Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: June 28th

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1. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

   It is 73 degrees in Tucson 🌵 with an expected daytime high of 97. Overcast skies right now with partly cloudy skies in the forecast. Sadly, none of the clouds will yield rain and ignorant people will be shooting off illegal backyard fireworks into the dry washes and wooded areas. People are dumb.

   My Fourth of July reflection is that most of the people celebrating don’t realize what they are commemorating. The holiday has been hijacked by a megalomaniacal drooling dotard who is bent on destroying the democracy established 250 years ago. Celebrating a document written by slave owners to break away from one king that led to a Constitution with no checks on the power of political parties to ratfk the country and install a new king doesn’t do much for me. Alexander Hamilton:

   “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

   The Republican Party, which allowed this to happen, should be burned to the ground and the ashes salted so that it may never rise again.

   I will have a day off from client expectations and will spend time watching sporting events and catching up on organizing personal documents. We do not know the fireworks “traditions” of our new neighborhood but I hope they are sensible. We used to be able to see the town fireworks from our apartment balcony but we are too high up and too surrounded by rooftops to see them from here (we can see the mountains but not the foothills). We may try to find a higher vantage point – or not! I used to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over Lake Michigan from the lakefront in Milwaukee and nothing really matches that for sheer drama and excitement and traffic jams. A quiet night at home sounds more pleasant.

   See all y’all later!

   Fierce

   • Jan, is your little dog still alive? Doggies hate fireworks.

     Fierce

     • I have a granddog now! She does not like fireworks either but she is not as terrified as my older doggie was. As she aged, she eventually lost her hearing and was not as agitated. She was a wonderful dog who succumbed to liver disease but who shared our lives for 10 years after we rescued her.

       Fierce

2. It’s 77 heat index 84 heading for 92 heat index 97 (I bet it will be higher when it gets here) and sunny at the moment. Yesterday we generated 18.07 and the m-t-d at 53.44 gained a little. Clouds are supposed to move in later today. We shall see what we shall see.

   Watered all of Natalia’s plants this morning. It is already really sticky out there. After the cats had their breakfasts the guys lounged about watching Jenny bounce all over the place doing kitten things. And when Jenny started pouncing on Bobbie, he batted a pine pellet into the middle of the room and then relaxed again as she pounced on and played with that. She’s exhausted her morning kitten energy now and everybody (except me) is napping.

   There’s not a lot to celebrate about this country – never was but I had to dig through the myth and Hollywood history to find that out – but the ideal of America is good. Not original except to Euro-white people. Many Indigenous peoples were living it, are still trying to live it, before they were invaded. But still good. Meanwhile there’s reality to deal with and I’d best be about my boosting day. Holding the Healing/Helping/Protecting Thought for everybody. {{{Meeses}}}

   Fierce

   • Our newspaper had a story (sorry, paywall) about what it was like in Tucson (called “S-cuk Ṣon” by the native O’odham tribes, a word that means “black base” to describe their home among the dark volcanic flanks of the hills nearby) on July 4th 1776:

     July 4, 1776, was just another hot summer day at the birthplace of Tucson along the Santa Cruz River.

     As the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to ratify the Declaration of Independence, the people of this desert valley more than 2,000 miles away were working in their fields, tending livestock and living much as they had been for centuries.[…]

     O’odham men from the Santa Cruz River Valley and elsewhere would walk to the Gulf of Mexico to collect salt and seashells using trails still visible today in the Gila Bend and Yuma areas. Indigenous trade networks had brought Hopi and Zuni pottery to the Sonoran Desert, but in 1776, the residents of S-cuk Ṣon still had few Mexican or European goods, beyond the rare metal knife or needle or the religious items handed out by priests. […]

     July 4, 1776, likely saw the O’odham busy in the fields or with domestic chores, while sentries from the group perched atop Sentinel Peak to watch for Apaches and the approach of summer storms. […]

     To the extent that the late-18th century Indigenous inhabitants of the area knew about the American Revolution, it probably didn’t mean much to them.

     “O’odham do not think of their history in terms of the western calendar,” said David Martinez, an Akimel and Hia-ced O’odham professor of American Indian Studies at ASU, where he also serves as director of the Institute for Transborder Indigenous Nations. “July 4, 1776, actually has no cultural meaning for us.”

     Actually, it has no cultural meaning for me as one of those left out of the “independence” being declared on July 4, 1776. It was for white male landowners (assumed to be Christian); women would not be given the right to vote until 1920 and have had to fight tooth and nail for other rights like the right to manage their own affairs not available until the coverture laws were nullified in 1981, in the part of the Roe v Wade ruling that was not shat upon by the Alito-Sanders Court in 2022. The holiday that I will celebrate wholeheartedly has not yet occurred – maybe if a future Congress and 2/3rd of the states ratify an Equal Rights Amendment, we will have a day that female Americans can celebrate as Independence Day.

     Fierce

     • Thank you. Yes, the rest of the world was living their normal – and very civilized – lives. Growing food, trading, keeping vigilance in case of danger – not looking for it but prepared to meet it, when white Xtian land, property, & slave owners declared their independence from a country they still try to imitate. I was in my 60s before I accepted the fact that “We, the People” didn’t and to a large extent still doesn’t included me.

       Fierce

3. Good glorious Fourth morning, Meese! Did you know HE wants his ugly face on Mt. Rushmore? And are you wondering how things are in dear old Hormuz? Well, 500 ships are stranded there because the Iranians have mined the waters. It’ll take weeks to Straiten out the situation if the war ever ends.

   I ain’t drivin’ nowheres this day. Or tomorrow, probably. I finished the project! Going to email it to the author, then I have to type all this stuff from a book because it explains why fiction writers shouldn’t get lost in a forest of dialogue tags. Better get to it, gotta meet a friend for the buffet at 11:45, then we’re going to see “1776.”

   Right now it’s all-the-eights in Ashburn, with higher temps and thunderstorms promised for 5 p.m.

   George Washington was no plaster saint, as we know. I derive a great deal of pleasure knowing that Oney Judge, a runaway slave, was one he NEVER caught, despite dispatching loads of a*holes to track her down. She died, poor but FREE, in New Hampshire.

   I’m also glad that Tom Jefferson’s children by Sally Hemings eventually escaped to freedom and dignity. Did you know that the slave states refused to sign the Constitution unless the paragraph AGAINST slavery was removed? Of course the white planters liked their forced-labor camps: living off the unpaid toil of others made them rich. When Robert Carter III, the First Emancipator, freed his slaves, the other planters threatened to shoot him. He fled to Baltimore to live out his life with his daughter.

   Well, now that I’ve cheered you up, I’d better get busy. Gotta meet someone at the buffet in a couple of hours. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!

   Fierce

   • Clearly there was not a lot of cheer to be handed out to a lot of the people who were not the Founding Fathers!

     I was reading that the American oil companies are making money hand over fist because of the increase in gasoline prices. They expressed concern that they would be reined in – hahahaha, as if! This malAdministration would never punish a donor.

     Fierce

4. Good morning, 58 and light clouds in Bellingham today. We will have our traditional 4th of July barbeque this afternoon so I’m baking pies this morning…..peach custard and fresh blueberry. I made pickled veggies on Friday for an antipasto tray and yesterday I found a good gf baguette, yay! Lisa and her family will be here soon so Elsa will have some time with Hans before we all go to Erich’s for the party. Our patios are ready for fun, but it was a good to pass the tote of 4th linens to him this year. We have a flag on the porch and that’s enough. Best wishes to all.

   Fierce

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