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!

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!

My grandmother was a very proper woman whom I never heard speak ill of anyone.

Except once.

Her husband was a Republican Senator who kept for posterity his thank you letter from Martin Luther King Jr. for voting for the Civil Rights Act.

Strom Thurmond, on the other hand… One of my older cousins asked her how he’d done his historic 24 hour filibuster and Gram did a sharp sniff, took a deep breath, and told us kids, “Well! He had a catheter installed under his pants.” The disdain in her voice was something so unexpected coming from her that I’ve never forgotten it.

(I debated saying contempt, but Merriam-Webster says disdain means considering someone as being beneath one’s notice or dignity and that captures it perfectly. Like I say, she was a proper woman.)

Today I watched now and then and then all of the last 45 minutes of Cory Booker’s speech before Congress. Senator Booker, with enough African heritage to know what it is to be a Black man in America today, was determined  to best the record of a man who had agitated for segregation and the snatching away of rights of people who looked like him. Booker was speaking up for the rule of law, the sanctity of the courts, and the rights of all of us. For us to reclaim all that is good in us as Americans and in our government.

And he did it. He did it. And he kept going, just for good measure, long enough to get past that 24 hour 18 mark to a solid 25-plus so that his number and Thurmond’s would never be the same. Beat the old bastard once and for all. It was a declaration that the old racist fascist in the White House is going to lose out to the judgments of history, too.

Gram’s reaction was never about the catheter. It was just the closest she could come to saying how p***-poor  Thurmond’s ideas had been and what kind of a person would go to so much effort towards damaging the lives of so many others.

Cory Booker stood there, for 25 hours on his feet straight he stood up for every single one of us and I am so proud and so grateful.

And thank you, Wisconsin! 

Someone had a lot of fun putting a dragon eye in that tree. The fact that the iris looks like a black beetle is the perfect extra Halloweeny touch to it.

Wrote to my city council members today. Wrote my congressman. Weighed the morality of being part of the April 5 peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations vs doing right by my family and not risking a flare by being out in the sun to hold up one of those placards. The physical reality of lupus always wins and I always stay inside and it’s so deeply frustrating–but it’s also how I made it to thirty-five years since diagnosis.

But by golly I can drive past slowly honking my horn and waving and cheering in solidarity.

Dunno if you saw the guy who tried pulling a stun gun on an older woman at a demonstration in front of the Berkeley Tesla dealership last week. It is fair to say that that UC Berkeley medical school professor was not having it. Peaceful, peaceful, guys! but yeah, she was not going to let him do that to anybody else.

Deep breath. And a thank you to the cops who came to serve and protect peacefully and they did.

Conflict creates drama. At the very end, Trump reveled out loud at what great television this was going to make.

He’s a star, and some voters let him do it.

And so in the Oval Office, JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of campaigning for “the other side” last year, incensing 47 and egging him on to even greater bullying. Even knowing what I was about to see, it was astonishing.

This was supposed to be the President and Vice President of the United States of America, representing the hopes and aspirations of the American people before the world from inside the most important room in one of the most important buildings in our country, a temple to democracy, a place of diplomacy and peacemaking for all of our history.

I had read about it and thought, was it really that bad? I didn’t want to judge by what anyone else said about them, I had to go watch it myself.

Zelenskyy, put in an impossible spot, handled the betrayal with a great grace that was completely unseen by his attackers.

Trump played angry Mad King George to the hilt. Vance was worse because he was fully aware what they were doing and who would suffer and what the potential fallout could be across not just Ukraine but all of Europe–and that was fine with him.

Do the people who voted for these guys even know that they’re blaming Ukraine for starting an invasion of Ukraine by Russia and how twisted that is?

Vote for a rapist….

What is Putin holding over these men that they’re trying so hard to hurt people seeking to keep their precious freedom?