Today is K's birthday. She is more beautiful than the day I married her, forever youthful and filled with smiles and grace.
We'll be having a celebratory dinner tomorrow -- she wants pho -- but today, we went to Furman for an informal concert as part of their Music by the Lake summer series. Since today's performance included Rhapsody in Blue (?!?!), it was held indoors: a piano wouldn't handle South Carolina humidity very well at all.
The Boy and I spent a little time working on my classroom. I head back in a week; the kids go back in two.
I was toying with the idea of changing things up in my room, but everything has been as it is for about the last six years and it works -- so why change it?
"Let's play a family board game tonight!" the Boy declared. The Girl was at track practice, and the three of us were going to head out for a mountain biking adventure before it began raining. But the Boy still wanted to do something together.
He wanted Monopoly (as always); we agreed to play Sequence.
It's a game we've played a lot over the years, and somewhere, I have a picture (and a post) of us playing it with Nana and Papa.
Perhaps this will be a game we play together when the kids come back home for a visit...
We dedicated today to our elderberries. I clipped the clusters from the bush in the late morning, and K spent a lot of time pulling the small black pearls from their clusters as I worked and after I finished when I joined her.
And when I say we dedicated today to the elderberries, I mean the whole day. As I type (and work on my safety videos for school), K is finishing up, filling jars with fresh elderberry preserves.
We ended up with something like who-knows-how-many kilos of berries (was it four? five? I can't recall) which will make who-knows-how-many pints of preserves.
The other task for the evening was helping the Boy get his room straightened up, a Sisyphean task if ever there be one. We ended up throwing out quite a bit of stuff, an act that initially stressed and frustrated the Boy a great deal.
Surrendering even the smallest trinket is difficult for someone as sentimental as E. I can understand that, though I hope eventually to grow out of it myself.
During our trips to Florida this summer, I noticed several interesting billboards. Many of them were theological; one was political:
This notion is perhaps the most loaded statement I've read in recent memory. It's certainly the most terrifying.
From the perspective of those who financed the billboard it is a statement about the 2020 election and the ever-persistent myth that somehow the Democrats committed election fraud. The complete lack of evidence for this is no matter: those who hold this view simply acknowledge non-facts as evidence. Those of us firmly grounded in reality are simply and willfully ignorant.
But just what are those catastrophic consequences? Again, from their perspective, it's multifaceted. First, there's simply the idea that an unelected individual is currently holding the nation's highest office. Were that true, it would be catastrophic. But there's a second notion hiding in that statement: what are people who believe this -- in their own eyes, good and God-fearing patriots, one and all -- to do about it? A recent article in Newsweek points out that there are renewed calls from the far right for civil war:
[Trump's post on Truth Social] warning that 2024 will be the new 1776 is in line with other threats of looming civil wars in the U.S. made by Trump supporters following the New York jury verdict on Thursday which found the former president guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money trial.
Newsweek
In Boston University's BU Today, staff members write,
A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”
BU Today
The billboard, then, suggests to informed drivers that a civil war might be the necessary outcome of such Democratic duplicity.
The attempted assassination of Trump will only add to this.
What politicians need to be doing now is talking us back from this brink. Biden and the Democrats seem to be doing this. What will Trump do? Will he try to quell this anger or will he stoke it? I don't think there's any doubt about how the man will react.
Those of us who warned friends and family around us who supported Trump in 2016 that he is a dangerous man continually feel more vindicated, but right now, I'd rather be proved wrong.
It was like finding cash in a coat pocket, but better: old pictures I'd never posted here. These are from 2014 when we spent the week at Deep Creek.
E is now twice the age L was during this vacation.
