If you live in California, you can now demand that Big Data about you be deleted. It won’t be instant, it takes several months, but it will happen.

Here’s the Mercury News article about it but it may be behind a paywall, so here’s the state’s site for doing so. You have to be a resident of California. To quote the first bit from the Merc:

“More than 300,000 Californians have demanded that hundreds of data brokers erase information about their locations, finances, health and personal lives as the state’s first-in-the-nation Delete Act”

You can register every device, your car, entering every name anyone might have info on you by, the works. Some things by law must be retained–those will be retained. The rest–poof! AI may not use it. Selling, say, your location or social security number will be outlawed if you say so.

Gavin Newsom signed that law and has been lobbying Congress to pass it nationwide.

But there is the information to take to your own representatives in Congress. Let them show who they really think they work for. Many of them have a particular incentive right now to pay attention to their voters.

Platner did the right thing and he’s out in time for Maine voters to choose someone else–Monday was the deadline for a special election to be called. May the best future Senator win.

Mitch McConnell, per the reporter who had been listening to the police scanner, had paramedics arriving seven minutes after they were called for an unconscious man in cardiac arrest, with McConnell taken to the hospital from that address.

The Republicans in Kentucky changed the law two years ago to where the governor could no longer appoint a successor to a Senator from his own party as previously required but rather that there would be a special election called. Let the voters decide. Honor democracy. Sounds good.

Except that that special election could not be held closer than 56 days to the general election, and short of that, Kentucky would just have to go with only one Senator till the next general election.

Their party spent big bucks defeating Rep. Thomas Massie in his run for Senate because he’d thwarted Trump and championed the cause of opening the Epstein files, pushing the bill to do so till he won. He lost his primary–but they want to make sure he stays out and is not the incumbent, however briefly. Voters do tend to love their incumbents. Just ask Mitch.

Oh wait you can’t.

So they’re pretending they’re talking to McConnell from his hospital bed and that he’s recovering nicely and that deadline against calling the special election is coming right up. You know that he’s suddenly going to take a turn for the worse, no, worst, but only when it’s convenient for what they want.

The video of a CNN reporter demanding one of them call McConnell right now, live on the air, and let the audience hear his voice to prove he’s alive–and the immediate backtracking and squirming and blustering and flustering and refusing to do so–said it all.

If Mitch McConnell is indeed brain dead–and seven minutes of cardiac arrest in a sick, old man before medical help arrived means he is–then every one of those men lying about it is committing outright election fraud.

We have this 14th Amendment for them (among other things.) We just have to use it.

Governor Beshear sent a letter to McConnell at his hospital room asking for an official response from him on his condition, as fellow representatives of the good people of Kentucky. Well played.

I have yet to get a good photo of this. The trees are actually going upward in a diagonal line right to left, for one thing, their trunks, seed stitch, and the yarn gloriously soft.

If I were really ambitious I would have added the concrete Ghost Ship as it’s known locally, a concrete boat (do those two words really go together?) built too close to the end of WWI to ever go to war or even be finished and was instead towed to Monterey Bay, where it was used for a dance hall and a tourist trap and a good time to be had by all. Take a romantic stroll on the pier, watch the birds, fish a little, hey, watch out for those sea lions!

It slowly fell to pieces over the years and the much-repaired pier to it washed out for good in a storm three years ago. What’s left of the ship lives on as an artificial marine reef.

All war-making equipment should be so lucky.

What we have here is a fine case of what the right would yell socialism at us for. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.

So: I typed out a note to the city public works department and said, My understanding is that Bradford pears usually live 15-25 years. Mine was planted in 1987. As far as I can tell, it’s got a bad case of fire blight and that fire blight has started infecting my other trees.

I asked them what my choices would be if they chose to replace it.

I sent that off Saturday night. Monday morning comes a response (including an apology that no, they don’t use fruit trees as street trees. Well, no, I didn’t really expect they’d want plums plopping on the sidewalk nor cherry pits under the tires but it was worth trying.)

Half an hour later they were at the door to inspect it and to plan what to do.

The guy thinks it can be saved. That will mean chopping away maybe even half of it and hoping the rest makes a comeback; there are bird nests up there, it’s been a beautiful tree, as he looked up fondly into it. Clearly he loves his trees.

There is no curing fire blight; there is only cutting it out. Maybe, just maybe, that will be enough.

He left and I thought, we are so lucky.

Gas, water, electricity, sewer, garbage–the city owns those, too. No fighting the endlessly manslaughtering PG&E, you just (remember this one?) call city hall. They’re right on it.

Because their city hall bosses will get voted out of office if they don’t, the council members know it, they have incentive to treat people well, and by and large our people take pride in serving and being a part of the community. That’s the one good thing about PG&E: everybody who doesn’t have to deal with them is so grateful to have the good guys on our side.

The pipeline that blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno? Which runs for miles including a block from our house? The state required PG&E to inspect every inch of it. They ripped up the street here. They cut corners. They broke the law again. They had to come back and do it again, with a temporary gas line laid out on top of the road next to traffic. That was fun.

It is so much nicer to have people that answer to us and all the better, who don’t mind at all that they do. Who take pride and who value that they get to do their job well.

How have I never heard of this?!

Okay, back up, back up. We went to a potluck with friends tonight and the hosts had visited Italy during April, and after we were done eating Sue showed us what they’d seen. Florence. Rome.

The Pope speaking.

Randomly running into a fellow Mormon in the crowd whose parents they knew in Germany!

There was a notice that due to the Exploding Cart, the buses would not be running on this date.

Yeah, she hadn’t known what that was either. She showed us a bit of it in video.

Wikipedia gives the history, and, um, the Crusades and stealing flints from a church did not help make those soldiers more righteous and nine hundred years of celebration with the spoils of war (they use them to start all this.)  But whatever.

Five hundred years ago some rich guy discovered fireworks. So they upgraded.

A mechanical dove shoots across the inside of the cathedral along a cable (about 4:20), lights The Cart, which looks a bit like someone saw a drawing of a Japanese tea house and decided that a metal version of that was just the thing, and shoots back into the cathedral while fireworks start to go off out there. The crowd is crazy-close but doesn’t try to come closer. There’s video here from last month that I haven’t found my friends’ faces in yet but they were there.

My favorite (10:21) is the deelie-bopper thingy on the top of this strange contraption twirling in glee.

Then shooting out miniature roll-down flags for the grand finale. Who knew.

(Written Saturday before the news hit, sending Sunday after realizing that it was still in my drafts–the sudden headlines in my inbox had taken the words right out of my keyboard.)

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Random weird word of the day: pilgarlic. Dating from 1529, originally describing a bald man (like a peeled clove of garlic) but gradually morphing into (per Merriam Webster) “A man looked upon with humorous contempt or mock pity.” The perfect word for the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. Someone go tell Jimmy Kimmel ‘dotard’ has competition.

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(After the shooting at that dinner: I, I, had no words.)

Palm Sunday: beautiful music, scripture, reverence for the Sacrifice made for us all so that we could find our way back to the Love that unites us all. His being willing to feel every person’s pain, to befriend us personally, compels us to be willing to share each other’s burdens in kind.

I caught tidbits of quiet conversations between friends trying not to talk politics there, but: Saturday’s protests. Where they were. How it united so many, so everywhere, so good.

There was Hope in the services.

And in those conversations. A lightness felt, a burden lifting: we will get where we intend to go.

I realized about five minutes in that I’d forgotten my phone, but then they had asked that no pictures be taken of faces and it’s kind of hard to take one of a crowd without doing that so it’s just as well.

Notable signs: the Statue of Liberty saying, I said, Your huddled masses, not your hooded asses!

No Epsteinization! Open the files!

Near a dentist’s office: No Truth Decay!

The organizers had said to line up on the west side of what the Spanish conquistadors had named The Royal Road, a fitting spot for a No Kings rally. Seven miles long from town to town to town. Don’t take up business parking lots; they need their customers to survive. Here are the public places for it. Share a ride, take a ride share, we can make this work.

That they did.

At this rally, for the first time, they said one could drive alongside cheering the protesters on and that that counted, too. That was all I needed; I signed up.

I really fervently wanted to be on that sidewalk holding a sign of my own but UV-reactive lupus and reality said that I’d like to stick around to vote for my grandchildren’s futures. So I grabbed my red Norwegian/Minnesotan Resist hat and set off.

I figured out real quick that people couldn’t all tell from there just what kind of red hat that was–details like a braid going to a tassel get lost at windshield distance. I snatched it off. It was too important to risk messing the experience up for even a single person.

Two, and often all three southbound lanes were packed with cars honking and waving. The northbound lanes seemed actually less than the usual traffic: people had other things to do today. As one could see.

It took me an hour, waving and saying thank you.

But what is important is that time after time, eyes meeting eyes, protester to protester however we came to the moment, it felt surprisingly sacred.

The way voting day does.

I was not expecting to be in tears.

We were bearing witness–together!–to our reclaiming our right to the rule of law. To due process. To honoring the Constitution. To the separation of powers. Honoring the immigrant who is abiding by the law. Amen and amen and amen.

So glad the organizers thought to include even people like me in a way I could feel an active part of it.

The Big Badminton Birdie! It’s back!

Let’s see if this local link works or if the paywall gets in the way. Wikipedia with more history, here.

There’s an immense hangar down the freeway–I mean, how many buildings have their own weather, naturally?–that was military, then NASA, then a decrepit environmental disaster leaking asbestos and more towards the Bay. Years and years of arguments: why do we need to preserve a massive WWII wind tunnel? Who are we hiding planes from these days? Who wants to pay for the Superfund cleanup?

There was the Golden Eagle nest at the top of the building that got left alone, until it didn’t. The shell of the building got removed and then the skeleton was left to rust in the elements. For years.

Meanwhile, Google’s founders had an idea to get around the distance and restrictions on nighttime flights at San Jose airport: they wouldn’t own the hangar, which was next to their headquarters, they would just fix it and lease it and after 60 years the Feds could take it back. Deal?

Yeah no, said lots of people.

Heck yeah, said lots of other people for whom this was an iconic landmark.

Why? wondered some of us.

My dad’s old high school buddy was one of if not the (I think the) first woman to be a boss at NASA Ames. Loved her and her husband, they had us over several times when my folks were in town and it was a hoot to listen to her and Dad catching up. Her funeral in a lovely old Catholic church is where I learned that Morning Is Broken was not, in fact, strictly a Cat Stevens song. I did quite the double take at the time.

Where my husband started a PhD, the head of the department quit when offered head of, yup, NASA Ames across the country, and I’ve wondered from time to time if the guy still lives around here or if he went back to his home state when it closed. I don’t know how he was as a boss there–but I can tell you that when he left his university and they announced the new head, half the faculty in his department quit, too, as fast as they could find other jobs, a fact that changed the entire trajectory of our lives and landed us in New Hampshire and then, eventually–here.

So yeah I guess we have a bit of history with the newly restored place, too. Who would have guessed.

Well, that was hellacious news to wake up to. Felon47 wanted a war of his own? Those Epstein files are cutting awfully close.

Writing the rest of this in hopes that someone finds it who’s facing doing this process and hasn’t ever yet: if I can, you can.

After he spent nine days in the hospital on IV antibiotics, it’s been a week of two and a half hour at-home infusions at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and a different one at 2:30 p.m. that takes five minutes per stopwatch to slowly go in but then it’s in, all three requiring I take the med out of the fridge an hour beforehand. Timers are our friend. We both got taught how to do this so that between us we wouldn’t forget any steps on what was at first a highly unfamiliar and uncomfortable process.

Don’t touch the blue part! (He was carefully holding only the bottom of it.)

I am so you won’t pull on it. (There being a needle at the far end for him.)

So, with some hovering mid-air between us, I screwed the other piece on without touching the blue it was screwing onto. It worked. Alcohol wipe, saline infusion, alcohol wipe, med, then alcohol wipe, saline, plastic cap. Oh yeah and the open/close the valves part: if it’s not going in, that’s where it went wrong. The number of valves varied. If it’s only almost not going in, that’s the stopwatch med, it wants to make you go as slow as you’re supposed to with a full minute between partial pushes and that timer is absolutely necessary.

The one thing I don’t get, though, is going through all the steps to completely disinfect my hands and then grabbing a paper towel to dry them. In college I had a job on an assembly line for *plastic medical goods and I saw how that place was run, FDA cleanliness regulations or no. (I would have reported them, had I been able to figure out how back then when a simple phone call to the East Coast could cost you a day’s wages, or figure out how to even get that number. Today’s generations have no idea how much better their world is because my parents’ peers broke up the monopoly of Ma Bell.)

So. A paper towel as a germ-secure tool? Seriously? But then after the antiseptic and the towel they have you Purell and shake, no towel. Well alright then.

The last IV is about done and the fridge has officially reclaimed its space for food. Unscrew, alcohol wipe, cap it off and we’re done. The PCC line allegedly comes out Monday morning, but we’ll know for sure after the doctor sees that foot.

Baby steps.

* Let me hasten back to add that those were not items along the lines of these syringes, they were larger plastic items used in hospitals, like barf bowls. Still.

Does your town use Flock Safety license plate readers at major intersections? Kind of a find-my-phone for law enforcement trying to track a known bad guy without having to do the dangers of a chase sequence.

Except.

Mountain View found out that, contrary to state law which says such info cannot be shared beyond state boundaries nor with the Feds without a warrant, the cameras had in fact been set up–or changed, but either way in direct opposition to what the city council had been specifically promised–to be accessible to the Feds. Flock Safety had not notified them of any such thing. Per the police chief, they lied.

Sixty thousand illegitimate requests for info from those new cameras?!

Caught by an audit.

Mountain View turned the cameras off.

Coyotes, once exterminated in San Francisco, have been back for about twenty-five years now, forming packs and territories and creating really cool sound effects for people in lockdown during Covid. There are about 200 now.

Several dogs being walked have been taken, with small white dogs being the apparent preference. A five year old child playing in a group at the park got attacked recently and needed stitches. That aggressive coyote is no more and they would test its brain for rabies–if the current administration hadn’t laid off the Federal civil servant who does that. It’s in a freezer, waiting for sanity to return.

One young male feeling the population pressure swam to Alcatraz.

The San Francisco packs’ DNA all tracked with animals from north of the city–they did not come up the open space preserves on the peninsula. The assumption then was that they came trotting across the Golden Gate bridge, but there were so few in Marin County that there would have been no reason for them to take that risk weaving among all those cars.

But here’s where it takes a turn: two different sources told this coyote enthusiast that the leg-trap ban that passed in a state proposition so angered one guy they knew that he blamed the liberals in the City by the Bay and sought revenge.

By using a different trap, a loophole in the law, set to hurt (badly) but not kill.

And then, having separated them from their packs and territories, he drove those injured coyotes across the Golden Gate Bridge and set them free in the Presidio. Repeatedly.

I don’t think he was expecting them to become celebrated, but mostly they have been.

Although I imagine the parents of that little kid would like a word.

I had seen pictures of the pattern and impassioned reasons for making the red hat with the sharp decrease lines at the top with the braided chain and tassel below. A knitter resurrected the pattern from the history of Norwegian resistance against Nazi rule; the Germans eventually caught on and threatened to arrest anyone who wore one.

I still didn’t much like the pattern.

At the same time, I could see how it would be the one you’d want to be wearing while protesting ICE. It’s like the pussy hats ten years ago: everybody would know you took the time to make your protest known. Others could find you in solidarity. The photos from the Woman’s March showed just how amazing that could become.

Today I actually found the website where the pattern is (Ravelry link to it here. Crochet version here.)

Here’s how the New York Times got my attention about it: it doesn’t matter if you’re going to knit that hat. What matters is that that five bucks for the pattern is not going to the designer nor their yarn store–it is going straight to the people helping people in Minnesota right now. The ones taking people food and clothing, the ones helping them pay their rent while things are so closed down.

ICE is arresting people without warrants, holding them in the Whipple building, stealing their phones and coats and then dumping some of them at the snow at the back of the building. Frostbite can set in fast. Volunteers are there to rescue and warm them. I want to help with that.

Needle and Skein‘s owners have given out $250,000 so far in $5 hat pattern sales plus donations from people who want to do more. There’s a major run on red wool yarn.

Five bucks. My next Zoom hat. Who’s with me.

The light is returning and the birds know it and they have started to show up more, picking out nesting spots, the hormones just starting to kick in.

I knew better than to park directly under our street tree–it had three nests last year, it’s a popular spot even if the storms took one–but I did it anyway. Habit.

It is safe to say our old Prius is a mess. And it’s not just the birds; the tree drips this time of year. I kept waiting for the gas gauge to go down enough to fill it at the carwash place.

Finally!

You put in the credit card, the little prompt comes up, Do you want a carwash today? Yes/No.

Except that–it didn’t. Huh. Maybe they changed the program. I’m sure it’ll ask me if I want that added after it’s done filling then.

It didn’t.

I considered. I puzzled. How does a carwash place not let you pick to do the carwash? Did they move that function over to the screen where you punch in your code right before it starts up? But what code? There were no temporary signs posted, looks like you could drive right on in like always… I mean, my car may be old but it really really needs a good cleaning off. My neighbors would surely be ever so grateful.

Just then a big white utility van pulled in. It turned around. It backed up to the end of the carwash building. And on the side of it, in large print, were the words, CARWASH REPAIR.

Oh.

But, but… That carwash is just there, it has always just been there, it works, I’ve totally taken it for granted.

Who knew there were enough carwashes and enough of them breaking down in close enough proximity and close enough times to warrant a clearly successful but also clearly very limited-in-scope business with a nice truck like that? And logo, too?

Well, as the old GPSes used to say, Recalculating… I found the standard gas station squeegee and soapy water and washed my own silly car. Not the whole thing–it was way too much to do to whoever might encounter that bucket of water next–but at least the front and back windows and the worst of a side one. Took me three tries and some fingernailing to get the bird poop off the windshield but it felt great when it was gone. I could see clearly again in all directions!

All the way home I felt the poem of it: that truck was the good people of Minnesota and elsewhere coming out to repair and restore our democracy and our rule of law we had so taken for granted. Clarifying the view.

While I did the small things I knew how to do to remedy what I could while trying not to burden others.

I parked on the other side of our driveway when I got home so that the birds could create their homes and live their new-life lives of the coming Spring with only gratitude from me.

It was reported that about a hundred of Alex Pretti’s neighbors joined in near his home last night in the bitterest cold to light candles and sing together, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” in tribute to the way he had lived his life.

It is not in our church’s songbook for children and there were so many choices they could have made–and yet this was the one that was picked and planned and practiced before his name was ever known to the world.

We had stake conference today, the gathering of five wards in one grand get-together. Not just our ward but most of the Peninsula. As part of the service they called all the little children ages three to about eight to come to the front and sing. Several of the youngest needed their mommies or daddies to walk them up there when they saw all those faces looking at them; some followed older siblings boldly, ready for this.

This Little Light of Mine.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one fighting back tears at that simplest of deliveries of a message that hit home.

G_d knew. He knew. The grief and the horror soon to come and how much we would need this very thing.

The message, through young children, that our one, own, inept, imperfect little light matters, that we must each hold it up against the darkness. Together we do create a brightness and it will prevail.