It's gently breezy and about 75 Freedom Degrees here on the back patio. The weather of Central Phoenix is kind early this weekday morning. Then the garbage truck pulls in. From Mourning Doves to jet-engine decibels in moments. Then the SWAT team guys suddenly appear out of nowhere and some dude with a bullhorn yells some nonsense about "the Feds" or whatever. Then some very loud; especially for six-thirty in the morning, authoritarian mommie-hang-up rant about "put down your weapons." What a bunch of
bunts.
Sure.
Weapons? I'm not even on second cup of coffee yet. I've never had a weapon in my life. Well, when I was a kid my brother had a pellet gun and he let me shoot it sometimes. But that's it for all the weapons in my life.
Wait. That's not exactly true. I have several weapons: My tongue, my pen and keyboard, and my (sometimes reluctant,) kinship with reality along with those select people who keep to it.
And my secret weapon: My spouse. Don't you dare even think it. Whatever it is. It isn't going to happen.
The advice given to me was to "let go of the tug-of-war rope and then simply walk, stroll, hop/skip/high-jump away." Let the opposing team collapse backwards. The whole game, and *all* power struggles are games, then falls apart. I'll show you another way:
You can always just
cheat on the Venn diagram. Who would care if you did? The Zenn-Diagram
Polizia? If you add another properly placed circle "D" to the diagram you can build (or just imagine,) one just as logical and simple as a Venn but which demonstrates that A, A+B, and B are all
equal because they equal D which is an imaginary overlap of C. It's a freaking fractal mess is what it is which is probably why Venns don't do that.
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We are going to move. We have a buyer.
We're sort-of working our way up from starting at the Isle of Wight. We were looking at possible places in Shanklin. Then it became Canterbury, then more inclusive surroundings as far as the Isle of Sheppey but still Kentish.
There are places north, which to me means anything above London on a map, which have stable and growing local economies. Maybe not so great as Canterbury's, but swinging up nonetheless. And with much better options for
a home to buy, (I could easily make that one our home,) and a job for my spouse.
My nursing license isn't valid in the U.K. I have slid into the cloudy footless realms of semi-retirement/unemployment anyway. It's unlikely I'll work as a nurse again here in Phoenix. I can't imagine.
A move to Cambridgeshire or Oxfordshire, perhaps? Spousie seems actually excited by their job prospects in those regions. Their MSW is quite valid there and there's also a shortage of social workers in the U.K.
My young one seems thrilled by the possibility of living in proximity to
a shopping mall perhaps like the one in Peterborough. This tells me that something went wrong somewhere. Whatever it may be it can certainly be addressed positively. I seem to be the only family member with voting rights, at least above Dog/Cat level, because they get a percentage of the household vote too, who prefers the rural to the city. But I like "dense" urban living very much too. So it goes. It's the asteroid-belt/suburban/automobile-based/corporation-dominated
/single-family-home/McMansion/snout-house stuff that doesn't seem to work for me.
Anyway, that's Plan A. Plan B might be going in the other direction but can you believe this? My family refuses to live in/on Hawaii. "Too isolated." That would be a much easier move than the U.K. too. But nooooo. Plan C? It probably isn't wise to try to consider. Having said that I admit to compulsivity and I have several alphabet-length lists of plans.
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Do not worry if you are continually afraid that someone will steal your pants. If you make people generally aware that you do not wear undergarments then they are very unlikely to take anything they believe you wore while "going commando."
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For many decades I have occasionally suffered from nightmare sequences involving some sort of "alien invasion, fascist-Nazi, chase 'em down and kill 'em" disturbing dream episodes. Typical PTSD stuff, I suppose. But I have decided to face down those paranoid fears. How, you may ask? By going to a scary movie.
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Movie aliens either look just like us or they are hideously strange and aggressive-looking. Not like
real aliens at all.
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James Hansen.
During the dark ages of the Bush administration, Hansen's NASA bosses and public-relations people tended to be Bush-appointed knucklehead anti-science Regent University types. The sort of true-believers you find described by
Chris Mooney. Well, they tried to stifle Hansen.
The NASA public-relations born-again boy-toys told him he had to clear everything through them before he spoke or wrote about climate change. Bullshit. Hansen instead went right to the press with that and a little "rightwing censorship" backlash brewed for a bit. Then they responded with the same hysterical lies again. And again. And again.
"Jakobshavn Isbrae is located on the west coast of Greenland at latitude 69°N and has been retreated more than 45 kilometers (27 miles) over the past 160 years, 10 kilometers (6 miles) in just the past decade. As the glacier has retreated, it has broken into a northern and southern branch. The breakup this week occurred in the north branch.
Scientists estimate that as much as 10 percent of all ice lost from Greenland is coming through Jakobshavn, which is also believed to be the single largest contributor to sea level rise in the northern hemisphere."
From an OLD July 2010 article in
Science Daily.
I love the desert and other places in Arizona. I have lived here twice; once with my birth family and again decades later with my own family. Phoenix has changed so much. It has gone fractally metastatic, unfortunately, and we want to leave
now. Before... well, just before.
That's not me out on Devil's Bridge. It's one of those aliens that look just like a regular person. They enjoy Sedona too.
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Desert. Drought. Mesa-top dwellings. That story. Again. Later.
