Some things I liked about 2022

This is a blatant rip-off of the post John Scalzi did over at Whatever.

If you're gonna steal, steal from people who you know do good work.

Right?

Anyway, I've never done one of these "year-in-review" sorts of posts before. Mostly because I've been looking forward rather than back; work-life tends to make you do that. You're pushing to stay ahead of the bill-collectors and corporate reviews and colonoscopies (okay, well, maybe not colonoscopies; those, like the occasional sudden sneeze, just sort of catch you) and all the other trouble in the world.

But this last year was different.

For one thing, I finally stopped being a wage-slave and having to strain to look forward.

Being a geologist-for-hire was a huge part of who I am - who I was - for thirty years. I did science for a living and put in a lot of long, hard days outside doing it. Shit, if you go to this website my front-page bio even says that: "...analytical by training and doggedly hard-working by necessity..." That was me.

Now?

Well...I'm still who I was then. Still analytical, still liberal, still...well, actually more judgemental, but that may have to do with the appalling tidal wave of reactionary shitheels that you can't swing a cat without smacking or so it seems.

But I've already gone into that. This is supposed to be about things I LIKED in 2022.

So. 

Retirement. 

I've liked being retired. At least so far.

I liked the lab work, soils testing, the sort of bench-chemistry-index-testing science we learn in school.

I liked the analysis, the puzzle-solving, the looking at the ground and the soil and the landforms and trying to figure out what was going on.

But because the bulk of my work was dirt-nanny stuff? Nagging asshole contractors to do what they low-bid and are trying to slime out of? That's the daily bread of most of earthwork engineers, and sweet baby Jesus how it sucks. Sucks the fun right out of all the other stuff.

So. NOT having to do that? I like that. And it makes up some for no longer having the disasters and lab and analysis to do.

So retirement? I liked that.

The Portland Japanese Garden

As you can probably tell from the photo essays, I love the Garden; the peaceful order, the quietly tended "nature". The colors, the light, the shape and the weight of it.

Membership in the Garden lets me get in early, when the City around it is still and the pathways are empty. I get to stroll and think, watch and reflect, and I like that a lot.

And speaking of Japan...

Anime and Manga

For some reason this past year I've been sinking deeper into the world of Japanese graphic art, whether in written form as manga - 漫画 - or animeアニメ . 

The Girl shares my enjoyment of the animated form; over the last year together we've enjoyed the big-screen versions of a couple of Studio Ghibli classics - The Cat Returns and Howl's Moving Castle - along with perhaps the most visually gorgeous film I've ever seen, Belle.

The story? Oh, just the old "beauty and the beast" chestnut. Fun enough, and the story of Suzu, the "belle" of the title, her friends and family, is genuinely sweet and moving. But that's not the main reason to watch.

It's the graphics.

Amazing.

My taste in the dead-tree forms runs all over the place, from dystopian futurism like Ghost In The Shell to sweetly adorable yuri romances. I think I've mentioned my fondness for the goofy adventure/military/fantasy Gate: Where The JSDF Fought. 

Rory Mercury?

Yow.

My favorite from 2022, though?

Sweat and Soap.

It's a weird, weird, deeply weird premise; the female lead, Asako, has "hyperhidrosis" - meaning she sweats more than she thinks is "normal" - while the male lead, Koutarou, has an incredible sense of smell which he normally uses in his job as soap designer but which leads him to Asako...who smells delicious! At least to him.

I picked it up purely out of curiosity; the storyline seemed odd but the artist (Yamada Kintetsu) has a nice clean style and I'm a sucker for that.

But that didn't catch me. 

What caught me was how it turns out to be a true, sweet, and moving love story.

True in the sense that these fictional people are deeply flawed, as are we all, and that they meet and become a couple in a very weird way...but one that finds goodness and joy even in their own and each others' flaws.

It's just gentle and kind and very, very romantic.

And speaking of romance...

First Night With The Duke

I follow a shockingly large number of comics at the "Webtoon" site, but this was far and away the most delightful; a goofy, funny, exciting, bizarre little story about an ordinary Korean girl who wakes up inside the romance novel she's reading but not (as is the usual form of these "isekai" (異世界) stories) as the heroine or the villainess.

She's just "Ripley", a minor character at the party scene where Zeronis - the titular Duke and a classic manga "dark and dangerous" hero - is supposed to meet the heroine and fall for her.

Instead Ripley gets plowed and ends up in bed with the Duke, who becomes obsessed with her instead of the woman he's supposed to fall for.

Oh, it's waaaayyyy more complex than that. There's fake deaths, and mad suitors and actual love and it was just big crazy fun. I'm sorry it's over, and I'm hoping that maybe the author will release an English language version, because I'd love to re-read it; it was my Top Romance Story of 2022.

And speaking of even more romance...

Everything Everywhere All At Once

I've been a Michelle Yeoh fanboi ever since her Hong Kong action days. But she, and this wildly inventive film, were perhaps the best thing I've seen at the movies not just in 2022 but for many years.

She's, well, everything all at once; mom, wife, diva, artist, businesswoman, savior of the world...while all the time being the same struggling everyday person just trying to get through one more day that we all are.

It's action and adventure and comedy but y'know what?

It's really a love story.

Yeoh is a woman who is tired. She's tired of herself, her husband, her daughter, her dumpy little laundromat that is her whole life. She's tired of struggling through every day just to find another just like it. And she is terrified to find that there's worse; the actual no-shit end of the world - worlds! - that only she - tired and beat up and struggling - can save.

And she does. Because deep down, she loves herself, her husband, her daughter...she loves the whole world enough to fight to save them all.

It's an epic performance in a terrific flick. 

It won't win Best Picture and she won't win Best Actress. 

It's too weird, and she's not diva enough.

But they should.

The Portland Thorns

God but this was a fun season. Winning the title was pretty awesome; I liked that, duh. But getting to write and think about the team and the league and the game was a hell of a lot of fun, too.

And we might just be getting a new owner and a new front office, after a pretty rugged couple of years from the old regime, and I'm liking that.

Oh, and I love this photo; it's from the post-match celebration. The player in the circle is Olivia Moultrie, who's still in high school and 1) can't drink, and 2) is clearly embarrassed at the grownups. Yeah, Livvy, grups can be pretty cringe-y.

Mary Bennett

One of the most fun things I've read - as a no-pictures-just-words book - this year has been the three volumes of the "Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett" series, beginning with the first Pride and Prejudice-based story of the middle Bennett sister finding work as a spy for the Regency government and continuing with the next two.

The fun part about these is that the author doesn't try to heroine-up her protagonist by making her more witty or clever or smart or attractive. Yes, she's the "heroine"...but she's also the same socially awkward, pedantic, prosy middle Bennett sister we meet in Jane Austin's novel.

Cowley makes that plausible; being drab, plodding, and detail-oriented might make you a crashing bore at an afternoon tea but a damn good undercover agent.

Mary is more than just that, though. Crowley shows us how her exposure to the bigger world outside of Longbourne helps Mary grow. She learns that she has actual skills, that she doesn't have to push herself forward to show them to others. Indeed, as a confidential agent she has to learn to conceal what she knows and does!

By the third book - where she has to "learn" to kiss to sweeten up a possible source or beguile an enemy agent - she's become genuinely thoughtful and even a bit wise. Does she still manage to find a way to work a moralizing quote into a romantic moment?

She's Mary Bennett! Of course she does!

But this Mary can have a romantic moment, and even enjoy it fully and intelligently.

There's supposed to be two more of these coming; I can't wait.

What else?

I still like this furry butthead. He's a good cat. Or, as my Bride describes him, he's "good at being a cat".

And I still love my family, my home, and my hometown.

So all in all, it was a pretty decent year. There were a lot of things I liked.

Tomorrow I want to talk about the next year, though.

Wait, wait..!

I can't go on without recommending...

 Lore Olympus

Rachel Smythe's post-modern take on the ancient Hades-Persephone tale.

It's funny, clever, sexy, all with the wonderful graphics that pulled me in the first time.

Plus it's an absolutely heartwarming love story.

(Can you tell I'm a sucker for a love story?)

Anyway...go, read it. It's tons of fun.

Ice

We had our annual December ice storm last week. Predictably Portlanders panicked, abandoned their vehicles on the freeways, and huddled around the gas heater when the limbs came down and the power went out.

We did none of those, spending the day Friday and Saturday sitting indoors waiting out the cold.

When we did emerge the damage was pretty photogenic.

The Girl's comment?

"Yeah. I can see how that might not have fit inside the green compost bin."

It's raining now, by the way. It's winter, but it's still Oregon.

America Worst

Long before Orange Foolius and his gang of GQP nitwits adopted it, the slogan "America First" was the boast of another gang of fascist-fluffing traitors.

That would be Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh and the original, isolationist version.

The Wiki entry at the link cited claims that most of the Forties Firsters were genuine isolationists who didn't want the nation to get involved in "foreign wars".

That's fine. I'm all for not getting involved in other people's wars, or wars, period, if it comes to that.

On the other hand, there are some people who have some ideas or goals rotten enough that only killing enough of them will stop them, and those people will force wars on you whether that's a good idea or not.

The bulk of the original Firsters recognized that; the outfit killed itself on December 11, 1941 when it became brutally obvious who those really rotten people were. 

That brings us to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I'm not going to make a case for war. Or that war. Or for Americans to fight, kill, and die in that, or any war not forced upon us.

If I was going to make that argument I'd be learning Ukrainian on my way to volunteer to run a battery fire direction center for Сухопу́тні військá Збрóйних сил Украї́ни. 

I'm not, and so I refuse to be a hypocrite and cheer for other people's sons and daughters to go and fight.

But.

There doesn't seem to be any gray area on which side as Americans we should be fighting for if it comes to fighting, and it sure as fuck isn't Vlad Putin and his gang. My compa the Rude Pundit pretty much sums it up:

"Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. 

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are."

Yes. Ohhellyes.

We now have the same choice that We the People faced in 1939. Do we help out the dictator whose people will - who are - cheerfully butchering anyone in their conquests they can catch? Or do we help the people fighting those sonsofbitches?

It's not really a hard choice.

The Ukrainians don't have to be great. And they aren't; there's a lot of post-Soviet fuckery there.

But they sure as Hell are better than the actual Putin-led post-Soviets.

And that brings me to the Latter-Day America Firsters.

That's a couple of them there; January 6th traitors; Matt Gaetz and Lauren "I luv gunz" Boebert during the speech that the ;leader of Ukraine gave to the joint session of Congress. The Wordle of that day must have been a real toughie; both the little rascals are still glued to their phones during the applause lines. 

But that's just another day at the shop for the New Firsters. It's part of their job as the Putin Wing of the GQP, to stan for a criminal fascist.

Well, hell; if you're gonna rep for Donald Trump, how is Putin a stretch?

Look. There's no such thing as a "good war". I can certainly understand being on the fence about, say, the war in Yemen. There's a lot of bad and no real good options there. Most wars are a choice between worse and even worse.

But here?

Fuck that noise.

We shipped millions of tanks and trucks to that rotten bastard Stalin to beat that rotten-er bastard, Hitler because it was in our national interest.

To send arms and ammo to Zelensky - who is not anywhere near as rotten as Stalin - to beat that rotten bastard Putin is a no-brainer.

Unless you're a MAGAt-loving, QAnon-huffing, Putin-fluffing GOP shitweasel.

Like these two and the other Firsters, the Cosplay Mossy Oak Militia (thanks, Jim Wright!) and all the other Putin Fanbois?

You know how I keep saying these people are traitors?

Well, if you were an original Firster and you still had your Adolf poster up on the wall on December 12?

Yeah. You were a traitor.

Who's gonna tell these people about that?

Their domestic policies, such as they are, are enough to make me loathe them. But to prefer a brutal foreign dictator over a flawed but still-better polity that dictator is invading?

The new Firsters are...what their Adolf-loving predecessors were. 

I'll let the Rude One see me out here:

"That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up."

Holly Jolly

 So it is "that time of year", and - unchurched as I am - I can't dodge hard enough to avoid the reason for the season.

Presents!

In my younger days I labored like a galley slave over the worktable making hand-drawn Christmas cards even though I cared little enough for the day itself. 

Well...I'm like anyone else and like the pretty lights and music and the overall feeling of happy anticipation that surrounds the commercial Western Christmastime we've invented since breaking out of the old winter-solstice/dead-of-winter religious holiday binds.

But I'm barely tolerant of religion in general, and Christmas the holiday has become such a grotesque parody of the notions put forward in the Christian literature as to be almost hypocritical.

So I realized at some point that it was ridiculous to put that much work into something stanning a thing I barely cared about. So, I just stopped.

The one thing I kept on with was doing hand-drawn wrapping paper.

That was quick and fun, and was more entertaining than trying to come up with a single card idea. I could knock out a dozen of these little cartoons and they'd actually be of some use for the real reason for the season - loot!

Being retired has given me time to return to this old December tradition.

 Drachma the Cat always takes a licking on these. Well, all the pets do; they're cute and easy to work into a vaguely holiday-esque sort of image.

Here's the little fuzzy nutling again:

I'm a huge Gojira fanboi, so of course the Big Green had to make an appearance:

In case it's too small to read, the off-stage voice is saying: "You'll never fit down that (the chimney). You know that, right?" to which Gojira politely disagrees ("Shut the fuck up").

Of course My Bride has to make a cameo as Miss Debra The School Secretary:

She's also thinking about a trip to Scotland this coming summer, where she hopes to take a short course on dry-stone walling, so here she is meeting one of the locals:

Of course there are kiddos, so the Girl showed up having grown up quite a bit:

The Boy...mmmm, maybe not so much:

My Bride's comment was: "A bit too on-point, hmmm?"

Yeah. Well, he is what he is.

Well, that's the first hint of KrisKringlism for 2022. Tomorrow I am due back up in Goble to freeze my ass off testing fucking trench backfill. It'll be bloody awful fucking freezing, and I hope that'll be it for the year, but we'll see.

Hope you and yours are looking forward to a peaceful and happy Christmas season.

Whatever you may believe in.

The Politics of Stupid

So here's what's been bugging me.

This past November the voters of Oregon went marginally in favor - 50.6 to 49.4 - of a ballot measure, 114, that imposed some restrictions on firearms.

Those included:

• requiring permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
• requiring photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
• prohibiting manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.

 And y'know what?

That's just fine as far as I'm concerned. 

It doesn't infringe the "right to keep and bear arms". It infringes the non-right to keep and bear certain types of magazines, to keep and bear arms without being evaluated for things like criminal records or knowing how to use the fucking things, and being on record so that IF your bang-stick gets used for bad purposes it can be chased back to you.

If I'd have been the ballot measure writer I'd have added some of Jim Wright's "bang bang sanity" proscriptions like making "accidental" shootings crimes that would lose you your "right" to fuck up other people with the weapon you obviously don't know how to use and have no business having and requiring people to store the things like we did in the Army, locked up right.

So vox populi vox Dei, right? Gonna get right on that, sheriff. Right?

No.

Because if you're a wingnut ammosexual then the public spirit only bloweth where wingnut fap-memes listeth, and so, of course, a judge in West Buttfuckistan (or Harney County, which is effectively the same thing...) heard a suit brought by a bunch of these clucks and, of course, has been hammering down Measure 114 because...reasons.

Well.

I don't really need to go over - again - why fewer people with smaller, slower, less capable firearms is good.

It's the same reasons that a NASCAR-grade Camero isn't street legal. What soldiers need in war is the exact opposite of what Sparky needs behind the counter of the 7-Eleven.

But because the Right has spent more than sixty years grooming these chucklefucks to scree like wounded eagles anytime some sensible reduction in the mad carnival of firearms is proposed here in the Land of the Free trying to make that obvious fact a reality is damn near impossible.

Different day, same nitwit wingnut shit, though, right?

Here's the problem with just shrugging about that.

These dopes are making life harder for all of us, and not just about firearms.

Some of the things they want - more racism, more prejudice, more ignorance, more misogyny - are 1) irritating and vile as well as 2) predictable, but are baked into them and can only be ignored when trivial and mocked and slammed down when violent. 

Any sensible government - any sensible organization - can and will do that. Even corporations, sociopathic sonsofbitches that they are, realize that gays and immigrants and dusky people buy toasters, so being associated with redneck shitbirds is bad for business.

No. It's the other political obsessions that they're being talked into now that are so fucked up.

These ammosexual rule-free Days of Jubilee are one of them.

If you think we're bad here in Oregon look at Florida, where their Wingnut Jesus wants to enact "constitutional carry", meaning that any and everyone can walk around strapped. No rules, no license, no training, no nothing.

Imagine how your average rural Florida deputy sheriff - Nobel Prize winning philosopher and gentle soul that he will be - is going to act now that EVERYone he meets is packing heat?

You think we're way ahead of the mean on copper shooting of randos now?

Oh, and try pulling that shit if your skin color is marginally darker than a sheet of notebook paper.

Fuuuuuucccccckkkkkk.

But even beyond how fucked up that is, is the wingnut neediness to repeal the 20th Century.

When I was learning my trade, an older engineer told me that things like building codes and design requirements were enacted "one death at a time".

Because we would do our best to head off fucked up things like deadly building fires or earthquake collapses based on our best guess on how bad those fires or earthquakes could get.

Then a worse fire or earthquake would come along, kill a bunch of people, we'd learn from that and revise our codes and designs to head off those worse fires and earthquakes.

If you look at public health and safety rules - things like OHSA regs, vaccination requirements, medical practice - between 1900 and 2000 you see a fairly broad, if uneven, progression from "we don't understand and couldn't do anything even if we did" to "oh, okay, here's what's happening and here's how we can prevent or mitigate that."

No everyone was on board with that - look back at the "polio monkey serum" shit that the Birtchers ran with back in the 1940s and 50s - but the public in general agreed; safer is better in the general sense.

So it was less fun to drive with seatbelts and sober. But it was safer for everyone.

It wasn't much fun to get measles shots. But it was safer than getting measles, safer for everyone.

It was more irking to have guards on saws, and rules for ladders. Some things - like the tipping toddler on 5-gallon buckets, seemed even silly and excessive.

Taking the handle off the pump sucked. But shitting yourself to death from cholera sucked worse.

The general public consensus was that this stuff was a minor issue compared to, say, dying horribly of smallpox and cholera or being paralyzed by polio.

Now that consensus is in ruins, and it's for a simple, horrible, stupid reason;

Because the political right's policy goals are subjectively shit - plutocracy, oligarchy, theocracy - they need red cultural meat to feed their C.H.U.D. hordes, something like 40% of the U.S. public, and they've chosen things like democracy, equity, and, yes, public health to feed this ignorant beast.

As the linked article points out, it's killing those CHUDs.

And, as the article also points out, the CHUDs don't care. 

If those cultural "wins" kill those they hate and "own the libs"?

They'll die happy.

How the fuck do you fight that?

That's whackadoodle cult thinking.

That's hashishin thinking, the kind of thinking that made blissed-out drug-addled assassins that you had to kill to stop.

And, as I've also said here before, if that is the case...

...and I believe it is...

...the implication is that our choices are grim; give up all the social and political and economic and even medical gains of the 20th Century,

or,

Kill them.

I know which I think is the worse option.

But I also know that I'm rolling a massive rock uphill to even begin to clue the vast bulk of my supposedly-fellow citizens in that that's even a possibility, much less a necessity.

And so here we are.

They will kill us before they let us take the fucking handle off the fucking pump.

And that, my friend, is a Peak Fucking Stupid way to die.

Light Housekeeping

Quick note: I've had to do a bit of cleaning up the sidebar where I've put up links to what I'm reading or sites I want to push up. I removed several links.

That's always a bit saddening, because it means that I've lost some friends from my digital life.

One of the saddest was having to remove The Hidden Thimble.

I've followed Talyssa and Siree's blog for years, as long as I've posted their blog up on the right side of my page. I've enjoyed the hell out of their adventures both for the adventures themselves and for the way the two of them shine through the words and pictures on their blog like good deeds in a weary world.

But their last post was over a year ago. 

The site has drifted, untended, since then. I'm afraid my friends have moved on in the way people on the internet do. I hope that means they've moved on to other happy, adventurous places. I hope they're well, and enjoying their lives.

But I'll never know. And that's a trifle hard. As much as you can "like" someone you've never met IRL, I liked the Thimblers a lot.

Another loss is Maia's The Voyagers. 

(Here's what I remind the reader that Graphic Firing Table's privacy policy is that we don't show anyone's face outside family - and The Girl has made clear that it's not okay to show her face, either, so that's no longer a thing - so if someone is mentioned in a photo it's only from the knees down. Cats? They're attention whores, so they don't count...)

Not Maia herself - she's still busy and creating beautiful things over at Feather and Stone - but her account of her voyage through her and her amazing child's lives.

That's been dark since 2019, and I have to conclude that she, like so many other friends, has moved on from blogging. She joins the rest of the crew that was linked by our adoptions, like Carrie (formerly of walternatives) and India (formerly of The Atomic Ranch) who are nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la; not gone, merely marching far away.

I still need to do some more work here. The US Army Field Artillery site isn't linking anymore, and the TechDirt links to some sort of gibberish.

The happier news is that I have some new places to link to, but that's a matter for another post.

Cup Final

Meant to get back earlier, but Cedar and I were utterly waxed by the high drama of the World Cup Final...

Not my doggo, BTW; she's a friends', and a very sweet girl.

Anyway, yeah, the Final. 

I have a weird relationship with Argentine soccer. The Albiceleste are, have been, and can be, a magnificent squad that plays gorgeous, engaging football. 

I'm not exactly a Lionel Messi stan, but I respect the guy's skills and was vaguely happy that he finally got to the top step after all those hard years and disappointments.

At the same time, it's hard for me to get around the ugly things also associated with that blue-and-white kit. The Dirty War Cup of 1978 and the brutal chicanery that the junta put into ensuring that their team took the gold, including the shiking of another truly great side, the Clockwork Orange of Seventies Holland.

Then the second star in 1986, which is indelibly linked with one of the great and appalling characters of the game, Diego Maradona. 

His quarterfinal against England sums up my feelings about the Albiceleste; a moment of utter shame followed by a moment of unutterable brilliance. 

We're all a bit like that, I suppose; we can be thugs moments before or moments after being kind and gentle. The hard part is getting beyond the way we tend to save the kindness for our "own" and the brutality for "them". 

I'd like to pretend I don't share that failing. I do.

So it was with mixed emotions I watched the Argentine fans and their team celebrate, because I couldn't entirely forget the past to revel in the present. They had no such constraints, and that's what makes this game so compelling. It's the long, slow, grinding oppression of anxiety and fear as you watch your hopes teeter on the brink...

...and the sudden, wild, manic explosion of joy when they win...

...but with the lurking understanding that that joy is never completely free of the shadow of grief and loss.

Which is what gives the game whatever weight it has. It's a bit like life; sun and shadow, joy and pain, hope and fear.

Which, in turn, leads me back to what I meant to talk about this past weekend. But sufficient unto the day is this rumination on the import of a kids' game. I'll be back later to day to talk about what is bugging me about the goings on out in the unpaved parts of my crib.

Hazy Shade of Winter

It was just less than a month ago that I posted pictures of the autumn drama at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Writing shit about new snow
For the rich
Is not art.
 ~ Robert Hass (supposedly a translation from 小林 一茶 (Kobayashi Issa)

As Kobayashi-san says; that shit's done with.

The weather has made a hard turn to winter. Mind you, it's winter in the Northwest, which means one of two things.

Typically it's an endless gray drizzle spiced with days of genuine hard rain. Low temperature 42, high temperature 44, rinse, repeat. That's the "west-wind winter".

Then every couple of weeks the polar high looms down over the intermediate space between the Cascades and the Rockies, over the high desert, and the east wind blows the clouds away and the cold in.

That's when you get mornings of freezing fog, and bright, chill afternoons that never let old bones warm, and my bones - those of which that aren't titanium aftermarket parts - feel very, very old on those sorts of days.

They're also not beloved of Portlanders, creatures of the Mediterranean that we are. So the Garden was quiet and I enjoyed the change from red and gold to spare black branches. 

Or bare red ones, as on the red-twig dogwood...

I should note that True Portland dies hard in the winter; this young woman attending the annual "Crafty Wonderland" fair refused to let the biting weather nip her toes back into closed shoes:

That's not actually an uncommon sight here (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it somewhere but am too lazy to look...), the combination of a heavy sweater or jacket above some chilly pink toes below. 

Part of it may be hardiness, part of it may be unwillingness to surrender to the season. Part of it may be the simple ease of slipping into sandals rather than wrestling with heavy socks and shoes.

Whatever the reason, it's a thing, and a Portland thing, at that.

Speaking of Crafty Wonderland, several Portlanders took advantage of the seasonal surroundings to let some pretty serious Xmass-y freak flags fly.

One such was this gal; I couldn't get a great shot of her outfit but this gives you the idea - the entire front of her dress was an solid mass of Christmas-tree bling, like the gold-encrustation on Smaug's belly:

Plus glittery silver snowflakes in her hair. 

The effect was completely insane in a sort of holly-jolly way. The Nikes make it sort of Ugly-Christmas-sweater-casual. Fun look, but I sure couldn't pull it off. There's something to being cute and /or pretty that helps make "okay, that's freaky" into "awww...that's cute".

But the award for Most High-level Holiday Cosplay goes to the Elf Off The Shelf:

I don't want to show her face, so you miss the Santa-hat topping, but given the rest of the outfit you get the idea.

My favorite bit is from the hem to the floor; you got your saucy fishnets going for the whole "Santa Baby" frisky sex-under-the-Christmas-tree thing, but then you've got the massive engineer boots that add a touch of "...but-fucking-try-it-and-I'll-kick-your-fucking-ass" danger. 

Clearly this is someone who has the authority to get you on the Naughty List.

That's all for now.

This little post has been too much fun to load up with serious business, so I'll close with Christmas standard you know (It's the "Piano Guys" doing the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts tunes, and since Blogger is being a dick about letting me embed it, here's the link to copy and paste - https://youtu.be/tyPDQpel8bI and a finger to you, Blogger, for being dickish about this). 

But I will be back later in the weekend to discuss some of the nonsense that we're getting up to here in the Land of the East Wind Cold.

Back in a bit.

In passing

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.

Portland is Burning!

 Wait! No! I mean...Portland is on fire! 

We're LIT! Not actually burning! No smoke, no flames!

No. Just no. Outside of the usual assload of scruffy street people, Portland is fine.

So we braved the Antifa arson mobs the other day to poke around downtown, and ran into two of our favorite places here in the Beehive of Terrorism.

The first was Scrap.

Scrap is...well, pretty much everything. You want old stickers? Weird metal bits? X-ray prints? Patterns from the 1970s? Glitter, ribbon, postcards from 1908, decoupage (who knew that decoupage was even still a thing?), back issues of National Geographic?

Scrap's got 'em.

The Bride goes to paw through the fabric and other sewing treasures. 

I just like the congeries of weird and bizarre old vinyl, hubcaps, and random shit that the place has scrounged up. 

Sewing Susan? Ohhellyes!

There's even some stuff that is not entirely appropriate for the kiddies!

 

This is a postcard, BTW. I'd pay good money to see the look on the other folks at the post office when you take that out of the post box.

Even the street randos like them some Scrap!

Then down to near Pioneer Square to the downtown Kinokuniya.

Our local outlet of this Japanese bookstore has every manga and most anime every released (of course), and it is pretty critical for keeping up with Spy x Family and The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen and all my other manga favorites.

But it also has every cute, silly, whack, funny, goofy, and just Japanese thing that a would-be otaku could ever crave.

 

All topped off with a stop at St. Honore boulangerie for coffee and a croissant?

Because that's how we roll here in Little Beirut.  

Burn, baby, burn!

Away from home...

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.