Arrivederci, 2025!

I made the trip around "our" star again. Always glad to still be in this dimension, on this planet, in this solar system, in this galaxy.  As crazy as quantum physics seem, you never know.  However, this year's big question is: Am I still in the USA?

If you are a trump supporter, stop reading right now!  If we are still friends, let's just call it good for now, and hope that we are still friends after that bloated gas bag openly selling his Presidential favors for millions of dollars, among other egregious, immoral, illegal and disgusting acts, is gone. 

The terror among US citizens of Mexican lineage, of Native American heritage, of any brown-skinned ethnicity is a blight on each of us.  The innocent baby tear gassed in its parents' car by ICE "agents".  The women slammed to the pavement, violently clubbed, choked.  People taken off the streets and disappeared into the black hole of racial hatred, cruelty, lawlessness and monumental incompetence by trump's army of angry white militants.  Even if someone IS here illegally, it is a misdemeanor, not a goddamned criminal felony offense!

I simply cannot list all the terrible things occurring in my country right now, not because I am not aware of them, but this is supposed to be my summation of another year, when I take stock of my life.  I normally determine that it was a pretty damned good year, all things considered. Not so much this year.  The USA I grew up in is gone. Oh, we are still a country but things have changed.  Even once trump and his handlers are gone, the old USA is forever gone.  We cannot go back.  The young people will have to rebuild the country into whatever makes sense to them.  There is the yawning abyss of a tragically uneducated population fed a constant soup of rage-baiting propaganda flowing from Fox News, Christian Nationalist FM radio stations, X, various podcasts, and a host of militant hate groups - to name a few. 

Climate change is bearing down on our children and grandchildren like a horde of demons. The ugly failings of unrestrained Capitalism have produced the richest assholes in the history of the world and starved the American middle class almost out of existence, while creating an enormous working class of honest people living in poverty regardless of how hard or long they work. Add to this dismal picture the failing medical system, also being starved of money by insurance companies with fiduciary accountability to shareholders, not ill human beings. 

When it comes time for me to shuffle off this mortal coil, I will take my failed responsibilities and the despair for my children's future with me, but it will do not one iota of good.

So... that's the bad news.  

The good news is that I am still kicking, though getting old is for the goddamned birds!  More often than not, I cannot open a jar, or even a carton of milk, because my hands are losing strength.  I have to wrestle those jars like I am wrestling a baby alligator.  Every year it seems the 'gator gets bigger and stronger. 

I can still lift 50 pounds bags of horse feed, but I certainly cannot carry them very far.  I can still take care of myself and the Supreme Beings and the wolf pack of German Shepherds. However, if you come to my house unexpectedly, you might catch the floors between vacuuming operations.  I had NO IDEA that two German Shepherds shed enough hair every single day to cover a small home in drifts of black hair.  They are not allowed on the furniture, so all of their hair is on the floor.  I do not invite people to meals any more because I am terrified a black, two-inch long German Shepherd hair would make its way into the soup!  I have only had this happen to me once, but it killed my appetite for several days.  I would hate that to happen to someone eating at my table.  

This year has been a steady stream of doctor office visits, tests, and the beginning of a list of medications and physical treatments.  I have officially entered the realm of old age, I guess. Even so, I am still lucky.  Nothing has progressed to a critical or debilitating stage.  I will take my good fortune and be thankful. 

I will be thankful for my little house here in the peace of the Kansas countryside.  If I could magically transform my life, I would be living in a little cabin high on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean - northern California or Oregon, maybe.  My bank account would be full of so much money that I could give money to family or friends any time they needed some.  I would donate to environmental organizations that actively protect and support wildlife, wilderness places, and educate the rest of the world.  I will thankfully accept my humble home here, and share my meager stash of treasure as I can, when I can, for as long as I can.  

I will be grateful for another year with my beloved old horses, who patiently wait for me by the gate so we can all make the trip to the barn together in the mornings.  I will always be happy to look out my window and see them quietly nodding in their frequent naps, or leisurely grazing, or standing near together, companions in their equine experience of this strange earth and mysterious life.

I will be grateful for my Mattie's gentle canine companionship.  We recently discovered we could communicate quite clearly.  She will sit quietly, staring at me until I become aware of her.  When I get up and say, "Show me."  She will take a few steps toward the door, the food, the water, or most often, to the location of the bag of treats!  She stops every few steps to look back, making sure I am still following.  Then she will glance at whatever it is she wants.  She doesn't ask for treats every day, and when she does get them, two tiny morsels, that is enough for her.  Somehow, that breaks my heart - either for her trusting innocence that two is all she can expect, or my human frailty that makes two morsels never enough. 

I pray for this world, for my country, for my friends and family, for myself.  I give thanks for the sum of all of humanity's wisdom at my finger tips via Google, though I have to wade through a lot of dross to get to the goods.  I fell asleep listening to Professor Brian Cox explain how black holes evaporate, that black holes are at the end of time, and how Albert Einstein intuited the Theory of Relativity by simply imagining.  Of course, he was brilliant enough to produce the rigorous mathematics needed to prove it. But it was his imagination that led him to the holy grail.

What an amazing experience it is to live on this earth.  

As is customary:

Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward (Some) Men.

from the Old Lady, the Supreme Beings, and the German Shepherds of Spirit Creek

   

We Take a Turn on the Crazy Train

In the years since horses have lived on my little "farm" there has been a long string of unreliable farriers.  Then I found Vince via google search. At first I thought maybe he was nefarious because he claimed to live in St George, Kansas but his phone number placed him in far western Kansas.  Desperate I was, so I hired him.  He has been trimming hooves here since. He treats my horses like they are my friends, not livestock.

My horses know the drill and cooperate with Vince, often almost falling asleep.  There must be something quite comforting and pleasant to having your hooves trimmed and filed.  It takes Vince all of ten minutes per horse, or less.  He is usually here for about thirty minutes.  It takes that long because we are talking.  It is crazy that you can become friends with someone you only see four or five times a year for twenty minutes, but it happens.  

The same veterinarian has taken care of all my animals since I moved here, but he no longer looks after horses.  Luckily for me, he hired a young woman veterinarian who does.  It means my horses are not hit or banged around, or have twitches placed on them.  If something dangerous needs to happen, like floating their teeth, they get tranquilizing injections, then nullifying injections to return them to normal - sort of.  After a half hour or so, they resume their normal horse business with apparently no ill effects.  No one is stomped, kicked, dragged away, and no horse is terrified or injured in a panicked outburst of bucking and rearing.   

I got off the spring schedule with the horses' yearly immunizations so now they are vaccinated in late November or early December.  They get rabies, West Nile Virus, and I am not even sure what exactly the vaccines are for.  Maybe I should know, but I simply trust that the vets know what they are doing in this matter.  Kansas State Veterinary College is a mere thirty miles from here.  The college and the area veterinarians work closely to stay current.  In fact, all of the veterinarians I have ever taken any of my animals to are, without exception, graduates of  Kansas State University.    

The vet was here yesterday for an annual check up and the immunizations. Since the good doctor is a decades-younger, stronger woman than I, as well as being taller, I asked if she would also please administer the dewormer paste.  It is for ridding horses of the parasites that plague them, and sold over the counter at the farm store.  No horse alive appreciates the unimaginable horror of having a small tube of goopy, awful-tasting chemical substance squirted into his mouth. The secret it to just do it quickly before the horses have an inkling.  Otherwise, they toss their heads up and I cannot reach them.  

So, the Supreme Being Herself was not happy with the parasite treatment, and did not want to hold still for the immunizations administered into her neck, either. After a dance at the end of the halter rope, and some white-eyed pulling back, and escalating behavior that did not bode well for anyone, I took the rope.  I stood next to my old friend and spoke quietly to her.  She settled down immediately and did not even flinch when the Doctor stuck her with two needles.

I learned a lesson that I should have already known.  My horses trust me not to let anything bad happen to them.  And if people they do not know very well begin acting in suspicious ways, they are naturally going to behave defensively. The Supreme Being settled down immediately - even closed her eyes.  The two inoculations were administered in less than a minute with not so much as a flinch.  It warmed my heart and also broke my heart.  

No one knows who will go first - me or the horses.  I continually ask that I outlive both of my horses so that when their times come, they will be put down humanely, so they won't be sold for slaughter.  The thought of my old friends suffering on the slaughter truck to some distant inhumane end, surrounded by the horror and fear of their terrified companions simply cannot be allowed.  She was afraid of the gentle veterinarian and the young assistant.  How terrified would she be at the hands of cruel men who will gladly crowd as many horses onto a truck as possible, never bothering to provide even water regardless of how many days they are on the truck in transport.  These men do not care if horses are trampled on the truck, if they are sick or pregnant, young or old, sound or not.  All it takes is for someone to not want a horse.  

Once horse slaughter was effectively halted in the United States (2007), people who make a living from horses one way or the other were angry. They claimed it ruined the horse industry since they could no longer easily dispose of unwanted horses.  I am talking about people who breed horses for sale, who profess to love horses, but have no compunction sending young horses to slaughter - horses that are perfectly healthy, just not conforming to breed standards or otherwise not marketable.  

Horse slaughter has not been outlawed in the USA.  The work-around is that the Federal Government no longer allows inspection of slaughter houses that process horses for consumption.  Since meat that has not been inspected cannot be sold for food, then there is no market for dead horses.  All horses that end up on the slaughter trucks go to Mexico or Canada, so it is a long, shameful, terrible end for horses that worked all their lives for farmers, or cowboys but are no longer sound or otherwise useful.  Many are pregnant to add weight, upping their sale price by a few dollars.  Many are injured or ill.  Many are simply unwanted.  It is a terrible end for horses, the selfless companions that carried our species into agriculture, warfare, and civilization.

If, by some unimaginably evil twist of fate, either of my horses end up in Mexico or Canada, slaughtered and sold as food, just know that every summer they have been liberally sprayed with fly and tick repellant that has a warning label to not use on horses intended for consumption.  They have been given annual vaccines and stuffed with ivermectin twice a year every year. So, go ahead, motherfuckers:  Bon Appetit!

Did I mentioned ivermectin - that miracle "medicine" that some online folks argue quite ferociously saved them from covid? They also swear it neutralizes cancer despite the fact that there is zero scientific evidence that it has any effect on cancer whatsoever.  It is given to humans for the same reason it is given to horses:  internal parasites.  

The world has gone off the rails  - on a crazy train.  Difficult to stay sane but better than believing in a flat earth or that ivermectin cures cancer.  Who is making up these crazy fairytales? 

Map of the Flat Earth can be bought from Amazon for $21.95 plus shipping and handling.

"Black Holes Lie at the End of Time"

With the Spotify subscription, there are selections of podcasts and audiobooks available for free.  I have been listening to several books by Professor Brian Cox.  

There is something immensely appealing about this mild mannered Brit who also plays in a rock band.  I recently came across a YouTube video of  Dr. Cox as a guest on Conan.  Brian Cox angered Depok Chopra, by "tweeting some facts", to which Chopra tweeted in reply, "I am going to shove my cosmic consciousness up your ass."

Professor Cox was wearing a suit coat over a t-shirt with an origami unicorn stencil, clearly the unicorn left for Deckard and Rachael at the end of Blade Runner, the greatest science fiction movie of all time.

Brian Cox is also a Professor of Particle Physics, and has written several books.  With all of this, you would think Professor Brian Cox is an immensely cool guy, but his appearance on Conan proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he is a (super-intelligent) nerd.  I am a serious fan of the Professor! Listening to him explain quantum physics in his Oldham accent just kills me, in a very good way. He says the most outrageous things in the incredible English vernacular.

If you ever need to stretch your imagination, think about these facts:

Our sun converts 600,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen into helium EVERY SECOND! (My emphasis.) It has been doing this since before the earth was formed. It has enough hydrogen for another five billion years.

(31,536,000 seconds per year x 5,000,000,000 years = 1.57680000e+17 on my little calculator - which might mean that the math broke its little chip.  There are big number calculators on line, but you get the idea.) 

Our sun is 1.4 million kilometers in diameter.  A passenger jet would have to fly for six months to circumnavigate it.  It is a small star.  The largest known stars are thousand of times larger with diameters in the region of a billion kilometers.

The rigidity of matter is something of an illusion,  Electron clouds surrounding atomic nuclei keep atoms apart but a sugar cubed-\sized lump of neutron star material would weigh at least one hundred million tons.

September 14, 2015, scientific instruments on earth (LIGO and Virgo Collaboration laboratories) detected gravity waves from a black hole collision/merge 1.3 billion years from earth. The black holes were 29 and 36 times the mass of our sun.  They collided and merged in less than 2/10th of a second.  During the collision, the peak power output exceeded that of all the stars in the observable universe by a factor of 50.  ***

These are numbers and time frames that are inconceivable to our mere human minds. Alright, I am speaking for my own mind here.  Unimaginable, but the math is owed to all of our science and physics prior to September 2015.   

Where are we headed as a species in this unimaginable, inconceivable universe?  What is our purpose  (aside from pissing off Depok Chopra)? What the hell is the purpose of black holes?

Black Hole Bonus fact!!

"The idea of objects whose gravity is so intense not even light can escape them is far older. In 1783, an English cleric and amateur scientist named John Michell showed that Newton’s law of gravity suggested such objects could exist. But Michell went further, suggesting that despite being invisible, such objects might reveal themselves if they happened to have a star in orbit about them." 
- BBC Science Focus Magazine

***All facts in italics are either direct quotes or paraphrased from: Black Holes - The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Published 2022 by HarperCollins

First photo of a black hole, taken by Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Kindness

So, there I was at the Farm Store with the subpar customer service, buying ONLY dog food for the resident wolf girls of Spiritcreek.  (One needs weight management and the other has allergies.)  For the two different 25 pound bags of Science Diet, I expected the total cost to be $110 - $120.  When the grumpy young man rang it up, for a whopping total of $200, I was shocked.  I have been buying 38 pound bags for about $82.

"Good God Almighty!  Those dogs are going to have to start earning their keep!"  It just slipped out.

Amazingly, a young man behind me in line immediately said, "M'am, I will pay for it."

What did he say? 

I was taken aback and slightly embarrassed. I told him that was very kind of him but I was just complaining.  

He said, "I heard no complaint."

I was so shocked that I do not think I properly thanked him for his offer.  I did not accept it but was very moved just the same.    

Who does such a thing in these days of people ranting over women buying cupcakes from the bakery for their children's birthday party using SNAP cards?  

I have been praying for that young man, asking for blessings of good fortune, good health and much happiness for him.  Each time I think of it, I automatically call for blessings for him.

As for the wolf girls, those creatures of splendid canine senses, they who bark at the wind blowing, earthworms tunneling in the soil, silent and invisible extraterrestrials surveying the domicile at night, ghosts and whang doodles haunting the timber, and that most horrible monster threat of all time:  hoofbeats of the resident horses far out in the pasture!  The very same animals - German Shepherds of quality breeding - that never made a sound when a truck full of men got all the way to the front of my house, exited the truck, and circled the house.  That is how I came to be standing naked in my bedroom when I saw a man walk past the window in broad daylight.  Not a peep from those $200 dog food burners!!! 

Has Science Diet added unicorn meat to their recipes?  Pixie tears? Hobbit leaf?  

Regardless, next time I buy dog food, it is going to have to be something much less expensive. Counting on the kindness of strangers is probably not an effective budgeting practice.

 See where one particular wolf girl is stationed? 

 At all times, she finds the exact location where I need to be!  

When Life was Still Good in the USA - December of 2024

Ere the sun rose on this day, I bailed out of bed early to drive to Radina's Bakehouse in Manhattan.  It is a local coffee shop and bakery.  You drive up, order, then all manner of goodies are handed through your automobile window. It is like Christmas, almost. 

The only thing that cannot be handed through your window is a loaf of bread.  I do not know the reasoning behind this rule.  You could get bread through the car window during the pandemic.  A bureaucrat somewhere in Riley County must have discovered Radina handing out too much convenience and simple happiness far too early in the morning.  

"If you want warm bread first thing in the morning, you lazy bastards, you WILL get out of your cars, go inside to buy the bread the way miserable people have always had to buy bread!"  

I mean, maaaaaaybe the bureaucrat said that?

Luckily for me, on this morning, I did not want an entire loaf of bread.  I just wanted a little adventure.  I wanted piping hot coffee and a croissant, or some other delectable bakery item.  Then, I parked my car to enjoy everything at once.  

The photo was taken in the parking lot of the MoA+L, which is The Museum of Art Plus Light.  I have not yet visited this place, but I certainly intend to do so!

I was so happy that morning.  I felt great and the weather was fine.  I was enjoying the break in routine, and definitely appreciating fresh baked goods with coffee.  There was no traffic, and the city was just not quite awake, so it was very peaceful.  The smell of coffee was in the still air when I turned the corner.  I wondered if the working gals were aware of the good jobs they had, even though they came in before daybreak.  (I thought if I had ever had a job like that, I would look back on it fondly.)

I marveled at our clean, orderly, sleeping Kansas university town.  We live good lives in Kansas, for the most part.  Women can go to work in the dark safely, for the most part. It is an amazing thing when a small town like Manhattan, Kansas has a bakehouse!  

I sipped my coffee that morning - the heater on and the windows down.  I loved the Christmas lights, which were far more colorful than they look in the photo.  It was a bit of colorful magic in the dark and I thanked God for my life in Kansas, for Christmas and my children, and my little house on the prairie.  I was thankful for the clean streets, that none of our buildings have been bombed or riddled with weapons of war.  Most of us have jobs to do, and we do them well.  From the little gal taking my order with sleep still in her eyes, to the people who wrapped these trees in miles of Christmas lights.  

It was a wonderful sunrise.

  

Sunrise, December 30. 2024  Manhattan, Kansas

Delightful

TikTok is a huge diversion, and depending on your interests, you can spend hours being served video after video of your favorite things.  My TikToks are mostly cute animals, kids across the world doing the latest dance craze, a young Scot, the most dramatic poet I have ever encountered.  I hope he is copyrighting all of his work and planning to publish a book!  (I do believe that the Scots are indeed Warrior Poets.)

I also get an occasional video of someone walking along a beach somewhere in the world, collecting rocks or shells or sea glass.  That is how I stumbled across a woman in Scotland who finds bits of sea glass at the shore, including bits of broken dishes that, I guess, are antique pottery.  (They are not porcelain or china, so pottery that does not dissolve in the sea?) Each time I watched one of her videos, I coveted pieces of sea glass for myself.  

I was not the only person casting an envious eye toward her sea treasures.  Many of her fans request a piece or two of sea glass.  She offered an exchange with only 5 people from anywhere in the world - bits of sea glass, etched by sand and salt, in exchange for whatever treasures you would like to exchange with her.  This was too exciting!  I immediately sent her a message, explaining that even if I was not chosen from among her fans, I still wanted to send her Permian Sea fossils from my Kansas prairie creek.  I do not know why I thought she would want the oldest, most prolific and common fossils on the planet, which are all gray and NOT beautiful like sea glass.  No comparison.  Nevertheless, I offered up my local treasures. With embarrassing enthusiasm, I might add.

Now, I am not normally a lucky person.  According to a very sweet lady in Scotland, it just so happened that my name was one of the five names already randomly chosen.  Is that amazing or what?  The little box of treasures arrived all the way from Ayr, Scotland in less than a week.  Can you believe it?  I have a handful of bits of sea glass, frosted and ground smooth from being rolled by the waves on the Scottish shores for decades, possibly centuries.  She also included a hag rock, a lucky stone, and two pieces of blue and white pottery.  Perhaps some of my Scots ancestors ate from plates with the same pattern?  

Nothing has delighted me more than this delivery from Scotland.

I sent her a small bag of Permian Sea fossils found in the clean sand in my creek, a copy of two of my blog posts about the Permian Sea and the fossils, photos of my horses and hounds and my kids with their dogs.  I sent one of my hand-painted cards.  She did not ask for these things but anyone who loves to spend time collecting sea glass is a kindred spirit.  I am sure of it. 

This delightful person is known as Seasalt Witch Scotland.  

Her ETSY shop   Seasalt Witch Scotland

Bob Dylan, Maryland, and The Home Stretch

Bob Dylan
You know those quizzes people pass around on the social media sites, asking how many things from a list that you have done?  I love those.  I always want to check them all off, but I have not been to Europe nor have I gone sky diving.  

Some of the quizzes are about mostly minor delinquency - like skinny dipping? Hitch-hiking?  Ever been arrested?  (I can check all of those off the list.) 

Some quizzes are lists of random things, like, have you ever been to Mexico, been on tv, or broken a bone?  I normally get most of those checked off but I have not been anywhere in Europe or Asia, or even Canada.  I have not been to New York but I have been to Philadelphia and Los Angeles.  I have not broken a bone.  I have not been snow skiing but I was a scuba diver. I had never been on television until March, 2025.  

March 30, 2025, Topeka Performing Arts Center, Bob Dylan and his band took the stage at 8 pm.  This time the whole family was there.  Me. Daughter. Son.  My third time. Daughter's second time.  Son's first time.  I can now depart this realm in peace knowing that both of my children have been in the living presence of the Old Poet.  I was breathing the same air as that irascible old man yet one more time. 

I had warned my kids that unless you genuinely know his songs, you aren't likely to recognize any of them!  I do not care about that.  The music itself was excellent, as always.  I do not think Bob Dylan can sing any of his songs the same ever again once they have been recorded.  I have tried to reproduce copies of my own water color or acrylic paintings.  It simply cannot be done.  You are not stepping into the same creative river the second time around. Besides, it is Bob Dylan we are talking about here. They are his songs and he can sing them anyway he feels like singing them!  And if his singing voice is so awful now, (never that great to begin with), who the hell cares?  The millions of fans around the world have spent long hours in his company, getting through life quite well with his subtle humor, his fierce outrage, and his joy.  He simply is not an apologetic person, even when he sings the blues. 

So, while we were standing in the security check line, there was a very young local tv reporter interviewing old people, looking for the oldest fans who had seen Dylan more than once.  It was only slightly patronizing but I forgave her.  In the first place, she had no idea who Bob Dylan truly is, what he has brought into the world, or why it is important.  It was probably funny to all those youngsters at the tv station that a bunch of old boomers would turn out for an 83 year old man no one can clearly understand on stage any longer.  All she had to do was look around at the generations in attendance.  Real art, genuine creativity, speaks to any and all who lend an ear, regardless of age. 

So, yes, I had my fifteen seconds of local fame on television that night.  At least two people that I know personally recognized me on their tvs.  The trouble came when I saw myself.  My glasses were seriously askew on my face.  I looked senile, as if my kids had dragged old Mom out of the Home and treated her to some old guy - Bill Dylan, was it?  Oh, lord.  

Those youngsters at the television station need to do better at fact checking.  They called Bob Dylan a Pulitzer winning entertainer.  No, my dears.  He is a Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. 

A lot was accomplished on March 30, 2025.  My whole family has seen Dylan perform live now.  I have seen my personal muse for the third and likely last time in this life.  I can check off another item on the Facebook quizzes.  I have been on television. 

Maryland
I was filling the gas tank at the truck stop and noticed a Maryland license plate on the truck next to me.  A young, stern faced man set about filling up.  I asked him how things were up in Maryland.  He was only a bit taken aback, but politely said things were fine.  Not willing to leave the guy in peace, I asked, if he did not mind me asking, what was he doing in Kansas? 

That opened the flood gates.  He was on a long trip across the USA going to as many National Parks as they could manage.  He had spent two nights in Yellowstone, visited the Black Hills.  They went to Custer State Park and they were on their way to Kansas City for Barbecue!  I was delighted he was willing to share those couple of minutes of his summer adventure. 

I always want to talk to people with out of state plates.  Sometimes I do, but mostly I do not.  I think I will make it a point to ask more.

The Home Stretch
I thought getting old was going to be awful.  It is not awful, at least not yet.  There are many things to enjoy.  I am set free of a host of insecurities and doubts, and far removed from the most embarrassing times.  Most of my heartache is far in the past, though I am reluctant to speak such a thing for fear of calling down the cruel realities life offers daily to every single living thing.  We can only live one moment at a time so we have no choice, really.  It is, always, take the next step.  

I found out that you can go to bed old but wake up elderly.  I am still getting around alright.  I can still mow and keep my own house.  I can safely drive.  I am tending my own affairs though I realize my memory can be slipping a bit.  When I was young, if I had ever spoken to you once, I recognized you again, even decades later.  Now, I am not sure if I am talking to the same nurse I saw last time I was in the doctor's office!  I have high anxiety when I am introduced to new people because not only will I not remember their name, I likely will not recognize their face the next time I see them - even if it is later in the same event. 

I cannot remember if I have done some things.  The pest control service man had been coming to my house for 15 years, then suddenly I had a new technician.  He retired without saying anything!  At least I do not remember he said anything about retiring.  I wanted to send a card, thanking and congratulating him.  The trouble is, I think I did send him a retirement card.  Should I send him another card and explain?  Or just send it and hope he has already forgotten I sent one earlier?  If I did send one already, that is.  See what I mean?

I am in the home stretch.  Such things are to be expected. I sometimes cannot remember if I fed both dogs, or if I fed them at all.  (I think they often get fed twice.)  I worry that I might not be able to see well enough to renew my license, though my vision still corrects to 20/20 with glasses.  I worry that I might do something stupid like leave the car running, or a burner on the stove.  

Getting old is not terrible, yet.  If I live long enough, it will be terrible. I simply cannot imagine living in an old folks home.  How goddamned awful that would be!  I am in no hurry to check out, but I also do not want to overstay my welcome on this old earth.  

I know I am coming down the homestretch, or as Bob puts it:  "The fourth part of the day is already gone."

Whoever or whatever created this world with all her creatures has a reason for the horrific reality of suffering and death.  I hope it is a damn good reason.

Fuck All Y'all

As you may recall, I continued to do business with a conveniently located farm store in town despite the fact that the employees were universally the rudest, most nonmotivated people I ever had to deal with.  (If it was my attitude, I would expect to encounter rude people everywhere, which is not the case, though I certainly have resting bitch face.) 

A corporate buyout of the farm store brought in a small army of motivated, attentive, courteous employees that absolutely delighted me.  It was pleasant to do business there and that lasted quite awhile.  Alas, all good things come to an end.  I was recently disappointed to find that the employees are back to the natural state of rudeness and minimal customer service.  It is comforting to have things back to normal. However, the new rude employees are even worse than the old rude employees.  I am seriously considering never spending any money there again. The old employees simply vexed me with their sullen and rude minimal customer service.  The new employees have no problem speaking to me as if I am four years old, or stupid, or both.  Fuck the farm store.  Fuck the farm store very much.

Here is another example of great customer service:  I bought a new car in September, 2024.  The guy doing to the final paperwork enrolled me in over $7000 worth of warranties that I specifically said no to, repeatedly.  While most of the money had been refunded, they owed me over $800 for a tire warranty that I never agreed to.  On Tuesday of this week, I finally received the refund.  It took almost 9 months for them to cut a check.  Nine months, about two dozen phone calls, (almost all of them unreturned) and four trips in person.  Also, fuck the car dealership.  Fuck the car dealership very much.

I am not sure what is going on.  I am properly an old woman now so perhaps the disrespect simply comes as part of the aging process.  There is a lot of worry thanks to the despicable things taking place in our country right now.  Every day the headlines are more worrisome than the day before. Maybe everyone is under such stress that it is just the best they can do.  Insulting and embarrassing an old woman is apparently acceptable to the farm store employees.  Adding over $7000 to a car's purchase price despite clear and repeated refusal is actually dishonest, something you would expect from a cut-rate used car joint, not a premier car dealership. 

Some days I genuinely feel like fuck all y'all, fuck all y'all very much.

Careening Planet, Mothership, Portal or Cloud? It's A Cloud. It's Always a Cloud.

On the morning of February 21, 2025 at approximately 7:08 am, on location in Wabaunsee County, Kansas, I witnessed a phantom planet drawn close to the earth.  Or, a mothership in the east.  Or, an enormous portal that dwarfed the sun.  Or, I was dreaming. 

I found my glasses and got out of bed to look through the window, the upper pane that has no screen.  What was I seeing?

It was nearly sunrise,  but partially hidden by the timber behind my house was an enormous orb. It  appeared to be a near planet, the way they are depicted in science fiction movies. It was electrifying! Had Mars been knocked out of orbit into a collision with the earth?  Probably not. (Would we not have felt a disturbance in the force?)

Were the extraterrestrials at long last returning to earth, the gigantic spherical mothership parked between me and the sun?  No.  Millions of people would have already seen it.  Someone would surely have called me by now. (That would be news worth more than a mere text, right?)

Still awash in the brain waves of the dream state, maybe I was capable of seeing a portal of space/time, or a spiritual gateway - in my pasture. Maybe.  (My dogs were behaving as if I was pretty darned wide awake.)

I went to the other east windows to try to get a better view.  The orb did not shift or change from a different angle so it was, in fact, very large or very far away.  I decided to just observe it.  I thought maybe I should try to photograph it.  If it was real, it would show up in a photo.

So, I photographed it, knowing the true size, the strangeness, or the wonder of it, whatever it was, would not translate.  It was underwhelming in the photo.  I waited until the sun was up then photographed it again to get a comparison in size.

Ultimately, I thought it had to be a cloud.  (A perfectly round, featureless, unchanging cloud that I have never witnessed in all the decades of cloud watching I have logged?) Occam's razor instructs us to prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions. For a few glorious moments, I thought the world had shifted.  

  

Here is the photo of the strange anomaly.  I tweaked every aspect I could to try to better see it. In this extreme zoom it is pixilated but it was smooth and perfectly round to the eye.  

Here is the sun rising behind it, for comparison.  Using my circle templates, I measured the "mothership" as 1-7/8" on the screen while the diameter of the sun measures 11/32" - roughly twelve times the size of the sun.

 

We Grieve When Nothing is Lost

 

In a remote realm of perfection, there was a just monarch who had a wife and a wonderful son and daughter.  They all lived together in happiness.

One day the father called his children before him and said:

"The time has come, as it does for all.  You are to go down, an infinite distance, to another land.  You shall seek and find and bring back a precious Jewel."

The travelers were conducted in disguise to a strange land, whose inhabitants almost all lived a dark existence. Such was the effect of this place that the two lost touch with each other, wandering as if asleep.

From time to time they saw phantoms, similitudes of their country and of the Jewel, but such was their condition that these things only increased the depth of their reveries, which they now began to take as reality.

When news of his children's plight reached the king, he sent word by a trusted servant, a wise man:

"Remember your mission, awaken from your dream, and remain together."

With this message they roused themselves, and with the help of their rescuing guide they dared the monstrous perils which surrounded the Jewel, and by its magic aid returned to their realm of light, to remain in increased happiness for evermore.                                                                              

                                                                              - Thinkers of the East by Idries Shah - 1971

Human beings, each one of us, catch glimmers of the Light.  We feel the celestial chord.  Sometimes it is a conscious, resounding flash.  Often it is a whisper, a fleeting sigh in the first stirring breeze of sunrise.  Maybe it comes in an dream, forgotten except for a sustained peace for a day or so. There are moments of delight with family or friends.  The generous earth herself often sounds the clarion.

As beings with a vocal language, the gift we evolved into alphabets in order to share across time and distance, the written word often incandesces, illuminating another bit of the mystery.

"You are to go down, an infinite distance, to another land."

It is why we grieve when nothing is lost, when we weep in the full light of day.  

We Need More Freshly Baked Bread

 

Almost every morning I have the idea that I will quickly finish the chores so I can drive to Manhattan for freshly baked bread and a flat white. It requires very little to change my mind - too cold, too tired, too far, too wasteful, too fattening.  It also elicits a touch of depression.  A genuine bakery does not exist in Topeka. A bakery is too woke, I guess.  

Next, inevitably, I think I could bake my own bread.  There is enough time in my day, every day, that I should get in the habit of baking my own bread. I wonder if I lived on freshly baked bread and whole milk, would I eventually weigh a thousand pounds or would I lose weight? Become young again? Be happy despite the "generally wretched times" we live in?

My grandmother often made bread, baked in the oven of a large wood burning stove.  The aroma of the rising dough was an elixir of comfort and love that I experienced no where else in my life, not then and not since. The yeast and baking bread and burning wood created a deeply satisfying warmth that nourished me to my very center.  Grandma loved me.  Simply.  And never once in her long life did she ever hurt my feelings or make me feel bad about myself.  She was the only one.  Maybe that is why freshly baked bread is disproportionately delicious.  It is, after all, merely yeast and flour.  Hardly a complicated list of ingredients. 

My grandmother was a loving old woman. The worst thing I ever heard her say was to call a particularly unpleasant woman an old heifer.  There were several women she deemed old heifers. I think an old heifer is a double insult, as a heifer is actually a cow that has not yet given birth. You had to be a horrible person to have my sweet old granny say such a thing about you.

Grandma was a musician, an accomplished pianist.  There was a long list of songs she could play from memory. Once in a great while, when the whole family was gathered, she could be persuaded to open the parlor and play for us.  The old piano was so terribly out of tune, but it mattered not.  The longer she played, the livelier the tunes and the more complicated the music.  A brief island of light and ease in all of our lives. She outlived her music and piano playing skill. I was not around for all those years that she surely filled the air with her joyful music.  

It was not until her funeral that I learned that one thing she did to earn money as a young woman was to break horses for people. How did I not know this about her?  That was important information that someone should have told me! I never had the chance to ask her a thing about it!

She rode a horse to school. She explained the purpose of those enormous horse blanket pins to me.   You pinned the horse blanket closed over your legs when riding in the cold.  She often told me of her father hauling a piano home in a wagon with a team of big work horses.  It must have been one of her favorite memories.

Her father called her Babe.  When she cut off her long hair the way the young women were doing in the Twenties, he was shocked.  He asked, "Babe, what have you done to your hair?"  She said she never cut her hair again. 

My grandmother was the oldest daughter of ten children.  I wonder if her father called all of his daughters "Babe", or if that was his name just for her. She clearly loved her father dearly and missed him her entire long life.  Just as I have missed her.

Another year passes into the mystery of wherever time goes.  We consume our time whether we wish to or not.  Such a strange state of affairs for a sentient being to find herself in.  People we love so deeply and dearly, like our fathers and our grandmas and our children and grandchildren, all strung along a deep river of time.  Some come and go quickly and others stay the distance but, ultimately, we are all separated.  Someone can be gone for a lifetime yet we love and miss them as acutely as when they lived.  I am not sad about this, though it seems tragic from our point of view in our finite lives.  Once we are gone, either simply vanished into the ethers or expanded into an infinite knowing, it is all good because:  what a gift a life is... how delicious freshly baked bread is...how clearly music is joy made manifest...how dearly we love one another.  

As is my custom, I wish:

Peace on Earth and Good Will to (some) men.  From the old lady, the supreme beings, and the German Shepherds of Spiritcreek.