Oh, lord. She was just a baby the last time I saw you!

I keep hoping one pops up for Indianapolis. (Realistically, I probably won't be able to go, even if I find one. My mother is getting more unstable on her feet by the day, and it wouldn't be safe to leave her on her own for that long. But a girl can dream!)

This reminds me of the time I knit some toys for my brother's new cats. I put a good pinch of catnip in with the fluff, and I guess I scored some really good stuff. My brother texted me about an hour after they got home to let me know my nieces were stoned out of their gourds.

When Christmas starts in mid-October, the rest of the calendar creeps up with it.

Mmm. We had a really good tamale place down the street for a while, and we’d do that for Christmas Eve. But the pandemic did them in. I found some frozen tamales that are supposed to be pretty good, so fingers crossed.

Even if they remember those facts forever, they won’t be good for much beyond bar trivia if they can’t understand how those individual facts relate to one another.

(It’s more fun than it sounds, I promise.) Some of the cards that came up were events the kids had just been rattling facts about, but they couldn’t place them in relation to each other. So yeah, they memorized some stuff, but did they actually learn anything?

A few years back we had a bunch of family to visit, including my cousin, who homeschooled her kids. My uncle was bragging about how smart they were and how many facts they could recite. We sat down to play a game called Timeline, where you have to put a series of historical events in order.

The US government is engaging in piracy. I wouldn’t be shocked if they were dead. Horrified, but not shocked.

I’ve never had the experience of being accused of drug seeking or brushed off and told it’s not that bad or all in my head, but the possibility that *this* could be the time, that I’m not really sick enough to go yet, is always in the back of my head when I’m making the decision to go or not.

Wow, that's a lot. From the outside, I was expecting a modern, loft apartment. I felt claustrophobic just looking at all that.

I’ve been wanting to read that one. But it feels like an impossibly huge commitment to read it with my eyes right now (my vision is fine, but my concentration has been shot to hell for months), and the preview of the audiobook just isn’t doing it for me. sigh.

That would explain why I keep describing Shane as "Captain America, but Canadian."

I haven't done any of my wrapping yet. But I do have all my gift shopping done, and the last few grocery items are in my cart, waiting for me to schedule the curbside pickup. So I'm feeling pretty on top of things.

This gives me actual chills as I revisit Anderson’s exchange with vile Stephen Miller (via @shaneisland.bsky.social’s WaPo interview). He is a national treasure.

(I do, however, have two tattoos.)

I don’t know what this person is talking about. Pretty much every car around here has those stick figure family decals or ones repping their kid’s sportsball team. And those that don’t are covered in band logos or Coexist bumper stickers. I’m the weirdo because I *don’t* have any crap on my car.