Eight more rows of seed stitch to go.

It was past time to decide what the next baby blanket is going to be because there’s another baby due about the same time and I need to get to it.

When you can make anything at all, how do you narrow it down to a single idea?

(Say the obvious all together with me now: Ravelry!)

Under Patterns, search: baby blanket.

Fifteen thousand six hundred fifteen matches.

I got through fifty pages of results, and I definitely got some inspiration and no I still don’t know what I’m going to make, but it left me wanting to ask–waving a sweeping arm out there–why? Why was there an elephant pattern on just about every page for the first thirty or so, till they finally started to peter out? Two rhinos, one giraffe, (hey, giraffes are a big thing with babies too!) and elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant.

Scroll…scroll… You know you’re getting into the category of only one or two people besides the artist have actually made this one when the raccoons start showing up. (Nods to self, Bought that one awhile ago, maybe I finally will.)

I mean, I get the metaphor: babies are tiny yet before you can begin to comprehend it they’re all grown up and probably towering over you, and certainly over their original sizes. Yes babies and elephant motifs are a longstanding thing.

But I’d be an a** not to consider how it might be interpreted in today’s political climate.

I look forward to the day when things can be normal again and a cute baby blanket is just a cute baby blanket and can comfortably look like anything it wants.

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.”

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 couldn’t do a thing about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House so I scrubbed and cleaned and made my own better today. And then read up some more on the candidates on the ballot.

The guy who’s been the property tax assessor for 30 years finally retired at 84, triggering a special election.

Do we vote for the “only I can fix it” firebrand with no relevant background nor expertise but lots and lots of glossy fliers in the mail? For County Assessor. Since when is that such a big expensive race.

Oh wait.

Or the experienced lawyer who knows this subject inside and out and took the second in command job when the old guy was fading, who then had a man promoted over her as “acting commissioner” who’s running too now while she’s the one actually running the 250-person office and updating the systems per the local reporters. She’s taken on the big tech companies who’ve been snapping up buildings in a big land race between themselves and then fighting their property assessments by suing over billions of dollars at the same time that Proposition 13 from the 1970’s has already shifted most of that tax burden off corporations and onto homeowners. And now the richest companies in the country want to pay less. She’s on it.

Just where does all the money for all those glossy fliers for one person coming from nowhere who knows nothing about the job come from?

We have to pay attention to the local races.

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.

Got my flu shot, got my covid shot. One of my friends had to jump through the hoop of getting her doctor to write a prescription for hers, which is silly and I hope we can get back to a normal, functioning CDC and NIH and basic public health policies again, but I can just imagine that doctor feeling grateful that her patient was pro-actively asking to do the right thing.

It feels good to have done my part to make the world a little healthier for every person I encounter.

California passed a law that all political fliers must say who paid for them.

You know there are a lot of entities that want to get around that.

A glossy brochure arrived today that you could only agree with its basic premise: that we need to put more money into the Wildfire Fund that was established six years ago to help individuals and communities recover because the fires are only getting worse.

It didn’t give any more information than that. No mention of a bill in the legislature and what it might actually say. Scary pictures and hunky linemen looking serious.

“Paid for by Sustainable Wildfire Fund California.”

The who. Wait. Someone paid millions of dollars at the very minimum to tell us to pressure a particular state senator to protect us from fires. Money that could have been spent towards exactly that goal, but obviously that was not their actual priority.

So I Googled to see just who these guys were.

San Diego Gas & Electric.

Southern California Edison.

And the ever infamous Pacific Gas & Electric, PG&E, held to be directly responsible for the worst of the fires up north that killed so many people after siphoning money to the then-CEO. Rate increases for them had been okayed by the state to replace equipment including wildland towers that were about 100 years old: they did not do that but the CEO’s enormous bonus magically matched the numbers that that rate increase had produced.

And so now we have the Wildfire Fund that they have to help pay into so that they have an economic incentive to do the maintenance jobs they were supposed to be doing all along. Upgraded lines, fewer fires.

My sister and brother-in-law and nephew spent four hours fleeing the Pacific Palisades fire bearing down on them with roads closed and bulldozers pushing abandoned cars out of the way for people like them who stayed in theirs, embers flying and the neighborhood blazing to ashes. The utility towers up the hill were believed to have helped spark that blaze.

Someone clearly doesn’t want to pay their share of their costs anymore. It’s not hard to guess that they want the taxpayers to.

We’re not the ones trying to stiff the hunky linemen. Nor the communities.

Some thoughts re Gavin Newsom’s talk about redistricting to match Texas’s sudden mid-decade redistricting to kowtow to 47’s demands. The first screaming and dishonest flier has already come to the mailbox.

We voted in a nonpartisan commission to set our boundaries. I wish we had ranked-choice, too.

But here’s the thing: in Texas, the Republicans have complete control and are ramming it through and they certainly aren’t asking the voters about it.

In California, Newsom asked the legislature to put the question on a ballot, not to rescind that commission but whether we the people want to, for a maximum of three redistrictings, change our boundaries ourselves as a statewide choice, to add five majority-Democrat seats to the House of Representatives–to ONLY take effect if Texas takes away five majority-Democrat seats there as they’ve loudly said they will.

Newsom could have redrawn ours to be eight. He didn’t. It’s not a competition nor punishment, it’s a statement and a remedy to a wrong. You break it, then on behalf of the entire country since we’re the ones who can do something about it, we balance it out. Representation continues exactly as it was, overall.

He is using democracy in an effort to save democracy and he will abide by the will of the people on the issue. Yay or nay, speak up, vote, choose to be heard! Treasure the fact that you have a choice and a voice so that you still will!

This is how you serve the people.

At the same time, given how red Texas is, the very fact that they’re playing stretchy Silly Putty with those lines gives away how afraid they are that they would otherwise surely lose.

Because after all, you just can’t vote for people who would ask the taxpayers to fund one single storm monitor to be awake during a massive flood where kids are camping, right?

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.

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.

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.

She held up the vial to show me, quite pleased, giving it a little swirl to let the dark red particles stand out in the suspension of pink liquid (solution+me) that for all my curiosity in things medical I kinda could have gone without seeing. But the message was, Much better. At last we’ll finally know for sure.

I was fine till I left that room and then suddenly I wanted to faint and barf, but never mind.

A year ago I had symptoms (still do), and while it was agreed all around that it probably wasn’t cancer you can’t leave something like that to chance, you have to biopsy. So she did–but got precious little in the sample. The ultrasound was reassuring though so she gave me my options on following up and advise on when to do so.

Today was that day.

This time she gave me a prescription to use ahead of time: one pill the night before. That’s it.

Which is a good thing, because the pain was instant and I hope never to take it again.

It opened things right up and today she was able to get that good biopsy and by the end of the week we should have the results.

After I got home I searched the name of that med because it had sounded vaguely familiar and I was curious.

I was staggered. Although, it made perfect sense: it is the second drug that is sometimes prescribed as a follow-up in medically-induced abortions. It induces labor.

And thus affects post-menopausal women such that the doctor can get a decent sample to see if they have endometrial cancer.

Women’s health. Full stop.

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!