When the Cookie Crumbles
I'd still eat it. Cookies are great!
And so is democracy.
But it’s not over yet. 47 cannot cancel elections because the federal government doesn’t run elections. The states do. So get out the vote and donate and let’s vote more Dems or progressives (I’m a socialist pinko ecosexual treehugging librul myself) into position and start to take back what belongs to US. The US = us. Not Them.
Cookies are good. Democracy is better.
So is barbecue. We’re going to grill a bunch of meats and veg and whatever else we can tonight and then eat it for the rest of the week, sans cooking. That’s what hot days do to me. I turn into a slow-moving mollusk. Have you tried grilling half-onions over the fire, still wearing their crispy paper skins? Have you tried roasting whole ears of corn, in the husk? Have you tried charred pineapple? How about halved whole romaine lettuce? Charred romaine makes an incredible Caesar or Greek salad. TRY IT. The sabor1 could not be finer.
The rest of the garden looks like this in the end-of-fiscal-year farm:
I’m still being cheap AF about everything because I fear we are months away from banking collapse, and we are on the very brink of losing the benefits of ACA if Medicaid goes away. And Social Security. We may end up running a boarding house like old Ma Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. So I do the frugal thing (with gratitude to my Scots forebears) by holding tight to my pennies and nickels when they come my way.
Look, Mom, I washed my own rug! Thanks to OxyClean, Mrs. Meyer’s soap and a bucket and scrub brush, plus some 90˚ weather. ($200 savings, more or less)
I bake my own bread. We eat leftovers. We use the stalks, pods, cobs, outer leaves and peels, plus the $5 Costco rotisserie carcass, down to the nubbin2. My father is an inveterate nail-straightener from the Great Depression. He is proud of his coffee cans of nails and screws out in the barn. Gen Z and Alpha don’t know a thing about it3. I would hope they never need to, but it seems these things have to come in waves or cycles, so that the next 100 years of folks will see it and remember.
Trust me, I love to shop, travel, dine out and get spa treatments. I LOVE THEM. I want them all. But we are nervous about what we have in the bank lasting us more than say five-ten years, especially if SS/MC fall away, and both of us have long-term health issues (his chronic back/pain, and my recent cancer). I suppose we’ll just suffer and die if it comes down to it, unless we escape to Australia with daughters, or Mexico. One wonders. We wonder.
So I’m cheap AF while we wait for the next protest, send postcards and emails, contribute to campaigns, bitch on social media. We’re here, we’re in fear, we rage as we age. Will my posts go viral? Will I grow more beans and tomatoes? Will I sell more books? Good question.
I shall certainly write more books, and we’ll see if they sell. I’m doing my best, friends. Are you hanging in there?
Five Good Things:
I am on Day 168 of my German lessons. Grateful to Frau Stonitsch for grilling us on regular and irregular verbs every week. I remember a lot of it now.
Ice cream. I just had a cone.
Barbecued everything!
Mr. Husband made coffee for me this morning.
KITTENS. The tuxedo is Posey Ophelia and the all-black boy is Willoughby Black the 2nd.
Hot kittens, kitten yoga, and let's have zoomies in the yard.
I know it is just a single word, but I’ll bet you didn’t know I am passably fluent in Spanish. I’ve been speaking it well since I was 20 (Nicaraguan babydaddy and much SF restaurant work), but I’m illiterate. Can’t read or write it to any degree. I can swear pretty well, however. Cuidanse, mis amigos.
Makes good soup, jook, fried rice, or even cat/dog food. Chickens will eat whatever is leftover after that. #nowaste is my credo.
One of my nephews was doing some yard work for my folks one summer about 10 years ago, and he was shocked to have to put on the same (new) work gloves the second time he showed up. “But they’re—dirty!” I know, shocking. But he survived wearing dirty, aka broken in, gloves the next days, and one hopes he understands how not everything is a juice box or a snack-bag you throw away after a single use. <insert eco-sobbing here>