last saturday in november

The sky hazed over and so I think the sun will set without much fanfare. Unlike the past few sunsets, which have been quite dramatic. I haven't done much with my long weekend, so far. I spent three hours out front yesterday, hacking at dead lavender and cutting back rose bushes. This morning I walked over to the farmers market, which was pared back post Thanksgiving, and then I walked up the hill to get milk and butter and chocolate at the grocery store on Cortland. The bus pulled up just as I was walking out of the store, so I got on it.

I played a couple of the Goldberg Variations and remembered that the piano badly needs tuning. Also, I am clumsy and rusty -- I haven't played much at all in the past year or so. I think it's because I'm self-conscious about the sound carrying through the walls. Someday I'll look into insulation. I don't know why I haven't done it already. I can hear the neighbors through the walls, sometimes. It's another thing on the list of things I'm thinking about spending money on.

post-Tday

Thanksgiving at L+C's was unexpectedly easy. Who knows, maybe I'm getting better at being the odd woman in a world of couples with children. Or maybe it was just a nice group of people. There were so many dishes and I tried each one, so I ate too much -- but not too too much. I got home sometime around 10:30, and somebody somewhere was playing loud music. All I could hear was the baseline. It kept me up, watching Survivor's Remorse, trying not to get worked up about the rudeness of it all. (I succeeded, for the most part.)

Now it's late morning, and I'm enjoying the light in the kitchen. It was worth it to spend all that money on the house, right? I think the answer is yes.

I took the 44 to Glen Park on Wednesday afternoon and walked up Mt. Davidson. I had never done that before. I was the only person walking up (and then down) the winding streets lined with midcentury houses. It was weirdly warm and I was impressed by the clouds. But what finally prompted me to leave the house was a need for cheddar cheese -- the little market on Diamond St has a good selection.

I don't know what I'll do today. I'm hoping A will want to take a walk with me. It will rain later this weekend so I feel some urgency about getting outside. Also, of course, it is Black Friday/Opt Outside Day. I'm uninterested in both, though I am strongly tempted to buy those Frama trestles while they are 15 percent cheaper. Maybe tomorrow I'll go see a movie.

I guess I should call Wallace. I've been putting it off, telling myself that maybe ghosting is the gentlest thing I could do. Why call someone just to tell them you won't be calling anymore? But he has called a couple of times now, and I think I need to stop rationalizing and procrastinating. 

loose ends

Feeling low and small. Heading into winter, toward the end of what has been a punishing year out there in the world. In here it's been OK. I am a bit stuck in place, I count the decades I may have left and wonder if or how I'll drift through them. Alone, most likely. I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself but sometimes I press up against the joint that ties self-pity to anxiety. I can tell that I'm low because I haven't got much of an appetite for social interaction, or even leaving the house. I am drifting, I watch too many Outlander episodes. I can sometimes find an opening, a way to contribute to efforts to counteract the insanity of our national situation. But it's a challenge to get beyond my sense of the world as too chaotic and the people in it as beyond my ken.

more from Nikole Hannah-Jones

Segregation in housing is the way you can accomplish segregation in every aspect of life. Housing segregation means that certain jobs are located in certain communities, that certain grocery stores are located in certain communities; it determines where parks are located, if streets are repaired, if toxic dump sites are built nearby. Segregation accomplishes so many other inequalities because you effectively contain a population to a geographic area and suddenly all the other civil rights laws don't matter.

We don't have to discriminate if we're living in totally segregated neighborhoods; all the work is already done. If you look at the history of civil rights legislation, it's the Fair Housing laws that get passed last — and barely so. Dr. King had to get assassinated in order for it to get passed, and that was because it was considered the Northern civil rights bill. It was civil rights made personal; it was determining who would live next door to you and therefore who would be able to share the resources that you received. The same is true of school desegregation.

Education and housing are the two most intimate areas of American life, and they're the areas where we've made the least progress. And we believe that schools are the primary driver of opportunity, and white children have benefited from an unequal system. And why is this so? Why have white people allowed this? Because it benefited them to have it that way.

fire and wind

I went to Laughing Monk this afternoon to help write postcards to voters in Virginia, and then I went for a walk at Candlestick with A and her dog W. It was warm -- it felt like 80 -- and that was a little disconcerting, given the fires up north. I don't have much to say about the fires because they are too horrific. It's terrible to think about all the houses burned, the people who have died, the firefighters (including the prisoners) who have been struggling to contain the fires. The aftermath isn't quite here yet, as far as I can tell from reading about it online. But the air in my corner of SF was much less smoky today.

After I got home I watered out front. Then I went in and called Wallace; we chatted about his treatment and his recovery reading list while I brought in the clothes that I had hung out back, washed a few dishes, and started making myself dinner. He has been in and out of the hospital this past week. It is odd, I barely know him and yet I'm concerned about his prognosis. I guess that's not odd, really. It's human.

yosemite/parallel universes

On the same day that nb and I drove through the valley, a rock from El Capitan fell into someone else's car, through the sun roof. The day before, climbers died. But we didn't know anything about that until after we got home. As far as we were concerned, it was a wonderful camping trip, except for the noisy neighbors and the smoke from other campfires. This is modern life, in a nutshell.

Awful things go on all over the world, and we hear about some of them but we just . . . move on. It's very difficult to fathom, especially after I've spent all day reading through a manuscript that makes very little sense. After a night of fractured sleep, thanks to the raccoons making noise right outside my bedroom window. I got up at one point and looked out at two young ones trying to figure out where to go from the top of my fence. When they saw me looking out at them, they moved closer to my bedroom window, and I was frightened. How would I have done on the frontier? Not well, I'm afraid.

heat wave

Already September! In a few days I'll be 55. It is cooler today -- only 75, so far. I had an ant incursion, fairly minor, probably because I left the sliding door open until very late and there's a small opening at the bottom corner of the screen door. I went to D+T's for dinner and games last night. It was lovely to sit out in their yard the whole time, especially after T brought out ice packs for each of us.

I left work Friday with V -- we were getting off early for the holiday weekend. V was going to waste some time at SFMOMA before she met her husband for a undisclosed activity he had planned. We walked out of the climate-controlled building and into a wall of heat -- aka a heat wave. It was 103 or 104 or something like that. After I left V, I decided to walk to King St and get on the T there. As I was moving slowly along Third St, looking for shade, I saw Ashley coming toward me. What are the chances.

I have been taking pictures of the sunsets since I moved here. There have been some real beauties lately. This one above was taken on the evening of the eclipse, which I watched at work, or tried to watch through the fog. Even if we'd had a full view we wouldn't have seen all that much, given our location. But it was fun to be out on the deck with coworkers wearing funny-looking eclipse glasses. One really wonderful thing about living here is that I see so much of the sky, even when we are not having a spectacular sunset.

Yesterday the water heater cut out while I was rinsing my hair in the shower, and then it started beeping. That was alarming. I dried myself quickly and ran back to look at the diagnostic code flashing on the display panel -- 25, which means that the condensate trap is full. Huh? I pressed the off button to get the beeping to stop and then started googling. I called a couple of plumbers, looked for advice online, and eventually decided that it was probably just a system/sensor glitch. In the meantime I got acquainted with Shedrick the Plumber, who lives a few blocks away. I think I'm going to ask him to come flush the water heater -- it needs to be done once a year or so, and I don't want to do it myself.

class and money

I had a conversation with my neighbor S the other night. S works for a huge corporation based in San Jose. S is very smart, probably very good at what he does. What does S do? I'm not sure! Devises monetization schemes, I think. We were talking about our current national situation, and of course S thinks it's unbearable, terrible, and so on. I really don't want to meet a person who would use an approving adjective. We were agreeing and then I started talking about my pet issue, about which I have nothing original to say, because it's all taken from economic blogs, and so I assume that all the smart people I know are also reading these blogs or something like them. At first I thought S was with me but then I realized that when I said that globalization is not organic but drive by policy choices, S didn't really understand me.

I began to talk about the movement of capital (allowed) vs. the movement of labor (restricted) but S started talking about a new technology they are working on that would allow a person to, say, manage an oil well out in the ocean (his example! ugh) via video. So, you see, labor wouldn't need to move! Then I said, you're talking about people who have jobs. I'm talking about people who need or want to move to places (other countries, other states) where they might be able to live and work. Even within the US it has gotten harder to move around. S looked at me, and then started talking about a factory in Minnesota that has a problem with absenteeism, which has prompted them to bring in robotic "contract workers" (so now even the robots don't get benefits!), for only $15/hr. I asked if that was what the human workers were getting paid, and S said, oh, less than that, somewhere around $11 or $12. I said, well, one solution would be to raise wages. S looked puzzled, and said that the workers didn't need more money because the cost of a house is so low -- $60,000. I was taken aback on many levels. First, it's almost certainly not true that the cost of a house is anywhere near that low. But, wow, I couldn't believe that a person who makes a six-figure salary could be so dismissive of other people's desire to make a decent living. I guess that's the thing -- from the monetization standpoint, these people are not people, in any meaningful sense.

Anyway, it turns out that a lot of people -- white people? white men? -- don't understand, or don't want to know, that there are a lot of other people outside the golden circle who probably want the same things they want. I shouldn't be surprised. But I am. Maybe it's because people like S do seem at least somewhat interested in their communities -- for example, S often says that the diversity in the neighborhood is important. But what does diversity really mean to S? I'm not sure.

book passage

They walked close together, their arms sometimes touching. She felt his immanence, the fullness of his attention; they seemed to be walking towards some agreement, something inevitable, without ever quite reaching it.

Rachel Cusk, Transit

July almost over

I am meeting another okc guy on Sunday. A possibility. It's a good exercise, I tell myself. At least. We might be able to talk, who knows. I think that hopefulness is worth something in and of itself. Disappointment be damned.

I have been feeling dull and self-critical. I am afraid of so many things. You would think that at this age I'd be less timid. I suppose I *am* less timid but I struggle with myself most of the time, which is another way of saying that I'm still alive. But that's really not good enough. I need to push myself to do things I don't want to do, things that make me anxious. Such as: Call mom and dad. Write something every day, or almost every day, without caring about what I have in mind.

judgments

I am sitting in the corner of my dining area and it feels like a room to me, for the first time. I can feel the breeze, it's a relief. I feel that I made the right decision about the window, to have it open from the right to the left. The Giants have just lost to the Rockies, in the bottom of the ninth. I have been reading the DeLillo novel; I need to finish it by tomorrow evening, so we can talk about it. I wasn't liking it all that much but now that I'm getting close to the end I am changing my mind.

I've been trying out the online personals again. Two of the men who have contacted me seem like they might be worth meeting -- might find me interesting enough, might be interesting to me. I got a message from D that almost made me take down the profile. He clearly did not recognize me. All in all, I think this is a good thing. But certainly it's an indication that my judgment was quite bad -- not that I needed any more indications. Judging from his profile, he seems OK, and that's good. He claims that he's a Buddhist and that he does not drink. I hope that last claim is true. He says he's training to become a marriage and family therapist. Gulp. That is . . . surprising.

I am hoping that by the time I leave the house to meet people for dinner the breeze will have cooled the temperature outside.

not interested in being pretty

This from Zero K:

Here we are, the woman smart, determined, not detached so much as measuring every occasion, including this one, brown hair swept back, a face that is not interested in being pretty, and this gives her a quality I can't quite name, a kind of undividedness. 

I wonder if DeLillo knows, is aware of, what it costs to be uninterested in being pretty.

betwixt

Sometimes I feel trapped. But for me, forward movement happens mostly by accident. I can't completely abandon whatever it is that keeps me safe. I crave and fear a sense of going and not coming back. What would it be like to sign up for a one-way voyage to mars? Or to head west in 19c. America?

spring pang

A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
In contrast with the things that sing
Not Birds entirely – but Minds –
And Winds – Minute Effulgencies
When what they sung for is undone
Who cares about a Blue Bird's Tune –
Why, Resurrection had to wait
Till they had moved a Stone –

          --Emily Dickinson, ca. 1881

WEB DuBois vs. Hillbilly Elegy

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

-WEB DuBois

plants and walks

My persimmon tree has started to grow leaves! And one of the salvia plants is blooming. Yesterday I did some weeding out front, and this morning I spent a little time in the back yard. The sun has been out all day and it feels warmer than it's been in months. I realized that I'd left the gate unlocked for I don't know how long. Oh, well -- if anybody got back there they didn't do or take anything.  

I walked over to A and K's house and then climbed up Bayview Hill with A and her one-eyed dog,Wilson. It's lush and green up there, of course. We encountered one group of four men, each with a little dog. After that I went to Duc Loi, where there were three or four other shoppers. It might be attracting more customers? I'm not sure. I hope they keep it open.

I had lunch -- avocado smeared on the last slice of the Tartine bread, which is very good -- and now I'm sitting here thinking about trying out a recipe for chocolate bread. If it turns out I might make it for next Sunday's bake sale. Also trying to get up the energy to try out my new vacuum, which arrived on Friday. Exciting times!

unexpected confidences

J told me she's unhappy in her marriage -- we were in a noisy bar with a small group, you had to shout into the ear of your interlocutor, and she started saying that it was getting to be too difficult. Ten or fifteen minutes earlier, she'd been telling a funny story about her spouse and their pets, as she so often does. I don't remember what she and I were talking about at that moment but I know I wasn't prepared to veer into a conversation about marital trouble.

I managed to say a few things but mostly I just listened. I sounded like she was having  a hard time with the hours her spouse puts in at work and the way that makes her responsible for everything house-related. Then again, it has always sounded like her spouse simply doesn't do domestic chores, under any circumstances. Some of my feelings at this moment were not the most generous -- part of me was welcoming her to the very large club of people whose longterm relationships have foundered. Part of me was thinking that J doesn't do a lot of listening to or thinking about other people, and what they might be feeling.

But most of me was feeling bad for her, and hoping this is just a difficult moment that will pass. That she'll feel happy and loved again, and soon.

inequality and education

Nikole Hannah-Jones nails it (on Fresh Air): 

The systems that and the actions that created this inequality took a lot of effort and a lot of time. And we want to undo them, you know, with no pain for anyone with a snap of the fingers. On my Twitter account, I say -- I cover race from 1619. And 1619 is the year the first Africans were brought to what would become America as -- to be enslaved. I say that so that we understand there is a very -- before we were even a country, we had created this system that was going to put black people on the bottom, and we created a caste system. 

And to undo that, we feel like no one has to give anything up or there's not going to be any tensions or it's going to be easy, and it simply won't. One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating the segregation and inequality, and we're willing to put almost no effort in fixing it. And that's the problem.
. . .

[M]y daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40,000 a year in private school tuition, but that's kind of the whole point of public schools. I think she -- I know she's learning a lot. I think it is making her a good citizen. I think it is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her, not any less worthy than her. And I truly -- and I say this -- and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent because a lot of other parents look at you a little, you know, like you're maybe not as good of a parent -- I don't think she's deserving of more than other kids. I just don't.

I think that we can't say this school is not good enough for my child and then sustain that system. I think that that's just morally wrong; if it's not good enough for my child then why are we putting any children in those schools?
. . .

Brown v. Board of Education never talks about test scores. We are hyper focused on test scores now. And the way that we have comforted ourselves with the segregation in schools is to say we're just going to get those schools' test scores up to par. Well, one, we haven't done that. But there are lots of measures of what schools are supposed to do. 

See also this Atlantic article in on the overarching goal of Finnish education reform:

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
. . .

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society,* and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

*Economic inequality and race are inextricable in this highly segregated country, so I don't entirely agree with this assertion. 

sleepless in SF

I could not sleep last night. I ate and drank a little too much and after I did a little cleaning up I lay awake in bed for a long time, feeling overheated. My eyes feel heavy and dry and my head is cloudy.

This is a first-world problem. It's a beautiful day and I will get myself outside, eventually.

Yesterday I walked to the farmers market and then to Lucca in the Mission. I went past what used to be the Cole Hardware store on Mission and wondered how deep the rain pool might be. I made a good basic lasagna -- simmered canned tomatoes, sliced garlic, and salt for half an hour, then mixed in creme fraiche. Waited for the sauce to cool and then spread it in the pyrex along with two cheeses and basil. It was tangy and decadent. I left the apple galette in too long, which was a shame. Also, I put it on a rimless baking sheet, which was a bad idea. I hope I can get the butter off the oven floor. (Another first-world problem.)

pro-business or pro-market

After his election, it was difficult to predict what President Trump would do. In the election campaign he said everything and the opposite of everything: from a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports to the reintroduction of the separation of commercial and investment banks, from an aggressive use of antitrust authority to the total abolishment of Dodd-Frank, the financial regulation that was enacted after the crisis. After two months, it is clear that the Trump industrial policy will be pro-business, not pro-market.

It may seem to be a nuance, but there is a fundamental difference. A pro-business policy favors existing companies at the expense of future generations. A pro-market policy favors conditions that allow all businesses to thrive without any favoritism.

-Luigi ZIngaleshttps://promarket.org/donald-trumps-economic-policy-pro-business-not-pro-market/

no ban, no wall

women's march

spot-on remarks on david brooks

from a blog called Easily Distracted, by a guy named Timothy Burke:

I think the thing I hate most about most mainstream punditry, liberal and conservative, but especially David Brooks, is a brutal combination of two connected syndromes: complete lack of self-reflection and a relentless moving of goalposts to conform to the conventional wisdom of the week. It is what betrays most of them as being people without abiding values, and it is what underscores how little any of them talk with people outside their own protected worlds. When I say “hate”, in a few cases I really mean it. David Brooks most of all: I think he now belongs in a select rank of the most noxiously sanctimonious American essayists in the country’s history. Whom, I might add, are hard for anyone but historians and literary specialists to name, because they are so forgettable once their era passes.

The commentary is never about the “I” that is writing. So today Brooks is his usual self: the marches were very nice, you see, but they’re about the wrong thing. And also it’s the wrong time–it’s always the wrong time, strangely enough, for this kind of politics, according to Brooks, except at some point in the past that Brooks usually knows almost nothing about. (Protip hint, should he ever grow curious: there has never been a social movement in this country or any other which included everyone in all segments of society. Every “success,” like the civil rights movement, the favorite of sanctimonious pundits, had numerous enemies and was socially divisive.)

shame and guilt

Undigested, unassimilated tidbits . . . 

Shame and guilt are improperly used to define kinds of cultures; for what they define, rather, is a subject’s relation to her culture. I use culture here to refer to a form of life that we inherit at birth, to all those things - such as family, race, ethnicity, and national identity - we do not choose, but which choose us. Call them gifts of our ancestors. The manner in which we assume this inheritance, and the way we understand what it means to keep faith with it, are, I argue, what determine shame or guilt.

. . .

To experience shame is to experience oneself not as a despised or degraded object, but to experience oneself as a subject. I am not ashamed of myself, I am the shame I feel: shame is there in the place of an object. Giorgio Agamben puts this clearly when he designates shame as the “proper emotive tonality of subjectivity” (Remnants of Auschwitz 110), as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject” (107). The entire thrust of Sedgwick’s argument, in fact, goes in this direction; shame, she says, is the sentiment that “attaches to and sharpens the sense of who one is” (37). The searing pain associated with shame is not one of being turned by another into an object, of being degraded; it has to do with the fact that one is not “integrated” with oneself (44), one is fundamentally split from oneself. (But isn’t this the very definition of a subject?)

. . .

The unbearable question of who we are was no sooner raised by modernity than resolved by capitalism as a matter no longer of being, but of possessing an identity. Like all possessions, identity turned out to be susceptible to measurement. One could have more or less of it, better or worse forms of it, but one cannot fully acquire it. Around this insufficiency a traffic in identity grows up and the value of modesty recedes drastically.

-Joan Copjec, "The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema"

inauguration day

I did not listen to or watch any of the coverage -- then again, I've never been an inauguration watcher, even in much, much better times. I did appreciate this take on the speech via Digby:

There is a gap between those who think that Trump is fit for the presidency, in mind and character, and those who don't. That gap is damn near unbridgeable.  

To my ears, Trump's address was nasty and borderline un-American -- for all its talk of patriotism and "America First." 

My favorite part of the address was its brevity.

From a columnist for the National Review! Who said Trump couldn't unify America?

optimism or pessimism? neither applies

I don’t tend to look for reasons for optimism or pessimism. I think human societies tend to be problematic. And we are just conforming to the rule.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates

ACA rally

I'm glad I went. It was one way of celebrating MLKjr's birthday. The majority of the crowd was a lot like me: nice white people with graying hair. It feels best to rally around something concrete, and this particular something has helped a lot of lower-income people by redistributing a bit of income downward. I was impressed by Keith Ellison. As you can see, I didn't get any good photos.

My reward was the Civic Center farmer's market -- I had forgotten about it.

I am home now, sitting in my sunny living room. I made an egg tortilla for myself and nearly burned the pan by leaving it on the burner that I had forgotten to turn off. A hint of what is to come in my doddering old age, perhaps.

bike crash

I had a little accident on my bike ride home from work. I'm OK but my hip is bruised pretty badly. I was waiting at a T-intersection just south of the Third St. bridge (behind the ballpark), and when the walk sign started flashing I got on my bike and coasted into the crosswalk, intending to turn onto the bike lane once I got to the other side of the street. But a car turning left off of Third St didn't see me, I guess -- and I didn't see him until the front corner of his car was right in front of me. I reached out, as if to push the car away, and then I fell on my right hip. I landed hard, a little bit underneath the car -- but, fortunately, NOT under any of the wheels. I got up relatively quickly -- adrenaline! -- and was told that somebody had called 911. I guess this was a good idea -- you don't always know right away if you're hurt or how. This set the whole firetruck/paramedic/police process in motion. The driver stuck around, and I think I can get him to cover my ambulance and ER copays -- I ended up agreeing to go to a hospital, just to be on the safe side. It turned out that nothing is broken. When I got home several hours later (thanks to a wonderful neighbor who came and got me) I burst into tears (relief, probably) and then I went to bed. Now I'm mostly just sitting around, walking very slowly with a cane, popping ibuprofen, and waiting the the bruise to make my flank turn colors. 

couldn't have said it better

Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours, and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld from her because she did not deserve it or did not attract them. They did not blame themselves or the electorate or the system for failing to stop Trump.

-Rebecca Solnit, LRB 

Except that maybe I would change "she had failed to make them vote for her" to "she had failed to earn their support" -- because, for the most part, Solnit is talking about politically liberal men, or at least men who are not rabid conservatives. And many of these men did vote for her, but then, after she lost, declared -- with gusto -- that she lost because she was a terrible candidate. As if they could have done better.

a story is different

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment… A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. 
-Walter Benjamin

hunkering

The wind retreated for an hour or two but now it's blowing hard again. It is scaring me more than I expected. I was waiting for it, pretty much all day yesterday. I'm also afraid to look inside the leaky garage.

This too, shall pass, I tell myself. Meantime I try to avoid reading or hearing any news because I don't want to get too far into this apocalyptic frame of mind.