Braking news: Our daughter passed her phlebotomy exam! 😀 She improved to a 397 (390 to pass), so she is now certified, or will be in a few weeks (some routine paperwork to complete). This is good news. She had a 389 the last time she took it, so this is a relief for her.
Good morning. Today they are completing the installation of the new boiler. It looks a lot more modern than the old one. Seems like I'm getting my money's worth (I own 9% of it). I went down to the basement to get something and found the atmosphere warm and humid--they are apparently testing it to make sure it puts out heat. We shouldn't need to turn it on again until fall, when they will come back and do some adjustments and calibration, because you really can't tell in this weather.
Speaking of weather, It's sunny and warmish today, finally. But there is smoke in the forecast ("patchy smoke" is specified for late tonight), from wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. And it's supposed to rain starting late afternoon. I think I can get my tomato and impatiens planted out today, now that the weather has warmed up out of the 50s.
Katie drove up to Dunkirk, Indiana (NE of Muncie) to visit a friend with a "long arm", which is a 5 figure sewing machine that can hold a quilt the size of a king sized bed. Fortunately, we don't have room for one. She'll be back this afternoon.
We're awaiting word on whether or not our daughter passed her phlebotomy exam. If she missed she has to wait a year to retake it. She missed it last month by 1 question. She did study some more so we hope....
Work for Katie is a 💩show for now. A Nogoodnik hacked Kettering Health Network's (KHN) IT, and is holding it for an 8 figure ransom. Their network, computers, phones are all down. This means instead of transmitting prescriptions electronically, they are phoning them in on private cell phones. Did I mention this is a 💩 show? Too many over there have forgotten how to fill in a 'scrip manually, so the pharmacists have to prompt them for info. A 'scrip is taking 2-3 minutes to get the info...and only pharmacists can take the calls. Handwritten is okay, unless the Dr's office didn't include all the relevant info, in which case the pharmacist has to refuse to fill it, seriously annoying the customer, who doesn't understand the pharmacist can lose their license if they don't refuse. The chain had an emergency phone call this morning (mandatory but unpaid, of course) offering liberal OT to pharmacists to come in early or work late to clean up the daily 💩 show. So when she comes back she'll go in for an hour or so today to help out, on her day off. 😡Probably tomorrow too! 😡
Tonight I need to go online and freeze my, Katie, and our children's accounts. 🤦♂️ I hope the catch the nogoodnik and sentence him to 10 years of hard labor answering the phone! 😡
That’s quite the IT mess. I think we’re still living in the before-times of denial about the general risks involved here, and the scope and scale of the people behind it. In short, it’s in part tacitly accommodated by the Russo-Chinese-North Korean Axis that’s now openly at war with us.
The global Scam Inc criminal enterprise is estimated to cost the economy some half a trillion dollars at this point, and no one has managed to get a handle on it enough even to slow its growth as an industry.
Basically, at some point we’re going to wake up to the realization that having everything in our economy accessible through the open internet, as opposed to walled-off intranets, puts us in serious jeopardy.
I can confirm that there is very little protection of personal data, almost any of it. A very small company I was working with maybe 15 years ago was fairly easily able to get access to the big credit scoring guys - Equifax etc. I asked the manager to see what he could pull on me, and it was scary. The company wanted just basic economic scoring data, but had access to so much more: all financial accounts, current and previous addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, associated family members, vehicles owned and on and on. I can't remember if SSN but I suspect so. Equifax etc is SUPPOSED to closely guard such access, but they have sales people that are happy to grease the process. If our guys got it, anyone can. And anyone can then sell that data to anyone else (not supposed to but of course they do.) It's a joke. What Equifax etc is doing should be criminal. Since then, I've put a credit freeze on all those services, and check it annually to make sure it's still there.
Our larger business was Software as a Service to health care companies. We had access to 10s of millions of individual health care records. We lived in mortal fear of an existential hack, and took security very very seriously. The greatest of ironies is that we were acquired by a much bigger public company, and as part of that the due diligence on our security was brutal. But we got through that - and then 12 months later the larger company was hacked and ransomed. I've since left the business and sleep much much better.
The burgeoning AI world will open up exponentially more risks, because AI engines (controlled by whom?) MUST have access to all kinds of data to do anything useful. Do I want AI on my smart phone, for example for Siri to be able to make and pay for travel plans with simple voice commands? Does virtually anyone know when the AI is listening? I don't think so.
I predict a university will get hit soon: think of all the FAFSA forms, the tuition/room and board payments, faculty/staff personnel information: Someone could make money selling that data real fast. It needs locked down. I wonder if email should be separated from internal controls, in some way that if an email gets hacked it doesn't get them into the other sections.
We've been officially informed by the Diocese that Father Redacted will be retired as of July 8. It's a Christmas miracle in July! Whatever happens next, as the English music director and the A/V director and I were discussing last Sunday, it can't be worse.
The email from our pastor concluded, "His work at St. Luke, especially with the RCIA program, music ministry, and Hispanic ministry, was outstanding." This is either black irony, evidence of dementia, or an intentional poke in the eye to everyone who's still around in the RCIA program, the music ministry, and the Hispanic ministry. Or some combination with the emphasis on "dementia."
I will send Father Redacted a card, sincerely wishing him a very happy retirement. Nothing against him once he's away from us.
ETA: Unfortunately, the assignments list doesn't mention a replacement, which means we'll be back to our one sick pastor with advancing dementia. I hope he doesn't die. Maybe there will be additional assignments announced later. Anyhow, we'll just show up and do Spanish music until someone tells us to stop or something else happens.
“We offer you this commemorative pen-and-plaque set as acknowledgment for your efforts in exchange for your agreement to work from home from here on out.”
Handcuffed in front of his wife and son, after working on the Manhattan Project, developing the Jet engine and first missles at CalTech and TuteTech, I guess Dr. Qian rightly felt slighted by America.
He then persuaded Mao to develop guided missles et al, and seeded the Chinese technological effort from the early 1950s.
I just succeeded in uploading various financial documents to my mother's adviser/accountant. I had to ask for help at first, but then I did it myself several times. The adviser is licensed in NC, and I don't see why we shouldn't keep using her services. I consider my mother's judgment about a financial adviser to be reliable, even late in her life. She wouldn't have worked with anyone she didn't think was as competent as herself, which was very competent.
Regarding the norm experiments, the "no-snitch" norm seems to be growing in strength (based solely on anecdotal experience). If true, I wonder if our collective skepticism about government - albeit justified - is the cause.
> But why France? After all, its Catholic church has been damaged by home-grown sexual-abuse scandals. Many churches struggle to put bottoms on pews, or priests in the pulpit. Some point to the spiritual effect of the fire that gutted Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, and the painstaking and transcendently successful project to rebuild it—a form of resurrection and an invitation to faith, according to its chaplain. Others suggest a link to the prominence of Catholic-nationalist politicians; a pushback against France’s strict secular culture; or even an unspoken rivalry with Islam in a country with a big Muslim population.
> France does not share America’s starry, big-teeth televangelist culture. Yet even here some younger priests have become mini online stars, helping to spread the word—and prompting the odd clash with the church’s staid hierarchy. Frère Paul-Adrien, a bearded Dominican monk with half a million YouTube followers and an acoustic guitar, is one such influenceur. At Easter he says he received an average of five baptism requests a day: “We are overwhelmed by what is taking place.” <
In general, Gen Z may be experiencing a religious interest that is different from what Millennials had. My youngest has noticed interest in campus ministry is growing since he arrive two years ago, and the young life group he helps lead is doing so as well.
When he was in high school, praying with the other team after a game was rare; now it is becoming much more common.
The article is paywalled, but the picture suggests that one element may be an increasing number of residents from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa.
We find with immigrants from Latin America, especially the poorer/rural ones, that while they identify as Catholic, they may not have received any of the sacraments, including baptism, because of situations in their countries of origin.
Good morning. 60 degrees and overcast, with rain coming most of the day, as the Memorial begins the second round. Rain during the Memorial is something of a tradition. Last year’s winner and current PGA champ Scott Scheffler is in the lead.
The mothership reports on how populist tax breaks like no tax on tips have crowded out family friendly measures from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. The FP has their usual Friday potpourri.
Not sure if it was previously reported here, but George Wendt, the actor who played Norm on "Cheers" passed away last week at 76. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyIeAa7R8t0
That’s the problem in general, though. Figuring out the norms in a small-scale society of hunter-gatherers, tribal herdsmen, or maybe your local bowling league: that’s all relatively easy and straightforward.
But when it comes to faraway people we know from mass media, the rules are no longer as clearcut. There’s a lot that looks like a bagatelle violation when you happen to like the player(s) in question. But if it’s performed by those you don’t agree with, we’re talking about serious norm violations for which punishment cannot be too harsh.
Norms aside, the great horned owlet is hanging out on the tree branches now and is darn adorable. I hear him calling at night for food. The neighbor’s driveway is littered with pellets and there was a rabbit leg under the tree yesterday.
My cat was an excellent hunter. Would bring everything into the house & chow down on everything except the intestines. But he never killed chipmunks. He’d bring them in dangling from his mouth, find the dog, sit, & drop the chipmunk & calmly watch the dog chase that critter all over the house. This is when I lived in another state with more land with doggy door. I often helped by opening doors to get that chipmunk out. More often than not the dog would catch it, shake it, throw it onto the floor or wall a few times till she’d nudge to make sure she could take it outside. Sometimes the chipmunk would climb behind a bookcase… I have no idea how often this happened when I wasn’t home…
Quite true. As Lloyd Bridges says in "Airplane!": "Looks like I picked the wrong time to quit drinking". (and smoking, and sniffing glue, and doing cocaine, etc etc).
I think that both parts of that are features of our basic social instincts: the part where we have norms for Our Group that we enforce by various mechanisms, and the part where Our Group defines itself against Other Group.
That’s surely a big part of it. We’ve got the tribal instinct that allows us to imagine members of Other Group aren’t actual humans.
In most languages, tracing the root words for what a people call themselves ends in some variant of “the real people” or “genuine human beings” or suchlike.
There have been some legal processes regarding front-yard vegetables. I don't think any of them succeeded in convincing even quite local authorities that it's anything but personal preference, even though neighbors were trying to get "code enforcement" involved.
our HOA rules are really riduculous! But many are not enforced. Then there's the randomness --- some people receive letters of noncompliance, others don't. We live in an area w/ close to 9,000 homes. I imagine if someone were to go way off kilter, & plant a vegetable garden in the small front yard, they'd receive notice. Because they'd have to put a tall fence around it to keep the deer out.
wish I could post of pic of what's in our front yard. A Whale's Tongue agave, that's about 20 yrs old, that is going thru the Bloom of Death. That stalk is taller than our house top, & has about 2 dozen 'limbs' of blooms/budding, attracting yellowjackets & hummingbirds. We waited till sundown to put a Jack in the Beanstalk doll on it :-). I don't think our HOA will mind the doll. The Bloom is getting a lot of sightseers taking pics. It's sad to think it'll leave a huge bare spot in our yard this time next yr. We'll replace it w/ an Americana Agave which looks similar but reproduces from shoots around the base of the plant, & they grow faster & are less expensive.
If we had vegetables in the front, I expect we'd get deer, too. I see one in the front yard every now and then, just passing through.
Our HOA is only mildly irritating. They sent us a nastygram about "weeds" in our front flowerbeds a couple of years ago, in like April when the plants were growing up but weren't blooming yet. My husband took a picture and labelled each of the plants, as well as a rock, a birdfeeder, the cat, etc. Problem solved.
It turned out that, as long as you responded to them, they really didn't care.
I'm thankful we live in a rural area where we can reasonably do as we please. Of course, that also means ripe fertilizer on the fields (and concurrent invasions of flies), neighbors target shooting on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon, and sharing landscape plants and garden produce with our native wildlife friends.
We chose to live in a neighborhood without an HOA. They are a nuisance. Our condo has one, but we knew to expect that, and they are pretty good. Expensive (maintaining an older building often is), but it stays quiet and is well maintained. I get it there--it's apartment living.
Yeah...I know HOA's. A big chunk of my business was "consulting" with HOA's on technical issues, with "consulting" meaning being tasked with figuring out how to make everything "illegal" using the building codes and manufacturers required or recommended practices. I didn't like the work but it paid well.
"For minor violations, violators may become fair game for targeted theft of their belongings when they’re not looking. They may find their garden plots or sleeping quarters damaged in some way. They face targeted gossipy whisper campaigns to damage their reputations even further."
Sounds like school, where the "norm violations" can include wearing clothes out of fashion, behaving non-disruptively in class, and knowing the material.
There is an article in the NYT this morning, delving into why young people are having fewer children. As is common, the article has in my view unnecessarily extended complexity. The article identifies how increased awareness of psychological "harms" is a large part of the problem. An irony is the article itself is in a way yet another permission to find oneself a victim. Of being conditioned to be a victim.
"Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life."
I've had children say, "You're the one who decided to have me, so you ..." [have the responsibility to put my clothes away, or whatever he doesn't want to do.] "Would you like me to breathe for you, as well?"
This kind of thing can result, for GenX parents, in a deep sense of "Yeah, whatever." I don't worry about "the world we're leaving to our children." They'll get what's coming to them, just like we did, and they'll either make the best of it, or not, and that's on them.
Clean
Braking news: Our daughter passed her phlebotomy exam! 😀 She improved to a 397 (390 to pass), so she is now certified, or will be in a few weeks (some routine paperwork to complete). This is good news. She had a 389 the last time she took it, so this is a relief for her.
Well done! 🎉🤩🫀⛑️🩺🩸🩹
Congratulations! Now you can get her a sticker that says, "I'm a phlebotomist. I make grown men cry."
Good morning. Today they are completing the installation of the new boiler. It looks a lot more modern than the old one. Seems like I'm getting my money's worth (I own 9% of it). I went down to the basement to get something and found the atmosphere warm and humid--they are apparently testing it to make sure it puts out heat. We shouldn't need to turn it on again until fall, when they will come back and do some adjustments and calibration, because you really can't tell in this weather.
Speaking of weather, It's sunny and warmish today, finally. But there is smoke in the forecast ("patchy smoke" is specified for late tonight), from wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. And it's supposed to rain starting late afternoon. I think I can get my tomato and impatiens planted out today, now that the weather has warmed up out of the 50s.
Katie drove up to Dunkirk, Indiana (NE of Muncie) to visit a friend with a "long arm", which is a 5 figure sewing machine that can hold a quilt the size of a king sized bed. Fortunately, we don't have room for one. She'll be back this afternoon.
We're awaiting word on whether or not our daughter passed her phlebotomy exam. If she missed she has to wait a year to retake it. She missed it last month by 1 question. She did study some more so we hope....
Work for Katie is a 💩show for now. A Nogoodnik hacked Kettering Health Network's (KHN) IT, and is holding it for an 8 figure ransom. Their network, computers, phones are all down. This means instead of transmitting prescriptions electronically, they are phoning them in on private cell phones. Did I mention this is a 💩 show? Too many over there have forgotten how to fill in a 'scrip manually, so the pharmacists have to prompt them for info. A 'scrip is taking 2-3 minutes to get the info...and only pharmacists can take the calls. Handwritten is okay, unless the Dr's office didn't include all the relevant info, in which case the pharmacist has to refuse to fill it, seriously annoying the customer, who doesn't understand the pharmacist can lose their license if they don't refuse. The chain had an emergency phone call this morning (mandatory but unpaid, of course) offering liberal OT to pharmacists to come in early or work late to clean up the daily 💩 show. So when she comes back she'll go in for an hour or so today to help out, on her day off. 😡Probably tomorrow too! 😡
Tonight I need to go online and freeze my, Katie, and our children's accounts. 🤦♂️ I hope the catch the nogoodnik and sentence him to 10 years of hard labor answering the phone! 😡
That’s quite the IT mess. I think we’re still living in the before-times of denial about the general risks involved here, and the scope and scale of the people behind it. In short, it’s in part tacitly accommodated by the Russo-Chinese-North Korean Axis that’s now openly at war with us.
The global Scam Inc criminal enterprise is estimated to cost the economy some half a trillion dollars at this point, and no one has managed to get a handle on it enough even to slow its growth as an industry.
Basically, at some point we’re going to wake up to the realization that having everything in our economy accessible through the open internet, as opposed to walled-off intranets, puts us in serious jeopardy.
I can confirm that there is very little protection of personal data, almost any of it. A very small company I was working with maybe 15 years ago was fairly easily able to get access to the big credit scoring guys - Equifax etc. I asked the manager to see what he could pull on me, and it was scary. The company wanted just basic economic scoring data, but had access to so much more: all financial accounts, current and previous addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, associated family members, vehicles owned and on and on. I can't remember if SSN but I suspect so. Equifax etc is SUPPOSED to closely guard such access, but they have sales people that are happy to grease the process. If our guys got it, anyone can. And anyone can then sell that data to anyone else (not supposed to but of course they do.) It's a joke. What Equifax etc is doing should be criminal. Since then, I've put a credit freeze on all those services, and check it annually to make sure it's still there.
Our larger business was Software as a Service to health care companies. We had access to 10s of millions of individual health care records. We lived in mortal fear of an existential hack, and took security very very seriously. The greatest of ironies is that we were acquired by a much bigger public company, and as part of that the due diligence on our security was brutal. But we got through that - and then 12 months later the larger company was hacked and ransomed. I've since left the business and sleep much much better.
The burgeoning AI world will open up exponentially more risks, because AI engines (controlled by whom?) MUST have access to all kinds of data to do anything useful. Do I want AI on my smart phone, for example for Siri to be able to make and pay for travel plans with simple voice commands? Does virtually anyone know when the AI is listening? I don't think so.
Sadly, I agree.
I predict a university will get hit soon: think of all the FAFSA forms, the tuition/room and board payments, faculty/staff personnel information: Someone could make money selling that data real fast. It needs locked down. I wonder if email should be separated from internal controls, in some way that if an email gets hacked it doesn't get them into the other sections.
I wonder what rule Norm from Cheers broke that he died last week? 🤔 Must have been a big one.
We've been officially informed by the Diocese that Father Redacted will be retired as of July 8. It's a Christmas miracle in July! Whatever happens next, as the English music director and the A/V director and I were discussing last Sunday, it can't be worse.
The email from our pastor concluded, "His work at St. Luke, especially with the RCIA program, music ministry, and Hispanic ministry, was outstanding." This is either black irony, evidence of dementia, or an intentional poke in the eye to everyone who's still around in the RCIA program, the music ministry, and the Hispanic ministry. Or some combination with the emphasis on "dementia."
I will send Father Redacted a card, sincerely wishing him a very happy retirement. Nothing against him once he's away from us.
ETA: Unfortunately, the assignments list doesn't mention a replacement, which means we'll be back to our one sick pastor with advancing dementia. I hope he doesn't die. Maybe there will be additional assignments announced later. Anyhow, we'll just show up and do Spanish music until someone tells us to stop or something else happens.
I once "praised" someone by noting "she has done a lot of work." You may perhaps imagine what was left unsaid. The "work" was very counterproductive.
“We offer you this commemorative pen-and-plaque set as acknowledgment for your efforts in exchange for your agreement to work from home from here on out.”
"I see the quality of your work is up to your usual standards"
"I must say, you've certainly met my expectations" 🙂
"Outstanding," like "consequential," doesn't necessarily convey positivity, although I believe it's intended to in this case.
Anyway, the happy day is now solidly identified, woo-hoo.
A classic reactionary response to a "non" norm breaking - normal US person -
The U.S. Deported This Chinese Scientist, in a Decision That Changed World History
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/visas-china-rockets-scientist-technology.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE8.ozXX.D47eyOzvy3un&smid=url-share
Handcuffed in front of his wife and son, after working on the Manhattan Project, developing the Jet engine and first missles at CalTech and TuteTech, I guess Dr. Qian rightly felt slighted by America.
He then persuaded Mao to develop guided missles et al, and seeded the Chinese technological effort from the early 1950s.
There has been a few of these...eminent scientists trying to be Americans that got deported because they're Chinese.
There's a fear the Chinese are spying on us, unlike the NSA of course!
I’m fine with the NSA. China too. Of course everyone’s spying.
This trip, I learned some stuff. I hesitate to get into it because it is not at all in line with the sanctified nonsense we get in Western media.
I can respect that.
I just succeeded in uploading various financial documents to my mother's adviser/accountant. I had to ask for help at first, but then I did it myself several times. The adviser is licensed in NC, and I don't see why we shouldn't keep using her services. I consider my mother's judgment about a financial adviser to be reliable, even late in her life. She wouldn't have worked with anyone she didn't think was as competent as herself, which was very competent.
Comments glitch- can see only two. 😞
Regarding the norm experiments, the "no-snitch" norm seems to be growing in strength (based solely on anecdotal experience). If true, I wonder if our collective skepticism about government - albeit justified - is the cause.
France is experiencing a boom in Catholic baptisms, the Economist reports, with numbers doubling between Easter ‘23 and this year (to over 10K).
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/05/26/frances-improbable-adult-baptism-boom
Not sure if the link is paywall-free.
To cite generously:
> But why France? After all, its Catholic church has been damaged by home-grown sexual-abuse scandals. Many churches struggle to put bottoms on pews, or priests in the pulpit. Some point to the spiritual effect of the fire that gutted Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, and the painstaking and transcendently successful project to rebuild it—a form of resurrection and an invitation to faith, according to its chaplain. Others suggest a link to the prominence of Catholic-nationalist politicians; a pushback against France’s strict secular culture; or even an unspoken rivalry with Islam in a country with a big Muslim population.
> France does not share America’s starry, big-teeth televangelist culture. Yet even here some younger priests have become mini online stars, helping to spread the word—and prompting the odd clash with the church’s staid hierarchy. Frère Paul-Adrien, a bearded Dominican monk with half a million YouTube followers and an acoustic guitar, is one such influenceur. At Easter he says he received an average of five baptism requests a day: “We are overwhelmed by what is taking place.” <
In general, Gen Z may be experiencing a religious interest that is different from what Millennials had. My youngest has noticed interest in campus ministry is growing since he arrive two years ago, and the young life group he helps lead is doing so as well.
When he was in high school, praying with the other team after a game was rare; now it is becoming much more common.
If I had to guess, a combination of the Notre Dame fire and Muslim immigration.
The article is paywalled, but the picture suggests that one element may be an increasing number of residents from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa.
We find with immigrants from Latin America, especially the poorer/rural ones, that while they identify as Catholic, they may not have received any of the sacraments, including baptism, because of situations in their countries of origin.
Interesting. As trends go, there are worse things that could happen.
Good morning. 60 degrees and overcast, with rain coming most of the day, as the Memorial begins the second round. Rain during the Memorial is something of a tradition. Last year’s winner and current PGA champ Scott Scheffler is in the lead.
The mothership reports on how populist tax breaks like no tax on tips have crowded out family friendly measures from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. The FP has their usual Friday potpourri.
Love the NORM! at the end. He was so good in Cheers.
Not sure if it was previously reported here, but George Wendt, the actor who played Norm on "Cheers" passed away last week at 76. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyIeAa7R8t0
And his nephew is Jason Sudekis
Did not know that.
It was a big story in Chicago.
well, I might agree, however, go back to the cover up of Biden.... now what do you say???
That’s the problem in general, though. Figuring out the norms in a small-scale society of hunter-gatherers, tribal herdsmen, or maybe your local bowling league: that’s all relatively easy and straightforward.
But when it comes to faraway people we know from mass media, the rules are no longer as clearcut. There’s a lot that looks like a bagatelle violation when you happen to like the player(s) in question. But if it’s performed by those you don’t agree with, we’re talking about serious norm violations for which punishment cannot be too harsh.
Norms aside, the great horned owlet is hanging out on the tree branches now and is darn adorable. I hear him calling at night for food. The neighbor’s driveway is littered with pellets and there was a rabbit leg under the tree yesterday.
Elegant creatures make for sloppy eaters.
I'm elegant! 😀
Cats.
My cat was an excellent hunter. Would bring everything into the house & chow down on everything except the intestines. But he never killed chipmunks. He’d bring them in dangling from his mouth, find the dog, sit, & drop the chipmunk & calmly watch the dog chase that critter all over the house. This is when I lived in another state with more land with doggy door. I often helped by opening doors to get that chipmunk out. More often than not the dog would catch it, shake it, throw it onto the floor or wall a few times till she’d nudge to make sure she could take it outside. Sometimes the chipmunk would climb behind a bookcase… I have no idea how often this happened when I wasn’t home…
Our cats mainly ate heads.
I watched one teach its young to fly from one tree to another a few years ago. Loved it!!
what happens when you don't like any of the players?
*drink*
My doctor says that's bad for your liver.
Quite true. As Lloyd Bridges says in "Airplane!": "Looks like I picked the wrong time to quit drinking". (and smoking, and sniffing glue, and doing cocaine, etc etc).
You just feel violated, presumably.
or sickened
I think that both parts of that are features of our basic social instincts: the part where we have norms for Our Group that we enforce by various mechanisms, and the part where Our Group defines itself against Other Group.
WWN - The Battle of the Norms !!
News is now how AI is taking over - so battle bots! I used to get a kick out of watching that show
That’s surely a big part of it. We’ve got the tribal instinct that allows us to imagine members of Other Group aren’t actual humans.
In most languages, tracing the root words for what a people call themselves ends in some variant of “the real people” or “genuine human beings” or suchlike.
And the nearest neighbors are "Our Enemies".
I say that more than one thing can be bad, and more than one person can be unfit to be either president or animal control officer.
Is growing vegetables in one's front yard instead of grass violating a norm? I think there's such a thing as victimless norm violating.
There have been some legal processes regarding front-yard vegetables. I don't think any of them succeeded in convincing even quite local authorities that it's anything but personal preference, even though neighbors were trying to get "code enforcement" involved.
HOA rules are a different thing, though.
our HOA rules are really riduculous! But many are not enforced. Then there's the randomness --- some people receive letters of noncompliance, others don't. We live in an area w/ close to 9,000 homes. I imagine if someone were to go way off kilter, & plant a vegetable garden in the small front yard, they'd receive notice. Because they'd have to put a tall fence around it to keep the deer out.
wish I could post of pic of what's in our front yard. A Whale's Tongue agave, that's about 20 yrs old, that is going thru the Bloom of Death. That stalk is taller than our house top, & has about 2 dozen 'limbs' of blooms/budding, attracting yellowjackets & hummingbirds. We waited till sundown to put a Jack in the Beanstalk doll on it :-). I don't think our HOA will mind the doll. The Bloom is getting a lot of sightseers taking pics. It's sad to think it'll leave a huge bare spot in our yard this time next yr. We'll replace it w/ an Americana Agave which looks similar but reproduces from shoots around the base of the plant, & they grow faster & are less expensive.
https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=38998
Here are some pictures!
Yes!! that's it! Thank you!
We should have named ours... And that's correct, the bees are up top & the flies are down by the leaves of the plant.
It's rare to see agaves where I live (the Charlotte, NC, area).
That's really cool!
If we had vegetables in the front, I expect we'd get deer, too. I see one in the front yard every now and then, just passing through.
Our HOA is only mildly irritating. They sent us a nastygram about "weeds" in our front flowerbeds a couple of years ago, in like April when the plants were growing up but weren't blooming yet. My husband took a picture and labelled each of the plants, as well as a rock, a birdfeeder, the cat, etc. Problem solved.
It turned out that, as long as you responded to them, they really didn't care.
HOAs are an invasive species somewhere between crabgrass and giant African snails.
I'm thankful we live in a rural area where we can reasonably do as we please. Of course, that also means ripe fertilizer on the fields (and concurrent invasions of flies), neighbors target shooting on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon, and sharing landscape plants and garden produce with our native wildlife friends.
We chose to live in a neighborhood without an HOA. They are a nuisance. Our condo has one, but we knew to expect that, and they are pretty good. Expensive (maintaining an older building often is), but it stays quiet and is well maintained. I get it there--it's apartment living.
Yeah...I know HOA's. A big chunk of my business was "consulting" with HOA's on technical issues, with "consulting" meaning being tasked with figuring out how to make everything "illegal" using the building codes and manufacturers required or recommended practices. I didn't like the work but it paid well.
"For minor violations, violators may become fair game for targeted theft of their belongings when they’re not looking. They may find their garden plots or sleeping quarters damaged in some way. They face targeted gossipy whisper campaigns to damage their reputations even further."
Sounds like school, where the "norm violations" can include wearing clothes out of fashion, behaving non-disruptively in class, and knowing the material.
Good point. Never occurred to me before, but so obvious.
We're all the product of our own experiences.
There is an article in the NYT this morning, delving into why young people are having fewer children. As is common, the article has in my view unnecessarily extended complexity. The article identifies how increased awareness of psychological "harms" is a large part of the problem. An irony is the article itself is in a way yet another permission to find oneself a victim. Of being conditioned to be a victim.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html
"Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life."
That was a really interesting article.
I've had children say, "You're the one who decided to have me, so you ..." [have the responsibility to put my clothes away, or whatever he doesn't want to do.] "Would you like me to breathe for you, as well?"
This kind of thing can result, for GenX parents, in a deep sense of "Yeah, whatever." I don't worry about "the world we're leaving to our children." They'll get what's coming to them, just like we did, and they'll either make the best of it, or not, and that's on them.