News and Updates

1. We just had a lovely visit from my brother, my niece, and her boyfriend and there will be blogging about it soon, oh yes there will. It has been a summer of brotherly love, it has.

2. The World Cup is over and now I have to get back to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress. I’m not sure how I feel about that. The rest of my life involves things like running errands and figuring out what to have for dinner every night and I’m just not looking forward to that sort of thing. I’m glad Spain won the tournament, even though they were not on my list of top five teams I wanted to win. But they were in the final, and to have had Argentina’s blatant thuggery and official favoritism rewarded with a second straight championship would have been a grotesque injustice. I hope the Egyptians are cheering now.

3. Seriously – punching opposing players after the final whistle? I wouldn’t have put up with that from my kids when they were in middle school. Why is this a thing with people who are supposed to be adults?

4. Also, the fact that tens of thousands of fans booed Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and held up red cards when he staggered onto the field after the game like a junkie looking for last night's cheeseburger warms the cockles of my shriveled heart, yes it does. If it weren’t for the fact that he lives in a hermetically sealed ego bubble surrounded by an impenetrable wall of bootlickers and toadies I would hope he might have gotten the hint or at least have been dismayed but I know he thinks they were cheers and flowers. Mostly people do that for each other, to remind us that we’re a majority and soon he and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves will be relegated to the dustbin of history with the original Fascists.

5. It’s Smoke Season again, the inevitable result of the global climate change that right-wingers refuse to accept as real because it would interfere with corporate profits that will never trickle down to most of them but that’s owning the libs for ya. The air here in Our Little Town has been either Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy, Extremely Unhealthy, or Hazardous for a week now – on a scale where 0-50 is normal and 300 is Hazardous we hit 658 at one point, which is impressive until you consider that Duluth MN hit 1165. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump thinks he can use this as an excuse to impose huge illegal tariffs on Canada because that’s his only solution to anything that doesn’t necessarily involve voter suppression or white supremacism. Truly we live in the stupidest timeline.

6. If anyone’s reading this in 50 years, I just want you to know that this didn’t used to be normal. We never had a Smoke Season until a couple of years ago. We used to have insects. There was such a thing as snow. You could go outside in the summer without protective gear. Hard to believe, I know.

7. It’s been hot here the last week or so – not as hot as it’s been in Europe this summer but hot enough that we pulled the rabbit inside for the week because we know what happens to rabbits if you don’t do that (RIP Hazel). Between the heat and the smoke we’ve mostly stayed inside and I’m glad that we have lives that allow us to do that.

8. I’ve spent a combined two hours on the phone with my internet provider over the last two weeks because they upgraded something that worked just fine and now it doesn’t. At some point later this week one of their tech people will come out to let me know that this is probably my fault, at least from a financial standpoint, but in the meantime here we are. The kicker of it is that the problem has occurred in the one service that we don’t actually use at all, but every time we threaten to cancel our landline the provider panics and offers us a deal where it’s significantly cheaper to keep it than get rid of it. If we cancel that now, I suspect our bill would go up. I am not sure why they are so bound and determined that we keep our landline but so be it.  

9. Apparently I am one of the very few people who managed to get the Wordle on the day they decided that “Pshaw” was a word. They make weird decisions in that game – not as weird as the Spelling Bee, where a couple of days ago there were supposed to be three pangrams and I got three pangrams, all of which were actual words but two of them were “not in the word book” so they didn’t count – but weird enough and what are you going to do about it, really. It’s a free game, after all.

10. Some days the references around here are so pointlessly obscure that I think I may be the only person on earth who will get them. The title of a recent post, for example, was a reference to a single line in a 1970s sitcom so forgettable that even the original network no longer believes it once aired, but it became a tagline in my family and we remember. Yes, my brother got it. He even named the show. I don’t really expect people to get things that obscure, to be honest. Sometimes you just have to keep yourself entertained.