Month: December 2023

When I started college at the University of Minnesota I was sixteen. I was not ready. At an orientation session the speaker told the 1200 students assembled to look at the students on their left and right. “A year from today only one of you will still be here,” he said. I looked at my neighbors and thought “You poor schmucks, why not give up right now.” But a year later it was me that was gone.

The coursework was not the issue. I had been a good little high school student and had rote memorization absolutely down pat. Ask me a question and I could regurgitate pages of information without necessarily understanding what I was saying.

When I hit campus I was on my own, no one to tell me where to go or where to turn and it wasn’t working for me. I kept taking turns westward and walking down to the river road to breathe in the earthy pungency of the Mississippi River while I read poetry and imagined that I was the bastard soul child of T.S. Eliot and Anna Akhmatova, kept hidden all these years.

The university wasn’t going to reward my personal variety of independent study so I dropped out in early Spring.

This time I lasted less than six months before the river called my name again and I answered. Taking a year completely off finally cured me of those wandering urges and I began to buckle down and do the work. Never looked back.

And all the while, down at the Big Ten, this tune was in frequent rotation.

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I’ve got a problem. A couple of years ago I was introduced to a condiment that absolutely improved my life in the kitchen. When one adds a spoonful of this stuff to a soup, stew, chili sauce … a myriad of dishes … there is quite an umami kick.

I found it to be such a flexible and delectable ingredient and yet, in this entire time I have failed to get even one person to try it. It goes like this:

You like to cook? Well you really ought to try this the next time you make that stew.

What is it, then?

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New Year’s Eve approacheth. We have no plans. We usually have no plans. The last times we hosted parties everyone had gone home to bed by 10:30. If one is not drinking alcohol, the excitement of watching a mechanical ball drop or televised strangers displaying embarrassing behavior somewhere in the world palls a bit.

We could take up my grandfather’s practice and write 2024 on the pipe leading from the oil heater in the living room with a piece of carpenter chalk. If we had an oil heater, a pipe, and a hunk of blue chalk, that is.

New Year’s is really the only holiday affected by my living sober. In my family of origin it was the generally recognized excuse for getting inebriated, if one chose to take that route.

I have recollections of spending more than one New Year’s morning worshipping the porcelain god back when I was quite a bit more foolish than I am now. I miss those times not at all.

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We don’t make New Year’s resolutions here at Basecamp. Actually, if you are in a recovery program, you’re making them off and on throughout the entire year. Any goal that I set these days is a modest one, and has to be something achievable within a fairly short period of time.

Part of the reason for doing it this way is that my memory has made a shift from a remarkably reliable instrument to one that is barely worth squat, and if I say I’ll do such and such by twelve months from now, when that deadline rolls around I may not even notice it, much less adhere to an old pledge.

But you insist that I make at least one New Year’s resolution? Okay, here’s one I think that I can keep: During the year 2024 I will work very hard at improving the level of discourse here on the blog. I will do this by becoming as politically neutral as I can, and stop calling former president Cluck a malignant blowhard. Henceforth he will be referred to as the Turncoat in Chief.

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Robin and I spent Christmas in Durango this year. The weather was mild but there were enough icy patches that it took us three hours to cover the first 120 miles. While we basically have no snow on the ground here in Paradise, there was a thin layer on the other side of the southern passes.

I had a long talk with my friend Bill H. yesterday, who reminded me of times when my acrophobia caused some awkwardness in our travels together.

These days I am much more … I was going to say “comfortable” but that’s not quite right. I can now drive across the Red Mountain Road (also known as the Million Dollar Highway or Forty Miles of Abject Terror) in either direction without freezing at the wheel in a panic. I can even appreciate some of the scenery as I motor along.

This didn’t happen by accident. When we moved to Paradise, I found a small book on “curing” oneself of acrophobia entitled Overcoming Fear of Heights, and followed its instructions. Basically, they went like this:Walk out as far on the path as you can go until you just barely begin to feel distress, then stop and just stand there. Wait. If panic rises, go back two steps and pause there.

[Clicking on the link above will take you to a downloadable PDF of the entire book, if you know someone who might benefit from reading it.]

The advice has worked, although progress was by millimeters and not miles. There are places I cannot and probably never will be able to go, and I accept that. But I am not nearly the prisoner of geography and topography that I was when I first came to this country.

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Our pets have adapted to winter pretty well so far. It’s been mild enough that they can make short forays outside without too much inconvenience.

It was obvious that she needed emergency psychiatric help, so I tapped her just behind the right ear with the sap I carry for special occasions and self-defense. Gently loading her into the Subaru I took her to see Dr. Hermione Crock, who we keep on retainer. She’s not an MD, but a practitioner of ayurvedic socialistic humanistic opportunistic fairy dust quackalism.

Listening to my story, her august brow became so deeply furrowed that it began to trap lint from the atmosphere. She then raised a single finger and I was quickly subdued by two large and white-suited orderlies and whisked away to a comfortable room with the softest walls you’ll find anywhere.

“You can’t keep bringing your wife in whenever you disagree with her,” she said to me. “It’s just not done.”

It’s really not too bad here. Robin comes to visit every day, I was allowed to keep a crayon and some writing paper, and my only real complaint is that because I don’t have a belt my pants keep falling down. But they tell me that if I behave myself, I’ll be out in a fortnight.

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Yesterday afternoon I betook myself down to the stream that runs through our village, and put on the costume that on other person’s bodies might indicate a skilled fisherman, including waders and boots to keep a person from sliding about on mossy rocks. I then proceeded to vigorously flail the waters with my Tenkara rod and line while doing absolutely no damage to the fish population thereabouts.

There was a young couple upstream from me who were having the same luck, and were still enjoying themselves as much as I was. It was mid-December and the three of us were out there, with no shivering, no frozen fingers, no snow or ice … a complete absence of misery.

I wear sunglasses with Polaroid lenses when fishing, allowing me to cut through the normal glare on the clear water and see fish if any are present. I saw none at all. I have no idea where they went and why they weren’t on that particular stretch of water. I know that if I were a trout, that’s where I’d be, no doubt about it. It was lovely.

Walking around in flowing rivers is not the perfect milieu for a geezer. You know how it is to watch an infant who is just learning to walk? How they careen unsteadily across the room looking as if at any moment they will take a header into the furniture? I’m pretty sure that’s how I look walking in streams. Seniors like myself have enough problems navigating on dry and level surfaces, and our balance issues are magnified when walking on slippery and rocky-bottomed streams.

Yesterday I felt as if I were going to go in swimming … let’s see … about a gazillion times during my two hours on the river. Somehow that never happened, but I think that I am realistic in accepting that if I go out there enough times I will eventually take a cool bath.

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Biting The Hand That Feeds Me Department

Most of my posts over the years have contained at least one purloined cartoon from the New Yorker archives. That wonderful storehouse is an amazing thing to wander. Type in the name of your subject and be rewarded with the best that the art form can offer. I publish a handful of them here because I love them, and try always to attribute them properly, hoping to be given a more comfortable prison cell when the magazine gets down to prosecuting small-change thieves like myself.

But when I get to the present-day version of the magazine, I find nothing worth stealing. Every week I go through these cartoons and am saddened by how pathetic they are, how unfunny, how they are repeatedly guilty of terminal archness. The old guard cartoonists have died off one by one and been replaced by, I don’t know, unimaginative people who draw fairly well. Don’t look for the lovely dementedness of a George Booth panel like the one above because you won’t find it in today’s bland drawings.

So how ungrateful can an unworthy burglar be, to criticize the people he is stealing from? It’s an upside-down world my friends, is the only explanation I can offer.

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A Repeated And Enormous Puzzlement

Not infrequently I will order cole slaw as a side when eating out in casual restaurants. This, in spite of the fact that most of the time I will be brought a highly disappointing bowl of chopped and undistinguished cabbage that remains uneaten when I have departed my table.

I love cole slaw. It is a simple dish, requires no cooking, and asks very little of the preparer in order to be attractive and tasty. But over and over the words tasteless, insipid, plain, weak, unsavory, watery, thin, and dead come to mind as the first forkful reaches my taste buds.

It’s an affront of the highest order, and can mean only one of two things. Either the cook never tasted what they were sending out to the customers, or they did but didn’t care. Their eyes were on the main entrée and not on the sides.

The world of recipes available on the internet contains hundreds of formulas that one can follow to make excellent cole slaw. A few ingredients and no cooking skills are all that is required. We’re not talking Michelin stars here, just the most basic kitchen stuff.

I have begun to regard a limp and tasteless bowl of cabbage as an indicator, and marking the whole meal down as a minus score for the establishment.

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I am a morning person. More so every year, with my tendency these days to rise before 0500 hours. I never thought of it as something to be concerned about, the world was divided into early people and late people, and that was that. Until today, that is.

This morning the New York Times published a piece in their Science section that stated:

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What I will not do is get one of those DNA analyses that purport to show who dallied with who a few thousand years ago and eventually produced me. My self-image is fragile enough without having to accept that just because I like to rise early every day that my distant ancestor’s name was likely to have been Glurk rather than Olaf. 

However, the more I look at the photograph, the more I realize that the guy is a dead ringer for a second cousin on my father’s side.  He was a little slow in school but by God he could throw a spear like nobody’s business.

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‘Twas not always so. There were many years when there were emergency trips to shops on the afternoon of the 24th, plugging gaps in a doomed attempt to create the seamless fabric of a perfect Christmas.

It never happened, of course. Last year, for example, our guests arrived and within hours I had developed a febrile illness which I spread to several others before I knew I was ill.

Then there was the Christmas Eve a couple of decades ago when one of my children was stuck in Morocco of all places, as a coup was under way outside her hotel door.

Or when I was eight years old and I inadvertently tripped over the bicycles that Dad had hidden in a stairwell, and as I recall I received at least three undeserved swats to a tender behind before I could convince him that it was an innocent act on my part, and that I wasn’t trying to see what my present was ahead of time.

And yet I remain an absolute sucker for Christmas. For the stories, the legends, the traditions, the foods, the music. Especially the music. Robin’s tolerance for my playing the same tunes over and over during the season has grown a bit shorter over time, and who can blame her? Even I have a problem with hearing Jingle Bell Rock more than once a year.

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Those darlin’ congressional Republicans are just chunks of fun, aren’t they? They have just opened a congressional inquiry to see whether President Biden has done anything that they could impeach him for.

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Vignette #1

Spring day in Buffalo NY, 1972. I am out on the backyard patio at the gas grill. Behind me is my young daughter.

She says: What dat white tuff? What dat boo tuff?I am puzzled for a moment, and ask her to repeat her question.What dat white tuff? What dat boo duff? This time she points at the sky.

Then the answer dawns. The skies have been gray and gloomy for weeks on end. Today is the first day with blue skies and white clouds in months.

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You know how an odor can just snap you back into a room in your memory? I just had one of those. I was making yogurt this morning and lingered over the pot of hot milk that was being set to cooling until I could add the cultures. That aroma was linked to one of my mother’s remedies for nearly everything. Warm milk and saltine crackers in a bowl.

That concoction carried me through measles, rubella, whooping cough, mumps, and a host of nameless maladies. Obviously it worked, because here I am.

Since I left home and went out on my own, I haven’t used this amazing curative at all. Lord knows how much suffering I have experienced unnecessarily. I believe I’ll resurrect it during my next illness, whatever that turns out to be.

(BTW. Mom had two remedies in her arsenal. The other one was Canada Dry Ginger Ale.)

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Vignette #2

Thanksgiving Day in Buffalo NY, 1972. I am once again at the grill, having just finished doing the ceremonial bird out there.

I set the platter containing the turkey on the picnic table behind me and turn to attend to closing down the grill.When I turn back, our large Siberian Husky is standing on the table with the entire bird in its mouth.

Without thinking I give him a swat with the spatula I am holding and he drops the turkey back onto the platter.

I carry the bird indoors and we go on with the meal. Only I have the secret knowledge.

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Most of the people I know well in AA are looking for spiritual connections of one sort or another. Some are Christians who found that the straight ahead approach in their churches of origin didn’t help at all when they discovered they were addicts. There was a lot of being judged, a lot of bad advice given (just STOP, for cripes’ sake!), and a loss of the feeling they once had that there was a God and that he/she cared for them.

Nearly all of those whose recovery is solid have found a source of personal … power … for lack of a better word. I tend to believe that these strengths, this power was always present in us, and what happened was that we became able to access it. Approaches were unique to individuals, but the result was the same.

You admitted to being lost. You admitted having hurt others, and made resolutions to make amends to those people when it was possible to do so. You let go, and you emptied yourself. You began to meditate in one form or another, and replaced bad self-talk with a better variety. You talked about this process as it was going on while in meetings, and welcomed the stories of other members’ journeys, borrowing practices of theirs that seemed to apply to your situation. You kept coming back and sharing what you had in hopes that someone else might benefit from hearing of your successes and errors, and in this way you were aways polishing, paring, shaping your own internal life and thought.

Those simple acts were enough to bring me back to that moment, instead of doing what I had been doing which was rushing ahead in my mind to tomorrow … next month … next year … all of them absolutely uncertain, none with a guarantee.

But all I had to do right then was to accept the companionship that this small animal was offering, and not to try to solve the rest of my life in an evening.  Over and over again, the process was enough to maintain a smidgen of sanity and the rudiments of direction. With the passage of time, I began to see the truths in the Zen proverb:

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

If you are intrigued by this proverb, there is a really good article I can recommend: On Enlightenment: 3 Meanings of the “Chop Wood, Carry Water” Zen quote.

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I’ve started in on War & Peace, and I believe this will be the fourth time I’ve read it.  It’s an amazing novel, an all time favorite.

It’s quite a fat book, and thus completely unsuited to putting under the odd leg of a wobbly coffee table. It would, however, be great for throwing at intruders should the need arise. Used in this way I think the force generated would be similar to that produced by a brisk swing with your average truncheon.

There are quite a few famous people who think that War & Peace is the greatest novel of all time, which is an interesting thing to say, since there is no one on this planet who has read every novel. And even if they had read everything up until last week, there would be enough new ones published since that time to keep them so busy they wouldn’t have time to write book blurbs at all.

Since I am not an intellectual or a serious writer, I can’t comment on the writer’s art, the book’s form, or anything else smacking of pretensions that I know what I am talking about. What I can say is that each time I read it I was swept up in the stories and came to care about the characters too much to comfortably leave them behind when I finished my reading. Each and every time, I grieved a little that I was done with the book. ‘Nuff said.

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From The New Yorker

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When I was a lad one of my favorite things to eat was green olives. We rarely had them except at holiday meals. I recall one Thanksgiving that I sidled out to the kitchen hoping to score one more olive, but found the serving dish on full empty.

My spirits fell, and then I spied the bottle that the olives had come in, but there were only a few ounces of liquid in it. I stared at it, wondering … could a kid drink that stuff? Would the kid croak? There was no one around, and cautiously I raised the bottle to my mouth and took first a sip and then a great swallow.

It was delicious.

At that very moment my mother snatched the bottle from my hand exclaiming “Don’t DO that, there’s too much salt in it and you could get sick and you could just die!”

(At this point I should mention that this was my mother’s standard exclamation whenever we kids ate something-anything-that she would prefer we not ingest, which included many perfectly safe substances and foodstuffs).

Why tell this story now? Because yesterday when I retrieved a jar of green olives from the refrigerator, there was only one left, which I quickly and quite selfishly ate. But it was not enough olive for me for that particular moment.

I looked at the jar, with that couple of ounces of faintly green brine within. Checking to see that I was alone, I raised the bottle to my lips and swigged away for the first time in more than a half-century.

It was delicious.

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As far as I can tell, our federal government is presently doing everything it can to avoid governing. There are now scores of proceedings where one bunch is trying to unseat, impugn, impeach, or otherwise do harm to another individual or group. Too many to keep track of, really. This keeps them so busy squabbling that they can’t possibly have time to even go to the bathroom at proper intervals, which accounts for some of their irritability.

They seem to have completely lost their minds, at least the part that would allow them to do the people’s business. It has also become obvious that the word “impeachment” has lost whatever negative meaning it ever had, and now is about as important or useful as the airplane you made from a sheet of paper in the fifth grade and tried to sail into the hair of the student in front of you.

In fact, I can foresee the day when if you haven’t been impeached for something your status will be considered diminished, and people begin to wonder just what you are doing in Washington, anyway.

It’s enough to make you want to drink an entire quart of olive brine and kiss the world goodbye..

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From The New Yorker

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It’s only a couple of weeks now until the old guy in the red suit makes his rounds. We don’t go through the routine of chimney, fireplace, milk, and cookies. For one thing we have a hot water baseboard heating system, so it’s come in the front door or fageddaboudit.

One year I had the opportunity to talk with him for a few minutes as the sleigh was getting a stripped bolt replaced on a runner, and I asked him how it was to be still working when no one believed in him anymore.

He said: “First of all, there’s not 100% disbelief, but more like 75%. That’s really not so bad when you compare it to some others. Check out this chart I carry with me to refer to whenever I’m on feeling a little low.”

BELIEVABILITY PERCENTAGES

• Lawyers. <1%
• Parents. 10%
• Grandparents. 50%
• Monster under bed. 93%

“So you see, I’m not doing all that bad, really. Context, me bucko, context,”

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Livin’ large at that time of life when every Christmas there is at least one less friend at the table than there was last year. It’s a perfect time of life for a natural melancholic. When I was twenty and walked around brooding about things even I recognized that I was a fraud, and that I hadn’t lived long enough to be wearing such world-weary garments. But now there isn’t any need to pretend. I ran out of fingers and toes to count the rings on my trunk a while back.

One problem is that when you achieve geezer status, and have all that experience to share, no one wants to hear about it. The young can’t relate to anything emanating from something as ancient as you, and your older friends simply wait for you to take an in-breath and then they break in with their own stories before you can finish your own.

I find myself gravitating toward the wistful music of the world more than I once did. Not exclusively, but more often. Like this one.

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From The New Yorker

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As a general pediatrician, I was frequently called in to stand by at the delivery of a child whenever there was a possibility that the baby would need more than the usual support and care. Gowned, gloved, and masked I would stand over in the corner of the room by the infant warmer, making sure that it was ready to receive the infant. Since I had nothing to do when things went well, I stood there, hands clasped in front of me so I wouldn’t inadvertently touch something and contaminate the gloves.

After one such delivery where the baby was just fine and needed no help from yours truly, the exhausted mother was giddy and thanking everyone in the room for their help. At the end of her litany she said: “Oh, and thank you to the priest over in the corner for coming.”

That masked clergyman in the corner, of course, was me.

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Even though it’s not really about Christmas, and only mentions the holiday very briefly, I still have it in the corner of my poorly assorted mind as Christmas music. YouTube served this up to me this to enjoy on a December morning. One of Joni Mitchell’s beautiful tunes done beautifully.

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Tuesday friend Joe and I went fishing at Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park, near Ridgway. It was a bluebird day, temp in the lower 50s. Right now the river water flows are down at winter levels. I managed to do three things that morning: catch a nice rainbow, get a nasty aircast that cost me half an hour to straighten out, and come within a hair of dumping myself in the Uncompahgre River.

If it hadn’t have been for a convenient boulder that I fetched up against, my spirits would definitely have been dampened (the water is low enough that all that would have happened is that I would have become cold and wet and used up my curse word allotment for the entire month).

At one pool we could see 8 large trout just hanging out together in some slower water. Seeing us didn’t spook them at all. Nor were they enticed by anything we tossed at them, but for one moment when a trout the size of Jaws wandered slowly over to my fly, took it in his mouth, and immediately spit it out again. Too quickly for me to react.

I never take my camera/phone while actually out in the river. Eventually I know that I will make a misstep and stumble into the drink so I don’t carry anything that wouldn’t tolerate being immersed. Therefore, I haven’t any photos of my own of the river in this location, but here’s a handful that I borrowed from the web.

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Just got a seed catalog in the mail. An odd time of year for such a thing, you might say, and I’d agree with you. Since It’s snowing here and the temp is 40 degrees, it’s hard to put myself into an agricultural frame of mind.

I received it because I ordered two packets of seeds from them last Spring, from their website. After last year’s poor experience I wasn’t even sure I wanted to have a garden next year, but hey, mebbe I will.

Here are scans of three sample pages:

So if any of you would like to grow your own wasabi to clear your sinuses with, or cabbages that weigh 25 pounds, here’s the address.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

2278 Baker Creek Road

Mansfield, MO 65704

(Disclaimer: I get no remuneration from manufacturers of products that I might mention in this blog. Although several of them have offered to pay me money if I promise never to mention their wares ever again. Apparently they fear being associated in the public mind with substandard literary endeavors.)

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From The New Yorker

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And here it is, the full-bore, two-hanky weeper from Les Miserables that you might have known was coming, had you taken the time to think bout it. Here is Marius returning to the tavern where he had spent hours planning a revolution with his comrades, who then perished while he was saved.

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Finished trimming the tree, a fragrant little spruce of nearly perfect symmetry. It’s only six feet high, which suits the room just fine.

After this many years Robin and I no longer have any tree decorations that can break. All of those were swept into the trash long ago and gradually replaced with sturdier ones that are equally pretty. Tree trimming is so much easier now than when my dad would struggle and mutter each Christmas. The only things that are the same are the tree and the stand that it sits in.

Lights: our tiny but very bright light-strings never seem to wear out. Just put them away and take them out again next year. Dad had to deal with larger glass incandescent bulbs where if one burned out the whole string went dark. Which meant laboriously trying a new bulb in each socket until you found the right one. And each year several bulbs would go dead during the season. Which was where much of the aforementioned muttering came in.

Ornaments: nearly all were made of a sort of glass that if you even looked at one sideways it would break into exactly one thousand tiny particles. Each one somehow became invisible until the opportunity arose to stick itself into the foot of a passing barefoot child.

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From The New Yorker

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Driving around town one day this week I heard such a heartening story, and it was all about the fact that labor unions have removed themselves from life support and raised their banners once again.

I could not be happier. Ever since the handlers of Ronald Reagan told him to fire all the air traffic controllers back in 1981, large corporations have had things their own way, using the Republican Party as a vise to crush the unions in order to be able to treat their workers as disposable industrial fodder. I am not faulting the corporations here, it is what we should expect them to do when there are no constraints. They are not moral or beneficent entities.

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If we are going to reverse the race to the bottom, workers must have the right to engage in collective bargaining.

Bernie Sanders

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“Lili Marleen” is a German love song that gained immense popularity during World War II. The song’s history is intertwined with the experiences of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

The lyrics were written in 1915 by Hans Leip, a German school teacher and poet. Leip wrote the poem as a love letter to his girlfriend Lili, who was waiting for him at home. The poem was published in 1937 in the poetry collection “Die kleine Hafenorgel” (“The Little Harbor Organ”).

In 1938, Norbert Schultze, a German composer, discovered Leip’s poem and decided to set it to music. The song was first recorded by Lale Andersen, a German singer, in 1939. However, it initially received little attention.

The turning point for “Lili Marleen” came when German soldiers stationed in North Africa heard the song on the radio. It struck a chord with them, and they began requesting it frequently. The song’s popularity spread rapidly among German troops, and it became an unofficial anthem for the soldiers on the front lines.

Simultaneously, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) picked up on the song’s popularity among German troops and began broadcasting it as part of their “Soldiers’ Request” program. This ironic turn of events led to the song becoming famous among both Allied and Axis forces.

“Lili Marleen” became a symbol of the universal experience of soldiers longing for their loved ones during wartime. The song’s melancholic melody and poignant lyrics resonated with the emotions of separation and yearning. It transcended national boundaries and became a shared cultural phenomenon.

After the war, the song continued to be popular, and numerous artists recorded their versions in various languages. Lale Andersen, the original singer, continued to perform the song throughout her career. Over the years, “Lili Marleen” has become a classic and is considered one of the most famous and enduring songs associated with World War II.

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That’s pretty interesting, right? Love the story of how both sides adopted the song, and love the wistful melody as well.

Underneath the lantern,
By the barrack gate
Darling I remember
The way you used to wait
T’was there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me,
You’d always be,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene

Time would come for roll call,
Time for us to part,
Darling I’d caress you
And press you to my heart,
And there ‘neath that far-off lantern light,
I’d hold you tight ,
We’d kiss good night,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene

Orders came for sailing,
Somewhere over there
All confined to barracks
was more than I could bear
I knew you were waiting in the street
I heard your feet,
But could not meet,
My Lilly of the Lamplight,
my own Lilly Marlene

Resting in our billets,
Just behind the lines
Even tho’ we’re parted,
Your lips are close to mine
You wait where that lantern softly gleams,
Your sweet face seems
To haunt my dreams
My Lilly of the Lamplight,
My own Lilly Marlene

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BTW, if you want to play with ChatGPT, you start at the address https://chat.openai.com. It’s free.

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From The New Yorker

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Dressing for winter here in Paradise is not difficult. Your wardrobe need contain only a single light jacket and a rain shell. There is no need for feather-stuffed clothing of any kind. Our stores don’t even sell long-sleeved garments because there is so little use for them. Pajama bottoms? Boxer-style will do the trick nicely the year around.

I was lounging in shorts and a t-shirt on a chaise in the back yard last February when I was turned in my neighbor for violating a Stoney Creek HOA rule against indecent exposure. When I appealed the decision, the board informed me that in my particular case, any exposure was considered indecent, no matter how minuscule. But, I sputtered, I was not even close to being nude.

A visible shudder rippled through the members of the HOA board as they put together the concepts of me and being nude in their minds. Chairperson Parsnip Lively (bless her heart) turned mint green and Secretary Abner Thrushfinger looked positively apoplectic.

But that is life here in Stoney Creek. A little give, a little take, some indigestion.

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From The New Yorker

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Christmas approacheth. We prepareth. The fake tree is up on the patio, and the colored overhead lights are strung out there as well. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are in their places on a flat rock on the berm in front, having replaced Buddha, who spends the Yuletide in the garage.

We have a few items in the Christmas Village series that are on the sofa table. We used to have maybe twenty of those buildings but as our homes grew smaller and smaller we doled them out to family members.

Robin thinks we ought to put up stockings for the cats. I chimed in that those would really be for we humans, because the kitties care not a farthing for them. Cats not being impressed by surfaces, but only by what’s inside.

Nevertheless, it’s very possible that there are pet stockings in our future.

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Every once in a great while surprises pop up where you least expect them. For instance, earlier today there were four salted almonds left in a bag in the pantry. Now the foursome and the bag they were in is gone. Robin has eaten them all.

You know about the principle of choosing which battles to fight? In this case I chose to remain silent, even though I was down one almond that I was probably never going to get back.

Takes a big man to let stuff like this go, but …

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From The New Yorker

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Friday the House of Representatives was going to vote to expel a Big Liar. Panic set in when the Republicans discovered that they had forgotten which one of their number was going to get the boot. The problem being that there were so many potential candidates.

After hours of rending of garments and tearing of hair they had still come to no conclusion when George Santos walked through the door of their caucus room.

When asked where he had been he answered: “I’ve been doing the people’s work, meeting with the Democrats on climate change, immigration, and trying to find a way to reduce deaths from firearms.”

You could hear a sigh of relief pass thru the assembled GOP members. They had their man.

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