I have encountered on City Councils -- is for the chairperson themselves to handle the job.  That works well if the chair is strongly motivated and reasonably impartial (and has a loud gavel), and stinks on ice if they favor one side and lack the gift of persuasion.

     It's frustrating, and more so if you -- or in this case me -- happen to be cranky and impatient.  Ten or fifteen minutes later, the matter was resolved, but not before I began to think I could have just as easily stood in bed.  They had an interesting speaker later, so, so I'm glad I didn't.
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* It is not, however, the only way.  Many Quebecois prefer the Morin Code, which among other things has the advantage of not needing to be translated into French from some other language.  I like consensus-based decision-making, but it can be slow, awkward, and lacks -- much as you might expect -- any definitive central reference like, say, a single book.  Versions that insist on unanimity invite schism; versions that allow for small dissenting minorities can create festering resentment.  No system is perfect and RRO has the advantage of taking simple majority rule (for most things) as axiomatic.
 
† Complicating this, the most competent parliamentarians are liable to be people who have read for the law; and while there must be attorneys somewhere who do not enjoy spirited debate, I have yet to meet one.

Drat That Infection

     Tam and I both fought viral bronchitis and I have to say, too many more victories like this and we will be undone.  We're both struggling to get back to the lung capacity we had before it struck.  I can't speak for her but I tire easily at present and I get foggier when I am tired.

     I struggled to finish manuscript critiques for the writer's group I chair, and then I discovered I've run the black ink tank dry on my color printer.  I still have the big, fancy all-black laser printer, at least, so I got everything printed out.  The highlighting doesn't work quite as well, but it should do.

Bloop Is Now Fucus!

     I had to put Microsoft Teams on my home computer for work and now every time the computer starts up. there's a splashy notice that Skype has gotten hitched with Teams and taken its name, or possibly the two have done something hasty and lurid at a bus station.  Whatever, Microsoft wants to make Very Very Sure I know it has happened, is happening or will happen with the videocall app I don't have -- on this computer that doesn't have a camera connected to it.

     It's Philip K. Dick's world, cheesily intrusive ads and all.  We're just living in it, long after he moved on.  I suppose we should be glad we got that part and not the The Man in the High Castle part, though sometimes I wonder if there's not a surplus of fools who want that as well.

Carrying On

     Not today, ever-increasing sense of futility.  Not today.  I will enjoy the sunshine as much as I can.

     Also, the eagle flew on schedule, so that's a good sign.  But I refuse to count on it.  With the flakes and weirdos running around Washington, wreaking havoc, it could dry up at any time.

Weighing In Lightly

     He wasn't the leader of my religion; I don't even have much in the way of religion.  But I will note the late Pope Francis as a man who put in an honest day's work and wasn't particularly impressed by the trappings of his office, at least the ones that weren't intrinsic parts of the rites and rituals of his faith.  He seemed genuinely concerned by human suffering and he tried to help alleviate it.  I admire that.

Ears

     As my hearing slowly goes wonky, I get delightfully surreal flashes: "Funding provided by Bakery Drinker, supporting the upcoming Ham and Egg Conference in Indianapolis."  I'd go to that one, but they're gonna have to promise to lay off the sauce.

     It's largely a phenomenon of listening to radio streams and podcasts on the tiny speaker of an Alexa "Dot" while washing dishes or cooking: lots of background noise and audio with a wider bandwidth than the transducer can handle.  With a better audio system and earphones or bigger speakers, I'm fine.  I probably won't always be fine -- and I remind myself, as I am reminding you, to take time to listen to music you like, at volume levels that are suitable but do not endanger your hearing.  Later replays will trigger memories, allowing you to "hear" even the parts your ears can no longer accommodate.

See Previous Post

     I meant it.

     Today brought new evidence of arrogant incompetence.  If they'd take their jobs seriously, it would make up for a lot -- not everything, but at least show up, pay attention, and color inside the lines!

A Wig Made Of Fire

     Some commenters tell me to calm down about the politics; one guy claimed that the country had "suffered greatly" under President Biden, and what was ahead was going to be much, much better.

     Better hang onto your hat, buster -- especially if it was made overseas, which is likely.  Ask the longshoremen; ask the truckers: goods move much more slowly than a President's whim, but the flow is dwindling and will come to a near stop by and by.  We "ain't seen nothing yet," in the most literal sense: China-made stuff is going to vanish long before there's anything to replace it, and we'll have plenty of nothing in the meantime.

     Adam Smith wasn't wrong.  Trade will still move.  But it will have to pivot.  If a factory in Country C can churn out out blivets for a nickel each, and people in Country A are willing to pay five bucks apiece, once tariff barriers go up there's still a market at six-fifty per when somebody sets up a warehouse in low- or no-tariff Country B where they buy blivets from C, stamp 'em with the complex and unmistakable sigil of Country B Blivet Works, and export them to Country A.  But it takes time to set that up, especially since whoever's doing the stamping needs to get it done for no more than a few cents if they're going to turn a profit.  And when it's got to be done in a hurry, on everything from saucepans to sponges to steering wheels?  Ouch.  We're going to have a summer of empty shelves and if we're lucky, the five and dime will be restocking stuff, junk and sundries at only slightly inflated prices in time to make a head start on Christmas shopping.

     It's going to be ugly.  Even if the Administration finds a way to blink on tariffs and claim victory -- and they're good at that, a sleight-of-mind with a couple centuries of polishing in Washington -- there's a big glitch coming, one that will do damage to a country and society I hold dear.

     Damage to the big Commissions and Departments being savaged and hacked by a half-baked bunch of "efficiency experts" culled from Silicon Valley is likely to be more lasting.  They're heaving institutional knowledge overboard with zero regard, and by the time those chickens come home to roost, the "experts" will be long gone.  Many of us have seen smaller versions of it in our workplaces and the outcome is rarely an improvement.  It's not going to be an improvement when it's Grandma's health care and Social Security, Junior's baby formula and your tax return.  Political meddling is destroying the stable future I was counting on for my own retirement, and I resent the hell out of it.

     Look, Joe Biden was what you get when you ask Central Casting for an Elder Statesman Democrat President, and Kamala Harris is who they send as the Next Generation of the same thing.  But they took their jobs seriously and put in an honest day's work.  The 2024 election was Herbert Hoover or Harry Truman vs. Mussolini, a choice between George Bush (either one) or Stalin: neither candidate was a perfect wonderful choice, but one of them was much, much worse, and hadn't made any secret of it.  That was the test my country was put to, and we failed it.

     I'm not going to try holding my tongue until the the problem passes -- because I am none too sure it will pass at all, especially if nobody's willing to get out and push.  Congress is too damn comfortable; they have been for years.  There are very few things that will rile up enough Senators and Representatives to get a plurality of them engaged in vigorous debate, let alone take action.  It's why they're all so happy with stalemate, with tiny majorities who can make a valid-seeming claim to the utter, futile impossibility of accomplishing anything, as they yawn, turn over, and let the White House run unbalanced and unchecked.  It's up to you and me to do what we can.  I won't miss a vote -- and I won't shut up, either.

     There are other things to write about here and I will pursue them.  But politics will keep on coming up as long as it's a problem, and it's unlikely to stop being a problem for the next several years.

The Shot Heard 'Round The World...

     It is counted as the first shot of the American Revolutionary War, even though there'd been other shooting; our Revolution was the end point of a slow boil, not a bolt from the blue.  It was a shot across the bow of rule-by-decree.  It was a shot to the heart of kings and aristocrats, but even more so, it marked resistance to top-down, autocratic government, where elites made up the rules as they went and the masses were expected to obey.

     Is any of that sounding familiar?  We've got a President in the White House right now who has signed far fewer bills into law than any other President this far into his term -- and has already issued at least 130 Executive Orders, within spitting distance of the 162 his predecessor managed in four years.

     250 years ago, forty-nine Americans died fighting for liberty, for a responsive, representative government and individual freedoms that were then little more than the bare outline of a dream.  250 years later, a significant proportion of Americans appear willing to sleepwalk back into a world where the government's men can imprison anyone on mere suspicion and what we might watch, say, read or write is policed to hew to the official government line -- and not by a mere scolding.

     As the dream of America's Federal government took shape, Benjamin Franklin is purported to have described it as, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

     Can we?  Will we?

The Doctor Wasn't Kidding

     The write-up from the clinic said I'd be coughing after this thing had faded and they weren't kidding.  It comes and goes, sometimes just a productive hack, other times a lingering ache or a round of knives in the lungs.

     Not my idea of a thrill ride, but still better than pulling the emergency cord and climbing off.

Better?

     Yesterday, I managed to go to work and even got some stuff done.  Drove home in a haze, wary of surprises.  Once I got my stuff settled, I put in the effort to make a quick grocery-store visit, and came up with precut ingredients and a couple of cans of soup that resulted in vaguely-Cajun stew: a little ground beef, a little mild sausage, onion, bell peppers and celery, fresh mushrooms, Amy's French Country Vegetable Soup.  Brown, drain, saute, mix, simmer.

     It was probably more effort than I should have put in, and I sat a spell before cleaning up the kitchen after dinner.  I slept heavily, in two unbroken four-hour stretches, more than I have slept at a time since the bronchitis started.

     Meanwhile, the Federal government is busy doing terrible things, while the President talks about his plans to do even worse.  The Executive Branch is in the hands of crooks, cranks, possible spies and religious extremists; the Legislative Branch is divided, and complicit when they are not ineffectual; and the Federal Judiciary -- ah, the Judicial Branch: divided in the lower courts, deeply compromised at the very top.  Republic is lurching into Empire, and an attenuated, incompetent, vicious empire at that.  I'm not afraid for my country any more, I'm ashamed of it: as voters, we failed.  As constituents, we failed.  I failed.  I should have done more to cheer on representative government and spent less time sneering at its shortcomings.  Recovery looks unlikely and America, that dear shining city on a hill, is now just one more rat-bag polity getting looted by its own elites.  With any luck, it will be a long slow ride down; if the dice turn up bad, it could be a short, brutal fall.  Either way, the boys at the top will leave the nation sick, poor and dirty, and it'll stay that way for a long time.

     Yeah, I might not be in a real good mood.

Normalcy Bias

     This is not a post about current events.  It's not a post about politics.  It's about health.

     I have been ill for most of this month.  I started feeling better Sunday afternoon, but I was worn out.  Monday, I made an effort to get ready for work -- and ran out of energy.  As in laying on the bed, dizzy, panting for breath, heart rater high and oxygen level low.  After a rest and a nap, I managed a short expedition to the neighborhood grocer, which left me weak and shaking.

     Yesterday, I moved with a little more speed, and still had had a couple of near-faints that convinced me to stay off the roads.  I kept having night sweats, too, an experience I cannot recommend.  But I kept telling myself it was just a failure of willpower.

     Last night, no night sweats.  I slept most of the afternoon and all of the night.  I'm weak and clumsy, still coughing a little, but I can just about see normal from here.  And I know that for the last two days, I was unsuccessfully trying to pretend I felt normal.

     Maybe I can manage the trick today.  Here goes -- hey, presto!

On Comments

      Guys, you have made comments on "Prescriptive History" that are interesting water-cooler talk, but they're also unattested and more than a little dubious.  "I heard" and "I suspect" are jumping-off points, not landing points: they are where research should begin, not where speculation starts to wander.

     Local Civil War history is often not difficult to track down -- find your local Historical Society or its analog; they often have extensive libraries, which may even contain otherwise unpublished material.  Likewise, many churches retain extensive historical material, and you can directly find out the source of the "Second," Third," "New," "Reformed," etc. offshoots.  Newspaper "morgues" -- back issues -- are increasingly online, and many are free to browse.  There's no need to guess or muse, and I have decided not to publish your recent comments, interesting though they were: we can all do that kind of speculation on our own, each about as well as anyone else.  On the other hand, only the person near the source material can go look up the facts and report back.

     I realize that this may appear harsh, arbitrary or stuck-up, and I'm sorry about that.  But the answer to guesswork is not more guesswork.  It's facts.

     Someone's going to object that I write off the cuff a lot in this blog.  It's true; I do.  And you're welcome to refute me, in detail and with credible supporting information.  This is, however, my blog.  I get to natter on from time to time, just like any other fool can do with their own blog.

America's Favorite Projector Screen

     Was it a Disney invention?  I don't remember.  It's a neat trick: you take a three-dimensional head shape, coat it with reflective motion-picture screen material, set it against an absorptive background and project a carefully sized and cropped movie or video of a person's face on it.  It'll look almost alive, especially if you have good control of the observer's distance and viewing angle.

     The Framers and Founders come in for similar treatment: we tend to project our beliefs and issues on 'em, then take the illusion for reality.  In dealing with men like Jefferson and Washington, you have have to go back to primary evidence: what did they actually leave written down?  When in their life did they write it, and under what circumstances?  Those men were masses of what appear now to be contradictions -- future President John Adams, already involved in the Patriot cause, defended the British soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre of 1770, describing the (at least nominally) Patriot mob that provoked matters in absolutely scurrilous terms.

     Jefferson, who never saw a third rail he didn't almost touch while tapdancing adroitly around it, is frequently misrepresented.  He came in for an especially egregious ride at the hands of the newly-elected Speaker of the House back in January, and while it would be nice to lay all the blame at the feet of Mike Johnson, it turns out he had plenty of help, some of it from unexpected and largely innocent corners.  There's a nice podcast that tells the tale -- and it serves as a reminder to always look things up.  Too many people enjoy repeating plausible tales for the joy of it, and never bother to do any homework.

Prescriptive History

      History ought to be left to the historians, professional and amateur.  History ought to be allowed to have arguments, to be blurry around the edges sometimes, to be in dispute where we genuinely don't know for sure -- and supported by as much first-hand testimony as can be gathered and preserved, so that we can know just what it is we do know.

     History should not be rewritten by politicians, especially ones who have the power to change public monuments.  Many of the people who make history aren't simple saints, or even very nice.  Harriet Tubman was haunted by migraines and worse; Thomas Paine was so cross-grained and argumentative he just about ran out of friends, ending up in a French jail during their Revolution and getting back to the U.S. thanks to people who didn't want him dead, but could also barely stand to have him around.  Deist Ethan Allen brought a magistrate to the point of tears, arguing about the nature of the Supreme Being invoked during his own wedding.  And nobody ever pretended the brick-throwing queens of the Stonewall Riots were particularly nice.

     Most of 'em are getting edited out or flattened down by the Trump Administration.  You may or may not think the site of the Stonewall Inn should be a National Monument, but there's one there now, and if you read the plaques, you'd think the riot was one hundred percent well-scrubbed lady plumbers and nice boy accountants, miffed at the cops; Tubman got back on her own website after vociferous complaint, but it was a near thing.  Museums covering African-American history are getting defunded.  Founders and Framers are treated as if they were flawless plaster statues, not real people.

     The Trump Administration claims to be doing all this to "end wokeness" and overthrow what they see as an "anti-American" bias in historical coverage.  They're swinging at shadows; there's long been an effort to show the unvarnished truth, pushback against the "Lost Cause" retconning that simmered a long time and got up to steam under the odious Woodrow Wilson, but the correction has been that we get the good along with the bad.  And if you don't know what mistakes we have made in the past, how can you recognize when we start to make new versions of old errors all over again?  There once was a nation devoted to rewriting their own history, re-rewriting and re-re-rewriting, as many times as it took to create "the right kind of people."  They ended up making the wrong kind of people instead, and it hasn't worked out well, for them or their neighbors.  We should not follow them down that path.

Scavenging Breakfast

     Okay, it's not from nothing and random weeds; but I haven't been able to go the the grocery as much as I'd prefer.

     I had microwave brown Basmati rice, a "half-sized" can of Spam, eggs and some carrots.  Dried soybeans intended for snacking.  Some wasabi peas, likewise.  Dried minced onion, chives, cilantro, parsley. A takeout-sized packet of soy sauce.  It's plenty.

     Diced the Spam and started it browning.  Put a heaping teaspoon or a bit more of the soybeans in a glass custard cup of water and gave it thirty seconds in the microwave while minding the Spam.  (I find a small, non-stick-friendly spatula makes an excellent Spam-minder.)  Added a half-dozen dried wasabi peas, a half-teaspoon of minced onion and gave it another thirty, let it cool enough to handle, then parked it on the back of the stove and added some chives, cilantro, parsley and a little more minced onion.  The goal is to not have much water left over.

     While that was going on, I diced a handful of baby carrots into pea-and-bean-sized sections and added them to the Spam, giving it a good stir.  I zapped the rice for a minute and a half and checked the fringe for stuff.  One last Piparra pepper in the jar, so I sat it and a par of kitchen shears handy to the stove.  Pushed the Spam and carrots to the side, added the rice, snipped the pepper over it, poured the packet of soy sauce over that, turned the heat up and stirred the rice vigorously until it was all the same color, then added in the rehydrated soybeans, peas and onion, and mixed it all in, bringing in the Spam and carrots.  I went after it for a minute or so, then pushed it to the sides, broke a couple of eggs into it and scrambled them in the center with a bamboo skewer.  When the eggs were done, I mixed the remainder of the contents in, and there you have it.

     Made myself a bowl and took it back to the office.  "Got some breakfast stuff out there, if you want any.  Spam-fried rice."
     Tam: "H'mm."
     A few minutes later, she went out to take a look.
     "Whattaya think?"
     "It's got beans in it.  I'm not all that hungry."
     They're no more than grace notes, but I will never get her to liking most legumes.  Not even good Hoosier soybeans packed with protein, or wasabi peas with a lingering mild zing.  I won't kid you; my definition of "freedom from want" is being able to make a meal with a whole lot of different things in it.  You live on ramen, hot dogs and the occasional egg long enough and you might be a little that way, too.

Night Sweats/Day Heat

     Still?  Really?  Yes.  I suppose an advantage of a flannel nightgown is that it's highly absorbent: I went to sleep chilly -- the house is set at 67 F -- and woke up four hours later, coughing, damp every place one usually perspires, flannel soaked clean through.  The sheets were almost dry, so I turned the covers back, changed into a fresh nightgown and read for a little while before climbing back in.  Woke only to cough after that, so call it progress.

     Both the infection and one of the drugs I'm on for it can cause this, as can stress; I figure they're all interacting.  Fight it out, damn you, and leave me alone.

     Hungry this morning, and not much in the house in the way of fresh vegetables.  Bread, we've got; I picked up a meter-long fresh baguette when I was out getting my medication a couple of days ago.  I had a slice and a half of bacon, a pound of sweet Italian sausage, eggs, and...h'mm.  Tasty Bites microwavable Bombay Potatoes: "Potatoes and chickpeas with fresh tomatoes, onions, and spices."  I've had it before and it's good stuff.  Some kinds of Indian food are kissin' cousins to Tex-Mex, and this dish is one of them.  Perhaps a little strong and too high a sauce to vegetable ratio for what I was thinking. I found a small can of house-brand whole peeled potatoes that needed used up.

     In a 12" non-stick skillet, I fried the bacon, set it aside and drained the grease.  Followed with half of the sausage, saving the rest for later.  While that was going, I drained the canned potatoes, and diced them coarsely, setting a few aside that seemed overly soft. (Cheap canned potatoes are a diceroll, perfectly fine to bulk up a soup or stew, but textures vary.)  When the sausage was mostly done, I pushed it to the sides of the pan and added the potatoes to the center, with a dollop of bacon grease for luck.

     We had fresh baby carrots; I chopped a handful and added them to the potatoes, stirring, and microwaved the Bombay Potatoes.  I kept an eye on the pan, watching for the potatoes to turn a little translucent.  Once they did, I added the contents of the microwave bag and mixed everything well.  After giving it a little while to get acquainted, I pushed it all to the sides and scrambled a couple of large eggs in the center.  Eggs done, I mixed it all back together and crumbled the bacon into it.

     The end result has more sauce to it than my usual breakfast skillet meals, but not excessively so; you can eat it with a fork.  And it's a good as anything I have made.  There's a recognizably "Indian"* edge to it, but the tomato, onion and spices in the sauce resonate well with breakfast expectations.
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* India is a huge place, with a huge population and vast sweep of cultures.  Most of what we enjoy as "Indian" food in the West are dishes heavily affected by palate of the British Raj.  Try whatever comes along; they cook a lot of excellent stuff, often in delightfully unexpected ways and combinations. And I don't get a dime for the links.

"Those Poor Boys"

     Last week, as this lung infection was getting started, I opened the front door and nearly stepped out on a dead mouse, neatly centered on the doormat.

     It was pretty good-sized, and appeared to have been bitten on the back of the neck.  I used a piece of scrap cardboard to scoop it up and deposit it in a trash can waiting at the curb for pickup.

     As near as I can guess, one of the local feral female cats has seen our two tomcats lounging in the front window, and decided they look a little peaked (they aren't), or perhaps too pampered to know how to hunt.  So she left them a treat and a hint, right there at the door.  I can just about guess which one, too: there's a munchkin calico who had litter after litter of kittens until she was finally caught and spayed a few years ago.  She's sweet as can be, but completely distrustful of people.  Our neighbor to the north, who fed her for years, could get close and that was all.   Every other well-meaning attempt to civilize the cat resulted in an unhappy cat and a sad would-be benefactor.  But she is a nice cat nevertheless, and leaving a spare mouse for the handsome gentlemen-cats of Roseholme Cottage would be just her style.

     In other news, I am still sick, and getting tired of it.  Last night was another series of dozing off and waking up damp and overheated, then just overheated after I got wise to the pattern, and then chilled, and then too hot, and -- you get the picture.  Time.  I've just got to keep taking the pills and give it time.

Whiplash! (Cough, Cough, Cough)

     We now know how long "Forever" is in the Trump Administration: less than twenty-four hours.  Day before yesterday, the recent tariffs were going to be in place forever.  The President said so himself, on video.  Yesterday, he tweeted (or Truthed, Tictocked or blarthled or whatever the kids are doing these days) that most of the tariffs were suspended for three months, right then.

     I supposed they're technically still in place during a "suspension."  There's a ten percent floor on nearly everybody and China's still high and rising, both directions.  It was amusing to watch the various department heads and mouthpieces doing their level best to pivot and get the new shade of lipstick on the same tired old pig, but I'm not really up for nearly four more years of this.

     I wasn't really up for a trip to the clinic yesterday, either, but after a couple of episodes in which I couldn't draw breath for a bit, expert advice was needed.  It took something of a wait to get in, and they weren't very impressed with my pulse rate (rapid) or blood pressure (surprise! Or not).  The doc ran the list of my symptoms, from coughing, panting, night sweats, chills, dizziness, screamin' tinnitus, sinus drip, scratchy throat and so on all the way to low blood oxygen levels, then did her listening, poking, peering and prodding.

     "Viral bronchitis," the ultimate paperwork says, adding, "Most...infections last for 2-3 weeks and a post-bronchitic cough can last for 1-2 months." Two to three weeks?  One to two months?  Yikes!

     The doctor told me to keep on with my expectorant pills and acetaminophen, and drink plenty of liquids.  The paperwork adds "...research shows...increased water intake is more effective than a mucolytic...." when it comes to thinning out the thick stuff.  Good to know!  (Hot lemonade or limeade is a good source of liquids when you get tired of tea, just don't make it too strong.  Coffee, well, I love it, but it's not ideal in this application.)

     Antiviral meds for this sort of infection are few to nonexistent, and you have to narrow down which bug.  Conservative treatment addresses symptoms and relies on the tincture of time.*  So I have a witch's brew of a steroid (to calm the inflammation that's keeping my lungs full), a non-narcotic drug that sings the stretch sensors in the lungs to sleep so I don't hurt and can cough intentionally rather than getting ambushed, and a rescue inhaler.  The drugstore had the first two ready in a trice but the inhaler had to wait.  I managed to arrange for delivery, but I have already needed it three times and not had it, between last night and this morning.  Should be here in the next few hours.  I'm already short-tempered and I am mustering awareness that the steroid can turn me into an utter jerk, in the hope of mitigating the effect.

     Did the dishes just now -- three mugs, a glass, a bowl, a small skillet and some silverware -- and found I had to go sit down for awhile to catch my breath.  That's how annoying this is.
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* The doctor's secret is that many of the ills that affect us will run their due course in a healthy person, and the best way to address them is to ensure the symptoms don't beat the patient up while their body is fending off the aliment: the job of the physician is keeping the patient going while the tincture of time does the actual healing.  We've got cures for many diseases now, and time alone won't fix, say, a broken leg, but the best doctors I have known were keenly aware that time was the healer and they were there to help matters along.  --And that patients could be counted on to get in the way; but that's another story, about why Doc K envied veterinarians, whose patients couldn't talk back or scare themselves sicker looking up symptoms on WebMD. 

But About Me

     I can't fix the collapsing world economy, but after passing another lousy night complete with waking up panting, sweat-soaked, ears ringing a tune to the rhythm of my fast-hammering heart, I am going to try to get to the clinic today.  I think the deciding event was the breath I tried to draw that didn't work until I panicked, coughed and hacked my airway clear and beat my target pulse rate.

     Doctor stuff frustrates and annoys me.  I have very little dignity and they want to take away every scrap of it.  But there's a time to admit defeat.

     It is -- and you may read this as widely or as narrowly as you like -- it is never too late to realize you've been stubbornly sticking to a tactic or a plan that's not working, give up on it and try something else.

Wasted Day

     I was determined to get on the downhill side of this cold today.  Got up, had a sketchy breakfast, showered, took one of the twelve-hour OTC expectorant pills I had ordered and took Huck to the vet for his arthritis shot.

     Drove back home and had nothing left.  Nothing.  I called in sick, laid down and dozed off.  Woke a couple of hours later, made easy Eggs Pomodoro (a strip and a half of peppered bacon, fried and set aside; canned plain tomato sauce with the run of the spice cabinet: "Italian mix," basil, diced minced onion, garlic, chives, parsley, a little celery salt, a half-dozen wasabi peas for zing: crumble the bacon in, get it simmering, break three eggs into it, add a little diced cheese to the yolks -- I break 'em, YMMV -- and save the rest for serving), ate it and felt like a well-used washcloth again.  I laid down, dozed off while posting something silly on social media, and woke up twenty minutes later, panting like I'd tried to run a mile.  It took several minutes to catch my breath.  I felt chilled, and dozed off and on under the covers with a heating pad.

     That was six hours ago.  Tam woke me at dinner time (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for me, and that may have been too much).  I finally gathered enough wits to stick an oximeter on my finger: 92% with activity, flirting with the "maybe go see a doctor" level.  Which I will, if I still feel this lousy tomorrow.  Might be dancing around something ugly.  I'm still breathing like a bad imitation of Darth Vader in a housedress.  "Luke...I am your grandma!"
"No....!" [Lets go and falls away.]
Rats, and I had even baked cookies.  Ungrateful child.

Insightful Analysis

     It would be lovely to give you insightful analysis about what's going to happen to the economy next, but after the way this cold kicked me around yesterday, I don't have any.  I barely made it home from work, and crawled into bed as soon as I could change into a nightgown.

     And after fifty-some years of working for wages, mostly hourly, I'm about that optimistic about the economy.  Every time I have gotten a little bit ahead, either the politicians stagger into a war or they and/or their big-business friends get to tinkering, pull the wrong cord, and whatever gains I have made get mostly wiped out.  In 1980, I had a decent job and I was buying an older house in a kind of artsy neighborhood.  In 2025, I'm in the same position -- only the 1980 house was a duplex, and I could usually rent out one side of it for what I needed to make the house payments.

     Oh, time marches on; the big anchor stores a couple blocks away from that first house -- a local grocery chain (Ross), a pharmacy (maybe a Rexall?) and an oversized five-and-dime (Zayre) -- closed not long after the city took out the bridge that had connected that neighborhood to a nearby college, and spent multiple years replacing it.  I had long since moved away, and a good thing, too: the area hit the skids and has never recovered.

     Meanwhile, the fat-cats and pols who were in charge through wars and recessions, gas-price crunches and downturns are still there, or their kids are.  They'll be all right.  You and me?  It remains to be seen.

Still Sick

     Last night was considerably less miserable than the night before and I have every reason to believe the trend will continue.

     The economy's got a cold, too, and perhaps today is the day we find out if it is only a cold or devastating influenza.  The stock market, here and elsewhere, is a useful if imperfect proxy for economic health, and...  Um.  It's not looking so good.  Time will tell, and only a bad person or a lunatic would wish for a crash.

But What A Cold It Is

     Holy cow, what a cold.  I was pretty puny yesterday, temperature up and down, fuzzy-headed, but I managed to make a nice breakfast omelet, and much later, heat up some chicken soup for supper.

     The fun started when I went to bed.  I hit the hay early and alternated between freezing, burning up, having to clear my sinuses so I could breathe and needing to tinkle.  Along about two this morning, I woke up soaking with sweat and feeling an urgent need to head down the hall -- if only I could remember which way to turn!  It's literally five steps from my room to the smallest room.  It should not be a challenge.

     Once there, unfastening the fluffy robe I had fallen asleep wearing over a flannel nightgown was almost too difficult to do: two simple shoelace-type bows, pull on a free end and knot falls apart.  I finally figured it out.  It was about that point when I realized I had a dangerously high temperature.  But hey, no hallucinations, so still okay.  Just a quart low on brains.  I managed to take care of what needed taking care of, including swapping the sweat-wet nightgown for a dry one, and made it back to bed.  The next time I woke, I felt more clear-headed than I had in some time.

     Clear-headed but beat up and dragged through a knothole: I hurt all over.  I still do.  I was awake and asleep several times, and the last time I started feeling overheated, I got out the thermometer: 99.5°F.  No telling how high it was earlier except I start seeing things around 104, so it never got that high.

     This is a lousy cold.

And Now I Have A cold

     It was inevitable.  This one comes with aches, runny nose, scratchy throat and a productive cough.  I'm going back to bed.

It's Good For You

     Tam's been fighting a cold and yesterday, it was pretty bad.  So I made chicken soup.

     Thursday is Trash Night, when we change all the litter boxes, gather up all the trash, and get it out to the curb for Friday morning pickup.  We usually order pizza, to avoid time spent cooking and cleaning up the kitchen.  To make matters worse, I worked over.

     But canned chicken soup is--  Well, it's good enough and some brands are better.  Still, for full effect, home made chicken soup is best.

     I compromised.  The neighborhood grocer had diced fresh white onion in deli containers, about a third of a cup, and snack-sized celery right next to it.  A small bag of baby carrots rounded out the vegetables.  They had nice, big chicken drumsticks in the hot deli counter, too, so I got four of them.  Noodles were going to be time-consuming, but Pacific brand chicken soup has lots of nice, broad noodles.  I picked up a 16-ounce can of soup and an eight-ounce container of chicken broth.

     Once home, I didn't want to fiddle around too much.  I heated up about a teaspoon of good olive oil in the medium stock pot, dumped the onion in and gave it a couple of shakes to coat.  The baby carrots were skinny enough to snip with kitchen shears right over the pot (no cutting board!) and once they were in and cooking, I gave the celery the same treatment.  I followed with the chicken.  It's a little tricky, but the meat snips right off, skin and all.  By the time I finished the last one. the onion was translucent and the carrots and celery had brightened up.  I poured the can of soup over, added the broth, put in a shake of Bragg's seasoning mix, gave it a stir, put the lid on and went about setting up for supper.  Ten minutes later, we were enjoying big, hearty bowls of not quite homemade chicken soup, loaded with fresh vegetables and roasted chicken.

     No, it's not as quick as using the phone or computer to summon food.  It's not as quick as opening a can and heating it up.  But it's not that much slower, and it's better for you.  It's a lot faster than doing the whole thing from scratch, and while I didn't simmer the broth down for hours, the profit-minded hippies at the soup company did, or at least used some process with the same end result.  And the deli roasts chicken as well as anyone.  If I'd had more time, I would have thrown the drumsticks in whole for a half hour, then taken the meat off and put the bones back in to simmer with the broth; but sometimes you have to choose your degree of difficulty and the end result was a healing treat on a busy night.

"What's In The Box?"

     The title of this post is a line from Dune.  The young hero (or is he?) Paul is about to undergo a test meant, "To determine if you're human," if he can deal rationally with fear.  What's in the box is pain.

     America's economy -- the global economy -- has been handed a box, too.  We don't know what's in it.  The President and his advisors who devised our new tariffs say it's full of wonders.  Many highly-qualified economists say it's full of pain.  The history of tariffs is, at best, alarming; the Smoot-Hawley tariffs didn't cause the Great Depression, but the general consensus is they made it worse.

     What's in the box?  We'll find out -- and you can bet none of the higher-ups in Washington will feel any pain, including the spineless Congress that has, once again, dodged responsibility by handing the Executive a power, in this case taxation, normally reserved to the Legislative branch.  The power to declare war, they abrogated that long ago; the power to make laws is ebbing, what with Executive Orders now being treated as if they were laws; impoundment of allocated funds and the imposition of "emergency" tariffs cede the power of the purse.

     Anyone with an eye to Classical history can tell you that the Emperor of Rome didn't spring forth full-fledged, but by the gradual accretion of powers and responsibilities once held by the Senate and people of Rome and their various Executives to the office of Emperor.  The framers of the U. S. Constitution were wary of such a thing happening in their new republic, and did their best to hedge against it.  Did they do enough?

     What's in the box?

Quick Dinner

     Last night, I wanted something easy for supper.  I'd had a lousy day and I didn't have much energy.  Our corner grocery often has fresh vegetables and a basic seasoning, bagged up and ready to microwave.  Last night, their "mixed vegetables with Tuscan butter" was front and center, a collection of green and yellow zucchini, pea pods, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, asparagus and shredded carrots with a dollop of seasoned butter.  There's a bit over a pound per bag.

     It's a good assortment and "Tuscan" had me thinking.  I picked up a container of fresh cherry tomatoes, a 16-oounce container of quality red sauce (Michael's of Brooklyn "Homestyle Gravy," which we here in the Midwest know as spaghetti sauce with everything, the full garden of vegetables, cooked down) and a little under a pound of mild Italian sausage.

     This is not the cheapest collection of stuff, but it's still far less than dining out or ordering in.  I browned and drained the sausage with some extra spices, adding a generous double-handful of chopped cherry tomatoes after draining.  I ran the bagged vegetables in the microwave while that cooked, adding the sauce to the meat and tomatoes after a few minutes.  With the pan bubbling, I put in the vegetables (leaving any excess melted seasoned butter in the bag), covered it and let it simmer for a few more minutes -- but not long enough for the vegetables to get mushy.

     The end result has enough sauce to coat everything but not drown the other ingredients.  You could have it over pasta if you wanted to, but we didn't.  Tam even went back for seconds!  Total time was around fifteen minutes and it will easily serve four or five adults.  We had leftovers.

In Which I Address Fools

     An unpublished commenter has chided me. "The right to an education isn't a real right," they claim, leading into a basic explanation of the difference between positive rights (requiring some action on the part of others) and negative rights (requiring only that others refrain from interfering).

     It's all stuff no one who was awake and paying attention over the last 30-odd years could have possibly missed, especially if they inclined to libertarian or even conservative views.  It's also not the point.  Free public schools exist; our taxes fund them.  Speaking as a childless homeowner (Indiana school funding comes from property taxes), I would just as soon live in a world with fewer ignorant children left with plenty of idle time to get up to trouble and I'll pay money to get it.  Like it or not, free universal public education through Grade 12 is how it works.

     If Billy, who was born here but whose parents came from elsewhere and Ramon, who was born here and whose ancestors came here before the Civil War, one of them on the Mayflower, both get a free education, but Billy's big sister Daphne, who was born in the old country before Mumsie and Daddy sneaked across the Canadian frontier, does not, that's pretty plainly bullshit -- especially when Vladimir and Valerie, children of legal immigrants, one born in Undershirtistan and the other here, both attend the same public schools, free for nothing.

     One of the biggest problems with this exclusion is it amounts to punishment of a child for the offenses of their parents -- while Billy and Daphne's parents are presumably still some sort of scofflaws,* little Daphne had no choice in the matter.  In Indiana, this is known as "corruption of the blood," and our state Constitution specifically forbids it.  You can lecture me about it all day, but it's still there, in black and white.  It's got antecedents that go right back to the Old Testament, for that matter.
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* Or possibly not; there are a number of paths, now and in the past, that might let 'em stay here under various sorts of residency.  And just how a law barring children of "illegals" from public education might apply to those situations is unknown and untested.  It's nice that attorneys have a chance to earn a living finding this stuff out, but we don't owe them the opportunity.