The Year in Posts

 January:

I got good news

February

I go on a rant

March

It begins

And continues

And continues

April 

My little park in April (bonus pandemic items)

May

I get

what might be

Covid-19

Bonus Cat Picture

June 

Good news 

July

Children as possessions

August

Good news again!

September

I watch Die Hard so you don't have to

October 

I write Dear Prudence

Also: Bad News

November

Good news for us all

December

America, bless your heart

ETA:

Silliness from the Right

 This post (plus its comments) remind me of right after Obama won, when all the reactionary whiners were declaring they would "go Galt!" and thus shut down the US economy.

So, what if they take out all phone and internet on the 6th, and then claim this was Trump supporters, and that Trump is trying to effect a revolution, and they send out people to arrest all known/prominent Trump supporters (Note this probably won’t get to my level. It MIGHT, but probably won’t.)

And then in three days internet is restored, and the phone, and the story is set of the failed Trump coup. Which, of course, allows them to move on with their political cleansing program “completely justified”?

 Of course, here, they're threatening to lynch people and commit acts of terrorism because an old white guy got elected, so, you know, not really the same thing.

Just as filled with rebel posturing, though.

Dog Walk

 These are photographs taken while walking the little dog by the river:

He's doing better now -- his blood sugar is still high (252 fasting, 345 six hours after his morning shot), but he's high energy again and runs all the way around the walking trail by the river.

Haiku Written on Election Day 2020

 

Election Day 2020

Acorns rattle the tin roof

Late sunlight fills oak trees

Cat goes back to sleep

(Source for painting of cat)

Dr. Skull Bakes

 Dr. Skull makes pie and bread.

That's (clockwise, left to right) French bread, mincemeat pie, and fig bread. These were all for the dinner we had last night with Uncle Charger, except the fig bread, which he made specially for me.

There was another loaf of French bread, but we ate it in about two minutes flat.

Happy Holidays!

 The best part of marrying into and adopting Jewish traditions is how much better Hanukkah is than Christmas, at least in terms of celebrations.

Hanukkah is eight very low-stakes nights, and includes allowing small children to light candles and mess about with melting wax. There are latkes on the first night, which is wonderful; and only brief prayers as far as rituals are concerned.

Also it is often over before Christmas, which means while all the world is harried and overwrought, making huge dinners and having crowds and political arguments, I am nestled in my big white chair in peaceful silence, working on my novel and listening to a cat purr in my ear. (Jasper has taken to sleeping on the back of the chair while I work.)

Today we are having Charger, the kid's fictive uncle, down for a dinner which includes mince pie, because he was not able to travel to be with his family; but that is not much trouble, and also he is bringing wine.

The kid remains in Fayetteville, with his sweetie and BFF roommate. They had Chinese food, thus fulfilling the mitzvah.

Hope all is going well wherever you are, and whatever your plans!

My first sweater

There were some problems

"Pro-life" means "Pro-eugenics"

 This is, in fact, the rhetoric -- even the very language -- which I have been hearing from Trump supporters for months.

"Only old people will die."

"Only fat people will die."

"We need to thin the herd."

This is eugenics, and it tells you everything you need to know about the "pro-life" crowd.

None of this was an accident. It is exactly what they wanted.

A Little Quiz

This is a quiz for all the educators in these trying times.

Situation: a student reaches out to you and says their parent/grandparent/other relative is sick or has died. They say their work and/or paper may be late as a result.

Do you

(1) Reply with an agreement to accept late work if the student provides documentation, such as a note from the doctor or a copy of an obituary

(2) Refuse to accept late work. The student will have to work around their personal problems. This is the Real World, after all.

(3) Make a joke about how many grandparents die near finals.

(4) Reply with sympathy to both the student and their family, and tell the student to take as much time as they need. Assure them that you will help in any way you can.

I know I was told, while a graduate students, that (1) or (2) was the correct answer. But honestly, if people are still doing this, maybe rethink your position.

What I'm Crocheting RN

 It's a hat for the kid's sweetie, and also part of a sweater:

TDS

 

We now know what "Trump Derangement Syndrome" really is -- it's what happens to Trump supporters when reality does not adhere to their bizarre worldview. 

Read the comments on these if you want a glimpse at a truly unhinged community.

Honestly, at this point, they're just embarrassing themselves.

A common notion

Tens of Protesters

New Recipe for These Cold Days

 Here's my recipe for milk punch, up at Cooking with Delagar.

You can have it with rum or without, though I don't know why you would want it without.

Life on Sabbatical

 Technically, my sabbatical is ending this week. 

Actually, of course, I have another month before I return to campus, thanks to winter break. Nevertheless, maybe a retrospective is in order.

As I have mentioned to my friends and family, more than once, this was an excellent time to have a sabbatical. I hate online teaching with a fiery passion, so I would have been caught between a high-risk action or having a truly miserable semester. (I've already elected to teach what our university is calling "alt.hybrid" in the spring, which means f2f, but only half of the class meets each time.)

So that part feels lucky.

Beyond that, this sabbatical was wonderful. It is my life's dream, day after day with nothing planned. I sleep enough each night, get up when I liked, drink coffee all morning and write, write, write. 

I finished the sequel to Velocity, had it accepted, and have returned the first set of revisions to my (amazing) editor. Now I am writing another novel, though it's not quite the one I meant to write. 

I also wrote five or six short stories, and am working on three book reviews. 

And I read so many books, took long walks nearly every day, and put all our books in alphabetical order. I also took up crocheting, though I think that was more of a coping mechanism (related to the election) than anything else.

Honestly, if I were suddenly independently wealthy, I would live like this forever.

Because 2020 didn't suck enough

So two nights ago, my dog started whining and gasping in the middle of the night.

Our town has an emergency animal clinic. At two in the morning on a night with a low of 22 degrees, I took him to the clinic and sat outside in the icy car (because covid) while the vets looked at him. They did bloodwork and other tests, said they couldn't tell what was wrong, started him on fluids and gave him IV antibiotics, and told me to take him to the regular vet when it opened.

I did that, and he spent the next two days there. His blood sugar was high, he had a fever of 104.5, and his liver functions were off.

Two days and nearly a thousand dollars later, they still don't know what's wrong. They said we could take him to a specialist, but good God, we can't even afford this.

I've brought him home and we're keeping him on antibiotics and insulin and taking him back in two weeks to see if anything has changed. His fever is normal now, so that's good, and he seems a little quiet, but he's eating well.

2020 can just stop now, please.

 

The Little Dog

Remaining Trump Supporters: the Unhinged and the Bizarre

Most people have now accepted that Biden actually won the election.

This is not to say that we don't have some unhinged fringe numpties still pushing truly bizarre nonsense and calling for violence to support their nonsense.

See here, for instance:

Look, I know you guys think I’m crazy when I say that only 10 to 25% of the democrat votes are REAL votes. But think about it: think about forcing Joe-the-houseplant in, and then giving him one of the least appealing running mates possible. And then running a potemkin campaign mostly from the basement.

(snip)

...they went so completely out of their minds and really hate us so much [because of Trump’s election], that they’ve been throwing a naked rage-fit for four years, and doing what they can to hurt America and secondarily to drive Orangemanbad off. And 2020 has been like the expression of how much they hate and despise us. Yeah, at the top the lockdowns were driven by Chinese agents (this is not under dispute) but the left loves them, embraces them and keeps resorting to them because it destroys small business owners, families and well…. Americans. 

Someone in the comments calls for a "limited nuclear war" on "core cities" to removed these dangerous liberals who hate America. Someone else agrees with him, and says that, after all, nuclear wars are quite survivable.

This is logical progression from Reagan through George W. Bush to Trump. Here, have a look at Stephen Colbert's riff from the 2006 White House Correspondence dinner -- look at how many things he's warning us about that now are just commonplace.

This isn't all down to Fox News and talk radio -- people on the Right have been happily gulping down Kool-Aid since about 300 A.D. -- but yeah, Rupert Murdoch weaponsized that shit.

(Though it is kind of funny that the Far-Right have swirled so far down the hole that they have now turned on Fox News.)

Notice that in the post above, Hoyt explains to us how smart she is -- that's something I see a lot in such garbling nonsense from the unhinged. They're convinced that they are smarter than anyone around them, and therefore they can see the conspirators all the sheep are blind to.

And notice how, having been thwarted by the election of Biden, these unhinged buckets are willing to jump straight to shooting those who dared to oppose them:

So…. are we going to fight for our liberties? Is the fourth box on the program? I’d like to think so. Not because I’m a fan of war and destruction, but because there are worse things than war, and the destruction of the land of liberty from within is one of those

It's the Dunning-Kruger train crossed with the propaganda jet engine, and it takes us directly to MAGA country, where public schools are evil, fact-checks have a liberal bias, and you can't trust science but you can totally trust some slicked-up talk show host who is in this to fill his pockets.

ETA: See also this. I love how at the end he asks Trump to be the better man. Has he met Trump?

True

 Original is here