We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
As the last snows mostly melt, the soil defrosts a bit, and the blackbirds return, it's time to fertilize flowering shrubs and trees and perennial beds in Yankeeland. Any further snows will be short-lived.
Remember that roots of grasses, perennials, shrubs, and trees begin growing long before green shoots appear. By the time growth appears, it's sort-of too late for plants' spring feeding - especially woody plants. It takes a while for the food to get into the soil, and even longer to get down to the roots and then up into the plant.
Rain is required. I cheat and put Preen on the perennial beds. It's not perfect, but it helps. For shrubs and roses, I use a stick to poke a 6-10" hole near the drip line, and pour some all-purpose fertilizer in there. Just like Jesus' fig tree parable.
If you got too busy to do it in the fall, now is the time. I did my shrubs, roses, gardens, boxwoods, and lawns yesterday, and used up an old bag of Hollytone and an old left-over bag of lawn dolomite (lime) too. I have hollies and hybrid Rhodies in sheltered spots and a few Azaleas too where they are well-protected from winter winds even though we are north of the hybrid Rhodie and Azalea happy zone. North of the Holly zone too, but I love my hollies and the birds do, too.
Heck, I can even get good hardy Crepe Myrtles to thrive here if they are well-sheltered and against the house. Green thumb, or dumb luck? They are well-sheltered, and close to walls and foundations. When they are in bloom up here in August, people wonder what the heck they are because they are a southern shrub/tree.
Need to remember to get my lawns plugged in early June, but I will probably forget to do it because it makes for a week of muddy dog paws on the beds and couches. A hard-packed lawn is an unhappy lawn, and our local tool-rental place rents lawn-pluggers. Fortunately, I decrease our lawn size every time we add a new garden. That's good - but weeding and mulching new gardens is bad. Too hard. In a while I will mulch the heck out of the gardens and let summer do what it will.
Unless they happen to be in the tourist trade or the mini-mart business, the Yankee native does not tend to welcome visitors to his corners of the woods. Maybe this applies to all of small-town USA.
You get the feeling that the old families don't welcome out-of-towners, much less furriners. And whenever they see a New York license plate in town, they worry and grumble. I'm sorry, but it's just the way the folks are: "Please respect our space and our ways and we will try to tolerate yours as long as you keep them somewhere else."
City people might term it parochial, but it's actually a strong sense of proprietorship and protectiveness towards something valuable - "Our town."
I guess we like things as they are, or, preferably, as they were. The old-timers still refer to my place as "Peck's farm," even though old Amos Peck, the fourth generation on that land and a member of a founding family of the town, ascended to his reward in 1932 and his kids sold the old chicken and dairy farm to a dairy farmer down the road who was looking to expand his herd. One wonders whether there is a covert message in it: "You don't really belong there - you are just a transient with a mortgage."
It takes two to three generations at minimum, I think, to get past being a newcomer. To be an old family, I'd guess five generations minimum. (That makes sense to me. It is an indication that your family might be committed to the town, and not just passing by the way people often do these days, viewing land as real estate rather than as a place to anchor for your future generations.)
Yes, it's about different views of land and of "place". Ideally, your ancestors would have helped build our simple 1742 Meeting House/Congregational Church, which remains the only place of worship for seven miles.
I have mentioned in the past that our modest place (which is one component of the abstraction which is Maggie's Farm) abuts the Farmington River in north-central CT, whose happy rippling and sighing I can hear from my pool and from my poolside hammock.
We have eagles, ospreys, Wood Duck, trout (mostly stocked but with some sea-run I think), herring, and maybe soon we will have a return of fishable numbers of migratory Atlantic Salmon, thanks to the fish people. We canoe the river all the time, counting the herons and the Kingfishers, and cleaning garbage from the banks when we find it.
But do not come here. We prefer it quiet and private.
Photo above: A classic Yankee front door-mat. It does NOT apply to Maggie's Farm: you are the visitors that we welcome.
Photo below: Fishing on the Farmington in early morning mist.
The answer that I keep gravitating to is that despite the 4.9 percent unemployment rate, the job market is still pretty weak, and probably malfunctioning in some way. This isn't the only possible answer...
Inside Park has taken over the great hall of St. Bartholomew's Church (St. Bart's) on Park Avenue. Inexpensive, good simple food in a cool location. I have had many jolly lunches there.
AOC near Bleeker St in the West Village. Mrs. BD and daughter rave about it. They say their steak tartare, assembled at your table by server to your specs, is dynamite. Country French, I'd call it.
Despite snow today, we are headed towards early Spring. Northward migrating blackbirds have been passing through - Grackles, Cowbirds, and Redwings. Song Sparrows, scarce in winter, are back. Geese overhead all the time - Snows, Brant, and Canadas moving north from the Atlantic coast. Large flocks of Robins too.
Seen any migrants where you live? (birds, I mean)
(Off topic but re Spring: Snow Peas: St. Paddy's Day is coming. That's when we plant Snow Peas around here, regardless of weather. I have planted them in frozen earth and they still come up.)
There are a number of diseases and disorders which can result in dementia, but Alzhemer's is the most common. It seems to be, basically, progressive brain rot. Its progress can be slow or quick. Dementia is not to be confused with the normal memory loss of aging: "Why did I just walk into this room?" "Where the heck did I put my iPhone?"
I like living in a town where I know all the shopkeepers and even the workers at Dunkin Donuts and my mini-mart gas station. At my 24-hr Dunkin, they make my regular when they see my car pull in. That's nice. My Dunkin franchise is owned by a (Dot not Feather) Indian couple, but mostly served by Pakistani male immigrants. One black American lady works mornings there, and a Mexican guy does the night shift. The one black dude who worked there for about 6 months was fired for stealing from the till.
My gas-mini mart place ("Eat Here and get Gas") is manned by a Haitian, 2 Mexicans, and a Dominican. 4 shifts but they often do double shifts. A nice Mexican gal worked a fill-in shift for a while, but quit because nights were too fatiguing for her with three kids at home. I am friendly with the Mexican guy and the ever-cheerful Haitian guy who is always trying to figure out how to get rich and move to Miami. He is a brother in Christ. I briefly trade life stories for a minute or two with those 2, and they save a left-over Sunday New York Times for me on Monday morning. Free, of course, on Monday.
That Mexican guy has finally gotten off Oxycontin after two years of multiple leg repairs from his job in construction when he was in a ditch when a gas line exploded. Kept working through it all, in pain. He finally feels "pretty good, thank God." He has a noticeable gimp. He is legal, is trying to bring his wife and 2 kids to the US but has trouble paying the immigration lawyer. Has not seen his family for three years, sends them money. He lives in a small apartment with a cousin and brother, and the three share a small rusty 15 year-old Toyota. He is a sweet guy but he knows absolutely nothing about America beyond the citizenship test he had to take. Other than this job, he lives Mexican.
The other day he asked me about the bruises on my jaw. "Dental surgery," I said. "Pain?" he asked. "For a while," I said, "but better now." He said he had a very bad tooth, broke it on a chicken bone. Told me that in Mexico the dentist would pull it for $25 or $50. In the US, $400. and if he needs a root canal, $1200., so he is waiting to deal with it. Dentistry is expensive.
I told him about the couple of dental schools which have free clinics. Also, I told him that most dentists will give you a payment plan if you ask. After all, most people cannot walk in and put $4000 on their credit card, or write a $4000 check from their checking.
Very dangerous school, esp. for women and minorites. Remember its history as a school for white boys who wanted to become scholarly ministers in the Congregational Church. At the time, even scholarly ministers had to learn chemistry, physics, math, Latin, Greek, history, etc.
Who is more personally (not politically) unappealing - Cruz or Hillary! ? Mrs. BD and I were thinking about about which candidates we'd be glad to have as next-door neighbors. We came up with Carson and Bernie. Maybe Kasich. Nothing to do with political preferences.
"It cannot be said too often that in the New Testament, the opposite of sin is not virtue, it is faith. Not only does Paul say as much in Romans 14:23: "all that is not of faith is sin"; his endless insistence that salvation is not by the works of the law but by grace through faith . . . bears witness to the fact that our morals have nothing to do with either our salvation or our damnation. We are saved only because God, immorally, has accepted us while we were yet sinners; and we are damned only if we stupidly (that is, as neither faithful nor wise) insist on rejecting that acceptance by unbelief."
and
"Unfaith is its own punishment. All God ever does is confirm the stupid sentence of alienation it pronounces on itself; all he ever condemns are people who want to be more respectable than he is. . . . The best part of it all is that even your insistence on being a moralistic turkey doesn't matter. Nothing ever matters - nothing ever will matter - but faith."
I entirely get the idea of salvation, transformation through Christ. The idea of eternal life, in any form, holds no special appeal to me: What for? Why?
A modern John Deere tractor with 850 horsepower plays tug of war with an 1800s era steam tractor that has about 18 horsepower. While both are capable of getting an honest day's work done, there is only one that proves its dominance through sheer power.
Sooner or later, most of us are faced with helping make plans for elderly relatives who can't quite manage life any more in their own dwelling, whether because of medical problems and risk, or because of non-severe disabilities.
Mrs. BD and I have been moving her parents into an "Independent Living Senior Community" over the past month. (Ros Chast calls these places The Place, but I call them Old Folk's Homes.) Their new place is a one-bedroom apartment in a Senior complex in a suburban area less than a half-hour from us. The apartment is small, but they get the run of the place with its dining rooms (with 2 fireplaces), library (with fireplace), theater, patios, gym, meeting rooms, outdoor walking paths, etc. Their apartment has a small kitchen, large fancy bath, and a terrace to outdoors. You get three good meals, weekly cleaning and laundry, 24-hr handiman and 24-hr RN on duty. There are music concerts, movies, and good lectures all the time, religious services, plus of course Bingo and Mah Jong and all that. You can keep your car there, or they will drive you anywhere within 15 miles - included. That's all - no personal help unless you hire it on your own (which some residents do). These places are costly, but not necessarily a lot more costly that the cost of running and maintaining one's own home.
The next step, if needed, is Assisted Living. Assisted Living places often have specialized Dementia sections.
And then there are nursing homes, aka Skilled Nursing Facilities. Nobody ever wants to need those except temporarily to recover from something.
AKAUnstable Personality Disorder. Many in the mental health field prefer to avoid those with overly-intense reactions, unpredictability and volatility of behavior and emotion, especially anger, and frequent depression and unhappiness.
However, oftentimes that doesn't matter because these patients commonly turn on doctors and therapists in transference-like rages, and are gone. Thus the instability of some of their relationships in general.
Some or many such people may have Bipolar spectrum problems - or both.
What we are seeing here is something about how the Cloud People view the Dirt People. Loyalty to a society has always been anchored in loyalty to the people in that society. A man is willing to take up the sword on behalf of the king, because the king is doing the same for his subjects. In other words, you’re not fighting for the king, you’re fighting for what the king embodies, what the king represents. Loyalty flows in both directions.
Technically, the USA is still around, of course. We have the framework, sagging and rotted as it is, of what the country means still in place. There are the habits of a Republic still here. Technically we still vote. In name at least we have representatives in office. All of it still looks more or less the same. Its just been gutted, like the shell of an insect that has been burrowed out from within by parasites.
The only direction this nation goes from here on out is away from liberty, away from the founders, away from the great experiment, and toward inevitable failure and tyranny. There's only one vector, even if it staggers a bit once in a while.
500 high school choir students sing the U.S. National anthem in a high-rise hotel. Each night before curfew, they gather on their balconies to sing the Star-Spangled Banner from the balconies of the 18-story atrium at Louisville's downtown Hyatt Regency as part of the Kentucky Music Educators convention.
What Marco Rubio is all about is Warfare State republicanism. When he talks about restoring American Greatness it is through the agency of Imperial Washington. He has no kinship with Harding, Coolidge or Eisenhower. None of them were intent on searching the earth for monsters to destroy, as does Rubio in every single speech.
And make no mistake. Every time this naïve smart aleck chastises Obama for weak leadership and alleged failure to get the job forcefully done in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and countless elsewheres, the ghost of John Quincy Adams should be hollering in his grave. Stalking the globe for monsters to destroy is exactly what this wanna be little Napoléon is all about.
As the last snows mostly melt, the soil defrosts a bit, and the blackbirds return, it's time to fertilize flowering shrubs and trees and perennial beds in Yankeeland. Any further snows will be short-lived.
City people might term it parochial, but it's actually a strong sense of proprietorship and protectiveness towards something valuable - "Our town."
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Today's masters of the universe are 