Winter Hats and Other Observations Friday Round-Up

I love seeing the super-rich guy getting flummoxed by a 250-year-old institution (Congress) because he thought it was just a bunch of guys waiting for him to tell them what to do. Oh Elon. Failure to read the room is such a common problem for saviors. You really ought to study a little American history before you tweet yourself into a knot.

We wear hats in the house pretty much all winter. We do have heat, but we are both oddly averse to very much heat and prefer that soft breeze through our ancient house’s old first floor windows. When ‘people’ are coming, we turn up the heat. It’s disconcerting to have folks in coats at the dinner table, hunkering while they eat. The food is always hot though.

Stumped about how to start a story, any story, anything, I typed the first words that came to me, just like Hemingway suggested. Her hands still stank of fish. What unfolded was a curious tale but one so clear and dear to me that I could’ve lived it myself. That, I think, is the magic of short story writing. Take a quick ride down a very tall slide, just like when you were a kid. A novel, well, that requires outlines and plotting and organization. I’ll stick with sliding.

The flags in Wisconsin are at half-staff at the direction of Governor Evers. This is in recognition of the school shooting that occurred Monday in Madison. Three people died, including the shooter, and two remain in serious condition. A terrible situation. But one not unfamiliar to us in Milwaukee where 142 people, including 25 under age 18, have been murdered this year without any attention to flags. If I was one of their mothers, I’d wonder why, not that having a flag lowered would make any difference.

Knee Camp wears us down at time but we are good at getting a second (third, fourth) wind. Every other day, somebody (today it was our auto mechanic) tells us that knee surgery is really hard to recover from, and we nod. Yes, it is. We try to stay in the frame of mind that says we are lucky to have this technology but part of me, especially today after several inches of snow, wishes getting around wasn’t such a challenge and that the team that we are as a couple was at full strength, which it is but not in its usual way.