mallorys_camera

I've wanted to visit the Radix Center here in Albany for quite a while now. I eventually figured out that one of the more timely ways to learn about what they have going on is to keep tabs on their social media updates, rather than relying on their website or newsletters. Through social media I learned they were holding an Open House this past Saturday from 10-2. I convinced S to join me there at 11 am, which is when there was a tour scheduled.

Rushing over there from Yet Another Boathouse Work Party, at first I didn't really see any other people. Just a whole lot of intriguing vegetation, including fruit trees loaded up with fruit.

I did appreciate seeing their Community Compost Drop-Off Station.

And the Free Food table and fridge.

While I was standing around, waiting for S and/or some more official-seeming people to show up, a woman drove up and said, "Hi there, can you help me?"

"I don't - I'm not a part of the programs here," I stuttered.

That turned out to not matter; she had come from a food pantry event where they wound up with a lot of leftover plums, frozen asparagus, and frozen fish. She knew about the fridge and table at the Radix Center, so people had helped load up her vehicle, but she wasn't strong enough to actually hoist all the boxes out of her car.

Well, THAT is certainly something I could help with! We filled the table with 6 boxes of plums, the freezer with tons of fish and some of the asparagus, and the fridge with even more asparagus and plums.

She seemed to know more about how the Radix Center worked, so she led me through to a spot near the classrooms where S and the folks from the Center had congregated. It turned out I'd found the rear entrance, not the main entrance. Whoops.

There was a small group of 4 of us for the tour, led by two of the Center's employees.

If I tried to do a full recap of the tour, this would turn into a really long post. Instead I've tried to write reasonably thorough captions under the photos, which can be seen over on my Flickr photostream for anyone who really wants to know.

Highlights, though. Behold, this glorious hoop house, full of tomatoes, potatoes, and squashes!

Awesome electric trikes for compost pick-up:

Beautiful and productive passion fruit vine inside the glorious main greenhouse:

Chickens responsible for the primary composting step:

Full facility map:

Community gathering space:

By the time the tour had wrapped up, almost all the food was gone from the free food table and fridge. The Radix Center was very intentionally located in this neighborhood in Albany, because it's a neighborhood of great need. Meanwhile, the woman who had brought over the food, B, turned out to be the sort of person more than happy to tell us about her life story, which included a period working on the Half Moon, a replica of the ship that Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in 16-whatever.

I felt like I'd heard of the Half Moon before, but I'm not entirely sure. It was interesting to learn that it was built at the behest of a millionaire, and that after a number of years, it eventually made its way to the Netherlands and is now rotting away because of a lack of interest in and money for maintaining it.

I mean, I'm not so sure I'd have much interest in trying to keep it going, compared to any number of other wooden vessels these days. There are several other wooden ships that still ply the Hudson, so I guess that niche is still filled.

But it still feels important to know about, as another element that has been present on the Hudson River for some years, bringing people down to the water.

flemmings

So of course I took the upright walker over to Dufferin for my Vietnamese coffee. It really is an unwieldy beast. The good part is that I can, yes, walk upright with it if I remember not to hunch: hunching is now so habitual after four years that I must mindful my way out of it. The drawbacks however are multiple. Major one being that the seat is too low-- below knee height-- for me to sit down in with any assurance of being able to stand up again. Fortunately the kind city has provided benches at intervals along Bloor, or rather, just off Bloor, some of them in the shade.

The removable basket is insufficient and tends to remove itself from the poles it hooks on to. The rests for the arms or forearms are hard plastic and in this weather one sweats into them, and (possibly confined to me) they cut off circulation to the hands so my little fingers go numb. Intended for a feature but is actually a bug: if you collapse the walker sideways so as to allow passage into letussay narrow doorways, it also collapses forwards. This is for easy storage in the trunk of the car everyone owns, that takes you to wherever you're going. But it makes it extremely difficult to enter a store whose door is up a step and that opens outwards, like the banh mi place. So I will not be doing this again in a hurry. I know I've walked over to nearly Dufferin before and not died, and my phone would have me believe it's shorter to there than to nearly Spadina, but psychologically, as I've said before, west is much much farther than east.

However it's a much different crowd west than east. In addition to the many cafés that have sprung up west of Ossington it also has most of the city's Ethiopian restaurants. On the way I passed an Indian gentleman in saffron robes taking the sun and a very large Grand Pyrenees in its summer-unfriendly shaggy coat. Coming back I passed an Asian family (I think: two adults and a teen/ early 20s guy who may or may not have been together) notable in that the younger guy was reading a hardcover book as he walked and didn't stop reading, or even look up, when he had to stop for a red light. What was engrossing him so? The lettering on the spine was faded but I could still make out 'Middlemarch'. Sugoi.

As for the walker, well, I shall still use it as long as I'm not intending to do anything but walk.

bleodswean

The story is posted!

Tell Your Park Fire Story

I have to take an unwanted BYE in Idol this week as the story and work has kept me too busy to pen anything fictional and fun. Next prompt.

bill_schubert

But for the small stuff I'm pretty much done with my office. The rest will be the usual battling entropy. I moved around some of the pictures and added a couple. What the desk wall looks like:

The lovely couple over the door are my great grandparents on my father's side. Prussian soldier and wife. Reminds me of Crosby's 'Triad'

Your mother's ghost stands at your shoulder
Got a face like ice, just a little colder
Saying, "You cannot do that, it breaks all the rules
You learned in schools"

The reverse wall is my quiet chair, the place I typically use to meditate:

At some point when I first set up our retail space for Friendly Computers I ran across this neon monkey. It was in the store window and then in my office window and now on the wall behind my chair. When he first met my mom at an age when he could barely talk he called her Monkey. And, of course, the way things went she was Monkey for the rest of her life and has watched over me and now meditates with me. I can't make the colors come out right. It is not so garish. It is also on an Alexa routine and comes on every evening shutting off at bedtime. She is accompanied by two amazing paintings by a friend of hers and a small landscape by one of her ancestors who was a Southwest painter. So they no doubt talk at night.

All in all I'm happy with things for the moment. There may still be some rearranging. I took down a huge picture of a sailing ship that belonged to my grandfather. I saved it but it takes up wall space that could contain a couple of other hangings, yet to be determined. I'm giving it some more thought.

But things are picked up and cleaned and neat. For the moment.

mallorys_camera

About six weeks ago, I saw a craigslist posting for a collective household in T-burg: Someone had just bought a Big Old House; they wanted sympatico people to move into it to form a sympatico household. Numerous photos of the house, of the grounds. They liked animals! They wanted people with pets!

I immediately dashed off a reply: Here are my many virtues. Blah, blah, blah.

I was disappointed when I did not hear back.

Okay, I thought. Well, not everyone wants to live with a septuagenarian. Or maybe they had all the residents but one lined up, and I was just not that one.

Three days ago, I saw the listing again and replied again—a tad more plaintively.

And did not hear back.

This irked me.

I mean, my reply had been a masterpiece! Flash fiction of the highest order! Sprightly yet subtle! Informative without the cringe factor!

Maybe I'm just repulsive! I thought. Back in the days of the Little Store, on days when we made practically no sales, I would often wonder about my own repulsiveness. I figured it was sort of like a radio beacon; depending on the weather or the white noise, it would pulse strongly or erratically, but it was always there, and people sensed it, and that's why they didn't flock to the Little Store to buy dozens of bottles of my own trademarked Monterey hot sauces Beast of Eden & The Chilis of Wrath!

Brian was very good at quelling this particular anxiety loop.

"Repeat after me," he'd say. "Say it loud, say it proud: 'I Am a Real Human Girl'."

He also found it extremely hilarious, which is exactly the right reaction for someone like me. I need to be laughed out of my own psychic contortions. The "Poor you" schtick doesn't work on me because even at my most self-pitying, I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that my life is better than 90% of the lives on this planet.

###

Anyway, the woman who bought the house finally emailed me yesterday, enormously apologetic that she hadn't contacted me sooner: I've been in the process of moving! My mom came to town to help!

We Zoomed this morning. And were amazingly sympatico.

She is an untenured professor at Cornell, proud member of the SDA (Social Democrats of America), writing a book on the history of child care labor in the U.S., how various stakeholders (labor unions, immigrant rights advocacy groups, federal agencies, municipal task forces, nanny and domestic worker placement agencies) value child care labor. She is also drop-dead gorgeous, so naturally, my mamala mind began sizing her up as a potential Ichabod mate. I restrained myself from asking how wide her hips are, though.

Next step will be a meeting with the other house residents and a tour of the house. Conflicting schedules have pushed that meeting into August.

If all goes well, I'll give one month's notice at the beginning of September and move in October.

Fingers crossed!

###

Other than that...

I have been going through the motions simply because one must, but the spark is not there.

I remind myself: Good habits take a long time to make, so it's unwise to break them. If you stop doing all the beneficial things—exercise! self-care! make-up! cooking dinner! laundry!—you fall into a kind of mental swamp from which it becomes increasingly difficult to hoist yourself out. Those little habits are grounding. Grounding is something I have issues with having no earth signs whatsoever in my astrological chart.

###

I harvested my first cucumber from the Hyde Park garden:

The tomatoes still have a month or so before they come in.

###

Yesterday afternoon, I wandered over to the New Paltz garden for the first time in three weeks. The garden was hosting a mid-harvest potluck. I took one look at all the cheerful, earnest, handsome gardeners with their endless variations on cucumbers in yogurt dressing, and thought, Yes! Babbling affably to strangers is my one Great Superpower, but I cannot do this.

And ran away.

But not before I checked out my plot. It is once more overgrown with weeds, but the weeds are not unmanageable—I could get rid of them in a single day now that the heat wave is broken. Plus there is one little tomato plant! I grew it a peat cup from seed and planted it with a bunch of other seedlings, and they all died but this tomato plant survived my neglect! Surely, it deserves other vegetables! Basil, I'm thinking. I didn't plant any basil in the Hyde Park garden this year, and I miss my pesto.

###

However much of a struggle human company and good habits are, I am still able to lose myself if the distraction is right.

I've been speed-reading my way through the complete works of Jennifer Haigh. Finished Baker Towers, her first novel about the small Pennsylvania coal mining town where she grew up.

Kinda interesting to see how Haigh's literary chops have evolved. Baker Towers, written in 2004, is kinda your straight-up Kristin Hannah-style novel, simple declarative sentences, not much in the way of thematic connective tissue between the various characters' POV sections. Heat and Light, on the other hand, written in 2016, is extremely ambitious from a literary point of view with a rather complex figurative subtext and a surprising end point. I sense the Jennifer Egan influence.

###

I also watched Andrea Arnold's American Honey.

American Honey is a road trip film, an odyssey. Eighteen-year-old Texas girl living in squalid conditions with an abusive father runs off with an itinerant magazine crew. High jinx ensue.

It won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and though Sean Baker's The Florida Project came out only one year after, it's difficult not to imagine that American Honey didn't have a profound influence on Baker's movie. They are both describing the same phenomenon, how youth transforms otherwise harsh & unforgiving environments where people stuggle for survival into wild adventures filled with promise.

It's a long movie, nearly three hours, but I was transfixed throughout.

Two-thirds of the reviews I read afterwards complained that the movie just went on and on and on, but nothing happened! I think those reviewers have spent too much time in the Marvel Universe. This kind of story best is told by seamless integration of the music, the character acting, the improvised dialogue, the way locations are shot, the vibes in short. It would be poorly served by a linear narrative grid.

puddleshark

Stopped off at Bicton Park Botanical Gardens on my drive down to Exmouth at the weekend, and although the sky was full of featureless white cloud, and the light really horrible for photography, had a fabulous time wandering round the gardens. There are a few pretty flower beds in the Italian Garden and the Rose Garden, but Bicton is not really a flower garden. It's a place to visit if you love conifers, or strange things growing in glasshouses.

( Coniferous interlude )

mellowtigger

After a recent discussion with brian_bogue about costs of online transactions, I have to wonder publicly a question that I've pondered before:

Why doesn't the USA provide infrastructure for the online economy?

The USA for the last 2 centuries has provided infrastructure for physical money. It performed the costly services of minting coins and printing bills, even vaults and security for storing gold-backed money, so why doesn't it provide the online equivalent? No, I absolutely do not mean selecting a favored cybercurrency. I mean providing the network and database to process microtransactions, providing the bare minimum necessary to maintain a financial system. Why should they? Using a credit/debit card includes notoriously high fees even on tiny transactions. That's profit, sure, but it's profit to some corporation siphoning its benefits from the currency of the nation. This non-cash issue came to the foreground of some news stories during the start of the pandemic, when some businesses decided to not accept cash, since it was thought to be a potential vector for virus transmission.

The currency of the nation seems to be the national government's responsibility, right? I've tried to read up on the Constitution's wording, but clearly I'm not the first to be confused by its vagueness.

My argument is this: The USA federal government is responsible for the creation of durable (enduring frequent transaction between citizens and corporations) money. In the modern age, that transaction is digital, so the USA federal government should be responsible for creating that enduring methodology, and that means providing a "currency network" of servers and databases which people may access "for free" (paid by taxes) with the same ease and zero-transaction-cost of using physical money.

So... does anyone know why we don't do that? It seems obvious to me that we should.

summersgate

This morning. The stargazers are in bloom.

Where I like to sit for chicken watching time.

Jules and I are heading to Pittsburgh to pick up Hazel. Today is her birthday. 27.

smokingboot

6 years ago we were at Ramblin' Man, a great festival which unfortunately went under. Now we learn that Northern Kin's collapsed too, though this one's not a surprise. The UK festival circuit's saturated, and the NK organisers never struck me as particularly gifted. Still, it's a shame. I think we could do with a festival round here. We should hold it in one of the old silver mines, which would be dry, unique, and possibly accompanied by remarkable acoustics. What could possibly go wrong?

This photo of R at Northern Kin always makes me smile.

But Ramblin Man Russ is something special.

poliphilo

Terry invited us to the summer party at his care home. There was a buffet, there was entertainment. Had it not been raining we might have sat in the garden.

When I first started visiting care homes the preferred entertainment was the music of WWII. "Roll out the barrel", Vera Lynn and all that kind of thing. A little later it was Max Bygraves. Generation follows generation into senescence and the music changes accordingly. At our little party yesterday we had a Cliff Richard tribute act. By the time we reach late-period Beatles it'll be me sleeping through the fun in one of those fusty armchairs....

The singer conjured up Cliff quite well. He had the hair and the glasses- only he wasn't nearly as pretty and if he could reproduce the golden voice he wouldn't be playing care homes. He injected a little satire into the proceedings by insisting he was "Sir" Cliff.

And of course he sang this....

The young ones
Darling, we're the young ones
And the young ones
Shouldn't be afraid
To live, love
While the flame is strong
For we may not be
The young ones very long

summersgate

"Division". This was just one of those where I had no idea where it was going even from the beginning. Just playing with paint.

Three Headed Dog. This morning I was reading the short story called, Eyes of Dogs by Lucy Corin. It's in the book, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me - Forty New Fairy Tales. Corin's story was a take-off from the Hans Christian Andersen story called The Tinder Box. A soldier coming back from war but in Corin's story he has PTSD. I got the fairy tale book years ago (2017), and as I do I read a little bit, a story or two and then set it aside. I think I'm going to settle down and try to read all the stories.

I let the young chickens out into the yard for the first time yesterday so they could mingle with the old chickens. All went well. Just one little "fight". The young hen called Black Star is acting like she wants to be head of all the chickens and went up to the group of 3 old chickens and jumped into the air in front of them to challenge them. Of course Blondie took the challenge and jumped up, wings flapping and feet grasping back at Star. Little Red got scared and flew through the air about 15 feet to where Johnny and I were sitting, to land in my lap. Johnny and I petted her for a while. She is the tamest of all the young ones. From watching them outside in the yard yesterday and today I'm getting a much better idea of their personalities. Star ain't gonna take shit from no one, Rocky is just big and dumb (can't figure out where the door is and is always pacing back and forth in the wrong place trying to get to her friends), Muffy wants to be left alone and stay out of any altercations, and Little Red is a scaredy cat.

flemmings

Not much accomplished bar a socks and underwear wash at the laundromat. Never go on a Saturday, yes, but there's always washers available and I don’t use dryers for my smalls. Also I got in before the two guys and the family came in with something like five bags of laundry apiece, containing quilts and blankets and what-all. These must be regulars because two of the men greeted each other in the jovial way of long acquaintances. Guy 1 introduced guy 2 to family guy 3, 'this is my older brother', then introduced guy 3 to his brother 'and this is the owner.' Did wonder why guy 3 gave me a nod as he came in, because faceblind me didn't recognize him from my one, I think, previous brief encounter. Am bemused that the owner of a laundromat would do his family wash there, especially as four of the dryers are still out of order, but I suppose it's an outing for the wife and kid.

Have been fighting a desire for Vietnamese coffee with coffee jelly, as provided by a Banh Mi place two subway stops west of here. Viet coffee has condensed milk and I don't need the calories, and the coffee jelly is sweetened and I don't need the sugar. Thought about ordering in, but you can't order just two coffees and I have no change for tipping. Thought about walking there, which would burn calories, but that stretch of Bloor was having the Koreatown festival, which I know from last year makes Bloor impassable. Elbows are unhappy today and taking the rollator there felt like too much. Thought of using the upright walker instead, but it's a wide beast that takes up 3/4 of the sidewalk and is not what one wants on a summer Saturday when everyone is out and about, even on the sidestreets. Especially the dog walkers, of which there are many many in the last five years, often with two or three dogs apiece. So I stayed in with the fans on and vegged.

bill_schubert

Dana has an aunt with whom she is currently staying. She and Dana get on wonderfully. Aunt is a country club type. Married into the Zeppa oil family (Dana is Dana Zeppa Schubert). The company was a boom/bust kind of thing with Keating Zeppa in charge during the latter part. Dana's Aunt was married to him until he died a while back. All that is prelude to her visiting and enjoying the perks of country club membership and lunch with the Rose Festival Queen contestants. AKA, one of my inner circles of hell.

I have to watch the dogs. Aunt has two standard Poodles who probably eat steak at the table with napkins tucked into their collars. I'd so much love to visit too but I need to do my hair.

Keating had a sailboat. I've never seen it but I think it is pretty good size. Moored since long before he died at a dock in lake Tyler. Knowing what I do about boats I'm sure it is barely salvageable and, if so, for a bunch of money.

Dana texted me and said that Aunt didn't want to sell the boat but was offering it to me for free.

I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be able to give the boat away. Maybe could sell it to someone on a coast for a few bucks but likely not even that.

If I were in my 20s I'd look at it. Now I wouldn't even get close enough to count the wasp nests.

There are few things I'd like to do more than go out on the blue water on a good sailboat for a day or two. Or sail over to the the Caribbean from Florida. But a man has to know his limitations.

I'll just stay here and mind the dogs, thank you very much.

poliphilo

When a thunderstorm is out over the sea you don't hear very much. I imagine there's a simple explanation- like water absorbs sound- but there it is- and when the storm started last night I only knew because it was like someone in the house next door was playing with a light switch. I got up and watched for a while.....

The rain followed. We need rain. And I only hope they copped for some in the Midlands where they're threatened with drought. This morning, up the coast from here at St Leonards, Hasting and Pett, there could be flooding.

The Hastings Meeting House has flooded twice recently. If they flood a third time their insurers are likely to go, "Sorry, Friends, but....."

smokingboot

Ages ago, R and I attended a night of tabletop roleplaying (D&D etc) in the middle of Edinburgh. I won a prize which turned out to be a night's gaming with the organisers. It's taken ages to arrange but happened last night when they came round here and we played this. I am tempted to believe it has no equal.

(Credit: By Grant Howitt - My own photo of my copy, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155082874 )

bill_schubert

The new Chromebox is much better than the Celeron 4GB one. This one has no problems with multiple windows, two monitors and graphics. So it is a keeper. AND I got permission to return the old one. All the packaging is in perfect condition and Amazon agreed. I was really worried that they would disallow a return. But I'm good. I'll UPS it tomorrow.

All done but for the clean up and rearranging things. And making all the minor adjustments (I just turned down the brightness of the monitors). But it is, finally, a good transition and Microsoft is in my rear view mirror. I have an emmense amount of respect for the company and the product and would be using it today if it made sense. But Google already has all my stuff and it makes no sense to run Google on top of an MS operating system.

I clearly remember buying my first real computer. We drove down to Orlando to a 'Computer Show' where they would have this huge vendor fair and sell computers that had been assembled by the people selling them. No national vendors. I bought a Pentium DX4, I486 'clock tripled' processor with probably 8MB ram and a 200MB hard drive with a 5 1/4 floppy disk and a dial up modem. It was a top of the line computer and my first real one. I was immensely proud of it. Probably ran DOS 3.0 on it.

Been a while. Things have changed a bit.

rebeccmeister

Overall I have been finding that signing myself up for 3 rowing practices per week is the right level of commitment for me. Part of this is because there are benefits to having a couple mornings a week where I have some time at home to do things like cook myself a hot breakfast and tackle small house and garden miscellanea.

While I ate breakfast this morning, S and I had a bit of conversation about meal plans for the upcoming week. At this very moment we have a fair amount of foodstuffs around the house, but didn't have any broccoli on hand in the event that it becomes time for me to mix up a batch of broccoli-chickpea burrito filling. Somehow or another, this conversation led to the idea to run up to the Farmer's India Market in the car, with side trips to the grocery co-op, sporting goods store, and hardware store, before dropping me off at work.

It was good to get these errands done, although ultimately it was a somewhat silly trip, because we weren't actually able to get any of the 3 items on our "Asian Grocery" list from the Farmer's India Market (good Japanese soy sauce, giant cans of hominy, Salsa Lizano). Not finding any Salsa Lizano was the most disappointing; we know of other places where we can get the other two items, but Salsa Lizano has historically been almost impossible to find on store shelves, and I was thrilled to find it at the Farmer's India Market last year.

Somehow or another, we still left the Farmer's India Market with an ample supply of various other enjoyable things, like mango-flavored Tang, frozen okra, pepper spread, and the good kind of sheep's milk feta. And we got broccoli and other items at the grocery co-op, so we're set on groceries for the week.

We also struck out on finding another swim buoy for S at the sporting-goods store at the mall, but did have lots of chances to marvel at how many arcades were there, plus all of the stores that somehow still exist all these decades later (Hot Topic! Newbury Comics!). Best of all, we probably won't have to go back to that mall again for a very long time.

So now the rest of today and the weekend can be devoted to other things.

bill_schubert

My new Chrome box is coming today, two weeks before promised. Very smart of Amazon.

So I can finally get everything organized and set up and run the wires and figure out how I want the furniture and pack up the sloooooow Chromebox and get it returned.

I'm looking forward to having a not lagging computer and I'm looking foward to having everything organized for a day or so anyway.

And I just got a reminder that I have a one o'clock massage. Weird that it should have slipped my mind even for a bit. But I'm on schedule to have a shower and drive there in plenty of time.

Fortunately Amazon has the deliver in my garage thing so I don't have to worry about the delivery. We have a visually screened from the street kind of porch but I'd still be anxious receiving something worth that much. So nice to have it put in the garage. I love being in that system. It works so well.

Dana is going to stay in Tyler and return on Monday so I'm all alone for three more days. About the time I get used to it she'll get back. I do feel bad for Toby, though. He is not happy when she is gone.

Meanwhile, I think Zoe is going downhill. She is panting a lot and I think it is pain. She's on two different pain pills and something for inflammation but it doesnt' seem to be helping much. She still eats and processes the food but I think her pain is getting worse. She can't much bend her back legs and I think they may be bothering her a lot. I wrote the vet an email yesterday to get some advice but haven't heard back. It is a shitty thing to go through but is the price to be paid.

summersgate

We had another good thing happen yesterday. We got our first egg from the young chickens. According to my original plan I will be letting them out into the big yard to intermingle with the old chickens. I figure they are "adults" now (laying eggs) and should be able to handle themselves with the slightly bigger old hens. Soon there'll be 7 hens roaming the yard in the afternoons instead of just 3.

Candle. I collaged and painted this on Wednesday but it didn't quite look done to me. This morning I added the egg and now I'm satisfied.

Another good thing. I found out that my Z5 is just fine. I had accidently pushed a little button that I didn't even know was there and it had turned off the back screen.

The temps have cooled off. It's "nice" summer weather now. A high of 77F expected today, Partly sunny. Clouds!

smokingboot

Too many phone calls to make. The NHS keeps making all these appointments for me to have vaccinations. First it was the shingles one, which I still haven't rescheduled (because I know that the moment I phone to do that, they will remind me that I haven't had my Covid booster this year) now it's the pneumococcal. All this because I am perceived to be more at risk. The surgeon warned me that they were going to be pestering me for the next decade, but I thought that was just the yearly mammogram. Apparently there's more to it than that. I know I should be grateful and am trying to be, but injections! Pah!

Meanwhile, looks like the government is keeping its manifesto promise of lowering the voting age from 18 to 16. Loud is the harrumphing. While I can see that a 16 year old may be too immature to understand the ramifications of their vote, and yes, greater understanding with age is an expectation, I wouldn't say election results bear these ideas out. It took supposedly mature individuals to vote for Brexit, Johnson, and Truss, and now many of these same supposedly mature individuals are gathering behind Nigel Farage and Reform. There's never a guarantee that a 20/40/60/80 year old will vote wisely, even given a universal value of wisdom. I think it was Jefferson who believed that an educated citizenry is necessary for the survival of a democracy. There's a need to teach people how government works as well as the responsibilities of democracy, and we just don't do it, we never did. That's where the problem lies. We're lazy and tribal and find politics dull unless someone's knickers are involved. It's only when things go wrong that we shift our butts into gear, often too late. The main weakness with this new legislation is that perhaps 16-18 is an easily propagandised age group, very vulnerable to social contagion and media influence. But hasn't everyone had similar issues? I remember times when women voted as their husbands told them to, and an old friend of mine recalled to me how as an adult back in the 70s, he was taken to his first polling booth by his dad who also told him where to put his X. Now he doesn't vote at all.

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Every Day Above Ground

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Mallory's Camera

Reading

Radix Center Open House [gardening, hippie update]

(no subject)

(no subject)

Slowly fixing my environment

The Importance of Habits

The Pinetum, Bicton Park

why no USA cyberfinance infrastructure?

sunday

Dreaming Man

The Young Ones

saturday

(no subject)

Family

The British Weather

Honey Heist

So much better

A somewhat silly morning of errands

Finally

friday

Things and Stuff

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July 2025

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