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.

I don’t know how to cope with it other than to write it out. Feel free to skip if you need to for your own sake. It’s been so much.

I was not going to watch the video. Which quickly became videos, because so many Minnesotans have turned out in the bitterest cold to bear witness with their friends and their phones.

But my friends are there and they are experiencing this madness in person, and so in the end I did.

A woman found herself somehow a little too far away from others and the ICE predators went after her. They sprayed her in the face and as she bent over in agony, they pounced, pulling her downwards to beat her.

The white tall male ICU nurse from the VA had been recording but that quickly became not enough for him and he went to her aid, moving as if to first tend to her stricken face and then trying to pull them off her.

The last decision in his life was to defend the innocent from harm no matter what they might do to him for it.

ICE pulled them apart and pushed him to his knees, they bashed his head with tear gas canisters, then spotted what he had a permit for. One reached down into the scrum and walked away with it–how ’bout them jack-booted government thugs some claim their 2A rights are all about–and then, with him disarmed and on the ground and never having threatened them in any way other than with the truth-telling of his phone, they shot him in the back. And again. And again. And again. And again.

All this started with electing a man who rapes children who resurrected the South’s pre-Civil War Slave Patrols against all non-whites.

Now the dementors he’s let loose are fighting anyone who won’t surrender their every right as an American, especially against anyone who by showing compassion shows them who *they* are so they respond with murderous fury.

The state sued to have the scene be preserved for investigation. ICE defied them.

First they came for… goes the poem.

Maybe, said my sweet husband a few days ago, trying hard to find any way to make any sense of the ongoing horror of all this, maybe all this will be what finally gets America to turn away from her racism for good.

One of the former owners of Purlescence, my favorite yarn store during its ten years, lives in the Minneapolis area now, as does her ex. He teaches at one of the local schools.

He posted that he is riding the afternoon school bus to the end of its route now in order to make sure every child on it makes it home. He said it’s not just fear that something could happen, it’s reality–kids have been snatched there by ICE between the bus and their front doors and as a white man and a teacher and just plain a decent human being he felt heavily the responsibility to do whatever he can to protect those kids and to spare their parents the horror of them disappearing for the color of their skin.

DHS is circulating a memo to its agents falsely stating that ICE have absolute immunity and that anyone who interferes with them in any way is committing a felony. Who decides what is interfering? They do. Ergo, you’re a felon and going to jail. American or not.

The NY Times broke down that claim: ICE are not cops and immunity was always qualified.

One agent was so horrified at Renee Good’s murder that they leaked the names and info on several thousand agents to an Irish relative living in the Netherlands. Who is not rushing to immediately publicize them but rather is checking each one out: do they still work for ICE? In what capacity? Nurses, daycare workers–leave them alone. Beating people up on the street? They want to verify that first.

Because good people have ethics.

Thankgsiving travel: a millionaire with a real answer to the required FAA cutbacks. Wow. Who knew that even that was designed to favor the oligarchs?

Edited to add Abigail Disney’s text in case the link doesn’t work:

“Private planes make up nearly 12% of all flights. Instead of grounding 10% of commercial flights at 40 major U.S. airports, why doesn’t the DOT ground 100% of private flights instead?

So good luck traveling in the coming days, unless you can afford to charter a plane! Because yet again, the Trump admin is prioritizing the interests of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.”

Sean Dunn has been exonerated: the man who had twenty officers sent to arrest him after he threw the Subway salami foot-long (video) he’d just bought at a Border Patrol agent in order to deflect the goons, as he testified in court after they’d tried to charge him with felony assault. And it had worked! They ran after him!

He had been warning people in the neighborhood that the gay bar over there was hosting a latin night so, look out, Trump’s guys had come.

Note that he was arrested and released but then they decided they wanted to arrest him again. Don’t want those pesky onlookers. His attorney offered to have him surrender to the authorities but they refused to accept that surrender and those twenty men broke his door down instead. It’s more fun that way.

Jeanine Pirro at the Justice Department announced he’d been fired from his job there.

The officer who got sandwich-snipered said he’d felt it through his bulletproof vest. That he had mustard stains on his uniform and a piece of onion hanging off his radio antenna.

So scary.

Only problem is, the thing was still neatly wrapped up when it hit the ground and the video proved it. The BP guy had lied under oath.

The other problem is that one of the silly-in-order-to-make-a-point cliches of law school is the prosecutor who’s so good he can indict a ham sandwich–and here we are. Two grand juries had refused to indict the guy, though, so they’d had to make do with only a misdemeanor.

The jury thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

It was (and I am going to borrow freely from others’ comments here)

A salt with a breadly weapon.

BOGO at Subway’s when ICE shows up: one and Dunn!

Lettuce us celebrate that he got out of the pickle he was in. Now he can ketchup with the rest of his life.

Clearly, it doesn’t take years on the job to become a seasoned officer.

Hero goes free because charges were bologna.

When asked for her take on it, Pirro said, No condiment.

Jury foreman: Salami? Where’s the beef?

Trump’s Justice Department is out of hammunition; the defense is on a roll!

So what if he had a machine bun? Second condimentment rights!

If the sandwich doesn’t split you must acquit.

I’ll just add, I think the Pirrotechniques quite blew up in her face.

Writing this while awaiting our election results to start to post.

The doorbell rang this afternoon: a young woman doing some last minute canvassing for Proposition 50.

She was too young to remember the days when voters fervently wanted this stupid gerrymandering to be over with and, after years of trying, got a proposition on the ballot that neither party much wanted that set up an independent redistricting commission. Its members were required to be balanced between the parties.

But we did it and it passed. The districts finally made sense. We don’t have seats like what Georgia did, where Marjorie Taylor-Greene was certainly going to lose her first re-election bid so their legislature ran a rope down the cliff to swing it around in a town an hour south.

Today Schwarzenegger was claiming credit for that commission. No, sir. We did that.

So you would think Prop 50 would fail–but what is often skipped over in the national press is that this wasn’t imposed on us: the voters were being asked if the voters wanted to temporarily suspend our commission and adopt a map specifically in direct answer to Texas’s non-Census-year attempt to wipe out Democrat-held seats there. Right there in the official Voter’s Guide, the why of this, and what that new temporary map would be.  We got to choose the districts. Come the next Census, we would go back to our commission, or before, if we said so. We decide.

Texas having put a literal bounty on the heads of women fleeing its draconian laws, making no exceptions even for molar (turning into cancer instead of a fetus) or ectopic, there is no way we’re going to have them rule over us on a national level.

We already voted, I told the woman, but the smile on my face matched the hope in hers and I added, Absolutely, we voted for it, and thank you for doing this!

We had two other things on the ballot: the tax assessor’s office that was surprisingly important and a 5/8 cent sales tax to cover the Federal cutoffs to the hospitals to keep the smaller ones open and the larger ones fully functional.

I don’t like it much, he said last night as he filled in the Yes circle.

I don’t either, I said as I filled in mine, But we have to take care of the poor among us.

That was a given for both of us.

Now to go hit refresh on those California and local results… Sixteen minutes after the polls closed and they’ve already called it: 50 passed!

I grew up near the C&O Canal and always walk part of it whenever I’m back home. So historical footnotes on the subject tend to get my attention.

How is it that nobody ever taught us this one?

At the beginnings of the C&O and the Erie canals, and after traveling to Niagara Falls where he saw a ship run aground and all that had to be done about that, one bright young man foresaw the problem in the canals if the water should get too low in one section.

So he thought up a device to lift them. Someone made a model of it for him and he submitted it to the Patent Office, where it got approved.

The inventor?

Abraham Lincoln.

So many approval processes that had to be gone through, none of them done because he didn’t want to be told no. He wanted to punish the country for Saturday’s protests in the way he knew would hurt the most.

And so the wrecking ball arrived today. At the White House. OUR White House. The People’s House. Our beautiful national symbol of hope to the world. Smashed in and torn apart.

The 9/11 attackers couldn’t do that to us because we resisted well enough. But Donald did.

There are no words.

My first thought when I heard the news was to my friend who had been through this before and how it must feel for her to see this again. Her cat had suddenly taken ill and instead of going to services she had taken him to the vet on emergency, where he died in her arms, while, unknown to her…

Someone in my Zoom knitting group tonight asked, with others nodding, Didn’t they have security?

The frank answer could only be, Mormons haven’t personally been put through this before.

(Well, the then-governor of Missouri ordered all of us to be shot on sight because we were threatening to outvote the slaveholders which would toss out the Missouri Compromise and end slavery hopefully peacefully, but that’s been awhile.)

I mentioned that our own ward had once been picketed by a group looking to intimidate.

But they got our start time wrong and almost nobody was there. Then there was a sudden hard downpour of cold rain and who was there to even notice they were even there? They left.

Then the sun came out for everybody arriving for church in the hour after that.

If only…

Meantime, my retina and cataract surgeries are in the morning. I have heard about bubbles and head angles and one person lying in bed for a week and a week of not looking up and not lifting anything–there’s a maybe on all of that, it depends on the doctor and the specific procedure–and I have no real idea what the next few days are going to be like.

Curious. This Supreme Court just in effect nullified its own Citizens United ruling.

Because it ruled in a shadow docket case, meaning one for which there were no hearings, was not aired publicly, with a decision that does not even have their names signed to it to hold themselves accountable to the public–that the president can decide to withhold funds that Congress had decided on a bipartisan basis to spend.

In this case, on foreign aid.

One of my high school friends was laid off from her USAID job months ago and she could tell you many a story about just how effective a peacemaker we were in the world in helping people learn to farm and feed each other better and in establishing public schools where there had been none. She saw it. She lived it. We were perceived as Good Samaritans. The Anya apricots that I go on and on about how intensely flavored and juicy they are? That’s how that original seed ended up here: a farmer from California working on behalf of the State Department befriended people along the Silk Road, who offered him their best to show the world what they had and that not everything there was about war. The good that’s done when individuals help individuals across cultures and backgrounds goes both ways and USAID, with little publicity or public knowledge, is how it happens.

And every year for decades, Congress has voted from both sides to sustain those efforts.

Power of the purse? Separation of powers? Constitution? Voting as a representative of one’s constituents on the matter? Pffft, who needs that. Wiped away with the swipe of an anonymous pen.The president controls all. And you know the only thing this one cares about money is how much of it goes to him.

So, since they can pay for nothing and do nothing now no matter how they vote, why would anyone donate to the campaign of any member of Congress again? (Or at least, of those who are going along with this.)

Besides, there are so many of them. Why bother when there are only six to have to deal with on the Court who have shown that they can be bought off.

Last week I went in with Richard to his appointment with the wound care specialist.

The doctor barely made eye contact with him, and me not at all. He dealt with the problem at foot, competently so. All business, all seriousness.

He had a follow-up Tuesday this week and again I came in in case there was anything the doctor wanted to teach me about taking care of those injured toes, since he had changed the protocol a little and who knows if he might again.

This time, I was wearing Galina’s gerdan with the small beaded bird perched on a Ukrainian bandura, singing its heart out. (Wow, that article: there was a time when you could be shot by the Bolshevik Russians for being a Ukrainian playing one. No wonder Galina used that imagery!)

The doctor came in, nodded hello, and did a slight double take as he seemed to be taking in the heart of that bird for a moment. Something in him seemed to let go of I could only guess what, and he exhaled.

He talked to us. He made eye contact this time. He took off the bandaging. He saw that all the open wounds but one were now healed and that that one was making progress, and that was very gratifying to him: last week he had said this could still go either way (meaning he could still lose those toes), but now, six weeks in, he said with clear relief that we were finally getting there.

We don’t have collection plates nor fundraisers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he reminded us.

With the exception that the youth are allowed to have one activity every year to raise money for camp: locally, that’s at the church-owned campground up in the mountains that the kids put many volunteer hours into cleaning up after the CZU Complex fire burned the facilities down a few years ago. Most of those redwoods have begun to green out again, thank goodness.

They have really earned getting to go and to see the forest renew year by year after the devastation.

Last year there was a carwash.

Today was a party. Balloon animals for the little ones and showing them how to make them, cotton candy, come have fun.

We had baked goods by volunteers. Those, you paid for, one of two prices: Original, and Generous, trying to meet everybody’s budgets. First claim first served.

And a silent auction: a picture of the thing offered and a sign-up sheet to put your bid on. Dog walking by one of the teens, water your plants while you’re away. Lessons in various languages. A tour of Filoli Gardens.

Sue likes to knit socks and offered to knit a pair to fit.

I offered a Malabrigo Mecha hat.

The dad of the now-grown Eli, who used to take care of my mango tree when we were away and who loves the teal hat I knit his son, took one look at the blue twin to it and made sure that that was going to be his and made my day.

Someone wrote down $10 for Sue’s socks and probably thought they were being generous for a pair of socks.

She was going to have to bid a whole lot higher than that if she wanted those. After the huge expenses of this past week I hadn’t been going to spend a dime but I knew she wasn’t offering even the price of the yarn (unless it was a really good sale and/or old stash.) But how would she know that.

How about a different number to look at. After that it’s up to her (and hey, I would dearly love a pair from Sue’s hands.)

I got pulled away to family errands before I found out if I’d won but I was assured I would be emailed and could take care of it then if I did.

To quote the good doctor (as in Suess), Who sees who sew whose new socks, sir? You see Sue sew Sue’s new socks, sir!

Sue’s note said pick your size and color. I think forest green sounds good.