Category Archives: History

Weather and…

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So I thought I’d forgotten to shift the PM to AM when I scheduled the publication of todays exciting adventure. Nope. The computer nicely says it missed the publication, but doesn’t tell me why. Grrrrrrrrr

Weather in the Tries: Wowsa!! A whole week coming up with no triple digit days in sight! Alas, a week of 90+ but they ain’t gonna be triple digit days!!! We takes our cool where we can find it, yes?

For you folks in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, &c, you have my most sincere sympathies. Maybe get the whitest white paint made and paint your homes? It might help. Use color in the trim if you need color.

Read the other day where if we were able to stop Climate Change now, we will not cool down in our lifetimes or anytime soon, but we can stop the heat climb. If we want to. In other words, if we stop it right now, this is gonna be as good as it gets. And if we don’t stop it, it’s just gonna get hotter. That’s the crux of the problem, eh? We don’t really want to. We want others to do it, but don’t want to take responsibility ourselves because we’re too good, too rich, too obnoxious?! The countries who contribute the least to the Change, suffer the most. Island nations in Southeast are already under water. Bangladesh, is learning how to grow food on floating gardens. Countries with low-lying coastal areas are already losing ground. When I lived in Florida, my house was built on top of a hill with a 27-foot elevation. I think I’d have been okay as long as I had a boat and could out-paddle the resident ‘gators. 

And the higher the temps, the smaller the food crops and production. Coral is already bleaching in Florida, when the coral dies, the reef will die, the fish will migrate toward more habitable waters. Sharks will follow, and when they can’t find enough fish, they’ll go for people. ‘Gators will go for dogs, cats, people, whatever they can catch, kill, and eat. And don’t get me started on my beloved salmon and bears! 

And check out this magazine. Hakai. It’s free.

It’s kind of nice having a housemate who is a progressive. Slowly, we are cutting down on our use of plastics. I am back to using bar soap, and bar shampoo, and when my conditioner is gone, I’ll use bar conditioner. I wish someone would come up with a solid dish soap. Wait, what did I say? I asked the Duck(DuckGo) and I’ll be hornswaggled, The Earthling Co., has a solid dish soap. Non-toxic ingredients. 

Housemate is much better than I in one aspect, he buys ALL his books as electronic ones. I’m still on my paper books for nonfiction and poetry, and if the electronic version of fiction is more than $4.99, I’ll buy a used paper copy for less. I think Amazon &c should be honest, we are only renting books from them, not actually buying the electronic ones. We can’t loan them to friends, although some we can loan ONCE to one person. We can’t give them to our children when we die, unless they want to keep our accounts open. A lot of people check electronic books out from their libraries, but publishers are fighting that, too. They are cutting down on the affordable number of licenses libraries can buy.

Are the authors getting higher royalties when their books are electronic? No. Does it cost the publisher more money? No. In fact, they get more, because once the book is formatted, it’s done. It’s uploaded and forgotten, except the spreadsheet that comes however often from the seller. And they go bwahahahahaha all the way to the bank.

Also, trees are a renewable resource. In fact, we have some planted “forests” (orchards?) not too far from us where some kind of trees are planted and harvested by machine. I believe they are trees for paper. And I think it takes 4 years from plant the trees to harvest. Still, I try to use less paper. I’m afraid I’m failing. I also really like the feel and smell of books. Those tries might be for fence posts with the leftovers going to paper. It’s all used, somehow.

I watched the ducks the other day, when it was really, really hot (triple digit hot) and kinda wished I was a duck, and could go swimming and dabbling in the pond, and then I remembered what all is in that pond and decided a cool shower would make a whole lotta more better sense

So, DuhSantis is strangling the educational system in Florida, Abbot in Texas, and probably all the southern red states will follow suit, as well as a few of the northern ones. What will happen to the kids? Will they have to go to Prager U or Tammy Fey U in order to get a college education? I mean, seriously, do you think Hahvahd will take any of those kids? Or any of the other ivy league schools? And when they graduate and go hunting for jobs??? And those grand old southern schools of higher learning? What’s going to happen to them when-out-of-staters no longer want to apply? Sure, The Crimson Tide is a great football school, and so far a pretty good U. Will Southern Universities start giving local boys from the South preferred acceptance? Will that affect their good standing? Their income? Will they ever recover?

If you have any children in Florida or anywhere else where books are being censored, please, mail them some age-appropriate real books. Or send them an eReader and buy them some real books. Consider
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexei, 
We Had Our Reasons–Poems by Ricardo Ruiz and Other Hard-Working Mexicans from Eastern Washington, 
Wizard of the Pigeons a novel by Meghan Lindholm, and 
Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson. 
Read these books first, so you can discuss them with your far away child. Don’t forget books by Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Dee Brown, Vine Deloria, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Kathleen Alcala, Isabel Allende, and so many others. Give them a well-rounded reading. 

I have left LGBTQ+ category of books off, because I haven’t read that many—and that’s not to say there aren’t Two-Spirit authors mentioned above. I don’t know, nor do I care. I’ve read some LGBTQ+ books, and thoroughly enjoyed them. The best I’ve read lately is This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed. I laughed, I cried, and I recommended it to all my friends, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community. It’s a great book to show that odd as it seems, they’re just people, too. Oh, yeah, I cheered by the time I got to the end.

If my book suggestions don’t tickle your interest, check with your local librarians, they are the keepers of all knowledge 😉 And they love nothing more than to share that knowledge with readers.

Okay, your assignment, should you choose to accept, is to see that short people you know in book-censored states have access to good books to give them a more or less well-rounded look at the world in which they will live. This blog will not self-destruct in five seconds.

Sammy doesn’t understand the last paragraph. What can I say? He’s a dog. But he’s much happier with new, lower temperatures. It’s still too warm for him to snuggle all night long, but I often feel a little paw touching me somewhere. He sends pupkisses. As long as they come a while after he’s eaten, they are pretty nice to get. We all wish you a fantastical week!

Speaking of books, I have two more reviews posted at Rainy Day Reads.

What is Going On in Florida?

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Weather in the Tries: No triple digits in sight on my phones 10-day forecast. Friday was 103, so just for grins, I bought a cold weather fleece hoody because I know just as surely as Johnny Appleseed invented little green apples, it’s gonna be cold this winter! My gal pal and former travel partner lives just outside of Las Vegas. It’s considerably hotter there. The same day it was 103 here, she had 115 and at 8.30 that night it had cooled to 105.

Years ago, when I worked for a living, one of the Engineers I supported was from the Middle East and he told me about an underground city in the desert. That it was a beautiful city, cool, had water and fountains, but was underground. The desert above it was too hot for comfort. Coober Pedy in Australia is also underground. If we don’t want to change our ways, I think a lot of us are going to have to think of going underground, and figuring out how to grow our food, etc. There are also salt mines that have become underground towns/cities or at least tourist sites.

Vancouver BC has quite a large mall underground. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to visit (I’m claustrophobic), but it was like going into any large mall topside. It was actually quite pleasant, and there were several places with large skylights for natural lighting. Or there weren’t, we just kept coming around to the same ones from different angles?? Actually, Canada has several such malls, etc., in their larger cities. Or so I’ve been told.

My understanding is that being underground is a pretty fair way of maintaining a constant temperature, I suppose it varies on the location of the city—altitude, type of rock, etc. But I don’t know. I’m truly claustrophobic, and spelunking has never held my interest long enough to try it. I’m okay, until I get to the entrance hole, then I change my mind.

Okay, on to Florida!

What is going on down there? I lived there when JEB was governor, and he certainly didn’t try any of the stuff DuhSantis is doing! I understand a lot of construction isn’t being completed because a lot of the workers left. They no longer feel welcome. Well, duh! Some were undocumented, some were documented, but members of their family weren’t. Pretty soon, the housecleaning staff at the major hotels will be sorely missed, too, when the snow birds fly south for the winter. And now they are rewriting history that slavery taught the slaves usable skills? Was good for them? Reminds me of people I knew when I was a kid that didn’t understand why the slaves even wanted their freedom. After all, they were clothed, fed, had homes in which to live and raise their families, why, they never had it so good! They didn’t believe the history books. They just didn’t believe no one would be as mean, as cruel, as Massa was.

A few years ago, Alabama tried basically the same thing, except the history re-write. The Mexicans (all Spanish speakers are Mexican to them) were taking jobs from decent white boys. The state went after all the “Mexicans,” and you know what? There was nobody to pick the harvest when it was ready. Those “decent white boys” surely didn’t want to stoop and pick cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries, etc. That’s back-breaking work. And they sure enough weren’t going to pick cotton, but I think that’s mechanical now. Not sure about then. Anyhow, when the harvest rotted in the fields, and those hard-working decent white boys weren’t interested in hard work, but hardly work, the new law was repealed, or at least forgotten, and eventually, the pickers returned. 

Florida is already experiencing the same thing. A lot of their crops are not being picked. Too many crops, too few pickers. 

I think I’d really rather talk about living underground, claustrophobe that I am. I think I could live in Coober Pedy. Not sure I’d want to live in a salt mine, think my food would always taste salty. Salty Caramel might be okay, but salty flan? Although it would be beautiful, I’d rather look for opals in Coober Pedy. There are other underground malls in Canada. Wonder if they have underground hotels, homes, apartments, etc.?

Helsinki has a vast network of almost 10 million square metres of underground spaces and tunnels. Watch the video, it’s fascinating, and up to date. They can hold 150% of current population of Helsinki, and though meant for bunkers/survival, many of the spaces are used today for running, indoor sports, etc.

And now, I’m up, have coffee, and realized it’s Monday and this isn’t yet posted. Sigh. Eventually, I’ll get back to being normal. Or maybe I’ll develop a new normal just for me. Patience, Grasshopper! What will come, will come.

Have a fantastical week. Do good things for others and yourself. Stay cool. Smile. Hard to think depressive thoughts when you’re smiling. Besides, it makes other people what you’re up to.

The Big Chihuahua says he’s ready for some cooler weather for a while. Not a lot cooler, but cool enough the parking lot where he walks isn’t quite so hot. I agree with him.