How About the Price of Those Eggs?

 

Or...

The good, the bad, and well, what I’m doing.

You know how we have had a long record of wrongs the President and his cohorts have done to harm this country and alienate our allies. Now you know he is changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America; how insulting is that?!

Well, that isn’t what I want to write about.

Notice that we don’t see much about the Epstein files anymore—he has done a good job turning our attention away from those.

I didn’t want to write about those either.

After committing absurdity after absurdity that would take pages to enumerate, and you guys know them already anyway, he is now setting the stage as he did before the last two Presidential elections, making us doubt the legitimacy of any election where he is not the winner. And look what he is doing with AI, portraying himself pumped up, then insulting his opponents. They are as fake as his qualifications for being the Chief of this country.

And the Republican Party is holding on by the skin of its teeth. Don’t you wonder why?

Ha ha. “Money makes the world go round.”

 

Sometimes we need to shut up and let a picture tell the story.

This is from Robert Reich’s Substack post:

$594 million in 2017 from his own endeavors.

$ 2.24 billion after he became president.

How do you like the price of those eggs?

Holy Schmoley!

A Reprieve:

Saturday: My daughter, grandson, and I visited a farm where she chose two baby goats to be Daughter Dear’s in the middle of September. 

I sat on a pile of pallets, and one little female goat climbed onto my lap and slept while Daughter Dear talked with the owner. She will be getting neutered males, gently neutered, using rubber bands. All the females were already reserved.

Neutered males are called wethers, and they are gentle and lovable; we know because we had two when we lived in the forest of Oregon. 

Here are two little females we bottle-fed in Hawaii:

All our goats kept the brush around the house cleared. All were free-range because we had the room. The goats we will get this time will need to be penned. Too bad, but necessary.

We hear goats love to eat blackberry vines, and blackberry vines are taking over the back portion of the property. Husband dear had cut them a few months ago, but the vines loved their hair cutting so much they broke out in song and grew new stalks.

I won’t use poison on them—and they know it.

Goats to the rescue. We have an extra wild area behind the outbuilding behind our backyard we call the Wayback, where I have my office and where I am writing to you right now.

My Saturday lap baby wasn’t for sale. The young man who ran the farm adopted her. She was the third of triplets to be born. Two larger, stronger males were born before her, and the mother said, “That’s enough,” and focused on the strong ones. Her adopted dad takes her into the house at night, and she sleeps on his lap.

I was recharged on the farm. I felt its peacefulness the moment I stepped out of the car.

Back to Writing:

For the last couple of weeks, I had been rewriting old stories, editing, and submitting some to agents with no responses, but I had a brilliant idea.

“You need to write a new book.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, write about things working instead of things not working.”

You know that people loved Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield—it sold a kazillion copies.

You know that people loved Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?” It was on the New York Times List for almost two Years.  

So, see, people do like uplifting stories. Yes, yes, I know, those were non-fiction. I am talking about fiction.

It doesn’t matter; it tells me people want to believe in good, to see the world as a safe place, to realize life has its struggles, yet to hold an idea such as W. Clement Stone had when he said, “I believe God is a reverse pessimist; He conspires to do me good.” With fiction, you need conflict, or you have no story—so say the writing gurus. Okay, we’ll see what transpires.  

Then, to give me cause for pause, this week I read a post by an author saying he gave up writing and it almost killed him. He had written a book; it was published and got good reviews, but it didn’t sell.

He was devastated.

He languished in misery. Stopped writing. Took up tennis, and became fanatical with it: lessons, practicing daily,

He didn’t miss writing.

And then it slammed in on him. He did miss it.

So, why am I writing when there are authors far better than me out there?

Because I want to.

So, I began, and for the first 24,000 words it flowed. It felt like the universe was throwing helpers at me.  Amazing people (fictitious) appeared on the road to somewhere.

 

Elevator pitch for “No Working Title:”

“Fifteen-year-old Josie is on the run—no folks, her 92-year-old grandmother has died, so with a GED, a driver’s learner’s permit, and being an emancipated teenager, she and her dog, Zeus, climb into Grandmother’s pickup and aim for parts unknown.”

 

P.S. Josie grows up.

Listen. What'a Ya Think?

 

“There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear...”

 “I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down”

These are the lyrics to this 1966 protest song by Buffalo Springfield, written by Stephen Stills. It describes the tension and paranoia of the Sunset Strip riots. It is titled For What’s It’s Worth, but identified as ‘There’s something happening here.”

“There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong...”

“We better stop, hey, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down.”

*I give praise to Leigh Horne’s brilliance as a writer on Substack. She posted the lyrics to that song. Thanks, Horne, you gave me hope that things are a changing.

Yesterday I started to write this blog—I was griping about apps. Apps here, apps there, everywhere an app app.  Even coffee kiosks want you to order using an app. I was complaining because I called a company by phone—hey, the number was listed on their ad, but they asked me if I had an app. I think I did because I use their phone service, but I had never used it and didn’t know my 15-word code. They offered to guide me through it. Sometimes we want guidance. I just wanted to ask a question.

I graciously excused myself, but didn’t feel gracious.

I think I’m becoming a Curmudgeon. I’m fried like half the country.

You know how events, like technology, come along and we are so excited with them, take cell phones. What a wonderful invention. And then we have to limit their use because young people become so addicted it takes over their life.

Once, when I was a teenager, my boyfriend and I took a drive into a forest in Oregon. We had taken a logging load. I had used my folks’ car, and I got it stuck. Try as we might, we couldn’t dislodge that vehicle. So, we walked home—half the night, all the while thinking that any strange sound, a snap or a crunch, was a cougar stalking us.

We made it to a pay phone and called my folks, who still had a phone attached to the wall by a cord. (Everybody did.) My dad drove out with us the following day and got the car out easily. It’s a good thing we remembered where we had left it.

My point?

Sometimes technology is really handy. Except we are left wondering if it will save us or swallow us.

One of my favorite quotes is by the poet William Cowper. “To find the medium takes some share of wit, so tis a mark fools seldom hit.”

We’re impatient, fed up, irritated, and probably intentionally driven crazy. Of course, I am speaking for myself, but it feels right for about half the country. And I see how some people hold so tenaciously to their beliefs that wild horses couldn’t drag it out of them. But then why would wild horses want to drag anything? They want to be free. Human or critter, no one wants to be a slave.

Another take from Horne is her comment on Angie Nixon, whom she didn’t know about, nor did I, until she won the Democratic Primary for the US Senate in Florida.

“Just wow,” said Horne after she listened to Nixon being interviewed. “This young working mother and public-spirited volunteer for social justice just blew me away.”  

“Nixon is a single working mother and is now a stepmother. She is down to earth, smart, informed, and above all unafraid to listen to and otherwise engage with the people she wants to represent in Congress. The fact that she’s black is another plus.” Horne, a certifiably white person, says, "Black people, of necessity and through no choice of their own, have always understood the nature of oppression and their oppressors. And it’s about time we fully recognized that they have a whole lot to teach us about not only how to resist them, but how to take care of themselves and each other on the long, long road to freedom and dignity.”

P.S. William Cowper wrote, among many other poems and songs, “Amazing Grace,” and “The Negro’s Complaint,” 1788.