tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53312136855426302582024-03-15T23:05:12.876-04:00DC SpinsterAbout running and life in the DC area.peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.comBlogger1356125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-47349240133239906972024-02-29T14:44:00.014-05:002024-02-29T14:54:59.613-05:00The bleakest season . . .<div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">It's that extra day in the year, February 29th, one that comes only every four years. The last time it came I was in my sixties, and still within a distant last sighting of any of my 3 children more than a decade earlier . Now I'm in my seventies and my last sighting of any of my children has slipped to two decades earlier. The divorce you know.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgl6B9QQicJH40LHVdcUOHlprluRS0lyRO3I7U0jNTOO4K1sKWFnLXGROFWbuUWZUGYo-1GK9yFYN1WUSl1PRvS6mIKwapu37pGIXcpR1NKNKnKaLzzCFMlHtkJ2A3STjFBmM3WfCCFxWL2ik54e46gew7aSFcKQkdYpfJyqkQDWfraqjv8S6hH6BLVKk/s1600/DWLFootball.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1044" data-original-width="1600" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgl6B9QQicJH40LHVdcUOHlprluRS0lyRO3I7U0jNTOO4K1sKWFnLXGROFWbuUWZUGYo-1GK9yFYN1WUSl1PRvS6mIKwapu37pGIXcpR1NKNKnKaLzzCFMlHtkJ2A3STjFBmM3WfCCFxWL2ik54e46gew7aSFcKQkdYpfJyqkQDWfraqjv8S6hH6BLVKk/s320/DWLFootball.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">This the the day the bleak third of the year ends each year, usually on March 1st, occasionally on February 29th. For persons <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>estranged from their loved ones darkness often descends on Thanksgiving, the start of the holiday season, and ends . . . ? For me it's always at the end of February when my youngest child, now in his mid-thirties, has his birthday at the regular end of the month. The other two sons cram their birthdays in between the New Year and the youngest's birthday. Time moves on, you know?</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihD0rU6LrJcAvbuNNCukkLGkznZocEKhnbysKdweKZSBigXKvtCELRJg__YSXy11SbHEYCl8NQmncLAwTjyzz5S1vf0whZuD7jZyPdnTZXiSQZb1lZS2zC0MdoU-2bM98CTXi_f4CXTVIllqN8UEN98oKqLGxnMWNdvL9b-z2kfew3Er22oaJRmDe7asQ/s4288/JHL&Santa.JPG" style="font-family: inherit; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3216" data-original-width="4288" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihD0rU6LrJcAvbuNNCukkLGkznZocEKhnbysKdweKZSBigXKvtCELRJg__YSXy11SbHEYCl8NQmncLAwTjyzz5S1vf0whZuD7jZyPdnTZXiSQZb1lZS2zC0MdoU-2bM98CTXi_f4CXTVIllqN8UEN98oKqLGxnMWNdvL9b-z2kfew3Er22oaJRmDe7asQ/s320/JHL&Santa.JPG" width="320" /></a></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Do I still care? Yeah, I guess so. Probably a lot. But less so now, as the years-now decades-march on. Their mother made a fine job of poisoning their tende<span style="font-family: inherit;">r minds back then against me and all Lambertons, none of whom have heard from them since they were mere children. She painted with a broad brush, and has made a lifetime work of it. She's truly extraordinary in her accomplishment, and the boys-now men-have an unnatural enmity hardening their hearts. I'm sorry for them. C'est la vie, or perhaps, c'est la guerre.</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn9Aon1TdhMPk-ebIpdIOJaRpXTP8lxh6Sk5epRcRmkA6h8dQIoISFGQ3d2SjjA9f0z1v7dqufrwL-Z6kK7M894BgXpptpy3lo6qVmvK6JzdJxHwuCBniTJ5Ai-GRtppZ_ahthGXFFFTvJq7mYdKlC3nsqM81drlPhxAadvRY9uMjFpVMU2CedS_6cmoM/s4288/JBL&PLSuit.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3216" data-original-width="4288" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn9Aon1TdhMPk-ebIpdIOJaRpXTP8lxh6Sk5epRcRmkA6h8dQIoISFGQ3d2SjjA9f0z1v7dqufrwL-Z6kK7M894BgXpptpy3lo6qVmvK6JzdJxHwuCBniTJ5Ai-GRtppZ_ahthGXFFFTvJq7mYdKlC3nsqM81drlPhxAadvRY9uMjFpVMU2CedS_6cmoM/s320/JBL&PLSuit.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-91611845018611775322024-01-17T05:16:00.015-05:002024-01-25T23:33:37.109-05:00The Phone Call<p><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">2023 in Review. August 2d. The phone rang at 6:30 AM her time, exactly two weeks after we’d tenderly kissed goodbye and I’d driven away at midnight, a fortnight filled with my phone calls not being taken because she was wiped, busy, buzzed, would call me later. “Are you sitting down?” the familiar voice asked.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgx8O0AI9PqvVSCVv9CLya4xf8cmqwKeNS3SxYjI1bHVpH89t2SrBCRAU11CEetJ82n5NZ-ilsOBhZ9jiC0xRC2u_dwzLXiRecneB664HPRtDlSLud500yDwoE3YdjMqL5HdO_5Fp-_qhA7-bOvZYiNh68ALAmFccM_wxxYw1AZF71NDL3OPJAQDoeIvY/s640/IMG_4285.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgx8O0AI9PqvVSCVv9CLya4xf8cmqwKeNS3SxYjI1bHVpH89t2SrBCRAU11CEetJ82n5NZ-ilsOBhZ9jiC0xRC2u_dwzLXiRecneB664HPRtDlSLud500yDwoE3YdjMqL5HdO_5Fp-_qhA7-bOvZYiNh68ALAmFccM_wxxYw1AZF71NDL3OPJAQDoeIvY/s320/IMG_4285.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">For three minutes I wordlessly listened to how blessed she was to have known me and how kind and generous I was. How devoted and considerate I’d been when I’d taken care of her after her terrible bike accident when no family member had had the time nor inclination to come visit her during her two days in the hospital or during those first awful ten days of recovery at home, with her displaced front teeth splinted shut to save them, stitches in her eyebrow and from her lip to her nose to close gaping lacerations, her voice barely discernible from a blow to her larynx, contusions all over her body and her head wracked with pain from a concussion.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibjqaak1RyrmX0p2UPIM75rseXMvlqH3v134GBy6I9Wk9vYqXjXNTt9DZ5pnPTqT-T5FckX1SEJi1jlPC2SvIx4UlivxSlROmYQRCwvIbeLwyZnT9asOKqF8kGSYIFJ6Yr52I_mNsI7JQAtWNj1lhHOYhQRsE_v2uEF8NsmvTetk_CAo4emdWfLpmsefY/s640/IMG_9773-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibjqaak1RyrmX0p2UPIM75rseXMvlqH3v134GBy6I9Wk9vYqXjXNTt9DZ5pnPTqT-T5FckX1SEJi1jlPC2SvIx4UlivxSlROmYQRCwvIbeLwyZnT9asOKqF8kGSYIFJ6Yr52I_mNsI7JQAtWNj1lhHOYhQRsE_v2uEF8NsmvTetk_CAo4emdWfLpmsefY/s320/IMG_9773-2.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><br /></span><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">She continued on about how smart and what a good writer I was, and how much she’d learned from me. I could tell she was reading from a list of bullet points she’d written down beforehand, a lawyer’s trick I’d taught her to do before she undertook any important phone call so she could unerringly stay on point and not be swayed from her main purpose. And she was unswerving in where she was going, everything was in the past tense.</span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGmUjW6ZWxhiHxBu1aZ4yz2vpq9WkZVNt7T4JjtIWv6qrYLMflvB4k9v8Mv6a5YFVI4kkAdGRD_2hDIw2YdIMkPhOv47pWDmJkm1Zi8rpxdBbRUVaNunHQfXwheGuaK4M4aKxAoy7QKxYM0_Tp9-C4bDEG8IvpNeUKE4vbczYChnxKosvXbCUnkmBuwuI/s640/IMG_4157.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGmUjW6ZWxhiHxBu1aZ4yz2vpq9WkZVNt7T4JjtIWv6qrYLMflvB4k9v8Mv6a5YFVI4kkAdGRD_2hDIw2YdIMkPhOv47pWDmJkm1Zi8rpxdBbRUVaNunHQfXwheGuaK4M4aKxAoy7QKxYM0_Tp9-C4bDEG8IvpNeUKE4vbczYChnxKosvXbCUnkmBuwuI/s320/IMG_4157.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><br /></span><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">She was wrapping it up. But we were so different! Although we got along so fabulously and had always had such a great time together, now that she was established in her new life so far away, and a long distance relationship was so tenuous no matter how temporary it was, and given how opposite our outlooks and personalities were—her voice gave off a tiny little sob, a manipulative trick in her bag of feminine wiles that I knew well from having heard its use before to create an instant of sympathy and empathy for herself during a highly wrought moment—“We should each go our own separate ways now.”</span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_3UTFompkA8kiBw6IKoocXxJsMLwdejbvE_2cTM_1goSrins13jVbHrRGcuBDp0BbIeACLiFcDHwbiDob349iQZccx-b3LRr_QzkqeoRbNLhsJJP_A25Nm52RGVywcxUmj45rocZW2t-oODv0uSHWuE039x89GYx5W0H_ZOpch-WEDY7fzmcoNAzdT-g/s640/IMG_4938.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_3UTFompkA8kiBw6IKoocXxJsMLwdejbvE_2cTM_1goSrins13jVbHrRGcuBDp0BbIeACLiFcDHwbiDob349iQZccx-b3LRr_QzkqeoRbNLhsJJP_A25Nm52RGVywcxUmj45rocZW2t-oODv0uSHWuE039x89GYx5W0H_ZOpch-WEDY7fzmcoNAzdT-g/s320/IMG_4938.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">She paused—it was my turn. I hesitated for a second as thirteen wonderful, blessed months raced in a jumble through my mind. I loved her deeply, and she had said many months earlier, while crying at the realization, that she loved me, but now she obviously wanted nothing further to do with me, I had somehow become a leper to her. In a sudden, three minute termination interview over the phone I had just been discharged.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZWFItVNlQghfr318OmQ2K965-I9JOk-iDWrrxwEqErznmdUD21utovJaWGtCEplTVNTKbr6jzcl4YIhLpXvfgWN6gFg5tKcNlSPSJN1RR8xEUA9LOEDiDKgB1fs9yuDI9II6KpvU9UB7vj3PFZzB3vkwxFrrgoMLO0QcBiHv3LjwM5LpE_u9sqso3o4A/s640/IMG_2999.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZWFItVNlQghfr318OmQ2K965-I9JOk-iDWrrxwEqErznmdUD21utovJaWGtCEplTVNTKbr6jzcl4YIhLpXvfgWN6gFg5tKcNlSPSJN1RR8xEUA9LOEDiDKgB1fs9yuDI9II6KpvU9UB7vj3PFZzB3vkwxFrrgoMLO0QcBiHv3LjwM5LpE_u9sqso3o4A/s320/IMG_2999.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><br /></span><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">I remembered how she had definitely kept me sealed off in July from any of her friends back here that she visited when she came back for a week to see her dental specialist, although many of them had seen us as a couple before she’d moved away in February. I drove a thousand miles gallivanting all over with her that week, but I never met even one friend of hers except her friend in Charlotte for two minutes in the driveway in the dark while we unloaded her bags before I drove away to return home, because it had been made clear that there was no room for me in her friend's expansive house that night or by her side during the next two days’ activities either.</span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_T5_95rLX8g9tpxtvdxknZEXgN9OMmniM3GTWvLdcwCklGZ7vBrU7O4Bxu2QtHqz1ot4Y-JC_5wPCgOuqUr5lKf0SmIfJTPB0ypmzumrrTSZB_C1pmifh9L489IuiJ_EukQ4Yh8Zx58qpnykBdESB5aUFQ20eKasL1BTzvouSSnXycVKD71eSstaIGSI/s640/IMG_4661.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_T5_95rLX8g9tpxtvdxknZEXgN9OMmniM3GTWvLdcwCklGZ7vBrU7O4Bxu2QtHqz1ot4Y-JC_5wPCgOuqUr5lKf0SmIfJTPB0ypmzumrrTSZB_C1pmifh9L489IuiJ_EukQ4Yh8Zx58qpnykBdESB5aUFQ20eKasL1BTzvouSSnXycVKD71eSstaIGSI/s320/IMG_4661.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">And except for her sister, whom I had contacted on the afternoon of her accident in September of 2022 to say that she was in the ER, I don’t think anyone else in her family knew that I existed or that we were in a “serious relationship” all those months, to use her own words to her sister. Or maybe they did, or perhaps they found out from her sister when my presence didn’t fade away after she had fully recovered and effected her move out west, and they were aghast that she was still in a “serious relationship” with a white, East Coast liberal who fervently believed in choice, sensible gun control, and that women or gay persons could serve as pastors or priests every bit as well as heterosexual or sacerdotally celibate men, stances which I had perceived over time to be anathema in whole or in part to some or most of her immediate family members her age.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD74_41ea0w8dCglWUCBkQ4cpHalBOUnJ7COw02-M46eh_4k_ttVz2AaJOKMGUjySfuSUn31jZcn9r6b5PLhGaybF8aPSquNhxLwpSA_T-oMLP4vtjo3_2FNIbjf50SC0WEK5jOFkAyBtuN_xnUqCLBu3g3lZbOLTzqInbtSkbtJoseQHn1qnz6ZU8LxU/s640/IMG_0008.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD74_41ea0w8dCglWUCBkQ4cpHalBOUnJ7COw02-M46eh_4k_ttVz2AaJOKMGUjySfuSUn31jZcn9r6b5PLhGaybF8aPSquNhxLwpSA_T-oMLP4vtjo3_2FNIbjf50SC0WEK5jOFkAyBtuN_xnUqCLBu3g3lZbOLTzqInbtSkbtJoseQHn1qnz6ZU8LxU/s320/IMG_0008.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">I thought with an aching heart of the common grief we had shared those many months of close togetherness over our estranged children, a son and a daughter for her and three boys for me, as a result of our separate, bitter divorces and the pernicious influences exerted thereby upon each set of tender children by other, abusive adults (Parental Alienation Syndrome, or "PAS," is a form of abuse--towards children). Now a descent back into that yawning, lonely void, alone again without a friendly voice to share my sorrow with any more, was my immediate and probable long term or lifelong prospect once again.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtEiq3gc_th2aFmpDKNU91d9xVdw_9nLXQAChpoi9Psh7qMpGlBtyqnsN3O9p0RkIl1k-dACQ3h_Mrta9HgXxqPFWxBkI3a5bHLL3IH_VUzFQsCRSuGNC5cocvoxEyKPsM8tCt5q08Dybie8YnXdjePn4Zri_UQzDuy-VNwRN2nT9DA1F4o1Ne-RE3H00/s640/IMG_0708.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtEiq3gc_th2aFmpDKNU91d9xVdw_9nLXQAChpoi9Psh7qMpGlBtyqnsN3O9p0RkIl1k-dACQ3h_Mrta9HgXxqPFWxBkI3a5bHLL3IH_VUzFQsCRSuGNC5cocvoxEyKPsM8tCt5q08Dybie8YnXdjePn4Zri_UQzDuy-VNwRN2nT9DA1F4o1Ne-RE3H00/s320/IMG_0708.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><br /></span><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;">"Goodbye,” I said. A tiny voice came back, “Bye.” The connection was severed.</span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg127mf6FWLPiZigWW6wj-nNAuEn5qL0lwu1-9Y7UogmA2-IhIQUjkhI2Mhyphenhyphen-BcnITqdGy7DV0lS9eMCABWXkk5xVJAh0G-A3FJWyBfkROGiONYudiNlvQDcic690WxCRUt6eSqoKLdKCeAG-8jQecA9RXq7t0mvOl9xqm-Yh-p8Jv000iDlWyOkeXyL3Q/s640/IMG_4227-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg127mf6FWLPiZigWW6wj-nNAuEn5qL0lwu1-9Y7UogmA2-IhIQUjkhI2Mhyphenhyphen-BcnITqdGy7DV0lS9eMCABWXkk5xVJAh0G-A3FJWyBfkROGiONYudiNlvQDcic690WxCRUt6eSqoKLdKCeAG-8jQecA9RXq7t0mvOl9xqm-Yh-p8Jv000iDlWyOkeXyL3Q/s320/IMG_4227-2.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span color="var(--primary-text)" style="caret-color: rgb(28, 30, 33); 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display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem; font-weight: 600; line-height: 1.3333; max-width: 100%; min-width: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">Share</span></div></div><div class="x1o1ewxj x3x9cwd x1e5q0jg x13rtm0m x1ey2m1c xds687c xg01cxk x47corl x10l6tqk x17qophe x13vifvy x1ebt8du x19991ni x1dhq9h x1wpzbip" data-visualcompletion="ignore" role="none" style="border-bottom-left-radius: 4px; border-bottom-right-radius: 4px; border-top-left-radius: 4px; border-top-right-radius: 4px; bottom: 0px; font-family: inherit; left: 0px; opacity: 0; pointer-events: none; position: absolute; right: 0px; top: 0px; transition-duration: var(--fds-duration-extra-extra-short-out); transition-property: opacity; transition-timing-function: var(--fds-animation-fade-out);"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-22194826361753204212024-01-11T10:06:00.005-05:002024-01-11T11:26:45.626-05:00The Visit<p><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In July a friend visited me from out west and we had a wonderful time traveling about for almost a week. After she met with a specialist in the District for some followup treatment, we played pickleball in my town and then we travelled to Maryland where we feasted on a dozen crabs in Annapolis and spent a magical three days on the Eastern Shore. We shopped for art and she bought a southwestern piece to have sent out to her apartment, we rode bicycles, enjoyed an elixir by the harbor and explored Tilghman Island.</span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_0qaNq_XSa8C-j1j03l01bn36lKK3rr271Ici69CJEJABAoQIlsO2FrvOve3WZu4unDRVVmXSlLFrALZRWz2NAxFK_Mt83y6ozvWIK5MzGnFl1tiGWYOfGlfGeBDRgg8MhDxlNMMdyhafmR5eWoi1uJcHuJPFNphKNFy3pdHerukKAhoTgjexS9x2DXU/s640/RoomTillIsle.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_0qaNq_XSa8C-j1j03l01bn36lKK3rr271Ici69CJEJABAoQIlsO2FrvOve3WZu4unDRVVmXSlLFrALZRWz2NAxFK_Mt83y6ozvWIK5MzGnFl1tiGWYOfGlfGeBDRgg8MhDxlNMMdyhafmR5eWoi1uJcHuJPFNphKNFy3pdHerukKAhoTgjexS9x2DXU/s320/RoomTillIsle.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next we jumped into my car and drove </span></span></span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">to Virginia where we visited a fabled postbellum hotel in Richmond. While my friend attended, in its grand lobby setting, </span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">a formal English tea which she had reserved at exorbitant cost, with some family members who naturally arrived late, I walked over to the Virginia War Museum down by the river to have a look at it and gaze at the water. When her desultory "family reunion" was concluded she called me back and we returned to Fairfax. There we hung out in our old haunts in Mosaic, saw a movie, did some shopping and partook in a happy hour at our favorite English Pub, where we each had a gin and tonic that turned to lavender from clear when we touched it. Afterwards we ate a dinner of fish cakes, shepherd's pie and had a sticky toffee pudding for dessert.</span></span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirdMujczrqfhcdbj1IIJ8UFAIA0fTNdLtcIEarIqTJeADo1MJLcxIddyB0vURpg1PmT43KjgqwIj2e22VjpVYVQMaBOsQYQkmfl0q1ulWvirknDzBJrn4WcQLHtTdlwyARPoXUdv7uOyLoE3QQGcunZzOjyNkJa43UavTwNjrw7VQdDiyCXt6UtHwMVb8/s640/RichiHotel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirdMujczrqfhcdbj1IIJ8UFAIA0fTNdLtcIEarIqTJeADo1MJLcxIddyB0vURpg1PmT43KjgqwIj2e22VjpVYVQMaBOsQYQkmfl0q1ulWvirknDzBJrn4WcQLHtTdlwyARPoXUdv7uOyLoE3QQGcunZzOjyNkJa43UavTwNjrw7VQdDiyCXt6UtHwMVb8/s320/RichiHotel.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next day we attended a service at a nearby church of my faith which had a cool outdoor altar, cross and labyrinth that I had wanted to show her, and then she attended a service at her former church and afterwards she had lunch with her friends.</span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTKUkrSYzTcKzb_Ne1E-J1JJTBVYKayynLdghjwpUTnaczulk3nbkx9RNjN-n-WYPUrMd9RsxaXmwrKs6ud1zcSK-Th6G_41bMk1vFYqEegIP1LaDBQGN-aGk98h5J-8P2n38TjMa2w0Rwgd5Et_MHXEzcQ_aeCfdpnW7samw0C-oWriTyNJbhlS1re9A/s640/thumbnail.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTKUkrSYzTcKzb_Ne1E-J1JJTBVYKayynLdghjwpUTnaczulk3nbkx9RNjN-n-WYPUrMd9RsxaXmwrKs6ud1zcSK-Th6G_41bMk1vFYqEegIP1LaDBQGN-aGk98h5J-8P2n38TjMa2w0Rwgd5Et_MHXEzcQ_aeCfdpnW7samw0C-oWriTyNJbhlS1re9A/s320/thumbnail.jpeg" width="320" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">When she picked me back up in my car late that afternoon, we drove down the Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina where I dropped her off at midnight in Charlotte and drove home overnight so that she could visit with a friend there for a couple of days and then fly home.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75yrnTZ85oXC0dYUWAy8eIugBnTiHYk8Uvf1SYYimLvAlCeFlNd1rCM0jjFsC2LFdcL5_l0pfaG8RJZ92LXjsQi8aazm0Gu11cM4Q5VVfWygcZ0t99uAk5htEv33nV5n8K52Xffp6witZS7iGUC5Ty3ZEQ4Cyls3VVclDY32cgRh8t-icdfqP3ifv2lQ/s640/1DrivinAllNight.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75yrnTZ85oXC0dYUWAy8eIugBnTiHYk8Uvf1SYYimLvAlCeFlNd1rCM0jjFsC2LFdcL5_l0pfaG8RJZ92LXjsQi8aazm0Gu11cM4Q5VVfWygcZ0t99uAk5htEv33nV5n8K52Xffp6witZS7iGUC5Ty3ZEQ4Cyls3VVclDY32cgRh8t-icdfqP3ifv2lQ/s320/1DrivinAllNight.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had taken </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">a photograph we both admired </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">of a fiery sunrise on the Eastern Shore during our travels; I didn’t suspect then, being obtuse or perhaps blindly unaware, that as a </span><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">result</span><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of her recent move I had somehow become merely a naive suitor of hers rather than something far closer just a short time earlier, and the picture better represented a fast approaching sunset rather than a grand burgeoning dawn.</span></span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKnWVxqSG_OFWBy51t3HO5snwcQbP0_YcC8DOgUtWYfzbwXE177DjH98tKOmR1aImn8Jkytx8lFIFZN0HImsKdJo17knpmZ2HbqC428gsd5wJByQhpmJBZCZVWWNWYmlLSwuBdZwMo6DnVweMWFQ2n8uXhr5CwRJVocXcBKjz7NuRueG_8KzDwzC4dsE/s853/SunRise.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKnWVxqSG_OFWBy51t3HO5snwcQbP0_YcC8DOgUtWYfzbwXE177DjH98tKOmR1aImn8Jkytx8lFIFZN0HImsKdJo17knpmZ2HbqC428gsd5wJByQhpmJBZCZVWWNWYmlLSwuBdZwMo6DnVweMWFQ2n8uXhr5CwRJVocXcBKjz7NuRueG_8KzDwzC4dsE/s320/SunRise.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span><p></p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-26663954810562169122022-09-21T01:37:00.005-04:002022-09-21T01:37:38.095-04:00Pickleball Wars<p><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pickleball Musings from a FB post I wrote in July. Here in September, this woman can't beat me, yet. We played to 11-6 recently (in singles, which is much different from doubles). It won't be long.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm creating a Frankenstein monster. For three weeks I have been helping a woman new to pickleball (she started 5 weeks ago she claims) who is younger than me by several years and much more fit (she runs for things but doesn't always get there) by practicing with her one-on-one for 75 minutes two or three times a week. Decades ago she played a little tennis. </span></p><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">She asked me to help her with her serve, which never went in, and her game which was all over the <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>place. Serving rules in PB are dumb, so I dumbed it down for her. Just drop it (and then all the fussy rules don't apply) I told her, and hit it on the bounce up into that big rectangle over there diagonally and you'll instantly improve your game 100%. Because you can't score if you don't get your serve in, period. </div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">But I want a deep serve (to keep her opponent back and on the defensive) she said. Just get it in, I said, and deepness, and a good shortness which is a tricky change of pace and can produce an ace, will come. That's what we did the first week; using my 8 practice balls I would demonstrate putting 22 of 24 soft serves in, and that was 22 serves I could pick up points on. She is a quick study, and being competitive, she simplified her serve by converting to a bounce serve and ditching the awkward high-shoulder drop, dropping the ball from waist-high instead (better control as to where the ball will bounce up to) and softened her service strike by foregoing smash or spin attempts, and now she never misses putting a serve in. And once or twice she gets an "ace" in each game because her serve suddenly bounces short and is unreachable.</div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Then we worked on rallying, off our serves. We don't keep score, we just serve to each other and hit it back and forth, back and forth and back and forth till it goes out or in my case, she hits a slant shot to the other half court on my side (she's good at those and never puts this "touch" shot out) that I eschew running for because I'm old, heavy and tired. She always pulls up short and cries, "Yes!" when she does this which makes me chuckle. </div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Then to get back, when she serves next I hit the return low and hard to the spot she just vacated as she moves towards the center of her court (i.e. behind her) and watch as she reverses, sprints for it, lunges and, barely missing it, cries out in exaggerated anguish. It's fun and funny.</div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">So in two weeks she picked up serving, returning and rallying, and added her natural talent at slant shots (balls off to the side). But her backhand was weak and she jumped at the ball, waving at it in a backhanded stab that rarely made it over the net. Can't generate any power if your feet are off the ground, I told her. Plus she wasn't getting set for the shot, she was always moving towards the ball but never "arriving at it." So we worked on that this week and she came up with, on her own, incorporating a 2-handed backhand, which a few players have but not many. Her BH improved exponentially as we practiced (she got properly set by using the 2-handed technique) and today I watched as she played at Senior Drop-In games looking like Evonne Goolagong raking double-fisted backhands by Chris Evert, one after another. In only five weeks, I wondered? </div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">I've been working for 11 long months to get to where I actually win occasionally, and I "only" lose 9-11 to the immortals now at Drop-In (being, of course, partnered with an immortal whom I cause to lose alongside of me) instead of 2-11. I've been getting backhanded compliments lately, Peter your game has really improved! Now I look at my "student" and wonder if I'll be able to beat her in August even. Didn't the monster creation kill Dr. Frankenstein?</div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-87772508732035622042022-09-03T12:36:00.001-04:002022-09-03T14:15:04.582-04:00I read more than a dozen books in 2020 . . .<p>. . . and these are the dozen that I thought were the most impressive, in order of best to less significant.</p><p>1.<span> </span><span>The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45 V3 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2013). The conclusion of Pulitzer Prize winning Atkinson's opus on the Allied ETO war effort from the American POV. The trilogy reaches its conclusion with complete victory over Nazi Germany in this stunning denouement that details the end of WW2 in Europe, from the D-Day landings to the fall of Berlin (to the Russians) with the Anglo-American armies poised on the Elbe River a short distance away and Germany prostate and utterly beaten.</span></p><p><span>2.<span> To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a </span></span>revered American novel, with small-town lawyer Atticus Finch fighting for justice in the Jim Crow south even as his two small children, Scout and Jem grow up in a racist town. Boo Radley, a reclusive figure who strikes fear in their hearts, saves them in the end in a morality tale that shows that often nothing is as it appears to be.</p><p>3.<span> An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-43 V1 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2002). This Atkinson book about Operation Torch, the American landings in Vichy French North Africa, won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Atkinson is a florid writer--it's almost like you're reading literature, no history--and using all sorts of metaphors he describes the North African campaign where: a) the Americans got into the fight against the fearsome German army for the first time; and b) learned how to take on the </span>Wehrmacht; c) learned valuable amphibious assault lessons against feeble, half-hearted resistance that the Vichy troops threw up; which d) stood them in good stead for invading Sicily, then Italy and then the Big Show, Normandy.</p><p>4.<span> American Predator: The Hunt For The Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan (2019). This true-crime book is a page-turner (I stayed up all night reading it). Utterly fascinating and chilling.</span></p><p><span>5.<span> Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson (2015). The sinking of this passenger liner (reputedly carrying munitions to the Allies) in 2015 almost brought America into the Great War a couple of years before Woodrow Wilson, a president too proud to fight, finally successfully petitioned Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 2017. The narrative recreating the destruction of the great ship is memorable. Interestingly, infected American troops going Over There in 1918 brought on the deadly "Spanish Flu"pandemic of 1918-1919 which killed 60 million </span></span>persons worldwide, triple the number of persons killed by The War To End All Wars. The flu had originated in the cattle farms of rural Iowa, where it was a local phenomena of "pneumonia" which spread to the troop barracks on the East Coast then to the trenches of the frontlines in France and then to the world.</p><p>6.<span> Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathanial Philbrick (2013). A long version of the Bunker Hill battle, fought on Breed's Hill in Charlestown across the bay from Boston, and the people and events leading up to it and resulting from it.</span></p><p><span>7.<span> The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (1959). The old standby reference for the D-Day invasion that liberated Europe from the Nazi scourge.</span></span></p><p><span><span>8.<span> Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers Home by Matthew Pinsker (2003). An interesting book about "Lincoln's Summer Cottage," a little known National Historical Place on the northern edge of Washington which Lincoln rode to, usually alone, every evening during the summers because it was cooler there. He was shot at, accosted, and suffered a runaway horse before a </span></span></span>guard troop was finally encamped there. The book touches on the emancipation proclamation, claiming it was largely written there.</p><p>9.<span> Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James McPherson (1993). The redefinition of liberal democracy expostulated at Gettysburg. A new birth of freedom. All those white national January 6th fascistic traitors should effin' read this book.</span></p><p><span>10. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-44 V2 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2007). The Allied effort in the ETO continued with a leap across the </span>Mediterranean to Sicily then Italy. But this was bloody war in a sock for the Allies because Italy has a mountainous spine and the Germans always had the high ground. The Americans on the left and the British on the right hammered away in frontal assaults on well-prepared and heavily fortified mountain strongholds for two years, lending little to the Allied success in beating Nazi Germany. Vally after valley had a mountain range bristling with enemy guns facing it. The idea was to tie down German divisions thereby helping the Soviets on the Eastern Front but the Allies expended more divisions in attacking than the Germans used in defense.</p><p><span>11.<span> Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story by David Humphreys (1957). I'm a sucker for any book on Custer. I didn't find anything new here. Read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt (1932) </span></span>instead.</p><p><span><span>12.<span> The Life of Johnny Reb by Bell Irvin Riley (1943). This has long been considered a classic Civil War exposition by this Emory University professor using local sources of how the hardy, emaciated Rebel soldier lived and fought but I found it to be long, boring, unilluminating and racist. I gave away my copy of his subsequent book, The Life of Billy Yank.</span></span></span></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-68855529573485182572022-08-23T06:19:00.003-04:002022-08-23T06:22:55.361-04:00Books I read in 2021, Part II<p><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 2021 I read 18 books, and earlier this month I posted the first six of the dozen that had the most impact on me. Here are books 7-12 on my list of favorites.</span></p><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">7. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams #1954. This play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Big Daddy and the machinations swirling around his fortune and his alcoholic sexually ambivalent favored son, Brick and his dissolute wife Maggie. She speaks wisdom that is applicable to our polarized country one year <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>out from January 6: "Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant . . ."</div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">8. The First Wave: D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in WW2 by Alex Kershaw #2019. Extraordinary heroism at work on the five invasion beaches and beyond by men who were the tip of the spear that pierced the Third Reich and destroyed fascism in the world, at least until it reared its ugly head here on home ground during the last enabling, potentially fatal presidency. When I visited the five beaches with the aid of a paid guide in 2019 with friends, <span style="font-family: inherit;">it cracked us up when the guide referred the three beaches (Sword, Juno and Gold) stormed by the Britsh and Canadians as "the Commonwealth beaches." When I stood on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest beach to secure and a very near thing, I was standing on a place of now-lost American exceptionalism.</span></div></div></div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">9. Das Reich by Max Hastings #2013. The bloody tale of the blood-soaked trail left across France by this elite SS Panzer Division as it made its way from garrison duty watching the coast in Southern France to the raging battle in Normandy after D-Day. Traveling mostly at night to avoid Allied air interdiction in the daylight, it took 10 days to arrive at the battlefield because the division stopped to exact terrible retribution upon innocent civilians almost every time it was attacked in any fashion by the French Resistance enroute--expending murderous German fury over the lost war on the hapless and helpless French population.</div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">10. 1776 by David McCullough #2005. The book dragged on a bit as it covered a bewildering cast of colonial characters while it described the important events of the fashioning of our nation like Lexington and Concord, the Battle of <span style="font-family: inherit;">Bunker Hill and finally Washington forcing the British to withdraw from Boston by maneuver rather than battle.</span></div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">11. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W. Toll #2006. An interesting account of the early growth of the US Navy from gunboats guarding the rivers and coastline of the nasceant United State building warships able to challenge British warships in proper one-on-one situations and to project American power overseas, especially against the Barbary Pirates.</div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">12. "A Few Acres Snow" The Saga of the French and Indian War by Robert Leckie #1996. A French minister consoled the French king who was lamenting losing Quebec and the upper Mississippi Valley to the British during this war by describing the loss as merely a few worthless acres in a winter wasteland while France still controlled rich sugar-cane islands in the Caribbean. How did that work out for the French?</div></div><div class="l7ghb35v kjdc1dyq kmwttqpk gh25dzvf jikcssrz n3t5jt4f" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">The other six books were hardly worth mentioning but I did glean a few factoids and interesting tidbits from each of them, I suppose.</div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-21689017224857340812022-08-10T20:01:00.003-04:002022-08-10T20:01:57.268-04:002021 Books--A half dozen<p> I lost control of my blog in late 2020 and wrote about 60 posts in a nearby blog which now I can't locate. C'est le guerre. I seem to have found a tenuous route back to my original blog so copied straight from a FB post last year here are the half dozen most impactful books of the 18 I read last year. I like summarizing lists.</p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 2021 I read 18 books, the most I'd read since before I retired five years ago. In the next two days I'll list the dozen books that had the most impact on me. </span></p><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Fifteen of the books were histories of some sort, focusing upon WW2 and the American Revolutionary War mostly but I also read a book on the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, the French and Indian War and the Civil War. One book was a play--I try to read a play a year--one book was a biography of an artist with lots of pictures of his drawings so it went down easy, and one book was literature, not fiction but literature as I try to limit any made-up story I read to be a classic as long as I usually only read one fictional tale (non-play) per year.</div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">1. As I lay Dying by William Faulkner, #1930. I love Faulkner. Everybody should read Faulkner. Such scathing disapprobation of the racial inequities in the South, but also such love for its uniqueness. And its strong women, what depictions of them! There's subtle humor that's occasionally laugh-out-loud in them, like when the poor white trash family in this book can't afford to take an adult family member to the doctor when he breaks his leg, they try to fix it themselves by making him a cast out of concrete. But first they have to persuade the store owner to break open a 25-pound bag to sell them 10 cents worth of cement, which he finally does to get this noisy, smelly out-of-town riff-raff out of his store. Having a cement cast does not do the injured family member any good, it turns out. I suppose it was worth a try, in a poor-man's canny self-help sort of way. </div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">2. The Conquering Tide: War In The Pacific Islands 1942-44 by Ian W. Toll, #2015. My Dad fought in the Pacific War with the First Marine Division at two horrific battles and was training to be in on the invasion of the Japanese mainland in 1946, with its projected one million American casualties, before we dropped the bomb which finally caused beaten Japan to surrender already. Sorry, but not sorry at all about that.</div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">3. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-45 by Ian W. Toll, #2020. The Americans ruthlessly and relentlessly brought the ruthless and implacable Japanese to the peace table just before the Russians' cynical, opportunistic and cheap land grab garnered a prized Japanese island for themselves and communism. The ensuing Cold War would never have been the same. The section on the peaceful occupation of Japan itself made the book fascinating and worthwhile.</div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">4. The British Are Coming! The War For America 1775-77 by Rick Atkinson, #2019. Volume One of the Revolution Trilogy by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Liberation Trilogy (WW2, ETO), which I read last year. I can't wait for volumes two and three to come out.</div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">5. Stars In Their Courses, The Gettysburg Campaign June-July 1863 by Shelby Foote #1994, 1963. This is a "book" lifted straight out of Foote's magisterial Civil War Trilogy and deposited whole as a history of the Gettysburg campaign, with all of its star-fated actors, Lee who lost the war on the afternoon of Pickett's Charge, Meade who steadfastly defended his high ground that couldn't be taken but just as steadfastly refused to come out of his redoubt and attack a defeated foe and therefore consigned the nation to another two years of bloodletting, Reynolds who died after setting the Union line in its winning position, Ewell who hid behind the words "if practicable" in Lee's order of the first day to attack the reeling enemy and knock him off of his dominant position and therefore failed to unhinge the Union line while it was still possible and assured the loss for the Confederacy of the key battle in North American history. I read the massive trilogy back in the nineties and still remember it as a great read, even if written from a Southern POV. Every American adult should know something, or more, about the Battle of Gettysburg, it is where slavery was doomed to die in North America. </div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">6. The Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-42 by Ian W. Toll #2012. The desperate first two years of WW2 in the Pacific, at least until the Battle of Midway changed the course of WW2 in five minutes on June 22, 1942 when American dive-bombers from the US carriers Enterprise and Yorktown arrived simultaneously over the attacking Japanese fleet by happenstance from different directions and battle groups and sank three of the four Japanese carriers in the enemy's taskforce in the most momentous five minutes of WW2. Japan never seriously regained the initiative again during the war, just as Nazi Germany never seriously regained the initiative again after the Battle of Stalingrad was fought to a standstill in 1942, before the Russians annihilated the overextended and encircled German Sixth Army in January 1943.</div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-30351410562300403942022-08-01T04:49:00.008-04:002022-08-01T04:49:55.961-04:00Pickleball and . . . literature?<p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For 75 minutes on Saturday morning I practiced PB with a friend, volleying, serving and returning, and backhands. "Yes! " would ring out in mock triumph as she put yet another slant shot off to one side of the court causing me to run way over there for a weak, lunging return, and then hit the wide-open court as I desperately tried to reverse course and run back into the play. I would hit volley shots at her that would handcuff her between forehand/backhand stabs at the ball and laugh as she quixotically looked at her paddle that had just failed her by trying to return a chicken-wing shot off its narrow banding edge. In between faux triumphs we would discuss Rick Atkinson's fascinating opening volume in the Revolution Trilogy which we both are reading, The Redcoats Are Coming. "Atkinson has a felicity for turning history into literature," says the Washington Post. No score was kept, only momentary scores were settled. I love pickleball.</span></p><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Sunday, as showers threatened and the sky spit raindrops, I showed up at general PB Drop-In and filled out a 4-some on a water-slicked court hoping to quickly get in a couple of games before a deluge made playing untenable. I thought I was being handy by immediately filling out a 3-some even though our two opponents were half my age and the best players (one by far) of the 12 toilers playing on three courts. The game went quickly as Pen put his wicked spin serve onto the wet court where it sliced wickedly away off the moist veneer of the hard court and weak lunging rally returns were put away decidedly by Player at the Kitchen Line with triumph aplomb. We went up for faux "good game" platitudes at 1-11 and I drolly said, "Work up a sweat, you two?" The losing two of us expectantly waited for Pen and Player to split up with us in some more equitable matchup that would, you know, be more fun but Pen and Player wanted to remain together. Okay. We became a mere ballboy and ballgirl for game two chasing down smashed winners so they could thereupon perform more spectacular kitchen putaways and spin-serves that actually curved wickedly in the wet-laden air from "out" to "in." Quickly dispensing with the false platitudes at the net following the 0-11 shellacking (Pickled!) I kept on going, got into my car and drove home to finish reading my depressing Thomas Hardy novel where the heroine gets hanged for murdering her rapist and her husband, the perfect man, runs off with her sister, equally beautiful but half his age, at the exact moment that poor Tessie is strung up for her "crimes." "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess." There was more profit in reading those lines than playing those games. I hate pickleball.</div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-71159331087609029962022-07-30T04:14:00.000-04:002022-07-30T04:14:28.571-04:00Pickleball Musings.<p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pickleball Musings. I'm creating a Frankenstein monster. For three weeks I have been helping a woman new to pickleball (she started 5 weeks ago she claims) who is younger than me by several years and much more fit (she runs for things but doesn't always get there) by practicing with her one-on-one for 75 minutes two or three times a week. Decades ago she played a little tennis. </span></p><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">She asked me to help her with her serve, which never went in, and her game which was all over the place. Serving rules in PB are dumb, so I dumbed it down for her. Just drop it (and then all the fussy rules don't apply) I told her, and hit it on the bounce up into that big rectangle over there diagonally and you'll instantly improve your game 100%. Because you can't score if you don't get your serve in, period. </div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">But I want a deep serve (to keep her opponent back and on the defensive) she said. Just get it in, I said, and deepness, and a good shortness which is a tricky change of pace and can produce an ace, will come. That's what we did the first week; using my 8 practice balls I would demonstrate putting 22 of 24 soft serves in, and that was 22 serves I could pick up points on. She is a quick study, and being competitive, she simplified her serve by converting to a bounce serve and ditching the awkward high-shoulder drop, dropping the ball from waist-high instead (better control as to where the ball will bounce up to) and softened her service strike by foregoing smash or spin attempts, and now she never misses putting a serve in. And once or twice she gets an "ace" in each game because her serve suddenly bounces short and is unreachable.</div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Then we worked on rallying, off our serves. We don't keep score, we just serve to each other and hit it back and forth, back and forth and back and forth till it goes out or in my case, she hits a slant shot to the other half court on my side (she's good at those and never puts this "touch" shot out) that I eschew running for because I'm old, heavy and tired. She always pulls up short and cries, "Yes!" when she does this which makes me chuckle. </div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Then to get back, when she serves next I hit the return low and hard to the spot she just vacated as she moves towards the center of her court (i.e. behind her) and watch as she reverses, sprints for it, lunges and, barely missing it, cries out in exaggerated anguish. It's fun and funny.</div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">So in two weeks she picked up serving, returning and rallying, and added her natural talent at slant shots (balls off to the side). But her backhand was weak and she jumped at the ball, waving at it in a backhanded stab that rarely made it over the net. Can't generate any power if your feet are off the ground, I told her. Plus she wasn't getting set for the shot, she was always moving towards the ball but never "arriving at it." So we worked on that this week and she came up with, on her own, incorporating a 2-handed backhand, which a few players have but not many. Her BH improved exponentially as we practiced (she got properly set by using the 2-handed technique) and today I watched as she played at Senior Drop-In games looking like Evonne Goolagong raking double-fisted backhands by Chris Evert, one after another. In only five weeks, I wondered? </div></div><div class="cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql o9v6fnle ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">I've been working for 11 long months to get to where I actually win occasionally, and I "only" lose 9-11 to the immortals now at Drop-In (being, of course, partnered with an immortal whom I cause to lose alongside of me) instead of 2-11. I've been getting backhanded compliments lately, Peter your game has really improved! Now I look at my "student" and wonder if I'll be able to beat her in August even. Didn't the Frankenstein monster kill its creator?</div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-68228625614884517032022-07-26T00:18:00.003-04:002022-07-30T04:34:02.908-04:00Back<p> I lost control of my first blog in December of 2020 because, well, suddenly I couldn't get into it with my Google username and password. For years my computer had just brought up my blog and I could just click into it but all of a sudden, no more. I have no idea what my Google name is much less my password. </p><p>For awhile I published an adjacent blog that no one could see (except for one sibling) because, well, it was insecure or something. I have no idea.</p><p>Anyway, suddenly in a corner of my computer ,I found a link to DC Spinster so I'm back for how long I don't know. My adjacent blog, with a few dozen posts, seems to have gone off to somewhere from a few months' disuse, maybe I'll find it again also. So I'm baaack, for now anyway.</p><p>I 'm heavy into pickleball now. It's taken me 11 months, since when I first picked up a paddle in Sugust last year till now, to get anywhere near decent. </p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-44048834469713471282020-12-04T19:25:00.006-05:002020-12-04T19:25:51.947-05:00Two Memories<p> I'm trying to remember occurrences in this year that wasn't. when the coronavirus closed down our lives in March and the USA's non-response to it was akin to allowing the Japanese to invade America in 1942 and now they're poised upon the heights of Arlington ready to overwhelm DC on the morrow. I guess FDR wouldn't be one of the Triumphant Threesome off Presidents if he had followed Trump's incompetent response to everything (which gets lots of people killed) and thrown up his hands and said, The Virginia and Maryland governors need to act and if they need combat boots or web belts for their militias, I could assign my son-in-law to seek contracts worldwide to help procure those.</p><p>My last post detailed the one thing during this year-that-wasn't that was normal that I indulged in. Movie-going, I went to see Parasite on Valentine's Day, the Academy Award winning film that, well, sucked. I got incredibly sick that night that made me see God and for the next two weeks I thought I might die as I coughed my lungs out. I wonder what I had, but there were no reliable or helpful tests then, despite the president's subsequent claim that If you want a test you can get a test.</p><p>So now it's time to remember my two most memorable moments this year without referring to my daily notes, and I can do that. I went to a wedding party in January in the District that was thrown by a supermarket magnate that was way over the top; I boogied with my love and barely made the last subway to Virginia and expected moreso the rest of the year. But no. the coronavirus intervened and way later, in July when we were all housebound, I come out of my house on July 4th and saw 500 feet up a B-29 bomber fly over my house escorted by four P-51 Mustangs, all restored WW2 warplanes which had flown on Independence Day over the National Mall and were headed to IAD then, and in that instant I thought of my dad who endured 180 days of intense combat in two battles in the Pacific and my mother who got out of her small-town as a teenager by traveling to CA to work in the war industries (where she met my dad at an USO dance).</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-4220742110812470292020-12-01T22:11:00.004-05:002020-12-02T00:42:48.400-05:00It's December . . .<p> It's December finally in the year that wasn't. The time for a summing up of the year past, a making of lists.</p><p>Except there aren't many or any noteworthy personal events in this year that never should have happened; it's like God stepped away for a moment and got distracted. What would I list as something I did, because I never went anywhere hardly, or did anything practically, once the virus took hold, and what I think happened this year, my reality, is regarded by the Trumpite side of my family as my fantasy, induced by osmosis apparently by my location not only within the Northeast Bubble but actually <i>inside the Beltway</i>. </p><p>Of course, they live in the real fantasy world, not me, because I operate on real information that I acquire from the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and my further reading in books and magazines as filtered through my education at boarding school, a state university and a top ten law school which taught me critical thinking skills to augment my life experiences acquired from being a ski bum for four years, a policeman for nine years and a lawyer for 25 years. So what did I accomplish or do in this DOA year?</p><p>I went to one movie, on Valentine's Day, Parasite, because it won the Academy Award for being the best picture, where I got really sick by that night with a respiratory ailment that kept me down for two weeks and that I still don't believe I've fully recovered from. The movie was, well, awful and the illness was, well, I'll never know what I actually had because in Trump's America nothing is as it was before him and not for the better by a long shot.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-46786014992505080792020-11-30T19:21:00.003-05:002020-11-30T19:21:25.419-05:00How Many<p>I called a friend today, a former running buddy who got married and moved out of DC; he asked me how things were going. I said, "Everything sucks." </p><p>I was losing money in my retirement fund, down 45% this year alone despite this month which was the most robust in 30 years, I ate my Thanksgiving dinner alone (oh, doesn't that warm your heart Sharon!) and the holiday season was upon us which keeps me depressed from Veterans Day till March. You see, I have 3 children, all now in their early thirties, who threw me over and ceased all communication with me or any Lamberton due to the divorce two decades ago thanks to her insidious, invidious utilization of PAS back then when they were tender children and my three children all have their birthdays in January or February.</p><p>This makes me sad every holiday season. So my friend, a very smart man, embarked upon an enlightening discussion thinly disguised as a quest to find the winter of my discontent and he asked me to list three things that were good in my life now.</p><p>I was hard pressed to say what made me feel uplifted currently but I finally settled upon the very important and blessed situations that a) I have enough food to eat (no food insecurity); b) I have enough liquids stored to drink for several months if necessary; and c) all of my five siblings are alive (which is more than I know about my three children). We simultaneously decided that I wished I knew more about the welfare of my real family (my kids) during this lugubrious season; and I decided further that it would be decent or human to know not if I have any grandchildren, but how many I have, and how they are.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-47047303030691398512020-11-26T18:32:00.002-05:002020-11-27T03:22:38.802-05:00Very Unusual Human Beings<p> <span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">This Thanksgiving I was home since I am not traveling in deference to the over-stressed US health care system, thanks to the criminally negligent pandemic nonresponse on the part of President Baby Huey. At Noon I went to take out a pizza from the Lost Dog Pizzeria in Westover but it was closed for the holiday, although several Uber-Eats drivers were hanging around with putative takeout orders, wondering what was going on. </span></p><p><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I waited awhile in my car to see if anyone I knew showed up. Nobody I recognized came by so I went home to cook a solitary meal for myself.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The meal was fine, a pork roast slathered in BBQ sauce plus fixings. I ate it wondering how many grandchildren I might have, but I also knew two immutable </span></span></span><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">things: my ex-wife who turned our children against me through PAS when they were minors (a form of child abuse) would never tell me if one of them suffered a tragedy; or if I as a parent would ever be informed by her or them of the pleasure and pride of indulging in any grandchildren of any of these three now-adults might have had by now.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wouldn't want to be my ex-wife</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Sharon R. Lightbourne (<i>nee</i> Sharon Rogers), good luck to her at St. Peters gate! And as for JJ&D, I wonder how any of them could have accepted such largess as their Lamberton grandmother provided for them through her own frugal sacrifices as a widow and still diss all Lambertons for these last two decades as being unworthy of having any gratitude towards or communication with, I would have thought that accepting such a sum of money (about 100K each in trust money) from so apparently foul a source would have compelled them to either refuse it or cause them to turn it over to charity; those three now fully mature male adults are unfortunately <i>very</i> unusual human beings, persons I wouldn't recognize now as having had any upbringing influence from me as to what they have become from all appearances. </span></span></p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-66328552197704955622020-11-18T22:24:00.002-05:002020-11-18T22:24:28.267-05:00Veteran's Day 2020<p> On Veteran's Day earlier this month I went to see my main street corner man, Trevor, who holds down the intersection of Route 29 and I-66 while wearing a sign declaring himself a combat vet and asking God to bless America. I hadn't seen him in months because I don't hardly ever go by there anymore since since the pandemic began, I only go to Merrifield sometimes in the other direction from my house, which has a Home Depot, and to the grocery store a couple of miles away. He had been sitting on some intel for me for months he said when he saw me. Sharon, the mother of my three estranged children, a heartless covert narcissist (in my opinion) who turned all three boys against me by using the form of child abuse (in some people's opinion including mine) known as PAS, had been in a red car driving by weeks earlier.</p><p>Sharon, who has stonily refused to tell me <i>anything</i> about any of my children (even whether they're all still alive--this is a <i>very</i> abnormal woman), is the only link I have with any of my children, since in the consuming hatred she harbors in her flinty soul towards me she influenced our children not to communicate with a single relative on my side of the family for over 15 years. Now that's abnormal! She used to live two miles from me, a block away from Trevor's intersection, and she used to use her phony concerned Christian blather on him whenever she walked by him with her most recent husband Jim. A couple of years ago she moved away for parts unknown, thus severing my only link to my children. </p><p>Trevor knows cars as well as people. Whenever I drive by, even if I'm three lanes over, he'll shout out to me, "Hey, lawyer man!" He knows Jim drives a Jeep. He knows Sharon drives a red convertible Mustang. The car he saw her in was red but not a Mustang nor a convertible nor a Jeep. But he said it had North Carolina tags. Thanks Trevor!</p><p>Then since it was almost noon and a federal holiday, I went over to Westover and went into the Lost Dog pizzeria and looked around but didn't see anyone I recognized so I left and hung out outside for awhile watching the comings and goings at the restaurant, which has limited seating inside as well as takeout. It felt like I used to feel every holiday when I went to Sharon's residence until the youngest one turned 18 to execute upon my plain vanilla visitation, but she never cooperated with the court order; the house was always dark, the phone was never answered and no children ever came out. For a few months initially when the children were learning under her tutelage how to become scofflaws and that court orders meant nothing (there wasn't enough money in my world to go running to court to get a hearing 6 weeks later every time this happened), the kids would come out in their stockinged feet, even in cold weather, to brightly recite, "Mom sent us out ready to go but we don't want to go with you so we're not." And then they would skip back into her house, close the door and that was my visitation for those two weeks. After a period of time they even abandoned that charade. You see, research shows that children would rather keep the parent happy with whom they spend the most amount of time (she had them 83% of the time to my 17% of the time under the visitation order) and who puts the most amount of stress upon them through manipulation, oftentimes unrelenting in the case of an alienating parent, to the point where they abandon or start to hate the other parent to keep the grotesque manipulator happy. </p><p>Anyway, I went home from the Lost Dog this Veteran's Day and cooked myself a frozen Stouffers Pizza on French Bread for lunch. The holiday season is coming up fast so I'm starting to get sad again. Then the three children, now all adults in their 30s, all have birthdays in January or February. The middle child, whose birthday is next, registered to vote in Seattle a few years back, as I discovered poking around on the internet, the only child who ever moved any distance away from her. I thought he might be trying to break her unnatural influence upon him as he started to fully mature in adulthood. Since she's now in North Carolina, I wonder if he'll move back east and maybe follow her there.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-31361420867910802922020-11-14T20:47:00.006-05:002020-11-18T20:55:42.053-05:00And the winner is . . .not Chump Trump.Biden won going away. By more than 5.5 million votes. He blew Don the Con out in the electoral college by an historic landslide. Really. He won 306 electoral college votes, the same amount Trump won by in 2016, when the orange bloviator used to hand out maps of his electoral college victory to visitors and claim it was the greatest wipeout in history. Not the Trump is insecure and craves adulation. Never mind that Tricky Dick won 49 states in 1972. Ignore that Trump won his victory by about 77,000 votes in three states combined, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the so-called Blue Wall. Biden reclaimed those three states by a quarter million votes combined and flipped three more states Trump won in2016, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Yeah, that's right, Georgia. <div><br /></div><div>I think that when Biden calls at the White House on the morning of January 20th, he ought to bring the Baby Huey president a gift--a framed picture of the electoral college victory that Biden won, entitled An Historic Wipeout of an Incumbent President. Yeah, that's what I think. It'd be perfect, a perfect gift for the departing president perfectly outlining the 306 votes that Biden won over the biggest election loser in presidential history.</div><div><br /></div><div>Trump should look forward to departing the presidency. Even more time for golf. No more boring briefings which cut into his TV time. He won't have to salute North Korean generals anymore. Angela Merkel won't be around to throw candy bars at. No more annoying powerful women around to feel inferior to like Nancy Pelosi or Angela Merkel. He can surround himself with even more foolish and feckless women than the gibberish-spouting Kellyanne Conway, the stupid, lying bimbo Kayleigh McEnany, the pathetically untruthful Sarah Huckaby Sanders and the hopelessly corrupt Hope Hicks.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's a shame Trump's going to spend his last two months in office doing nothing about the raging pandemic but everything about subverting our democracy by denying the incoming president classified briefings so he can be fully informed when he takes the reins of power, that is whenever L'il Richie Rich isn't stamping his foot wherever he's sulking and railing that the election was rigged, somehow, thus turning his 71 million cult followers into vacuous conspiracy believers for the rest of their lives. None Dare Call It Treason.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-57795531187783456672020-11-04T10:36:00.008-05:002020-11-04T10:36:43.835-05:00We can now announce . . . .<p> I dragged myself off to my motel room in 2016 at 11 pm in Newport News on election night after a 16 hour stint being an inside poll observer in that town (apparently SE Virginia doesn't have any democratic lawyers, so they have to reach 300 miles up to Arlington and Falls Church to find lawyers willing to drive down there for three days). I switched on the TV set and settled into bed ready for an exciting night watching the returns come in leading to a Hillary Clinton victory. Remember how she was 99% certain to win?</p><p>I had been inside a bubble all day since 5 am locked into a polling precinct place in the poorest part of town where the tally at the end of the night was akin to 80% Clinton, 11% Trump and 9% those faux candidates the pothead Johnson and the useful idiot Stein so nothing had prepared me for what I saw within a minute of turning the TV on. I have watched enough presidential returns to know that something unimaginable and momentous was afoot. Florida was gone, North Carolina (where I had canvassed) was gone, Clinton was losing in Virginia (where I had canvassed) with 95% of the vote in, but some returns from Democrat-rich Fairfax County were not yet in (where indeed Hillary eked out a thin state victory). I switched off the light and went to sleep with the TV set still on.</p><p>At about 4 am the change in the tone of the announcers woke me up in time to hear, "We can now announce that Donald Trump has just been elected as the 45th president president of the United States. I instantly knew, lying there in darkness in a strange bed all by myself in a seedy motel room far from home, that a bottleneck had arrived that my life was flowing through at that very moment. Into the one end my past life entered, a proud, confident American who knew America for all its faults was exceptional, and out the other end was emerging a citizen who knew he no longer knew his country and was fearful of the future, both for himself and his country. I felt like this moment actually might be a death knell of either myself or my country.</p><p>Sound overblown? America and its democratic institutions have become empty husks of themselves in four short years, no longer a world leader and having become the laughing stock of the world in its response to the worldwide pandemic with the most deaths and infections from it by far. Me die as a result of the occurrence of that moment? How about the threats or perhaps eventualities of dying by COVID-19, nuclear war with North Korea, a one-off nuclear exchange with a state like Iran (I do live in the DC blast range), shot by a heavily armed militiaman or soldier at a protest or denied necessary medical care by administration-ordered retrenchments in the health-care networks so the super rich could get get another hefty tax cut.</p><p>The last four years have been horrible for America and Americans who care to keep informed.</p><p>Last night felt pretty much the same as that 2016 moment for me, mingled with incredulity because Americans have seen what's happened in the past four years (caged and orphaned children, separated families, a quarter million Americans dead unnecessarily, unemployment at record-level, a looming depression, racism exposed and coddled, assassination plots against political or governing leaders tacitly encouraged, rampant corruption, allies cast aside, adversaries embraced etc. etc. etc.) , but I when I went to bed last night I still thought Biden would win, barely, the electoral college, perhaps by 270-268.</p><p>The political landscape was even more bleak when I woke up this morning, with no chance of the Dems taking the senate, the Dems losing seats in the house and Biden temporarily behind in his Blue Wall reclaiming bid, but I still think Biden will win, barely. We know that Biden will win millions more votes than Trump nationwide--so much for one person one vote--yet he has only one one tenuous path to a nail biter victory. But Dems are used to this; the last two Republican presidents, both tenures being utterly ruinous for the nation, were both outvoted yet entered the people's house (Dubya Bush thanks to a single vote--GOP appointed Scalia's).</p><p>Next perhaps I'll recount last night's fevered dream while I fitfully slept, no TV blaring this time to wake me up into an ongoing nightmare.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-36864722473154753662020-11-02T23:02:00.006-05:002020-11-03T05:38:37.611-05:00When I was on the radio . . . .<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">This post was inspired by a FB post that went like this: Child--Alexa, play Let It Go. Parent--When I was your age, I would call a radio station, wait on hold for 30 minutes till I got through, request a song then sit by my boombox for an hour with a blank cassette in it so I could record the song when it came on. Child--I don't know what that means.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I recorded myself on the radio once as a boy of about 11. It was on a general call-in talk show in New York City </span></span><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">and I lay on my parents bed upstairs next to the radio tuned in to the station, dialed it up about 50 times on the rotary dial phone, which required seven twirls of the round number wheel for each call, always got a busy signal, had to hang up and repeat the process, but after an hour of constant dialing I got through to the station, waited 5 or 10 minutes more and got through to the radio host.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I talked for three or four minutes with the host about potholes in the roads which jarred my bike as I delivered the Herald Tribune each morning at 5 am and these vibrations sometimes caused the folded papers to fall out of the bike's basket. As soon as I got on I switched on my little reel to reel tape recorder and recorded the interview as it came out of the radio by my parents bed. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The host explained that potholes were caused by the expanding property of water as it turns to ice after it gets into the crevices of roadway asphalt during cold weather. (I actually knew this but pretended that I didn't.) </span></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I got off the host wondered to the audience why I was still up, it being about 9:30 pm by the time I got through to the station, and when I announced to my parents downstairs that I had just been on the radio, they merely said, "We wondered what all that dialing was for." </span></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So I check marked Being On The Radio on my life's list, but I doubt any kid today would have the patience, or the idiocy, to make a dialing motion 350 times, which also involved removing the finger each time so the wheel could slowly spin back. I also wonder if they would know what a cigar-box sized two-reel tape recorder was, or how to operate a rotary dial phone, or how to record a program by setting a running tape recorder next to a radio which was tuned in to a station. Memories of the early 60s.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Happy birthday, Mom! Vote tomorrow!</span></span></span></p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-29029102409777601012020-10-29T05:29:00.004-04:002020-10-29T05:29:45.431-04:00The Recent Ruination of American Exceptionalism<p><span style="background-color: white;">There is l</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">ess than a week to go before we can start restoring America to its former greatness. Unfortunately the first priority will be to get some control over the coronavirus and by January 20th, and we will have wasted a full year in that endeavor thanks to the recklessness a minority of American voters four years ago who voted for a crass failed businessman to "Make America Great Again." Any critical thinker then could have seen that was a dangerous put-the-tooth-under-the-pillow wish with ten minutes of Google research.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I voted early over a month ago, and although I have done nothing for any campaign this time, unlike in 2016, 2017 and 2018 when I worked hard for democrats, to good success in 2017 and 2018, and clearly the nation's immediate, rapid decline starting in 2017 wasn't because of anything that I left undone in 2016. Because I am in a vulnerable category for the coronavirus, I have chosen not to put myself at risk by working within the confines of a campaign and potentially become a further burden upon our straining health care system by getting sick. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also, I have been hearing hospital administrators lately talking about rationing health care and making choices about who to treat because their hospitals have no further capacity. I understand triage and I have no doubt my care would be placed behind that of reckless, maskless young people who got themselves sick by attending packed GOP functions if health care started to be rationed in Trump's America in the face of all the hot spots everywhere. In other words, people over 65 like me would be sent home to die there with no treatment.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I talked my gardener into voting early and he voted for Biden. I talked my neighbor's live-in adult son into voting early and he voted for Biden. This week I talked the young man living at his parents house across the street into promising that he would vote. So I consider that I multiplied my vote by two and a half times. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am retired, my 401K has gone down over 60% this year and my social security check was late this month but I have sent a $25 check to 23 democratic incumbents or challengers, mostly senatorial candidates because the soulless grim reaper, aka Moscow Mitch McConnell, has shown us all that true Machiavellian power in the US resides in the senate where a paltry minority of the population can control negatively the lives of the large majority in this country. But I mailed contributions to a few representatives as well like Wendy Davis in TX and Max Rose in NY. I admire Davis because of her heroic efforts in an 18-hour filibuster while trying to block draconian restrictions being put upon a woman's right to control her own body in \Texas a few years back. I am from conservative Staten Island and I wish good luck to the unflappable, feisty Rose!. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I put a Biden sign in my yard and on my car. If I ever meet any of my grandchildren, I won't feel totally embarrassed if they complain to me about the total and hopefully not irretrievable ruination of American excellence under Trump.</span></span></span></p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-91404430636622731992020-10-24T03:58:00.000-04:002020-10-24T03:58:26.701-04:00Less than two weeks out, and closing in on 225,000 deaths<p> There's not much to do for the election since I voted last month. I get text messages asking me to sign up for inside poll watcher training, like I did in 2016, but I resist it since I have more than one comorbidities concerning COVID-19. I decided I am not going to spend16 hours in a closed space packed with people working and constantly shuffling in and out, it's a younger person's job now to save our tottering republic--I did my best the last presidential election.</p><p>I had chatted up one of the two live-at-home sons of my neighbors who had indicated an interest in the election and offered to take him to City Hall to vote in-person early, but he never answered the door when I knocked at the prearranged time. (The other son, the one who went to college, brusquely said he didn't vote, go figure.) I saw him last week on the sidewalk and he told me that he had indeed voted the day I knocked, only later, and he had voted for Biden. Score!</p><p>I watched the second debate in its entirety, and clips of the first one, both gave me a headache to see a snarling, mugging bully hector an aging septuagenarian with utter, lying and nonsensical BS. And I watch the count of American dead mount steadily each day, about to pass 225,000 in a mere eight months, most of them unnecessary if only there had been leadership from the president and a national plan. As it is, the coronavirus is raging uncontrollably across the land while Nero fiddles, the U.S. is the laughing stock of the world in its ineptitude.</p><p>I sit at home, watch the news, go out threesor four times a week to the store and wait for the virus to be over or quelled. It's obviously going to be a long wait because absolutely nothing is going to be done to ameliorate the current situation before January 20th, which is still three months away at which time the U.S. under Biden will start at Go, with a full year utterly wasted thanks to the shocking recklessness of the U.S electorate in 2016 who took a flier on such an obviously utterly unfit candidate and voted him in thanks to the obsolescent electoral college which strips the populous coasts of the power of a democracy's supposed mainstay of one person one vote. All power flows through the Senate, Mitch McConnell has shown us that with his grim reaping, and every day I send out another $25 check to Democratic senatorial candidates, twenty checks so far.</p><p>I can't wait for November 3rd at 7 pm.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-50811285278634301802020-10-12T16:42:00.006-04:002020-10-12T16:42:55.706-04:00Dreams of My Children, or Why I Hate Holidays.<p>Besides Christmas or Thanksgiving, which cause the heart to bring forth images of family and longing memories of missing loved ones, Columbus Day is the holiday I most dislike. Nineteen years ago during The Divorce I brought my children back from a lovely trip to Ohio to visit their cousins and aunt and uncle and that night their mother called Dr. Victor Elion, a charlatan court-house-lounging psychologist who acquired visitation overseeing powers over my visitation thanks to the careless writing of an order by my dreadful then-divorce attorney, to complain that I had brought the children home "tired." He completely suspended my visitation privileges that night, <i>ex parte</i>, and I wasn't able to restore my rights until after a hearing scheduled <i>two months later</i> and by then, the children had turned against me by application of PAS, a form of brainwashing which immature tender children are especially sensitive to, by their mother and her coterie of agenda-driven hired gun social services "professionals" no better than Dr. Elion. I remember thinking at the time that 60 days of no communication with my children was heartbreakingly cruel and painful. What did I know then in my ignorance, I haven't seen nor heard from any of my children in 15 years.</p><p>But you don't have to take my word for it. You could google my name and the name of my oldest son, James Bradley Lamberton, before he changed his name to her name on his eighteenth birthday, and find an opinion by the Virginia appellate court on how that divorce went, which contains phrases like "reprehensible." a "harassment petition" and "unjustified" in describing the actions of the mother during the litigation. She was assessed sanctions and my costs of just under $50,000 finally which ended the litigation finally after several dreadful soul and money sucking years.</p><p>So I hate Columbus Day, it immediately conjures up memories of my lost children and the unfairness men mostly face these days in heartless domestic law courts. For years I have maintained a public outreach to my children on this very venue, letting them know that on any holiday during which I am home that I would be at a nearby pizzeria to where they grew up during the noon hour and inviting any or all of them to join me so we could, as adults in a loving family, could pick up the threads from this day going forward. After all, until each one turned 18, I was always at their curbside every other holiday or Friday at 5 pm to undertake my court-ordered visitation and partake in the custody order (full joint legal custody), although they (nor their mother) never answered my cellphone calls to the house and after ten minutes I would drive away to return on the next holiday or twice-monthly Friday.</p><p>No one besides a forlorn fellow sufferer in the Arlington Court who I didn't know (I thought she was serving me a subpoena when she approached me in the restaurant as I ate) who was undergoing the very same PAS applications that I suffered from. She described the same unfair and dreadful undertakings by the same cast of characters in the case she was associated with, like, in my opinion, the odious and unprofessional Meg Sullivan, LPSW, that in my opinion in conjunction with other hired whore "professionals" extrajudicially cost me my fatherhood. But I persevere. Today, even during the pandemic, I parked at noon within sight of the front door of the Lost Dog Restaurant in Westover, donned my mask and checked out the inside quickly and ordered a Polynesian Pie, spent the time it was cooking in my car watching people entering or leaving the front door of the premises, received a text at 12:33 that my pie was ready, watched for a few minutes more then picked up my pie and a few minutes later drove home to enjoy it. I am sorry for those three, as the fatuous Dr. Elion used to refer to them as, lads, now all adults in their thirties. What men they should be, that they so easily cast family members out on temptations offered to them by others, even though as young children but now mature adults! </p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-84319656008744885752020-10-07T10:27:00.006-04:002020-10-07T10:27:42.969-04:00A Two-fer . . . <p>Ernesto, who mows my lawn, called me yesterday, which he almost never does. He's a friend of mine, a Bolivian who has been here for thirty years and a citizen since 2000. He speaks passable English (I am envious when I sit outside with my next door neighbor occasionally--she is his brother--and those two start speaking together in an indigent dialect from South America which means that they speak three languages, including of of course Spanish, whereas I can only speak one) but he is not fully up on politics in America so I do my best to inform him.</p><p>He told me that he had just voted early at City Hall and it only took him five minutes--in and out with no one else there except for the registrar. He thanked me for informing him of the existence of early voting and where to go and when it was open (M-F 9-5 untill election week) because he wasn't sure otherwise if he would have gone to his local precinct at the elementary school on election day and waited on line during a pandemic to vote otherwise and getting an absentee mail-in ballot was otherwise too cumbersome for him in Virginia (you have to obtain the proper application form, fill it out correctly, send it to the proper place, receive the ballot back, fill that out correctly, including fulfilling properly all the requirements for the return envelope including a proper signature in the right place. and sending it back so it'll arrive in time in an era when the U.S, mail is being deliberately being slowed down by Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump sycophant).</p><p>I was gratified to hear from Ernesto because I had offered to take my neighbor, her husband and her two adult children to City Hall to vote when I went to vote early but they were no shows when I knocked on their door at the prearranged time. I then issued a standing offer to drive any of them to City Hall during early voting hours but a complicated series of reasons why they had no time to do this whenever I suggested a time made it dawn upon me that although they revile Donald Trump, they were going to vote, if at all, on their own time.</p><p>I felt bad that I really had no other plans to work in this election--I am too much in a suspect group health-wise to physically electioneer during a pandemic--besides voting early myself, sending modest checks to democratic senatorial candidates and putting up a Biden sign in my yard. Receiving Ernesto's call out of the clear blue yesterday was a delight.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-65490902911164497872020-10-06T13:10:00.007-04:002020-10-06T13:14:45.562-04:00I voted . . .<p> In these cataclysmic times, I executed my plan to vote on the first day early voting started in Virginia last month, on September 18th. I drove down to City Hall at 10 am armed with a notice dated in August from my bank which came addressed to me at my residential address indicating that a check I had deposited had in fact been deposited.</p><p>I walked in with a face mask on and was met by a sheriff's deputy to whom I announced that I was present to vote. He directed me towards the city's registrar office without requiring me to go through any security, where there was no there aside from a receptionist behind a plexiglass shield and the registrar and two polling volunteers. The receptionist asked to see my driver's license whereupon I presented her with my bank account note (Virginia dropped its photo ID law this year after the democrats reclaimed both chambers of the statehouse although it still requires suitable documents) which she examined with a sour face and then handed me a voting slip which I gave to the registrar who gave me a ballot in a folder and a free (the pandemic you know) pen to fill it out with.</p><p>The choice for president/VP was easy as were the choices for senator and representative and it took but a second to mark those blank ovals. I didn't know a single thing about any of the four persons running for three spots on city council so I left those blank and read carefully the two proposed constitutional amendments and marked "yes' on both of those (I'm a democrat you see, and since I discerned through the incomprehensible legalese that they were both measures intent on lessening burdens on poor people and "totally" disabled veterans, in other words giving money away, of course I voted for those), slipped my ballot into the scanning and counting machine and handed my folder back to a volunteer (did she wipe it down for the next voter who showed up?).</p><p>I asked if I was the first person there so far and was surprised to hear that 32 other voters had already preceded me that morning and that a third of the registered voters in the city had already made applications for mail-in ballots. With such a crushing response already in the very first hour of voting seven weeks out from election day it was and remains clear to me that Trump is going to go down in a landslide and the country, and the world, will awaken from this four-year, horrific nightmare.</p><p><br /></p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-74924471347830711082020-09-29T04:59:00.002-04:002020-09-29T04:59:28.056-04:00It finally came . . .<p> On the first of the month, I prodded myself out of my numbing COVID-19 self-quarantine and made a plan to address the upcoming election, now a mere five weeks away. There are 206,000 Americans who tragically won't be voting because they're dead unnecessarily thanks largely to our tax-cheat president's massively inept coronavirus response leading directly to the still continuing lack of reliable testing, contact tracing, provision of PPE, disclosure of truthful, non-divisive information etc.</p><p>I went to the city registrar's office and found out that I was indeed registered to vote and when and where early voting started, and I voted thereby on the first available date. I went to Joe Biden's campaign website and for a $50 contribution, ordered two buttons, a bumper sticker and a Biden/Harris yard sign.</p><p>It finally arrived yesterday and I immediately planted it in my front yard. I took a picture, which I ordinarily would have posted here but a few months go I lost the ability to transfer photos from my computer to my blog, and I no longer have the ability to put photos into this blog except for pictures from previous blog posts.</p><p>So now I parse out twenty-five dollar checks to democratic senatorial candidates and wait for January 21st, Joe Biden's first full day in office when patriotic Americans who aren't beholden to foreign money or influence can start making America Great Again. Meanwhile my Biden yard sign stands out like an evergreen tree in a pine forest as I have yet to see a single Trump sign anywhere in town.</p>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5331213685542630258.post-61993532071979098582020-09-25T09:09:00.004-04:002020-09-25T09:09:53.912-04:00The problem with Act Blue<p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm trying to do my best to help restore American greatness--I've already voted, in person so my vote won't get caught in any election day invalidation by being mailed in and never arriving or being counted too late after the current president has created the deepest constitutional crisis since the Civil War by declaring the election invalid on election night. I'm not going canvassing door-to-door like I did in 2016 ned 2018 nor doing poll-watching like I did in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I'm in the high-risk group for COVID-19. What I think is most crucial, beyond ousting our corrupt, faux president is to throw the senate out from the corrupt, soulless grip of Moscow Mitch, so that the tail no longer wags the dog, wherein 53 venal anti-patriotic senators representing about 29% of the population jam their values (none that I can discern besides getting themselves rich and maintaining power) and judges (young, pro-big business and rabidly antichoice) down on the majority of Americans, who think otherwise, are patriots and value principles and concern for all our citizens. </span></p><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="8ivl4" data-offset-key="fhkms-0-0" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="8ivl4" data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">So I contribute $25 to contested senate races, so far sending a check to Dr. Barbara Bollier (KS), Mark Kelly (AZ), Amy McGrath (KY), Maggie Hassan (NH), Jaime Harrison (SC) and MJ Hegar (TX). The trouble is, except for one example, those are in response to solicitations that come in the mail that I can return a check to. For Harrison, I googled his name and found a site where it listed an address I could send a check to for his campaign. For the rest, like the Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana, Iowa and Virginia races, I get mired in an inescapable maze of the Act Blue payment system for those democratic candidates, with no way to get to a page which tells me where I can send a check to. First off, these pages want too much information from me and I don't trust their security in terms of safeguarding my on-line payments. I can't understand exactly what I'm supposedly paying for or how many times. I learned in 2018 about "recurrent payments" that appear a fortnight later on my credit card no matter how closely I read the fine print and that are a pain to get rid of. </span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="eig0c-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Never again, democrats, sorry! I'm retired and watch my nest egg go down dramatically each month in Trump's Amerika and fear for the future of Social Security under the administration of the kleptocrats in charge. So I sit and wait each day for the mail to arrive (or not as has been happening lately) in the hope that another solicitation will arrive for a democratic challenger for senate so I can contribute. I voted in person already--have you?</span></div></div>peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17284634727671648704noreply@blogger.com0