What Year Is It? 1984?

 

Today was a very blah day for me. I worked from home and had two meetings, but I never left the house because it was so hot. Around five I thought about stepping outside, since it had cooled off a bit, but it was drizzling, and now it's storming out. Travalon had bought me a necklace holder for my rosaries, so I put some of them on it.

As you can see, it's not full yet, but it already weighs a ton. This isn't anything like all my rosaries - I will need at least two more of these things. What I'm hoping to find is a commercial-sized one like they display necklaces on at department stores. Maybe then I can take these off of this smaller holder and use it for actual necklaces, since I have quite a few of those too.

One of the craziest things I've seen in the last few days is the number of people who said on social media that Dear Leader was the only logical choice for president because he wouldn't get us into a Mideast war now saying how smart they think he is for getting us into a Mideast war. To be fair, there are still people on the right who are angry with him for bombing Iran, and I have a grudging respect for them, but man does it feel like we're living in 1984 - of course we've always been at war with Oceania, not Eastasia. Until next week, when it will switch around again. Weirdly, Dear Leader, who is an atheist who only worships himself, gushed about thanking God for bombing Iran. If anyone wonders why Christianity is declining in this country, I give you Exhibit A: Why Would Anyone Follow the Religion This Guy Claims to Profess? Stealing from the poor to make the rich richer? Bombing countries that were following their treaties? Mocking the disabled and dehumanizing women and minorities? It's the antithesis of Christianity as taught by Jesus, but I'm not going to claim the "no true Scotsman" fallacy and say these people aren't true Christians, because if they say they are, then that is what Christianity is here and now, in our country. Ugh. It used to not be true of Catholic churches, but lately Catholics are moving to the right of Evangelicals, so I go to a church where nobody discusses politics, and I keep my head down. Once upon a time my old parish downtown used to have people to the left and to the right of me, but after the pandemic all the leftists bolted, so what's left of that parish seems to be these far-right Qatholics, people who get their news from randos on the internet because even FAUX News is not far enough to the right for them. There may be people like that at our new parish, but I have not run across them, and there's a lot going on there about donating to the poor in other countries and taking care of the environment. It's very focused on the group, not the individual. After all, if I were not going to be part of a religion that cares for all of us, what was the point of being a human during this lifetime? I might as well have been a panther again.

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Photos of the Tenney Park Bird Party

 

On TV they keep showing how lots of countries are lighting up their landmarks blue and yellow in solidarity with Ukraine. It's a lovely sentiment, but I feel like we should be doing more than lighting things up. However, we don't want to get into a nuclear war with Russia, so we do have to tread carefully. There's a forty-mile-long convoy of Russian army equipment headed to Kyiv, and I keep thinking that if we could blow that up, we would take out a lot of their hardware. Forty miles! War sucks. Like everyone else, I am pulling for the scrappy Ukrainians and their scrappy comedian president, but how long can they hold out while we just watch, too afraid to help? At some point we'll have to do something, because sooner or later Putin will attack a country in NATO, and then we'll be obligated to help. The correspondents who are in Kyiv always seem to stand in front of this gorgeous white building with gold onion domes, so I googled it and found out it's the Monastery of St. Michael. It was an ancient building that the Soviets tore down in the 1930's and replaced with administrative buildings, but architects had secretly made drawings of it so that sixty years later, when Ukraine was independent again, they could rebuild it. And now will the Russians destroy it again?

On a lighter note, I got this sticker from DuoLingo. It would have been so fitting if I'd gotten this on Twosday, 2/22/22, but alas, I got it the next day.

Here are some pretty orchids I saw on Saturday that I didn't remember seeing last time.

When Travalon and I were walking along the canal yesterday, we saw this mushroom drawn on the underside of a bridge. My regular readers know I find mushrooms not only delicious, but totes adorbs too.

Travalon took some photos of eagles in Sauk on Saturday.

Tiffy and I didn't have good cameras with us on Saturday, so we couldn't take photos of the bird party at Tenney Park. Travalon took some photos yesterday. Here you can see tons of geese came from the south to join the bird party.

In this photo you can see scaups and red-headed ducks.

This is a goldeneye duck.

Here is a scaup next to a mallard that is dabbling. The scaups are diving ducks, so they are harder to photograph because they keep going underwater.

And here is another scaup, and I'm not sure what the duck to its left is. The female?

I had to google some of these ducks, and ask the hive mind on social media to ID others, but I know mallards when I see them!

For some reason a ton of the Canada geese were heading towards this house, which I found hilarious. Was there a party I didn't know about?

This is apparently a female bibbed mallard, which is a cross between a mallard and a domestic duck.

And this is the bibbed mallard drake.

This is the sunset over the jetty at Tenney Park locks.

This scaup looks like he's laughing!

Then Travalon caught him in a more sober moment.

I don't know why bird parties make me so happy. Maybe seeing all the birds hanging out together, looking like they're having fun, lets some of their joy rub off on me. Tiffy and Travalon enjoyed the bird party too, and on Sunday a ton of people had gathered to watch them, so it's not just me.

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Milkweed Collectors Helped the War Effort

Sorry that I didn’t blog yesterday. Travalon and I went to the East Side Club’s Thanksgiving dinner for members, which was catered by Bunky’s. (They have closed their restaurant and only do catering now.) We sat at a table with three kindergarten teachers who were very friendly, and one tried to talk me into joining the Social Committee. Not that I have an abundance of free time, but maybe that way I would at least know when social events have been canceled… After dinner, a member talked about how as a child during World War II she collected milkweed pods so the fuzz inside could be used to make life preservers, and several other people in the audience had done the same thing. I had no idea this huge war effort existed! The speaker had even made a DVD of two survivors of the USS Indianapolis disaster (if you didn’t know anything about this, join the club) who had survived in the ocean for five days before being rescued, thanks to their milkweed down-filled life preservers! It is kind of cool to think that back then kids were expected to contribute to the war effort with such an age-appropriate yet obviously important task. Not that I desire in any way to be in a war, but I wish there were something that united us all the way the war effort seemed to unite people seventy years ago. We could sure use it after this contentious election!

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My Work Pet "Boxy"

Sorry for the lack of posts the last couple of days. Wednesday we had Irish class because our teacher was busy on Tuesday, and after that I had choir practice, so there wasn’t time for blogging. Yesterday after work I took a walk on the boardwalk behind Edgewood College, on the shores of Lake Wingra, and then I went to a presentation Antoshka gave on the situation in Ukraine. It was very enlightening, although the main video did not have subtitles, so it was more of a visual and then Antoshka gave us the background on what was going on. Travalon met me there, and plenty of other people were there too, including Jilly Moose, Cecil Markovitch, Mr. N’Awlins, the Dairyman’s Daughter, and of course Rich, since it was at his house. That ran so long that Travalon and I had to leave long before it was over, so of course I never got a chance to blog.

And what would I have blogged about if I’d had the chance? I am going to put pictures of our road trips up at some point, but the big “news” in my life is I have a sort of work pet. OK, not really, but there is a bug that has been hanging around my office all week. It is a big, friendly, pretty, harmless-looking bug and seemed very familiar, so I googled “black and red bug” and found it is a box elder bug. It was crawling across my computer screen as I found an image of it, and it saw the image and stopped and kind of reared up a little, as if it were thinking, “That’s the biggest bug I’ve ever seen!” The image was twice the size of “Boxy.” So Boxy seemed really tense until I left that screen and went back to data entry, and then it relaxed and walked the rest of the way across my screen and along the top of my monitor. I feel like I should be a good hostess and offer it something to eat, but according to Wikipedia they eat the seeds of maple trees, and I am fresh out of those. We’ll see how long Boxy hangs around my maple seed-free office…

The other big news is that Prince died at the relatively young age of 57 yesterday. It was all anyone could talk about. He was such a big deal when I was growing up in Minnesota, where people I knew had actually met him. It seemed so cool to have a rock star just an hour away, and not way off in California or New York. And I loved his music. He was wild in his younger days but had long since become a Jehovah’s Witness and lived a quiet life, so he was the last celebrity anyone expected to die young. However, it sounds as if he were sick, but like David Bowie he didn’t tell anyone. Goodbye, sweet Prince. I hope you’re partying up in heaven like it’s 1999! There is a photo online of a rainbow over his complex, Paisley Park, so maybe he is smiling down on us stuck in 2016.

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Christmas Cookies This Year

We are doing a cookie exchange at work again, and just today a bus buddy gave me this ad from 1942. Nothing says Christmas like cookies shaped like bombs and tanks!

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