A friend sent this to me and it piqued my interest… from the New York Times:

_{The Pandemic in Six-Word Memoirs}

By Larry Smith

Since 2006, I’ve been challenging people to describe their lives in six words, a form I call the six-word memoir — a personal twist on the legendary six-word story attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

I’ve found that some of the most memorable six-word stories arise in the extremes — during our toughest and most joyous moments. So over the past several months, I’ve asked adults and children around the country to use the form to make sense of this moment in history: one person, one story, and six words at a time.

Not a criminal, but running masked.
— Stella Kleinman

Every day’s a bad hair day.
— Leigh Giza

Home ec: rationing butter, bourbon, sanity.
— Christine Triano

Can’t smell the campfire on Zoom.
— Melanie Abrams

Messy hair, messy room, messy thoughts.
— Lily Herman

Read every book in the house.
— Francesca Gomez-Novy

Never-ending, but boredom doesn’t faze me.
— Lily Gold

Won scrabble; smile breaks through mask.
— Abby Ellin

This is what time looks like.
— Sylvia Sichel

Avoiding death, but certainly not living.
— Sydney Reimann

Social distancing myself from the fridge.
— Maria Leopoldo

Cleaned Lysol container with Lysol wipe.
— Alex Wasser

Hallway hike, bathtub swim, Pandora concert.
— Susan Evind

Numbers rise, but sun does too.
— Paloma Lenz

Afraid of: snakes, heights, opening schools.
— Michelle Wolff

The world has never felt smaller.
— Maggie Smith

~~~

So… I tried one:

Reality resented. Solutions invented. Gratitude cemented.

~~~

This post needs a picture:

This picture: first, it shows that the plants went into the ground today. Big day in the continuing backyard saga. I’m dying to get out there and get all fussy — pick leaves out of the rock beds, collect twigs, tidy things up. I’m actually kind of excited.

Secondly, looking carefully, you’ll see my face in the glass looking out. There’s prolly a great pandemic metaphor in there somewhere. I could massage the image metaphor to fit my 6-word pandemic story above. Or not.

I’ll leave it at that.

This is getting old, isn’t it. Hardly nuthin left to say, but it’s still pouring forth… how do we find ourselves here? I will never understand the GOP not calling this sh*t out, letting him continue to wield the power, define the party. It’s just bizarre. Could they really not find somebody better to carry republican water?

I hardly fault him, because he’s just completely sick and we had his number from day one and could see how amoral, creepy and sad he is. No business being in government. And I hardly fault the voters (the evangelicals and the yahoos) because, well, it’s all they’re capable of. I DO fault educated, privileged voters because they’re just selfish and care not a a wit about anybody else, but I lay most of the blame at the feet of corrupt republican legislators who can’t win w/o cheating and who are using trump and his ignorant base to cling to power because they can’t earn it outright.

(Yeah… I’m mad and disgusted and just beyond frustrated that we all have to suffer because of this supreme stupidity and injustice.)

Just for my own historical memory of these days (while plenty will be available for everyone to read when this is all over and the books are written)… I’ll just note a few things.

Rudy’s the legal department now. All the other credible attorneys, mostly, bailed. They are 0 for 30-ish (with maybe a small inconsequential victory on one of the cases somewhere). Chris Cuomo made the point tonight that, in order for a conspiracy to continue to grip and inspire Trump’s people, it has to remain untested in any legal way (b/c it’s nothing more than a conspiracy… e.g., this whole thing about voter fraud and rigged elections). Testing it in a real court reveals its bogusness. A conspiracy is best when it’s something to be disproved. You can’t prove it right in a real court (b/c it’s a lie). So they are blowing this by going to court. And Rudy, who can’t supply evidence, is sweating brown stuff out of his hair over it. So gross. So beneath.

And, on top of 1 hour and 45 minute press conference fiasco (which I gratefully did not see), today was just more of Trump in desperate, caged animal mode, thrashing (tweeting) and hail marying. Vengeful (sabotaging Biden’s everything), childish snowflake. He can’t (nor does he want to) lead. He only wants to be the president. He. can. not. lose b/c losing is for losers. Of which he’s one and can’t bear it. Super stuck, the poor guy. Can’t buy, cheat or talk his way out of his loss … so we’re just watching him fuh lip out. It’s ugly. And delicious at the same time. But also scary and deeply unsettling. As I said to Vicki this morning on our crazy beautiful walk: I’m more anxious now than before the election… both for what holy hell he’ll wreak in the next 60 days, and for the prospects of having to deal with his desperate cries for attention and power over the next four years. We will stay stuck in manic, toxic trump mania forever, it seems. And it’s not right.

Which I think is exactly what I wrote about yesterday.

Sorry.

Like I did a couple days ago, I’m going to assuage all this anxiety with some nice fall pics — my favorites from today …. speaking of crazy beautiful walks.

Can you believe those? Pointing and clicking right and left. Just too beautiful for words.

I know I haven’t written anything political for days. It’s not that I haven’t been tracking… I have. I’m pretty knotted up. It’s incredibly disturbing to watch a person unravel, worse to watch an entire GOP continue to keep their wagons hitched to said unraveler (I mean, WTF). It’s scary to imagine where this goes over the next two years.. four years. It’s despairing to think we actually have to deal with this stupid, damaged man. I just don’t have time for this shit. I want a boring government full of committed public servants just doing their good government thing. Meanwhile, a quarter of a million people in this country have died as of today — a seriously shocking number — and, not only is he, and he alone, hugely responsible for that, he has zero interest in doing a damn thing about it in his last two months in office, choosing instead to hide out in the White House watching TV and tweeting, mortified that he actually lost, realizing that he can’t buy or cheat his way out of this new mess.

Loser.

So.. yeah.. been tracking. Feel sick about it all, and quaking in my boots about where we’re all going.

~~

But, let’s talk about progress on a different front. Two major developments today. We got our concrete contractor’s bid for the patio thingie and raised beds! Weeks and weeks late, but at least we’re somewhere now. The bid’s crazy high.

Secondly, out of the blue, Ruben and Steve showed up with plants! This weekend, they’ll get planted. Then irrigation. Then hardscape. Then patio furniture. Then we’re sort of on our way to a new backyard.

This is Steve figuring out where to put all the plants, according to Claudia’s plan. Thank goodness for Steve. He’s also going to help figure out an alternative to the very expensive raised beds in Stuart’s bid.

See? On our way!

I thought I had coronavirus last night (not really), which is to say I woke up in the middle of the night with a sore throat, persistent cough and stuffed up nose. And the remnants of a roaring headache from the day before. So, thinking I might be buggy, I didn’t walk with Vicki.

Hours later, however, the symptoms had all disappeared and I took myself for one of those great arboretum-in-the-fall walks where I stopped a million times and took pictures to my heart’s content. Such the landscape photographer, wielding her mighty iPhone! Scrambling around in bushes, getting down on my knees on creek banks (I imagined more than once that I could easily tumble into the water, and wouldn’t that be a sight!).

Hilarious.

It was a dark-ish, broody, pre-storm morning (which has made for a cozy, rainy afternoon of reading and tea-drinking).

I got some great pics!

So… I’ve been working on a wall in our kitchen.. trying to fill in some space with just the right thing…. after a year of looking at said space.

I’d finally found what I thought was just the thing.. some decorative, arty plates. This gave me an excuse to finally acquire some pottery art by a guy I came upon years ago on a trip to Taos. I’ve been getting Stephen Kilborn’s monthly newsletter for years (maybe ten years?)… something I signed up for when I visited his gallery/studio all those years ago (maybe more like 16-17 years ago, thinking back to the likely trip to Taos).

Anyway, settled on two fish plates. They arrived about 3 weeks ago and have been sitting on a chair in the kitchen waiting to be hung on the wall. But, today this happened:

Here’s its partner:

So…

I decided to go back to the kilbornpottery dot com website and search for an alternative and came up with these:

I just ordered them (which is why they are now sold out). Each one is a one-of-a-kind, a single issue art piece.

I like these because they remind me, of course, of mom. A collector of goofy owls her whole adult life.

This is where they will go:

The Enterprise is where the remaining fish plate will go, and the pair of ovals, of course, is where the owls will go.

For what it’s worth, that is my plan. I think we’ll enjoy them!

After complaining bitterly that I’d failed to get a real live copy of the NYT on Sunday, November 8, the day after the world declared Biden the president-elect of the United States (ahhh… that still sounds so good), my friend Laurie messaged me to say Newsbeat got a whole bunch more. The folks at the NYT, apparently, have been responding to intense interest in their headline-for-the-ages edition. Funny, huh?

Well I hustled my butt right on down to Newsbeat and got myself a souvenir issue.

Now… what shall I do with it?

This was a bear. I don’t know exactly why…looking at it here, it looks like it’d be pretty straight forward. But it wasn’t. I think the tiny detail made assembling so much of it difficult. The dresses were easier, but once they were done, it was maximum tedium… especially all the shades of black. Lordy.

Still… I love a good jigsaw puzzle.

I saw two Archibald Motley paintings at the Art Institute in Chicago last summer and loved them. I was so pleased Vicki Smith just happened to have a Motley puzzle.

It started as something to fill the downtime between calls during the flurry of phone banking in the last few weeks. It proved, however, to be too difficult to puzzle and phone bank at the same time!

Just finished today…

I’m not exactly keeping score, but I’m more than a little aware that the list of aging signs is growing.

Take, for example, my hair color.

This is grey, right? This seemed to happen overnight.

(And, yes, of course, I touched up this photo and removed all my wrinkles! I didn’t want you to focus on anything but the grey hair.)

Also on the list:

• I just applied for Medicare!
• I had a hip replaced–nearly four years ago!
• I have hearing aids!
• My skin seems to be separating from my bones.. it’s so incredible loosey goosey!
• And I have wrinkles. Everywhere!

It feels so good to look beyond what’s right in your path, or to look straight up. Many treasures to be seen. Sure there’s a metaphor in there, certainly a lesson.

Message received.

This one’s is from this morning, down at the creek, of course:

This one’s along Third Street, an hour or so later, on my walk home, right in front of Bernardo’s:

… and it’s not a sinking feeling! It’s a feeling of lift and light. And it feels so so good.

Took a lovely walk downtown (as I guess I do pretty much daily lately) for a sandwich and coffee at Cloud Forest, while listening to the Pod boyz (Pod Save America). So deliciously wonky and smart…. and today, so hopeful.

We can let mr irrelevant fade from our consciousness. We can let him stew and froth in his own vomit, trying to hold on to some kind of twisted sense of self importance and power. The rest of us, though, can move on and enjoy a return to boring politics and democratic in-fighting between the factions in our party. At least we know our fighting comes from a place of decency and humanity. The foundation of progressive politics is caring for one another and the planet. We at least have facts and science and truth on our sides as we duke it out over fast v. slow solutions.

I know I’m being gauzy about it. I know there will be plenty of ugly politics to come. I know things will get frustrating and panicky soon enough. But I’ll say it feels so much better being on this side of the fight, standing up for humanity and a better life for all.