It’s still not quite finished, but this year we finally arrived at a point where I can finish it. There were a few years recently where the liner solution was looking real sketchy. That’s a done deal now, with a proper finish epoxy coat coming in probably spring ’23. It just took a few years to get the base built up enough to give it some physical integrity.
Recent year’s medical bullshittery is now water under the bridge as well. My body has recovered from the hip surgery malpractice as far as it’s ever gonna get. Struggling through the liner process spring ’20 almost finished me off. Suddenly losing the ability to do heavy labor was a difficult transition. It won’t take much to grind off the mess and re-seal after the liner is completely finished in another couple years. All that’s left to do before then is just moving small stones as I complete the masonry around the flowerbeds. I can manage that no problem with frequent breaks.
There’s around 40 goldfish in there now. Half are the old veterans in the 6-10″ range and the other half are new 1-2″ babies, born in the basement planters last winter.
Had to get my first seasonal helping of the Cubano at Snarf’s last week. I think this may be one of the biggest reasons I like that place: Reasonably sane people. I’m still not getting the whole transgender controversy – not to mention homophobia or whatever negative religious connotation blows your skirt up over that topic(s).
I’m still waiting for somebody to tell me exactly what percentage of all aspiring high school athletes in this country just happen to be transgender. Must be a whopping .05% or less. And the number who actually want to try their newfound sexual orientation on the track or field? Insignificant doesn’t even cover it.
But it sure makes a hot topic for scamming politicians eager to garner attention from their shrinking base of bigoted holy rollers. The legislative waste of time and money is just another Repuglican fool’s errand.
Anna almost got her first squirrel the other day, but they’re getting harder to hit with a clean head shot now that the leaves are out. These mutts were wiggin’ when I parked at the UPS store with the biggest squirrel I’ve seen in awhile sitting in the tree right outside the truck. That thing was about the size of a small cat.
Somebody left that gaslight turned on in DC. Apparently Trump supporters remaining in government continue attempting to whitewash his treasonous depravity. How the devout cannot feel grievously insulted is beyond me. How the authorities can get away with publishing a re-framed account of an obvious, video-graphed event like this is beyond the pale. Are the unemployment statistics preventing another crop of firings from within our subverted government?
Is it real? Or just a figment of your gaslit imagination?
Texas has taken on an unusual level of interest to me lately for a number of different reasons. Our oldest daughter Phoebe, now lives in the small town of Mason. Texas suffered some of the worst pandemic consequences. And they have risen to share a large amount of the political angst presently gripping the country. It’s alot to unpack. But Jeff Goodell did a great job connecting the dots in a Rolling Stone article last January.
Climate change motivated me to make a big investment in solar a few years ago, and to start contemplating my 1st emissions-free vehicle. Read the article and learn how the planet is reacting in a wholly unified, predictable pattern. These closely related things stand in stark contrast to the attitudes of people and politicians who recognize only their own selfish interests apart from and literally in denial of the environment. We are all in this world together, breathing the same air. Willfully ignorant or not, things are changing with or without our consent or awareness. It’s just that same old thing about the difference between the mistakes made by smart people and dumb people.
“In Texas, the first state to hit one million Covid cases, better disease surveillance would not have changed anything. People were practically dropping dead in the street from the virus, and still you could walk through a medium-sized town and not see a single person wearing a mask. Texas governor Abbott clashed with mayors and county judges over their authority to shut down businesses and enforce mask orders. The people who suffered the most as always, were poor people. people of color, people without health insurance – people on the margins of our high-tech fossil-fueled society. In the end, pandemics are a political problem – not a scientific one.”
The planet’s gonna be just fine. It’s the inhabitants who might have a problem.
It’s hard to say where the country is headed at this point, but if a Chinese plot to thin the herd with SARScoV2 was the plan, it appears to have failed to get nearly enough aged Repuglicans in this country.
“Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”
…and give the repugs something to think about in prison.
Civil Rights activists are blocked by National Guardsmen brandishing bayonets while trying to stage a protest on Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968.
It rained hard yesterday with more coming today, so this year’s Memorial Day general suck factor is fairly un-changed from last, for me. The big things I’m continually reminded of are how terrible I feel about most everything going on in my life and the country, in general. Remember all the dead military members who fought for what?
Fuck the GOP, Trump supporters and all things Repuglican.
Stumbled across this draft from sometime last year. No idea who/where it came from, so don’t hit me with the plagiarism label because I never finished synthesizing this cut ‘n paste idea. Seems more apt now than when I started putting it together:
“You correctly capture the intensity of hatred, but you completely and absolutely miss the mark as to why the respective parties make those statements.
Democrats didn’t go batshit absolutist simply because Republicans are the other team. This goes deeper than that. Trump is uniquely horrible, he’s verifiably done uniquely horrible things. I know you know this to be true.
There is some cadre of Republicans who are as tribal as you say… they’re against Democrats just because they aren’t Republicans. But they also say things like “Trump’s done bad things, but Hillary did worse, or she would have done worse things.”
When you ask them to explain “worse”, the responses you get point to things that simply aren’t real (qanon, “post-birth abortions”, or rank hypotheticals “we’ll become Venezuela”, or things that simply reveal an immature concept of “bad” (but her emails).
Tribalism exists, and it’s a factor, but it’s a big error to pretend it works the same way on both sides. It’s another big error to omit the fact that Trump supporters believe in a constructed false reality. They simply believe things that are made-up and imagined.
Having said that, I’ll contradict something I wrote above. Now, 3 years into the Trump presidency, many Democrats indeed have categorically written off Republicans. But it’s not, as you seem to think, because they’re Republicans. It’s because they’ve marched in lockstep to all the crazy, cruel, and delusional bullshit Trump has dished out over the past 4 years. They have proven themselves to be bad-faith governing partners because they are uninterested in governing society as a whole. They have shown themselves a pirate crew determined to loot wealth and power in the interest of preserving their own supremacy. This isn’t something I’d have said in the pre-Trump era, but it’s something they’ve demonstrated through complicity with the Trump crime racket.“
Hickenlooper, circa 2011: “We have to protect the children!”
Anonymous Staffer: “Tax revenues are projected to exceed a $Billion in 3 years.”
Hickenlooper: “Oh, OK then.”
Guess we’ll just have to accept that greed worked out in our favor this time.
Since 2012, when voters in Colorado passed Amendment 64 and legalized the first adult-use, recreational marijuana market in the U.S., the state has surpassed $10 billion in total sales.
…is just beautiful – at least the hill country of Mason county is, fer sure. I got to see maybe .001% of the state on the way down there last weekend. Maybe another .002% tooling around Mason for a few days, but it must’ve been the best part of the whole state, from what I saw. There are of course small towns everywhere all across the country. But I doubt many are real small towns the way Mason is.
