Schedule Conflict

     Found out yesterday that I am scheduled to work Saturday morning, a shift starting about a half-hour after the online meeting of the critique group I chair ends.

     This wouldn't be much of a problem on a regular day -- but where I'll be working is inside the perimeter for the Indianapolis 500 Festival Parade!*  My employer's building is right there on Meridian St. and you have to sweet-talk your way past the police to traverse a closed side street in order to reach the parking lot.  Traffic is busy and I'd never get there in time.

     The answer, of course, is to go in early, having begged permission from the boss to borrow one of the "quiet rooms" set up for the open-office folks on the second floor.  This should get me past the officer on roadblock duty before he or she has quite reached the boiling point of frustration and might even provide a head start on a busy workday.

     Of course, I'll probably have to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get ready for work, make coffee, gather everything for the meeting, pack my lunch, etc. but I knew it would be extra effort when I volunteered.  Ah, the glamor of showbiz!  The glamor of the literary life!
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* It is one of the largest holiday parades in the U.S., after the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, CA.  Those two are huge and the numbers fall off rapidly for the remainder, but it's not small.

Split Response

     One one hand, it's so good to be home, in a house where I built most of the furniture, where things are where I expect them and I can reach the nightstand from my bed without feeling as if I'm about to plunge to the floor.

     On the other hand, I have so much to do!  I'm struck again by the realization that I am a terrible housekeeper; to call my home "bohemian" is a grave insult to the good people of Bohemia, even the slovenly ones.

     No time like the present, I suppose, and when it's all a mess, I can start anywhere.

Not A Navigator

     While I have a little bit of a sense of direction -- I usually know which direction is north -- my memory of maps and routes has a tendency to become mirror-imaged, flipping east and west or, less often, north and south.  And once I'm off my mental map, I tend to fret.

     So the ability to get directions from Google Maps, and then smartphones that do the same thing only out loud and on the fly, has been a real help.  Software, however, is only as good as the questions we ask of it, and when I left for my in-factory class on Monday, I slipped up: I told my phone to take me to the destination city, and not the specific hotel where I had reservations.

     I left late, and drove mostly in a clear patch with storm clouds all around, perhaps one of the best ways to travel wide-open agricultural spaces: the sky was spectacular, anvil-shaped thunderheads lit from below, cream-colored against deep blue, ragged purple scarves flowing across turquoise; distant lighting flashing from slate-colored clouds or illuminating them from within, and as sunset approached, a thin spot in the storm allowed a pinkish-orange streak across the western sky.  It was stunning.

     It was also distracting.  The sun set while I was still on the road and my poor night vision combined with intermittent oncoming traffic meant 65 mph was about as fast as I could go without feeling like I was overrunning my headlights.  I still had fifteen miles or more to go.  A mile away from an exit to a state highway, my phone told me to take it, and reminded me again as I got closer.  "EXIT NOW!"  So I did.  Clever phone, it knows all the shortcuts, right?

     The highway angled off and downhill, in what felt like the right direction.  The city I was headed for is along a large river, with hills and bluffs to the east.  With plenty of curves and a 45 mph limit, the two-lane highway led me though the dark, past a few small businesses, though intersections with a house or store, and up the river valley.  I sensed more than felt an increasing bulk off to my right, and as I rounded a long curve, bright streetlights illuminated what looked like a castle wall with a pair of gates on that side of the highway: the huge entrance and exit of an underground quarry!

     Various industrial areas got thicker on either side and I started to worry.  I was well behind schedule, and this didn't look like hotel territory!  Factories and refineries gave way to warehouses, gas stations and corner stores; my phone directed me to turn among larger and newer buildings.  A couple of blocks more put me in downtown, about the time restaurants were closing.  "YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION," my phone announced.

     The hell I had.  I found a parking spot, fished my phone out of the cup holder and had a look, realizing for the first time that I had told it to take me to the city, not my hotel.  I corrected that and, a mere six and a half miles, ten stoplights and an increasingly protesting bladder later, reached my hotel.

     Check-in was refreshingly brisk, my luggage had somehow become unreasonably heavy along the way, and my room was comfortable, cool and inviting.  Especially the modern plumbing.  While I don't sleep well in hotel rooms -- the beds are too big, too soft and too high -- that night, I claimed every hour of the eight I had earned, entirely zonked out.

Got Back Home Yesterday Evening

     Of course, I managed to get lost on the way home: got off the interstate and turned south to pick up the county road that eventually becomes Kessler Avenue.  Too bad it was north of me.  Drove into Indianapolis on 38th Street instead, only a couple of miles farther south than intended.

      I had occasion to drive near a few large windpower farms twice over the past week, and I have to tell you, Don Quixote could be onto something: the windmills might indeed be giants.  They just might.  The darned things almost look alive.  The blowing wind is a free gift, and we'd be fools if we didn't put it to a little work along the way.

I Took A Break

     I am finishing up a week of intensive training on some fancy hardware for work, and it hasn't left a lot of energy for anything else.  It's been a long time since I last had this kind of "brain upload," both easier (no tests!) and more demanding (a lot of highly specific information in a very short time) than a college-level class.

     A fair amount of my education has come this way.  There's a lot to be learned -- if you pay attention.

---

     On politics, I don't have any insights.  I'm just watching it like everyone else.  For me it's like being a block away, watching two trains headed towards one another, unable to prevent the crash, hardly able to look away and wondering if I'm far enough back to avoid personal harm.  Probably not.  Probably none of us are.  Maybe it's an illusion, maybe the crash won't happen, but "maybe" is nowhere good enough.

Is This America In 2025?

     Committee To Protect Journalists: "Trump’s first 100 days portend long-lasting damage to press freedom."  More than mere portents.

     New York Post, and a zillion other news outlets: "President Trump is set to receive a “flying palace” Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s royal family, which he will use as Air Force One." But don't worry, folks, DOJ says it's totally not a violation of the Emoluments Clause and couldn't possibly be mistaken for a bribe -- even though it's entailed to be donated to Mr. Trump's Presidential Library after it's done serving as Air Force One.  Just a fill-in until Boeing finishes the real replacement Air Force One, some time in...well, it's way overdue and they aren't sure.

     ICE agents making raids with their faces and badges covered -- or no badges at all; the Executive Branch wanting to suspend habeas corpus; gold and more gold in the Oval Office; FEMA trimmed down to almost nothing; cranks and quacks running HHS and subsidiary agencies.  What are we doing?  What are we allowing to be done?

Kinda Slacked Today

     I spent the day on housework, laundry -- and slow-roasting four lightly marinated thick pork chops in a covered pan on the grill, with apple, turnip, carrots, onion, celery, a few cherry tomatoes, canned mild chilis, a couple of pickled Piparra peppers, fresh red, yellow, orange and green bell peppers and a half-dozen Shishito peppers.  Once it was pretty well cooked down, I added a half-dozen each sliced Castlevetrano and Kalamata olives, a tablespoon of capers and small jar of vegetable-heavy spaghetti sauce.

     The pork chops had a little time in a mixture of soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar, ginger, garlic and a little Cajun seasoning ahead of cooking.  The turnip got a dusting of smoked paprika.

     Cooking took three hours.  The meat fell off the bone, tender and moist.

An Organization Not Known For Surprise; Numbers That Will Remain Officially Unknown

     So the new Pope is an American by birth, though he most recently spent many years serving in Peru.  Like his predecessor, the first Pope from the New World, he is likely to bring a different perspective to his Church.  Nevertheless, and despite wild talk of the political leanings of the man, bear in mind that his Church has lasted longer than even the most generous read of the lifespan of the Roman Empire, and that as a result, it is institutionally conservative in a way few (if any) other organizations even come close to.

     Don't get pulled into the speculation.  This was a routine (if major) event, one that has happened many times before.
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     Elsewhere, the Trump Administration has announced they will no longer be determining, sharing or tracking the price tag of damage done by large-scale natural disasters.  Combined with an ongoing push to diminish the the role and functions of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), this might have the effect of minimizing the impact of news about such disasters, and possibly reducing voluntary contributions -- except, of course, that insurance companies (and many state governments) gather such data, share it with one another and often release it publicly; also "if it bleeds, it leads" in news coverage, and nothing bleeds headline ink and newscast opening video like a big disaster.

     Hurricane season, tornado season and wildfire season will be interesting this year.  Pretending a thing isn't there doesn't make it go away.  Never has, never will.

Why Not Let 'Em Be?

     If you're not Catholic, what do you care about who will be elected Pope?  If you are Catholic, the Cardinals will let you know when they settle on someone.

     It's not a horse race.  It's not even like electing a Speaker of the House of Representatives.  They'll get it done, in much the same way they have been since 1492.  It's not the World Series, and if you have bet on the outcome, I don't want to hear about it.

Civics Review

     A comment yesterday -- unpublished so I can address it here on the "front page" -- argued that the President is being frustrated by the courts in the faithful execution of his job:

     "...[T]he Executive can no longer fulfill Constitutional duties because Judicial Branch, particularly district courts, keep blocking his attempts.

     "The President is to faithfully execute the law as defined by the Legislative Branch, but it seems that the Judiciary and Democrats disagree."

     It's an interesting take, and I'll bet if you tuned the radio/TV dial and trawled the Web down the right-hand side of the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart, you'd find it repeated -- but it's got some problems.

     First and foremost, the three branches of the Federal government are supposed to get in each other's way.  It's that "checks and balances" thing you might remember from high school Civics or American Government class.  I hope you remember it -- an awful lot of talking heads in the media ignore it when they don't get the outcome they prefer.  If a law (or other Federal action) gets jammed up with any one branch, it can be stymied.  It might not be; but the Framers, well aware of how badly a powerful government can mess people up, were not at all shy about designing a system that offered many opportunities to reconsider.

     Second, "law as defined by the Legislative Branch" is one thing -- and Executive Orders are quite another.  And that other thing is not being laws.  Point to any specific Federal laws the current President is enforcing: nearly all of his high-profile moves have been based on his own Executive Orders instead.  The 119th Congress has been historically passive, enacting four (4) laws so far -- and that includes the one they had to pass to keep Federal paychecks from bouncing.

     Third, while Congress writes the laws -- and, ideally, writes them so clearly their meaning is unmistakable,* when issues of interpretation arise, it's up to the Judicial Branch to try to dope out what Congress meant: the courts define the law, not Congress.†

     Fourth, "it seems that the Judiciary and Democrats disagree," pretty much defines both why we have three branches of our Federal government and the role of opposition parties: they're there to disagree.  If the point intends to take aim at Federal judges appointed by Democratic Presidents, I have bad news for you: a significant number of the judges standing up to potentially unlawful or unconstitutional actions by the Trump administration were appointed by Republican Presidents -- including Mr. Trump himself.  The law is the law, the facts are the facts, and judges are reasonably expected to take a logical, dispassionate look at them.  Will they nevertheless tend to worry more about people caught up in the gears, or about the orderly workings of enforcement, or any number of other angles?  Probably; they're human beings.  But we expect them to make a solid try at getting it right.  And if their decision is the Executive didn't play by the rules, well, there you go.

     Look, there's a name for a system of government in which the guy in charge makes his own laws, sends armed minions to enforce them and expects the courts to condone his and their actions while nobody dares say boo, but it's not a democracy or a republic.  It's an old, old system, one the Ancient Greeks kept falling into and Rome threw over until it crept back nearly five centuries later.  It's a system Europe suffered under for centuries, and one that oppressed the American colonies until we stood up and kicked the King's men out.  Why are you so hot to bring it back?
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* Ha!  If there's one thing every Senator and Member of the House is good at, it's obfuscation.  When they send vacation postcards, you can't even figure out where they went.  Then there's the little matter of lobbyists handing out suggested draft legislation, like high school students with bootleg Cliff Notes....
 
† This is an oversimplification.  In practice, Congress often sets goals for the various Departments, Commissions, Bureaus and Agencies, and they in turn proceed to write regulations.  In the past, the courts have generally given considerable deference to what those entities have written and promulgated, but this arrangement is under increasing challenge.  Broadly, the courts decide -- and they may find themselves doing a lot more deciding in the future.

Maybe There Should Be Some Penalty Lines

     I'm starting to believe there are some lines that, if crossed, should cause a politician to be summarily stripped of office and tossed out into the street.

     It would be a high bar, foundational stuff, like refusing to admit the basic, Constitutionally-protected rights of citizens and residents of the United States.

     The U. S. Constitution is not an obscure or tricky document; while the language is a little archaic, it was written before lawyers had really polished the art of building in wiggle room and clever traps.  And it was written by a group of men who were not entirely all lawyers, and who were uniformly concerned with having the thing make sense and hold up* over time.

     When a President -- any President -- is asked if he is supposed to uphold the Constitution and his reply is that he doesn't know, he's got to check with his lawyers, that ought to result in immediate disqualification from office.  It should be a red card.  The requirement is right there in the oath of office publicly sworn by all Presidents:
     "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
     There isn't anything in it that needs to be parsed by a member of the bar.  Pretending otherwise is just bad-boss BS, the same as when you are promoted, negotiate your new salary with your boss, and when that first paycheck arrives, it's ten percent short.  You go to the boss, and his immediate response is, "Oh, Corporate trimmed it.  Tough luck.  It's not like we had anything in writing."  The Presidential oath of office is in writing -- and the swearing or affirmation of it by incoming Presidents is preserved on film, tape or electronically, as far back as we have had such media.

     Alas, there is no such automatic penalty clause, and Presidents inclined to dissemble and evade their clear duty do so with impunity -- and to our and the nation's peril.
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* Many of them became pessimistic about the results of their efforts in later years -- and not a one worried they had given the President too little power, or made too great an effort to protect the rights of The People.

Turbo-Dopey Authoritarianism

     The thing about rule by edict is, it'll make your head spin.  Take news about the news -- four days ago, the White House put Federal funding for PBS and NPR in the crosshairs, by telling the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting (of which the President is, literally, by statute, not their boss) to stop sending them money, and by telling the affiliate stations they cannot use their CPB funding to pay "membership fees" or individual programming fees to the networks.

     The first is no big deal; NPR, long in the culture-wars spotlight, has spent decades weaning themselves from Federal largesse, receiving just 1% of their budget from that source.  PBS counts on the Feds for somewhere north of 10%  of their funding.  But the second strikes deep: the smallest NPR and PBS affiliates rely on CPB money to stay on the air -- and their network membership fees are among their largest single expenses.  New York City and Indianapolis will have plenty of NPR and PBS on their air; Bushwhack, Alaska and Back-of-Beyond, Montana may end up with 24/7 polka music or nothing but static.  Many of the small-town and rural stations have only one or two people on staff, and spend a lot of time "riding the network" with nobody at the controls.  Don't like what you hear?  Spin the dial; you'll tune back during local bad weather or natural disaster.

     And here's the kicker, in two parts:
     1. The EO is titled, "ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA" and complains "...that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."  I don't know if any news media manage a hundred percent unbiased objectivity, but those two give it an honest try, and differentiate between news and opinion.  The Ad Fontes chart puts both of them not too far from the middle politically and rates them high on accuracy; NPR's News Now podcast, which consists of nothing but the same five-minute hourly newscasts you hear on the radio, comes in nearly at top dead center.
     2. Five days ago, the Trump Administration launched "White House Wire," a Federally-funded, White House run website devoted to positive coverage of Mr. Trump and his Executive Branch, modeled on news and opinion sites: it is wall-to-wall taxpayer-subsidized biased media.  How does the PBS/NPR EO put it?  Oh, yes, "At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage." Y'don't say?  But websites are different?  I doubt that.

     Do one or do the other, and it's pretty much politics as usual.  In a free society, the correct comeback to speech you don't like is to speak up yourself; through most of my life, Republicans have chafed at having to foot some of the bill for Sesame Street and All Things Considered and tried to skip out without paying.   But doing both at the same time?  Mr. Trump and his gang have not just murdered irony and left it bleeding out in a gutter, they are enthusiastically violating the corpse and sharing selfies of the process.

"What All Men Own, No Man Owns"

     The problem with shared resources in a workplace is, they're shared.  Tools, for example, are often subject to loss or abuse.  People use them and leave them wherever they were working -- or, if they are diligent and frustrated, they hoard company tools, piling them up on their desks or in a drawer.

     At one time, I had a coworker who would lock up miniature side cutters and needlenose pliers in his desk.  It worked well for him, but over the course of a month, every available set of small diagonal cutters and needlenoses would vanish into his custody, and you'd have to remind him that the other kids occasionally fixed stuff, too, and would he please return his accumulation to the marked drawers in the toolbox?

     Another coworker would complain bitterly about how nobody ever bothered to put tools away -- and walk out at the end of his day, leaving the workbench littered with tools he had used.  Asked about it, his reasoning was that if no one else returned them, why should he?

     I don't know.  Nor is is my job to hector people about their habits.  Frustrated by the ebb and flow, one of my first projects was to sort out, organize and label the toolboxes at my employer's various sites.  Finding the right screwdriver should not require checking every single drawer!  Over the past 37-plus years, I have bought my own personal tools for work, especially after the day I arrived with a relatively urgent project all planned out -- and found every one of the specialized crimping tools I needed for video cable had been taken across town to rewire a location used twice a year.  But I also routinely put away any tools I find lingering on the workbenches and elsewhere -- not because I'm such a wonderfully superior person or in an attempt to inspire anyone else but because it increases the odds, however slightly, that if I do need something from the company toolbox,* it'll be there. (At home, I am sloppier about this -- after all, it's just me, and why would I hide stuff from myself?  Yesterday's blog post illustrates how poorly that can work out.)

     Other than the basics (screwdrivers, pliers, diagonal cutters), there's not a lot of overlap between my work and my home stuff.  The plier-driver-and-knives multitool I carry every day (a Wave) covers most simple tasks, with a "green tweaker" analog† handy in my purse.  My work toolbag includes two kinds of tin snips, video coax cable strippers and crimpers, soft-jaw channel-lock pliers to loosen stuck connectors, a compact "drive everything" Wadsworth Falls toolkit (I'm not sure what's up with them these days) and a modern "Yankee" type push screwdriver (they are incredibly handy, subbing for power screwdrivers; recent ones use 1/4" hex drives, so driver bits and small drills that fit them are readily available).  I rely on work for wrenches (too heavy for the small amount of use they get), nutdrivers other than 1/4" and 5/16", and power tools.  In my very first radio job, the station manager was of the opinion that an engineer who was worth a darn would have their own tools (and he was cheapskate enough to not want to buy any from the station budget).  The lesson I took from that was that you can't count on having what you need unless you brought it yourself.  Other people in my line of work are of the opinion that if an employer wants the job done, they'll provide the tools, which strikes me as both optimistic and obstinate, a recipe for frustration and disappointment.

     Shared resources are yours while you're using them, and ideally, everyone would treat them that way.  But that's not what happens, and I try not to set my expectations too high or insist that everyone do as I do.  There are plenty of other things to go be annoyed about, if that's what you want to do.
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* Don't picture something like a tackle box or oversized lunchbox.  These toolboxes are a yard wide and five feet high, chock full of soldering tools, wrenches and drivers of many kinds, twist drills, crimpers, specialized installation/extraction tools, hammers and punches, taps and dies, punchblock and wire-wrap tools, crimpers and wire strippers.
 
† Mine is the smallest reversible wooden-handled "pocket screwdriver" Starrett sold. They're well-made, with hollow-ground tips and complete overkill for the uses I put it to -- but it'll never accidentally get mixed up with the company tools.  It's nicely designed and a delight to use.  I also carry a cheap "freebie" tweaker for situations with a high risk of loss.

Serendipity

     Also: always take the time to return tools to their proper places.  I know this.  I don't always do so.  I should.

     About a month ago, I needed my smallest two standard braces, those offset-cranked tools that drive a spiral auger bit through wood.  I own a chairmaker's brace with a six-inch sweep, meaning the handle is three inches offset from the axis of the bit, and a newer brace with a twelve-inch sweep (among others).  I couldn't find either one; there are hooks for the larger braces* and the chairmaker's brace lives in the top compartment of a wooden toolbox, but the braces weren't there.  I had vague memories of having used them in a project.  Bookshelves, maybe?  But they weren't anywhere near the most recent set of bookshelves.  There was a chance they'd been left in the garage or lost.

     Clearing away clutter so the plumbers would have plenty of room to work, I opened up what I thought was an empty cardboard box.  Inside, both braces and two large auger bits, the latter wrapped in a clean rag.  The big bits jogged my memory: when I replaced the sink faucet, I had drilled a hole in the floor of the cabinet, so I could poke a boresight camera through and see if there was anything unexpected going on with the pipes in the inaccessible space inside the cabinet base.  (There wasn't, and a sturdy cork plugged the opening until next time.)  I had carefully packed up the tools in a handy box, carried them to the basement...and set the box on a stack of other boxes until I'd had a look in the base and finished the plumbing.  They could always be put away later, right?

     "Later" didn't arrive.  The kitchen sink job was was in June and July of 2021, around the same time I had cataract surgery.  With plenty of distractions, I never went back to put the tools away and forgot where I had left them.  It's a lesson I keep relearning: put tools back in their proper place and you'll be able to find them the next time you need them.  Consider it the general case of which the Field Notes notebook company motto is a subset: "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now."  "Later" is never.  Do it now.
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* I've got another 12-inch sweep brace with an unusual chuck, a fourteen-inch sweep brace, a whimble brace, a very small 90-degree brace that is little more than a chuck, a ball-bearing pad and a lever handle, and a much larger 90-degree brace with a heavy frame and a gear drive.  Each one has its use -- but I don't kid myself, it's as much a collection as it is a set of working tools.  And it's not even every size -- there are eight- and ten-inch sweep versions, the latter apparently standard in Bell System installer's tools.

That Was Quick

     I've bought cars for less -- okay, it wasn't much of a car, it was ten years ago and my first step after the purchase was to have a rebuilt transmission put in, but still: replacement water heaters aren't cheap.

     They are, however, about as convenient as possible, at least around here.  A couple of decades ago, one of the large plumbing companies in the Indianapolis metro figured out that they were spending a significant proportion of their service calls replacing water heaters.  While customers were pleased when it went quickly, they were really annoyed when it took more than a day.  And the process had significant inefficiencies: you can't stock a service truck with an assortment of water heaters in the same way you can load it up with pipe, couplers, valves, etc.; if you're selling a wide range of water heaters, customers are going to take longer to make up their minds.  The work was taking multiple visits and skilled plumbers were spending time making estimates and shuttling bulky water heaters around instead of taking old ones out and plumbing new ones in.

     There was a niche for a company that could get the job done all in one day.

     They partnered up with a reputable manufacturer (and there are interesting opportunities there), made some clever choices about stocking and transportation (you do not, in fact, have to be a journeyman plumber to drive around a box truck full of water heaters), trained a group of estimators, and hung out a shingle: you get hot water today, or they'll pay you for the job!

     It's a heck of a system.  I called them after enjoying a brisk cold shower and my hair was still a little damp when the estimator showed up, checked out the basement, took photos and showed me the options.  We negotiated a little and I signed up for a slightly larger water heater, nineteen and a half years newer than the old one.*  He made some notations on his iPad and told me, "Alex and his helper will be by in a couple of hours."

     Ninety minutes later, my phone rang while I was bushwhacking a path from the back yard patio to the back gate.†  The truck arrived as I was unlocking the gate and it took about three and a half hours from then until there was a shiny new water heater in my basement and the old one was aboard the truck, ready to be recycled into cans and calcium supplements.‡  The new one is a little taller and sits in a drip pan that should protect it from the occasional basement flood (yes, it's supposed to be the other way around, but...).  It's got a fancy expansion tank (the city insists) and the safety valve is correctly plumbed down to floor level.  And the water is H-O-T hot!

     Yeah, it wasn't cheap.  But it was fast and involved remarkably little fuss.  No raised eyebrows at (or extra charge for) my preference for copper, no snooty lecture about temperature settings (unlike another plumbing firm I have employed), and no mess left behind.  The floor wasn't even wet.  (The floor drain is just a couple feet away -- props to the 1920s architect and builder, who put everything but the kitchen sink within a few feet of the floor drain: the water heater, basement laundry area and sink are under the ground-floor washroom.)  I knew the water heater would need to be replaced some day.  It turned out that day was yesterday.

     In February, I started receiving Social Security, which makes up for the nice raises I haven't got since 2008 ("Times are tough," they told us.  "Pass up your raises this year.  We'll make it up to you."  Somehow, times never got less tough afterward and us techies have never seen more than 1% in any year since).  I guess the Fates noticed.
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*  Estimator: "You know, that's about twice as long as they're expected to last."  I did not know.  I have never had to replace one, not in the houses I grew up in, not in houses I have owned and not in houses I have rented.  The only one I've seen replaced was at the North Campus, and the new one sat in the basement for months before it was installed.  From the smell of the hot water, I suspect mice made a nest in while it sat, but Building Maintenance doesn't believe my theory.  Fine, I've got an electric teakettle in the kitchenette.  (On second thought, I was involved in replacing one water heater in the late 1980s, shortly after my parents moved back to Indy and long after I was on my own. Dad had removed the old one and set the new one in place, but I'm the family go-to expert for soldering.  Home plumbing comes close to being exactly halfway between the big coaxial line I solder rarely and the small wire I solder often.)
 
† The weather has not been mowing friendly and the back yard has been thick with violets, white and pink Spring Beauty, yellow wild strawberry flowers and another purple-blue flower that may be Creepin' Charlie (Ground Ivy).  Call them weeds if you must, but the bees love them and I'm enjoying them too, though not quite the same way.  I'll have to get out there with a string trimmer, by and by.
 
‡ I'm not saying Indiana water is hard, but the old water heater was thumping and banging pretty good from the thick lime scale.  My glass-sided electric kettle goes from clear to opaque in a week of use, and vinegar's the only thing that'll remove the stuff.

It's Always Something?

     Last night, ten p.m.  My bedtime.  Tamara's washing her hands.  "Bobbi?  You might want to check the water heater."

     I did, Tam trailing after.  The pilot light had gone out.  It has never gone out by itself.

     You can call me paranoid if you like, but having lived in old houses with old appliances, one with a coal-converted-to-gas furnace best described as "terrifying," I will not relight a mystery-failure pilot light and drift off to dreamland.  That furnace, an old "octopus" large enough to climb inside, had a 30" gas-ring burner with a pilot light in the center, which exactly one (1) furnace tech in town would work on -- and in the other side of the duplex I owned at the time, the furnace had the same conversion with an even scarier blower setup, a wobbly 1930s squirrel-cage fan in the hot side instead of the external cold-side 1950s Sears job on mine.  Those furnaces would come on by hissing out gas for thirty seconds or more before starting with a "wumph!" you felt more than heard.  The possible failure modes were not good; the big combustion chamber was essentially a fuel-air bomb.

     Last night, I shut the gas valve.  This morning, I called a plumber.  He or she can check it out.  Maybe it's just the thermocouple that monitors the pilot light; they're designed to fail safe, shutting off the pilot valve even if the failure's in the thermocouple itself. That water heater is pushing twenty years old and if I can manage the cost, I wouldn't mind putting in a slightly larger one.

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.

Up For Debate

     If your rights are up for debate, they're not being recognized as inalieneable; the debaters do not think those rights are inherent.

     In Tennessee, there's a bill under consideration that would deny children in this country illegally the right to a public education.  ICE is conducting operations based on the notion that anyone in the country illegally is not entitled to due process of law -- and that they can"illegalize" anyone in the country on a student visa or "green card" simply by claiming they pose a threat to public safety or national security (or if they are found to have engaged in criminal activity or fraud).  Laws and Executive Orders in multiple states have barred adults changing the sex or gender marker on their ID -- and this applies not just to they/them boogeypersons with unusually-colored hair but to people like the late computer scientist Lynn Conway and electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos.  Bear in mind that "Real ID" driver's licenses and State ID cards require this information, and you'll soon need one just to board a passenger flight.

     All of these are examples of people whose rights are being debated -- not just in public forums but in legislatures and governmental executive offices, and while it is problematic in and of itself, if the rights of some group are questioned, the rights of everyone are under question, too.

     Within my lifetime, a single woman had difficulty opening a bank account, getting a credit card or buying a house; a married woman had to have her husband's consent, even to open an account solely in her own name.  Within the lifetimes of my grandmothers, women could not vote.

     When the rights of one subset of people are up for grabs, everyone's rights can be.  Maybe you believe you're safe.  Maybe you are -- but you'd be a lot safer if your inalienable rights were genuinely protected from the grubby paws of partisan politicians, stirring up division in search of power, and the only way that works is if those rights apply to everyone -- whitebread types happy near the statistical mean, weirdos, freaks, foreigners and criminals, even people who didn't vote for the same politicians you chose.