Life of Wry

As a kid, I used to say, “Hecko Mecko” all the time. I think just as a statement of wow!

And today my old standby wow-statement came in handy! Look what’s back in your local candy store (in this case Newsbeat).

I went to Newsbeat to buy a bit of candy… as I do (I confess), and lo.. there behind the licorice (an extensive array of choices, always), near the Haribo collection, were a pair of boxes of Neccos!! The company who had made Neccos since, I guess, 1847 — The New England Confectionery Co. — ended production a few years ago. VERY much to my and Jim’s disappointment! What in the world will we eat at the movies? What will Jim give me as a special add-on to birthday and anniversary gifts? What will Santa stuff in my stocking??

The funny guy behind the counter told me Newsbeat started carrying them again a couple months ago (they didn’t even call to tell me!).

I bought a few rolls of the chocolate ones and off I went in candy heaven.

Tonight I did a little research and found this:

And this…

(Written by Christopher Gavin in the Boston Globe in May of 2020… and maybe, because of the pandemic, got little attention…)

When reports circulated in 2018 that Necco and its famed wafers appeared to be heading to the big candy store in the sky, their most fervent fans stockpiled the iconic candy and readied for the beginning of the end.

But for those Necco survivalists out there chipping away at any remaining stash, there’s now some good news to chew on: Necco Wafers will soon be back.

The beloved candy that once rolled out of the former New England Confectionery Co. factory in Revere is set to make a comeback following a two-year hiatus thanks to the Ohio-based Spangler Candy Company.

“Just when comfort food is experiencing a resurgence, Necco Wafers is back with that very kind of familiar, comfortable feeling we all seem to be craving,” CEO Kirk Vashaw said in a statement. “We are delighted to bring Necco Wafers back into production and to share in their sweet return with fans old and new.”

Spangler has resurrected the wafers, which date back to 1847, after purchasing the Sweethearts and Necco brands in 2018. Necco was put up for auction earlier that year and later closed its doors.

The midwest company says affectionados and sweettooths alike can expect essentially the same product they’d come to love all those years, from the flavors on down to the wax paper wrapper and recognizable logo.

According to Spangler, that means the eight classic flavors will grace store shelves again: lemon, lime, orange, clove, cinnamon, wintergreen, licorice, and chocolate.

If there’s one caveat, it’s this: Spangler says “true Necco Wafers connoisseurs may detect a richer cocoa flavor in the chocolate wafers due to a minor improvement made in the cooking process.”

The wafers are expected to hit major drugstores in June, with other stores carrying them starting in July.

“We know fans have been waiting anxiously for the return of Necco Wafers and anticipate high demand,” Vashaw said. “Our production lines will continue to run as fast as possible to keep stores in-stock.”

So….

All is well in the world.

God. It’s been forever since I’ve blogged. Well over a month, like maybe closer to nearly two! Honestly, this feels just awful. With each passing day, I’ve felt shittier and shittier about it. Mostly because I like it. It grounds me. Without a daily check in on the day I feel a bit untethered.

I’ve been meaning, daily, to get back to it, to feel whole again. Not blogging has been so .. weird. The sorta-guilt’s been killin’ me.

Funnily, but not surprisingly, not a soul has noticed, nor said anything about it. Which confirms for me that my, uh, readership is not a readership at all. This is a-ok with me! I promise. Recall, I threatened a while back (well, hardly a threat) that I was going to take my blog offline. I don’t write this blog for the, uh, readership. I do this solely for me.. and a teeny tiny piece of a reason is for future Peter. I am hell bent on uploading photos and shaping — no, sharing — a narrative that gives him a glimpse of his life, his parents, the community from whence he came… because I know, on some level, that it will be meaningful to him at some point. Everyone’s life should be memorialized somehow.. no? And if it’s my job to do that for Peter, it’s a job I relish with all my heart (and neuroses).

I also have a bit of the document-sickness. My need to document everything is one of my most prized neuroses. That will be the subject of a later blog post. (One day, about a month ago, I made a list of all the things in life I document. A list.. isn’t that rich? I am an incorrigible list maker. Lists are my biggest crutch in life. All I can say about that is: could be worse. But the list, oh my god, was so long and hilarious (to me). I am a true documenting weirdo.)

Anyway. My plan is to resume daily posting. And, as I can, Ima gonna backfill lost days. Because, again: me. Documenting Weirdo.

Starting easy (though, wow, I’ve got a lot to say.. it’s been a full and crazy couple months here and thereabouts)… here goes:

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This past weekend, Jim and I uplifted and caged our tomatoes. About two months late, so it was a gawdawful job. By the end, Jim’s hands were stained dark green (and smelled oh so earthy) and I was a sweaty mess (this, after I told Jim I did NOT want to cage tomatoes at 5pm on a 100+ degree afternoon in the direct, unshaded sunlight of our highly reflective patio AFTER I’d already worked out and showered. (We both got what seem like tomato rashes on our arms.. though that’s faded now.) But we did it then anyway. Jim said I didn’t need to help. But I did (need to). It was def a two-person job.

We lost a lot of tomatoes along the way, cut off huge limbs full of future tomatoes, and may be smothering what remains. But… they look a bit better and we now have passage between the raised beds (so overgrown the tomato bushes had become!). We left some limbs uncaged, too… which is fine; they are spilling over parts of the beds that face the back fence, or are very out of the way, so are free to grow at will.

Some pics:

Four tomato plants — two cherries and two normal sized (early girl and beefsteak, I believe). You have to look hard to see the cages, but they are there. Some spillover shall be tolerated!

Is that crazy?

They sort of freak me out… like living inside the Jack and Beanstalk fairy tale. The whole garden sorta scares me in that regard. But that’s a blog post for another day.

…. good as it looks.

First non-cherry tomato from our garden. I forget what this variety is.. maybe a beefsteak tomato. It packed a lot of flavor.

Tonight for dinner: tomato, zucchini, chard, a pear, and some pita bread w/ hummus leftover from Sunday’s appetizer. My kinda summer dinner.

A few days ago, while hiking in/out of Wood Lake, I came upon the crooked little tree on the left. I liked it! Thought it was kinda plucky, making its own way in the world, plotting its own course.

Yesterday, on the way to Sunday brunch at Bernardo’s, Jim and I passed the tree on the right… it’s located at the corner of 3rd and University. Same size, same bends in its trunk. It looks like it’s been shaped and/or pruned in some sort of bonsai way… check out the way those needles drape! Not sure what’s going on here, but I like this tree, too.

Felt good to be vaccinated, among vaccinated fellow activists, rallying at a federal building, advocating for the people.

Literally for the people: We were showing up to Senator Padilla’s office in Sacramento in support of the For the People Act — S1 in the Senate and HR-1 in the House.

Those recalcitrant republicans in the Senate, led by politics-before-democracy asshole Mitch McConnell, filibustered the bill before it could even be debated. Not even debated. Which I’ve already ranted about.

It was nice to be out on a lovely morning, in the State’s capital, blissfully among like-minded patriots, humanitarians and democracy lovers. And while it was fun, it also felt urgent: time’s running out on this one and I can’t see enough pressure applied to enough Senators to pull this thing out of the trash heap. We’ll see.

Some pics, some mine, some Sue’s (the good ones):

I’m not sure this is everybody.. about 50 folks here, from Indivisible Yolo, Sac and Colusa (but I think there were more like 100).

Some of the Davis folks. Another dozen of our peeps, at least, showed up.

This is a Sac Indivisible person (Harue) introducing Senator Padilla’s Sac field office staffer (Roberto):

Some signs get right to the point:

Our Steve was among those who made comments:

We did a little bit of this, when not listening to speeches:

I’m kind of excited because I’m going to a political rally tomorrow. In person. With signs. Among the throngs. I’ll write about it tomorrow, but tonight I made my sign….

It was fun (even though this is serious business!).

I knew that Fatty and Skinny was a series of old timey rhymey things… couldn’t remember any, so looked it up (what’d we ever do without the googles?), and found this:

Fatty and Skinny went to bed.
Fatty rolled over and Skinny was dead.

Right? Coming back?

Well… that’s what I was reminded of when I harvested today’s garden veggies.

I couldn’t find any follows up to this (nor did I look very hard) … but I seem to remember at least one of them went something like this:

Mommy called the doctor and the doctor said,

One more cookie and we’ll all be dead.

I may have morphed together two completely different nursery rhymes… but there it is. Best my memory can muster.

How ’bout that zuc, though! And the tomatoes are insanely sweet. Going to be a fantastic summer.

I like our new fence. When I am looking back on my blog decades from now, I wonder if I’ll think, “Wow, look how spiffy and clean and new our front yard fence looked back then!”

Ruben suggested the copper tubing, which I think looks great and ties it into the copper tubing on the screen in front. The spacing — 1 1/2 inch boards, intersperced with 5″ boards — was my idea, fashioned after a fence I spotted on Villanova one day. Ruben was game.

The spaces are large enough that the objects on the opposite side provide all kinds of texture and variation. I think it’s simple, yet interesting and arty, and solid. Handsome, really.

Jim and I have joined the patio dining crowd. This could get habit forming.

Looks like Jim got caught with his hand in the parmesan jar.

Today, the For the People Act was finally introduced on the Senate floor. For months HR-1 and S-1 have been a huge focus for anyone interested in fairness and transparency in voting. Locally, through Indivisible Yolo, a whole bunch of us have been making endless calls to our members of congress to make sure the bills had their support (they did).

This is a sweeping and comprehensive bill that addresses all that ails voting in America. It improves and simplifies voter registration; it makes it easier and more efficient to vote in numerous ways; it addresses key issues of campaign finance and dark money; standardizes the redistricting process and creates independent, non-partisan redistricting commissions in all states… and more. Its provisions replaced all the foul bills getting passed in red states all over the country, which is essential because those are largely, flat-out voter suppression bills. It should have breezed through in non-partisan fashion because it was about protecting our democracy.

But, of course, republicans did not see it that way, and, of course, it didn’t breeze through. It went less than nowhere. As expected, Senate republicans filibustered before the bill could even be brought to floor debate.

Borrowing this summary from Crooked Media:

Here’s a bird’s-eye view of what just happened: The 50 Democratic senators who support some iteration of the For The People Act represent 43 million more Americans than the 50 GOP senators who oppose it, so naturally just 41 Republicans (who represent a mere 21 percent of the country) were needed to block any consideration of the very bill meant to correct that antidemocratic imbalance, which 68 percent of the country supports. Another functional day for the world’s greatest deliberative body.

I mean, right? It’s just sickening.

Here’s another great summary of what happened:

You know who said that? Martin Luther King on July 5, 1963… a half century ago. Is that crazy?

It honestly makes me hyperventilate. The injustice of politics is wearing me down.. it’s making me cynical and pessimistic and angry all the time. It’s stunning to me that fairness can not prevail in this country; it’s stunning how the public good is lost, how politicians (let’s be honest, mostly the republican ones) seek only to gain or hold onto power, or their own seats. Corrupt and evil to the core. I have no idea why they even choose public service; their motivations have nothing to do with that.

Our democracy is hanging on by a thread.

Ranting tonight over dinner, I was honest when I said I’d like Peter to move to Norway. His quality of life would be better there. It’s too late for Jim and me to pull up stakes and leave our lives, our home, our communities. But it’s not too late for Peter. He can raise a family in another country that cares about its people. He and his family will be better off.

I am growing to hate our country, hate the division, hate the dysfunction, hate the way our elected officials cannot even work for the good of the people anymore. I can’t live with the fact a majority of the people (the majority are democrats and independents) want one thing and the politicians manipulate the system at complete cross purposes. Politicians act in their own best interests, to hold power, to stay in the good graces of their donors, at the expense of the public’s interest. Period. A majority of the country (not all, I realize, but a measurable majority) wants voting to be fair; a majority wants sane gun laws; a majority thinks it’s none of the government’s business what a person does with their own body; a majority is freaking out about climate change. The majority’s will is ignored and undermined on all of this because legislative control is in the hands of a cheating, corrupt minority. And I don’t see a way out as long as they continue to cheat to hold onto power. They do not care about democracy.

There are plenty of corrupt democrats in congress, too. but far fewer. I truly believe democratic DNA is different than republican DNA. I deeply believe democrats work for the people, believe in and work for the common good. That is the core of democratic values. And republicans stand for self, their personal freedom, their wealth, their station, their dominance. I just can’t stand the mindset. But I particularly can’t stand that they don’t play fair. And that their cheating and political and strategic machinations are all about gaining power for personal advantage, not the for country’s, not for the greater good.

Jim and I can live in our progressive bubble surrounded by educated, civil, compassionate like-minded people. I can minimize the amount of news I consume so that I do not go stark raving mad. I can do my part to try and effect better outcomes, because it’s the right thing to do and we all have a responsibility to contribute, but not expect those better outcomes. AND hope our son gets the hell out of dodge because this is only going to get worse.