Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

House Repair Triage a guest post by Heroditus Huxley

We are in, no lie, a full-on economic meltdown.  Times are hard for everybody. 

Here’s a hint: they’re always hard for some.  My household is single income.  I budget hard, and carefully, to get the stuff done that needs to be done. 

And sometimes, stuff has to wait. 

So.  You’ve taken the plunge and become a homeowner.  You smile, and you look at your house.  Your house.  You’re in love with it.  And you move in.

And then…the flaws start appearing.  Repairs that the previous owners should have done (or, as was the case with our house, were gypped on). 

Your money’s really, really tight. 

What do you do?

You do what I did.  You prioritize.  It’s called triage. 

I grew up watching MASH.  I vividly remember the rapid-fire assessment of soldiers coming in, wounded in horrible ways, and one of the surgeons prioritizing who went in first (because it was a now-or-never chance to save him), who could wait, who wasn’t going to be looked at until last, sometimes because they weren’t that badly hurt, but sometimes because the person doing triage didn’t think they could survive even through the surgery.

You can do the same assessment and use the same kind of bloody-minded reasoning in ordering repairs and maintenance of your own home. 

For example: we moved into this house fully aware that at some point, we’d be replacing the roof, given that there was a bleedin’ hole in the roof over the garage, that dripped into a bucket on the steps down into the garage every time it rained.  And one of the turbine vents was…bent.  And wouldn’t turn.  And dripped rain down through the living room.  We might have been able to put it off longer if we’d found somebody willing to repair a few spots, but everybody wanted to quote for replacement. 

We…couldn’t afford that at the time, so we started socking money back as fast as we could. And placed buckets.

The immediate, as in, must do now, was the drains.  We bought the house, moved in, started living here…and the drains started backing up.  A lot.  Horribly.  And immediately. 

We called a septic tank pumping service, and they cleaned out the system, then said if that didn’t fix the problem, then it wasn’t the tank. 

It wasn’t the tank. 

We called a plumber.  And the plumber went under the house.  And then came back out, giggling.  “[Your drain system] is the worst DIY mess I have ever seen.  The toilets are the only things done right, and one of those is leaking from a cracked pipe.”

Okay.  That…was item number one on the triage list.  It was…spendy, but we gritted our teeth and did it.  Because every drain was backing up.   

Turned out, there was double the length of pipe in the drains that there should have been…at half the diameter they should have been.  As in, the plumbers took two days, and took out two linear feet of pipe for every foot they put back. 

We did that first because…honestly?  The house, with the drainage plumbing we bought it with, was not livable.  The washing machine drain overflowing with every load?  The sinks making the tubs and toilets back up?  The tub making the sinks vomit?  Yeah, that wasn’t livable.  At all.  The roof drips?  Those kinda were. 

Also in the “not-livable” category was the well pump going out (necessitating the replacement of the pump itself and almost 200’ of pipe) a few years later.  Immediate repair required, and done.  With much gritting of teeth. 

And then…after four years of saving, and living with it…we finally got the roof replaced.  There was more that needed done than there would have been if we’d done it immediately (almost all of the decking needed taken off and replaced because it was crumbling—which it wasn’t when we bought the place, even if having the rafters too widely spaced had the decking warped to the point it was visibly wavy).  But we did the main part of the roof, and re-covered the porch roof. 

We couldn’t afford to do the carport at the same time.  Because it needed a complete tear-down and rebuild, and tuition was coming up due within three months. 

We took another year to save for the carport (and got a significant boost in the form of a gift).  It’s rebuilt. 

Only…

…the patio roof has fallen off. 

The one part of the house that never gave us a hint that it was going to give us trouble.  And…it just…fell off.  At the end of August. 

Guess what’s next on the triage list. 

And yes, it’s a list.  We’ll need to replace the heat pump within the next ten years or so; the cook stove sooner than that.  I’d like plumbing done to do both on propane rather than electricity.  But it’s going to have to wait—and wait longer, since I’m going to be rebuilding our emergency reserve from paying for the tear-down of the patio roof, and then next year’s tuition. I’m balancing what needs to be done against what we can afford to do. 

The key question is this: what can you live around?  What must be fixed now because leaving it undone makes the house unlivable? 

Can you live with stairs that moan when there’s weight on them?  (Before you say yes, check the structure!  And there are almost always temporary fixes that will cost less than full replacement: braces, mending a broken joist AND bracing it, and such.)  How about the drains that won’t?  The roof that leaks?  What can you not live with?  What can you afford?  What can you patch until you can replace?

Priorities.  Priorities are everything. 

Choose wisely. 

As you guys know I might have a few opinions. Couple hundred. And while I’m often in doubt and often in error, there as some things that get under my skin in a way you can’t even begin to imagine.

Lately, everywhere, I’ve been listening about how the problems in America are because we’re trying to maintain our place at the top of the unipolar world.

Honestly, I hadn’t heard unipolar at all in news media or opinion pieces since my brother’s cohort was lamenting that “the good guys lost” the cold war. Now all of a sudden, it’s everywhere, from right to left, from top to bottom, as though released from above with the good old “journolist” hose. All of a sudden supply problems happen because “America’s decay” (I swear this is mandatory once per article) makes the “unipolar world” no longer possible. Russia’s militaristic bullshit, and the Junta pseudo-sending-Ukraine money (but really just embezzling it) is because America is willing to risk nuclear war to “maintain the unipolar world” and China’s troubles are because America can’t stand to have rivals and wants to maintain the “unipolar world.”

So was word sent from above to pound the drums of “unipolar”? I don’t know. It’s possible. Brandon’s Junta is such a hot mess that having a college kiddie decide that this weird desire for a “unipolar world” is the worst thing EVAH and we need more diversity in power int he world, or something.

I know it suits the cursed race of the Brandonites that we should think America is in decline, and that we were only prosperous and free because of our “militaristic attitudes”. It suits them because then we won’t notice what is going on with them and what they’re doing more or less in the open to destroy us.

It’s like they’re holding our heads underwater and telling us it’s the floods.

Unfortunately for them the strategy of “if you hold America down, the rest of the world will rise” is working about as well as all their other strategies. (Seen this weekend from a military desk pilot “The truth is that diversity is strength. It’s a scientific fact.” That’s about as scientific as the the idea that the sun circles the Earth or that the Earth “has a fever”.

In fact what we’re seeing is the unipolar (there are you happy I used the word?) Atlas, holding up the world and modern civilization being forced by bean counters to step away for a coffee break. And the rest of the world losing its mind, structure and wealth as a consequence.

Let’s be perfectly clear, not only is the world unipolar but it has been unipolar for a far longer time than any of these lackabrains can figure out. There was never a bipolar world during the cold war. There was a unipolar world pretending to be a bipolar one. Thanks to our own commie simps and pudding heads, we actively propped up the Soviet Union by feeding it, and not slapping it down as it so richly deserved. They had nothing. They were driving long pipes around on trucks to pretend they had missiles, and our commie simps, pudding heads and the CIA (BIRM) bought everything they were selling, and cowered with fear, and tried to convince us to get rid of our own arsenal and kneel in submission to the brutal commies so the world could live.

They’re still trying to do it. That’s what this unipolar and “decaying America” bullshit (with cream of bullshit on top) is all about.

The commies are gone. Fascists rule China, but that’s coming untangled too. And the socialists in Europe are freezing in the dark, but our fraking commie simps, pudding heads, and the federal bureaucracy are trying to kneel to them and give them power they couldn’t use if they had it.

They’re acting as if Reagan hadn’t taken a sharp pin to the balloon of gaseous bullshit they’d been spinning for years and revealed that there was no great USSR behind the curtain of nonsense. Worse, they’re acting as if Russia — all that remains of the USSR — hadn’t shat itself in public over the last year, and weren’t busily wiping its excrement-covered hands to the global walls in front of everyone. They talk about China being ascendant, as though we hadn’t known what happened the last time the original Mao — not the Winnie the Xi facsimile — was doing this “we Stronk” bullshit. Well, maybe they don’t know that millions starved in China and that the country was destroyed as though by an enemy (Which arguably it was. The voices in Mao’s head were no one’s friend.) They are the type of airy fairy bullshitters that were telling us back in the seventies that China would conquer the world, and which made me study Mao’s execrable “poetry” (ransom notes have more style) in school. (The only good thing about Mao’s poetry is that it was better than Samora Machel’s, which they also made us study. Note this is praising with loud damns.)

Now, is America in the greatest of shapes? No. But we’re not doing badly for a country whose institutions of learning, government, and to a great extent economy have been captured by a cabal of their enemies.

Yes, we’re buckling under the Brandonites decision not to let us drill for gas, or buy from relatively friendly countries. And the amount of cash that the bloated communist carcasses of the Junta are swallowing as they swell to blimp-like proportions is putting what was until relatively recently trivial expenses — like meat for the table — into the realm of near-unreachable for a lot of us. (I went grocery shopping between this morning’s post and this.) Black Friday was black indeed, with a lot of people window shopping but few buying, and I’m trying to boost the business of a lot of friends who are hurting a lot worse than we are.

We are relatively okay, even if losing ground, of course. Who isn’t? But writing, particularly escapist writing, is a counter-recessionary industry. People buy more of it as things get worse. Yes, we end up having to do things like putting all our stuff on Amazon if the readers can only borrow from KU not buy. (I’m working on a work around via my newsletter and book funnel. But I have to know how much I’m producing regularly before then. Because, see, my newsletter is with substack, which means I can have subscription levels, and allow the subscribers to get a book funnel link to download what I produce that year — but I need to know how much that will be (roughly) so I know what to charge. This past year wasn’t great, but I’m picking up. Anyway, I should know by January.) But we won’t starve. (And the only ones who object to escapism are those who want everyone in jail.) However, we have family and friends who will need our help — already need our help — and our ability isn’t infinite.

So America is going to have a rough, rough winter.

And yet, with all that, we’re probably the only semi-functional economy in the world. And we’ve been for a long time. As bad an infestation of commie simps, pudding heads, academics and deep staters (BI DEFINITELY RM) as we have, the other countries have it worse. As much as our elites don’t recognize reality, every other country (except maybe some very tiny ones) is markedly worse.

Unipolar? Well, no shit Sherlock. When Russia can’t invade its own backyard, and China is attempting (in vain) to occupy itself and Western Europe is freezing and starving itself to appease a frigging autistic Swedish teen.

Here’s the thing the Brandonites and their ilk don’t get: the US isn’t the “sole power” of the “Unipolar” world because it wants to be. It doesn’t get in fights because it wants to — although the left’s tendency to use the armed forces for world building (and by left in this case I include a lot of the soft-left that flies under the GOP) and general attempts at charity doesn’t help — but because as the sole functional (for values of functional) country we have everyone’s hand against us. And if we didn’t prop up these ‘Threats’ and ‘enemies’ — if we actually and for real went in, broke their shit and told them not to make us do it again — we’d sacrifice fewer of our boys and be more clearly the sole power. (Which frankly would only be sane.)

I mean, what do they want instead? A world of fighting slave states, stateless bandits, and demi-savage shitholes, with everyone’s hand against everyone else?

Don’t answer that. These shitweasels (apologies to shitweasels everywhere) think that if everyone is fighting everyone else, they get to rule. Yes, I know Machiaveli said “divide and conquer” but Machievali assumed the conquerors had half a functional brain to use. They weren’t fantasy addicts high on hopium like all our reality-deniers and insanity-peddlers.

A unipolar world? We should be so lucky.

If America can get rid of these rabid ducks nibbling our entrails and drop kick them into the hell they belong to, so we can come back from our coffee break of the soul, we’ll teach them the meaning of unipolar.

You think Atlas shrugging is bad?

Wait till Atlas drop kicks your whining asses to the college campuses that will no longer exist.

You ain’t seen nothing yet. And because I’m sane (ish) still, I hope you never will.

I think I broke Amazon.

No, seriously. They didn’t even bitch after Darskhip Thieves. Renegades and A Few Good Men went through without a peep. I guess having an hysterical Latin mom threatening them with la chancla if they keep asking her to prove she’s herself got a note put on my account saying “Do what the crazy woman wants. It’s not worth anyone’s time.”

So, A Few Good Men, Third of Darkships, is once more available electronic.

And hardcover is in the process of publishing.

Ahem. Real post later. I went to bed SO worried about this, though….

A Few Good Men

Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva spent fourteen years in solitary, before freedom comes suddenly: unexpected and startling.
He returns to the domain he was born to rule to find that his whole family is dead, his younger brother killed by shadowy forces.
With his own life in danger he must depend on revolutionaries and a roll of the dice to save himself and perhaps, just perhaps to win the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for himself those who depend on him.
But nothing is free and his life, his fortune, his sacred honor must be risked in this mad attempt at a Usaian revolution, centuries after that fabled country was erased from history.

If you like gaming figurines, or Or for people that just like to paint and collect minis, these are own created.

Let’s support our own.

Promo code HOYTSHOCKED, for 25% off of orders over $10 (I told you he was one of us.)

AND THESE PEOPLE ARE HAVING A MASSIVE BOOK SALE, AND I COULDN’T LIST ALL OF THEM:

FROM SARAH A. HOYT, ON SALE FOR 1.99

Darkship Thieves

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT, ON SALE FOR 99C. EACH:

Deep Pink

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go. But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music. When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell. This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

Other Rhodes

Lilly Gilden has a half-crazed cyborg in her airlock who thinks he’s Nick Rhodes,
a fictional 20th Century detective. If she doesn’t report him for destruction,
she’s guilty of a capital crime.

But with her husband missing, she’ll use every clue the cyborg holds,
and his detective abilities, to solve the crime her husband was investigating
when he disappeared.

With the help of a journalist who is more than he seems,
Lilly will risk everything to plunge into the interstellar underworld
and bring the love of her life home!

FROM TIM GILLILAND: Lawyer to the Stars: Book One of Damien Durne’s Accidental Adventures on the Frontier of the Galaxy.

What makes a Human?

A frozen world on the edge of civilized space has a deadly secret. The indigenous people, known as the Ixtyl were human-looking to be sure, but they had characteristics so unique there was doubt they were naturally acquired. Human? Or genetically modified creatures? Humans, including Indigenous peoples, were heavily protected by law. Genetically modified creatures were not. They were like lab rats who would have no rights, no hope, and no future. The tribe lives on a planet rich with an invaluable ore: One men are willing to kill for. When Certified Genomist Damien Durne is called to investigate the Ixtyl’s genome, to certify whether they are human or not, he is flung into an intrigue of lies and murder, with an ultimate goal of genocide.

FREE! FROM J. M. NEY-GRIMM

Eurydice Otherwise (The Hades Cycle Book 1)

She’s not Eurydice, but she’s caught the eye of hell’s king…

Phoebe, a nature spirit of ancient Greece, loves her mountain birthplace and intends never to leave it. But the Olympian Artemis’ dazzling glamor lures her away to join the goddess’ retinue of handmaidens.

Initially the handmaidens welcome Phoebe warmly, but their friendship turns to bullying once Artemis turns her back. Phoebe’s inexperience makes her no match for the mean girls, who win every verbal battle.

And when Phoebe chooses a protector other than the often-absent Artemis, she courts a danger far worse than cruel taunts or stinging slaps. Unless she learns to value herself for herself—rather than depending on the regard of others—she will perish in Hades’ depths.

Eurydice Otherwise is the intense first tale in The Hades Cycle. If you enjoy ancient mythology brought to vivid life, you’ll love the entrancing characters, inventive world building, and startling twists in J.M. Ney-Grimm’s gripping short story of the old gods.

AND FROM J. M. NEY-GRIMM AT 99C EACH

Artemis in Chase (The Hades Cycle Book 2)

The goddess of the hunt burns for justice…

When Artemis discovers her handmaiden dead in the forest—slain by Dìs, lord of the underworld—she demands that Zeus punish the murder. But Zeus upholds Dìs, who boasts that he will steal a nymph away to his dark realm whenever he so desires.

The indifference of the other Olympians forces Artemis to take matters into her own hands.

Because Dìs wields powers beyond any Artemis commands, she crafts a complex scheme to secure the magical artifact she needs to bring Dìs to his knees.

But unless Artemis learns the essential truth at the heart of all vengeance, her strategy must fail. Will she do what she knows is wrong to defeat Dìs? Or will she do right and condemn her nymphs to death by his hand?

Artemis in Chase is the second tale in the immersive Hades Cycle. If you’re entranced by the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece—if you long to visit their mythic world, to witness their passions and triumphs—you’ll love J.M. Ney-Grimm’s compelling story of revelation and revenge.

Take from Hell (The Hades Cycle Book 3)

Pierced by the hero’s song, she prays hell’s queen will weep…

A nameless shade, newly arrived in Hades’ darkness, struggles to remember her past. As ghosts press around her, she suspects she descended to the underworld deliberately, with a purpose—not just because she died. But what that purpose might be eludes her.

When the mortal hero Orpheus appears—effulgent with the light of the living—the shade hopes she is his beloved Eurydice and that he has come to rescue her.

But unless she learns that her most essential self cannot be stolen and cannot be restored by another, hell will claim her forever, dooming her to silence and forgotten memory—her quest unfulfilled.

Take from Hell is the third tale in the gripping Hades Cycle. If you loathe the despair of lost memory, if you long for the splendor of light vanquishing darkness, if you believe in the power of love, then you’ll revel in J.M. Ney-Grimm’s inventive riff on ancient myth.

Eurydice in Truth (The Hades Cycle Book 4)

When Orpheus sings in Hades’ shadows…

Eurydice longs for life, sunlight on her face, and her lover’s embrace. But no shade ever escapes the dark and dreary land of the dead, until Orpheus dares the undareable, confronting death’s king to win Eurydice’s freedom.

Confused and disoriented by her time in the underworld, Eurydice struggles to remember who she is, why she lied to Orpheus in life, and what she really wants after death.

But unless Eurydice learns that seeking life in the past yields only tragedy, Hades will imprison her forever.

Eurydice in Truth is the compelling third tale in the inventive Hades Cycle. If you enjoy characters who step out of myth into vivid life and ever-ratcheting tension, you’ll love J.M. Ney-Grimm’s heartstopping twist on an ancient legend.

Buy Eurydice in Truth to challenge darkness with song today!

FROM JAY CROWTHER, FREE!

Tales From The Pandemic.

A biologist faces certain death before the devil. A young tennis player evading lockdown is trapped on a tennis court by a wolf demon. A man tries to escape the corona fever in an isolated cabin. Poe’s Masque of the Red Death is reimagined in a Victorian steampunk setting. An isolated grandmother suffering from dementia sees a zombie.

In this collection of horror stories inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, explore these young authors unique view of the pandemic through a creepy, dark, and occasionally uplifting lens with a set of illustrated short stories that give a dark mirror to our own times and a window into the terrors that can stalk mankind at anytime.

Featuring original tales of horror and ones inspired by Edgar Allen Poe classics, come explore the pandemic through the warped lens of horror.

FROM MEL DUNAY, AT 99C:

Shadow Captain (Star Master Book 1)

His one chance to escape slavery could trap his brother in a terrible fate! Jetay has been on the run with his brother for a long time, hiding his psychic powers from the evil Red Knights. Living as a slave on a star freighter, Jetay dreams of freeing himself and his brother, and of wielding his powers openly. On a frontier planet, Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance seeks his help for a secret mission. It will take him across the stars to the edge of a black hole, with a Red Knight chasing him every step of the way. He might finally get a chance to use his powers for good. But the price of that chance may be too high, putting his brother in grave danger. Can Jetay save himself and his brother without sacrificing Lanati and her friends? If he can’t find a way to save them all, the battle against evil may be over before it begins….

Since tomorrow I will be doing Cyber Monday Promo, I didn’t mean to inflict two promos on you. And yes, I am slightly better. What happened is the dry coughing irritated my throat and got my asthma going, so there’s still some coughing going on, though substantially less every night. Will probably be on in a couple of days. I hate when my body takes a reaction to something, in this case medicine, and views it as a suggestion on how to kill me better.

Having auto-immune is like living with a stone cold assassin whose plans are ever changing and flexible. Hey, outsmarting it for sixty years is reason to rejoice, I guess.

So, we’re going to have vignettes without promo, which is like having second dessert without dessert, I guess.

I know it’s bee a light week on posts, and no, most not the holiday, but rather my stupid reaction to bp meds. I will try to do better next week.

I am going over the copyedits on AFGM in order to put it up. And I have another Rhodes hanging by a thread. Whether I’ll be able to do much today is a question, but tomorrow is likely at least.

And as for reasons to not try to write a post today, I downloaded the top image from pixabay this morning and spent not inconsiderabe time trying to decide whether to write a short story about a robot kitten with steel wool fur. Shoot. Me!

I think napping is on the program and then some light going over edits.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: FULL

So, it turns out the reason I was hacking up a lung was the blood pressure meds. Which I’d started when the coughing started. And of course, no one told me this. As a side effect I got told it’s “a diuretic.” At this point, it’s complicated by the fact that anything that makes people cough makes me cough ten times as hard (my airways are touchy) and that my throat is raw from coughing, but it’s …. tapering off.

However last night was another of those wake up every fifteen minutes coughing. I’m told it pretty much stops after twenty four hours without meds, and I hope so.

For now, I’m going to attempt to continue losing weight which is bringing the blood pressure down all on its own.

In the meantime I feel utterly blah. Like, I couldn’t be more blah if I were Ms. Blah.

Not helped by the fact that I woke up to a world in which, as friends remind me, Glenn Greenwald is the voice of sanity and reason.

Mind you, I thing Greenwald might very well have been a sincere “New Democrat” who believed Clinton was one of them, just like we were Defense Conservatives who believed Bush was one of us. In fact, they were both apparently part of a pincer movement of internationalist techno-power politicians who were executing a clever maneuver to take us to 2020.

On the good side, it’s becoming every day more obvious that they thought that 2020 would allow them to seize power globally to the same level that China supposedly has for its oligarchies. And that it would all run on rails.

This didn’t work. Unfortunately before it came apart it did enough damage that…. well, here we are. And getting out of here is going to be a lot of work.

It’s a good thing to remember, though, that we are not alone, and that people are resisting the new dumbocrats all over the world, pretty much.

Which is good, because of all possible tyrannies a tyranny by the intellectuals is the worst. Not only is what they want to impose on you impossible, but when it fails they’ll double down. And when it becomes obvious it can’t be done, they’ll hate you twice as hard for not conforming to their pretty plans.

So. So we don’t let them. We keep rubbing their noses on reality until they stop vomiting bs all over the house.

And we do it each of us where we are. And we hope if doesn’t take until it all crashes down.

Today, however, is not a good day for me to see it all working out. Because today I’m unslept and blah.

I’m going to go look over copyedits and typeset. There might be a nap in the not too distant future.

This is very much a state of the writer post, and the state of the writer is mixed. I seem to have hit some kind of respiratory allergy that keeps worsening, so I spend most of the nights trying to hack up a lung.

(Allergy, because it’s been going on for two weeks, and I haven’t given it to anyone, including my husband, and we kiss!)

It’s not a huge problem, as I don’t think it’s impairing my breathing. It’s just annoying because I’m not sleeping, which means I have a case of “don’t wanna.” I need to unpack, move furniture, set up rooms. I can do it. I mean, I’m not too tired to. I just don’t wanna.

Same with writing. I have a book — second Rhodes — almost done, and I’m awake enough to write, but I don’t wanna.

Meanwhile I’m ridiculously susceptible to online adds. At the moment I’m trying to convince myself I don’t need the Virginia edition of all of Heinlein’s books, even if they are $200 off. (Whines: but I just turned sixty. Surely I deserve a consolation prize. And I’ll never ask for anything again. I mean what would I even do with a pony. Answers back:oh, shuddup.)

At any rate, it’s been five very fun days, not including my birthday which was mildly blah due to husband’s health and cold. But– Well, there seems to be a new pattern establishing in the country, since we were set free from the crazy General Tso Flu. (Or since we started ignoring them and they reluctantly agreed we didn’t need to be under house arrest. I think we’re mixed on that, and it was one or the other depending on areas of the country. We’re a very large country, and there was a variety of responses. I happen to know due to friendships — yes, still — in the apparatus of state that the nesciis statists thought they could keep us hard-locked-down if not forever for a very long time while they implemented their utopian future. Until it became obvious orders wouldn’t be blindly followed.) It seems like suddenly (dare we say “unexpectedly”) a lot of us drive around within one or two days distance, where we’d fly in the past. I know Dan and I have flown not at all since the lockdowns, and have driven more than we did since our twenties.

What this means is that we get friends and family pinging or emailing to say “Hey, we’ll be headed your say on such and such a day.” And then we make arrangements for getting together for a meal or having them stay over. With the approach of thanksgiving there was a lot of that.

And thanksgiving was fun as we got the whole family plus younger son’s deadly-serious-girlfriend (meaning he’s very serious about her, and vice versa, not that she doesn’t laugh, which is not true at all.) So, it was a large and animated gathering, and we had much fun. Havey got his fill of pets.

I didn’t make quite so much food as in past years, and the kids took a bunch of leftovers, which means I actually (probably) won’t be eating leftovers for two weeks. (maybe.)

I really need to get my behind upstairs, and typeset A Few Good Men for re-release. As in I should be doing that right now, and not sitting here and typing…. Ah, whatever.

I dropped the ball, and didn’t schedule a new book sale for today or the next three days. OTOH I have scheduled three for sale on Monday, so there is that.

As a gauge on the economy, I always look at black Friday deals. This year they started pushing deals a month early, always a bad sign, but at least the deals on Black Friday seem to be real and not the contrived “truly a deal, I promise” as we got in the depths of the Obama economy. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, yeah, good that they can offer actual deals without going completely broke. OTOH perhaps they have to so anything moves. Friends in retail tell me it’s tighter than our clenched teeth.

Ah, well. We shall see. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation, and we’re going to probe the depth and length of it. Nothing we can do, except get ready for the rebuild.

And now I probably should drag my behind upstairs and go typeset. The last five days were indeed fun, but pretty much nothing got done. So, now to work.

Hopefully a more coherent post tomorrow.

Happy thanksgiving, guys. I’m doing family stuff.

Younger son matched way up! Older son and DIL agree.

Well, we got our butts in a bear trap and no mistake. Which is a funny thing to post about when I want to do a post on thankfullness.

But we’ve got our butts in a bear trap. And I don’t see any point lying about it. It certainly won’t make things easier, and it will make you distrust me, at which point my talking is useless.

So — we got our butts in a bear trap. And we must escape, even if it means chewing our tails off. Right now, still looking for solutions that free our tails. And having no clue how to do it. Still hopeful of a miracle, but the miracle needed is bigger than the miracle we needed this month, which didn’t happen. So not hopeful.

And yet thankful. Why thankful, you daft woman, when you have your butt in a bear trap, and are likely to have to leave your tail behind?

Ah. Well, first of all, it’s not just our bear trap. To an extent the rest of the world is in this bear trap. It was set by early twenty first century utopians, and reinforced by propaganda before, after, during and post the two world wars.

It’s a beaut of a bear trap, too, you know?

It came from the increasing ease of mass production and concentration of power in certain nodes in the early twentieth century. Mass production was faster and more efficient, so mass everything has to be the same.

And thus we came to hyper-centralized governments and orders issued from above for increasingly minutia and details to be carried out in the hinterlands.

Which of course got into the problem of knowledge. Because humans aren’t machines. And how things are done and what works are different district to district/county to county, let alone across the country.

Only the people giving directions and telling us how things are going to be done don’t know that. It’s an unknown-unknown.

And since the media went the same way, to the same level of centralization, and embraced the same bigger-more centralized-more-topdown philosophy, the media covered up the failures of the model — the more I read the more I think it started failing almost immediately — and made it seem viable and honky dory. And it entrenched more.

But there’s a limit on what you can run on what we’ll call the “Marxlite” model, though in practice it’s more corporatists-fascist, but the excuses are the same until you reach a critical level of failure, all over the world.

It’s reaching that now. And of course the Marxlitians are blaming “capitalism” and “nationalism” when the opposite is pretty much true. Because that’s what they’ll do, of course.

So — what is there to be thankful for?

We’re still us. No, please, shut up. The Doom Brigade on the right is bad as the left for not realizing how unique the US is.

Yes, yes, the founding fathers would already be shooting. Yes, but then again no. They put up with just as great or greater abuses for going on two decades, until it became obvious it couldn’t go on. And then they had to fight: from a position of weakness, with their butts in bear traps.

Americans don’t like war. Partly because we’re so good at it. So we’re slow to engage, because heaven help our foes when we do. Partly because we’re people who make and create things: art, yes, but new ways to make a widget, new ways to farm, a better gadget to do x when it’s needed.

We like our little lives. “Petit bourgeois” the French would call it with a sneer, but petit bourgeois is where the soul of America lives. We want to do work we by and large enjoy and are good at, while having families and raising fat babies who grow taller and bigger and more capable than us, and raiser fat babies, in turn, while doing the daily, unglamorous work of making the world a better place. Look, it’s nothing much. It’s just who we are.

We know that once things go kinectic that option is gone. It might not come back in our life times. Worse, it might not come back during our children’s lifetimes, and that’s much worse.

So we hold off.

Are we holding off too long? It’s always a danger, isn’t it? But so is going hot too fast. And you know it. And we all know it.

So, here in, the balance, we have our butts in a bear trap, and it doesn’t seem possible to get out of it without shooting our way out.

That’s probably true for the rest of the world. And what comes after for them might very well be worse than what they got. But– We are still America.

Yes, I should stop saying that, except I don’t think any of you individually or collectively have any idea what it means. Oh, maybe some. It takes living abroad. It takes living abroad as one of them. Then you see the differences starkly.

The entire world is in this position. And I can very well see the rest of the world defaulting to their historical position of getting in a king by any other name, and defaulting to being subjects.

Frankly, I’m not sure that most of them should ever have gone non-monarchical. Because, yes, it leads to abuses. But in cultures where the only loyalty is personal loyalty, you really can’t do the same with an impersonal “state” entity. You need the personal loyalty.

But that’s neither here nor there. Monarchy is not in any way shape or form an ideal state for mankind. Though perhaps better than the impersonal “international” state.

Fortunately for us, our country is too big, too populous and too diverse (in ways of living/landscape/wealth) to fit well with central control. And that’s become increasingly obvious to everyone for decades. Expressions like “Good enough for government work” didn’t come out of nowhere.

Secondly, fortunately for us we’re armed to the teeth. No, not those teeth. The back teeth too.

Look, I like guns, and I’m okay with one — something I’d never thought I’d say — though I need practice. It’s been. Busy.

But y’all outright scare me when you start gun talk. Dear Lord. I don’t think gun experts in Portugal know as much about guns as someone here, just pulled off the street. And y’all LIKE them. I mean, it’s like a mother talking about her newborn, or me talking about cats. Your eyes lit up, and you discuss mayhem dealing weapons like they’re your pride and joy.

And I love you for it, even when I sit there, gaping going “uh. How?”

Because even if no one on our side — thank Heavens — has yet started shooting, there is that knowledge that if they send people to round us up for the cattle trains, they can’t be sure we WON’T. And that if the shooting starts it will be visible from orbit.

Yes, they’re trespassing, increasingly openly and daring us. But they’re not doing half of what even Canada did openly and in our faces, let alone what places like China do. Because they can’t know where it would be safe, and where it would — literally — blow up in their faces.

And that has kept us relatively safe in the middle of the central state going rabid-badger-nuts.

Also fortunately here is where the internet and the commentary of the political kind took deeper and more irreverent root. I don’t know why even in the rest of the Anglosphere it’s somewhat stunted, and in the rest of world it’s rare as hen’s teeth: but here, online, you can find independent news reporting, commentary and political yelling as nowhere else in the world.

And that’s a good thing because that gives us perspectives the rest of the world lacks into what’s really going on. (Though the sources of information are so corrupted no one can know for sure.)

This is both because of and feeds into: we have different hardware in the head. There is no king of America and there never was. Yeah, yeah, English kings, but it doesn’t fit right atop of our matrix.

So there is no family we default to “just do what they say and we’ll go back to the best of us.”

Oh, the left tries — the Obamas, really? Get over yourselves racist lefties. Being black doesn’t make them special, and they’re such a depository of rabid evil and vapid — but it doesn’t take, because Americans don’t really have the concept to slot into.

And yeah, they project, and think we want Trump as an emperor. It doesn’t help we joke about it, but hey, liability of having a sense of humor. But he’s not, really in any sense. He’s our battle standard, our flag of dissent waved in their faces. They take it down we raise a new one they hate even more.

Because we don’t have a natural “we’ll obey this person.” But we do have a boatload of “No.” And “hell no.” And “You and whose army?”

And we’ll stand by that. And the more we’re pushed, the more we put both feet in the ground and become mule-like.

Yeah, yeah, the covidiocy got under our armor. Partly because people trusted Trump. But it’s a trick they can play once. Here. In the rest of the world they’re going for a reprise, this time with feeling.

But not here. It won’t work here.

Because we are a mule-like people, resentful of anyone ordering us, proud of being able to defend ourselves. We’re ornery and already thumbing our noses at the self proclaimed aristos in myriad ways.

And the more they push, the more my mule-like people will get a boatload of “no” up their noses.

For this if nothing else, I’m thankful.

We have our butts in a bear trap, but we are willing and able to chew our own tails off to get free. We’re trying other things now, in tiny, obnoxious ways. But — well, if it comes to blood, it comes to blood.

It’s an awkard as heck moment, poised here, hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

But still better than any other time and place.

And for this we’re grateful.

Ça irá!