Why It Happened

I remember the argument that started it quite well. I've told an abbreviated version of it several times over the years, using it as the main reason that I hate to cook. Yeah, me the 4-Her who made bread 6 loaves at a time, learned to cook, can, bake and a whole bunch of those necessary skills like sewing a woman needed in order to care for a husband and family. I won ribbons at the fair for that bread, one of my two 4-H trips to the State Fair. But that argument spoiled all that. These days I'm happy enough with popping a frozen dinner in the microwave most of the time, or getting take-out or even opening a can of soup. 

I mostly didn't let myself remember the other consequence of that argument. There just wasn't a need to remember, and some need not to.

We'd been married for over a year at that point, living in a duplex in South St. Paul, me working for Ma Bell since I'd let Paul talk me out of continuing college after only completing two years, despite having earned a full tuition scholarship for four. There was a whole lot I didn't know about the world at that time, about myself, marriage, what made good or bad relationships, or alcoholism. Those things had never come up in family conversations. I was great at what was taught in school, clueless about much of life. Turns out, it mattered.

My role at the time was to both work and keep the house. Paul made more money, and that was always his mark of who was important in the family. Everything in the home had to center around his needs. It didn't matter whether I got enough sleep, so long as he did and was fresh to go to his job in the morning. This also meant he needed to have supper ready when he got home. Of course I had to be the one to make it. I didn't realize there was a problem until that argument. I didn't know I had options either. By then, I didn't even know I had much worth, because the school stuff I was good at wasn't part of my life any more, and I was being schooled regularly on how useless I was in everything else.

I'm one of those people who discovers some particular food I like, and that is an incentive to repeat making it somewhat often. I was always discovering new foods back then, having gotten away from my Mom's somewhat limited repertoire. Since starting college I'd been introduced to steaks that weren't fried grey and tough, mushrooms that didn't come in a soup can, lobster, shrimp, Cornish game hens, and more. If Paul liked something, it was even more incentive to prepare it frequently - or so I thought. That particular night I made a dish from a new recipe that we'd enjoyed the week before. It was some kind of chicken casserole with rice, tomato based and with Italian seasoning. More I can't tell you because I never made it again, even threw away the recipe. Paul started in on me about as soon as he looked in the pan to see what it was. I was supposed to know that he wanted something different, without any clue from him as to what that might be. Liking it once didn't mean he wanted it again.

He continued through dinner. It was too late to cook something different, after all. He kept going while I was doing dishes. So I excused myself to go use the bathroom. It was sanctuary, and more.

I had a history of migraines since puberty. I would later find out they pretty much vanished with my first pregnancy - the wonders of hormones! (I would also learn that my nearsightedness followed the same schedule.) But at this point I'd been seeing my doctor trying to find something better than aspirin for the headaches. I dimly remember something useless called fiorinal. Darvon also did nothing. The next offering, what was in that bathroom that evening, was valium. I don't recall it did much for the headaches either, but I knew it relaxed me. So I went in and took two, then returned to the kitchen. Paul wasn't going to quit listing all my faults, so after another few minutes, I excused myself and went and took a couple more. I figured if I couldn't get away from him, and he wasn't going to go away and/or shut up, I could at least care less. Somehow I needed to find a way to get it all to stop, and if he wouldn't leave, I would. Within about half an hour I had taken 7 of them, and the effects were starting to show.

He actually noticed! I think perhaps I stopped answering his demands that I agree with him about how awful I was. Next thing I remember was being in the hospital being barraged with questions about what I'd taken and how much, and feeling a tube going into my nose to pump my stomach. (I knew what that was because when I was five I discovered how yummy children's aspirin was with its orange flavoring, and the bottle was left on top of the dresser where I could reach it.)

For the next two days I did a lot of sleeping in the hospital. They sent a counselor in thinking I'd tried suicide. It wasn't a suicide attempt, though I didn't get the feeling anybody there could make the distinction. I only planned to remove myself temporarily from the situation. They sent a nun in to talk to me and I recall just rolling over and ignoring her, rude as that was. Her talking to me wasn't going to help the problem. One conversation I clearly recall was one of the nurses explaining to me that I had actually taken a dangerous dose of valium. I only wanted to sleep, and while I knew it was a muscle relaxer, she had to remind me that the heart was one of those muscles. Oops!

Somehow, somewhere, Paul got enough of the message that he quit haranguing me for a while. We had agreed that when I told him I needed him to head outside for a walk until he cooled down, that he would actually leave for a bit. I had to remind him of that, but he left and whatever the subject had been that time around, it was dropped when he returned.

We never told anybody what had happened, though I worried about what might be in those hospital records for years. We left the area, started a family, moved a couple more times, and eventually divorced. The hospital quit being a hospital a few years after my stay, and I quit wondering if it would ever catch up with me and just how. Eventually I stopped even wondering that, and now might not even think about it except every dozen years or so.

But I still recall how that argument started.

Deeper Dive 2: Rich's + My Results

It's a learning curve, alright? First, I had to make a phone call to CRI in order to be able to pull up Rich's results. I couldn't figure out how to access his, ordered at the same time, though mine were simple. Turned out all I had to do was erase a bunch of stuff at the end of the URL for my results and go back and replace the number 1 (for my kit) with a number 2, and his popped up. I quickly bookmarked that spot so we could access that quickly again.

Part of the reason this took so long was my phone wasn't reliably working. After a lengthy call to T-Mobile - using Rich's cell - and after they checked the satellite, offered several times to let me verify myself by them texting a 6-digit number to a phone which wasn't working, in their hopes of my repeating it back to them, then passing me up to someone more knowledgeable who also didn't get the  part where my phone wouldn't receive texts, finally settling on email verification, it was discovered that 1: my sim card was ancient so they sent me a new one FREE!!! and 2: the local tower was undergoing some work for the last few days - coincidentally the same days my phone wasn't working. For some reason the first "helper" couldn't access that information. We got my phone back in order the next day. 

Whew!

The other part was figuring out - CRI, not me - that kit 2 was just a URL cut/paste away.

Rich's results were a tad different than mine, and ultimately just the same. First, there is no Native (North) American in his father's line. So it's verified that's another of Paul Sr's wild stories. However, there are a whole lot of ancestors who popped their DNA in the family lines over the centuries. Sure, we're both 90%+ European, whether it's Northern, Northwestern, British Isles, Iberian or Tuscany Italian. In the timeline, Rich popped up with a few new ones, Sri Lankan Tamil, Vietnamese and Bengali. However, I finally explored further in the advanced results and found out that we both have ever-so-slightly different percentages - more like tenth-of-a percentages, in nearly all the same origins. They just show up in different generations back, or not at all in the timelines. For some reason, they could only trace Rich back 35 generations, as opposed to my 75. Not sure how important that is, as nothing popped up in my timeline that far back which wasn't already there much more recently.

Here they are, by categories, each category in order of highest contribution, each piece within also ranked highest to lowest, my percentages first: 

90.3 / 90.4% European - Northern, Northwestern, British Isles, Iberian, Tuscany Italian

4.3 / 4.5% AdMixed American:  Peruvian, Columbian, Puerto Rican, Mexican

3.8 / 3.4% South Asian: Sri Lankan Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati Indian

Now the tiniest of differences show up: 

1.3 / 1.3% East Asian: Japanese, Southern Han Chinese, Chinese Dai, Kinh Vietnamese, with Rich adding Northern Han Chinese

0.3 / 0.3% African: Esan in Nigeria for both, African American added for me. (Hey, does the one drop rule still count with those crazy white supremicists? And have they tried this level of genetic testing? Whooo-eee, the surprises they could have in store! Maybe we'll all finally get around to defining ourselves as members of the human race, eh?)

 I still haven't decided whether the differences between Richard and myself or the similarities surprise me more.

The last new exploration was maternal and paternal haplo, those lines passing from mothers to daughters or fathers to sons. I had them test Richard's sample, knowing it would also provide my haplo results, along with giving the kids better understanding of theirs. (Hey brother Steve, get your test done to get the Maxson male line. CRI is advertising a Black Friday sale, hint hint.) The maternal mitochondrial line (H1) goes back to Kenya, group MT-eve. From there it traveled to Sudan, becoming L3, then Armenia becoming N, then Iran becoming R, then Saudi Arabia becoming RO, then South Turkey becoming HV, then the Near East (northern India) becoming H, finally ending up in Spain, becoming H1.

Rich's paternal haplo - coming through the Rosa line - started with an Adam (Y-Adam) in Cameroon. No major surprise, but the males traveled much more than the females did. From there, they went to Chad (A), Niger (A1), Lybia (A1b), Malawi (BT), Ethiopia/Sudan (CT), Iraq (CF), India (F), Pakistan (K), SE Asia (K2), Southern China (NO),  East China (P and P1), Kazakhstan (R), Iran (R1), and finally Turkey (R1b).

Looking these over, neither line crosses the other, i.e., nobody has the same region of origin anywhere along their lines. We all met in Minnesota.

I wish there were some indication of when these travels happened, especially the jump from Turkey to here. Are all the ancestors with the modern origins from further spreading up into Europe? And how did the AdMixed American ancestors pop into the equations without leaving haplo traces? Did the earliest Italian ancestors arrive in the Roman Legions and tomcat around as the powerful do? Does the AdMix American come from Conquistadors intermingling and returning to Europe with offspring? Any of that Chinese follow Genghis Khan across to Europe? There was raping in all that pillaging, folks. Perhaps something more consensual as well.

I still need that time machine, folks!

The Deeper Dive: CRI Genetics

I did the Ancestry.com thing a while back. Got the anticipated results for myself, bit of a letdown on the part of my kids, aka their father fibbed again, eh? Anyway, after hearing how far back these new guys went in DNA tracking, I decided to take advantage of one of their sales.

The results floored me. 

They report origins by which generations back they show up in your heritage. The first several generations pretty much abide by the family lore. European all, either western or northern, but primarily from the British Isles. In school I recited my heritage as Irish-English-Scottish (OK I said "Scotch") -Welsh-French-German-Danish-Swedish. Really fast, as though commas didn't exist. I had wondered as I got older and learned a bit more history whether the tales of the Scottish side's wandering after fighting with William Wallace and facing the consequences by fleeing and changing the family name meant that there actually was some Irish in the family tree because they stopped there for a while, or whether the Scots clustered together, inhabiting Ireland without inter-marrying.

It's real Irish.

Really, that stuff wasn't a real surprise. The REAL shocks started in the 4th generation. I'm part Fin. OK, I can see where the Danes and Swedes co-mingled throughout the greater area during Viking raids, but only 4 generations back and nobody knew? That isn't all, however, for that generation. Try Southern Han Chinese, as recently as 1870 - 1930. Seriously? Those traits sure are hidden in my blond hair, blue eyes appearance. When something this oddball pops up, I have to wonder who knew what, who said what, who kept the secrets. I mean, there's a long history of bigotry and white pride in those older generations. Pretty cool addition, though.

Fifth generation: the expected plus now add Peruvian! Somewhere around 1845-1905.

Sixth generation adds Iberian and Tuscany Italian.

Seventh generation, more of what we've already seen.

Eighth gives nothing new.

Ninth throws another curve: Gujarti Indian.

By ten, there's so much Iberian popping up I start to wonder if that came along in the part we've always referred to as the French ancestry. Maybe the Italian as well? We need a time machine here, folks!

Eleven  is the generation with the next big surprise: Japanese! Never saw that one  coming. Nor the Punjabi.

Twelve shows the fun's not over. Let's add Colombian, shall we? Mind you, these are cited with such a place on such a chromosome, and are listed as 99% accuracy. We get a little more Peruvian there, lest we are tempted to forget it's there, Gujarati Indian as well.

The next surprise waits until 17 generations back: Puerto Rican. 18 adds another ancestor from there, and 19 goes back to more Southern Han Chinese. We're still doing the British and Northern/Northwestern European all through here, so at least some of my ancestors seemed to have stayed put, still located back 75 generations ago.

Punjabi pops up as far as 22 generations ago, Tuscani Italian 23, Peruvian 35, and Puerto Rican 51.

Here I used think it was interesting that I could trace ancestors from 8 different locales. Now I'm wishing I could track a whole lot of the unexpectedly interesting world travelers from as far back as 95 - 155 AD!

Next, once I can access it, I'll examine Rich's results, get their father's contributions. We know there's a lot of Norwegian in there, but he often told of a French ancestor who "took himself a wife" up in Canada from one of the First Nations people. There was an old family bible which kept track of generations, including a name change from Rouseau to Rosa. One entry of interest documented a wedding without listing a name, as phrased above, with the rationale that no heathens would ever have their names put in the bible!!! There was even an old photo-equivalent on the wall showing a large family where the presumed wife/mother was dark skinned. So I want to see if this new test can settle the questions debated among remaining family members.

"New Math"?

I was feeling lazy. Normally I do sums in my head, or maybe pencil and paper if it's complicated.  I could have walked to the hardware drawer in the kitchen and gotten out the little calculator. But, lazy. Mentally and physically. So I just hit Google and entered the three numbers with a + between each and followed by =. I got the answer instantly.

Google also told me it was the first of 22,200,00 answers! When I grew up, there was only one correct math answer. Was that because it was back before "new math"? Or is this just an indication for why half the country works from "alternate facts" these days?

For the record, I was adding the different amounts for our modest remodel of the kitchen. Steve wants a dishwasher so badly he's been saving up enough to pay for it. Since that's the case, the countertops are getting replaced as well. The old broken dishwasher was installed after the 1961 house construction, which we know because there is a lumpy seam in the counter over it with a slightly different color from there to the wall. We've lived with it. After all, it still works, and there's still a bunch of ugly in this house. If we could have afforded prettier.... Well, we're basically just grateful to have a house, paid for. It would have kept the rain off our heads if there were such a thing down here. Google didn't offer my budget 22,200,000 housing options, after all.

Queen Of Chaos

Warning! If you meet her.... She calls herself Sara. In her late 30's, early 40's, she wears scraggly bleached blond hair, drives a red SUV circa 2005, and is accompanied by a little blond yap-dog, called "Baby Girl". Her "line" is showing up after a garage sale which hasn't cleaned everything out, saying she goes to swap meets and is looking to partner with somebody who has the merchandise for her to help sell. They'll split the proceeds 60-40, not bothering to mention whose share is the 60. Turns out neither is, because, after coaxing you into continuing your garage sale a few more days, she'll disappear with an incomplete ledger of sales and most of the proceeds from what is recorded in there. As well as whatever she can steal while she's in your house looking for what else can "go out to sell".

Let's back it up a week or so. The first weekend in November, Rich coordinated with the neighbor across the street to hold simultaneous garage sales. Both did fairly well. Problem is, Rich still had two more sales worth of merchandise. I had an unusable carport, patio, and could barely navigate a path through the lanai to take the dog out to the back yard. Which was - is - also a mess, by the way. I'm still waiting to turn the yard crew we hire loose in it to deal with a dying - or damaged - pine tree as well as clean up all the pruned branches from my last few weeks out there, and blow out all the accumulated leaf litter from the last year.

So when Sara turned up, talking partnership and connections and locations, Rich saw a solution to those problems. Besides, it's the only income around right now, and he/we insisted on mask wearing by prospective customers. Nearly all complied. 

The first day Sara showed up, Rich walked a mask down to her car for her. She rarely wore it. That was my first strike against her.

The second was her yap dog. Sara needed to use the bathroom, so Rich asked could she come in. Reluctantly, I said yes. Our pandemic rule has been nobody comes in the house. The whole 25 minutes or so she was in there the dog yowled as though it was being tortured. Imagine trying to watch TV or read to that background! The third strike came shortly afterwards, when I went to use it. She's one of those people who a: lines the toilet seat with toilet paper, and b: walks away without bothering to remove said paper from either the seat or floor. GAG! She was requested through Rich to find an alternative. For the dog too, whose entry into the house disturbed Heather Too so much she refused going through the lanai to outdoors with predictable results to have to be cleaned up from the rug. Mine to take care of again, of course.

I tried to simply avoid Sara. I could stay inside and in the back yard, she and Rich "owned" the carport and front yard. It was going to be for one day, Wednesday, for a sale, then Thursday would be packing up and taking things away for a Friday swap meet. Of course, she was totally scatterbrained and disorganized enough that he dubbed her Queen of Chaos. If only that were all of it! Resulting events make me think it might just be a ruse to encourage you to dismiss her.

I got talked into allowing the sale for another day, with Thursday evening being when the remainders were to be hauled off for the two of them to take to Friday's swap meet. Late afternoon, Sara loaded up her car for the "first" trip. We haven't seen her since.

Irritation started eroding trust, so Rich began the hunt for her ledger of sales and cache of proceeds from it. First the ledger listed less than Richard made in a single sale. Even of the puny recorded income, most of it had vanished with Sara. Then the real problems started piling up. The most valuable items which hadn't sold had vanished, carefully picked out and squirreled away during those times when Rich was occupied or in another location, or tucked in with other things she was loading into her car "for Friday's swap meet.". 

She'd come in and raided the lanai of his more valuable items as well. He'd come in and seen her going through his things, not sale things, and told her to quit or take off. Later going through the piles he'd seen her handling, he discovered many of his personal things missing as well. In a later conversation, I asked him who had paid for the supper that had been cooked outside the patio in the little Weber grill. He had, adding that she had offered to buy supper the next night "after her food stamps had come through.

Yes, I know it's not called food stamps now, but I forget the jargon. Anyway, her allotment was supposed to come through the next day, and she offered to pick up the tab for that next night's supper. Of course, it "didn't come through" on time. As soon as he told me that, I called "Bullshit." It comes in credit on a plastic card, renewed automatically each month on that date so long as the recipient qualifies. It's as regular as social security. At this point in our conversation Rich admitted it was then where he should have started questioning what was going on.

Steve and I privately questioned later whether he has some kind of invisible sign on his forehead which says "Mark." He tries to be useful and helpful, and usually is. We think a certain kind of person reads that and takes advantage.

Friday turned into a day of packing up stuff to get hauled off to a thrift shop close by that sends its proceeds to support education. First, however, customers were still showing up, and Rich made enough to likely cover the actual cash Sara made away with. Not that he could replace all the stolen items of course, but his mood lightened somewhat. By Saturday things were lined up in rows inside boxes and crates for loading in the car. I had promised him I would happily drive him for however many loads it took to get rid of the stuff. Our last load arrived 10 minutes after they closed for the day, so tomorrow we'll head out in the morning and dump off a load  packed to the roof of the car. 

There will still be clothing to sort through, into categories of toss, donate, and how-did-Rich's-clothes-get-mixed-in-here? Some of the shelving and whatnots Rich used to organize and display sale items well be coming back into the house to help store Rich's possessions in the tiny space he's cramped into.

I'm hoping he'll be taking our strongly worded request to find himself some other way of supporting himself, hard as that is these days. Some of the stuff he brought here for sale was accompanied - or should I say occupied? - by bugs of the blood loving kind. Heather Too is getting her flea control to kill off any of those that find her tasty. We're not sure whether it's totally fair to blame the bed bug infestation on him, but he deserves full credit for some very stubborn lice. Those have gotten so bad out in his area that he's taken to shaving every hair he can find off his head and body so the nits have no place to cling to.

(I need to sneak up and take a picture!)

He does have one comforting thought about Sara. He thinks he witnessed her absently scratching herself in a very familiar way just before she took off. Likely she picked up something from going through stuff that wasn't ready for sale in her hurry to scarf up anything she could lay her hands on and stuff in a pocket. He hadn't gotten around to telling her what the hazards of such unanticipated misbehavior could be.

Tee. Hee. Hee.

Proud "Boys"?

 Seems like an oxymoron to me. I mean, if they are really proud, wouldn't they call themselves the Proud Men? Chronologically, most of them look like they have hit the age where males are called men. I sincerely doubt they recognize how juvenile they are acting, threatening tantrums if they don't get it all their way. And only they are supposed to be the ones getting... whatever.

Hey, you think if they grew up and became men to be proud of, they'd get whatever it is they think they deserve to have handed to them?

Perhaps their spelling is a bit off, and they are telling us they are proud of their toys, all that body armor and those long semiautomatic weapons substituting for what they don't have. 

They seem to be screaming, "See me!" Women don't appear to, see them that is.  This is a guy's club, so a lack of women can be ignored while they get together, suggesting it is their choice that only males are around.

Then again, perhaps they are showing that ironic streak of honesty. These people are just boys, however large their bodies. Just boys. 

Dangerous ones, however.

Replying To The IRS

Backstory:

About 3 weeks ago I got a letter from the IRS. They were requesting another copy of the information supporting my income on my Schedule C. Translation is my income from club sales of my jewelry from last year. Last year was a good one, just a hair over the mandatory reporting $600. Reading between their lines, they misplaced my 1099. I know I sent it to them because all my tax info goes into a single envelope and I only had state and personal copies left. I did fill in the bare minimum of lines on the Schedule C, my name, etc., amount earned, no deductions because 1: it was too much bother, and 2: I didn't need them because I didn't need to pay any taxes. In fact, the income is so low I didn't even need to file. However, this was back when "everybody" was saying on the news that those of who are retired needed to file because they wouldn't be able to find us for our $1200 stimulus checks. Considering who our president was at the time, it didn't seem too far-fetched that they couldn't figure out how to follow our SS automatic deposit checks and send the stimulus checks the same way.

Call me a cynic.

The reply:

First they wanted some information, nevermind most of it was already on the other side of the same sheet of paper. My name, SS#, just redundant silliness. I guess they are too busy to flip the page? OK, I filled them in. Number of pages I was faxing? Zero. They are reading this from the mail and can't figure that out? Phone number? check. Hours they could call me on it? That needed some commentary: "Anytime I'm near my phone, since women's pants pockets don't hold the things." Hey, that's as precise as I can get. I didn't bother mentioning that if I'm in the club or similar buildings, the phone is cut off the grid. Not smart phones, apparently. Just mine. They can leave voicemail. Or send another letter. (Good luck with that.)

They left a little space on the bottom of the paper, so I added a little bit more.

"I'm sorry you lost my original copy of the 1099. Perhaps if you quit refusing to let us use staples or paper clips, it might quit happening. I apologize that this (State) copy is less legible than the original, but if you still can't read this one, perhaps you can go to the original that our club sent you. They do still do that, don't they, so you can be sure we taxpayers aren't lying?"

I had tried to make a xerox copy of the state version, but the copier mostly left the blanks just that: blank. Cost me a quarter to find that out. And as for the originals sent directly to the IRS, it works for banks and everyone else, so I'm just assuming if they were really interested, they'd have access. Then I went on....

"I did not fill in all the blanks on my Schedule C because 1: it was too much work and 2: I didn't need to. My income was so small I didn't need to pay taxes, and wouldn't even have filed except "they" were all over the news telling us we needed to because otherwise you couldn't find us for the $1200 stimulus checks. I wanted to believe that you were smarter than that, but I'm beginning to wonder what else you can lose track of." Then I signed it.

It did wind up being more than fit in the bottom margin, so I had to write in an arrow to where I finished higher up along the right margin.  Do you think they can find that?

Am I wrong to hope they have a sense of humor? Oh well, I still don't owe any taxes.

Numbers

That's all we've been seeing and hearing these past few days, right? So you're sick of them, right? Well, these aren't those numbers. Time for a little change of pace.

Let's start with some good news, the number 6 I got in the cardiologist's office this morning. I love their scale. It's surrounded by a walker for those of us who sometimes have issues with balance. It's also got the long horizontal bars that have weights hanging from them, sliding from notch to notch. No guesswork as to how accurate it is, no needing somebody else to get your weight because it's reported in metric on an electronic system. When it balances, that's you.

I started at the usual place, that particular set of 20-pound notches which never changes. Except today it did.  I was 2 pounds more than that notch a couple months ago, last time I stopped in. Adjusting, I started sliding the other bar up the 1 pound notches. WOW! A quick little bit of math, and I'm down 6 pounds! This keeps happening, even though either I think I'm gaining and I stay the same, or I think I'm gaining and I lose a bit. It's not so much I'm actually trying to lose, but the activity level has increased - just ask my back yard and my sore legs at bedtime keeping me from dropping off - and I'm back to counting carbs (more) faithfully, now that I have a blood sugar meter. Neither is counting calories, it's just life happening. Still happening.

Now for a new number: 2. I just ordered two baby plants of the kind I thought I'd bought about a week ago. However, it had a single bloom. One tiny little all-yellow bloom. Still not what I wanted, though I'll keep it in its spot along the back fence. When it gets really going, those little blooms will bring in bees. Possibly hummers, but for sure bees. However, since I'm still looking for that very specific plant, I went online and found a grower. Right down in Benson, AZ. You know, home of Kartchner Caverns, a must-visit living cave. They ship in special plant containers, and guarantee to make good if shipping causes damage, provided you send them a picture. Just in case, I ordered two. There's another space on a different side of the fence where something as big as a pair of them can flourish, given enough prior work. Now, I thought I was done with all the digging and watering and planting and fencing to keep out rabbits. Apparently I was wrong. Again! 

I won't give you that number, though.

Instead, here's another number: 3. While planting those orange-blooming aloes last week, I realized that my ponytail palm needs a companion in that spot on the north side of the house. The other one is doing great, while the one under the front window - same side, more sun due to different roof configuration - is suffering from sun blasting through the summers. It's too big to move now, and I'm happy to start small and let a new one grow in the better spot. They will become a pair of taller accents among the aloes. So I went to a garden center looking for ponytails. Sure they had them, as trees! But hey, 50% off sale on large trees now, so only $150.00! Not only too expensive but completely unwieldy. So, since I was heading there anyway, Wallmart. After persuading an employee to unlock (!) the plants section, none were on offer. They have previously supplied several in the past, just not now. So, yet another garden center, where I had a choice between $75 big ones, and $13, 4" pots of multiple trunk babies.  Well, the babies, of course. Right now they are soaking up water, with planning anticipated next week.

That's because of another number: 2. Our rabbits are so greedy down here that they eat even these, and even after they are well grown. So I need a chicken wire cage for it. Not "2" you say? That's because the other cage will host the plants being shipped. However, currently all our cages are hosting other plants, so I need to get out in the yard and uncage another established plant in order to spread the joy. I just did that with a plant that came home years ago with white blossoms rather than purple, and half died this summer. It is currently about a foot tall, with branches cluttering up the yard next to it, but their removal allowed the cage to be slid up over the remains of the plant for this other use. As for the seriously pruned plant, Mother Nature will decide if it survives.  I don't care. It was spectacular when it bloomed once - two days before a hail storm. You know, back when we had rain and stuff. It also played host to a very tall weed for a couple years, growing straight up out of its center, impossible to remove or kill. So yes, I'm holding a grudge.

The other bush I need to uncage really needs pruning as it's struggling to support what grew last year before it quit raining. It won't get such a severe clipping, so there will be a lot more physical work involved in removing this cage. Apparently that will do me some good. Aside from new sets of puncture holes in my arms, of course.

So far these have all been pretty small numbers. Let's jump to some bigger ones. For a modest jump, let's start with 11. You may recall months ago I was recording and blogging about covid numbers. Just because I quit hassling you with them doesn't mean I quit recording them. No, it's been a daily habit, keeping track of several sets in columns in a multi-page (now) file on my desktop, each day's changes. One of the incidentals was watching where Arizona stood in relation to other states in terms of highest case counts. A while ago we were 7th highest in the country. Then we gradually got surpassed by other states. Today we slid down to only 11th worst. Our daily counts are starting to climb again, but we've had plenty of days in the 3-digits of new cases. Too many others are doing as badly as 4,000+ to 8,000+ daily cases, and have overtaken us. Maricopa County instituted a mask mandate months ago, and our cases dropped and held relatively steady. Until just these last few days. While we are increasing our daily counts like everybody else, we're just not as bad right now. Arizona's relative ranking, from when I first noted it, changed as follows:

6/28: 10th   7/5: 8th   7/9: 7th    7/20 8th    8/16: 7th    10/7: 8th     10/19: 9th    11/4" 10th    11/6: 11th.

I follow Minnesota counties where my kids and brother live. Hennepin numbers started getting recorded after George Lloyd was murdered and the BLM movement spread. I was curious how the protests would affect case counts, and at first they didn't, much. Now it's going crazy there, 40,559 cases, 1016 deaths, but I have trouble pinning it on the protests because the numbers took so long to rise after that. Beltrami county started rising once summer tourism took hold, along with their death rate at a faster rate than many other rural counties with similar case numbers, today at 1154 cases and 13 deaths.  Chisago County held steady for so long, but now is jumping way up there in cases at 1561. Surprisingly, the death count is still sitting at two.

The latest numbers I started tracking were after the cases for the country started their recent dramatic climb, following all those super-spreader Trump events. Recent analysis by those with more information than I have directly linked the steepest rises to those events/locations. Here are my recorded U.S. daily increases, starting with October 28, as reported by Worldometer, which I have always trusted to have the best information available:

10/28:  91,630    10/29:  104,831     10/30:  101,461    10/31:   86,293    11/1:  71,321    11/2:  88,905   11/3:  93,947    11/4:  106,453    11/5:  118,204   11/6:  132,540.

Remember how Trump said those cases would just magically disappear on the 4th because the libs were lying about them to get votes? Yeah, me too.

Holding My Breath

It's election night, USA. At nearly 7PM mountain time, results are starting to trickle in. Pundits are finding ways to keep trickling what passes in their minds for information on these results, while we, the voters, hang on the results.

I can't stand it. It's too important, and nothing anybody says now without a time machine that can see ten days in the future has any meaning whatsoever. It's all speculation, a way of keeping our eyes glued to their particular screens in hope of getting the results we need to see. It's the horse race. It's always been the horse race. After being unable to call out the lies, the cruelty, the grift, the voter suppression, the relentless crimes of all sorts over the last 4 years, it's suddenly needful for them to make up for it - as if! - by giving us their play-by-play as a last ditch effort to make themselves relevant.

As if.

300,000 mail-in ballots sit in post offices all over the country right now, despite DeJoy being ordered by a federal judge to get busy and make it a priority to find and deliver all of them on time. Lets have news about warrants being written in affected states to arrest him and all others for defying the judge's order. From a state level, a certain resident of the White House can't counter with a pardon. That's the kind of news which would give me a reason to watch election coverage tonight.

I really don't care, tonight, just which categories of voters in which areas have voted in which ways. That analysis can wait, useful for planning the next campaign, but not so much tonight.

Trump is behind his "unscalable" new barricade surrounding the White House tonight. Supposedly this will deter rioters. After seeing coverage of the sections being put in place, I had two questions. It's pretty easily put together. Isn't the converse true? And even if not, has everybody forgotten about ladders? OK, let's make that three questions: what rioters? Businesses are setting plywood barricades around their properties with expectations of looting. Already? Before any real results are known? If patterns follow this summer, it will be Trump's minions doing the looting, and with months of his encouragement behind them. "Stand back and stand by" simply asks them to wait a bit, not cease and desist.

This is not the America I grew up in. This is not the America I want to see. Previous elections have been easy to watch, results more trusted, and whatever voter suppression there was remained fairly well hidden. Politicians worked with each other, compromising and becoming friends. Now it's war, and the country, our democracy is at stake. 

I just can't watch yet.