October 21 – Catching up, Leslie visit, Welcome JT!
October 28 – Election anxieties
November 4 – Election equanimity
November 6 – Election reaction
November 17 – Acceptance and getting on with things
October 21
We’ve been back from Ireland and Boston for two weeks now and this is pretty much the first time I’ve cracked open the computer. I’ve had something of a writer’s block in gathering notes and photos from the trip.
One of my excuses is that Leslie has been here for 5 nights – our first post-Covid visitor other than Allie (and maybe Frances for a night). I took the occasion as a reason to get a new TV for the guest bedroom but I don’t think Leslie has turned it on. In general, she’s been as unobtrusive a guest as possible, quiet as a church mouse but then one doesn’t really want mice in the church anyway. It’s nearly impossible to have a direct conversation with her because she has trouble stringing more than one or two thoughts together. But she and I do pretty well just watching postseason baseball games of which there have been many. She is nearly a fan. Barb has been going about her own regular busy schedule; where it overlaps with Leslie, fine, otherwise Leslie is with me or heads out on her own to drive around. She leaves tomorrow and I think we’re all pretty ready for her to go. Then again, we’re not entirely sure why she came.
This past Saturday we had Barb’s friends Betsy P, Sherry Lynn and Tiffany over for steak and shrimp and that was also a mighty distraction involving several days of planning and shopping. Plus we used it as an excuse to celebrate Barb’s birthday – we didn’t do much on the actual day. Leslie made her creamed corn which was a hit and we had a lot of leftovers which I’m still plowing through. It was very nice having them over but it took over the calendar for several days and I needed most of Sunday to recover.
Last week for Scattergories we got news of Susanna’s and Asheville’s plights in the wake of Hurricane Helene. She gave a harrowing chronicle of the first few days of total uncertainty followed by several weeks of being refugees in various homes in Raleigh, Hilton Head and Gainesville. She only just got power back and was planning to return to Asheville where the bulk of recovery still awaits. She was clearly still in shock and dealing with the dissonance of being in areas untouched by the destruction among people oblivious to Asheville’s suffering. Unfortunately, Laurie was not on the call so I had a separate call with her to recap as best as I could. Susanna will not want to walk through it again.
On October 10 we had sightings of the aurora borealis way down here in Maryland. I couldn’t really see it with my naked eye but my iPhone did a better job. Five days later we were treated to a comet in the evening sky. Hopefully these are not all signs of apocalypse. Time will tell.
And then there was Sara and the birth of JT on October 19, just two days after Barb’s bday and while I was cooking for all the ladies on Saturday. He looks healthy, all 8 lbs 1 ounce of him with strawberry blond hair. We wish all the best to Sara, Tylor, Emmy and JT. That said, we have no plans to head out to see them. Maybe sometime next year?
Looming among all the distractions is the 2024 election which is reaching its climax. I stumbled into reading my journal entries from October and November 2020 and it was like deja vu all over again. Worryingly, Biden had a substantially larger lead in the polls than Kamala Harris does now and the election was still ridiculously close. I am very concerned that a whole bunch of people will find closet reasons not to vote for a woman or person of color this time and Trump will end up winning via the electoral college bias toward Republicans. Woe unto us all if that happens.I try not to think about it too much. This is the first election cycle where I’ve donated to either party and I am now bombarded daily with dozens of emails and texts begging for more and raising my anxieties even further. It’s no way to run a country.
On the brighter side, the weather has been unspeakably nice since we returned from Ireland and looks to remain great for at least another week or so. It’s been sunny and in the 70s most days with cool evenings and mornings. Manny and I have enjoyed a lot of bonus deck time.
I’m waiting for details to drop about Rhiannon Giddens’ inaugural Biscuits and Banjos Festival. The dates are announced for April 25-27, 2024 in Durham, NC. Today I found that the reunion of the Carolina Chocolate Drops is top of the bill, along with Taj Mahal, Christian McBride, Leyla McCalla and others. I think an Our Native Daughters reunion is less likely because Amythyst Kiah is committed to her own tour on the west coast through April. Allison Russell has a small gap between gigs in Australia and a tour starting in New England, but she’s not official yet. I want to see details about the Festival and then maybe make plans to attend with Laurie, I hope. We’ll see how things shake out.
I’m also keen to nail down a trip to NYC probably in January to see Allison Russell in Hadestown. Lately we also learned there’s an Anne Frank exhibit that Barb would like to see. And there was an awesome review in today’s Washington Post of Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Blvd that maybe will entice Barb. To be determined.
October 28
My election anxieties are ramping up with one week to go. The polls show the race essentially tied with recent momentum slightly in Trump’s favor. Kamala still has a reasonable path to win but it involves winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and the stray “blue dot” vote in Omaha, Nebraska. None of those, other than maybe the blue dot, are givens.The poll averages have her leading in each of those states by less than 1%, so effectively tied. The races will depend on turnout in each state.
I resolved I would try to do more to help the Democrats win so today I volunteered to phone bank. It was an awful experience. I had some trouble simply logging in to their Zoom call for training. Once I got vaguely familiar with their calling technology and script tool, I took the plunge and made some calls. I actually talked to several North Carolina voters but I’m pretty sure I did more harm than good as I stumbled through my semblance of conversations with them. One voter said he was leaning toward the Republicans and put up with me for a minute or so; he might have been vaguely persuadable if I hadn’t completely botched the script or been able to carry on a human dialog. He was polite before hanging up. That was probably the best call I had. The others mostly just didn’t want to be bothered – and neither would I. Meanwhile my heart was racing and my anxiousness skyrocketed throughout the session. After less than 20 minutes I lost connection (or was disconnected?) from the system and didn’t make much of an effort to get back in. I conclude that I am not cut out for phone banking. I will send some more money instead. That I can do.
I’m trying to self-regulate the amount of time I doomscroll my news apps or watch CNN or MSNBC. They each just get me worked up in an unhealthy way. I’m ready for game 3 of the World Series tonight though it starts while I’m at tennis – that should be more calming.
Barb is doing her civic duty by being an election judge today, Wednesday and on election day. I’m proud of her. She woke up at 5:30am to get there at 6am; she likely won’t be home until after 8pm. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings she will coxswain her rowing team. More power to her on all counts. She’s doing all this partly to stay distracted. Hope it works.
I voted last week, the first day of early voting. It was quick and easy. Why can’t the whole election be that way?
In the midst of all our anxieties, Manny has developed some sort of urinary tract infection or cystitis or something. He was misbehaving when we first returned from Ireland, peeing in inappropriate places. We went for his regular annual checkup a few weeks ago and the doctor prescribed some pain medication. That seemed to work for a week or two but a few days ago he started again and this time I could identify some blood-tinged redness in his pee. We got some more medicine and he has another appointment tomorrow afternoon. In the meantime, I’m watching him sleep a lot, putting down newspapers in the spots he seems to want to pee, and trying to keep ahead of Barb’s sensitive sniffer. We don’t do well with defective cats. We’re hoping the vet can put him on the right track tomorrow.
November 4
Tomorrow is election day, finally. Another long national nightmare will be over and a new one will begin. Last week I was deep in election anxiety, not quite knowing how to deal with the uncertainty of an unreasonably tight race. Over the past few days I’ve reached some level of zen equanimity. Though the polls are still extraordinarily tight, I cling to some hope that things will fall the Democrats’ way. To some extent it comes back to choosing optimism over darkness and paranoia – it just seems a healthier way to live and I hope a sufficient number of other voters feel the same way. In any event, I have a high degree of certainty that whatever happens, the sun will rise the next day and we will continue to muddle along as best we can.
I’ve tried not to get too wrapped up in polls though when I do take a look the overall message is either bleak or inconclusive. My sense is that the entire polling industry is on shakier and shakier ground, due in no small part to changes in technologies and habits. People simply do not answer phone calls anymore and the poll companies have not yet developed reliable alternatives to frequently reach a random sample of voters. The pollsters have to layer in so many weights and assumptions into each group of responses they gather that the results end up closer to best guesses than reliable statistics (which are, of course, just damn lies anyway). They may as well be soothsayers or Wall Street analysts, neither of which have much of a track record. So it’s a good thing we will have an actual vote and I trust the results will be accurately tallied, assuming the Republican fringe wackos don’t get too much in the way.
As I said, I lately have a comforting level of faith (though it is based on little more than faith) that Kamala and the Democrats will pull the presidency and likely the House (but maybe not the Senate) out of the fire. We will soon see. There’s a small chance the picture will be clear by the time we get to bed on Tuesday but more likely the counts and recounts will last some tense days longer…but not more than a few days, I hope.
Even if Trump manages to prevail, I don’t think the end of democracy or our nation is nigh. It would be another ugly four years, to be sure, but I expect the backlash will be even stronger in 2028. And there will be a 2028 election. I don’t believe there’s a credible chance we will plunge into martial law and autocracy within four years but I’ll admit it’s not a non-zero possibility. I still think Trump is too incompetent to pull that off and his cronies are not that much better.
So, it is with all these sunny thoughts that I prepare to watch the news tomorrow evening and see how things go. It will be a much happier day if we can wave Trump off the national stage and out of our news feeds once and for all. I choose to maintain a sense of optimism that may be the case.
in other news, Manny started feeling better just as we took him to the vet. He got a reasonably clean bill of health from the vet — no kidney stones or problems with his urinary analysis. He did pretty well for several days but then lately we caught him peeing again on the newspaper we put down to protect our carpet. We’re doing what we can to dissuade him from this habit before it becomes a true habit.
Allie reports she is shopping for a new, somewhat larger apartment and seems to have found one she likes, Ashlar Park in Quincy, a few miles south of Boston and nearer to Jimmy. She also is talking about getting a car so she can more readily get around to see her friends, many of whom have moved out of the city. Our girl is growing from her city phase to a slightly suburban one. We are fine with all that and support her wishes. She also reports some issues with Perri. Perri hasn’t been eating per her regular schedule and meanwhile the vet identified an ear infection. So now Allie has to give Perri ear drops for several weeks which makes everyone less happy.
Sara sent more photos of Baby Jay, some from his day of birth and some after. Everyone seems to be doing well.
Susanna sent some devastating pictures and videos of the destruction in Asheville. She is clearly still shell-shocked from the damage but says there are other parts of Asheville that are unscathed.
Portable toilets and showers for the good citizens of Asheville. A month after the storm most homes finally have running water but it’s still brown and gross for showers.
Susanna followed that up with some happier photos of her Halloween crew.
November 6
Well, so much for optimism. Trump is back with a vengeance. I had a feeling the seven battleground states were likely to mostly fall in the same direction. When it became clear early in the evening that they wouldn’t fall the Democrats’ way I held out hope for a while that things would remain closely contested and the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin might hold for Kamala. By 10:00pm that was deeply in doubt. By 12:30am I gave up and went to bed, not wanting to see Trump celebrate the moment. Evidently he finally did so around 2:30am and the death knell was sealed at 5:30am when the newsrooms definitively called Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for Trump.
So here we are at the dawn of a new nightmare. No one, including Trump, is prepared or has a real idea of what may come. The Republicans clearly won the Senate; the House is still too close to call and it may take weeks before counting in California is complete. What Trump might accomplish or demolish in four years with Elon Musk and RFK Jr. at his side along with support of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court is unfathomable. Musk really got a bargain: a hostile takeover of America for just a few hundred million dollars. Chump change to a multi-billionaire.
There’s a dark truth to Trump’s favorite recent promise, “I will fix everything.” Yep. Fix as in “the fix is in.” I believe he will try to deliver that for himself. My only consolation is that he and his buddies are mostly incompetent and likely to spend more time fighting each other than really getting things done. But who knows? They’ve been incompetent enough to get him elected twice.
I was right about one thing: the sun did rise today. Though our psyches are bruised, I and my immediate loved ones and neighbors are not in measurably worse shape than the day before. I hate to say it but there’s a decent chance my financial outlook might even improve over the next few years, though I daresay not as much as it might have under the Democrats. I don’t think a Civil War or World War III are on the immediate horizon. The election results are not good but they’re nowhere near as devastating as the flooding Susanna encountered in Asheville or the trials millions of others around the world suffer every day.
I still think there will be a backlash and Democratic wave in the 2026 midterms and again in 2028, assuming there are actual elections then. Trump will come in as a lame duck and the jockeying for what follows starts immediately. Will Democratic resistance coalesce around Kamala or is she completely discredited? How long will it take for an heir apparent for Trump to emerge? (J.D. Vance? Don Jr.?, ugh.) The games will go on. I will continue to watch and play along for as long as I am able.
November 17
We are slowly settling into the acceptance phase of Trump 2.0. I’ve resolved to delve less into the daily outrages that flow from his camp. We are in the throes of some truly ridiculous cabinet nominations at the moment (Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr….). It remains to be seen if the Senate will show any sign of backbone and push back on any of these. No one’s holding their breath. It’s clear that Trump’s primary strategy is to disrupt major portions of the U.S. government and his vocal supporters are loudly behind him. To what end, I’m still not sure. Breaking things without a clear agenda makes about as much sense as storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Maybe that’s the point.
Nevertheless, we’re trying to move on with our lives. I’ve seen two good concerts in two weeks: Kacey Musgraves last week and Molly Tuttle Saaturday night. There is some redemption in gathering with an apolitical crowd for some good music. I’m also enjoying new releases from Molly, Gillian Welch (whom I’ll see next month), Silk Road and more. It’s a good time to open the antenna to new and old music. Barb’s doing the same but with Christmas music and Hallmark movies.
I’ve locked down our California trip in May. We’ll visit the Hunsbergers, Gerard and Chris, then Betsy and family in Denver. This trip is more about visiting friends and family in nice places rather than focusing on touristing. It looks very enjoyable and much cheaper than getting hotels everywhere – I was even able to use United miles for some of the flights. We’ll save southern California with more touristing and museum hopping for some other trip.
We’re looking forward to hosting Allie and Perri in a week for Thanksgiving festivities. It will be a chance to maybe go car shopping with her or at least help sort out financing. We can also discuss vacations next year whether she wants to or not. Allie is prepping to make us some bread for Thanksgiving dinner. I’m not quite sure what the rest of our menu will be. Barb wants bacon-wrapped asparagus. We’re kind of working our way from the sides inward.
I had lunch this week with Jenny (at Busboys and Poets) and with the neighborhood boys (at Tea Horse Sichuan Bistro). Both were enjoyable. That’s my fair share of socializing, I feel. Barb and I also drove to Bethesda so she could pay respects to the widow of former colleague, Jeff Miklos, who passed away far too early, a sad reminder of mortality.
Speaking of mortality, we had a scare with Manny last night. He’d been fine the past couple of weeks since we took him to the vet for urinary troubles but last night he stumbled from my lap around 10pm and went downstairs. I didn’t worry too much until he didn’t appear for his midnight snack when I went to bed. We hunted for him and I eventually found him in the basement under Laurie’s stored furniture. He let me drag him out but was otherwise limp and not very responsive. He slept on our bed much of the night but I had to hunt for him again in the morning. We found him under the bed, still very sluggish and lethargic. I took him to the vet who said he had a fever. The vet gave him some liquids, an antibiotic and pain killer. We’re letting him sleep it off now and hope he will feel better shortly. He has to get better for Perri’s visit next week. Fortunately, Allie reports that Perri is doing better now that her ear infection has cleared up. These cats!
December 9
I see it’s been a little while since I made a journal entry. We had a very nice Thanksgiving visit from Allie and Perri. They were here for more than a week, from Monday 11/25 through Tuesday, 12/3. Allie worked most days and we had few special activities other than going to dinners and seeing Wicked. It was just the three of us for Thanksgiving and the focus was on side dishes to go with the slices of Honeybaked Ham I procured. Allie baked some homemade rolls which were tasty and made for good sandwich leftovers. It was a low-key visit but very enjoyable.
The next time we’ll likely see Allie is in Punta Cana in February, a trip that we lined up while she was here. We also did some car shopping with her. She will likely get a car – leaning toward a Honda CRV – at the end of December in anticipation of moving to her new apartment in Quincy at the end of January. Exciting changes for her.
I’ve seen a flurry of concerts in November and December, the best of which included Molly Tuttle, Chris Smither and most especially Gillian Welch with David Rawlings. Larry and I agreed the Gillian Welch show was one of the best we’ve seen in years.
I had my first real brush with AI last week. I read an article about Spotify Wrapped making use of Google’s NotebookLM to generate a “podcast” summary discussion. I decided to see what the Google software would do with our family overview from Sue’s Memory Book post. The result was a 12-minute personalized podcast which I sent to Sue, Laurie, Len, Barb and Allie. Sue liked it and promptly used the technology for one of her own projects. Laurie found it creepy and raised questions. Len also had questions but shared it with Ana Maria which sparked conversations about her own family. It also got Len to read more of my site. Barb wouldn’t listen to it and Allie has been MIA on the topic. I concluded that the technology is an interesting toy but not necessarily a value added tool yet. I will keep an eye on it, however, and will also keep a lookout for technology which can easily turn my posts into “documentary” style videos which might be more accessible for people. The technology is both remarkable and off-putting for the time being but moving ever so quickly.
We’re getting some long-needed work done around the house. I’m juggling the schedules of a handyman (Colter Ryke), landscaper, and soon a carpet cleaner and drywall/painter guy. Got to get the old homestead in shape for the next decade or so. Meanwhile, Manny keeps pooping, peeing and puking in inappropriate places, making us wonder what’s wrong with him and hoping he doesn’t get worse.
There’s more going on in the outside world, including the surprisingly rapid collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria, more nonsense from Trump (why bother cataloging it?), the ongoing manhunt for the Manhattan shooter of a healthcare company (it’s a local boy!), and more…always more. I read the headlines but delve into the details less often since the election. It makes reading the newspaper in the morning far quicker.
December 20
After many, many months of on-again, off-again watching, with many intermittent naps and subsequent replays, I finally made it through all 36 episodes (“lectures”) of The Big History of Civilizations course on The Great Courses (nee, Wondrium). It was a worthwhile exercise reviewing all the stuff you should have learned about world history but never quite got around to synthesizing into one timeline. It starts with the dawn of the universe, jumps to the dawn of humans, takes 10 episodes to get to the Egyptians and 10 more to get to the Roman Empire. The course actually does a pretty good job contextualizing the last 500 years of European hegemony in just three episodes before taking two more episodes to consider the near and distant future. It makes a case for the importance of geography, climate changes, and the value of collective learning as key to human resilience. The course is not especially well presented but it does a reasonably good job of providing a high level macro-look at human history that I found useful.
Being on a roll and finally getting some money’s worth out of my Great Courses subscription, I also started their course on African American History. This finally gave me some insight into the pre-existing conditions in Western Africa before the transatlantic slave trade began. I have a better appreciation of the shifting kingdoms (particularly the Kingdom of Mali and the reign of Mansa Musa) and initial forays of the Portuguese. This helps fill in some gaps I’ve had since Laurie and I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. I’m not sure if I’ll get through the entirety of the rest of the course but the first few episodes were quite useful. Laurie also coincidentally pointed me (promoted by a NY Times article) to a new exhibit at the Museum of African American History in DC focusing on the broader transatlantic trade. She wants to see it in April and I think I’ll make a trip on my own sooner than that.
These latest history forays were partly sparked by finally reading The Wide, Wide Sea about the final voyage of Capt. James Cook. This helped clarify and deepen my understanding of Australian, New Zealand, South Pacific and Hawaiian history. There was not only the search and discovery of new lands but also the ferrying home of the Polynesian man, Mai (or Omai), who had come to England on the second of Cook’s South Seas voyages. It provides an account of early contact between cultures similar to the memorable stories of Pocahontas, Jemmy Button, Tisquantum and Enrique de Malacca. None of these contacts went particularly well for the “natives” but could make for interesting further study. Concurrently, I listened to some podcasts about Magellan’s voyage, including the story of Enrique of Malacca who has a more legitimate claim as the first circumnavigator of the globe.
All of which gets me around to saying I seem to be reaching another sort of plateau in my history journey which seems to call for another History Lesson post to build upon what I learned during the pandemic, so to speak. I also need to have a talk with Laurie to help process some of this. I’m toying with the thought of trying to edit various Wikipedia pages as a way to make a small contribution to collective human knowledge. I’m not sure if I will get that far or if I really have anything to add.
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