Looking at 2018, the first quarter

In January I published my settlement with the FTC for its age discrimination as evidenced by my premature retirement in early 2016 due to a hostile work environment created by management in my former division.  The Commission agreed in September of 2017 to pay me $5,000 in settlement of my claims, to change my latest evaluation from Acceptable which was biased and wrong to Outstanding which it should have been all along, to issue me a certificate of superior service and most importantly to me, to provide training to the managers in my former division specifically for age-discrimination and to, in what I informally call the Chris Clause, require the same training for any former manager of mine who left the agency and who also returned within five years.  I am proud of the settlement I achieved against my agency by myself after a year and a half of litigation and negotiations, in a blow against what I consider to be prevalent age discrimination, and which importantly to me did not contain an NDA agreement so that it would be buried in a veil of secrecy.

I also attended a rally at the Supreme Court protesting voter suppression emanating out of a case brought against Ohio for aggressively purging voter rolls of persons who didn't vote and then check their mail from the voter police, and I predicted to the spineless Republicans in Congress that "We're coming for you in November."  Which us Dems did, to the tune of a turnaround of going from four Democrats in Virginia versus seven Republican Congresspersons then to seven Democrats versus four Republicans now, and a blue wave sweeping over the House by forty flipped seats.  We're coming for you all in the Senate and White House in 2020 too, just you wait.

In February I kept up going to lunch program at the local pizzeria on holidays and my estranged sons' birthdays, since two of them have birthdays in February and someday I hope to see one or all of there on one of those special days.  I also started running again, slowly, after letting my restricting Achilles strain heal for half a year.  My doctor threatened to schedule me to see a surgeon if it didn't get better by wearing a Boot, so I gave it plenty of time to heal since I'm not a surgery-first guy.

In March I got into the District a few times to run a mile or two with former running buddies and to walk around to see some of the city's omnipresent famous sites.  I had the unpleasant experience of dealing with the Social Security Administration trying to "disenroll" from Medicare after I had already quit the program by letter, including a dreadful visit to a social security office which is like visiting a third-world bus station and cooling your heels there for an entire day.  Late in March I played the Street Fighting Man in the District again at the schoolchildren's March for our Lives, as our offspring plead for sensible gun regulations like no more sales of assault rifles to teenagers and prohibitions against mega-30+ round clips, where I signed up people's pledges to vote in November.