Graphic Firing Table

 The past week has been...interesting.

In the "big news" is obviously the conviction in criminal court of a former U.S. president.

Why this is "news" is kind of peculiar, because this particular jamoke has always been and is the most obviously incompetent, corrupt, and criminal individual to ever disgrace American presidential politics, and when you consider that includes people like Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce that's a pretty high fucking bar.

Convicting this scumbag of several of his many visible crimes was, as it should have been, as hard as hitting water when falling out of a boat.

No, what's "news" - in the sense of "revealing" - has been the reactions of the Republican Party.

In a sane world this would give the Party of (Cash, Guns, Jesus, and Whiteness) Personal Responsibility the perfect option; dump the dick.

You want a loudmouthed nitwit for President?

Margie Greene is right there!

The GQP could use this as a lockdown "It's not you, it's me!" moment and pivot towards some other loudmouthed but less facially corrupt nitwit. Gaetz, Lee, Tuberville, Boebert...I mean, goddamn, the party's chock full of 'em.

They didn't. They won't, because it's obvious that they can't.

Because, apparently, Trump scratches some sort of weird precognitive itch in Republicans. It always seems to me to be a sort of reflex rather than a thought-out decision. Tubby is the Perfect Own-The-Libs Storm, and that seems to be what gets the bulk of these people going.

Mind you, the overall GOP pyramid hasn't changed.

As they did in the pre-Q Era of the Eighties through the early Teens, the plutocrats at the top are using all this wingnut id to get the New Gilded Age they crave. They give a shit about trans women and abortion; (or, if they do, not enough to interfere with their pursuit of) low taxes and deregulation are their goals.

They're using these shiny objects to harvest the morons' votes.

And right now all the morons want is Moar Trump. So they'll get it.

And if they can turn that into Electoral votes in November so will we.

Good and hard.

So there's that.

While at home...

The divorce machinery grinds forward.

We've engaged a mediator, and part of that process means collecting every scrap of information on our financial lives. Mojo is doing the heavy lifting there as she has throughout our marriage.

And what's increasingly apparent is that we're...not rich.

Right now we're getting by.

But I'm pulling in retirement - Army retirement and Social Security - and contract work here and there. She's got her paycheck which is less than that...

Given how hard she works, and all she does for little Astor Elementary?

That's a shame and a hissing to you, Portland Public Schools.

As a unit we're doing okay.

As individuals?

Things get kinda scary.

So scary that the other night Mojo was up until midnight, sitting alone on the darkened deck, her mind so filled with fear and worry that she couldn't sleep.

It tore me. I'm not where she is; she's still my dear, still my best friend. It's murder seeing her like that.

So I made an offer. A very odd one by modern marriage standards.

Let's put a pin in divorce, I said.

Not call it off. I get it, you're done with me. But...let's give it time. Let's live together, friends, "roommates", business partners, for four years. Until the kids are through college and our expenses drop to the baseline.

Then? We go our ways.

The thing that had occurred to me as I watched her agony was that this was what millions of people did for thousands of years. They needed to stay solvent. They were rich and wanted to be richer, or poor and didn't want to be poorer. Or merchants and wanted business, or nobles and wanted land.

So they made a deal to work and live together.

This was the deal on offer. A deal that would give us breathing space and time. Time for her to find a better-paying job. Time to grow our investment wealth, time and space to better figure out how to find our ways as single people, instead of the current rush to be separate.

Unlike a lot of those people, we aren't strangers.

We were friends, and so far still are.

I think we could make that work.

I also don't think she'll take it.

But I had to make the offer. She IS my friend, my dearest friend, and regardless of everything else, I owe her every effort to help her to the best life she can.

I already miss her.

And, sadly, I'm afraid both that that will not change, and that, soon, it irrevocably will.

 ...the little group here at the 1922 House is still, well, being who we are.

There's still four, although this may be the last winter of that. The Girl is looking hard at four-year schools. She's been accepted at University of Minnesota at Minneapolis...

Father: Do you know anything about Minnesota?
Daughter: It's...ummm...in the Midwest!
F: Have you looked at the climate records for Minneapolis for, say, the past ten Februaries?
D:
F:
D: No?
F: Then I highly recommend you take a look. You might be surprised. Not saying that should change your mind if you really want to go. But you might want to know.

She's battering her usual bullrush way into her senior high school year, both in academics and in all her usual avocations; theater tech - she's the Sultan of the Soundboard - and ceramics and the Asian Student Group. She's a fighter.

This was last year, but it still works. That's her.

On the personal side she's who she's been; salty wiseass, meticulous, impatient, cynical. She seems too busy for relationships and so far as we can tell has no particular preference in that. We're pretty comfortable with who you want to pursue, so if the Girl is not conventional in her preferences I suspect she'd be upfront about it...so the lack of up-fronted-ness suggests that's not a thing, Yet.

The Young Man (I can't really call him "The Boy" anymore; he's an adult even while his sister retains a lot of "Girl") is, well, who he's been, too. He's taking classes at the local community college and is doing well there; GPA 3.7 when last seen.

For some odd reason he seems to be gravitating towards earth science/geology. Dunno how seriously to take that. I've told him he's a legacy at Portland State University for geology, if he is thinking of going that route. He seems unimpressed.

He's still gaming multiple hours in the day. He also still games his unique way, which involves lots of shouting and screaming, cursing, and (now and again) making literal monkey noises, which always makes me bust out laughing. Whatever happened to the stereotype of the dudebros gaming in silence broken only by occasional grunts?

(FWIW, when I showed her these last year my Bride winced at his. "A little too on-point..." was her comment.)

As for the Bride:

She's still "Miss Debra", beloved School Secretary at Astor Elementary.

A little sadder because her equally-if-not-more-beloved Work Wife Miss Chris retired at the end of the 21-22 school year. Still grouchy about how the District is being exceptionally shitty towards the clerical staff and paraprofessionals represented by her union.

Busily sewing, including her side-gig technical editing for the "Seamwork" line of patterns.

But slowing down, just like I am. She's eyeing retirement, which I simultaneously understand and dread, since what we'll do with both of us around this place all day I have no idea...

And me?

Older. Slower. A bit more creaky - surprising how little arthritic buildup it takes to make joints uncooperative! - and less speedy.

The contract work I was doing last spring and early summer finally ended and the outfit that hired me, after a couple of abortive offers, has faded out. My old employer still throws me a bone now and again, but that, too, appears to be waning.

My Guard retirement is a lifesaver; it's surprising how far $1,200 a month will go if you only spend it on things like gas and the occasional book. I'm thinking of cutting the Social Security wait short and applying at 66-and-a-half this spring - frankly because I think the fucking Republicans will run the table next fall and the plutocratic sonsofbitches will raise the qualification age to 70. It knocks the payday down significantly, but locks it in so keeps the greedy bastards' dickbeaters off it.

Otherwise I have lots of time to read. I've also been binge-watching stuff I've missed before, ranging from oddball anime to movies and serial shows. 

I'm still plugging away at kendo, despite being the slowest and clumsiest kendoka in the dojo. What's really frustrating is that the proper kamae, the basic fighting stance, demands an upright position; back straight, head up.

My back is...not straight (see "arthritis", above). I have to constantly think about my posture, which doesn't help when I'm trying to whack someone with a stick (or not get whacked...).

It's good training for me. But I spent years being as strong if not stronger and faster than my peers. It's very humbling to do the things your body did handily once only to find that that body is no longer as responsive.

Then there's the whole "kitchen and bathroom remodel" thing...but that's for another day.

Hope this brings us all up to date. Gotta go wrap some presents not; back in a bit.

 So the Little House turned 100 last year. Yep. 1922-2022 and still going.

That said, there's a LOT not to like about the Fire Direction Center.

The single bathroom, increasingly constraining for four adults.

The cheap fittings and appliances, many of them courtesy of former owners, that are a constant, low-grade nuisance. The - as my Bride call them - "ugly bones" of the house itself, a legacy of the pre-mid-century spec-house throw-it-up-quick-sell-it-cheap pedigree of this joint.

This year we finally had enough. Time to gut some of the interior and rebuild.

Specifically, the kitchen and bathroom.

The vanity was perfectly representative of the way this place was furnished.

The countertop was painted over linoleum, and the paint continually peeled and chipped. The sink was a gimcrack Home Depot-grade porcelain-over-cast-iron thing which had a big chip over on the left that had never been repaired and was rusted out, spreading red runoff whenever it got wet.

The drawers were fabricated from the cheapest three-ply with junky hardware. The outlet behind the sink never worked (which is why it has a blank cover over it.

Just around the corner...

...is the tub/shower and toilet. Both leak. The tub is interesting because it appeared to be a stock model that was about three inches too short for the space it was shoved into. The "solution" the architectural genius devised was not to find a larger tub but to fabricate a weird little stub-wall on the right side of the tub as you see it.

The whole setup was cheap and felt cheap, and my Bride hated it.

So...

...the vanity went first.

Note the long stick of white PVC pipe where the sink drain used to be. The plumber noted that it was utterly outside any close relationship to a sink drain per City of Portland code. Which fits with the rest of this house, which seems to have been remodeled and altered repeatedly without bothering with details like that.

Then the shower:

Note the faint pattern on the floor underneath the former tub location. That's very old - as in probably 1940s or earlier - linoleum. My guess is that the original bathroom had a standing claw-foot-type tub with a linoleum floor underneath which was left in place when the fitted-tub was built in the 1950s-1960s.

The real revelation, though, was underneath.

I mentioned that the tub leaked, right?

Okay, well, that leak began just days before the demo crew was scheduled. Well, fuckadoo, I figured it wouldn't kill us if we were without a shower one extras day or two, so I went downstairs to find and close the shutoff to the bathroom.

No such thing.

Not only that, but I looked at the plumbing - really looked at it - for the first time since we moved in more than twenty years ago. Guess what?

It's as fucked up as everything else around here.

Pipes going every which way. Random stretches of copper spliced directly into the original galvanized (which, BTW, is a big plumbing no-no; the iron and copper are incompatible and the solder (or clamp) will eventually fail and leak...). Lack of shut-off valves everywhere (except for the dishwasher, weirdly, but probably because it's a very late installation).

The sanitary stack is the original 1920s ductile iron, which I shudder to think looks like inside after a century of literal shit going down the drain. If the house next door - which is an exact mirror image of ours and was built by the same outfir - is an example the connection to the sewer main is old-school precast concrete, notorious for being invaded by roots (as the next-door house's was..).

I talked the plumber into looking at this literal plumber's-nightmare to give me a guesstimate on unfucking it. We'll see how that comes in.

And then there was this.

The kitchen remodel is going to include knocking out part of the wall to open the kitchen up to the front room. To do that we need to add additional support to the remaining wall, meaning a pair of new posts extending from the first floor to the ground.

This is the first attempt at one of them.

What's funny in a not-funny way is that, footings?

That's what I do. What I did, anyway, for thirty years. If I'd bothered to look at this fucker when they were building it I'd have screeched like a wounded eagle. That's so not-right it's not funny. Either the footing or the post are in the wrong place, seeing as how the one is supposed to be centered on the other.

The City inspector came in, peeked at it, and said "You fail". THAT's when I looked and was like "Ohfuckyeah".

The earthwork crew came and redid the work pro bono. Then it passed.

Oh. And the other thing.

The general contractor employs designers to work on, well, the interior design. We had one early who left, and were working with her replacement all the way up to the start of construction.

When we found out she'd been canned. Because, among other things, she failed to order parts and materials we needed. Among other jobs she'd fucked up the same way.

So we're two weeks behind on the shower tile.

That's...not great.

So if you'll excuse me, I gotta run to the gym.

To use the shower.

 

The summer has finally left, and the rains returned.

The winter is not far off.

I love the autumn, the somber, reflective mood fits me very well...although I sometimes miss the crisp dry chill of the Octobers of my Midwestern childhood. The Northwest lacks the fiery colors, as well; our deciduous trees are dominated by the bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum, which does turn a handsome golden-yellow but briefly; the leaves wither and brown up as quickly as they turn.

The days grow short, the shadows long, and another year draws to a close.

 I don't really have a topic today.

Retirement is interesting in a sort of not-very-interesting way. You tend to find yourself puttering about doing lots of little things that you put off in your previous life that, while often useful and entertaining (ir irking), aren't such of a muchness in terms of "hey, wow, how about this cool thing I did!"

Case in point: downspouts.

This is the south - back - side of the Little House.

FWIW, it's a sort of real oddity.

Back in 1922 when this crib was tossed together I think it was an open porch. There's signs that the back stairs to the then-half-basement were a sort of "storm cellar" kind of hatchway, and my guess is that the area next to that was not enclosed.

Some time in the next hundred years the owners enclosed it...in a very weird way. We think that it was as the same time that the goofy bastards ripped out all the interior closets and built what was a "room of closets" which is the most useless thing I (but, obviously, not they) could imagine.

We ripped open the thing to make the Girl's room, the account of which is at the link above, and very strange we found it.

Anyway...

Years ago we bought a couple of rain barrels at the Portland Nursery down on SE Glisan and installed them at the front and back east corners.

The front barrel still works just fine.

The back one? Not so much. It overflows, and the stormwater has an annoying habit of washing out the soil near the back corner of the house. So after a couple of bad winters it was time to replace the barrel with a downspout.

Off to the local hardware store I went to pick up the various bits needed for the upgrade...only to find that the local store had nothing like what I needed. C'mon, local hardware store! You want me to Shop Local, you gotta make it so I can Get What I Need Local!

Off to the not-local Home Depot, then, to feed the corporate beast and pick up all the pieces so I could slap the sucker up in fifteen minutes like any half-ass decent roofing crew.

And hour later, in the midst of my third full-on profane rant, it occurred to me that the reason that the roofers could slap these suckers up in fifteen minutes is because they're a crew, and have one guy who can hold the pieces in place while another guy nails the straps in.

Well...it's up now; not a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but it should work to keep the dirt around the foundation, which is the point. Yay, retired me.

I then took advantage of the cool morning and did some serious landscaping, largely whacking away at the annoying gardening efforts of our birds and squirrels whose passion it is to scurry across the street with nuts off the big black walnut tree and bury the fuckers over here. They're everywhere, and that reminds me someone buried a nut behind the air conditioning unit that I need to clamber over and dig out.

Bastards.

 Oh. This is the other "home improvement project" thing from this past week. Fencepost along the east side, between us and the nice gal who moved in this past year.

The original fence builder didn't bring the concrete footings high enough to protect the posts from damp rot, so after twenty or thirty years or so they're falling over. We really need to replace the whole thing but, barring that, have to swap out the ones that are actually rotted through and here you are.

As for the Rest of The World..?

Just like we've been for the past half-dozen years, We the non-insane People sit here, mesmerized like a mouse before a cobra, watching the Worst People in the Nation Fuck Around, desperately hoping that our "fellow citizens" don't make us Find Out whilst knowing full well that most of those gomers are clueless, credulous nitwits who eat up the public press' Both Sides Bullshit. 

Half of them believe that the GQP's culture war nonsense has some validity, or, at least, doesn't reveal them as the shrieking lunatics they are.

And what more can I say about that?

Other than is anyone surprised by any of this GQP fucktardry?

The “conservative” ideal has always been dictatorship. Whether it’s the dictatorship of a king, or of a mullah or pope or some other heirophant, or of a party as it was in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or as in our current problem, the only way you’re going to get We the People to go along is with one hand on the whip. Propaganda only gets you so far.

And the only way you can get these sorts of people off your neck is…well, do the math. If they’re willing to rule you with force, how willing will they be to respect your miserable little “vote”?

I know I keep banging this drum. But all these Tales of Trump Terror have a moral, and it’s not “let’s debate whether gay people should exist”.

It’s the same one that ended in a pillar of fire over Dresden.

I don’t like that. I don’t want that. But if it has to be that or a New Gilded Age?

Then fiat justitia ruat caelum.

But that's enough of that.

I've got to go off and find something to finish off the downspout. So let's just hope that Empty G doesn't manage to seize the Department of the Interior in the meantime, right?

 I don't really think much about this day, even on the day itself.

For one thing, the celebration of my country's "liberation", if you will, has been marked by some form of aggressive action by my country against someone else's "liberty" - whether that "liberty" is a particularly human good or not - all my adult life.

I recall thinking back when I was desperately trying to become part of an Army unit that had been set up to ostensibly help fight other peoples' guerrilla "wars of liberation" that the unit had spent much of its existence fighting and helping other people fight against "wars of liberation".

I like a lot of things about the United States. As nation-states go, it's one of the more decent (low bar? Fuck, yeah! But, hey, think of how many don't clear it...).

But it's hard to just get too flag-wave-y when you get to know enough about how hard We the People have fought against the most noble promises in the very document we are celebrating today. 

And how much harder it is when the nativist Right is roaring and shrieking that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"...unless they are gay. Or nonbinary. Or immigrants. Or Black.

And let's not even get into that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song.

I'm tired of watching the dumbfuck "conservatives" grab onto today and hug it like a rubber love doll.

It's possible to love this country without being blind to its problems.

Indeed; to me the only way to love this country is to be resolved to fix those problems to the extent they can be fixed.

So. Happy Birthday, US. 

May you always be right. 

And may I always be all dead square up in your ass if you're not.

(And Charlie Pierce says all the same things, and better, than I just did. Worth a read.)

As for me?

Well. Couple of things.

Finally got my Army retirement straightened out, so I'm getting a grand or so a month from Uncle Sugar. Trying not to blow it all on booze and hookers.

I'm also winding down my geotech work, and finding I don't miss it much other than the impetus it gave me to get up and outside every day. So trying to find other reasons for doing that. Picked back up kendo, something I did thirty years ago, and am finding that what my mind recalls my body scoffs at performing. 

Inside my head I may still be 36, but my muscles and bones are 65.

Oh, and I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier...

So there was a tax issue around my parents' retirement accounts which were passed on to my sister and I after my mother's death in 2019. The financial management company that managed the transfer reported the full amount - more than a quarter million - as taxable and submitted a 1099-R as such.

We didn't, and last August the IRS came after the full about, to the tune of penalties and interest of more then $80,000.

I then spend the next damn-near ten months going back to the feds - over and over - trying to get them to accept that, no, I didn't have a quarter-mil shells stuffed in a sack or stashed in the Caymans. It was in an "inherited IRA" just where it had gone back in 2020.

Well.

Finally in February we got a "Notice of Deficiency" telling us we needed to pay up, or file a petition in U.S. Tax Court.

We filed.

Got a docket number - and a letter from the IRS recommending we hire a tax attorney.

Figuring that if we were going to pay someone $80K it might as well be Uncle Sammy instead of some tax shyster I hunted around the legal aid outfits. No joy; we 're "too rich" (retired geologist and public school secretary? I know, right?) to get gratis legal help. Ugh.

Anyway, the tl:dr is that last Friday we got a call from the tax court attorney. K, he said, we've accepted your contention on the Carol IRA transfer. Still got a couple of little sums (2020 was a weird year in a lot of ways, and not getting (or not submitting) the 1099-Rs was one of them...) to pay down, but the damage is $2,600, not $82,000.

So. Good.

Mind you, still fucking irritating that Donny Trump cheated like a motherfucker on HIS taxes and hasn't paid so much as a nickel. But that's how that skeevy bastard rolls, and We the People let him. So.

Oh! Almost forgot this.

So my back went out this past weekend, and so I slept on the couch last night. It's not as soft as the mattress, so easier on an ouchie back.

But it's also closer to the street, and on a typical July 3rd I'd have had a mad minute all night, seeing as how shooting off pyro was how we roll here in the People's Republic. I even wrote a whole post about this ten years ago.

Last night?

Nothing.

We're in the middle of a long dry summer. The City of Portland, aware of the potential for pyromaniac inferno, issued a hard "no" to pyro this summer, warning the good people of Portland that the coppers would aggressively cite anyone caught making red glare.

So...my question is; was last night's quiet because the People of Portland sensibly realized that unless your aim was to set your garage on fire it wouldn't be a good idea to be shooting pyro all over the yard? Or was it purely fear of the heavy hand of the Law?

Given my general opinion of We the People?

My guess is that the dumb clucks forgot that it was a holiday, seeing as it's a Tuesday, and who the hell does holidays on a Tuesday?

So happy Tuesday, and hoping you and yours have a fire-free holiday.

I'm in my second week of the Stations of the COVID.

Week one was pretty miserable until the Paxlovid kicked in, and tolerable - more or less just a bad flu - through the weekend. Yesterday - about four or five days after the last Paxlovid dose - the head congestion got worse. This suggests I'm moving into the "Paxlovid rebound" I've read about.

Frankly, if the symptoms get no worse? I'm fine. It's irritating (for some reason decongestants seem to have no effect on this damn bug) but no more than that.

Other than that I've been faintly...amused is too gentle a word for it; I think "scornful" is closer...at the ridiculous antics of my supposed "fellow Americans" who've been sucking on the FAUX News crack pipe.

First, what the actual fuck is this:

Is this some sort of fucked-up Narnia cosplay? Tubby as Emperor complete with lion wingman and some sort of UH-60 pimp-my-ride? Who could actually think of this tangerine-colored crook like this?

Whatever.

Beyond the usual idiocy, though, it's telling that all the news out of MAGAtLand is about various culture war stuff, but what the hell else do these gomers have to sell their C.H.U.D.s? 

"Tax Cuts for Rich Fucks - Now In Your Face!" "Our Insurance Company Bureaucrat Will Totally Fuck Your Medical Care For Good Profit Reasons, Not Woke Shit Like A Government Bureaucrat Would!" "We Promise - Your Grandpa CAN Eat Nutritious Cat Food...and Like It!"

Take away the grade-school-homo-bullying and Bible-banging and what else do the sonsofbitches have, anyway..? I just wish they'd fuck off and do it somewhere that nice people don't have to see it. Like writing and masturbation.

Speaking of lions, though...here's our own domestic predator:

See the bald spot?

That's where the little goof got his flea treatment. It's NOT supposed to do that. Why he got a bald spot there I have no idea, but it might be stress, because he's on a diet and he haaaates it. He woke me as usual the other day:

 

 

This is a bathroom ceiling fan.

Specifically, this is the ceiling fan that has been sucking clouds of shower steam out of MY bathroom since long before it was mine (or my Bride's, whose mortgage the Little House was in, and whose name is on the ownership document...). Our guess is that it dates from somewhere around the Eighties; that would be consistent with the provenance of a LOT of the post-Twenties work done on this house.

(Which, I should remind you, was massively fucked with after the house fire sometime around then, when the occupants took the insurance money, spent it all on hookers and blow, or Vegas, or any other damn thing than making halfway-decent repairs on the poor little house...)

Well, about sometime this spring the old fan began making expensive squealing noises and shutting down. I suspected that the fan bearing had worn our, advised the rest of the Fire Direction crew not to use it, and contemplated having to replace it with no real enthusiasm.

After putting the distasteful chore off as long as possible (and long enough for some nasty mildew to build up on the bathroom ceiling) I finally went to the friendly Home Depot folks and bought a new fan.

 
Went to the 1920's attic stairs, pulled them down, and read, stamped on the upper section in 1920's ink:

"Maximum weight: 200 lbs".

I think I was below 200 some time back in 1988, right after I got out of the service all lean and hungry. And since then food and I have been better acquainted, and that weight is long since gone.

Luckily I have good friend who aren't so damn fat. And are also good people, and kindly, and pretty awesome handimen, too, so it was my friend Brent who came over with toolkit in hand and headlamp and power drill, and...

...yanked the old junker, checked the wiring (still good), put in the new fan, tested it to see if it worked (it did), fixed it to the joist, and there we had it; a new fan.

Thank you, Brent! I owe you something nice, really, and that's not even counting for snaking the nasty damn utility sink in the basement that was running slow because of the nasty washing machine lint!

Now I just have to spackle and paint the new L-angle piece of drywall and it'll be a thing of beauty and a joy...well, until the NEXT time it craps out. Hopefully some time in the 2060s long after I'm dead.

When I was with my ex, whose family were very "boat-y" people, they liked to say that a sailboat was a hole in the water into which you poured money.

Yeah, well, home ownership. Let's talk.

And speaking of fucked up things...

I see our new House Republican overlords finally got tired of pantsing Kevin Fucking McCarthy and let the poor stupid sod play Bang the Gavel.

The clusterfuckery was entertaining, yes, but let's not let it distract us from the plot of the story "The Cannibal Children Come To The Birthday Party".

The Traitor Twenty did what they did as much to extort their fap fanstasies of endless Hunter Biden and the other QANut nonsense we're now going to get 24/7/365 from these fucksticks.

But hidden in the pile of MAGAt shit is this tasty little raisin, noted by Kyle Cheney at Politico and emphasized by emptywheel:

Yep.

They're going to use their power to destroy the notes that the DoJ took on their criminal fuckin' conspiracy

So, even as we contemplate the goodness of new bathroom fans and good home improvement news, we need to remember that for at least the next two years we're going to be ruled - to the extent they can - by people who tried to betray the Constitutional requirement to peacefully transfer power to the winner of the general election.

That is, by traitors no different in fact from those guilty of Confederate treason 162 years ago.

And it's also a reminder that the thing that distinguished a criminal like Trump from a criminal like Nixon is that Nixon's crimes were, at bottom, political. 

Nixon had an agenda - loathsome, true - that he wanted to rule by. He had made his bones kneecapping his political enemies in California, and he grew to power with the same vicious political instincts until he finally went too far for even his political party to ignore.

Trump, on the other hand, was just a mobbed-up grifter, a real-estate crook with the instincts of a made guy. His crimes were the crimes of a streetcorner hood, a Mob guy, running his numbers and thumbbreaking his debtors (and stiffarming his creditors).

So it should be no surprise that the remoras that have fastened themselves to the Mob that is the Republican Party are not that much different. They know they're guilty of criminal conspiracy.

And, like their Orange Julius Caesar, they're now trying to use legal bullshit and lies to escape with their gains.

Well, the American people did, at least in this case, vote for these sonsofbitches.

And now, thanks to the people who voted for these sonsofbitches, all of us are gonna get it, good and hard.

But at least I'll have a nice new bathroom ceiling fan when they implode the debt ceiling this October.

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.

I don't have any particular thing to say. Just sort of noodling around and had nothing better to do than peck at the keyboard, so here I am, on a cool gray morning in mid-July, wondering what to say and do.

Well...not really wondering; I've got a busy and, I hope, fun day ahead. Volunteering at a local park. A Japanese brewing exhibition. Block party around the block. And then a home game of our women's pro soccer club.

But now? The Little House is quiet (as the local garage band has finally given up trying to cover Paint It Black, thank Asmodeus...) with everyone asleep except Drachma the Merkitty and me. So let's start with them.

Okay, Me; wassup?

Mostly the usual; work.

But that's not as business-as-usual as usual. 

For one thing, the local branch of my company is kind of imploding. We've hemorrhaged good people - three in the last quarter - and we're down to four:
1) the least-liked and least-respected senior engineer,
2) a complete noob who comes across as utterly green,
3) a tech who is at best marginally competent and has a weird, shifty personality, at that, and
4) me.

The fucked-up part is that my corporate doesn't seem to either know, or care, how to improve this. They know the senior engineer is kind of a putz - it's been his clumsy lack of management skills and greed to bag shitty development work that has gone a long way to driving off the good people - but won't either can him or try and fix him.

Instead their solution is to bring one of the Puget Sound office rainmakers down here to generate work.

The supposed plan was that this would help kickstart getting Portland good work...but this particular guy doesn't bring in "good" (that is, interesting, challenging, demanding engineering project-type work) work. His stuff is just the other guy's writ large - boring Earthwork 101 mass-grading development projects.

And, to make things weirder, he's set up a completely parallel-but-separate construction monitoring program here, all run out of the Seattle office. His staff and tech people use our equipment and office space while keeping their schedules and needs utterly hidden.

It's ridiculous and frustrating.

Add to that we just lost our last good field staff guy last Friday. I've got to work with the noob and the creepy guy, neither of whom I trust.

Frankly, I'm ready to hang it up.

Seriously. Our financial person looked at our assets and the actuarial tables and told me that I could legitimately retire this fall and not end up living under a bridge before I die. That's looking ever more attractive right now. I'm sick of trying to herd these boobs and noobs, I'm tired of the boring bullshit development work, I'm ready to give something else a shot.

(Narrator voice: "It became obvious that not all was well...")

Okay, wow, that sucks? What about Me, Personally.

Meh, fine.

I'm relatively healthy. I like where I live - sorry, Tucker, Portland still isn't burning down amid Antifa terror - and I like my life outside work. My knees are slowly healing, tho it took a fuck of a long time and I still have weird after effects - the top of my feet, the instep? is sort of numb, like when your arm or leg "goes to sleep"? Like that, and I have no idea why - but the horrible insomnia is gone, at least.

I am getting old. I can feel it in the slowing of my pace, lower energy, and slowly growing stiffness and creakiness. I don't feel like I'm going to take an Ivana-tumble-down-the-stairs (and how about that for a conspiracy-theory story, eh..?) but five years ago I could pretend that I was still in "vigorous-late-middle-age".

Now?

Fuck, I'm old.

I still enjoy the things I've always enjoyed: the world around me, the world of imagination and creation (I've recently gotten on a weird manga kick, and my reading is now vigorously interspersed with stuff like Sweat and Soap...). I've set up a gaming table downstairs to renew my enjoyment of tabletop wargaming. 

I still follow soccer - the Timbers (tho the cost finally persuaded me to yield my season ticket- a grand a year is too fucking much - and write the Thorns over at the Riveting! website.

My Bride is a treat. She's hitting the gym regularly and sewing and (also) reading and just being her, which is fun. 

The Girl is deep in teenland; she's salty and quirky, she's become a horror of a mess in the kitchen (where I'm rapidly becoming even more of a Neat Nazi - I hate when she cooks and leaves ingredients and cookware scattered all over...) and creates shockingly professional drawings and ever-more-impressive pottery.

The Boy is...gah.

His brief foray into low-end low-wage unskilled work (bag boy at the local grocery) ended in less than 100 days. Now his "plan" is to strike at a lineman job at PGE, but he seems in no hurry to get there. He mostly hangs out and games - which is mostly what he did in grade school, middle school, and high school - so it's like having a monster (because he's grown up into a big beast - with a neck beard, which is "ugh" but fuckit, it's his neck) kid still around the place.

He drives me kind of nuts; I want to chase him out of the house into the Navy or VISTA or to college or...something. It just feels to me like he's wasting his youth sitting in his old room playing HALO or World of Tanks.

But...he's an adult, technically. So he's his own boss to an extent.

I just wish corporate would kick himself in the pants a bit.

Oh, and Drachma the Merkitty?

He's living The Best Life.

Since little Nine's death he's the One and Only Boss Kitty. He gets to prowl his range, demanding with imperious meows that the support staff open doors for his entering-and-exiting pleasure. He has splendid quantities of food whenever he wants it. He gets to hunt - his latest prey appears to be dragonflies, for some bizarre reason - and proudly presents his game bag to the suitably-appalled humans.

The Girl still grieves her Little Cat and still wants another, more loving kitty...

(Drachma has become slightly more affectionate - at least, to me - but he's not really a "lover kitty". He won't cuddle with you or tolerate much holding, unlike Nine who was a complete love sponge. He really is how my Bride described him when asked whether he was a Good Kitty: "Well...he's good at being a cat.")

...but she's up against it. Drachma, obviously, is a hard "no", as is The Boy. The Bride is a "maybe" and I'm a "maybe but leaning no", so the Girl - after a brief spasm of cat-looking - appears to have conceded the One-Cat Family setting so long as Mister Mister is the cat.

So. That's that.

What about this place?

Well...I'm still struggling with that. This is the most writing I've done here in a long time. I've taken several stabs at doing a Brusilov Offensive battles piece but just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm. It's just dire Great War shit; people dying in pointless ways and to make matters worse it's the two most incompetent of the combatants, Austro-Hungary and Russia (the Italians are a special case...) finding ways to get their own people killed. 

And outside of personal stuff like this?

Well, for soccer I have my other blog. I'm really done with writing filler and oddball-news stuff. I've given thought to completing the Army I Knew series but am kind of at a point where it becomes less gripping and more All About Me. Maybe I'll give it a stab after I retire.

Politics? Oh, God. That's just dire.

Seriously. How many ways are there to say "Wake the fuck up and stop electing fucking Republicans!" How many times can I return, like a dog to its vomit, to the appalling reality that somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the American public are worthless, Bible-banging, gun-humping, woman-and-minority-hating, learning-despising, disease-enabling, fascist-loving shitbirds who will cheerfully either herd me and mine into the camps or look away while their Three Percenter and Oath Keeper bros do it?

I'm fucking sick of what my country has become, fucking angry that all the shitty things that I thought we'd driven from the public square - racism, proud ignorance, white power, religious nuttery - and into private muttering have returned out and loud.

The GOP must be destroyed. It's really just that simple, and just that impossible.

But that's for the next post; a State of the City and the State and THE Union.

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

~ T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

There was a time when I would struggle out of sleep on Christmas morning, desperate for caffeine amid jittering children impatient for loot.

Today? Nah. Just me and Little Cat, coffee and tuna pate' and soccer re-runs in the silent morning house. Why the hell was Qatar playing in the CONCACAF Cup semifinal? Fucker was in Eurasia last I checked. Fucking FIFA cash-grab, I suspect.

Finally the crew staggered in and the presents were distributed and everyone got down to the hard business of Christmas Day - napping (parents), gaming (The Boy), and something artistic (The Girl). The cats begged for food, prowled randomly, or napped, although Drachma did have a moment with his new catnip toy:

.

He had to sleep it off under the tree...

Late in the afternoon my Bride concluded that we needed a brisk walk, so we headed out into the gray, rainy, high-thirties evening, down to the little woodlot waste ground along the fringes of St. Johns to walk off excess Christmas Spirit.

And proceeded to immediately come across a dump of cut-up commercial weed.

"Oh Christmas weed, oh Christmas weed, how lovely are your branches..!"

Frankly it was miserable; cold, wet, with a nasty east wind that was just enough to chill any part of you that wasn't covered.

The Girl and I turned back just past the treeline in the distance of the photo above. The Bride kept on going just long enough to show us what weenies we were being, and I'm totally okay with that. That was a rotten ramble.

But we got home to the warmth and the glow of the lights, and the promise of the quiet evening to come.