Author: hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant

The lyricist was clearly not familiar with having to do his own work in the summer, by the way. (Edwin DuBose Heyward, if you care to read about him.)

Summer is when everything needs to be fixed and weeded and watered and chopped down and all in the hot. Sarah mumbled something about sanding furniture this morning. I braved the hardware store and bought a new ceiling fan: the old one broke after forty years of dedicated service. Not the motor, either, the pot metal that had held the blades. It’s not the modern design where you can put a new blade on, but they all came off a central ring . . . anyway, it’s clearly time to play with electricity while standing on a ladder. (Not to worry, as long as the electricity is paint by numbers, I’m good to go. Although in this house, it often isn’t.)

Meanwhile, the weather is doing exactly as pictured above. which at least offers some relief from the heat.

Like houses, and gardens, and trees, did I mention the pruning? countries take a lot of maintenance. We see the local Roads and Bridges doing their bit right now, with orange cones everywhere, filling potholes, chip sealing, repaving . . . but a lot of the work goes on in places that are less in plain sight.

Do you have a state campaign finance sunshine law? My state does, and it’s enlightening to see who’s getting how many donations from where. Mr. “I’m just one of the people” Republican gets an awful lot of money from out of state unions, for example. Now would also be a good time to sign up for poll worker training for November, if you’ve got not much else to do that day.

There’s a growing push to change the county medical services here, mostly because the new non-government hospital has managed to irritate everyone in a variety of ways (sanitation. billing, eating all the independent medical practices) and make the old county hospital look good by comparison. That’s one to watch, and keep an eye on the commissioners. Who is watching your county commissioners? Your city council and mayor? Anyone?

We hear a lot more about the big government than we do about the local from the media, by design, I think, and not malicious: everyone is affected by the federal government, but state may only affect five-hundred thousand, and county might be down in the four digits. Can’t sell nearly as much news if you have a maximum market of eight thousand souls as you can if you have a maximum market of the entire country and half the world beyond. So we hear that the House passed this, that, and the other, the Senate is sitting on their hands, and the President signed another executive order on any news site, but we don’t hear the closer-to-home news unless we go digging.

So after you mow the lawn, while you’re sipping your lemonade or beer and cooling off, check in on what shenanigans your local government, the not-orange-cones division, is up to. Because I promise you, they’re up to something. They always are. And it might just be something good.

A Blast from the Past (Original here: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/07/12/the-golden-summer/)

There are moments in life when you know something will end, and you’re not sure what’s ahead, but you know it will be difficult, at least for a while.

I think we’ve all gone through this, when moving, when graduating from a school we loved, or much later, when our kids are growing up and we know they won’t be around like that for very long.

And we can enjoy it a little while. We know what’s coming, but we get a chance to say goodbye.

There are other times that the bolt comes out of the blue. You go out on a beautiful September morning, walk the kids to school, and then get back and make coffee, and there’s a friend on the phone screaming “Turn your tv on, turn your tv on.” And after that day, everything changes, first slowly then very fast, so that a few years later, your writers group of tight knit friends doesn’t exist, your husband has changed jobs, and you have moved, and what seemed to be halcyon days that would last forever are gone.

Or you know, you come back from a trip, sit down for the winter, and plan to visit your parents next year and have all sorts of things you want to do. And then you’re locked down, your city goes to the dogs, your health heads south and two years later you’re in a place you never thought you’d live and your life before is a distant memory.

I’ll say for the last that the very last day before lockdown, as it happens, Dan and I took one of our rare days off, did the Museum of Nature and Science, the Zoo, a walk in the park and our favorite restaurant for dinner. I’ll always have that. That was, in retrospect, my goodbye to the Denver I loved. I just didn’t know it at the time. If I’d known it, I’d have done just what I did.

On the other hand, seeing my parents — given their ages possibly for the last time — is still not possible, for a whole host of complex reasons, of which “I’m afraid something will happen and I won’t be able to come back. And even if I knew Portugal would coast through this, while it will be hell on Earth in the US, I’d prefer being here, where I belong, with my people.” (And that’s true even if my kids were with me there.)

Which one is better? Knowing or not knowing? Saying goodbye or not saying goodbye? One last golden summer, or not?

In the moment we are facing right now, we’re not given a choice, are we?

We know. We all can feel on the ground the thumps of the approaching beast.

Maybe we’ll get lucky one more time. G-d looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America, and maybe he can still get our butts out of the bear trap, even now.

As some of you — and I myself — have mentioned, even though we’re in deep, deep trouble, the rest of the world is worse, and there is some protection in being the one eyed man in the realm of the blind, even in this.

Maybe we’ll see it play out in the rest of the world and right our boat before we take in too much water.

Maybe. But also, maybe this is the black dog speaking, but that’s not what I see ahead of us. I’m sorry. I think the idiots in power are going to continue idioting because they think no one is onto them.

And I think the water is going to get very choppy, very fast.

Americans aren’t used to deprivation, much less to hunger. I think it will get ugly. Very ugly.

Yes, I think in the end we win. But judging from the other countries that are now rebelling, I think it’s going to come to the brink of an irreversible situation.

Yes, I think we’ll reverse it. I think we’ll come around. I think we’re nowhere near done.

But I also think the next few years… two? three? four? are going to be difficult for almost everyone. We’re going to have to change the way we do everyday things in ways we can’t even imagine. We’re going to go through and have to do things we don’t think we could survive.

A lot of us, who are dependent on daily medication to stay alive, and who might otherwise live for another thirty years or so (forty, judging by my family history) might die if we can’t navigate alternatives.

I think most of — maybe even me, if I get very lucky — will come through this and see the other side. But we won’t be who we are now. And looking back at who we are now, we might very well think of this as our golden time of innocence, before we had to– do all those things, and endure all those things none of us wants to.

So, this last golden summer?

You know what’s coming. We all know what’s coming.

Take a day off. Take your sweetie to a park, or a museum, or the movies, or dinner, or whatever it is you’ve been putting off.

Take a day off and play with your kids.

Is there a trip you wanted to take, and is there some conceivable, not matter how much it requires you to pinch way to take it? Do it. Particularly if you and the family always wanted to.

Sit outside. Savor the peace. Take walks through the neighborhood. Forget your diet for just one day. There’s a chance the government will arrange for you to lose that weight anyway.

Mark some days, a week, a day a weekend. Go to that nice place you always wanted to go. Turn on the music and slow dance with your sweetie.

Be relaxed, be happy and savor it.

Make memories to take you through the hard times.

You can’t change what’s coming. It’s not something a single person can change. And you can’t prepare for everything. There will be things that take you by surprise, and those will hurt worst of all.

But for now, for this golden summer, this calm before the storm, enjoy how very very good life is.

Before everything changes.

(Note from Holly the Assistant: Isn’t it odd how much different and better and weirder and stranger things turned out then we expected four years ago? And in some ways worse, but in most ways better? And yet, the advice holds true: Make memories to take you through the hard times. Because there will always be hard times. And there will always be good times, too.)

By Holly the Assistant

(So today is the last day of the Annual ATH fundraiser, by the way.)

I know you all like cute critters, and we had one stop by earlier this week.

A bit of background: many, many years ago this house was built by some very weird people, and many years ago it was remodeled by some even weirder people. We do not have, nor do we need, air conditioning, and a fair part of the house will stay survivable even without heat in the winter. Most of our neighbors are not so fortunate and have more conventional homes. One result of this weirdness is that we are committed to daily opening and closing of the ventilation during the hot season. And I do mean committed: missing the moment by as little as five minutes means we gain a degree or two of extra daytime heat. And the windows mostly no longer work by crank, but must be opened by pushing out and closed by pulling in.

So, at approximately seven-twenty am, as the sun came over the ridge, on Tuesday morning, with less than the preferred amount of coffee in my system, I pulled the screens off our bedroom windows, pulled the windows shut, and put the screens back up. As I put the last screen back up, I noticed something in the corner that did not belong there. On the outside of the screen, mind you, but it did NOT belong there, and that screen had just been sitting on my bedroom floor while I fussed with the window!

Now, bats are all very well and fine, I loathe mosquitoes, but bats belong in the cracks and crevices and tunnels in the rocks on the mountain behind the house, across the creek. They do NOT belong in my bedroom window!

The bat hung out there for a while, as the day got hotter, and I kept the cats and dogs shut out of the room because the last thing I need is a bat loose in the house and a torn up screen. By and by, though, when we checked on him, we found he’d relocated to the bottom of the window screen.

Yes, I need to clean the window. But that’s probably the best detail photo of the little guy we got. Because understandably, we weren’t getting close. There has been a rabid bat in our county already in 2026, my husband went through treatment for a rabid dog bite as a child, and we do not mess with this risk. As a household, we may be slightly more paranoid than average about rabies.

At this point, my husband carefully pried the window open and the little guy crawled out, and ascended the wall.

He crawled around the wall for a while, then flew off. In the middle of the afternoon. I wish him well and hope he eats many, many bugs, and does not return to my house again, but sleeps in the rocks where he should be.

We think he’s a Little Brown Bat, based on size and ears and range of species, and we’re glad to have him and his kin around. Just . . . please not quite so close!

It amuses me which friends and relatives freaked out about rabies and which did not, which fell in love with the bat via photos, and how many did not mention white nose syndrome (no one, but it was the second thing that occurred to me in finding a bat where one ought not be).

I hope you enjoyed seeing our surprise guest!

Thank you all very much for your support of According To Hoyt, and for being a pretty awesome community of commenters. We love having you here. This is your last day of being bugged to support the blog this year, mostly because I pointed out to Sarah that this is a five Friday month and asked her to keep the fundraiser going until the third Friday for those biweekly folks who will get three paychecks. She grumbled, yes, but she hates having to ask in the first place for money.

There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107

And if you want to read the whole appeal, it’s here: Toss A Coin To Your Blogger, Oh Readers

By Holly the Assistant

Or at least I will throw up a recent picture of lovely Circe for you. Look at those toe beans! Are they not the most amazing toe beans?

It’s occasionally hard to believe that this chill kitty is the full sister of the vibrating Quicksilver, but there we go.

How are cats?

Sarah will likely have an update on the State of the Sarah, or a rant about current events, tomorrow, but today she’s a bit swamped.

Hope y’all are staying cool enough this summer, or warm enough this winter, wherever you may be.

And the fundraising blurb, and yes, you lovely weirdos, Sarah does indeed see that you mailed unmarked quarters or put it in a different donation bin or whatever you in fact did do, thank you very much. Circe would say thank you, too, but she’s snoozing.

If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107

And if you want to read the whole appeal, it’s here: Toss A Coin To Your Blogger, Oh Readers of Plenty.

By Holly the Assistant

Sarah has run off to obtain an appliance. So you get me for now.

An older friend lamented this morning in a non-local group chat that she’d missed a boil water order yesterday, but at least she feels fine. A younger friend asked how one even finds out about such things?

It’s a good question, with rather mixed answers, depending on your location, and no one real answer that works everywhere, and struck me as a good thing to bring up here, as obviously municipalities are failing to communicate to new residents how to find stuff out in their towns.

What I’ve learned so far: The HAMs find out about everything over their radios, someone else said local radio stations carry such alerts, so radio’s an option. Some folks still get daily papers. One has a local news blog that updates regularly to skim. There are text alert services in some areas. Someone said that the emergency sirens formerly used for tornadoes are now getting run for all weather events, which gets them ignored, unfortunately, but can be used to note to check the weather app or website. I get emails from the County, rely on Reverse 911 or a County Deputy showing up for Really Important Things (like GO NOW orders), and follow all the various interesting agencies and a couple local gossip groups on social media, and of course my neighbors talk. The hiking group wins the prize for fastest location and identification of any wildfire within eighty miles, interestingly enough. The neighbors get the prize for Large Predator Alerts.

How do you find out what’s going on? If there’s a wildfire, a SWAT situation, a flood, a tornado, or a cougar removing chicken coop roofs?

And since it’s Friday, and possibly your payday, here is your reminder that it is ATH Fundraising Season.

If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107

Thank you very much for your donations.

By Holly the Assistant

Quicksilver here feels this is an important enough point that she actually held still, almost, for a photo last night! She’s an aptly named kitty.

Quicksilver would like very much to inform you that her big brother Indy and big sisters Muse and Circe, and courtesy Uncle Havey, need you to please drop a few bucks in the annual blog fundraiser for churu supplies.

Sarah is in fine shape and off doing Sarah things with her Dan, and I am updating the blog so you know she’s still alive. (We know you: you start to fret.)

I can’t say that there’s much to report on our front except for this being the worst year yet for growing food. Wildlife, however, has delivered on entertainment. We had two sets of magpie nestlings, and watching the parents try to teach the dozen or so youngsters how to magpie is fun. “You expect me to CATCH a grasshopper? How about I just open my beak and you stick one in?”

We also have baby hummingbirds again: haven’t spotted the nests, but the babies are coming to the hummingbird feeder, zipping around as they do. Last year was a bad year for the hummers, almost none returned from migration. This year they’re rebuilding numbers, probably because we’re all dedicated to feeding them, because with the ongoing drought there are few flowers.

The does are teaching the fawns to cross the road: caught one showing her fawn to look both ways before crossing and wait for my vehicle before they did this morning. We’ll see how many survive.

Watching national politics has also been entertainment these last few weeks–McConnell? Platner? Seriously? Not sure which party is more . . . absurd here. Local politics are humming along as murkily as usual, tiny pond, moderately sized fish, lots of mud. (Tiny pond? A friend lost her primary by 40 votes. That tiny.) All in all I prefer rural politics: few participants, you know them all personally, and they all have to live together win or lose. Also if someone’s in the hospital you know, and probably took his family a casserole.

I believe I have managed to attach Sarah’s fundraising links, so go ahead and do that, thank you. Pretty Silvy wishes you to keep her kin in churu. You wouldn’t want to let that sweet face down, would you?

If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107

By Holly the Assistant.

Or maybe not so quick. . . so, the Dragon Awards are open for nominations. And it would be kind of cool, don’t y’all think, for Sarah to be nominated? No Man’s Land for science fiction.

https://applyto.dragoncon.org/fan_awards/dc_fan_awards_nominations.php

But also, there are lots of other deserving creators this year, a number of them from the weekly and special promo posts. Some of our number don’t even stick to books: you may or may not be aware, MCA Hogarth wrote a game!

The best part about this, from my “creators get paid” perspective, is that Finalists get publicity. Winners get publicity. Publicity gets sales. Sales pay creators. Everyone wins!

So please, no fuss or drama, click over and nominate.

Thank you!

Holly

By Holly the Assistant

I’ve been traveling a fair bit to conventions the last couple years with my elderly mother, and have gotten to see a fair bit of our great country from the non-local perspective. By and large, hotels have someone of Indian subcontinent ethnicity or some African ethnicity at the desk, and the rest of the staff is in the American Indian-to-Hispanic range, and very much NOT English speaking. Whether we’re in the Big Midwestern City, the Small Midwestern Town, the Western Resort Town . . . but last week we ended up in a Small Western University Town, and staffing was very different.

This particular university town is one I’m pretty familiar with. It runs about 20,000 people when school is in session, and half that when school is not. The university also hosts a very large and famous festival during the school year, now honoring one of the major contributors to the school, but during his life, he attended right up until the last year (and I got to meet him). For two weeks in the winter, the entire world shows up. The local hotels are definitely not resort quality, but they don’t belong in such a small town, either. Other than that event and graduation, they look to fill their rooms by hosting whatever conventions they can attract, and they’re pretty good at doing that.

The worker population at those hotels reflects exactly the local demographics. European ancestry, that American Indian-to-Hispanic–but these are all native English speakers level fluency–and a small smattering of other. Front Desk/Housekeeping the day we checked in said she was in the Large Animal Veterinary program.

Americans will take these jobs, if they are allowed to. American university students will take these jobs. Americans who have every expectation of rising far, both in social standing and in income bracket, beyond this work, will take these jobs. They won’t stay there for thirty years: the young lady I talked to would much rather treat sick calves, but they’ll take them and work at them. Hard. That hotel was as clean or cleaner than any of the others, the breakfast prep area was clean (and they had the door open so we could see them breaking the eggs to scramble, unlike the other hotels), their computer system at the front desk was no worse, and they were pleasant and hospitable.

Meanwhile, my own young adult children have been working, not in hotels, but in similar types of low paying low prestige jobs, while working on their own plans for life improvement. Food, mostly. They don’t intend to stay there for a career, but it gets their bills paid (because they know how to be frugal) and builds their savings for the next step.

But I’m noticing that a lot of American parents are trying to protect their kids from those low-paid and unpleasant jobs. Not so much in my region, where half the population farms or ranches, and young adults work on a family corporation owned farm or ranch, or if old enough legally for the neighbor’s ranch. But folks in other regions. And more here every year. “Well, Matt can’t get a job because he has travel soccer.” Don’t do that to your kids, please. My oldest had ballet (which was more hours than his travel sports friends per week) and got a grocery clerk job at sixteen. They worked with him on scheduling. Mostly. And when they didn’t, he learned how to leave a job and find another.

You learn something from those low level jobs that you can’t learn from sports, arts, and other paid-for activities, that you can’t learn from school. Some of the most wildly successful adults I know came from families so poor their parents took their income for the family when they worked as teens, decades ago. The scramble, the hustle, the knowledge that if one job fails another can be found, showing up on time, when they have to pay you and for what, you can’t learn that from an activity your parents pay for you to be part of, or that the government mandates you participate in.

American teens and early twenties are willing to do those jobs, if they’re allowed to. Don’t say “We need immigrants because Americans won’t work.” That’s blatantly untrue. When they’re allowed to, Americans will work. (Americans will insist on being paid fairly according to law, and on safety, and on breaks, and you can’t keep their passport so they can’t leave, but we DO have laws about those things.) If you want young adults to not get into illegal activities to make money, give them legal jobs. Let the high schoolers have jobs even when they’re failing class: not working won’t make them care more about school, working will. Let them work on non-family-owned farms, which is currently illegal in much if not all of the country. Let the junior high and middle schoolers work. Sure, limit their hours, but let them have actual show up to and get paid jobs after school a couple days a week and on weekends. There is not one thing about running a cash register that the average twelve year old cannot do successfully and safely.

Get the government out of the way of Americans working. Get social class out of the way of young Americans working.

We’ll all be better off for it in the long run, and the kids these days will be better off for it in the very short run.

By Holly the Assistant

About noon yesterday I got the first note from a college student of my acquaintance, followed very shortly by confirmation from a different student at a different school: Canvas got hacked by a ransom group.

Canvas, for all five of you that have not had to deal with it for a public school, a public charter school, a private school, a college, a university, or any other group that uses it, is a really pretty terrible software platform that lets you read textbooks, download assignments, upload assignments, take exams, check grades, submit grades, etc. It works mostly, depending on the users. Mostly.

Which makes it slightly better than the competition, so many educational entities have signed up. Internationally many.

Almost all the eggs are in one basket, and as those of us who remember the nineties recollect, the tech troublemakers target the biggest basket as much as they can: the payout is better, whether money or chaos.

One friend asked “But what do they think they’ll gain? Who would pay the ransom?”

My answer was “Not everyone is as tech savvy as you are. Think of our local school district, which had to close a school due to declining enrollment, and whose position is ‘we didn’t do anything wrong, it’s home schoolers’. Faced with the ransom message, with a debit card to a slush fund meant to cover paper and toner, and two weeks from final exams, are you absolutely sure that some administrator isn’t going to pay up to avoid more people pulling their kids out angrily and more school closures resulting?”

The policy at the colleges and universities appears to be landing solidly on “We’ll just cancel finals in the affected classes.” So no finals for the kids who waited to the last minute to take the online finals, and the pre-final grade is the grade for the class. Or that’s how it’s playing out for my friends. Colleges I don’t have sources at, or where my sources are busy taking in-person finals right this minute, may be doing other things.

There’s no great answer in the short term.

In the long term, maybe more pen and paper in person exams. I’m old enough to remember blue book exams, and I heard those are coming back in some classes because of AI usage by students, which is a whole other thing, because apparently it’s been found that a number of the students enrolled in online classes and turning in AI essays are not actual people but extraction of loans and grant money fictions who vanish when the funds are gone with no recourse for the government . . . but that’s a different story.

I certainly don’t fondly remember standing in line with the course registration paper in hand, waiting at the registrars’ office to sign up for classes. It worked, but it was obnoxious and a pain. Online WAS quick and easy, comparatively . . . but right now it’s down, so you cannot register.

Link to schools affected, sort of (found not the individual districts but the state department of education for my state):https://privatebin.net/?f8c17bc224cd9f22#F2qrJM6a2juvQjziJTH8Pbwef5Lsa8TzRbCFW5FMg4uW

A good summary article: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/instructure-canvas-shinyhunters-275-million-students-3-6tb-breach-2026/

If you and your children are affected, time for The Old Freeze Your Credit Song and Dance. Except if you did that two months ago for the Blue Cross Blue Shield hack, you’re probably still frozen. Or one of the many, many other hacks, that have become part of our daily lives.

At the same time, our oh-so-safe-by-obscurity Linux distros have had a couple nasty exploits discovered in the last week. Maybe not-so-safe-by-obscurity anymore.

P.S. Those are not MY eggs pictured: mine are considerably dirtier because my hens are messy creatures. I do believe that eggs are probably safe from computer hackers, but the local magpies are hopeful of successful thievery. The roosters think that magpies look like they might be tasty . . . in any event, there are no computers involved in the production of eggs here, and the highest tech is the whiteboard that holds the daily records.

By Holly the Assistant

Sarah says to post something fun, while she’s off doing necessary and unfun appointments. I’m not sure about fun, but shocking?

This is the most recent four-footed addition to the family, Hyrokken. She’s an in-family rescue who joined us the end of January, my uncle’s dog (his health is declining), a five-year-old ninety-five pound red and white Malamute, who is exactly as shocking as she looks when she hops up to look in the window in the dusk.

She was raised by cats, and is bullyable by cats. Watching her cringe away from five pounds of hissing black Gertrude will always be funny.

So chaos increases here, as do dog food bills. How are your fuzzy four-footed family members this fine spring day?