Saturdays Critters

 A furry friend who was blowing in the wind when I met him/her.

And off they went for their walk. I did ask the dog's name, but promptly forgot it!

I have some cute tiny birds that visit the trees (bare in winter of course) outside my windows over the laptop screen. Sometimes I try to take their photos...usually pretty sad results.

Big Windy had hoarfrost showing early on last Monday morning.

See the blue bird to the right of the blue flag!

Nope, an enlargement didn't help, even changing the background to more shadows.

He was all fluffed up and kept coming back to that branch all day long. Silly guy wasn't even in warm sunshine most of the time.

Our smattering of snow Wed. morning last...melted away by noon and that was all we got here!

Thursday morning  Big Windy showed a bit of snow, and neighbor's roof had either frost on snow...so grateful not to be snowed in, but actually I was "cold-in," and didn't go out till Friday (except to get the mail wearing my big coat)

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Sharing with Saturday's Critters

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Today's notes on politics: (which I mainly post to have as a journaled record of what these crazy times are experiencing!)

From PBS News Tues. Feb. 18, 2025 - 9:55 pm

Let’s look at some of the facets of the federal workforce that have lost staff. Consider this a snapshot of the landscape right now, with the caveat that more actions may take place after this week’s email.

• U.S. Forest Service: 3,400 workers laid off
• Department of Energy: some 1,000 workers laid off
• Veterans Affairs: more than 1,000 workers fired
• National Institutes of Health: Between 1,000 and 1,200 workers fired
• Bureau of Land Management: 800 workers fired
• National Park Service: 1,000 workers fired
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: About 750 workers fired
• Small Business Administration: About 720 workers fired
• Federal Aviation Administration: About 400 workers fired
• Environmental Protection Agency: About 400 workers fired
• Federal Emergency Management Agency: More than 200 workers fired

Other agencies, such as the General Services Administration, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Department of Education, have had dozens of staffers cut.

 

The hardest hit agency. Currently the largest source of layoffs is the U.S. Agency for International Development.

 

So far, more than 12,000 American workers — most of them contractors — have been laid off, according to Stop-WorkUSAID, a group tracking the cuts. Organizer Sadie Healy told us they tallied this figure based on individual names they have vetted. The actual total is likely larger, she said.

 

Thousands more at USAID are also under a stop-work order and face potential firing, depending on a court ruling, which has frozen action against them for the moment.

 

Teenage Mutant MAGA Incels, the young men who gained access to our Social Security and IRS records thanks to MUSK.

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Today's quote:

A memory may feel abstract or immaterial, but it is actually a biochemical process taking place in the brain. It involves neurons communicating with each other via the “wires” or synapses connecting them. The pathway an electrochemical signal follows as it continually travels from neuron to synapse to neuron constitutes a memory.  

Whenever you have that memory, the same pathway gets activated. And the more it’s activated, the more it becomes hardwired into the brain’s circuitry. Eventually, it becomes a long-term memory. 

Activation also requires enzymes, molecules that set off chemical reactions. The problem is that these enzymes don’t exist for longer than a week. If a memory is to endure, it would seem that the enzymes would have to remain functioning for years or even decades. 

Once the enzymes turn off, one would expect the memories to go with them. “This became a holy grail in neuroscience,” Lisman says. “How can a molecule in your brain serve as a memory? How does nature accomplish this?”

—John Lisman

Thanks to fellow blogger, Love is a Place, 

I'm quite relieved to know why my brain has such trouble these days!

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Today's art:

Noelle E. DeVito

Sepia photos

 Sepia Saturday reminds me to look at old photos (of which I have a lot actually)

This week Alan has offered this prompt... Stringed instruments and people bunched together!

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I just went down a rabbit hole, and was looking at many photos of my ex-husband's on Facebook. That's because he posted one of myself, which was a repost from 2023, and had been taken in 1969.  I had no idea the photo even existed!

This was shared in 2023 on Facebook by my ex (with whom I had not become Facebook friends yet) and seen by at least two female relatives, who liked and commented on it...but nobody thought to share it with me! 

Now I'm a friend of my ex on Facebook, so when he reshared it this week, I finally got to see what I looked like in 1969...and I barely (pardon the pun) remember that swim suit.

We had just moved to Florida, so it might have been my sons' (Russ to l. and Marty to r.) first experience of fine white beach sand in St. Petersburg. I do wonder who the blue sleeve and arm belong to, who was drinking a Pepsi in a bottle on the far right corner! Doug (my ex) was probably taking the photo...at that angle there couldn't have been a place for him to set the camera with a delayed shutter, so I do wonder. We didn't know anyone in the area yet, so I'm at a loss for who the blue shirted person might be.

Incidentally we had stayed at a Holiday Inn with a room right on the beach in Jacksonville Beach on the way to Tampa, where we were relocating. Maybe there was bad weather and we hadn't enjoyed the waves of the Atlantic before coming to the west coast of Florida, not a clear memory 56 years later!

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Here is a shot of some men playing stringed instruments - back to topic!

West Virginia Coon Hunters ( unknown photographer)

And some lovely young ladies with their stringed instruments!

And I gave up on finding any photos of 5 men sitting on a bench. Here are some more mature ladies sitting together. My maternal grandmother, Mozelle Miller Webb Munhall, is seated in the middle with her sisters Dorothy, Margaret and Rowena circled above. A Christmas picture no less! My grandmother was the oldest, and Margaret the youngest. They lived almost all their lives in San Antonio TX.

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And over on Open Yesterday's Pages: Muhammad Ali for Black History Month

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Politics again:

"This coup is the greatest theft of information ever."

From: Choose Democraacy via ActionNetwork.org

"This is an administrative coup, and it will require persistent action to block further erosion of democratic norms and build democratic power on the local, state, and national levels. "  

From: Side with Love, The Organizing Strategy Team of the Unitarian Universalist Association

 From Jen Rubin on Substack site, The Contrarian, dated Feb. 19, 2025:

On Monday, thousands of ordinary Americans across the country turned out to protest.

“Thousands of protesters opposing broad swaths of President Trump’s agenda took to the streets across the United States on Monday, calling Mr. Trump a ‘king’ on Presidents’ Day for his efforts to terminate thousands of federal workers and to fire prosecutors and independent watchdogs within the federal government,” the New York Times reported.

If Trump does not understand the essence of our constitutional system, at least some Americans do:

“No king, no crown, we will not back down,” chanted those who gathered a few hundred feet from the U.S. Capitol on the National Mall in Washington.

Many protesters opposed to Mr. Trump’s agenda embraced symbols of patriotism, waving flags and wearing heart-shaped earrings and beanies adorned with the U.S. flag. The members of an a cappella group sang the national anthem by the Capitol Reflecting Pool. The audience burst into applause after the final line: “And the home of the brave.”

Many Americans have expressed frustration with congressional Democrats for not doing more (although it is hard to pinpoint what “more” would look like). The protestors on Monday did not wait for elected officials to lead. They took it upon themselves in the best tradition of our democracy to make their voices heard.

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Today's quote:

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. 

-Lin Yutang, writer and translator (1895-1976)

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Today's art: (Seated people at least, and a group of men in the background!)

Carl Bloch's In a Roman Osteria (1866)

I love how everyone at the main table is looking at the artist!

Moving about over the face of the earth

  I enjoyed seeing the map showing ancient rulers of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The connection is (not about rulers, though that's pretty big in conversations these days) but about how we human move about and deal with changes all around us! Civilizations, cultures, immigrants...it's been happening since the beginning of time.

And another map which shows the peoples who lived in North America before the western Europeans arrived. 

So here's a map showing the routes the various visitors from European counties took into the Americas.

Locations of Stone Circles and Henges in the UK & Ireland - just so you don't think I'm totally 

Ameri-centric. But I'm sorry this was such a pale photo-map...a bit hard to see where what is.

No idea how to pronounce, but it is preferable to Gulf of America (as Trump wants to change it.)

And this is the Dymaxion Map...which shows the land masses in proper sizing...as opposed to the more popular and inaccurate Mercator maps.

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OK, back to real life. Today I'm thankful that the cold front which slammed into our area with heavy winds on Sunday as I was writing this, didn't bring snow as had been forecast. However, you never know, as of then it was due on Wednesday which was yesterday as you read this.

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Sunday I got into a cooking frenzy...I want you to know my usual meals go from refrigerator to microwave...so there I was cleaning some baby bella mushrooms, cutting up some garlic, and sauteing them all in butter. It smelled so good. So how about making it into a soup, I thought. I hunted around in the pantry and found some vegetable stock that expired in 2023. It's going to boil, I thought, so whatever might have happened to it will be ok. Then I thought, cream. Nope, didn't have anything but 2% milk. I put 2 cups in anyway. Thickener? There was this expired container of mashed potatoes. 

DO NOT USE THESE! I was innocent of what would happen. Science came along and smacked me upside the head. The potatoes were runny, so I gently stirred them into the soup mix. No problem. No chunks appeared, so I got bold and poured the rest in. I sure didn't have any other use for them, so thought they might make a nice body for the soup. I sprinkled my favorite spices and some dried onions (since I didn't want to cut a whole one which might be too much for those baby bellas.)

Then there were little blobs that formed throughout the soup. They were like little pieces of tapioca, which for all I knew had been hidden in the potatoes which had stopped having any firmness to them already. But nothing, stir stir stir, would get rid of the little blobs. And they were noticeable when I tasted the soup. Yuk.

OK, maybe I can blenderize them away. So slowly poured hot soup (without mushrooms) into the glass blender, tried low setting, no help. Tried the highest setting. And the blobs were gone. Of course the soup was now aerated with plenty of tiny air bubbles. I poured that first batch into a container which would go in refrigerator. Then did another batch. Let me just say by the time I got to the lase of 6 batches I tried using a colander that had a bigger bottom than the top of the blender...so soup ran down all the outside as well as inside, and the mushrooms I'd been trying to save were covered with little blobs...so that wasn't working.

I just blenderized the mushrooms too. Once I was trying to let some steam escape from the blender, and whirring at the same time...so it splattered mushroom soup all over the place. So that had to be cleaned up. 

I finally had all the soup turned to aerated liquid without any blobs, and I served myself the last cup. Of course lots of the seasoning was in it...whew, lots of flavor. But I ended up with 2 quarts of my own creamed mushroom soup!

Now if only I had someone to do the dishes....

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Today's politics: (yes, I am back thinking, reading, listening, sharing!)

So how do Democrats fight back? If the GOP doesn’t care about the negative impact Trump’s and Musk’s policies and decisions have on ordinary Americans, aren’t Democrats essentially negotiating with political terrorists?

Many demonstrations against Musk and Trump "Not our King" on President's Day, Feb. 17, 2025

 So far we have seen three models of Democratic pushback.

One camp of Democrats appears to think that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the way to go, clinging to norms that have been shattered by the opposition in hopes that a bygone notion of bipartisan consensus about the importance of public service can be preserved. We saw how this worked out for Merrick Garland the last four years. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also appears to be mounting a wait-and-see approach in the face of unprecedented, anti-democratic onslaught.

A second camp, represented by a younger cohort of Democrats, wants to counter the GOP blow for blow, trolling back hard in the hopes it will bring press attention to the unfolding national crisis. For example, Rep. David Garcia recently presented a photo of Elon Musk on the House floor as a “dick pic.” And Rep. Jasmine Crockett famously fired back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a hearing, calling her a “bleach blond butch bad built body.” These are admittedly headline-grabbing moves, which in this attention economy has some real value. They also demonstrate to Democratic voters that someone is fighting back, an important reassurance at this time. But while these counterpunches may feel good in the moment, there is little evidence they actually do anything to make MAGA stop behaving so terribly. If anything, they encourage more bad behavior in an endless cycle. If the other side is behaving like spoiled children, and our side does it, too, the fear is we will be locked forever in a schoolyard fight.

Perhaps there’s a third way, best represented by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s style of discourse. He combines a willingness to engage and actually listen to the other side with a sturdy defense of Democratic values. Buttigieg is not afraid to go on Fox News and other outlets where Republicans are tuned in. He looks past the bad behavior and taunts of the MAGA right and tries instead to get at the heart of why they feel aggrieved, even when that grievance is tainted with racism and misogyny. He then seeks to find common ground, at least on some level. He always presents a path forward, even if it is an aspirational one, where the two sides can treat each other as people caught in the same dysfunctional system, yet all with a shared need for security, health, and community.

It may be too lofty for these rough and tumble times. And there are few in the Democratic Party who can actually step into this role with the skill of Buttigieg and consistently resist the urge to condemn the other side as irredeemable monsters. Few leaders will bother to try and unpack whatever it is that drives the dangerous nihilism at the core of the MAGA right.

But considering the incredibly high stakes, more Buttigieges may be sorely needed if we are ever to escape the downward pull of Trumpian nihilism.

SOURCE: The Big Picture newsletter  Feb. 19, 2025

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Sharing with Thankful Thursday

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Today's quote: 

Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle but I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”

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Today's art:

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth.1

Back to the lake and some laughs

 Lake Tomahawk has thawed from its ice of a few weeks ago. And a few sunny days bring out shirt-sleeved people enjoying the environment

And yes, the first little sprouts are coming up in the garden near the path.

This duck flew overhead and landed on the water. It wasn't until I tried to get this shot of him, that I realized he had a white spot on his head and his sides...he wasn't a mallard like the other ducks. But he was more interested in staying a long way away so this is the best I got.

The mallard couple were more used to hanging out by the bank nearby.

Noonday sun casts long shadows still...it's February.

And I stopped to watch the gentleman sailor with his radio controlled boat skimming around with the wind.

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I went upstairs to pick up a "to-go" lunch and saw some of the other seniors who signed up for these low cost meals. I don't go every day, but look at the menu for the month and sign up for which days I want to order their meal. They are prepared by the Moose Cafe' - a favorite southern style restaurant in Asheville, then trucked over to Black Mountain in insulated boxes. Council on Aging still is offering them (she says as so many federal programs are being cut)...and we pay a minimal fee of $1.50. I usually toss $2 into the till, to keep the program running as long as we can!

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Sharing with "My Corner of the World" hosted from New Zealand. The header is the more recent phot of the lake.

Today's quote:

Civilization is the encouragement of differences. 

-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

Today's art:

by Tina Schart Hyman 

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Today's politics:

If you’re feeling down, depressed or filled with dread, may I recommend a bit of action? Join a protest, go on a march, be around others who feel the same way as you do! It will lift your spirits, and who knows? And the world needs to see us out there, to know that Americans are not complacent nor complicit. Share your participation and others’ with your contacts and social media, because the mainstream media will report on protests only sporadically, at best. Next time, invite your friends and neighbors!

Starhawk

Starhawk demonstrating in San Francisco at the Tesla showroom, Feb. 17, 2025

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On today's blog Open Yesterday's Pages, Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts Douglass

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Today's laugh:

Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio

 Frank Lloyd Wright - Home & Studio (1889- 1909)

Oak Park IL

This Complex served as Wright's primary residence, studio and laboratory during the first 20 years of his career from 1889 to 1909.

The Home and Studio is the Birthplace of the Prairie Style of Architecture and a Historic House Museum.

Most of the sculptures on the exterior of the Home and studio were designed by Wright's friend and collaborator, Richard Bock.

These include the two boulder figures flanking the entrance of the studio, which features a man crouching and breaking free from the ground beneath him (above the column on the right in this photo)

Wright raised six Children with his first wife, Catherine Tobin and designed such famous buildings as The Robie House, Larkin Building and Unity Temple.

Many of his Trademark designs can be seen in their Infancy, as he experimented with concepts before sharing them with Clients.

Or take a tour...

Sharing with Tuesday's Treasures

Today's quote:

Sometimes we need to be alone, to simply do nothing but enjoy the sound of silence.

Today's art:

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (American painter) 1876 - 1958

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And while you are enjoying the beautiful construction by Frank Lloyd Wright, or Miss Smith's cranes, here is a bit of trivial world facts. Not politics though!!

I subscribe to Keith Kron's Substack, -Weekly Prayer. February 16, 2025

Just one paragraph gave me some world statistics that I wanted to share, thanks to Transparency International.

We pray for an end to corruption worldwide. Transparency International released its 2024 list of levels of corruption of countries around the world. 

• The least corrupt countries in order are Denmark, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand. Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, Ireland, and Iceland (the latter three were tied) are in the top 10. 

• The countries with the most corruption were South Sudan, Somalia, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Nicaragua, and the Sudan and North Korea (the latter two tied).

• Russia ranks 154^th.

• The United States is tied with the Bahamas in 28^th.

• Canada is ranked as the 15^th least corrupt country.

• Mexico is ranked 140^th.

• Italy ranked 54^th continues its policing in the Palermo area to end organized crime. Over 150 people suspected of mafia connections were arrested.  

We pray for justice and fairness worldwide. (bullet points mine)

This is the order which Keith published the information in. And he gave many other interesting things associated with Feb. 16. (Sorry I didn't have room to include this on that day's post)

If you’re looking to celebrate today is also National Almond Day, National Tartar Sauce Day, World Whale Day, Do a Grouch a Favor Day, Innovation Day, Library Lovers Day, and No One Eats Alone Day—even if all you eat is almonds with tartar sauce. We say a prayer of remembrance for these observations. 

And finally, a prayer for perpetual kindness, attention, and giving. A father in Fort Worth, Texas, this week out at breakfast with his family of five, learned from his server that the bill had been paid for by another customer. The server brought the $85 dollar receipt to show the note written on it that read, “Thank you for being a great dad.” The father also saw the note on the back of the receipt that read. “Thank you for being the dad they need you to be regardless of who’s watching. We need more men like you, Thank you for letting us see your love for them all.” The note was ended with, “from a retired army medic.”

 

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Politics here...kind of.

And I also enjoyed on Sunday last...an interview by Jen Rubin with Heather Cox Richardson on the Integrity of the President. If the link doesn't work, it may be because I'm a subscribed member of The Contrarian, bu the free version also has a lot of information to keep up with our wild times.