Seasonal [and other] observations

Now comes the season of the woolly bear migration. Or, rather, The Great Woolly Bear Dispersal, since they are all crossing the roads, but about equally in opposite directions. Just now coming back over the hill from the supermarket at thirty miles per hour, I watched carefully not too far in front of my car for small moving things and swerved this way and that way so as to avoid squashing any of the little guys. At one point I was faced with a Sophie's Choice -- one caterpillar heading east, the other heading west, and in such proximity to each other that if I saved one, I would obliterate the other. The only thing I could do: I stopped the car until they were out of my path. I'm glad there was no one driving behind me. I have seen bumper stickers that say, "I brake for fill in the blank" but none of them say "...woolly bear caterpillars." If there is one, I should avail myself of it.

I have stopped picking tomatoes. I feel a little guilty about that, but I can pick no more. Husband has noticed the abundance of red globes remaining in the garden, and has brought in his own piles of the things. 

He is making fresh tomato juice, a monumentally delectable item that I have never tasted before. It involves the food mill, and lots of patience. Too much fiddling for me; I just want to get to my book. But he doesn't mind, and I am glad to do the Wifely Praise part of the operation. The Wife Rule Book again, you know.

The soapstone stove's installed and operational. Notice, please, that we ordered it in brown metal rather than black. My choice because the brown is just about the same color as the ash and dust that will inevitably accumulate on the thing. Once it's rolling for the season, it will be too hot to dust or wash, so we might as well have it filth-colored to begin with.

Sweet Young Thing, my new morning boss, is still a refreshing change from Jane the Tyrant. I do find, howsomever, that she is one of those who get their talking points and marching orders from Rush, Sean, and Glen. 

"...all those people who are making us the minority!"

"The only reason Obama got elected was that he got all the blacks and Puerto Ricans to vote."

I wanted to say, "HOW DARE THEY!" but I did not.

I foresee June keeping her mouth shut in the area of political discussion. Friday morning I came about as close to getting into it as I hope ever to do. New Boss was lamenting the abundance of other-than-Caucasian students at the local college. She went on with such . . . vigor . . . about other cultures ruining "ours" that I finally asked, in a mild and curious tone, "I wonder why our culture can't withstand that influence?"

A pause, and then: "I don't know."

"Well," I said, "maybe it'll make you feel a little better to know that four of them were just murdered in Guilderland."

"Oh! That! That was terrible! There were children!"

I have yet to nail down the age at which but what about the children! cuts off and veers into . . . distaste, or how long people have to be in this country before they're acceptable.

Okay. Enough of that incendiary writing. Back to the safely prosaic.

Molly had fresh rabbit for breakfast this morning, and eschewed her kibble as a result. It's good she doesn't want to overeat. She took the bunny leftovers to the garden and hid them. Husband walked down to see if he could see how much was left. I watched the two of them from the upstairs bedroom window and saw Molly pretending the hiding place didn't exist ("Let's go down this way, Dad!") and Husband looking, looking, as Molly stood by, her tail wagging feebly, apparently hoping he would not find and steal her cache. He did not find any evidence of bunny remains and the two of them returned to the lawn with one of them vastly relieved.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

We just watched The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 
Very heavy. But very worthwhile. 

No diatribe here, but it seems sometimes that our country just needs to . . . step away . . . from other countries' personal business, and let those countries' cultures exist as they will and not as we would have them. It seems we forget that we're all, this whole world over, just people. One by one. All just human beings.
And maybe money isn't every, single, important, thing in this world.

The movie made me think of New Hymn, written by Reynolds Price and sung by James Taylor.

Source of all we hope or dread

Sheepdog, jackal, rattler, swan

We hunt your face and long to trust

That your hid mouth will say again let there be light

A clear new day

But when we thirst in this dry night

We drink from hot wells poisoned with the blood of children

And when we strain to hear a steady homing beam

Our ears are balked by stifled moans

And howls of desolation from the throats of sisters, brothers, wild men

Clawing at the gates for bread

Even our own feeble hands

Aim to seize the crown you wear

And work our private havoc through

The known and unknown lands of space

Absolute in flame beyond us

Seed and source of dark and day

Maker whom we beg to be

Our mother father comrade mate

Til our few atoms blow to dust

Or form again in wiser lives

Or find your face and hear our name

In your calm voice the end of night

If dark may end

Wellspring gold of dark and day

Be here, be now

An observation

Gwinnett County sign (photo by Patrick Fitzgerald - CC-BY)

I know, through my job, a woman who is funny, intelligent, attractive, clean, employed, fit, married. You know . . . normal. I do not do Facebook (is the second syllable supposed to be capitalized?) but over a friend's shoulder I happened to see subject woman's Facebook page, in which she rants about her . . . distaste . . . for a "nanny state." I was surprised by her anger as she is, in person, quite pleasant. This woman lives on a street partly and temporarily populated by students of the local college. The noise, particularly on Thursday nights, well into the wee hours, is making her insane. I know exactly how she feels, having lived across the street from a suburban twenty-four hour supermarket. A few years ago I wrote about those horrors. 

So.
Small Pond has enacted a toothier noise ordinance, and our woman was pleased to hear it. Progress! she felt. She was mightily disappointed when it turned out that the new law does not require public beheadings of suspected noisemakers after one whistle, hiss, holler, etc. In some unrelated correspondence, she asked me if a certain new property owner would be permitted to rent his apartments to college students. I replied that it is illegal to discriminate against any class of people and her response was, verbatim: "blah, blah, blah..."

So.
I conclude that in her eyes, government trying to help other people . . . people who can't support their families on minimum wage jobs, for example . . . is wrong, but government definitely needs to keep college students from waking her up at night. 

Whose line is it and where should it be drawn?
And besides all that, maybe one of those college students will graduate to become a signmaker who can spell. That would be worth a little discomfort in the short run, wouldn't it?

I just don't know

I am often confused about politics in general, and my own in particular. 


I'm employed by the smallest possible governmental unit, and, of course, I see what I do as necessary to the general good. Somebody wants to build a fence between his yard and his neighbor's; the law says it can be no more than eight feet in height. He wants it to be as tall as possible and who are we to tell him a fence on his own property can only be eight feet tall? He has a deck and if he sits on his deck, he'll still be able to see his annoying neighbor. The annoying neighbor, on the other hand, will get No Sunshine on his property if the fence is as tall as our man wants to build it.


Small Pond, the village that employs me, had a little damage from the floods. Nothing in comparison  to the village that I call My Village. After the flooding, Small Pond's authorities had a dumpster put in place for use by the one street of people whose cellars and cellar contents had been damaged by the water. A couple of officials went door to door to let that street's residents know the dumpster was there for them. There wasn't wide publication of its presence because it wasn't meant for regular ol' garbage. A Man Who Is Never Happy phoned and complained that the dumpster was too high . . . people kept wanting to borrow his truck so they could reach the top to throw in their ruined armchairs and things. "And what about the old people?" he asked. "How are they supposed to use it? In BlahBlah and OverThere, they had trucks go around and pick up from in front of houses."
"Yes, those would have been National Guard troops going house to house where entire houses had been swallowed up by flood water and were being gutted," I did not say.
"I had to replace my furnace twice in three days!" he ranted. "Do you know how much that costs?"
"Yes. Yes I do," I said, calmly.
He went on for some time, complaining that the dumpster was there, that it was unsightly, complaining that it wasn't accessible enough, complaining that the sidewalk on his street has a dip in it that still held water. 
"I don't mean to be a pain in the ass," he said.
"Too late," I did not say.


People call every week on trash pickup days. 

• The truck [that went by at 7am] didn't pick up my trash and I put it out there as soon as I got up at 7:30! 
• The containers are too big for me to move from my garage to the curb! What am I gonna do? (To that person, I did say, conversationally, "I guess I'd ask my neighbor for help.")
• The containers are too small for our household: we have nine people in our family. 
• The containers are too big: I don't fill it up in a week. Why should I pay the same amount as the people next door who have nine people making trash?

All of us who take these calls wish that Small Pond would get out of the garbage business. The group of people who make these decisions keep renewing the contract. The alternative would be to have individual haulers coming through the village every day of the week, with trash containers sitting out on the curbs here and there every day of the week. And the cost to individual households would be higher than the existing arrangement. And maybe some people wouldn't have a hauler come, and would let their garbage accumulate. And then there would be . . . vermin. Another can of worms. So to speak.


So, I think about these small-scale problems, and I think about people's dissatisfaction with the services that Government provides, and I know that there is no winning. Sometimes I think that this country is too large and too varied in need and custom for one government to perform services that make people happy. Even perhaps this state, with its great variation in population densities and lifestyles . . . for Heaven's sake, we have New York County (aka Manhattan) and Onondaga County in one state! 


Everybody thinks the government should do some things for the public good. But it seems that nobody can agree on what those things should be. 
Take care of the roads? Yes, of course. But what roads? If all the roads are partially demolished, in what order should they be repaired?
Provide education to minor children? Sure. The argument goes, "We all benefit from communities filled with people who can read and write." Do the schools need to provide basketball programs? Swim programs? And, well, you know . . . Husband and I have no children, but we've been paying school taxes forever.
I get a tax break because I own land that's used partially for agriculture. Why should I get any favors because we could afford to buy that much land?
I pay taxes that pay for the state trucks and other pieces of equipment that are dredging out the streams that the floods filled up with gravel and rocks and rootballs. But I'm on top of a hill: my land won't flood. At least not until the gravel and rocks and rootballs accumulate to a depth of four hundred feet. I guess that would take quite a while.


So here are the questions that I keep coming back to: 
Should we just let it all go and let everybody get by as well as they can on their own? 
Should we have no permanent dwellings where there might be floods, or tornados, or wildfires that start by lightning? 
Maybe we should all migrate seasonally, garden with pointed sticks, live in houses partially heated by the bodies of large animals. 

At night in summer and all day in winter the peasants shared their huts with their animals. Parts of it were screened off for the livestock. Their body heat helped to keep the hut warm. ~A History of Homes

My boss read the other day that the house of the future will have no livingrooms. Dwelling units will have fewer rooms, and those rooms will be multi-purpose. That sounds to me like a return to a way of living that worked for humans for a good many years. We'll all have multi-generational households, filled with fleas and the aroma of manure, and we might be stuck all together for weeks on end if the roads are impassable, but at least it would take our minds off complaining about government.

Where does the money go...?

I got started on this train of thought the other day when I heard somebody on NPR say that the true cost of a gallon of gas for a military vehicle in Afghanistan was $300. 
The US Department of Defense 2011 Budget Request, Figure 6-1 "War Funding by Dollars by Function" shows budgeted War funding for 2010 at roughly 4,645,714 times my personal gross 2010 income. Without spending a lot of time digging around doing real research, I found a site that informed me that in 2008 there were approximately 216,885,346  other people paying taxes right along with me. Correction: They filed returns with the Internal Revenue Service. Who knows if they paid taxes, but let's assume they did. Whew! What a relief, because that means that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost each of us an average of less than eight hundred dollars in 2010! ...especially because surely in 2010 there were more people paying taxes (or filing income tax returns) than there were in 2008. 
Quel bargain! ...although I'm not sure I trust my own calculations or their sources.


Rachel's Slow Lane Life sent me to a cute little geography quiz web page. Whatever the cost per taxpayer of War Funding by Dollars by Function, it seems to me that American taxpayers ought to be able to complete this little quiz quite handily. I mean, with all the "buy local" propaganda these days, you wouldn't hand over $700+ every year to somebody selling you Peru asparagus without knowing that it came from the continent of South America, would you? 
G'ahead. See how you do: Map Game

Proud to be . . . what?

Two days ago I received yet another one of those despicable email screeds. It was entitled "Proud to be White," and claimed that it reproduced Michael Richards' defense speech in court. It was, of course, a load of horse puckey. Snopes.com cleared up the author question: it wasn't Michael Richards. Those distasteful messages that claim to have been authored by any celebrity, I find, rarely were. I am offended particularly because I received that ignorant, evil message during Black History Month.

I don't know why people send me that stuff. I won't be reading any more of that person's emails: my personal email will recognize her now as Junk. For a while I was receiving lots of Let's All Hate Mexicans rantings. The last one of those that I received was the last one because I replied, mentioning my Mexicana friend Estela. I can't respond to this latest email, though. I am too angry.

For years, I worked in the heart of a black ghetto. I was never mugged, never shot at, never carjacked. I was never called Whitey, Cracker, or Honky. I was never sneered at as I passed one of the residents on the street. When I was in high school I telephoned a black friend. Her brother answered the phone, I asked for Margery, and he hung up on me. She called me back and said, "He doesn't like white people, and . . . you know . . . you can tell from the voice..." To that young man, I was a white voice, nothing more than one of them, and therefore disconnection-worthy. That's about as close, I think, as I have ever come to suffering racial discrimination, and it felt awful. I felt . . . invisible. I can't imagine what it would be like to, daily, get that treatment to any degree. Other than that one incident, I am not aware of ever having suffered from any kind of discrimination. I have always been white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. I've always been female, but I think I was always able to work that to my advantage.

A black coworker once told me that her cousin had started work on their family's genealogy. She got back a hundred years or so, and couldn't find a thread to follow: there was no record of her family. Another friend of mine, a Jew, told me that her mother had corresponded with her cousin in Poland every week since she was a little girl. During World War II the letters sent to her cousin came back; her cousin's town no longer existed. Presumably, neither did her cousin. Those of us who are able to trace our family history, who never had people just . . . disappear . . . from the face of the earth or from historical records are fortunate indeed.

Image credit

My email correspondent who is now Junk needs to be educated. But you can't educate somebody who has so little empathy, and limps along under such a big concrete chip on her shoulder, that she will not learn. I am in a poor position to enlighten her: she is one of the people who pay my salary via her tax dollars, and a member of one of "my" boards. The emailed diatribe was preceded by a personal message that people should turn the other cheek, that when she was a kid she had been called names, and she never let it bother her. If being called names had been the worst thing that happened to you, I guess that would be relatively easy to overcome. If members of your lineage had been tortured and killed while being called those names . . . that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it?

Some things just seem self-evident to me

Mr. Loughner, of recent fame, is out of touch with reality. 

image from The Mental Illness Quiz

don't take the quiz . . . it's a long route to a Match.com-alike

He isn't an SOB; he is sick. Somebody should have gotten him hospitalized.
Sadly, of course, you can no longer hospitalize somebody against his will unless he's already exhibited that he is a danger to himself or others. Well, now that's done.


All the gun laws in the world won't keep somebody from shooting somebody if their grasp of reality is tenuous or non-existent, and if shooting somebody, or several somebodies, seems like a good idea. One Wal-Mart wouldn't sell him ammunition; another one did. 


I don't think the horrible incident has much to do with Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and their ilk, either. If it wasn't that bunch of wingnuts it would have been some other bunch of wingnuts that set him off. That's how crazy people behave, and to attribute this tragedy to either side in the incipient civil war is counterproductive and absurd.


A terrible, terrible thing happened in Tucson, yes.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything more than a man was sick in the head, his family had no idea how to deal with the problems he presented, and people got hurt and killed. It doesn't represent an entire trend throughout the country.


With this one exception, in my opinion:  People who are in need of mental health care and medication ought to be able to get it instead of being lost in their own heads among the rest of us.


Friko, you asked what I do when I'm suffering from insomnia. 
This is it.

Religion and politics. In one post.

I've been reading about Draw Mohammed Day. Apparently there's been a big flurry of activity on Facebook with people up in arms over a television cartoon show having been censored to remove what some other people saw as an offensive depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, or rather, other people were offended because Mohammed was depicted at all.  
So.
In response to this censorship some people concluded that the right to free speech in the United States was at risk, and in turn, decided to participate in the May 20 Draw Mohammed Day.
To show those lousy Muslims that we can say any damn thing we want in this country.


I know a guy who trucks cars for car dealers from auctions to the dealers' lots. A particular car dealer owed this guy's boss some money, wasn't paying . . . and the guy (who's American, born and raised) suggested to his boss that they put some stuff in one of the dealer's car's gas tanks. Something that would destroy the motor. Later.
The boss told him, "No. What he's doing to me isn't right, but that wouldn't be right either. And if you do it, I'll fire you."
The boss is named Ali and he's a Muslim.


Years ago I waited tables with a younger woman who was dating a Muslim, and eventually married him.  She had told me once that when she married her beloved, she would need to make peace with her family over issues that had existed since she was very young. I said, at the time, "Well, if you can, that's good..." And she said, urgently, "I have to." One day she and I had some words . . . I questioned her dedication to the job at hand, she told me the only thing to which she was committed was her art. (She was a cellist with the city's symphony orchestra, very artsy, kinda ditsy, but her heart was in the right place.) A couple of years after I last saw her I received a letter from her bringing me up to date on events in her life. The letter included no overt indication that she was making amends, but I wrote back and never heard from her again. I think she might have been converting to Islam at that time and was cleaning up the wreckage of burned bridges. 


I know a Yemeni named Abdul. He is one of the most charming and gracious people I have ever known. Simultaneously, he can be one of the most infuriating people I have ever known. His temper can go from zero to sixty in nothing flat, over things that seem, from my vantage point, to be insignificant. I yell back at him, tell him to Stop it! You're makin' me picture a bunch of guys on a beach in Yemen. Jumpin' up and down with daggers in their teeth. In Hammer pants !  ...and he laughs.  
It's a cultural thing: Yelling and laughing are what he does. 


Back to DMD.
I think that just because a person may lawfully do a thing is no justification for taking, and returning, offense. I think the people who want to "draw Mohammed" just because they have the right to do that are wrong. 
Not because I have sympathy for jihadis.
Not because I'm a Leftist; I don't think I am . . . at least not hardcore.
Not because I lack respect for my own country, or people in military uniform.
Here's why: Because people are people and people have a right not to be poked at with sticks over their religion or their ethnicity or any other thing. 
It's just bad manners.

My starving brain

I think I'm losing my mind. It came to me this morning:  I am becoming stupid!

I Googled around for "Can stress make you stupid?" and found an article, "The Reinvention of the Self," that appears to apply. 

When I used to watch soap operas, on Fridays they'd recap everything that had happened during the week, apparently just in case a viewer was only able to catch that one day's episode.  In that spirit, here is the outline of June's [mostly] work life since late 2004. 

I was promoted at work. Part of the process that led to my promotion was the requirement that I testify, at a civil service hearing, to the malfeasance of my department head (with whom I had been very friendly until she began to malfease). She was dismissed. 

The promotion put higher numbers in my paycheck but was not, overall, a good thing for me.  It put me in a position of being boss to the former boss's deputy, a volatile personality who, within a few weeks, loudly and forcefully invited me to perform the classic impossible act and stormed out of the office, not to return for several days. 

Other department heads knew about the former department head's malfeasance and the unsuitability of the unstable deputy for the position I now held, but felt that I had the ear of the administration and was, therefore, on The Other Side. Holding that view, they were fearful of sharing much "department head" wisdom with this newbie; each felt they might be the next one to be thrown under the wheels of the bus that they thought I was driving.

My erstwhile friend Jane (also a department head, see above) did not speak to me. Several times each day we passed in the hall, hugging our respective walls, never making eye contact. Until the day she came to my desk, leaned over me and screamed at me, "Will I come in tomorrow and have Power That Be tell me, 'June will be taking your job now'?" 

Enter The Felon. He ran for the office of Power That Be, The Main Man in Small Pond.  He campaigned through the village with an open car and a bullhorn, criticizing me by name.

All's fair in love, war and politics. 

The Felon came to my desk one afternoon and contemplated aloud what he would do to me when he was elected.  I suggested that we wait for that discussion until he was in office. At length he left, screaming from my doorway that I had made a Faustian bargain and I would suffer for it. As, indeed, I have.

About that time, Husband left home, having had it right up to here with my self-medication.  I commiserated with a coworker who (I later learned) had gone straight down the hall to Jane's office to regale, with high humor, Jane and others with my tales of woe, and to The Felon (with whom an alliance had formed) with every detail. 

That rule about not sharing extremely personal information at work is a good one. I wish I had heeded it then.

Time passed. I got sober. 

Husband came back. 

The deputy found out that I was making twenty thousand dollars less per year than he had thought, and in fact, my salary was lower than his, and resigned. 

New boss was hired.

All appeared to be sorting itself out. 

Then The Felon got elected, not as Power That Be, but as a member of the governing body.  

One of Jane's employees stopped coming to work. Days later, a medical excuse arrived, and eventually the employee resigned.

November 2008 budget approval meeting time came, and The Felon called for The Termination of June.  (His demand has always been treated as "termination of June's employment," but I have my doubts; I think he would like my physical existence terminated.) That evening his full request was denied, but he did manage to gain the votes to alter my position to part-time. To Jane's credit, she jumped in and volunteered to take me on as the needed part-timer in her office, thereby keeping me employed full-time. 

When Jane told me the news early on the morning after the meeting, I was shocked. I did not react with gleeful gratitude. 

I asked repeatedly, "What's the plan?"  

In response, Jane cried, "There is no plan!"

No one told my Afternoon Boss that he would have me only part-time until I did, upon my return from the conversation with Jane. 

Never was there any discussion between Jane and my Afternoon Boss.

Never did the chief administrative office take the lead in any part of the process.

Memories of angry Jane looming over my desk and screaming came back and played and replayed in my mind and I became more and more fearful.  Jane interpreted my trepidation as rejection of her, and once again we were back to not speaking, hugging hallway walls, etc.  

A couple of times during December 2008 I went down the hall to Jane's office and asked if there was anything I could do to help her since I had an hour or so to spare.  

"Not yet," she'd say, not looking up from her work.

On January 5, 2009, Jane (now aka Morning Boss) phoned me at 8:30am, "It's time. This is the first day of the fiscal year. I want you here in the mornings."

For the first two weeks of my new placement, every morning Jane would get calls from her friends, fellow department heads. Her end of the conversation always consisted of, "Awful. Just awful. It's awful," as she stared, expressionless, at her desk. 

The function and resulting quiet tappity-tappity atmosphere of Jane's office (aka Morning Job) is very different from the friendly and jovial atmosphere in Afternoon (formerly "Whole", aka "Afternoon, aka "Real") Job.  Computer programs I had never seen before, file cabinets full of unknown and unidentified material, deadlines of which I had never been aware.  I was frankly fearful.  My hands shook, my heart raced, I gasped for breath, and lacking it, I sighed to catch up on my blood oxygen. 

Sighing elicited exclamations of, "What's wrong with you?" 

My coping strategy of humming bought me, "Are you humming?" 

"Yes." 

"Stop it!" 

Jane began to play her desk radio, with the volume set to stun to mask my tortured sounds. 

My questions about how to proceed with various tasks were met with exaggerated patience. "You have done this before. See? that's your handwriting!"  Yes, I had done "this" before.  Once.  

If only someone had said, "If you need an example, here is where the previous files are stored." 
If only someone had said, "Here is the big picture; here is where what your part of it fits." 

I had hoped that the 2010 budget year would return me, full-time, to my Real Job. It is the place where my skills and my talents come together and I shine.  Failure, unremitting day-after-day failure, makes me stupid(er). 

The new Power That Be has done two things that give me hope: He removed The Felon from office on the grounds that The Felon's election had been in violation of the Public Officers Law, and he has said he wants me back in my Real Job full-time. The prognosis for the latter, however, depends on several factors beyond his control.  

Every morning I pick up my yoke and try to act cheerful. I remain silent. I do not hum. I try to remember to breathe deeply and regularly, so as not to sigh. Sometimes when I speak to Jane, her reaction is as if I have not spoken. I do as good a job as I can. 

I'm getting worse. My errors are no longer errors of ignorance; they are errors of I-don't-know-what. Where is my mind? The article I cited above offers an explanation:  

"The structure of our brain, from the details of our dendrites to the density of our hippocampus, is incredibly influenced by our surroundings. Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured."

So it is not simply my perception; I really am getting dumber.  

Your Score Summary Overall, you scored as follows: 
72% scored higher (more stupid),4% scored the same, and 24% scored lower (less stupid). You are 24% stupid. This means...

You are far from stupid. Congrats on a great accomplishment!

~Stoopid Test~ 

I'm sure a few years ago I might have been only, say, 20% stupid.

I have sent resumes and nobody's hiring . . . no funding. Maybe that's good. Yet another new job might send me straight to the loony bin.  

I have kept notes and have put them together into a written manual of how to do the Morning Job tasks. New information is added daily. Friday I organized it yet again for the use of the person who will take my place. 

Perhaps it is time to retire before I forget which end of the pen makes marks on paper. 

Tennessee hankerin'

It's probably as much a wish to retire as it is a wish to move. 

I have once again been looking at online real estate listings, 
more or less in the Knoxville general area.  
The prices for houses amaze me. 

These places would be listed here for half again as much!

Imagine waking up in this aerie room, and not being in a vacation rental!

This view would make me feel right at home.

A real honest-to-God, hand-hewn log cabin!  I wonder how long it would take before I got worn out with brown walls everywhere. 

But doesn't it look cozy?

Even this one....tiny, tiny, is just so dang cute! 

It looks a lot like the replica cabin at Davy Crockett's birthsite!

I'm about to reveal some of my stereotyped "moving south" worries.  

Call it ignorance if that's what it is, and feel free to enlighten me.

These are the things that worry me:

...that I wouldn't be social enough, girly enough. 

...that I wouldn't be God-fearin' enough.

...that I might be a tad too politically left-leaning. 

Can a woman born and raised in "one of the most liberal regions in the United States" find happiness in a dark pink state?

Happy Holidays!

I didn't want to get into this before the holidays were over.

There seems to be an uprising of angry folks who want to say and hear only "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" or any generic greeting.  Just as a reassurance to those who worry that the general decline of the country's moral fiber is due to that perceived change, I offer these images of vintage Christmas cards. 

Vintage, as in "1950s." 

When men were men, John Wayne was relaxing at the end of his workday by donning women's clothing, when a black man (Nat King Cole) having his own television show was cause for public clamor, when Jews were the them that Muslims are now.  The good old days.  Nobody was offended by "Happy Holidays" then.


Hey... (suspicious squint)...Wait a minute.
Maybe that's when it all started!