Deeply cynical sister Gail sent me this. She was at Target and saw this, and she knew what the label would say. Maybe not exactly, just that it would NOT say, "Made in America."
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It's All Done Now

Finally, you will be spared further stories of the Chelan house.

Yesterday I popped in for about two hours to pick up the last of the garbage and books and sundry crap that I've been hauling over the Cascades to work on it and furnish it. Turns out I have people moving in to the house for the coming two years, so all my stuff had to go home. No more midnight swims; no more morning coffee on the water.

Here are two pics. The way I got it, and the way I left it...

Before...
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...after!
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Filthy, Lying Criminals

Someone, please, wake everyone up.
(Click on title for link to story.)

...
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The Future is a Present to be Past

I am hostage to history.

This is not an A&E special. This is my basement.

The things I have. I still have. I bought new shelves this week from Costco just to store these things. Again. I move them. I look inside, thinking of things past. I don’t know why I hold them.

Some sentimental. Some just garbage I was told to keep.

I have a row of large, bulky, beautifully decorated glossy boxes from Microsoft and Adobe. They once contained a slim silvery disk with more data on them than my entire home could house. But still, they come with large books – many hundreds of pages – weighing pounds. Boxes with books and air and an enormous amount of data on a thing the size of a whisper. Keep the whisper.

Do you want an Operator Manual for Windows 95? I have two. How about for Photoshop 6.5? I’m using 7.0 anyway. (I put these all in the recycling now.)

Here are grade reports from my Freshman year in college. The FBI, I suspect, has these too. Why do I keep them? Perhaps this paper seems too…real…to throw away. It’s not a memory. It was issued by a secretary who actually typed the ink onto the paper. Now retired. Or dead. Her children had to throw her crap away.

I know I made a deposit at First National in Boulder at 12:38 p.m. on October 12^th, 1983. That’s a memory I’ll cherish.

This is a somewhat creased photograph of a person who used to be a friend. He’s having fun in this picture, smiling with me. He pathologically pursued sex with each of my ex-girlfriends in college. Sometimes he succeeded. Eventually he dropped out…and years later married the woman who was married to his "best friend" who had died. He must have been part dog, this former friend of mine. Why do I have this photo? (I tear it in half and throw it away.)

Clothes? Size what? Was I ever that size? (Boxes now going to Goodwill.)

Radios. Printers. Many electronics. That CD player that started doing that thing. That thing that was not right, and I thought, “I’ll try to fix that.” And it’s six years now. It needs to go away.

There would be so much more air in my house with these things gone.

I need more air.

An Ideal in the Storm

"Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream." - Eric Hoffer, 1955

It's Like A Little Baby in Your Belly

Apropos of nothing. Just FREAKY, and I know some of you turn to me for your freak...

Doctors in Bangladesh say they have removed a long-dead foetus from the abdomen of a teenage boy who was complaining of stomach pains.

Full story right here - from the beeb no less

Somewhere under the rainbow... Flying back from Chelan yesterday, spotted this great corona over the Columbia gorge. There were two nearly complete circles around the sun.
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