Dwarf Planet in Purple

Friday night, shortly after I ate dinner, R. called for his usual "midnight bark." R. goes on and on about all the details of his life and his memories that his life triggers and the geeky bits of linguistics that are triggered by his memories, so I half-listened to the stories I've heard a zillion times before and I half-heartedly scrolled through Facebook. I saw several posts that said things like "FUCK" and "Oh, no" and "I thought 2020 couldn't get any worse." I scrolled a bit further and saw that someone had posted a link to an NPR story that said Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. My heart sank because NPR usually doesn't post false rumors, but I didn't -- yet -- see it reported on the WaPo and NYT sites. Then the boy toy knocked on the door and started to say "Ginsburg died," but I motioned to him that I knew. I didn't say anything to R. about hit. He is so conservative and the last thing I needed at that moment was a cutting remark from him.

The rest of the evening I was simultaneously sad and filled with white-hot fury at the universe. Fucking Mitch McConnell didn't even have the decency to wait until her body was cold before crowing that he would fill her seat immediately. Fuck him with a white-hot poker.

I half-listened to Maugorn's concert over Zoom. A program filled with pirate songs and sea shanties did not cheer me up. I had one of the earpieces of my headphones in my ear, but with the other ear I kept on listening to CNN.

At the moment I don't have the cash for Metro fare to go downtown and mourn at the Supreme Court steps. Maybe later this week.

This weekend I've been going through another box of paper and throwing out ancient computer manuals (how did I get binders full of MS-DOS instructions?) and my Uncle Rene's old bills. Going through the motions, it feels like. I feel so empty.

In fact, today is the 40th birthday of my cousin Tim's daughter! Tim and his wife have been parents for four decades!

Monday night I went for election judge training. I had waffled on whether to sign up, because of the pandemic, but ultimately I came down on the side of wanting to help a fair election take place. This is truly something that's bigger than I am. After all, my father volunteered for the military right after Pearl Harbor. He had no living parents and no kids (yet), so what did he have to lose, right? Serving as an election judge might not be the same as volunteering to take a bullet for my country, but there is still some risk, even though the state will provide us with PPE (masks, gloves, face shields, hand sanitizer).

Most of my experience has been as a provisional ballot judge, and that's what I have been trained for this time around, too. I think we provisional judges are going to be WAY busier than in "normal" election times, because so many people will send in their absentee ballot applications in the mail and then never receive them. Damn Governor Hogan for not just sending ballots out to everyone. Especially damn Drumpus for screwing with the Postal Service, denigrating mail-in voting, and urging people to vote twice.

Three of the four nights of the virtual Democratic National Convention are in the books. Wow, so much inspiration. So many feels.

I should really change some of the icons I have here on my DW account. A few of them are starting to look a bit ... dated. Does anyone remember what SOPA was? Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee in ... 2012.

So, if you see some icons change around here (at least on DW) ... a well-deserved housecleaning.

Over and out.

Don't even know where to begin....

Yes, the novel-coronavirus pandemic is still raging, the U.S. death toll is now in six figures, and the horrible excuse for a president thinks that businesses should rush to be open, virus-spread be damned. Then on Monday, white Minneapolis police officers lynched a black man who was being investigated for a non-violent offense. Yes, I said lynched. That's what they did. The cops killed a man while someone was taking a video of it, and now Minneapolis and other cities are burning. And the pathetic excuse for a president cannot tell the difference between actual leadership and egging on a race war. More and more cities are devolving into chaos and, even though I don't like violence, I can't say I blame the protesters. That lynching was beyond appalling.

Yes, I had a nice time during the Virtual Balticon sessions last weekend, plus a nice chat with Sonya/Patches on Wednesday night. I am plugging away with the church budget team, Toastmasters, and plans to teach a class through the Virtual University of Atlantia in two weeks. But my own concerns seem so damned petty. Pathetic, really.

This won't be the most coherent post I'm ever going to write.

I knew that the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination would winnow itself down to two or three people, but the big culling happened so quickly. Whew. The pundits will be flying blind because the polls can't have caught up yet. As someone on Slate.com wrote, we have to wait for actual votes, just like the 1950s!

Also, my favorite political blog, Electoral-vote.com, started today with this quip: "If you are a fan of white men in their seventies, have we got the Democratic field for you." Yikes. Sanders, Bloomberg, and Biden aren't even Boomers -- they are pre-Boomers, Silent Generation, whatever.

I have been intrigued by how U.S. presidents born in the 20th century have been clustered in terms of their birth years. The first decade of the 1900s produced one president: LBJ. The 1910s saw four presidents: Reagan, Nixon, Ford, and JFK. (Yes, I know how Ford and LBJ became president, but let's look at the fact that they were presidents rather than the circumstances that brought them there.) The only two presidents born in the 1920s -- Carter and the first Bush -- were both born in 1924. Then there is a HUGE gap in birth dates until 1946, when *three* presidents were born: Clinton, the second Bush and the orange dumpster fire. No chief executives yet were born in the 1950s, and Obama, birth year 1961, is still an outlier.

I know some of this "clumpiness" is the product of external events. Obviously, service in World War II was a considerable boost to political careers, starting with Eisenhower, the last president born in the 19th century. So it's no surprise that the Greatest Generation is overrepresented in the list of White House residents as well as failed nominees from McGovern to Bob Dole. (I know that the "Greatest Generation" is defined by WWII service, but Pew's definition of birth dates -- 1901 to 1927 -- means that the latest Greatest Generation members could have been the children of the earliest members, which seems to fly in the face of the whole notion of a "generation." But then again, the WWII draft did apply to men ages 18 to 44....) Likewise, the American birth rate dipped during the 1930s and early 1940s, so there are somewhat fewer people in that age range to begin with, never mind now that they are all old.

But still, how the heck did we end up with *three* presidents born in the first year of the Boom, the generation presumably most hated by all the others?

And while I know I am a Boomer too, I find it hard to believe that I am in the same generation as those three presidents. In my mind I split the Boomer generation around halfway through, at birth year 1955. Why? Because the Vietnam-era military draft ended in January 1973, just as the 1955 cohort was starting to turn 18. The older Boomers were shaped by the very real threat of being forced to fight in a miserable war (or their brothers and boyfriends were, if they were female). The younger Boomers did not have to face that threat and were too young to march in the streets, drop acid, and roll around in the mud at Woodstock (though we saw that stuff on TV).

But I am really digressing from Super Tuesday. I *told* you this post wouldn't be coherent.

If I could vote today, I'd cast my ballot for Elizabeth Warren. But I have to wait more than a month to do that, because I live in Maryland, and who knows whether support for Warren will mean anything by April 28.

Not that anything terribly momentous is going on in my personal life. I've been working on some short to medium-length articles for the most recent client, the European marketeers. Not terribly exciting, although I look forward to getting paid. Trust me, international standards for medical devices are the kind of reading materials that will put *anyone* to sleep.

As far as that shit-show of a sham "trial" that ended today in the Senate … so much of it has been described elsewhere, what else can I say? When I was a teenager, I spent great quantities of time recording minutiae about Watergate in my diary (when I wasn't writing about the boys I had crushes on). Nowadays, I have other things to do. I've never been a fan of Mitt Romney, but I will grudgingly admit that by voting for one of the two articles of impeachment, he … didn't exactly "grow a pair," but maybe grew one testicle? Hmmm. The rest of the Republicans be damned. I shall never vote for anyone in that party again. "The company you keep" and all that.

I do want to write more about my recent SCA activities, but I'm tired and I really ought to hit the hay.

Right this minute I'm watching probably the last baseball game of my personal season, because the Nationals are behind the Dodgers 3-1 in the last game of the NLDS. Once again, the home team is choking in the NLDS. (The Red Sox, though, didn't even make this year's postseason.)

Fall Coronation went swimmingly, with over 430 attendees and a fantastic feast. I got the main body of the German dress done, though not the trim on the skirt, or the detachable sleeves, or the headgear. I still have more to do, but I'm taking a break. My left hand feels rather crampy from grasping fabric while my right hand does the hand-stitching.

As far as national politics and the current U.S. constitutional crisis ... some days events seem to be moving faster than I can comment on them ... the buffoon-in-chief continues to revolt and disgust me.

And now ... we're tied in the top of the eighth inning! This game ain't over YET!! Back to watching!!

Very busy. I finished the feature article in the wee hours between Monday and Tuesday, then went to sleep until noon or something. I did nothing productive except go to Teleri's monthly gathering and play around with air-dry (non-food-safe) clay.

This week I had to do two other short pieces of writing and fact-checking work. Got them done.

On Wednesday night I went to Toastmasters -- first time since early February, due to (a) the threat of icy roads and (b) the evening my car had issues. Someone brought cookies because it was contest night. I chomped down on a shortbread biscuit and one of my molar crowns popped off. Fortunately, I was able to drop it into a paper cup and take it home. I have made a dental appointment for Monday morning (ugh). If the crown can't be reattached ... I don't know what to do. Care Credit is probably NOT an option for me because I'm sure my credit score is in the toilet.

Last night the boy toy and I went to the Baltimore Lithuanian Hall for the first time in ages. (Hey, it's not easy to get there when you don't have a car.) It was egg-decorating night -- a fun activity! -- and we got to try some of the food from the new chef in the kitchen. Mmm, cepelinai! Not until later did I learn the news that the Mueller report was finished.

Today has been another quiet day -- mostly tinkering with computer stuff, like the boy toy's audio problems with Skype and my efforts to log into the Atlantian Order of Precedence site (which I still can't get into). Tomorrow is another day....

1. I already wrote stuff about my Christmas-week trip to Massachusetts in my paper diary, so please pardon me for not rehashing it. I'm thankful for the people I did see and am sorry I didn't get to see more people. Schedules are always a bit tricky around the holidays. I'm just glad that I got to see people instead of interacting with them on Facebook. Not only had it been three years since I'd been to my native commonwealth, but also I hadn't visited with some friends for four or five years.

2. I am disgusted beyond words at the cruelty the Trump administration is inflicting on people -- unpaid federal employees and contractors, possibly food-stamp and Section 8 recipients, and who knows who else -- during this government shutdown. I have been living on the financial margins for eight years now, and I wouldn't inflict this on anybody, even for a month.

3. We're in the middle of a cold snap. Last night I wanted to see the total lunar eclipse, but I could stay out for only a few minutes at a time. (The last time I went out, I put my sweatpants on over my jeans.) I couldn't look at it through a window because the Moon was roughly straight overhead and my upstairs neighbors' balconies got in the way. It was really windy, too. I didn't think of looking up the temperature on my phone, but I sort of didn't want to know. (The lunar disc looked so three-dimensional during totality.)

4. Speaking of last night ... the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl yet again! But, geez, the latter part of that AFC championship game (fourth quarter and OT) were anxiety-inducing in the extreme. By the time the Pats actually won, I felt physically exhausted. Well, OK, maybe not as exhausted as the players, but still....

5. I should mention that I have started to work on a feature article that is due in mid-March.

Five things make a post....

1. My grad-school adviser has cancer and is not doing too well. This news comes from yesterday's email blast from the astronomy department chairman. Further correspondence with the chairman (who still remembers me) is that Mike (my adviser) is not quite up to visitors, but cards would be welcome. I have a hard time imagine Mike under the weather -- he is a tall force of nature, with a busy white beard that makes him look like a New England sea captain, and when he's not bashing human-made objects into comets, he goes sailing on the Chesapeake. Still, Wikipedia says he is now 76.

2. I may have some additional freelance assignments. Two offers of potential work landed in my inbox on May 9 within five minutes of each other. One was from a resume I sent in to a freelance-job ad back in January or February. I'd honestly forgotten about it.

3. My church has a candidate for the position of settled (permanent) minister. It was touch and go there for a while, and I was fervently hoping that we would not have to get another interim minister when our current interim's two-year contract ends next month. I don't know the name of the candidate yet, only that she has been referred to as "she." Fingers crossed that's she's great....

4. Don't know what to add about the fast-moving events surrounding the Giant Lying Russian Stooge and his cronies, except to state that I really want to compare the current timeline to that of the Watergate scandal. We're getting a special counsel very close to the 44th anniversary of the appointment of Archibald Cox, for what that's worth.

5. Lately I have been seeing puddles of plain water around the toilet. My current cat has no interest in the toilet bowl, so it's something else. As far as I can tell, the shut-off valve underneath the toilet is the source of the leak. The boy toy put an old pot under the valve to catch the water and then put green food coloring in the toilet tank. So far, the water that drips into the pot is crystal-clear, but since the boy toy pretty much dumped the entire bottle of green food coloring into the tank, the bowl keeps filling up with brilliant green water every time we flush. It's our space-alien toilet.