My Country 'Tis of Thee

Well, the unthinkable has come to pass, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed as the USA's new health secretary. I really did not think it would happen. I thought just a handful of Republicans -- particularly those with medical backgrounds or moderate tendencies (like Collins and Murkowski) -- might oppose him. But no! It turns out the only Republican with any integrity is Mitch McConnell, who helped enable the Trump administration in the first place and now seems to be having sudden pangs of conscience. Too little too late, Mitch.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service has stripped any references to transgender people from its page dedicated to the Stonewall Inn and the uprising there in 1969 -- even though transgender people were a key component of that event. Talk about rewriting history. It's positively Soviet.

All my life, I have believed in the strength of the American system of government. Checks and balances seemed to ensure that nothing too wild could or would ever happen. That was the genius of our Founding Fathers, right? Even the dark days of George W. Bush and his war on terror, when we tortured and incarcerated people indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay without trial and I was left with the feeling that I didn't know my own country -- even those days didn't seem as perilous as this. With Congress as Trump's lapdog, the only checks and balances we have are the courts. They are pushing back valiantly, but you gotta wonder what's going to happen when Trump, with his apparently endless reserves of money, litigiousness and bile, appeals any contrary decision to the Supreme Court.

Trump and his minions insist those pesky judges have no right to stop him. He's the president, after all! Apparently he failed civics, if he ever studied it.

And while Trump continues to lay claim of ownership to Gaza, imperiling the release of Israeli hostages (who he really doesn't care about and in fact would rather see not released, giving him and Netanyahu a green light to continue exterminating the Palestinians), I note that the right-wing media outlet I peruse doesn't report his Gaza comments at all. His MAGA followers don't like this Gaza idea, because they don't see it as "America First," so the right-wing media response is to simply ignore it.

I don't want to seem too pessimistic, but it does seem like we're in uncharted waters and about to smash ourselves on a reef. I have no idea what's going to happen. Meanwhile I have friends in Washington who are losing their jobs or, if they're lucky enough to still be employed (so far), are sifting through agency grants and policies for problematic words like "justice." It makes my head spin.

I know, I know. Resist. Believe me, I'm resisting in whatever way I know how. I'm putting my money where my mouth is with donations. Just the other day I bought a "Gulf of Mexico" t-shirt in a vain attempt to resist Trump's ridiculous rewriting of our global map -- a minor form of resistance, to be sure, but it's something. (The shirt is being delivered to Dave's parents in Florida, where I hope I'll be able to wear it without being killed.)

In other news, unrelated to Trump, I purged my iPhone of photos. I'd stacked up a ridiculous quantity of photos over the years -- about 2,600 of them since 2017 or so. I winnowed them repeatedly over time but they still felt overly burdensome for my phone's operating system. They were all backed up elsewhere, so on Wednesday I deleted about 2,000 of them, giving me a much more reasonable library of pictures that I might actually want to look through. Of course, Olga is in at least half of them.

I just realized, seeing the date, that I penned this political screed on Valentine's Day. Sorry about that. Not very celebratory of love, but I send you all a virtual hug anyway.

(Photos, both taken yesterday: A glass-block sidewalk panel over a shop basement on Finchley Road; a brick wall in St. John's Wood.)

Skunk, NAFO and Another Moment

Here's another dewy plant in our garden -- an aquilegia that's just sprouting. More signs of spring and new growth!

I think my computer is biting the dust. When I started it this morning, after it nursed at its charger all night, it promptly died. I got a "low battery" notice but when I clicked on the icon, it said the battery was at 98 percent (although I also got a "service recommended" alert). Anyway, I can't do much on battery now, and the speaker is shot, and a lot of the letters are worn off my keyboard, which looks hilarious. I've had this machine for nine years and it's had heavy use. I think its time has come.

I probably won't deal with that until we come back from Florida. I have enough on my plate at the moment.

Yesterday afternoon was quiet in the library and I finally got some things done that I've been meaning to tackle, like updating our database usage statistics. Doesn't that sound exciting?! Woo hoo! I even had a chance to respond to blog comments and catch up on some blogs.

I expect more of the same today, though I have a couple of projects I want to work on, like cleaning up our resource lists and collections in our catalogue. (Sometimes when a class does a certain project, we put together a list of books for the students to draw on as resources, and those lists tend to stack up in our computer even if the class never does that project again. They must be manually cleared out from time to time.)

You know how I'm always intrigued by stickers I find around town? Here's one that's a bit mysterious. What on earth is NAFO? And what is that creature that looks like a fox with Donald Trump hair?

Well, according to the ever-reliable Internet, NAFO stands for the North Atlantic Fella Organization, an "internet meme and social media movement" that arose after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's meant to counter Russian propaganda and support Ukraine, and its symbol is a Shiba Inu dog, which is somehow related to the Doge meme. I think I'm too unhip to really understand how all these things come together, but at any rate, that's what we're dealing with.

Speaking of being unhip, I walked into the library yesterday and smelt a distinct skunky smell. I thought, "How did some animal get into the library?" I wondered if a fox had invaded the building and left its mark somewhere. But then a co-worker came up to me and said, "Did you smell the marijuana when you came in this morning?" Oh, is that what it was?! Now I once again understand why some people call it skunk. Why the library smelled like marijuana I could not tell you, but I assure you I was not involved.

Finally, here's another item from my archives -- a 12-second "Moment of Zen." Back in 2011 I uploaded a video of light changing on a wall over a period of about two minutes. In my days of Zen practice, this is the kind of thing we'd notice while meditating facing a wall -- the patterns of light shifting and changing. I suppose I was trying to convey some of that meditative tranquility. I took the video above on the same day, as a first attempt. It's too short, but if you need a quick Moment of Zen, here you go.

Crocus and Citrus

Another crazy day yesterday. I just do not have "normal" workdays anymore. There's always so much to do -- now that I've taken on half of the duties of my former colleague, whose position has gone part-time -- that I'm streaking from one thing to the next. On the plus side, I got in 14,480 steps according to my Apple health app, so maybe I worked off that chocolate horror of a donut from the day before.

I forgot to mention our biggest news from Monday, which is that we once again have a door on our kitchen cabinet. Remember when it fell off last August? Well, I reported it to property management, but nothing was done until late January, when the property inspector visited and raised the issue in his report. Suddenly, the door was scheduled for repair. Whatever it takes, I suppose.

As you can see, things are happening in the garden. We have a crocus coming up (above) and the buds on the daffodils are yellow, though none of them have opened yet.

Also...

...the stolen citrus tree, which is currently spending the winter just inside the back door, has produced an anemic little fruit! I don't fully understand this tree. It produces white buds which never seem to open into the kinds of citrus blossoms that I remember from my years in Florida, and somehow it occasionally manages a meager little fruit like this. But I doubt the fruit (which I think is a mandarin orange) will ever reach a size suitable for eating or any other use. We shall see.

Dave and I finished "Shrinking" on Apple TV, and even though some of the characters are a little too clever and thus a bit annoying, we're looking forward to Season 3. We also started the third episode of the new season of "Severance" last night, but we've realized we have no idea what's going on. It's possible that we both fell asleep for a portion of the first two episodes, so I think we're going to back up and start the season again.

Finally, while I take a certain amount of pride and satisfaction in blogging every day without fail -- I like to think of myself as a constant in an inconstant world -- I can't hold a candle to this woman, who has written in her diary every single day since 1936, and is still going! (That link is to The Washington Post, which has a pay wall. I am posting it as a "gift article" because you should then be able to read it, but you may have to enter an e-mail address or somehow register with the site. I'm not sure.)

Ten Across

When I got off the tube in West Hampstead the other day, I saw these shoes sitting forlornly beside a bench. Did someone take them off, switch into fancier footwear, and then leave them behind? Maybe they ran to catch a train and then, just as the doors closed, thought, "Oh no! My shoes!" Or maybe they left them behind on purpose, wanting to get rid of them. Another urban mystery with no solution.

I ate this yesterday, and I'm not proud of it. Not long after I got to work, a colleague called me on the phone and said donuts were available, courtesy of our school's parent group. So I went to check them out and found a variety of heart-shaped confections from Dunkin Donuts including this one with an Oreo on top, and Oreo filling. There's really no way to make a donut nutritious, but this one threw caution to the wind! And so did I.

And here's a career first for me -- I was a clue in a crossword puzzle in the school paper!

Ronald Reagan's Dolphins, and a Cat Named Bob Dylan

I didn't leave the house at all yesterday. The weather was grim -- damp and drizzly, cold and cloudy -- so I stayed inside and read "The Wager." I also did all my usual minor housekeeping and plant maintenance. And I dug around a little more in my photo archives.

As it turns out, it's very difficult to tell whether all my photo CDs have been moved to my hard drive. But everything I checked had, in fact, been moved, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

Above is a piece of street art I found in Brooklyn way back in 2007, depicting leaping dolphins in a circle around Ronald Reagan's nose. Here's the original Reagan photo, a pretty famous one. I'm not sure what the art means, if anything, but it's visually intriguing, isn't it?

And this is me, on the roof of our family home in Florida in 2007. Every once in a while we'd have to climb up there and rake the leaves off the shingles. Otherwise they'd pile up and my mom was convinced (probably correctly) that they'd rot the roof.

And finally, here I am in New York City with two other bloggers in 2007. Some of you may remember Reya, in the middle, who had a couple of blogs including The Gold Puppy, named after her beloved dog Jake. She hasn't blogged for about ten years now, but she posts regularly on Facebook -- which I suppose is blogging, in a way. She can still be found in older comments on my blog, and in some of my posts like this one about our blogger May Pole gathering in 2008.

And on the left is Janine, whose blog Tangled up in L'Heure Bleue was a combination of personal writing, Bob Dylan fandom and perfume reviews, with photos featuring her cats. Some of the cats -- one of whom was named after Bob Dylan -- even had their own blogs, as I recall. I used to hang out with Janine a bit but I haven't seen or heard from her in years.

You know, it's interesting -- the 2000s seem to collapse like a telescope when it comes to the passage of time. The year 2000 seems not that long ago, doesn't it? The '70s, '80s and '90s are very distinct decades in my mind, but the 2000s are a muddle. I don't feel like fashions have changed much, or that life is all that different now than it was a quarter-century ago. We now have AI and streaming television, but that's about it. Maybe the years seem to streak past more quickly because I have now lived so many of them.

Anyway, that was a blast from the past!

Today, back to work -- but it's a light week for me. Thursday and Friday are parent/teacher conferences so the kids aren't in regular classes, and though I'll be at work, there won't be much to do with no kids around. Wednesday is only a half day. Woo hoo!

More Memory Lane

Another old picture, this one from July 2011, the month we moved to London. I don't think I ever blogged it before -- at least, not that I could find. I don't remember where it was taken. Maybe Notting Hill or Queensway, near the flat where we were moving.

As you can probably tell, I spent part of yesterday looking through more archives. I'm trying to make sure everything that is on a CD has been moved to a portable hard drive, because how long are those CDs going to be accessible? I already have to borrow a CD player from work to read them. Pretty soon even that will be difficult.

Here are two more photos from the beginning of July 2011, right before we left the USA:

We drove first to Michigan, where we left our furniture to be sold and put some stuff in storage in Dave's parents' basement.

Here's Dave at the home where his family once lived on Grosse Ile. The funny thing about this picture is, they didn't live there at the time it was taken. They'd already sold it, but as I recall we went back to pick up an old bathtub from the garage. Dave's father wanted to install it in one of his rental properties. While we were there Dave apparently felt the need to water the new owners' garden. Why he did this is a complete mystery to me -- maybe the plants were looking desperate. And what's that that tripod on the lawn behind him? Looks like something that would be used by a land surveyor.

And here I am in Saugatuck, on Lake Michigan,  where Dave and I caught the local Fourth of July parade. I remember this only because I blogged about it. I don't have that shirt anymore but I liked it -- I got it at the Bridgewater Commons mall in New Jersey. Lord & Taylor, I think, or maybe Bloomingdales.

It's kind of fun to root out these old photos that I'd completely forgotten about and show them the light of day.

What else did I do yesterday? Well, I read about 75 pages of "The Wager," which is really good. It's been fun to enjoy some non-fiction for a change. Reading about the perilous life of a seaman in the 1700s -- the lice, the typhus, the scurvy, the ever-present danger of falling overboard or getting tangled in the rigging, the rats, the filth -- makes me appreciate the luxury of my own life now. We don't know how good we have it, honestly. Just a couple of hundred years ago people lived truly hellish existences. (And still do in some places on our modern planet.)

Dave and I also went to the 50th birthday party of one of his co-workers. She had a little gathering at her flat in Lisson Grove, near St. Johns Wood. And when I say "little gathering," it was still too big for her microscopic flat. But we had fun and it was good to get out and socialize.

One of Dave's co-workers asked if I was still walking around the city with my camera as much. I said no, I haven't been, that I've been taking more photos with my phone these days. "They're almost as good as the camera photos," I said.

"But is it as satisfying?" she asked. And I thought, hmmmm...that's a good question. "No, it's not," I said. And maybe that's an aspect of photography that I've been missing lately -- the ability that the camera gives me to control more of the exposure. Something to think about. (It doesn't mean I will strap on the ten-pound camera and lens bag any more readily.)

The Past is Never Dead

Because I'm sure you all don't want to read another post about shelving books and other library activities, how about a little trip down memory lane?

I went digging around in my digital archives last night to try to find some writing I did years ago that I thought I might be able to turn into a post. In 2006 or so I wrote a lot about my childhood and my life, partly because I'd gone to a therapist who encouraged it, and partly because I was hypochondriacal and convinced I was going to die (these two things are not unrelated), and I wanted to write down all my stories.

I was thinking specifically about a time when I "ran away" as a little kid, and went meandering aimlessly through my neighborhood until someone came and got me. I was sure I had written all that down and wanted to refresh my memory.

I got briefly distracted when I found the much more recent photo above, from May 2015, featuring Olga as a graceful young lady (!) watching Dave come into the living room. We'd just moved into this flat the previous summer, and I'm struck by how empty the place looks compared to now. And doesn't Olga look robust?! She was only about five years old then. (She got up with me this morning but now she's back in bed as I write this.)

I also found this picture, which isn't even mine -- it's something I took off the Internet because we used to have cups just like these when I was a kid. As I recall, I sold sets of them in 1978 or so as part of a school fundraiser for the marching band. Or maybe for the Boy Scouts.

Anyway, we wound up with a set and I have never forgotten them. My brother and I still talk about them. I have no idea what happened to ours, but similar cups are still available on eBay and other resale sites. I'm sure bazillions of them were made. They're very '70s.

I finally found the writing I was looking for. Here's a snippet:

The Central Florida that I knew as a child has disappeared from many areas. Back then, it was already suburbia, but sparsely developed. There were pine lilies in the vacant lots in autumn and vast tracts of palmetto and scrub. The road in front of our house was unpaved white limestone marl. Quail ran across our backyard in a single-file line, and mayflies blanketed the windows in spring.

The sunlight, the coarse grass, the pine needles, the fire ants. The sighing of the wind in the pines. The stinky, decayed smell of the muddy lakeshore. All of it is so deeply embedded in me that I feel like part of the land – I feel like the tannins that darken the water in Lake Wisteria are flowing through my veins. I may be part alligator.

A few paragraphs later:

(My brother and I) went “camping” together one day, packing our little school bags with slices of white bread and jars of water. We walked to the end of the road. Then Mr. Betz drove up and told us to go home, that Mom was worried, and so we did.

That's it?! Not quite the memory I have now, which is that I walked not only to the end of the road but to a distant part of an adjacent road, and that my brother wasn't with me, and that I was not "camping" but running away. But I may be conflating two different incidents, neither one particularly significant or eventful. I thought I'd written more. Oh well.

This is not my picture, but one my brother took last November while attending a remembrance for my mom at the church we grew up in. (And thus, also related to my childhood and this post!) I had no pictures of the sanctuary and I asked him to get some, having spent many hours staring up at those stained glass windows of Jesus, which at the time were shadowed by the fronds of a palm tree planted outside that back wall.

I suppose I'm thinking more about Florida now that I'm preparing to go back there in a week's time. One of the tasks my brother and I have planned is to spread my mom's ashes near where we grew up.

Anyway, thanks for indulging this rather disjointed trek down memory lane. As William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."