There’s a book club being put together by a friend who moved here in the last year.

She announced what the first book was going to be, so of course I ran and looked it up.

Twenty-four hours later and here it is: “By the Second Spring: seven lives and one year of the war in Ukraine,” by an American who had grown up there and has a PhD in history. You know I couldn’t pass that one up.

The first thing I did was to look for a list of chapters, hoping for names, but right after the title page there it was, a list of them. I knew there wouldn’t be someone I knew–but you just never know… (Thinking in particular of the gerdan artist who trusted me with photos of the shelling damage to her home inside and out and whose town has now been evacuated.)

I didn’t want to start reading yet. Not at this time of day. I didn’t want nightmares tonight; I wanted time after the first dose of the book to sift through my emotions and make peace with what I would encounter inside.

And yet.

I opened to a random page.

There were two mug shots and a poem.

Quoted in part:

Oh human, I cannot believe your life is

just about looking into my cell?

you stand in my heavy sorrow, my aching heart is filled with your misfortune

because you are just twice as sad as I am.

I have myself, and you are just a shadow

I am the good, you are the dust, decay

we are both prisoners…

I closed the book. Tomorrow I start.

This song. Thank you, Sly.

The box in her hands was very big and awkward and it looked heavy. I said, Here, let me get that door for you, and ran a little ahead to the post office entrance and then made sure she went ahead of me with that; all I was sending off was a couple of hats. (Still working on the blue, the gauge was way different with a finer yarn but I wanted my cousin’s granddaughter to get to match her grandmother and it was time to get those off.)

Such an ordinary interaction on an ordinary day. It wasn’t till quite a bit later that I realized how fortunate we were and how quiet it is here: I didn’t have to try to bodily throw my privilege between us to try to save her from masked random men on the street claiming to be ICE, none of that, and I can’t imagine….

We could simply. have. a. nice. day. You know, be in America. With a shared smile at having met in the moment.

This is a long read but a good one by a Constitutional law professor and the then-President Rex Lee of BYU, a man held in high esteem in the Mormon community a generation ago.

At some point in his first term, someone called out the new Senator Mike Lee on the discrepancies between some of the stuff he was spouting and his dad’s scholarship on what the Constitution actually said. His dad had passed not long before.

Lee’s terse response was, My dad was wrong.

The Deseret News, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, posted an editorial today denouncing Lee’s vindictive, deceitful, and cruel posts on X that one could only describe as gloating towards the targets and survivors of the assassinations in Minnesota.

When Senator Tina Smith, who’d been on that hit list, wanted to ask him why he’d done that, he put his phone to his ear to fake a phone call and ran from her. She cornered him in the cloakroom to just, plain, talk about this and why he had done this, calling out to his sense of decency as if he had one. But that famous old-fashioned “collegiality of the Senate” tradition of the ages: she claimed it and offered it and he let her explain to him why what he’d said was so painful because he knew it would be front-page news (again) if he did not.

Lee often justifies himself by claiming he’s an upstanding member of the Church. Yeah, I’d love to be a fly on the wall when his bishop asks him if he lives a life of integrity in all things?

But here’s the thing: if the Church excommunicates you, they never say so publicly. Your choices are between you and G_d.

Nor can I remember any time when they’ve denounced someone publicly.

But that editorial did and they demanded he apologize to his victims.

And if he does not do so, and as publicly as that X post was, then anyone somehow still wondering about him has their answer.

Two Tesla dealerships two cities apart. Organizers were hoping for 7000 people and to have an unbroken line from one car lot to the other.

The town paper counted: 20,000 to 22,000 came.

Overall, the protesters–just the ones in the US–were said to be 5.2 million, with people pouring out onto the streets in defense of democracy across Europe, too. (Update Monday: It was 13.12 million!)

The assassin in Minnesota was caught before he could carry out his written intention to kill more Democratic lawmakers across the Midwest.

While here in my tiny corner of the world I finished the brown hat, printed the pattern for a more involved one, realized it was a mismatch for color and weight vs what I have and debated how to take it from there while casting on not a single stitch for it. Yet.

So all in one day, a whistleblower engineer from Boeing was set to give Congressional testimony about a particular plane, while said plane model went down in India, killing hundreds. Meantime, one of my Senators was being briefed and heard that Kristi Noem was speaking to the press down the hall, so he went there to ask her questions.

Congressional oversight of the Executive being in his job description. A member of the Senate actually doing what he signed up for.

But he was Hispanic.

He said who he was and started asking his questions–and was immediately manhandled, shoved out of the room by quite a few people in uniforms, pushed to his knees and then the floor and handcuffed behind his back. Noem blamed him for not identifying himself, which, of course, was the first thing he had done.

It is a requirement in this Administration that one be as quick with a lie as 47 himself. Because it is always the underlings who go to jail before the boss does and he wants them guilty as sin in every way so they’ll support him in hopes they don’t take the fall. But they will.

You definitely wouldn’t want to vote for Noem for so much as dogcatcher now. Just ask her kids.

Meantime, Israel flew over Iraq and attacked Iran, saying it was taking out its nuclear capabilities and personnel.

Meantime, Gavin Newsom rewrote his original plea to the court, upon which–praise be–it sided with the State of California and found Trump’s orders spurious and in violation of the Constitution and ordered the National Guard, which Trump had deployed without food nor lodging orders because who cares about them anyway, to be returned to Newsom’s control. So, among other tasks, they can be free to monitor–wait for it–the border.

But not today. Tomorrow at noon. Hey–we’ll take it.

I think the protesters need to bring them pizzas and pillows.

And Saturday, if the troops are somehow not yet gone, we need to celebrate No Kings Day with flowers to put in their gun barrels. (Wincing at the National Guardsman who took aim and shot an Australian reporter in the back with a rubber bullet yesterday as she stood in the middle of the street with no protesters immediately around her: shot for telling the camera what was happening.)

Remember when those flowers and sweet entreaties to join the protesters’ more righteous side helped overthrow Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines?

Oh, and one more thing: in Ukraine someone’s cat took out a Russian drone. I just hope the cat was okay.

The blowup between Musk vs. 47: things are about to get even more interesting as they try to expose and tear each other down in order to build themselves up. As bullies do. Popcorn!

Meantime: the South Carolina legislature. A special election. A 24-year-old African-American Democrat vs the older guy who’d been county Republican chair.

The kid won his primary by eleven votes (the state required a recount, which bumped it up from ten) and then won the race 70-29%.  The voters chose the hopeful, idealistic young person wanting to do good.

The other guy said, well, G_d has other plans for me, then.

Yes, dear, He does: He didn’t want it on your eternal conscience that you would have helped deny lifesaving healthcare and emergency help to “the least of these My brethren” because He loves your soul, too. But He needed the voters to help Him out on that, because He loves them enough to let them learn from, thank heavens, their triumphs as well as their mistakes, and they totally came through.

Almost 71%. We can do this!

We have some Cherry Garcia in the freezer, he said. We need some.

Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s said in protest at a Congressional hearing yesterday, Congress kills poor children in Gaza and pays for the bombs by kicking poor children in America off MedicAid.

This good Jewish man stood up and said Congress needed to let food into Gaza for starving children. The cameras were rolling. He spoke again and again on behalf of the little ones as they zip-tied his arms behind his back, giving voice at long last to his anguish and to that of so many millions of other people, knowing that a famous rich white man and a political donor at that, they might at least pay some attention to.

He was frog marched out of there during his arrest.

Here at home: some for him, some for me. Cherry Garcia was always his favorite and definitely not mine, but in that moment it seemed like the best ice cream there ever was and I knew I wanted to never turn it down again.

“In solidarity,” Richard pronounced, raising his bowl to me and to Ben out there somewhere in thanks.

The news today was horrific, again and again and again.

The new pope was the one great and shining beam of hope. A good moral leader calling on the best in ourselves towards one another is exactly what the world needs right now, badly.

I made myself walk away and pick up my knitting. I will still have nightmares over what people caught on camera being done by our own government on our dime and in our name to innocent people and without so much as a warrant.

But I talked a little to my sister and then I knit for her and tried to be a good voice in the world and found I felt just a little better because I had.

So here’s my question: if you order yarn from a country (Britain) that’s had a 10% tariff slapped on them but I think that tariff has come and gone but it looks like it’s back, and the company didn’t add it to the bill, is everything peachy fine? Did Colourmart absorb the cost? Does it get stamped due on arrival? How does this work if the tariff gets re-slapped while it’s in transit? I see references to manufacturing there being under what we were supposed to learn was a terrible idea via the Great Depression, but retail sales, it seems unclear. It’s yarn, not a car.

It seems to be taking longer than usual to get here.

How do you run a mail-order business when your fixed costs are someone’s bouncy laser light on the wall that a cat is frantically clawing at?

Meantime, I finally got going again on that afghan start that I’d mostly ripped out and I’m past where I was and let me just lecture my future knitting self right here that yes it was absolutely worth the do-over. Much better.

But it will need more of that green shortly. I know Colourmart is trying.

Twice, we had forgotten to get more sugar. I never run out of sugar: it’s just one of those things that’s always there.

Angel food cake time of year and–well that was brilliant. I’d already separated the dozen eggs. Hah, maybe I could…

Going next door to borrow a cup of sugar sounds so delightfully old-fashioned (and half-embarrassing to have to, just like way back when. But we don’t go shopping on the Sabbath, and that was something that was entirely understood back there back then. Maryland was the last state to let go of its Blue laws that enforced the religious concept of a day of rest on many commercial establishments–because Sunday isn’t every religion’s Sabbath. Nor is everybody religious. Equal protection under the law. No governmental establishment of religion. Totally reasonable to revoke. Done.)

The thought also always takes me straight back to–

–I don’t think I had ever actually attached the word “refugee” to her. She was just Vicky. But when your colonialist mom sews what she can of the family fortune inside the hem of her little girl’s dress right before they flee the country in order not to lose that one last bit of all that they had…

As a young woman, that little girl became a nanny to one of my dad’s artist clients, who brought her along with his family on a trip to the US. My mom was cooking dinner for twelve rather than eight and she found herself out of sugar. Knowing Mom, it was surely to bake fruit pies.

She asked Vicky to go next door to borrow a cup.

Vicky came back astonished: Madame! Your neighbors! They are Jewish!

Mom was astonished: Yes of course!   (??!)

We would never…!

I don’t know if she knew that the dad of her young charge had illustrated anti-Nazi material before France fell or that he was Jewish himself. Maybe even she was.

But what came out in their conversation was that America had been portrayed in her growing up as the most flamingly racist, bigoted country there is.

And here was an American woman astonished that anybody would be surprised at having a Jewish family next door. And not just next door. Why would anyone even think about it, people are people.

Too bad it was too early to know that the family that would later buy that house was headed by an African-American surgeon.

After making all the baking sounds in the kitchen this afternoon I said to Richard: You know how we kept forgetting to buy sugar?

The look of uh-oh on his face.

We have a melanger. The box of superfine at the back of the cabinet. We had enough.

—

(Edited to add, and the verdict is, with more than half the sugar being superfine that was the best angel food cake with the best crumb I have ever made, and I’ve made a lot of them. I wrote it down in my vintage 1952 Betty Crocker to make sure I do it that way again from here on out.)

(Forgot to post this last night.) We went off to Oakland for the afternoon and when we came back, three of the four peregrine eggs had hatched!

If you watch this, that baby bird is amazing. A few hours old, not even at the dried white fluff stage yet and already it’s moving around towards where Momma is after being accidentally scooted out of the way while she was paying attention to the firstling. The video was taken just before the third made it out.

Given how bird flu has wiped out most of the peregrines in the greater Bay Area and left nests birdless, to see healthy parents and three living chicks so far feels so good.

Re today’s protests: the initial numbers are three and a half million people participating. The day before Easter, with families with so many other things to do, but they still did.

It was not pretty when I got done. (The pictures embiggen.) I was pretty sure I wasn’t done, but the bin was full.

The forecast was off that day in February and it froze that night.

They say in mango forums to leave the tree alone, give it a chance to make a comeback wherever it will after the weather warms up, especially if it’s past those first few tender years.

So I waited. And wished. The top half of the tree looked utterly dead and what was below didn’t look happy at all.

Saturday it had been warm enough long enough. I went out there with the clippers: no sense in letting the injured parts kill off the rest, and besides, all those dead leaves were shadowing whatever might be underneath, and oh look there’s fungal disease on that one and that one and that one. Out!

Mangos meander. You don’t get a single trunk growing upwards, you get a kid twisting their hair in their fingers endlessly.

I found just a few places where there was blackened branch but still some green above it and those I left alone. Then I watered the tree and hoped. All those years I’d taken such good care of it, one week of warning weather that I didn’t pay much attention to because it wasn’t going to freeze and then it did and I could have avoided all that damage if I’d taken it seriously…

I had needed for some time to take out the old line of incandescent Christmas bulbs draped on it for heat and put in a new set where they all worked but I hadn’t been able to follow the line and see nor reach what I was doing in that thick growth.

I can now.

With Constance headed for home after a great visit, I went back out there this evening. There were some larger branches that everything coming off of them had been brittle and very much dead and were now gone but I’d left the main part just because, because…it all was so much and so hard to do after babying this tree for ten years.

That big V-shaped line in the foreground of the first photo had, it turned out, the tiniest new bits of green at quite a few nodes. Those were not there yesterday. There may well be more tomorrow.

This is one of the smaller branches that still had leaves despite the freezer-burning. The fact that it’s growing from a circle of leaves rather than a single one means that it will be a cluster of new branches from there.

Look and look and look! There are more sprouts all over the sun-facing side of the tree!

All it had needed was the deadened parts cleared out of its way so it could grow again.

Speaking of which, there’s another pro-democracy protest this Saturday across the nation.

We’ve been badly burned but our ideals live on. We can honor the sacrifices of our fathers. We can demand our leaders protect democracy, free speech, equal protection under the law, the right to be heard in a court of law, the rule of law itself that makes all that is America great or at least potentially great. Those are ours and we claim them for the good of all. Go team go!

An old friend needed a place to crash for a night to break up an eight hour round trip and we’ve been having a great time catching up. Years ago I lined up her little kids’ books by height to look pretty for the real estate photos, thus aiding and abetting with mixed emotions her move to California’s Gold Country: happy for her, sad for me. I’m so glad we’ve kept in touch.

One of the things mentioned over dinner was that during remodeling some of the much older houses out there, the owners have found gold embedded in the walls.

Huh. Who knew. Makes sense I guess if you’re in the 1800s and want to put it where no one can find it nor steal it.

I wondered, if I say that out loud will people show up at real estate open houses there with metal detectors?

Of course if that were to become a thing, the owners themselves would give it a go.

So since I couldn’t join the Hands Off! protest for the sun exposure, I watched the Saturday sessions of the LDS Church’s semi-annual conference in real time rather than later. (Link is to Sunday’s.)

I was struck by how again and again the talks were pleas for compassion and humility, reminding us at this Easter season how the enormity of the Atonement was in Jesus’s compassion for every single one of us, more than we can ever know. “Love one another as I have loved you.” One speaker even said to ‘never let your party or’ (as he quickly added I forget what else, I was too busy being surprised) ‘be greater than your love of God’–given that they never, ever talk politics from the pulpit. I’m quite sorry it needed to be said and very glad he said it.

Afterward, I checked the reports: well done, everybody! Look at all those crowds–yay!!! Look at DC. Wow. Of course WaPo reported it: they had to. Wow. You did it. You spoke up for the least of these and for all of us–and for me, on a personal scale in my disability. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

They say the last person who was qualified for the position Trump hired them for was Stormy Daniels. (Credit to an anonymous Washington Post commenter, a little long for a placard.) How about, Overthrow the money changers in the temple of our government! (Still long. Taking suggestions.)

Saturday is the day: April 5 and the Hands Off! protests across the country. Or as I think of it, the Restore Hope Again declaration of We the People to demand a reinstatement of that which functions well in our government, to reclaim our democracy, to reclaim the Rule of Law as the ideal our country has been striving towards since its founding, to reclaim all that is good about democracy, which our fathers put their lives on the line to fight for. We refuse to be ruled by fascists. We refuse to allow our government to kidnap people off the streets by people who offer no names nor warrants, and any law enforcement officer of any kind who has participated in that should be held accountable before a court himself. All those who have been so disappeared must be allowed to appear before an American court and the innocent set free. And yes foreign grad students are allowed to write op-eds in their school paper that some might disagree with. But Americans are not afraid of free speech.

We can do all these things if we speak up.

The Post just lost Eugene Robinson to Bezos’ clampdown on any editorial writing that he and his Rupert Murdoch henchman don’t like. The Post claims that news reporters are not interfered with.

Well, then show it. Let’s see if the protests are covered at WaPo. But Politico, the Contrarian, BBC news, the Guardian, and I know our scrappy little small town paper here will all be snapping pictures and interviewing and hoping people know how important supporting reporters is because they’re the ones holding government figures accountable to us and their work is not easy right now.

Re Trump throwing tariffs at a penguin-only island: bullies hate being made fun of. How about a placard of an indignant penguin holding a placard.

Go team go!