The third January 6 hearing today: I missed part of the second due to the time zone difference–I was not getting up at  6 a.m., thanks. But listening to bits and snippets afterwards of what reporters thought were the main points just didn’t have the same effect as listening to the whole thing start to finish.

One of the things about being hearing impaired since my teens is a need to see someone’s face when they’re talking. It’s not just the words that matter, it’s how they feel about those words as they’re saying them and I wanted to know.

I remember the chapter in Dad’s book about the wealthy Texas oilman turned art collector who could never be fooled by frauds and fakes as long as his deaf wife was alive. She could always tell if the seller believed his own words–or not.

And man did he get swindled after she was gone.

There is such an enormity to the story of our first violent transfer of power in history, and it felt last time like a dereliction of democracy not to have paid attention to the entire hearing.

So today’s, I did. (With the quick exception of answering one email while the retired judge was choosing his words very carefully as history watched, and v e r y  slowly.)

I wanted to say to some of the people involved in this mess, Didn’t your parents teach you to make choices that you would always be glad to publicly acknowledge you’d made? Didn’t they tell you that cheaters always get caught–if not by anyone else then by their own consciences, and that feels even worse? How not putting that burden on yourself, much less others, is far more the way to go in life, hon?

“Get yourself an f’in good criminal defense attorney, John, because you’re going to need one.”

And not just him.

Man, am I grateful for my folks.

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(Dad’s book, The Fabulous Frauds, got him and the publisher sued by one of the forgers who was still alive but hiding from the French authorities in South America. The book got republished without that chapter and another the publisher was antsy about, so if you’re interested in it at all, the purple Weybright and Talley imprint is the one you’d want. But in one of the other stories, someone did copy the Mona Lisa about a hundred years ago, stole the original and put their fake in its place and nobody noticed for a week or two. –edit: two years.–  No worries, the Louvre got the real deal back and held him accountable.

Wait. There’s an analogy lurking in there.)

The first January 6th committee public hearing. Covered by every news network except the Murdochian one that just lost its last claim on the word.

I saw some of that day as it was happening, riveted in fear on our Constitutional self-911. But this. The video that punctuated points of testimony, the visceral reminder again and again of just how bad it was. Officer Edwards’ testimony and hug afterwards with Officer Sicknick’s widow.

Cheney laid out the case like a gifted prosecutor.

She only named one particular Pennsylvania Congressman who went to Trump seeking a pardon for what he’d done on Trump’s behalf (of course Trump blew him off because the cruelty was always the point with him) but it was clear there were going to be more names to come.

It felt like Justice Herself walked into that room tonight and took a seat. We’ve waited so long. But as the old K-Tel ads used to say in my childhood, But wait–there’s more!

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(On a side note: my email works again! Yay Richard!)

It came!

No bought article of clothing has ever brought me to tears before, nor was I expecting it to.

I hadn’t been at all sure it would arrive at all; I’d thought of it more as a donation on a personal level to someone in an area of the world where–well, there was one guy there who told a reporter he’d found a phone number in the glove box and called it and confessed, I’m so sorry. I’ve stolen your car. I watched it for two hours and the key was in and my family was under fire and we had to get out and I’ve taken them to relatives in the east.

Basically, along with the profound apology it was, How do I get your car back to you now? Is it even possible? Are you okay?

The man who answered the call exclaimed, Thank G_d!  He owned four cars, he told him, he’d evacuated his own family in one and he’d filled and parked the other three in areas where it seemed people were most going to need that help to get out. He couldn’t know who they were going to be but he knew he could do something about it.

Every single car had now saved people, and in every single one, they’d found the number and had called him to let him know where his car was and to apologize.

And every one heard that same grateful response.

Good people looking out for each other.

Quite a few people in Ukraine are artists doing beautiful work.

Zelensky had pleaded with people to keep paying their taxes if at all possible so that the infrastructure, the utilities, things could be kept running for the people and be repaired after shelling.

Which is a very good reason to help a small business from abroad.

No photo can convey how beautiful this soft shirt is with its radiant viscose cross-stitched embroidery and how beautiful it instantly made me feel when I put it on. (I turned one sleeve slightly sideways so you could see the pattern better.) It deserves a far better photographer than I. Whoever Marina is out there, thank you so much, and I pray every day for you and for your country.

I knew she’d wanted to. I’m thrilled she was able to: it came!

(A side note: the address that is the name of this blog at gmail is still working. Work’s been intense for the resident geek and my main one is still on the fritz.)

The first cherry pie of the season, even if it was 1/3 store-bought Rainier sweet cherries to augment my early sour ones. We celebrated with a slice after coming home from dropping off our ballots at the local 24 hour box.

Seven states are having primaries Tuesday, including California. Vote!

Man, it felt good walking away from that box, and even more so that car after car was pulling in with people getting out and doing the same, that sense of community, that sense of coming together as Americans, that sense of purpose, whatever our politics. It felt sacred.

I sent a note to the county afterwards to let them know that box was full. It’s a good problem to have, but they needed to service it pronto.

Random and then suddenly it wasn’t anymore:

A friend made a comment out of the blue yesterday, and it took me straight back to when the folks were visiting when the kids were young and Dad hoped out loud that he could get to see his old Army buddy while they were in California; when he told me the town I said that was near the Monterey Bay Aquarium, about 100 minutes away, so we could make a day trip of it all. So we did.

That moment when the two of them laid eyes on each other for the first time in 30 years. Good memories. I had been wishing for several years that I could remember the guy’s name so I could let him know his old friend had passed, if he was still around himself.

So then my inbox clogs when it has no right to and I was vacuuming up old emails and tossing them to make space (and then it jammed like an antique typewriter anyway and won’t even let me do that and I’m sorry and the resident geek will work on it tomorrow) and one of those old emails…had Dad mentioning Walt.

I had his name.

I kept that email.

I went looking for an obituary. There wasn’t one. He’s still alive. Hit by a car at 95 at the start of the year and had a long recovery ahead of him at the time.

Someone had interviewed him in spring 2020 for an oral history project, by Zoom because of Covid, and it seems almost quaint now that they were hoping that by the fall this pandemic thing would be over with.

I knew Walt had done a lot of children’s theater in Carmel and some children’s cartoons back in the day.

Turns out the early Charlie Brown TV specials? The kids’ voices? Those were his kids. Till they got too old for it while new specials were being made. Turns out his were not made in Hollywood–they were made in Burlingame, ie between my favorite yarn store I went to yesterday and here. That was a surprise.

Turns out not only was he in the Army with Dad and I was nodding my head at some of the places he got assigned to–yup, yup, Dad, too. Having never made it into any actual war zone for having been too young when it all started, he re-enlisted for Korea out of a sense of duty and ended up sent to a desk in the Pentagon. Writing he was good at. Soldiering, no way to know.

And I quote:

The Chocolate Alchemist answered someone’s questions in his latest newsletter, and I learned something new.

A cocoa bean guillotine and why it is and totally isn’t useful. Okay, then.

And hey, Afton, he wrote, “From today through the end of the month, there is a 15% sale off all edibles.  Cocoa beans, nibs, cocoa butter, kits, etc.  Nothing fancy.  Just use 15%off” while saying he doesn’t have sales, he just–and then our favorite chocolate curmudgeon alluded to Uvalde by ending his note with

“Be safe and kind out there everyone.”

He didn’t add, Now go make some chocolate. Go share some chocolate. Go make someone’s day.

But I know someone who’s having a hard time that y’know, that’s exactly what I should go do for her. Since the start of the process takes several hours it’s too late for tonight, but. We haven’t used the *melanger since January. It’s way overdue.

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*Wow, that price really jumped. That machine is retrofitted from one designed to grind lentils for Indian cooking and some of the plastic parts are showing their age three and a half years later. If I were starting over, I’d be buying the Spectra machine from John, which was designed specifically for chocolate making.

Although, it was definitely fun getting the Premier and Dandelion Chocolate’s how-to book for $20 plus every last saved-up Amazon point.

Okay, as long as I’m in a funk over the Uvalde school massacre I’m going to post this link so I’ll be able to find it later.

I know Wallace Stegner was supposed to be a great writer. I know he taught at Stanford, where his name is honored. I’ve read a couple of his books.

And always thought it was somehow my fault that, y’know? I just don’t like this guy very much. I couldn’t make myself read a third one I’d heard a lot about. He sure didn’t seem to be great towards the women in his stories, and they say his books have a lot of autobiography written into them.

But what we didn’t know was–his most famous one, the one I never got around to reading, had a lot of someone else’s autobiography written into it: plagiarized word for word at times, right down to the title, “Angle of Repose,” and letters his character wrote, Stegner did not. Not only that, he twisted the real woman’s good life into something dark and terrible and unrecognizable.

Her family knew who’d borrowed her manuscripts. They knew who’d defamed their grandmother.

He was always afraid someone would find out what he’d stolen–not just the words but the life.

How could Mary Hallock Foote’s grandkids set the record straight?

Someone intended to put on a play based on his novel in the town that, in real life, was where she had lived and–turns out–her descendants still do.

He finally got caught out. Not in his lifetime, but the real writer could finally get the recognition that had been so long denied and the record could be set straight.

A new play was written instead. Based on what Stegner did. He’d earned it.

Years ago, when our kids were young, we attended a talk by a neuropsychologist whose career was in brain rehab; his five kids were early elementary to late high school age, roughly ten years older than ours.

He described the growth of the myelin sheath around the nerves in the brain, and how that sheath played an essential part in its maturation process: it was the means by which kids became able, as they reached adulthood, to be able to intuit that if they do A towards B then C will happen as a result further out.

Lacking that, kids live in the moment and react to what’s around them.

He added, half-joking but also dead serious, and this is the direct quote we both remember, “So if your kids act brain damaged it’s because they are.”

One of us asked, So at what age…?

He answered, For girls, generally around 18, for boys, more often 21, some even 22 before they’re fully myelinated.

“Not fully myelinated” became our behind-the-scenes parental phrase to each other out of our kids’ earshot when we wanted to roll our eyes at some dumb thing or other.

All of this came rushing back as the news of Sandyhook 2.0 washed in today. Our hearts are crushed for the good people of Uvalde, Texas.

The shooter had waited for his 18th birthday to be able to buy his weaponry and then got right to it that day, according to one early report.

He was too young physically to have been able to grasp intuitively the enormity of what he was about to do. He certainly knew it was wrong and there’s absolutely no excusing his murderous rampage in any way whatsoever.

But maybe we can learn something from this: what if. Just what if we raise the age in every state whereby a kid can legally have  access to or ownership of a gun to when they’re able to begin to intuit what would happen if they succumb to the temptations of the illusions of power it conveys? To really get it? Case in point: in his diary, one of the Columbine high school shooters thought he was going to go to the prom after all this was over.

What if the kids had to be old enough to have a chance at being fully myelinated first?

So that other kids could grow up to be so, too.

Edited to add: turns out Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who by quite a few reports has serious dementia issues for which many of us think she should step down and let Gavin Newsome appoint her replacement (Adam Schiff! Katie Porter!) actually has it together on this issue: she has an Age 21 bill that would require states to raise their minimum age for gun buying to 21 if they haven’t already. Good for her!

I don’t usually lift other people’s pictures but I wanted to show you this one before it’s sold to show you what I’m talking about.

In the middle of the war, the Washington Post interviewed people and had an article, bless them, on the traditional embroidery and clothing of Ukraine and the women who create it. Vyshyvanka is the word but they said it carries memories of the Soviets’ efforts to erase the village-by-village patterns in order to basically de-Ukraine the country.

So President Zelenskyy simply called the traditional day of celebrating that part of their heritage National Embroidered Shirt day. Simple, to the point, and good marketing for his people.

One mention jumped out at me:

The crows and ravens do not fly over my yard. They clearly still have institutional memory of the fake dead crow that was out there at harvest times a few years running, and crows do not go where another crow died. Which is why I put it out there. Ravens ain’t dumb either.

So it was quite the surprise that there was this big flash of black wings beating it hard across the back yard this afternoon.

With a mockingbird right at its back just in front of its tail, divebombing harassing right there on it and calling for the death of a thousand exploding suns on its enemy and I’ll rip your tail feathers off get out get out get OUT! as the raven dove down on the neighbor’s side of the fence and up on the other side of their yard, trying to escape its fury. AND STAY OUT! as the defender swooped up to the phone line.

Clearly the raven had earned that.

The size difference between the two was just astonishing.

I think my mockingbird pair just earned themselves names: Zelenskyy, and Ukraine. (Not, you: crane. Wrong bird.)

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Edited to add, before I forget: I have been told this is verified as having actually happened, and now you know as much about that as I do. Watch out for hurling pineapples. To Mom: to read the story all the way through, click on See Replies each time and his next posts will show.

Ron at Buffalo Wool Co (whose buffalo/silk socks are the only ones my husband wears now, and they made it through over two years of him walking around in his socks while working from home. I finally just replaced them) mentioned today that they’d donated a bunch of buffalo hair to a group gathering any kind they could get to felt and use for cleaning up the BP oil spill and he’d never heard what came of it.

Till now.

And if you pay attention to the NOAA guy in that video, they quit using the stuffed tubes of hair because then it got waterlogged and fell to the bottom of the ocean, and then how do you get it out, so they switched to a chemical method of dispersing the oil, which he acknowledged wasn’t great for the environment but better than oil and now it’s sitting out of the way at the bottom of the ocean. Cue to a picture of a mass of oil down there.

Um, wait…

It’s not funny, my husband insisted. You can’t condone doing bad things just because someone else is doing bad things.

He’s right. But… I still laughed. I’d only read a description of it and it sounded hilarious. I told him, Bullies only understand being stood up to and some form of that has needed to happen.

And now there’s video.

There’s an Assemblywoman in the East Bay who proposed a bill that would protect women so they couldn’t be charged for having a stillbirth, a miscarriage, or even, for that matter, an abortion. Roe v Wade is still the law of the land and will continue to be in our state.

My older sister and I have had miscarriages, mine at the 12-week mark. My younger sister had a stillborn son. All of those potential children were very wanted, but biology is messy and uneven and sometimes just plain random. The idea that going to the hospital for the 20 hours labor I went through for mine could put me in jail for something I didn’t want to have happen to me–and that happened to someone in Missouri and would it surprise anyone that she was Latina?–I mean, what are you going to do, slap handcuffs on G_d?

So. The truckers’ convoy that ran out of their mask mandate to protest against decided to drive all the way from DC to honk their horns here for hours, first in my town last week to try to intimidate our county public health leader who was receiving an award for having kept the covid rate the lowest in the country with her early lockdown despite our having some of the earliest cases and dense population; conveniently, that ceremony was happening at the local Jewish Community Center. Anti-Semitism! A two-fer! Then across the Bay to threaten and intimidate that Assemblywoman. I don’t think they would have done it to a man, but a woman, now, she needed to know her place–and her, too.

They actually had My Body My Choice written on some of their trucks. Because wearing a mask is so much more intrusive than a state telling you you have to die of an ectopic pregnancy.

Daily Kos says their reporter managed to snag a copy of the requirements on the participating truckers: they get reimbursed for all this gas they’re wasting but only if they turn the receipt for it in right away and in person, not by mail. Whoever’s funding them is determined to control them by keeping them together.

I wonder if they realize they have become the Westboro Baptist Trucks.

Now, anyone who knows anything about Oakland knows the traffic is terrible.

School let out.

There was a Safeway right where the truckers were being obnoxious and tying up traffic even worse and blowing their stupid horns. The police were not ticketing them for that horn use, they were not ticketing them for driving in residential areas, but they also didn’t ticket the pedestrian who walked in front of a truck and stood there in the street, basically a you block us we’ll block you.

First it was just middle fingers and yelling against the honking. (The guy in the middle of the street simply plugged his ears.)

Then someone bought that first carton of eggs.

Safeway had lots of eggs.

A woman walking by with a pizza she’d clearly just picked up took in the scene, went, yeah. Yeah I’d like an egg for those guys, thanks, and waited for the right moment because the truckers had sped up a bit now and clearly she didn’t want to waste this on bad aim. She nailed it.

And for the protection of those drivers’ good health she kept her mask on, as a polite person does.

At one or two points it was like a fireworks of exploding egg shells rising above the tops of the trucks. One guy rolled his window down so they could hear him better while he was yelling at them. Right on his shirt. He got out of his truck like an earlier guy had done to intimidate a woman, but there were a lot more people now and all those teens had joined in–he saw those arms drawn back to have a second go at him and quickly thought the better of it.

It worked. They hightailed it out of here. Wonder if their hidden source will reimburse them for those paint repair jobs.

I do not remember which TV show from when I was a kid had it as a tagline but I do remember “Here in beautiful downtown Burbank!” as the audience applauded and the show host waved his arm to the stage. I always wanted to know what did Burbank actually look like? Were they being proud? Ironic? Sharing a good day?

Okay, I just googled the phrase and apparently a bunch of shows and businesses there have now adopted it as their own. But–Price is Right, maybe? Who did it first?

Well, anyway, Southwest Air wanted hundreds of extra dollars each for the only nonstop return flight three weeks ago, so we flew Salt Lake to Burbank to San Jose instead.

The Bob Hope Airport at Burbank.

Which looked like it was straight out of the 1950’s. That had to be the original signage. Possibly the carpeting, too. Roll the metal steps up to the plane and cross the tarmac and should you want a wheelchair, the people working on the ground urgently requested a strong complaint to Southwest to finally provide them because they don’t.

But what I actually sat down to write about was what I saw on the way there, that I would never have on any other route nor even from the other side of the plane: a solar farm, sure, that was cool, but also another one that I had to figure out how to even search for it to learn more about the giant cobweb.

A solar tower that runs on melted salt. Including up to ten hours at night.

Melted. Salt.

What I can tell you is that the very top of that thing is brilliantly, painfully bright, so you know it’s doing its job.

It was very expensive to build and it was apparently a proof-of-concept endeavor.

But I figure (with admittedly limited knowledge) that once you build it you have it so why wouldn’t you and why aren’t there hundreds of these already.

Just make sure the pilots have sunglasses.

While we were at the Church History Museum, these are the two pieces that had me fighting sudden completely unexpected tears. Click to embiggen.

A crown of thorns made by olive leaves dipped in metal, and hanging from it, a thousand paper cranes, each one created with a person in mind, each paper printed with that person’s digital skin tone, the cranes separated by gold and suspended in the air and held in place only by the tension between the support from above and gravity from below.

I wondered if its creator had cared for Covid patients these past two years.

And this one. He Who Is Without Sin. It took a heartbeat to see the four (edit: five–making its point) bruises, none of them fully revealed to the viewer, where the stones had struck. The intensity of color and life above the ground in contrast to the stones returned to the dirt of the desert from which they’d come.

I came out of there wanting to be a better, kinder person: ‘First, do no harm.’

By way of introduction: Dave, who’s lived here most of his adult life, was a teenager whom we knew when we lived in New Hampshire 35 years ago. His oldest is in college now. His grandfather was a rabbi who fled the pograms in Russia.

He’s a lawyer.

So he prefaced his remark in Sunday School by saying that when you think of pardons, we generally think of a Presidential pardon. The difference between a pardon and forgiveness?

You don’t deserve a pardon.

You deserve forgiveness.

The person forgiving you deserves that they do so.

To which I would add, and of course forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning, it means I recognize the humanity in you in spite of what you did. If nothing else, to keep from pulling me down to your level.

Dang. I wrote all that out because his words sounded so brilliant at the time and, Sunday School lesson or no, I still can’t find it in me to forgive the murdering little warmonger over there. I am willing to turn that job over to Christ because it’s frankly well beyond me. I just want him stopped.

I am so glad Dave got to be born here.