I think we have all seen the videos about “Prepping”, and if you are like me they seem a bit paranoid, but I remember hearing from some who lived in Texas during that ice storm that knocked out power and had people freezing in their livingrooms. Now, as a Michigan kid, you have to understand that I find that incredible to consider that someone in Texas would be so cold as to have to deal with frozen pipes. And that perhaps underscores the biggest thing: we each are different; different lives, different climates, different environments, and what seems obvious for one is completely irrelevant for another. So, when you consider being prepared, there are no hard fast rules.
In short, I would recommend highly that you look into ways to have necessities, like air temp requirements, energy, entertainment, food and water. My considerations for this include a small room in my house that I can insulate with extra blankets, solar lights from the garden, a solar charger for my phone and pad, and simple easily managed food and water. I’m going to try to keep my car gas tank full, have a couple of gallons on hand extra in a gas can, and most importantly I’m doing my best to not be afraid but to be able to meet my needs if things get difficult.
I know there are readers that dealt with the really abusive and difficult times of being gay – like it’s all unicorns and rainbows now (sorry, that was too easy). This is something that I really don’t have the knowledge to speak on, don’t really have the experience, but definitely have concerns. Will we be hounded? I don’t think so, but I can’t help but to be concerned that those who want us rounded up and euthanized all seem to have cabinet positions under this particular reich. So, if I am prepping for needing to cover a couple meals during hard times, what about preparing for my safety when the gay police (and why did I suddenly get a vision out of the Village People?) come knocking on my door? Do I have a safe place to go to? Do I have a safe place to find socialization? As Scottie can tell you, this is a worry for me because I have a tendency to withdraw when I am stressed. I will be relying on social media, friends, and I don’t know what?
Are you making preparations? What are your concerns?
This morning I woke up to read that President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for any crimes, etc., he committed. And the republican right lost their shit.
You, who sought to humiliate and hound the only living son of a sitting president, are offended? You who put naked pictures of the his son up in open congress are aghast at his temerity? You who have excused attempted extortions, sexual assaults, tax evasions, theft from children’s charity, stated intentions of pardoning the people who assaulted the Capital, stated intentions of pardoning himself!, theft of State secrets… do I need to go on?… by your cult leader – you now beat your chest because the sitting president finally had enough? Wow. Yeah, cry me a damn river.
As I’ve mentioned before, Scottie encouraged me to share my – ok, we will use “unique” – perspective and experiences in my daily work life.
I will admit, this has been a bit of a week.
We have a bit of a partnership at the shop between myself and a very wonderful lady who has been there for 43 years. I can’t keep up with her. She has an ability to organize and handle problems that I do not… but they quite literally built the business around her. Would you believe this bitch went on vacation! I know, how rude is that~! So now I am flying around trying to do half of what she made look so easy and not drop the ball on the things I do daily promising myself to get a full roll of duct tape to strap her down if she ever hints at taking time off again. She has been gone for 8 days of work so far, only another 5 work days to go. Wish me luck.
We’ve had our first snow of the season. And, we’ve had excuses coming from one of our workers that “he can’t make it to work because it’s cold and snowing and he walks”. That didn’t pass when I was a kid in school, but I have to “understand”?
Now, I have a turkey – yes this story gets more ridiculous – I am now waiting on this idiot to come to work to receive his Thanksgiving Turkey, and I really couldn’t give a shit. Is that wrong of me? Why am I going out of my way for someone too lazy to come to work?
I’ve also mentioned in the past that I haven’t always responded the best to anger. It was really my wonderful and wacky dog that helped me with that. I needed that responsibility to help me think twice, that love to come home to, that absolute joy of life. I can’t tell you how much I miss her.
But also, If I am to be honest with myself, I’m still really disappointed by the vote. I’m still angry and afraid. I so wanted better things for our country, for our world.
I wanted to live in a world where people love who they want to love, express themselves genuinely, not indebt themselves in the healthcare gulags, not be forced to consider paying for electricity or eating.
I wanted to live in a world where education and intelligence are valued, where love is shared, where hope is prized. Will we ever get there?
I just hope for each of our sakes that we don’t get so wrapped up in the frustrations of life that we forget to live. I need to remember that there are still beautiful things in this world. I need to continue to look forward with expectation of better things.
This past week’s fall out has left me very depressed, very angry. I’m feeling those younger violent angry feelings returning, those hopeless ruminations of indifference. We keep telling our young people that things get better, we keep telling ourselves that things get better. Is it a lie? Is it just a papering over of rotten cores and hollow promises?
Many years ago, many years ago…. I spoke with a young man who was giving up. Giving in. Done. I tried to tell him there was more, that there was something to hold on to, that there was hope. He cried on my shoulder, told me that he didn’t believe me but thanked me for trying. I heard later he died, in darkness and fear. He died alone. He never found that worth hope. Never found that worth holding on to.
I think of him now today and my head hurts. My heart hurts. I fear what could come. When so many strides have been taken, when so much ground has been fought over and won by blood and tears and lives lost to hate and bigotry, to think what can be lost by one fucking svengali churns my stomach.
Good Evening, Everyone. Today I’d like to talk about the words we use, not even knowing the damage we do, with one specific question: Do you think you are a good person?
I’m willing to bet, to put real money on the line and bet that nearly everyone believes themselves to be a good person. I’m also willing to bet that many of the people who will answer that question with a “no” are really good people, but also really hurting people. They are the ones that have been told they are no good, that they are a monster, that they would be better off having never been born. And that hurts, more than a simple “I’m sorry” would ever be able to cover.
In these days of politics and fear, we lash out in anger and frustration. We use words to win, to wound, to prove we are right in the vain presumption that our being “right” even matters.
We flay our loved ones so very self-righteously; we flay innocent lives and cast salt to let it burn. Do we even know who we are hurting? Do we even care?
There is an old saying that goes something similar to ‘when you march to war, be sure you know where to point your weapons’.
And, maybe that’s the problem. We Americans have become so used to war, to fighting, to being strong, to having an enemy, that we’ve come to NEED an enemy. We’ve come to only know who we are and what we love by having someone to hate.
I’d like to begin with a bit of personal history this morning. I was raised in the ELCA Lutheran Church. There are a few different “Synods”, sects/divisions/understandings – if you will, of the Lutheran Church. I then went to a United Methodist church, where I received further education, eventually going on to earn a B.A. in a weird triple major of psychology, sociology and business – (I was originally really interested in how religion, business and “work” interacts within people themselves and society in general).
So, while I am full of questions and doubts, that is the structure of my very understanding of the world. What I’d like to shallowly talk about today is “religion”.
What we are seeing in much of the political realm is not religions of faith, they are religions of control.
I say this knowing this is going to be offensive to many people. But there are times when the truth hurts, and I remember reading somewhere how the truth shall set us free.
Religion seems rife with the blind – those who will not see, will not hear, because they are desperate.
I feel for those taken in by people who have found a pulpit the fastest way to power and wealth. Folks searching for answers and hope will grasp at anything that seems to be a good solution.
I believe this is the prophecy of the age. Graham was right, and he knows it to this day.
Belief in God is a very humbling thing. It is the knowledge that you will never be “all that”. What’s worse is that when you think you are, you realize you have become an arrogant ass comparing your perfection on the flaws of others and completely ignoring that guy in the mirror.
Despite getting my degree from a Christian College and growing up in the church, I no longer go to church. I sometimes wonder if God isn’t welcome there all too often. Instead I find God in all that I see, in the trees and stars in the sky. I don’t know that there is a God, but I want to believe there is, and so I do. Be it Humanist or Christian, what really becomes important in my book is that we love our neighbor and ourselves, and give a big thanks to however all this beauty that surrounds us came to be.
Scottie once suggested I write things about my day, my life, what I’m doing (I think he was having trouble falling asleep.) So, I thought I’d tell you a bit about what my week has had going on and what I’ve been dealing with in my little world, what I’ve learned, etc. Get your coffee.
So, while much of the country has been experiencing the excitement of impending and departing hurricanes and tornados, I live in Michigan where life is a bit more sedate. Sometimes we get wind storms, but things aren’t nearly so entertaining as in other areas. I sort of like that. Life has a tendency to simply “go on” here even while we worry about those suffering things we can only imagine, often making much worse or much lighter about their experience.
I work in a metal fabrication business in the role of shop supervisor, which for me includes production supervisor, maintenance man, turret operator and laser operator, material handler, and if I use the jokes of my father I should include “Chief Bottle Washer”. We are a small business, so I have to fill multiple roles. Sometimes that is terrifying as my ignorance becomes glaringly obvious to anyone not already aware, but often I have very busy, often very frustrating days and I always walk out the door at the end of the day having way more left to do but also having learned a number of new things. That is a good day – when you can end your day and know you have learned something new and can look in the mirror knowing you did your best. In the words of my grandfather – a man who was abandoned on a farm at the age of 10 to work or die, who had only an 8th grade education yet was an accomplished millwright, carpenter and mechanic: Learn something new everyday. If you make it to bed and haven’t learned anything new that day, get back up.
One of the more fulfilling things I learned this week was how to change the reference point on the Y1 and Y2 of a break press. IE: makes it go from / to –, lol. The operators get really nervous when a 200ton break press comes down crooked. That one was actually about 3″ off level in a 12-foot run and made the machine inoperable. This required a change of encoders as well as doing gymnastics in the computer and a whole lot of math. I wasn’t too crazy about the computer part, but the rest was easy enough. I’d never done it though, and wow did it feel good to have that machine making perfect bends. I had to have a tech come in to teach me, but hey – so goes life.
I also spent part of my week wiring in lights on the ceiling. One thing you may not know about me is that when I was a kid I got zapped good by a damaged extension cord. Some 45 years later, I still think about that every time I do electrical work. What’s worse, the ceiling is WAY up there, and the lift moves slightly every time my fat ass does. Then my knees start to move slightly and after a while I need to come down and sit for a while. Go figure, a person afraid of heights and afraid of electric discharges is doing electrical work up high. What could go wrong? I do take extra pants to work with me, just in case. But, wow is it so much brighter in there where I put in the LED lighting! It makes me feel good to have conquered my fears long enough to accomplish that job.
Today is a home day, working on this mess that I’ve yet to find gnomes or elves or whoever is willing to come in at night while I’m sleeping and clean. I tackled the pantry today, and got tackled back! I’m blessed in that I have enough income to buy ahead and stock a pantry, and equally blessed with a poor memory about what is in my pantry. So, I have food that I now have to figure out if I can keep and use, or like numerous cake mixes I’ll likely have to throw out.
My next task is to sort my clothes for those that, uh, “shrunk in the laundry”. (Sigh!)
OK, you all know me well enough by now to know I didn’t drive you this far only to tell you about my boring life. I gotta make a crack about one of the things I feel so much more important than almost anything going on in our country right now: the coming presidential election. Don’t get me wrong, please. To paraphrase a comment I heard from Dave Ramsey, we are far more impacted in our daily lives, for the most part, by being conscientious about our own house than the White House. Even still, what you can do in your own home, in your own life, and what the freedom of your children will have is under attack by someone who should never have been in the White House, and MUST NEVER be again.
New things are often frightening, and when we don’t know something we are often apt to accept what is known over something new. But, when we KNOW that what has been is counter to a good outcome, we need to make a change. We may not know what Harris will do, but WE KNOW how devastatingly trump failed. We know how he lied, nearly destroyed democracy, stole, betrayed, and was DISLOYAL to everyone who put their trust and loyalty in him. Let him go.
Hugs to everyone – even those who disagree with me.
Scottie's Playtime 