Red Leaves, Red Eyes

Yesterday could not decide what it wanted to be. One minute it wanted to be sunny; the next minute, it was raining. No sooner had I moved a rack of laundry onto the patio to dry than it was "chucking it down," as the British say. So the laundry is drying inside and the dehumidifier is on full-blast.

I guess I need to start using our dryer again. I usually stop over the summer and just air-dry everything, and the dryer -- being the ventless, condenser variety -- doesn't get things very dry anyway. But a rack of damp laundry is far preferable to a rack of wet laundry.

So, yes, I did laundry. I watered all the plants and re-potted my prayer plant, which I usually keep on a windowsill in the library. One of our maintenance guys, a plant enthusiast himself, took the liberty of repotting it in an incredibly ugly purple plastic pot, and between you and me, he did a very clumsy job -- the plant was so deep in the pot that some of its leaves were covered with dirt. So I brought the whole thing home and did it over in a clay pot, and I'll just keep it here. I'll take his pot back to the library. Yes, I am a control freak, and he meant to be helpful, but I mean, it's MY PLANT.

I also did some gardening, filling a yard waste bag with seasonal trimmings.

I succeeded in plowing through a New Yorker, featuring a fascinating article about an Austrian woman who, in the early '70s, spent months in a group home for children that was really a Nazi-inspired psychological experiment. She had all these dim memories of cruelty and hardship and hadn't really explored them, and the article followed her as she opened that Pandora's Box.

I also read Adam Gopnik's review of Heather Cox Richardson's new book, which dissects the strains on our democratic system in the era of Donald Trump. One of Gopnik's sentences, paraphrasing Richardson's ideas, stood out for me: "The crisis of Democracy in America is a deep-seated current of racial resentment that has now become a torrent, with Trump a mere bobblehead doll bouncing along in its wake."

YES! That is absolutely true.

When Barack Obama got elected in 2008, a substantial portion of the USA (and the world) celebrated, believing we'd turned a corner on our racist past. I know I did. But another portion of the country was shocked -- and subsequently infuriated -- that a black man, and a black man far more articulate and educated than they were, was now president. They've never gotten over it.

As I've mentioned before, I often read right-wing news outlets to try to understand what people are thinking, and perhaps the steadiest current running through a lot of reader comments on those sites -- in addition to a healthy dose of anti-Semitic, anti-gay and John Birch-style anti-communist rhetoric -- is an absolute and visceral personal hatred of Obama. In fact, a lot of the fury directed at Joe Biden is really meant for Obama. They believe Obama is still running the government, and call Biden Obama's "third term."

So, yes, based on what I read in Gopnik's review, it sounds like Richardson is on point.

Interesting that those same racist right-wing factions can be supportive of Clarence Thomas. But then, Thomas isn't challenging any of their beliefs or asking them to reconsider their views. He's just giving them what they want.

Last night was very quiet. We watched TV -- the second episode of Netflix's very Halloweenish "The Fall of the House of Usher." Dave isn't feeling well this weekend -- his eyes were super-red on Friday, which we first put down to allergies. But one of his co-workers urged him to see the school nurses, and they suggested he go to the doctor to check for conjunctivitis. The doc agreed that's what it is, so now Dave is dealing with eye drops, but he also has fatigue and other symptoms that lead me to suspect it may not just be conjunctivitis. I'm hoping I don't get it, as pink eye is notoriously contagious.

(Photos: Virginia creeper, like Dave's eyes, is now at its reddest!)