The Burrow

I do my best to do the right thing.  Usually, the right thing aligns with my own self-interest.  I lose nothing and I feel good about myself.  It's win/win until it isn't. We have run out of QTips. I have tried a variety of off-brand and generic cotton swabs and none have come close to the consistency, shape, durability, flexibility, and overall wonderfulness of the patented QTip. QTip is manufactured by Elida Beauty  , a subsidiary of TIGI Linea Corp.  I've never heard of either of them. In this political climate, that's a good thing.  So far, so good. I've been fairly successful at weaning myself off Amazon.  It's amazing how deep the stores in my closets run.  Before he neutered the WaPo and threw himself a wedding that had an entire city begging him to just go away, Jeff Bezos was the asnwer to problems like this.  Now, not so much. I could go to Walmart, but they aren't much more palatable.  I could go to CVS or Walgreens but they a...

There are so many shootings.   What is wrong with white men in America today?  Can you imagine if these shooters were women?  Commissions would be empaneled, laws enacted, restrictions placed.   I try to avoid going down that rabbit hole, but a  random Substack post  today got me thinking and hurting and ultimately posting a comment about what it's like to experience gun violence on a mass scale in your own town.   Commenting on gun violence sent me back to my early, post-perforation posts.  From the Before Times , I found that I had plans to be in Chicago, celebrating the birth of a grandchild with a friend from junior high and seeing a play at Steppenwolf.    I know that I lost the first three days after not bleeding to death on the sidewalk (which I do remember) to morphine and surgical anesthesia in the hospital.  But the fact that I was going on a trip to Chicago is new news to me. I had no idea.  Not about ...

That's the second time this week I've started with that as the title.  I think my fingers are trying to tell me something. I'm taking the day off, and hope you'll understand.  It's been an interesting week. To occupy yourself during these minutes when The Burrow would steal your time, why not                Call Congress    (202) 224-3121  main switchboard               ~ NO CR until the recissions are restored along with the Medicaid and SNAP-Ed funding                             allocated by Congress, which holds the power of the purse               ~ Release the Epstein files.  I want to know if my President is a pedophile.             ~ Investigate vindictive prosecutions by Pam Bondi's DOJ Have a great wee...

  Yesterday's post  (also published as late as this one.... sorry..... life, y'know?!) laid out a nightmare scenario. The comments pointed out  that I have good insurance, a connected network of physicians, friends with the ability provide specific advice, and the mental acuity to handle it all.   And none of that meant anything at all, until this morning. The triage nurse called and we have an appointment! She explained why we wait until Tuesday; it's medically appropriate.  She apologized for my having to call so often, adding that my calls did, in fact, move us to the top of the list.  They are overwhelmed; nine of the doctors in the practise have recently resigned. Lesson One: We are lucky to have Medicare coverage and a local hospital with an excellent Emergency Department.  Still, there was a slight delay in registration until the insurance goes through.  If it were denied, would they ask for cash up front? Lesson Two: Our network of co...

We took a trip to the ER yesterday afternoon.  We were seen immediately, treatment was given immediately,  a lovely PA spent quite some time explaining what was happening and what needed to be done.  We felt great when we left. Follow up with the GP and the specialist was called for in 1-2 days.  Easy peasy, right?  After all, it's written in the discharge orders so it must mean something, right?   HAHAHA. The GP was prompt in responding that the specialist was needed to respond to the ER visit since they couldn't handle the next step in their office. The specialist's triage team has been an entirely different matter.  No call back yesterday. No call back this morning.  I have now called and spoken to their scheduling office more than I've spoken to my kids. Their first available appointment is in December.  Yes, not today or tomorrow but three months from now.  The scheduler was really really sorry she couldn't help me, but only th...

I went to Grandma's Garden today.  It was only in the high nineties, versus the triple digits we're promised for the rest of the week. The kiddos were glad to see me, happily occupying themselves by pulling out the weeds which have completely covered the ground. It rained yesterday and the dirt was forgiving, easily releasing the roots,  to everyone's delight.  The Most Wonderful Social Worker dropped by to tell me the SNAP-Ed folks had dropped off an irrigation system.  After losing their funding they are closing up shop, distributing goodies from their storage to those they know and love.  The Perfect Principal thanked me for walking the littlest kiddo across the playground while rubbing his back and murmuring soothing nonsense about why he couldn't play with the hose.  The high achievers are planning a unit on garden to table produce; their teacher asked if I had any ideas as she guided a line of scholars I'd watched grow over the years up the stairs....

Credit to E. Jean Carroll's Substack  for this simple idea.  Joyce Vance restacked it and  wrote about it  and that's where I found it. During World War II,  Norwegians wore paper clips on their clothing to signify their resistance to the Nazis.  E. Jean is suggesting that Americans now do the same.   In her own words:   Why the paper clip mutiny ? The president can't sue the paper clip. Can't ban it. Can't deport it. Can't arrest it. Can't defund it. I came home and made sure I had a clip for every occasion: It's simple.  It's less provocative than a t-shirt.  It makes a statement with less chance of engendering violence against my person. And it will feel good.   It's one more arrow in my quiver of resistance, alongside the phone calls and the postcards and the protests and the signs.  We can get this done.  I have to believe that or I couldn't get out of bed in the morning.    And th...

If you are the parent or caregiver of children under 12, this is not for you.  I understand the importance of Nemo and Mickey Mouse to those adults who need a moment's peace.  Far be it from me that your offspring be denied the pleasures of the Clubhouse. But, for the rest of us, the reckoning has arrived.  I cancelled our subscription to Disney+ today.  It took a few minutes with a live person on Xfinity's chat.  It felt really good. The historians are right - they come for the comics, first.   It's not just Disney and ABC, of course.  MSNBC sent Matthew Down packing  for reminding us that hateful words lead to hateful actions.  CBS canned Colbert for..... I'm really not sure.  Big business means big mergers and that means that the government gets a say in what happens, and apparently what is said, too. So, what do we do?  I've been noodling on this all day.  I graduated from high school with Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney....

We are visiting the littlest grand babies and their parents.  Hence,  my days are full of love and oatmeal on the face,  with little time to blog.  Sorry this is late. 

The talking heads were having a hard time figuring out where to focus.  There was just so much there there.   Is Kash Patel worthy?  Better yet, is he capable of answering a question instead of spewing unrelated bile at the inquirer. FFOTUS is in Great Britain, much to the disdain of their media.  According to Rolling Stone,  British station Channel 4 will broadcast a marathon of Donald Trump's lies during the president's planned state visit with King Charles III.   That's our President they're trashing.... except it's not trashing when it's true.   Half-staff flags honoring a person who was perfectly comfortable with a few gun deaths competed with Mrs. Kirk stepping out of her trad wife role and taking center stage.   How long can one side mourn and the other decry when the real issue isn't what kind of man he was but the fact that guns are everywhere and no should feel safe anywhere and school kids are dying and ... y'know, I'm so tire...

I spent last Sunday scrolling through the interwebs.  It left me feeling informed, amused, and aware of what to expect over the next week.  Also,  my fingers were achy, my eyes were burning,  and I was vaguely displeased with myself.  I wasn't sure why.  I wasn't on Facebook or Instagram, following the algorithm's highways and byways. I dove deep into the longer Substacks. I looked at the music venues in town, and did some research on the artists I didn't recognize. The local reporting, published on Substack but narrowly focused, alerted me to an issue I needed to raise with my county supervisor.  But I'd spent most of the day on my phone. That just felt wrong.   But then I remembered the Sundays off my youth, lying in the living room floor with the NYTimes.  Arts and Leisure, Opinion, the front page.... amusements,  ideas,  and facts.  Just exactly what I had gleaned from scrolling.  Was that better?  Why am I j...

No, not flying the flags at half mast.  No, not inflammatory Presidential remarks.  No, not the price of hamburger.  What pushed me over the edge, after a day spent with dark thoughts about the state of the world,  a world where a school shooting is the second story on the news,  came when ESPN's football coverage revealed a colorful graphic with this headline: AI-Generated Fantasy Insights. Is irony dead? No,  I think it's worse.  Fantasy creating content for fantasy and calling it insightful has got to be a significant sign of the approaching apocalypse.   Google search shoves AI generated responses in my face, with a tiny AI responses may include mistakes disclaimer after I scroll through all the verbiage. Why take the time to create something that might be wrong? Because it's easy.  Because it's easy to blame   the other side. Because it feels good to say the subject is in custody. Because facts are for those who think, and who ...

CAVEAT: This was written Wednesday afternoon,  based on the first reporting.  Given my history,  I know enough to doubt that the facts in these early reports will stand the test of time.  Still..... ***** Another young man was assassinated, in front of a crowd of college students, and his wife, and his 3 year old, and his 1 year old. Sit with that for a minute.   Babies watched their daddy die, right before their eyes.  The first, unfiltered reporting spoke of lots and lots of blood on his neck .  They saw that.   HoneyBunny is 2-going-on-3; she remembers minutiae from our past visits. I'm not going to think about what she would have made of that scene, now and for the rest of her life. Mark Kelly was without words.   Nicolle Wallace looked stricken.   Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation.  Lots of politicians on the left and the center and the right said that.  I felt like screaming I ALREADY...

All those tracking cookies are extracting your habits, your likes, your spending, your gaming, mining the agglomeration for information they find useful. I knew all this, but reading Amanda Hess's memoir , Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age , opened my eyes wider than they ever expected to be. Technology was alternately terrifying and exhilarating and worrisome, but always a cash cow for the corporate world.  Her book is personal and universal.  The loss of self, subsumed by the master status of pregnancy, morphs into becoming a magnet for brands offering everything baby.   People wanted her when she held all the potential of another human being, a being who would require all sorts of equipment (her take on the Snoo is hilarious and heartbreaking) and whose patterns could be added to the algorithm with alarming speed. She was much less valuable once she gave birth.  Diapers, belly bands, wrinkle creams at staggeringly high prices guaranteed to ...

At least in Pima County, SNAP-Ed lives. I received a quick response from the grant administrator at our local Cooperative Extension office, who was happy to attach an application and some reminders. There is still $500 for stuff that promotes healthy eating.  Gardening is Ground Zero for them.   I spent today crafting a proposal.   I did a deep dive on olla balls, with and without a renewable water source.  Passive irrigation may be the solution to my long running feud with Grandma's Garden's drip system and its evil master, The Controller. He has dials that click and change his display and a big, black, plastic, on/off button; with evil intent he entices little fingers to twist and push them.  The kids just can't help themselves.   I turns out that there is a factory right here in Tucson .  Their on-line chat was very helpful. I researched raised beds and soils and rakes.  It took a lot longer than it might have because this time t...

There's no other excuse for my dropping $50 at Sprouts for five absolutely stunning but utterly inappropriate 5 gallon pots of mums. The first thing the label told me was how much they really don't like hot weather.  Did I mention that it's going up into the triple digits again this week? My zinnias are thriving in the containers which would normally house fall blooms, if it felt anything like fall.  It may be just a couple of weeks from the change of seasons, but here the drama is the occasional day in the 90's.   We do no leaf peeping here in the desert.  The migrating birds seem to be hanging out a little longer, the quail babies are a little later in appearing, but I'm still not doing much of anything outdoors after 9am.   But Little Cuter has been talking about buying her seasonal mums and my news feed can't resist tempting me so when I went into Sprouts and saw those beauties begging me to take them home and make them mine I was powerless to refu...

Our local paper, the Arizona Daily Star, ran an item today about this loss of funding.  You can read it here , if it's not behind a paywall. The suggestions in the comments yesterday  to write letters about this are lovely, but are inadequate.  The decision has been made and there's no getting around it.  A phone call to your Congressional delegation might be useful (phone number below if it's not already in your speed dial) but I'm holding out little hope. I did not know that Melania is interested in this issue .  I'm not sure she's talking to FFOTUS these days; she's certainly not living in DC.  I'll send a postcard to her at Trump Tower anyway. Who knows what kind of inquiry that postcard might start?  If they come for me, I'll let you know.  United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 And welcome to those of you who found me from my restack on Substack.  Keep making those phone calls.  It's only a republic if we can keep it.

Hidden amidst the hue and cry, buried beneath vaccines and tariffs and cankles (all of which are unpleasant but manageable for us), came something that touched me directly.  My news and Substack feeds led me to this tidbit: FNS encourages state agencies to submit notification of termination by Aug. 15, 2025, and to return unexpended FY 2025 SNAP-Ed grant funds by Dec.1, 2025.  Let me explain. Grandma's Garden  has been the recipient of much wonderfulness from the USDA's SNAP-Ed school garden program.  We received a hanging garden  grant (including plants and soil and irrigation) when we were first starting out.  Later on, they funded tools and trugs and fertilizer.  They went shopping for vegetable starters with me at Rillito Nursery , providing both sage advice on edible flowers and a credit card to pay for it all.   Each grant was worth about $500. It was good, seeing my tax dollars spread throughout the community, benefitting hundreds of k...

We huddled under the umbrella, seeking shelter from the sun.   The soil itself is just too hot to support new life.  We can't plant any of the seeds Rillito Nursery  donated. The weeds which had overgrown the ground have been trampled and smooshed by little feet.  Broken and despairing, they succumbed to the sun and the lack of water.  They are now remnants of their former selves, lying there, pale and yellow. The gardeners noticed a new hole at the edge of one of the big, please-don't-jump-on-that, rocks.  Being children, they were curious and their curiosity led to poking their feet around the edges, which led to kicking loose dirt in its direction, which was headed toward poking a stick inside to see what was in there. Remembering that Poison Control in Arizona calmed my reptilian qualms by pointing out that 99% of snake bite cases are the result of drunken young men with pointed sticks, I stepped into the conversation, explained that it was some be...

I was really looking forward to getting back into a classroom.  The Humanities Seminars at the University of Arizona have kept me entertained and educated since we moved to Tucson.  Between COVID and grandkids and life in general I've been enrolling less frequently, but this term I was intrigued.   I signed up. I did the reading.  I studied the slides.  I was prepared.  This morning, I took a seat in the front row, opened my yellow legal pad, clicked my ball point pen, sat up straight, and smiled at the teacher. It was all downhill from there. I did the reading and studied the slides the night before, wanting the keep the information fresh in mind.  Science isn't my strong suit; I wanted to do my part.  So I was mildly surprised that his introduction sounded familiar; I must have really understood what I read to be going along so easily with his lecture. But as he went on, my surprise turned into dismay.  He displayed and read aloud the...

I was feeling listless. I couldn't get myself motivated.  TBG couldn't do anything to help.   Even a breakfast of champions didn't perk me up.  And it tried its best: snoozeameatery.com Avocado and caramelized onions and sunny side up eggs and spinach salad (mine had tiny tomatoes, too) - except for a banana that fulfills my potassium quotient for the day.  That's the diet that's supposed to put spring in my step and vim in my vigor... or at least help to keep my heart pumping and my blood flowing. I read a YA novel about suicide.  As I turned every page, I remembered Little Cuter asking me why the books I brought home from my YA For Your Middle Schooler book club were all so damn depressing.  There was a good message buried beneath all the good intentions but ultimately it was probably not the best choice. But it was the shortest library book on my shelf, and we have plans for tonight.... ok, watching Bill Belichick coach college football, mostly for ...

  (This is one of my favorite posts, every year.  Slightly abbreviated, with a somber coda, for 2025.) My Zaydeh was a paperhanger. So was his son, my uncle. They belonged to the Paperhanger's Union. When he retired, my Zaydeh got a lapel pin and a photograph of himself and the also-retiring Union Rep. The Union Rep got a pension and health insurance. No one knows if he got a copy of the photograph, too. It was that kind of complicated relationship to Labor, with a capital L, that dominated my growing up years. Daddooooo's father owned a business. G'ma's father was a worker. That dynamic influenced their relationship in the same way that her parents' accented speech and his parents' religious devotion were there, bruising the edges of what must once have been love but wasn't anymore. I sat on my Zaydeh's shoulders as he bounced me around the living room, singing  Zum Gali Gali , a Zionist work song with one line, repeated over and over:  the pioneer is m...