Speaking of weirdness

I've been indulging in two hobbies -- quilting and pen palling -- for decades now. Pen pals since I was in the 8th grade (long, long ago in a galaxy far away) and quilting. Quilting is slightly more recent. I got into it in the early 1970s. Occasionally the two hobbies overlap.

In a post a number of years ago I mentioned that one of the ways pen pals used to (and still do) find new pals was through the exchange of friendship books, aka fbs. Most people call them eff bees; I tend to refer to them as fibs, possibly because Pen Pal Land has always had its fair share of fantasists. Long before the Internet came along to provide people with a platform for fictionalizing their lives, people did it in Pen Pal Land. But that's normal human behavior and definitely not what I'm thinking about today.

Shady Lady hand applique quilt block

In addition to the fbs, people swap exchange slips, i.e., short form chain letters. Instead of going through the whole rigamarole of "Send $1 to the first name on the list, cross it off, add yours to the bottom, make six copies and pass them on" an exchange slip will just say "2 Viewcards Exchange - 6 copies" (often abbreviated as 2 VC - 6 c) or "Sheet of Seals Exchange - 6 copies." Name an item and somewhere out there exchange slips probably circulate for it, like tea towels or dishcloths.

Tumblers

Or quilt blocks or fabric swatches. I used to do 12-1/2 inch square friendship block exchanges (pieced or applique), tumbler exchanges (a tumbler being a polygon shaped sort of like a drinking glass) done to a standard template, and a few others. At one point I had quite a few blocks other people had sent me. There was no standard pattern for generic friendship blocks, although there were a few exchanges for specific themes (Sunbonnet Sue, pinwheels) or holidays (Christmas). I must have really been into the whole blocks/swatches/whatever exchange thing for awhile. I made two Christmas wall hangings using Christmas blocks people sent me -- my standard Christmas block was one that mimicked a wrapped package -- as well as one full-size quilt top. I do still note in fbs that I'll "swap f/s blocks, 12-1/2 inches sq., pieced or applique" but no one's offered to swap in years. I think all the old ladies I used to get quilt blocks from have died off and no one's replaced them.

Christmas pinwheel, 12-1/2 inch square

Anyway, I'm at that point in the Woman Cave where one quilt just got finished and I have no idea what to do next. I have some vague ideas, but nothing solid. So I've been going through the stash: the multiple Sterlite bins and Rubbermaid totes and the dresser drawers. I'm pulling out odds and ends and kind of inventorying what I have. Do I want to do a quilt that is done from just one or two fabrics or do I want to do another scrap quilt? Maybe I want to take some of the odds and ends of extra blocks and parts of blocks and just sort of start in the middle and work out and see what happens? Not exactly a framed medallion, but the same general idea.

Grandmother's Flower Garden segments

In the process of inventorying, I discovered I still have quite a stash of stuff obtained through exchanges: ordinary blocks, some Christmas-themed blocks, some sets of hexagons for a Grandmother's Flower Garden (I didn't even remember ever getting into swapping those), some humongous butterflies ready to be appliqued on to something. Tumblers, lots of tumblers, enough tumblers sewn together to qualify as an extremely colorful table runner if I felt like putting a backing on it. Most of the finished blocks were quite good; one of the appliqued blocks, a Shady Lady (shown at the top of this post), is so nice that I don't want to put it into a quilt. I want to put it in a frame and hang it on a wall.

Cow pie? Lily pad? Or just plain weird?

And then there's the cow pie. Or perhaps it's supposed to be a lily pad. A kidney bean? Just what was the point? The blob is hand-appliqued so whoever sent it took her time assembling it. But, wow, it's weird.The fabric isn't bad. . . but the execution is definitely strange.

My standard f/s block pattern, for what it's worth, was Rolling Stone. We moved so often that it felt appropriate.

 You know, maybe that's what I should do next -- cut enough pieces to do an entire Rolling Stone quilt. It would be an especially apt project to work on this winter when we're on the road in the Guppy. Definitely something to think about.

Politics and other weirdness

As usual when I wake up at an hour when I really don't want to be awake, my mind is wandering off on odd tangents. Like Hillary Clinton's colostomy bag.

Yep. You read that right. Colostomy bag. Now, I know that there's been a lot of bizarre speculation by some right-wing commentators, radio talk show hosts, and others, including The Donald, that Hillary's health is Not Good. The usual speculation falls into one of two categories: she's suffering from some unspecified neurological disorder that goes back many years or she's never recovered from a head injury she incurred when she fell a couple years ago.

Naturally, given the nature of Internet rumors and weirdness in general, somehow one or both of those conditions have resulted in her (a) wearing Depends, (b) wearing a colostomy bag, or (c) both. WTF? I can understand the mental gymnastics involved in going from "unspecified neurological disorder" to Depends. After all, one of the things that happens in degenerative disorders like ALS and Huntington's chorea is that as nerves die a person loses control over various bodily functions, like bladder and bowel control. But a colostomy bag? Is this projection because everyone knows all politicians are full of crap and it's got to go somewhere?

I don't know. It just struck me as more than a tad bizarre, like maybe the person (or persons) indulging in that particular fantasy have no clue what a colostomy bag is -- they just know it can't be good. And it is a step up from the Hillary wears Depends line. Let's face it. The woman is less than 2 months away from turning 69. If she wears Depends, she's got a lot of company. Have any of these people looked in the personal care section of Walgreens or Family Dollar lately? Thanks to the proliferation of aging baby boomers, adult diapers are a growth industry. Companies that make "feminine hygiene products" have finally figured out there were a lot of women in their 50s and 60s who were buying mini and maxi pads as sneeze protection. Always has joined Depends and Poise in marketing pads that protect against bladder leakage. And older women aren't the only ones with aging bladder issues. If they were, Depends wouldn't sell "Man Guard" pads. Slight digression (as usual). I love that name. It's like they're not just selling a pad, they're selling armor, a super comfy jock strap.

In any case, the whole Hillary has one foot in the grave fantasy is classic magical thinking. Her opponents can't come up with a good argument against her policies (it's hard to when the woman is farther to the right than Eisenhower was) so they're hoping people will start worrying about how old and frail she is.

The problem with that line of reasoning, of course, is that The Donald is two years older than her and bears a startling resemblance to an Oompa Loompa, except a lot less healthy. He's an overweight geezer who has trouble speaking in complete sentences. Maybe. It hit me when I heard part of his press conference when he went to Mexico yesterday that he really has been playing his supporters for fools. He used actual polysyllables when he did the press conference. There was none of his usual speaking at maybe a 3rd grade level and repeating catch phrases over and over. I had heard this version of Trump emerges occasionally, that he can be an articulate adult, but yesterday for some reason it registered with me. Holy wah, he really is a remarkable con artist. I don't know if that quote that kicks around about him saying that if he ever got into politics he'd run as a Republican because the typical Republican voter is so easy to fool is true or not, but based on Trump's performance, it should be.

So what, I wonder, did he and President Pena Nieto chat about? Did The Donald tell him to relax, the talk about the wall was pure b.s. just to keep the rubes happy? Why did The Donald go to Mexico at all?  And, even bigger mystery, why would Pena Nieto want to do a a face to face with The Donald when his own popularity is tanking? And does anyone really care?

But back to the subject of The Donald's health. In his case, the speculation tends to be about what's between his ears. In a way it's similar to the speculating about Hillary's unspecified neurological problems, except The Donald's has a name: dementia. Lots and lots of speculation that he's in the early stages of some form of senile dementia. Could be Alzheimer's, could be one of the various other types caused by things like atherosclerosis, whatever. The man has always had a giant ego, but now, at least according to the speculation, he's slid over the edge into borderline psychosis with his megalomania and narcissism. I don't know. I have days when I say he reminds me of the some of the patients I dealt with long, long ago when I worked in a nursing home. You know, if he wasn't rich (or assumed to be rich), his adult children would be looking into getting him into assisted living or a memory care unit. But if a lot of his public persona is based on what he thinks is going to play best with his audience, who knows? Can't really fault him for the megalomania and narcissism -- they're part of the job description for most politicians. You've got to have a humongous ego to go into politics to begin with, and then to think that you can be President? That's ego on a size most people will never know. Unlike most politicians, though, Trump has never played the game of pretending to be nothing out of the ordinary. So is he crazier than anyone else currently in politics? Or is he just crazy in a way we're not used to seeing quite so blatantly revealed? 

A problem finally solved?

I used to wonder why so many travel trailers and motorhomes have that cheap dark fake wood paneling on the interior. Not anymore. Since purchasing the guest cabin, i.e., a thoroughly used Nomad travel trailer, a couple summers ago we've figured it out.

It's to hide the water stains.

There is apparently no way to seal the windows and various seams so that water will not seep in when it rains. We knew there was water damage when we bought it. The S.O. invested many hours in rebuilding the front end, sealing the corners, sealing the roof, and then putting up new paneling on the interior walls. I swear the first time it rained after he'd put that new nice white paneling up there were water stains around the windows. Heck, I'd swear there were times where all it took was a heavy dew and more water stains would appear.

Theoretically, we have now solved the water problem. We moved the carport we got a few years ago for parking the boats under. The boats will now get tarped for the winter; they can survive getting wet. The key thing is tarping them in a way that encourages snow to slide off instead of building up. And, speaking of snow, the S.O. plans to close in the gable ends on the carport down to just above the level of the front window to prevent the white stuff from blowing in and building up on the trailer roof over the winter. End result? The guest cabin should stay dry when it's totally roofed over in a way that discourages water from running down the exterior walls and coming in via the impossible to seal windows.

It has occurred to me that we've managed to put a lot of time and money into something that was supposed to save us the hassle of putting a lot of time and money into building an actual small cabin. At this point, we're both thinking that we should have just done a smaller version of our house. It would have cost a little more, but at least when it was done, it would have been done. With the guest cabin, each time we do something, we're left wondering if we've finally solved the problem. Maybe this time we'll get lucky.

There are days when I admire my self-restraint

Yesterday was one of them.

We recently had a person walk into the museum to volunteer. She's in Baraga temporarily, her spouse is on a short term assignment, she accompanied him and discovered living in a motel room for a month can get boring fast. So she stopped by the museum and asked if there was anything she could do. Of course we said yes. There's always the boring stuff like cleaning fingerprints off display cases and swiftering the floors. And she's literate, which suggested she could help with tasks like proofreading the finding aids or doing whatever the equivalent of ground truthing the finding aids against the actual files might be called. We've got her help for a few more days; she leaves Baraga on Friday.

The finding aids, incidentally, aren't true finding aids quite yet. They're a work in progress. The first step in creating any finding aid is figuring out just exactly what you have. Once you know that, then you can decide the best way to organize things, what categories would be most appropriate, and what is actually worth keeping and what can go into the round file. Back in 2012 when the whole finding aid project began there was nothing, no guide whatsoever to what might be lurking in the "archives." The vertical files were a mess. Not only were things stuck into folders rather randomly, there were two sets of filing cabinets: "Jim's stuff" and the files anyone was free to dig into. It wasn't a huge amount of material -- a total of 17 file drawers in all -- but it was a mess.

Since then, working at it for a few hours at a time one or two days a week I've gone through the files, merged Jim's stuff with everything else, and created an index that now runs about 300 pages long and is still growing. If someone walks into the museum now and wants to know if we have anything on a particular subject, we can pull a 3-ring binder off the shelf and tell them to take a look. It's far from done, definitely still a work in progress, but for sure it qualifies as better than what we had before. Once it's been cleaned up a little more, I'll convert it to a PDF and throw it up on the museum website, but that's probably not going to happen until next year. Before I do that, there are categories that need to moved around, stuff that needs to be either condensed into one file or expanded into multiples, and a reconciliation done between what's in the Archives on PastPerfect and what's listed in the finding aids.

I also know it's got issues. There are typos. There are inconsistencies in how things were entered as the index/finding aid evolved. For sure it needs a good proofreading because like most people I have a really hard time spotting my own typos and bloopers. So yesterday I made the mistake of asking our newest volunteer if she could do some proofreading.

Major mistake. Turns out the woman is a talker. I had computer stuff to do, some minor (filing the museum's 990-N for the 2016 tax year, which ended for us on June 30), some a little more complicated, and I really did not want any interruptions. No such luck. I thought proofreading would be a nice silent task for her. I told her to just highlight everything she saw that struck her as odd or as an obvious error and not to ask me about every bit of weirdness. No such luck.  Every misplaced piece of punctuation, each inconsistency in style, generated a comment or a question. Lots and lots of commenting on the inconsistencies, way too many suggestions on how we could have done it better, and in general way too much noise coming from that side of the office. You want to annoy a former professional copy editor really fast? Suggest to her that she doesn't know how to do bibliographic entries.

The good news is she's still alive.

The bad news is she's coming back this afternoon to torment me some more. I decided that in the interest of getting at least part of the document proofread I can live with the color commentary.

Trees died for this? Ultimate Sacrifice

See end note.

I finally made it to the end of Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for A Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of J.F.K. I'm not sure why I bothered pushing on through the incoherence, tautologies, and general weirdness for almost 800 pages, but I did. I think I kept hoping that the authors would actually tell me something interesting.

For example, the authors say the Central Intelligence Agency (a misnamed agency if there ever was one) indulged in multiple "let's kill Fidel Castro" schemes. The plans ranged from sending in hit squads armed with machine guns to sneaking in various poisons lurking in mundane items: cigars, lotions, pens. Reading that the CIA wanted to assassinate Fidel Castro through the use of a poison pen intrigued me. How exactly was that going to work? What type of strange James Bondian technological wonder had the agency dreamed up? The poison pen plan gets mentioned multiple times, but the authors never do provide more than vague references. I had to Google it. Turns out the pen was rigged with a hypodermic that would supposedly inject poison. mentalfloss.com managed to describe it in one brief sentence; why Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann couldn't do something similar is a mystery.

The pen, incidentally, is one of at least ten methods the CIA has admitted to either trying or planning to try in their attempts to assassinate Castro. If they've admitted to ten, there were probably a whole lot more, all of which quite obviously failed given that Fidel is now 90 years old and still tottering out of the Aging Dictators Nursing Home to make occasional public appearances. We can see just how effectively the Agency managed to spend our taxpayer dollars. I ask again: why does the CIA still exist? (And, yes, I am willing to make the completely amoral argument that if they're going to be evil they should at least be good at it.)

Back to the book. Ultimate Sacrifice is one of the many books that have been written that attempt to explain why President Kennedy was shot. It's a long, rambling, badly focused, repetitive, and rather murky explication of the Mob Hit Theory. The version of the Mob Hit Theory I was most familiar with prior to reading this book is that mobster Sam Giancana had JFK assassinated because JFK was banging Sam's girlfriend, Judith Campbell. This is a theory that always struck me as ridiculous. If Judith Campbell had been anything other than a casual girlfriend to a mobster, she'd have been the one who got whacked for screwing around and not Kennedy for taking advantage of her availability. If anything, if the mob knew about Campbell's intimate encounters with Kennedy, the logical thing to do would be to use it as a blackmail tool. Still, quite a few people apparently believe it.

This book is a variation on the Mob Hit Theory. The authors claim that Kennedy was shot by the mob, but it wasn't because of his love life. Nope. The motive was Bobby Kennedy's emphasis on fighting organized crime. As a Senator, John Kennedy had been aggressive in holding hearings to expose gangster activity, and after he was elected and appointed his brother Attorney General the crime fighting continued. Various mafioso began to feel threatened. Eventually the "godfathers" who controlled Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans got together and decided that much as they'd like to get rid of Bobby Kennedy, the more logical approach was to off JFK. With JFK dead, Bobby wouldn't last long as Attorney General because he and Lyndon Johnson hated each other.

As conspiracy theories, go it's not a bad one. What makes it slide over the line into the tinfoil hat territory pretty quickly is the combination of the authors' tendency to kitchen sink (every little factoid about any of the people involved, no matter how tangential, gets treated with equal seriousness), to rely heavily on hearsay that definitely falls into "a friend of a friend" urban legend category, and to speculate over and over that there are still a gazillion classified documents lurking in the filing cabinets at the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere. You know, there are way too many paragraphs that contain outright speculations, in essence saying "We haven't seen the actual documents, but we're sure they're there." Right. I've known people who believed in the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot who I thought were sliding pretty deeply into wishful thinking and fantasy, but in retrospect they were hardcore realists compared with Waldron and Hartmann.

How does their explanation actually play out? Well, it involves the CIA hiring mafioso to work with Cuban exiles on a plan to overthrow the Castro government. Supposedly, one particular action, a combination coup and invasion, was planned for December 1, 1963. Because the Kennedys wanted to get rid of Castro, Bobby Kennedy was deeply enmeshed in the coup/invasion planning. Why are the mafioso involved? Because they weaseled their way in on purpose so they could set up the Cubans to take the blame. They're going to use the planned coup to help cover up their plans to whack JFK. The reasoning is supposedly that if Bobby Kennedy thinks the Cubans did it, he won't push for a thorough investigation because that would reveal that JFK and Bobby had been plotting to overthrow Castro. It all struck me as unnecessarily complicated as well as illogical. If Kennedy hadn't been whacked, the coup planning would have gone forward as planned, Castro would have been gone, and the gangsters could have gotten their Cuban casinos back. If they had their Cuban casinos, brothels, and drug running safe havens back, they wouldn't have to worry as much about the Justice Department going after them for racketeering in the U.S.

It is true that a number of gangsters were openly gleeful when JFK got shot. So was Jimmy Hoffa, who was so far in bed with organized crime he came close to qualifying as a mobster himself. Does that mean they would have bothered to have come up with a plot with as many moving parts as the plots Waldron and Hartmann propose? I'm doubtful. 

In any case, the authors argue that the mob planned to pin the assassination on Cuba, hoping for an American invasion that would have the same end result as the aborted coup attempt. They manage to fill hundreds of pages of remarkably repetitive text with descriptions of various losers being set up to be patsies with Cuban connections. Lee Harvey Oswald was just one of several who would be manipulated into a position to take the fall. Unfortunately for the mob (and fortunately for the rest of us), LBJ worried a lot more about what the Russians might do than he did about impulsively avenging Kennedy's death.

In the end, the only surprising thing about this book was just how empty of actual content it was. The authors seem to think that the readers are already so thoroughly familiar with the various players involved that they can omit details like just exactly when did Oswald go to the Soviet Union? How long was he there? When he did move back to the U.S.? When did he start working at the Texas Book Depository? How much did he pay for the gun? How did he get the job? Turns out that if I want to know the answers to those questions, once again Google will be my friend.

As for my own thoughts, I can understand why so many people are reluctant to believe that Oswald acted alone. By today's standards, the postmortem examination and forensic investigation following the assassination were a disaster. Potential evidence wasn't secured, the Secret Service actually washed the blood out of the limo before investigators had a chance to do thorough documentation, and numerous other mistakes were made. It definitely did not help that J. Edgar Hoover pushed hard for the single shooter explanation -- he was in full CYA mode because he didn't want it coming out that the FBI had received multiple reports of potential attempts on JFK's life and had basically ignored them all. There was enough bureaucratic ineptitude and silo-ing of information that to anyone who assumes that law enforcement (especially federal law enforcement) knows what it's doing it does look suspiciously like deliberate attempts at obfuscation took place.

I'm skeptical. To me, Oswald strikes me as fitting the profile of semi-delusional misfit so well that I find it totally believable he was the only one involved. We've seen a fair number of these poor saps in the past few decades: John Hinckley thinking he was going to impress Jody Foster by shooting Reagan, Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon, various celebrity stalkers, some of the guys who go on mass shooting rampages. Maybe Oswald really did think he was striking a blow for some ideology, maybe he had deluded himself into believing he was secret agent on a mission, who knows? And, to be blunt, at this late date (almost 53 years after the fact) who cares?

I do know that having read one "who shot JFK?" conspiracy theory book, I am unlikely to ever read another. If this one was typical of the genre I won't be missing much.

Note: Back in 1996 I was living in Blacksburg, VA, and dependent on public transportation to get to and from the Virginia Tech campus. Got on the bus one morning and a seemingly normal-looking (no visible tinfoil) dude was talking to the driver about the X-Files episode he'd watched the night before. It was a long enough ride into town that it slowly dawned on me that the dude thought the X-Files were real. He really did think the television show was a documentary series. No doubt this year he's waiting impatiently to cast his ballot for Trump.

So which is she?

Super villain whose reach extends across time or frail old lady worried that her stash of Depends is about to run out?

I speak, of course, of Hillary Clinton and alt-right cognitive dissonance. The same people who will go on at great length about all the (nonexistent) signs that Hillary is failing physically seem to think she's capable of engaging in time travel to have people whacked. Julian Assange's lawyer dies in an accident the coroner rules a suicide and suddenly it's something Hillary did. Their reasoning? This summer Assange has been hinting that Wikileaks has dirt on Hillary, that he's going to do a data dump that will destroy her campaign. After all, there were all those leaked Democratic National Committee emails released just before the July convention that showed that the party insiders weren't too thrilled with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Supposedly Assange has even more troublesome material stashed and is just waiting for the right time to use it. And that's why the lawyer got whacked, as a warning to Assange.

Only one problem with that latest conspiracy theory. The lawyer stepped in front of a train back in April.

I repeat, April. Almost three full months before the Democratic national convention. Four full months before the lunatic theory about Hillary having him whacked as a warning to Assange showed up in my Facebook feed. The lunatic conspiracy theory meme makes it pretty clear that whoever began circulating it thinks the lawyer died because of the threatened still-to-come data dump. The stupid, it burns.

On the other hand, massive props to Hillary. The alt-right hates Obama and are notable for blaming him for everything, but even at their most fervent they've never seriously suggested he was capable of time travel. Way to go, Hill,you've achieved another first for women everywhere.

A waste of time and money

I heard on the news yesterday that President Obama is planning to visit Louisiana next Tuesday. I have just one question: Why?

What exactly is the point of having heads of state do a personal visit to a disaster? Does it somehow make it less disastrous for the thousands of people who have lost their homes? Does it make it more real for the rest of us? I know there was a lot of complaining going on in various circles about the fact that the President hadn't immediately cancelled his vacation and headed straight for Baton Rouge, but why should he? If the various state and federal agencies are doing their jobs, why does the President need to show up too?

We all know that a lot of what the President does is basically ceremonial: meetings with other heads of state to pretend to talk about stuff that's already been hashed out behind the scenes by various diplomats and policy wonks, giving speeches written by other people, pardoning an occasional turkey, and so on. Do we really need to also require meaningless appearances in areas that have been ravaged by floods or fires or earthquakes? Wouldn't it make life simpler for everyone -- local law enforcement, the Secret Service, taxpayers in general -- if whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office just goes on television and gives the typical "our hearts go out to the people of . . . " speech in which he or she urges us all to donate to relief efforts and let it go at that? No fly-overs, no photo ops with a token aid worker or flood victim or two, just an acknowledgement that something bad happened and various bureaucratic wheels have been set in motion to provide some help.

I noticed that the Governor of Louisiana is smart enough that he very bluntly said that Obama should stay away. Having a President visit for any reason, good or bad, always entails a clusterfuck of almost Biblical proportions. Highways get shut down, traffic's rerouted for hours before the actual visit, hundreds of local law enforcement end up getting pulled away from their regular jobs, businesses unlucky enough to located next to a motorcade route lose money. It's a mess, and it's a distraction from whatever the problem was to begin with.

I am curious as to when this expectation that the President would put in a personal appearance at every natural disaster worth noting first arose. How far back would we have to go to find a time when people didn't expect it? Can we blame Eleanor Roosevelt? Everyone knew that FDR wasn't going to pop in personally to check on conditions, but Eleanor was notorious for wanting to see things for herself.

Apparently not. According to PBS, the expectation that a President would make a personal appearance is much more recent. Until just a few years ago, the typical response was a statement from the White House, and not even a personal statement, more like a press release. For some reason, though, the President is now expected (on top of all the other responsibilities that come with the job) to be the Consoler in Chief, the sin eater who shows up at the wake to reassure the rest of us that everything is going to be okay. It makes no sense, but then most things about politics and public life don't.

Random thoughts at an ungodly early hour

Okay. So I woke up before 4 a.m. and could not get back to sleep. I think I have the world's screwiest biorhythyms. For years it's felt like I'm on a 48 hour cycle -- every other day or so I'm awake much, much earlier than I should be. And then once I'm awake I tend to just lie there thinking about stuff that seems guaranteed to keep me awake instead of falling back asleep like a normal human being. Some mornings I just stay in bed tossing and turning and some mornings I get up and wander the Intertubes. I've read that problems with sleep can get worse as you get older. So what does that mean? I'm going to go from being able to get a normal night's sleep a couple nights a week to not being able to sleep for more than a couple hours at a shot for the rest of my life? In any case, random thoughts at 4 a.m.:

• I'm still obsessing about how damn old the two major party presidential nominees are. I thought this was a youth-obsessed country. How on earth did we manage to end up with geezers at the top of the Republican and Democratic party tickets? I'm younger than either The Donald or Hillary, and I get asked if I need help carrying my groceries out of the store if I buy much more than a loaf of bread and a Coke. And we expect one of these elderly nominees to have the stamina to survive the Presidency? Unreal. Now that both tickets are topped by senior citizens, we're being treated to the spectacle of folks on one side of the political spectrum speculating that a candidate is showing signs of slipping into senile dementia and folks on the other claiming that the candidate they oppose is at death's door and suffering from a seizure disorder but won't admit it. Why weren't those rumors given a major push a year ago so maybe someone younger would have been a little more appealing? It's been a pretty bizarre election year to date and growing more so by the day. On top of the usual electioneering, we're being treated to a dead pool with only two entries. Why bother debating policy when you can just argue that the other party's candidate is going to die soon? 

• I finally figured out the right search term to use to go looking for some display racks for the museum. I knew what I wanted, I could see the product clearly, but I couldn't figure out what to call it. So every time I did an online search, I'd get a bunch of choices that were all not quite right. The display racks were a commercial product (i.e., intended for use in a retail setting), not something that shows up in museum specialty catalogs, so flipping through the Gaylord and similar catalogs didn't help at all. But yesterday it hit me -- I tried the phrase "poster display rack" and voila, multiple choices. Even better, by coincidence the product is actually something we can buy using the heritage grant funds. It qualifies as an exhibit expense. Now it's just a matter of kicking the idea around at the next historical society meeting so there's  input on what size rack to get and where to position it. We've got a lot of photos and maps and various interesting documents that it would be really neat to have accessible to visitors but the amount of wall space for hanging stuff is pretty limited. Bottom line that falls into the good news category: now when I have insomnia, I can lay awake mentally laying out pages for the display rack. It'll beat thinking about some of the other stuff I tend to obsess about.

•  I miss having a cat or a dog around. We've remained pet-less since Cleo died last fall, and much as I'm enjoying not having to sweep up drifts of cat hair and not having a cat box to clean, I miss having a wee beast trying to kill me every time I go up or down the stairs. It still feels odd not to have something underfoot. . . or sprawled across my desk when I'm trying to write a letter. Cleo never tried sprawling on a keyboard, but she would try insinuating herself on to the page when I was writing letters the old-fashioned way with a pen and paper. Most of the letters I mailed probably had cat hair in them. 

•  My car is now more than 7 years old and still going strong. Think the odometer has hit something like 110,000 miles. Back when I bought the Focus in May 2009, I told the sales manager I planned to keep it for at least 7 years. In actual fact, my plan was and always been to drive it into the ground. My goal is to be not just its first owner, but also its last. Every so often, I look at the car and am moderately amazed. I am old enough that I can recall when people did not expect cars to last much beyond 40 or 50 thousand miles. Odometers, which were mechanical, topped out at 99,999.9. It was a big deal if you had a car that was still running when the odometer rolled over to solid zeroes. Now people drive their cars to the moon and back and no one blinks an eye. Even what used to be a major issue up here on the tundra -- the dreaded iron moths -- are becoming an endangered species. Cars just don't rust out as quickly as they used to. No doubt one reason is the increasing use of nonferrous materials (composites, aluminum) but another is better coatings. Rust doesn't penetrate as quickly or as easily it did a couple decades ago. 

• We need to start renting goats. We definitely don't mow the lawn as often as we should, so it's either rent some goats or invest in a baler. I don't want to actually own goats because that would require building a goat barn, worrying about what to do about them in the winter, and, worst of all, dealing with barn chores. My days of shoveling shit are behind me; I have no desire to revisit them.

•  Once I start doing a list with bullet points it's really hard for me to stop.

Bring on the crochet hook

It's cataract couching time. I've lost two lines on the eye chart and there is apparently something unpleasant parked dead center in the lens of my right eye. The ophthalmologist played around with different lens strength combinations and nothing got me lower down the chart. Things have indeed slid past the point where new glasses would make a difference.

Lovely.

The left eye, however, appears stable. No real changes since a year ago so it's possible the slice and pulverize will be limited to just one side. In any case, I see the surgeon next month, and the actual procedure will be in October. I do have this sinking feeling it will be done at the Marquette hospital, a facility that's been scoring in the low D's on quality lately.

Oh well. I'll survive. Or at least I'm going to assume I'll survive -- the alternative would be messy for the S.O. to deal with. 

I did toy with the idea of waiting until next Spring to deal with it, but when Dr. Bauer said the one sitting in the right eye hadn't been there a year ago and is apparently growing fast procrastination did not seem like a good plan. If we play tourist while we're snowbirds it would be nice to actually be able to see the Grand Canyon and not just have a vague impression of a big hole in the ground.

Screw driving, I want to be able to thread needles again

Tomorrow I'm off to see the ophthalmologist. As usual, given my age and previous comments made at the more-or-less annual eye exam, I'm wondering if this will be The Year of Cataract Surgery. Probably not. The last couple of eye exams I've gotten told, yes, you have cataracts but, no, we're not going to do any slicing of eyeballs yet. As long as my vision is still correctable with glasses, the eye doctor is not going to get out the razor blade and crochet hook, or its modern equivalent, to do any couching. Cataract surgery goes back at least to the Middle Ages, as in the days of Richard the Lionhearted and Robin Hood (aka the 12th century) and that is basically what they used to do: slice into the eye and use the a little tiny crochet-type hook to fish the cataracts out. There were "surgeons" who wandered the countryside, moving from village to village, specializing only in eye surgery. I have no clue how effective it was, but it must have beat going totally blind because the surgeons managed to make a living doing it. I'm told the technique has changed a bit in recent decades -- among other things, the cataracts get broken up and sucked out instead of being snared like the world's tiniest frisbees -- but I kind of like that crochet hook image.

I do know that when I see the ophthalmologist this time I'm going to tell her I have one request if she seems to think tweaking the prescription for the glasses will do the trick for another year or two. I messed up last time. She laid it on thick about making sure I had a prescription that helped with driving, made sure I could see really well behind the wheel. Screw that.

I really don't care if I'm seeing multiple yellow lines down the middle of the highway or if the traffic signs are a blur. Traffic is so thin around here that I'm not at much risk of running into anyone else even if I drive with no glasses at all. I'm just barely over the line for legally needing glasses for driving to begin with; the ability to see better when behind the wheel is not on my list of concerns.

No, this time around I'm bringing a needle and thread with me. I figured out a little too late that the eye doctor spent so much time worrying about my distance vision she didn't tweak the up close stuff. I'm not worried at all about being able to see oncoming logging trucks a mile away; what I want to see clearly is the eye on a needle that's right in front of me. If I get told a certain combination is good for a new prescription, I plan to test it by getting out the sewing gear.