Thank you, America!
Though not everything went the way I’d hoped, at least by bedtime, election results so far are a huge relief! Let’s savor the wins and celebrate the opportunity for a sea change. And then let’s get back to the hard work of keeping our government on track to work for the wellbeing of all Americans.
I’ve discovered my new favorite shortbread. I saved this zebra-striped shortbread recipe from Bon Appétit years ago but had never made it, and was looking for a special cookie for my personal shopper and his boss, who loves shortbread most of all. It wasn’t exactly simple, but it was pretty easy, and so delicious.
You mix the dry ingredients in two bowls, just flour and salt in one, and swap out a third cup flour for cocoa powder in the other. Once you’ve beaten the butter, sugars, egg yolk, and vanilla you split that into two equal parts and then mix the vanilla batch first, then the chocolate batch. Then you layer them, roll them, and chill them.
Once chilled, you brush each log all over with egg (I just used the white from the yolk in the dough), roll them in sanding sugar, and slice (as evenly as possible). Then pop them in the oven. Even if I opt not to go through the zebra striping process again, leaving out the cocoa, I’m going to make the dough otherwise the same. It came out so tender but not crumbly, and so tasty.
Just one more word about corruption, from Ta-Nehisi Coates; and then, an antidote if you’ve got 17 more minutes. Check out this inspiring short film about the Ground Game, featuring key candidates in battleground states and their massive grassroots support from volunteers. I am enthusiastically but also cautiously hopeful about democrats taking back the House and Senate this midterm after watching it. Mainstream/legacy media simply have not covered the millions of Americans who’ve been fighting for democracy since the last election, since the scale of the Republican president’s moral turpitude and staggering corruption have smeared themselves through our lives, leaving us all with some degree of moral injury. There really is a ground game, and we are certainly winning that. We’ve got the numbers to flip some seats, if only enough people bother to vote!
… that will never come again.
A third pea harvest!
Simple marinated beans, a quick and easy no-cook meal.
Sorting yarn odds n ends. Where’s Wren?
The Redemption cake came to fruition and was thoroughly appreciated at a dear friend’s 80th birthday brunch today.
After hours outside with a convivial crowd I was dehydrated and exhausted. Back home I napped, then sat under the apricot tree for a long time appreciating the dozens of pollinators all over it: butterflies, moths, bumblebees, digger bees, sweat bees… I was too tired to do more than soak it in. I’m grateful for good tired, and optimistic that I’ll share more about both the cake and the tree soon.
…and counting! I’m grateful for patience and trust from friends this morning, and of course for the cheese sandwich. Today’s included leftover Brie, gifted sliced chicken breast, sriracha mayo and regular mayo, romaine, and pickled red onion on fresh sourdough. But mostly I’m grateful I’ve lived another day. There was meant to be more to this post but the internets balked and it’s bedtime. May tomorrow be your peaceful day.
I believe that to have one or two people in your life who burst into heartfelt laughter at you on a regular basis is a fortunate gift. To have more than a couple such friends, as I do, is to be blessed and highly favored indeed. I’m so grateful for those people in my life, and recalled tonight the very first time I recognized this gift. My high school best friend and I were riding the after-school bus home. I don’t remember the situation, but I do remember I was upset and venting, possibly crying, and I said something that made her laugh out loud. That made me laugh, and the upset was over. I just sent that friend a hostage note proclaiming that I would die if I didn’t receive a certain recipe by noon tomorrow. As I hit send I imagined her reading it, and I could hear and even feel her unique, musical laughter erupt as she read it. And so I thought to mention my gratitude for her, and for those several other friends who frequently laugh at my way of expressing myself. You know who you are. Thank you for your laughter: I treasure it and I love you.
Working on perfecting the blueberry cinnamon roll. A batch last week from a new recipe didn’t satisfy me though the people I shared it with weren’t so particular. The dough was a little tough and there wasn’t enough filling. The batch I made yesterday had too much filling, but I’m closing in on perfection.
A new tiny friend made a surprise visit Saturday and was entranced with Biko, the first turtle she’s ever met in her whole life. When she was ready, she touched him ever so gently on the top of his shell. Then we took her to the pond, where she spotted her first ever frog. There is still at least one tadpole swimming around, and a few growing juveniles out even after a freeze the night before, and one brand new fingertip froglet on land. I sent them home with the last two rolls of Batch Number One.
I delivered a couple of rolls from Batch Number Two to the Honey Badger at the top of the driveway last night, so we could enjoy one with coffee this morning separately in our own homes together on Zoom. I was planning to deliver most of the rest to a few more neighbors today, but they disappeared before I could do that.
I’m a night owl and don’t see too many sunrises, so I was grateful for the extra motivation to rise in time to catch the morning clouds with the sun just behind Mendicant Ridge. I wish I could want to get out of bed while it’s still dark.
Yarden Helper came unexpectedly with a load of firewood, so I gave him three rolls to take home for his family, knowing that would brighten their day. Remembering the unattributable quote, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden,” or another version, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”
He was heading next to Garden Buddy’s so I gave him two for them, and suddenly, without ever having to leave the driveway, I was down to just enough to sustain me until I muster the motivation to tackle Batch Number Three. I’m grateful for the practice of generosity, a natural accompaniment to the gratitude and grief slow dancing inside me.
I can’t share the recipe for the rolls because I used three of them plus a couple of innovations. But most of the recipes I checked involved brushing the rolled dough with softened butter.
I wasn’t happy with the one cup of whole blueberries in Batch One, so I made a quick jam with two cups, but cooked it down too much, so threw in another handful of blueberries. It might have been ok if I’d only used half of it, or if I hadn’t put lemon zest in it as well as lemon juice.
The brown sugar – cinnamon mix was adequate, but I’ve been including some cardamom and the next batch will have only cinnamon.
Clearly it was too much filling!
And I’ll need to practice my glazing technique before I enter any contests, but at least it’s tasty. And I’m grateful I was still around for sunset.
I was just heading out for sunset last night when a friend from Australia called seeking help with a podcast software we both use. After I got her squared away with it, she wanted to chat so I took her out with me. The technical connection was murky, but the personal connection was delightful. We talked about the moral decay of civilization, the polycrises, the lorikeets in her birdbath, and some of our exes, and we laughed a lot. Sometimes it’s all you can do.
Prior to the broken lying man I dated briefly a few years ago, my previous relationship was with — well, another broken man — who, when I said I valued kindness above all, spit out “Kindness? I don’t even know what you mean by kindness.”
From today’s vantage point, I can see that this came from his brokenness. But he hadn’t said it in a sad way, he had dismissed my foremost core value with contempt. I should have dumped him that minute, instead of sticking around for another three years of emotional abuse.
Four decades of research by the Gottman Institute reveals that the primary destructive force in any relationship is contempt; and further, that being the recipient of contempt in a relationship is a good predictor of—this is wild—infectious disease.
Sadly, I’ve been in a number of emotionally abusive relationships. This likely accounts for my now being happily single for so long; and, it also gives me firm ground from which to point out that the American people are in an abusive relationship with their president.
The lying, meanness, belittling, controlling, gaslighting and contempt I’ve experienced with past partners have parallels in everything this president does. America is in a national abusive relationship with its President. America, he won’t give it up: It’s up to you to extricate yourself from it. It’s not easy to admit how thoroughly you’ve been fooled, how completely you’ve allowed your values to be undermined to the point that you’re willing to hurt yourself and your loved ones just to keep him happy.
I’m retraumatized every time I hear about the president’s performative cruelty, because I see it for what it is. So I’m retraumatized daily, and have to be careful how much of my attention budget I spend on the brilliant satires and shocked screeds that others are writing about his mental collapse, the brittle reports of each bite his regime takes out of the Constitution, the flagrant corruption of the Supreme Court, the complicity of legacy media and the oligarchy, and that’s just the tip of the shitshow.
After years of trying, I’m finally able to feel compassion for those who naively believed his lies, who felt a want, a lack, a need in their lives that they believed he and only he could fulfill. I imagine that some who voted for him weren’t voting based on hatred, mysogyny, and white supremacy, but on their very real needs: economic needs, a sense of security, a feeling of safety or belonging… and so they chose to believe the lies, despite some inner ick that tried to warn them.
I empathize with their longing for someone with seeming strength and certainty to make everything okay, and I understand the sense of betrayal they are starting to experience. I wish that they may find true relief from their suffering. It won’t come from piling more anger, hatred, cruelty and violence on top of what’s already being done in their name. May they come to see reality clearly, forgive themselves for their delusions, and walk away from this abusive relationship before it completely destroys their lives.
Over the past few days I’ve been appreciating political satire as medicine for mental stability. The Borowitz Report shared a series of great artworks redrawn for these hard times, of which this last was my favorite.
I became familiar with a grassroots nonprofit from North Carolina, American Muckrakers, when they took on ‘not-my’ western Colorado representative Lauren Boebert during her first term. Their motto is “holding terrible politicians and people accountable since 2021.” Their efforts, I believe, helped drive her out of CD3 where she would likely have lost reelection, but drove her into CD4 where she won in 2024. CD3 didn’t fare much better last November, with Jeff un-Hurd hurting his constituents from the get go by casting the swing vote that pushed the Big Bad Bill over the edge. As congress debates the must-pass budget bill this month, we can all let our senators know that we oppose it.
Meanwhile, another under-the-radar threat looming is the regime’s plan with the delusional Dr. Oz to require more pre-authorizations for Medicare patients, and to have AI be the decider about who gets what procedures, regardless of doctor’s orders. Indivisible has a petition that explains the dire implications of this AI Death Panel (remember who coined that phrase, death panel?).
So old people won’t be able to get the treatments they need to thrive or even to survive, and meanwhile Florida has decided it has too many children, as Alexandra Petri points out in this lucid satirical essay in The Atlantic about the state’s elimination of all vaccine mandates.
“Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks. They do this over and over again.”
The biggest threat to American public health is without doubt the delusional Health and Human Services secretary. His anti-science anti-vax platform is the first step to killing more children across America, but all this makes sense if the GOP goal is actually to decimate the population of the country.
Old people, poor people, children, everyone really, will suffer much more, and many of us are already suffering from the ramifications of Project 2025, which is what’s really at the heart of this campaign of cruelty, this great undoing of America’s carefully built societal infrastructure.
Setting aside all the insanity “out there” for awhile this evening, it was lovely to zoom with friends from coast to coast in a Grateful Gathering where we talked about pilgrimage as a metaphor for life, with gratefulness as a guiding light.
And then it was lovely to step out into the glorious light of a clear autumn evening and stroll til the sun set, grateful for another day.