A Gentle Reminder...

...that crowning a clown doesn't make them noble.

It just makes the throne the driver's seat in the clown car.

To make this a perfectly shitty year, I saw the neurologist last Tuesday.

It's Parkinson's.

So I'm on borrowed time. My great hope is to borrow enough time to outlive this shitheel in order to sneak into Mar-a-Lago and piss on his grave. 

I have no words, no profanities strong enough for my supposed-fellow-Americans, both those who voted for the bozo, and those who just didn't show up to vote against it.

We're gonna get it good and hard.

Today is a reminder that the "arc of history" is bullshit. "History", if it means anything, is an endless, remorseless grind of fighting people like these MAGAts, fighting their idiotic simpleminded "solutions" to complex problems, fighting their childish insistence that there was a former time of "greatness" that can be recalled if enough of the "wrong" people are exterminated. 

This past year We, the People just couldn't be arsed to do that, so here we are.

I've seldom been more ashamed of being an American than I am today.

Ya got me, podnuh

 I got the 'rona.

If you've had it, I feel for your ass.

If you haven't?

Do NOT fucking get this shit.

And I'm fully vaxxed and triple-boosted AND I got on Paxlovid within a day of the symptoms showing up.

Which they did as we were cleaning up the living room walls last Sunday night.

We painted these walls, oh, maybe ten years ago. The paint was a specialty brand called "Devine" that we found at the local Miller Paint store. We loved the smooth shades and cool textures; pretty much the whole Little House is done in this Devine paint of one shade or another.

And we've been very happy with it, by and large. Except the brown color we painted the front room and the hallway.

Not that we don't like the color - we do! - but over the years the walls slowly developed this odd white discoloration. My guess, from the home improvement literature, is that this was "chalking", apparently something that happens the paint deteriorates and the pigment and binder separate.

It wasn't harmful to the paint, just ugly.

I found out purely by accident - cleaning up an area where the Little Cat had shaken her bloody ear (we still miss you, sweetie!) - that windex-type cleaner removed the white discoloration for some time - at least a year. It seemed worth a try to avoid repainting the entire room.

So we moved everything away from the walls and went to work.

It pretty much sucked as much as you'd imagine, and so I wasn't surprised that I was sore and tired when we finished. What was odd was that I was also stuffy and was developing a nasty cough from the drip in my throat.

And that was late evening.

By midnight I was perfectly miserable. Think "the worst flu I've ever had" miserable; congestion like  stone in my forehead, body aches like I'd been pounded with a hammer, sneezing, coughing...ugh. Like I said; miserable.

One of the few good things about getting old is that your immune system has pretty much seen it all. You tend to miss the colds and flus that the younger people around you contract simply because you've had it, or something enough like it, to keep you immune.

So I'd forgotten how utterly shitty it is.

So, yeah. Sunday night (and Monday morning) was a total shitshow. By the time I got out of bed (I won't say "got up" because I didn't get more than an hour or so of badly broken sleep) I was convinced that I had the Plague and, sure enough, the faint line faded in below the "T" that confirmed that, yes, finally, more than three years after it had exploded out of southeastern China the fucking coronavirus had nailed me.

Monday was a misery punctuated by trying to figure out how to avoid dosing three other people in a tiny, 1,100-square-foot house. I did a video call with my GP, who got me a course of Paxlovid that, as sucky as the drive was, I ran up to Janzen Beach to pick up.

Lemme tellya. Paxlovid? That stuff is just better than sliced white bread.

I took the first dose Monday night and had another shitty night, but by Tuesday morning I was feeling more human. By the time I' writing this - Tuesday night- I have a "head cold", no worse.

Mind you...had I not been vaccinated, not been boosted, not had the Paxlovid?

You might well not be reading this.

I've got another four days of Pax before I'm out of the woods, and apparently there's a "rebound" that this fucking Plague slaps you with once you've finished the meds. The damn thing is a genuine threat, and a wag of the middle finger towards the idiot antivaxxers and Republicans who try and pretend otherwise.

K. Well, I gotta go put some pictures back up. Catch ya later.

Update 1/25: So this Paxlovid stuff is the bomb.

Seriously. It's kicking the 'rona's ass (along with the vaccines, I'm guessing). By this morning I was up and running around - mostly getting meds for pets (the cat's flea treatment) and people (more Paxlovid for my Bride, who probably has this damn Plague, too). Still achy down my back and still with headcold gunk in my skull. But otherwise? Good to go.

I'll be around here in a bit, I've got some thought but need to get them organized.

Nine

This was a hard post to write, and I almost couldn't bring myself to do it, and if that seems strange for someone who writes about his dead child every year, well, life can be like that sometimes.

Because this is about losing a little cat.

This - the cat, not the woman, is "Nine".

After we lost Nitty Kitty our daughter insisted that we were a "two-cat family", and that just Drachma the Merkitty alone wasn't enough. She insisted that we needed another kitty, was the guiding force behind the search, and finally found the Perfect Kitty; a small gray-and-white rescue cat. 

Her name came from the number of the storage unit in which she had to live for years.

Nine.

She'd had a tough life. One of her former families had another cat that objected to Nine, so the poor kitty had to live in a mudroom with a cat flap. 

That was it; the mudroom, the flap, and the yard, was her world.

She'd had a horrific case of ear mites that had given her a savage infection that was so bad that it messed up her inner ear, and thereafter she lived with her head cocked to one side, as though she was faintly perplexed by the entire world.

She was a foster kitty, so The Girl brought her home in hope. 

Drachma was an utter shit, of course, but the little newcomer was so sweet and loving that everyone but the Boy was willing to tell him to suck on it. 

Small Cat - as we started to call her - was a perfectly adorable and immediately well-beloved member of the family.

She had some kind of adorable quirks. 

Dirt. She loved dirt, dry, fluffy, dusty dirt; she'd race outside to wherever there was a delightfully fluffy bare spot and roll in it until she was utterly and happily filthy. So she was thrilled when we started the excavation for the front walkway; the spoil piles were perfect.

She was a cuddler, a real lap-kitty. After going through a series of very cat-cats (when asked whether Drachma was a "good cat" my Bride thought about that for a moment and replied that he "was very good at being a cat.") it was wonderful for the Girl to have a loving kitty who would cuddle with her.

The only snake in Eden was the little one's health. The damn ear infections just never seemed to completely go away. Every so often we've have to clean her ears, and we had to make sure that after her dirt-baths we brushed her thoroughly. But she was such a dear and loving kitty we were happy to take care of her.

So it was concerning but not exactly an emergency when her ears started troubling her again this summer after about a year and a half in our home. 

We took her to our regular vet, who told us she had "polyps" in her inner ears, and recommended a special "skin vet" who could remove them surgically.

So one morning in August I fed her her pre-op pill...

...which turned out to be a kitty-cat Xanax, and it was worth the price of admission to see the little one experiencing what must have been a goddamn amazing cat-buzz, and off we went to the vet. They extracted the polyps, returned the small one, and sent off the polyps for biopsy.

One came back cancerous. 

We scheduled a visit to a cancer specialist in January.

Then right before Christmas the Girl called in panic. Nine's ear was bleeding again. A hastened trip to an emergency vet showed that the mass had grown back in her left inner ear.

After that the end came painfully quickly. 

We tried to get her in to see a kitty-cancer doc and couldn't until after the new year. Between the holiday and January 6th she developed a palpable swelling on the left side of her head and down her neck.

I put her in her carrier and took her to the kitty oncologist in January hoping, frankly, for a miracle.

The oncologist was fresh out of miracles.

I cried in the car on the way home.

We knew it was weeks and not months, but within a fortnight she was wheezing as the cancer invaded her lungs, and though her appetite was undiminished she could no longer swallow solid food. 

We called the people at Compassionate Care. The kind, quiet vet arrived late one weeknight. The small one went quietly, first into drug-induced slumber in the Girl's trembling arms...

...and from there across the threshold of the Great Sleep.

If I ever lose my day job I'll be able to make a living as a cat gravedigger; Nine's was the third (after Lily's and Nitty's) I dug in the backyard.

The small one lay in state on the table for an hour as I dug in the cold wet earth under the drizzle that seems to be a household tradition for burying our cats. 

A final drink of sake' and candles at her head.

We all cried again when we laid her in the ground and covered her little cardboard coffin with the clods of soil that will divide her from us forever.

I told the Girl, and it was the simple truth, that for all the cats I'd known since I was small little Nine was the sweetest, lovingest kitty I'd ever known, and I'd loved her best of all.

The Girl grieved for many days. During her mourning she found a little temple bell at our Asian grocery. 

She hung it over Nine's grave.

So now the gentle chiming of her bell still reminds me of how heart-full little Nine was, and how much we all miss her. 

Your time with us was so short, little one. I wish your warm, soft body still curled on top of mine. 

You had too short a time to be happy and beloved.

Life can be like that sometimes. I'm sorry.

We miss you.

Nine Gellar 2013?-2021

Hugging the bowl

It took a while for me to get beyond Bryn's birthday this year.

Between that, and an exceptionally busy work week, and the Boy's continuing story, and a personal fascination with whatever-the-hell is going on in the Crimea I just haven't had the time to get back to this blog.

Sorry.

Blogging will be light for the next week, too, as I will be working on the Battle for this month: Glorieta Pass, 1863.

But I did want to poke my head up and look around so's you didn't think I'd gone into hibernation or something.

So, some minor bloggage.

Fucking CPAC.

What a goddamn shitshow. The fact that these idiots invited, and then cheered, Ollie Fucking North pretty much puts a stake in whatever-functions-as-the-organ-that-conservatives-have-instead-of-a-heart. Certainly not a brain; anyone who would do anything in the vicinity of Ollie Fucking North other than spit on him is a damn lunatic. The man is a walking skid mark on a U.S. Marine uniform pant.

And to top that there's Scooter Fucking Libby? And Bernie Fucking Kerik? Is this supposed to be a conservative convention or a damn parole board meeting?

Pretty much sums up modern U.S. movement conservatism, though. Neither benevolent nor intelligent, just a seething, wretched hive of angry, vindictive scum and villainy. Not with Extra Felons.

Sheesh.

And in other "conservative" news..."conservative Christians" are upset because of "historical inaccuracies" in a movie about...Noah?

Wait.

What?

No, this isn't "The Onion".

Seriously, Jesus-pesterers are having kitten-fits because this movie, whatever else the hell it does, doesn't fit the version of a made-up ancient Hebrew version of an older made-up Sumerian tale about a guy who builds a big-ass boat and stuffs animals in it?

(Extra points to the Jesus-pesterers who seem to have spent a ridiculous amount of wasted time trying to reconcile the logistical requirements of a gajillion animals by trying to hammer the Hebrew word "kind" (as in "two of each kind") as ever-larger phylogenetic categories. Apparently there's even a special Jesus-pesterer term for this - "baraminology" - which is essentially the same thing as the "science" of describing the types of ponies in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.)

The linked article at The Panda's Thumb is made of 100% awesomesauce, BTW; check it out.

"Historical inaccuracies."

Snort.

Speaking of dead conservatives...or were we?

Whatever. Point is, Shirley Temple Black kicked the bucket last month.

I know, I know...she's a film icon, the prototype Child Star and bigger in American film history than Lassie. My problem is that I discovered her in my teenage years and from the lofty maturity of fifteen her juvenile films always seemed cloying, childish, and twee. I've since developed a greater appreciation for her early talents but never quite to the point of loving her or her child work.

My loss, I suppose.

Thing is, I love the heck out of her late Forties work. After the war Shirley had matured into a damn good little comic actress.

She goes toe-to-toe with the heavyweights in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and is wonderful as a teenager in Since You Went Away. I've also seen her do delightful work in a piece of postwar comic nonsense called Honeymoon; she really had the chops to make it as an actress in light comedy. It's too bad she didn't manage to keep working past the late Forties, and you have to wonder if her childhood success didn't have something to do with that.

Seriously, think about it. Here was a young actress who was attractive, sexually attractive, but who was indelibly associated with the audiences of the late Forties and Fifties with a six-year-old girl. I mean, imagine; the ick-factor of getting a boner looking a little Curly Top?

Yeah, that.

I should add, though, that it's also probably good for her memory that Pete McCloskey beat her for the 11th Congressional District in 1967.

She ran to his right - she was a pretty conservative Republican for the middle Sixties (not that she'd be considered "conservative" today, mind you) and so we remember the child star, the promising young actress, and the gracious apolitical hostess and not a more divisive conservative Congresswoman in the Nixon (and possibly the Reagan) Era.

My favorite story about her?

Anne Edwards' biography says that when she was invited to the White House in 1935 she shot Eleanor Roosevelt in the ass:

"Temple and her parents traveled to Washington, D.C., late in 1935 to meet President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. The presidential couple invited the Temple family to a cook-out at their home in Hyde Park, New York, where Eleanor, bending over an outdoor grill, was hit smartly in the rear with a pebble from the slingshot Temple carried everywhere in her little lace purse." (Edwards, p. 81)

So maybe even then little Bubbles was a red-meat Republican.

Probably just as well we'll never know.

This was kind of intriguing in a very odd way:

"China Southern flight CZ628, operating as a code-share with Japan Airlines Co. (9201) as flight JL5021, was headed to Shenyang, China from Narita airport in Japan when North Korea fired the missile at 4:17 p.m. yesterday, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok said today by phone. The jet was over international water at an altitude of 10 kilometers (32,800 feet) at 4:24 p.m. when it crossed the trajectory of the missile, which reached a height of 20 kilometers, Kim said."

Despite what the article says the two objects were not actually very close in time; seven minutes is a hell of a long time at 400 miles per hour (or more, for the missile).

This wasn't a close call.

The odd part about this for me was that when we used to range fire on Fort Lewis, Washington part of our ballistic arc for high-angle fire was within the flight path for aircraft landing at SeaTac Airport in Seattle. Range Control would close the range for some time, ten minutes before or after (I forget the exact envelope) when an aircraft was scheduled to fly over.

That used to drive us bugnuts. The phrase you'd hear repeatedly was "Little bullet, big sky". But there was no room for any sort of miscalculation when a freakish mishap might kill 200-plus people.

We didn't shoot.

The corollary to this - for me, anyway - isn't that the Norks barely missed a civilian airliner. They misse by a mile. It's that they just didn't give a shit; their impact area was downrange of a commercial air corridor and they just popped off rounds without bothering to check and see if there even WAS anyone out there to hit.

That's almost scarier than if they were trying.

It's Saturday morning and if I thought that the end of the week would bring some relief I was kidding myself. Friday is the kids' "game night", so there were video games played from sunset to damn near midnight (okay, 10:30, but close enough...).

Then it was the Boy's "night to sleep with mommy", which is a toddlerhood ritual that he loves to reenact when he can. But the Girl tends to toddle out to the couch - which is where I sleep when the Boy is doing his Oedipus Junior thing - at the wee hours of the morning, so Peep-Mommy Night is always on a night I can sleep in the next morning.

Usually everybody is happy with this, so it was a bit surprising to be awakened sometime in the dark predawn by the sound of someone being violently ill.

It was my Bride, who was wretchedly hugging the porcelain chalice, shivering and gulping. In the Little House it's hard to escape one another so her struggles were everyone else's. The Boy retreated into his bedroom and shut the door (he's still in there at 9:30...), the Girl toddled out to ask what she could do, and I lay down in our bed listening to the sweet little voice and her mother's strained answers.

The Bride is back asleep now, finally at rest, the Girl is watching some sort of bizarre Minecraft video, and I need to get dressed and wake the Boy so we can go to futsal in a moment.

Just another day, and I promise; more substantive blogging when I return.

Friday Jukebox: Sometimes It Won't Edition

The dream dies.

I'll never be able to listen to "Muskrat Love" again without weeping.

(Who am I fucking kidding? I cry every time I hear it now and not from sentimental goopiness...)

Primum non nocere

What can I say?



Cold and flu season used to be a LOT more fun? Make you wonder what the "other ingredients were, don't it?

(h/t/ to Pierce, who garnered this little bit of yesteryear...)

Heart of Oak

Spent last Thursday up in the hills east of Gaston. Pretty spot but turned out to be full of poison oak.I tend to be susceptible to the noxious weed, so I was fully rain-suited and gloved, but something wasn't covered and a nasty patch of dermatitis turned up on my right wrist by Saturday. But the worse was Sunday, when a puffy redness below my right eye turned out to be more of the damn stuff.

I've tried the usual over-the-counter remedies but this is nastily resistant, and I suspect I will just have to wait and hope for the discomfort to run its course.

Well, bugger. Now I really need to scratch.

...high cotton...

Summer has finally decided to turn up.

The last several days have been hot, mid to upper 90's, which...is where my daughter jumped in my lap and caused me to post this prematurely. Sorry. Here's the rest of what I meant to post;

Anyway, it's damn hot. And to add to the entertainment, my usual commute home blew up Wednesday, trapping me and about 7-800 other commuters on northbound McLoughlin Blvd. as an old (as in 60-year-old) 12-inch water main deconstructed, flushing out the subgrade from under 1/8-mile of street.After a half-hour wait in the 90-degree heat I managed to turn around, find a local place to eat (and several hefeweitzens...), and after an hour...it was STILL a parking lot. Wednesday evening I left the office door at 5:05 and stepped through my own at 7:15. Yikes.

The kiddos have been sweethearts - having their Auntie Kathie here to give them a daycare break has helped. But we're going to need to pool time if this heat keeps up. Air conditioning and nonstop kidvid is NOT a good substitute for getting outdoors.

Oh. I should probably mention that it turns out that I have developed an intestinal ailment.

There are people whose nature it is to suffer from interesting and picturesque ailments. "Consumption". Now there was a disease. You wasted away delicately, fastidiously, Greta Garbo dying scenically in "Camille".

Or leukemia. You could get somewhere with leukemia - hell, Campbell Scott dawdling grave-ward with leukemia managed to nail Julia Roberts in that perennial topic of Oscar-neglect, "Dying Young". Those are diseases a guy can make work.

But this one? Nope. This one will forever be associated with SNL's Joe Piscopo and Robin Duke moaning that they have diiiiverticuliiiitisssss...
Yes. I have diverticulitis.

The is just no fucking romance in that.

Aside from the lack of theatrically pale wasting away, I've been taking antibiotics for two weeks, which, if your internal workings weren't screwed up before is guarenteed to screw them up fairly thoroughly. And I have been living with the sensation of having a roughly hamster-sized object wedged in my lower gut, which is about as much fun as it sounds.

So living isn't exactly easy.

But I suspect that the fish are jumping in the Willamette, somewhere. But don't eat them; they're full of PCBs, lead, creosote, and fecal coliforms.

Welcome, summer.

Yes, it's very nice to see you, too.

We'd be good with a teensy little less...ummm...summeryness, though.

OK?

Far above rubies

My friend Lisa is not feeling well.

In a world where it seems to me that undeserved praise, unwarranted ease, slippery self-justification, and special pleading are - and perhaps always have been - the rule rather than the exception, I have always found that Lisa is that rare person who seldom takes the easy path paved with excuses. She is a quality compounded of wit, knowledge, grace and beauty that makes Woman, a certain breed of woman, the crowning achievement of Creation. One that use hairy, less-evolved types would do well to simply admire in seemly silence.

I hope she feels better soon, because, like the sunrise on the ocean or the dawn chorus heard at the edge of the dark forest, she lightens a world which is a grayer and drabber place without her moving through it with lightness and verve.

And for her convalesence, a poem.

TWILIGHT: AFTER HAYING

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed—
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
—sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen . . . the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses. . . .

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

Jane Kenyon

Hope you're feeling more the thing soon, Lisa. Probae esti in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae enitent.