Two years

Where were you two years ago today?

Is January 6th, 2021 a date that lives in your mind, like 9/11? 

Or for my parents’ generation, November 22, 1963?

Or for my grandparents’ generation, December 7th, 1941?

It should.

Because two years ago today, a group of people, waving American flags, Trump flags, Confederate flags, and even Christian flags, started with a demonstration in front of the Capitol building — after listening to speeches by Donald Trump and others imploring the audience to “fight like hell” to take their country back. 

So they went to the Capitol.

Inside, Congress was going through their Constitutionally mandated responsibility to cast their electoral ballots.

The 2020 election season would soon come to a close.

But not without a fight. And it turned out to be a literal fight. 

We should not forget that there were people who stormed barricades, pushed past police officers, and eventually gained access to the Capitol building and marched to the door of the House of Representatives. 

Does anyone want to think about what would have happened if they had gotten in? 

Does anyone remember that someone brought a noose and a scaffold, and that one of the slogans the mob was screaming was, “Hang Mike Pence!”?

Does anyone remember that portions of the Capitol building was wrecked, and that part of the wreckage included bodily waste smeared on the walls?

I know there are people who argue about whether or not January 6, 2021 was an insurrection or not. I’m not going to fight with people. 

Today, in the same chamber, as I write this, Kevin McCarthy has lost 13 ballots to become the new Speaker of the House. Since the Republicans now have control of the House, it should be easy for them to elect a Speaker.  Right?

Uhhh, apparently not.

It’s 9:57 p.m. as I write this, and in three minutes, the House will reconvene for round 14. At this point, I fully expect to start hearing the fight theme from “Rocky” playing and Kevin McCarthy entering in boxer shorts and wearing boxing gloves. 

Until a Speaker is elected, the new House cannot be sworn in and they cannot do any work. According to CNN Politics, this is now the longest speaker contest in 164 years.  The last time a speaker contest went this long was in 1859, two years before the Civil War started.

There are a group of Republicans that are determined that McCarthy NOT be Speaker, but as I’m writing this, I just saw a tweet saying that the House is reconvening and that finally, on the 14th ballot, McCarthy should win his speakership, the House can be sworn in, and work can finally start. 

I fear that another January 6th could happen after the next Presidential election. All you have to do is scream loud enough, “The election was stolen!” and if you can get a large enough following with enough influence, you could very easily duplicate the events of January 6th.  

I hope not, but I’ve become very cynical and jaded, especially in the last decade and particularly in the last six years. Politics and news used to be fun for me to watch and listen to. Now I can barely stand it. 

Let’s hope the House chamber has lots of coffee. They will need it.

And let’s hope that maybe the American electorate has more common sense than I give it credit for having!

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Row, row, row your words, gently on the page . . .

This is another night where I will just be writing stream of consciousness again. I don't know if I am entertaining, boring, or torturing my poor little blog audience. I do okay when I have a particular subject I am writing about. I can knock off a blog entry in about an hour or less. 

Tonight I am writing to write. This is practice writing, so I guess anyone that reads this will have to take this as an equivalent to a musician practicing their scales. I took piano lessons as a child but never had the discipline to practice as much as I should have. And I am the daughter of a man that learned to play piano by ear. My dad did enjoy playing boogie-woogie on the piano; I think he was a fan of Jerry Lee Lewis. 

Where the "writing off the top of my head" ability came from, I have no idea. There are no writers in my family that I am aware of. Except for my late Uncle Jerry, and the two books, dissertation, and many academic papers he wrote would probably be a good cure for any insomnia I have. (I just looked on Amazon. One book is called Thermal Management Handbook: For Electronic Assemblies; one is Hybrid Microelectronics Handbook.) His dissertation title included the words "neutron-irradiated silicone", and when I found that title on a computer at my first library job and showed it to my reference desk partner, her response was, "Sure!" I love my Uncle Jerry. I would also probably not understand his writing. 

My mother never wrote anything, but she was the one who read to me. My father was not a book person; he enjoyed the newspaper, news magazines (and a copy of Field and Stream), and news programs. My mother read a lot of mystery and suspense. So did my grandmother. My sister takes after our father in that she prefers magazines to books. I prefer books. 

Well, there's my consciousness stream for the evening. 

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Writing to meet a goal

 Today is one of those days that I’m writing just because I said I was going to write every day, no matter what. So I’m not really sure what I am writing about. This may be just a stream of consciousness entry, where I write down whatever comes into my head and it may or may not make any sense. 

• Our church’s (very small) Young Adult group decreased by one as we held a good-bye dinner for a young lady that is leaving. She is Brazilian, and tomorrow she will take a non-stop flight from here to Rio to see her mother . . . and then hop a plane to Ireland, where she plans to study English. I think it’s funny that she is going to Ireland to study English. She’s young, unmarried, knows at least two languages, if not more, and has a kind and adventurous spirit. She’d also like to travel while she’s in Ireland. Now’s the time for her to do it!
• The 118th House apparently showed up wearing their Bozo the clown outfits. They’ve taken six ballots, and they still have no Speaker of the House, which means the new 118th House members cannot be sworn in yet.  It’s the first time in 100 years where there has been more than one ballot to elect a Speaker. Kevin McCarthy wants the job. There are those that don’t want him to have the job. Frankly, I think the House is acting like a bunch of two-year-olds, and I apologize for the insult to two-year-olds.
• We have not seen rats or mice since we returned home from Florida. Which probably means that I will find a trail of rat poop somewhere tomorrow morning. 
• I am officially back at work; I finished proofreading 221 pages and promptly got another assignment of around 250 pages which is due back Friday. I will be working all day Thursday.
• Because of all the holidays my husband has taken, all of the traveling we have done, and the fact that the calendar has rolled over, my own internal calendar is shot. It will probably take me a week or so to get a feel for what day it is . . . just in time for Martin Luther King Day to show up and wreck my internal calendar again. (No shade meant for MLK, who definitely deserves his day of remembrance. I’m just having a rough time remembering what day of the week it is!)
• I’m still stuck on giving my antagonist in my work in progress a reason not to shoot my protagonist. This is one of those things that drives writers crazy.
• And I still need to close out our financial books for the last year.
• As members of the Peanuts gang would say, “Sigh.” Or maybe, “Good grief!” would be a better exclamation!

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Sudden death

 Last month I experienced the sudden death of two people.

One was a Facebook friend who’d I’d been around for 20 years.

The other was a cousin of mine.

And we almost saw it happen again last night.

The first person, Kathy, I “met” during the days of Yahoo Groups. I joined a group made up of people who’d all read two books, Karen and With Love From Karen, both written by Marie Killilea. Marie’s daughter Karen was born in 1940 and a year later, diagnosed with cerebral palsy. It took her parents 23 doctors and two and a half years to find proper help. I read both books when I was 13 and was captivated. We in the group swapped stories about the effect the books had on us and swapped stories about each other. I joined the group right before my son was diagnosed with autism and the group was a support to me during that time. 

Kathy was one of the first people to say hello to me when I joined the group. Later, she formed another online group for people who loved books as she did. She was such a fan of the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. She loved God and was enormously proud of her family. 

She died in her sleep in mid-December, while she and her husband were on their way to a cruise to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. One of our mutual Facebook friends messaged me and when I saw the words, “Kathy is dead,” I was stunned. The only comfort I can find is that she went to sleep and woke up in heaven. 

I saw an enormous outpouring of love and memories for her on Facebook. I thought of three people who would be totally heartbroken (in addition to her husband): her best friend, and two other dear friends she met on Facebook. 

She lived a life that will be remembered, and you can’t ask for more than that.

The other was my cousin Bill, who I wrote about yesterday. His sudden death came when he went to burn some brush and the wind blew up. He either suffered smoke inhalation, or a heart attack, or both, and died. His funeral was yesterday, and since he broadcast high school sports for a number of years,  it was appropriate to hold his funeral in the Harlan County High School gymnasium. From the number of comments I saw on Facebook, Harlan County lost a legend. 

Last night, a young Buffalo Bills football player, Damar Hamlin, tackled a Cincinnati Bengals player, Tee Higgins.  They both went down and got up. Nothing remarkable. It’s normal, and expected, to see tackles in football games.  Right? 

Except two seconds after he got up, Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and this time, he did not get up.

The medical personnel raced onto the field, and both Bills players and Bengals players formed a human wall around Hamlin, shielding him from the audience and from the TV cameras. 

Hamlin was given CPR on the field in those agonizing moments before the ambulance arrived.  

Bills players - and Bengals players - cried, and many of them knelt in prayer for their fallen teammate. 

After an hour or so, and discussions with players and between both coaches, the game was suspended at 5:58 of the first quarter. They will not resume this game this week. Which I think is good. If the teams had tried to play again, no one would have been able to concentrate. All they’d see is the body of their fellow player, lying on the ground, his arms outstretched, receiving CPR so that he could just survive. 

I’m watching a clip of the Monday Night Football broadcast from last night. One of the speakers said he’d never seen an ambulance come onto the field. I have, one time on TV, where someone had a neck injury. (I cannot remember who was playing or when it was.) They did bring the ambulance onto the field and take the player off. 

However, there’s never been a situation where a player collapsed, on live TV, and had to be given CPR before being loaded into an ambulance. 

Damar Hamlin is currently in critical condition in the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. He is alive. 

But we could have seen sudden death on the field last night.

The idea of sudden death scares me. Of waking up and finding my husband dead next to me, or of losing my son, or sister, or niece. I think it scares me because death is something that is out of my control. There is a verse in the book of Proverbs that says “no man has power over the day of his death”.  I get scared of being the one left behind having to deal with an estate. It also scares me to be the one to die and leave others to handle my affairs. 

What do I say? What is there to say in the face of sudden death? Of a relative? Of a person you only knew through a computer screen? Of a young athlete? 

“I’m sorry,” sounds so trite. “Thoughts and prayers,” sounds tired and overused. 

Life is precious when you are looking into the face of sudden death. 

That’s all I know to say.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

“Blessed every day.”

 As I write this, the funeral of my cousin Bill Ellis is about to begin. 

The funeral will be held in the gymnasium of Harlan County High School, and when you have a funeral in a gymnasium, that says something about the number of people you expect.

My cousin Bill was from Harlan, Kentucky. Harlan is not a town with large churches or large places to “put on a show” in order to raise money. But it does have the gymnasium of the Harlan County High School. 

Bill’s death has hit me hard, and I think it’s because it happened so suddenly. 

Last Friday, December 30th, the family believes that Bill went out to burn some brush in a burn barrel, and the wind kicked up very suddenly. In trying to put the fire out, he suffered either smoke inhalation or a heart attack and died. The fire department was there for several hours until the fire was gone. 

He leaves behind a wife — his second wife, whom he married after the death of his first wife — a daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and a host of relatives and a county full of friends. 

Bill was 18 when I was born, and by the time I was four, he already had a baby daughter. That was my cousin Kellie, and when my family would visit from Florida, she was my playmate. Bill and his wife would later have a son, Jeff. 

I remember a younger Bill with a slightly sarcastic sense of humor. During a visit to Florida, he once jokingly asked me if someone had hit me over the head with an ugly stick. But I also remember on one visit to Harlan seeing him play in a baseball game—I think a neighborhood league or something like that—and his team lost. He shook hands with the opposing team afterwards, saying, “Good game.” I thought, “Why is he doing that? They lost!” 

What I didn’t know was that I was witnessing an example of good sportsmanship. 

Bill, for many years, was known as “the voice of the Bears” (the Harlan County High School teams),  broadcasting football and basketball games on radio station WTUK. Sometimes his wife Tami would call the games with him, and he’d often play the trick of turning off her mike (joking that he could always turn the volume down on her radio.)

I last saw Bill in 2019, when I made a trip to scatter a portion of my mother’s ashes at her father’s grave. He and his wife had dinner with Susie, his sister; and me. He showed me a bookmark where he had pasted my father’s obituary. He hoped it wouldn’t upset me. I appreciated that Bill remembered my dad in that way. (Bill was the son of my father’s sister.) It was obvious by then that he was fighting health problems but he did not complain. He was like my father in that way; he would not complain about how bad he felt. 

In reading his obituary, I learned that Bill had been an elder in the Rosspoint Church of Christ. Being an elder is not an easy task. I have no doubt he handled it with grace. 

The obituary writer pointed out what I hope people will remember about Bill when they think of him:  When anyone asked him, “How are you?” his answer was, “Blessed every day.” 

Maybe that was why he had the attitude he had about his health struggles, and other tragedies he faced in life. Carol, his first wife, died of ovarian cancer.  A few years later, his son Jeff died suddenly. In the best tradition of “life must go on”, Bill, just a few days after his son’s death, called a ballgame on the radio, and afterwards, the winning team presented the game ball to Bill. He thanked them and encouraged them to keep on walking with God, no matter what, and reminded them that if they did so, they would be “blessed every day” no matter what the circumstances were. 

I went up for his mother’s funeral in 2004, and I remember him sobbing as he stood in front of her casket. Just because Bill knew he was “blessed every day” didn’t mean that he couldn’t be heartbroken at the death of a beloved mother. 

I have a hard time understanding how God could allow certain things to happen. I don’t understand why He doesn’t intervene. I’m guessing that Bill’s widow and the rest of his family will lie awake at night asking,  “why?”. Man has asked that question since the time of Job, and pat and easy answers just do not cut it. 

Perhaps, though, the answer is not, “why did this happen?”

Perhaps Bill Ellis was placed on this earth to remind us that, no matter what, God had blessed him every day . . . and that no matter what, if we trust God, we, too, can be “blessed every day.”

In loving memory,

William Wayne Ellis, January 23, 1945 - December 30, 2022.

Rest in peace, Bill.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation. 

New Year’s writing on a bad day

 This year, I will write every day. 

Maybe it won’t be a lot of words, but I will write every day.

Whether on the current WIP (which has suffered a setback; I need a new reason for my big bad not to immediately shoot my hero) or in a journal, or here on the blog . . . I will write.

So why is today a bad day?

First off, I am not depressed. I do not have a black cloud hanging over my head and I’m not on the edge of tears. (I have also not seen a mouse since we came back from a short vacation to Florida). 

Yesterday I had a very bad headache, so I practiced some self-care and took some Advil PM and went to bed early. I woke up 10 minutes into the new year to the sound of fireworks. Many of my neighbors take advantage of any and every opportunity to set off fireworks. New Year’s is no exception. I did not find out until this morning that the Georgia Bulldogs won their playoff game at the stroke of midnight, just as the Peach Drop dropped. Now Bulldogs will be facing Horned Frogs (from Texas Christian University) for the national championship. And although I know which team I am rooting for, I am wondering what would happen if a real horned frog met a real bulldog in real life. (Bloodshed, maybe?)

Today we had church online; the service was pre-recorded and it was funny to see our preacher commenting on his own sermon in the chat room. (He and his wife are in Indiana at the moment because his wife’s father is ill.) 

Today I am also dealing with a bad backache between the shoulder blades. I think my back is getting revenge on me for all the driving we did in the four days of our vacation. We spent probably eight hours on the road getting to our hotel room in Ocala, several more hours the next day between driving to see my mother in law near Orlando, and then driving to our hotel room in Tampa. 

The next day I did driving (not hours of driving, though) when I had lunch with my BFF (she did most of the driving because she came up from Sebring). Then my husband did driving when we went to St. Petersburg to see my sister, her husband, and their daughter. 

And the next day, we spent nearly ten hours in the car from Tampa to home. Most of our time in the Atlanta area was spent crawling in a traffic jam. I was not shocked. 

Yesterday I spent more money than I wanted to buying groceries, but we will eat for some time. 

So I think my back finally said, “No more!” 

I did some self-care by taking an ice pack and lying down for a while; ended up taking a nap. 

Later this evening I will ask my husband for a back rub, probably with Biofreeze. 

It’s the back pain that’s making this day “bad”. But I am determined to write. 

Happy New Year, everyone.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Ten years later

Most of them would be in high school.

They should have had their first dates, first crushes, first loves.

Some of them should still be in the classroom doing the profession they loved. 

And at least one should still simply be a mother. 

But because of the actions of a deeply disturbed young man, 26 people died ten years ago today at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. 

Six were adults who worked at the schools:  the principal, teachers, and teacher assistants.  A seventh adult, the mother of the shooter (I will not name the shooter; he killed himself at the school), died at home, the first victim of the massacre.  

The other twenty were first-graders.

Let that sink in.

First-graders, with single digits showing their ages. 

What can I say that hasn't already been said about Sandy Hook? 

It remains the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school. 

When you say "Sandy Hook" and "Columbine", people know immediately what you are talking about, and it is not simply a place name. They are names with horrible connotations of blood, of murder, of screaming parents and other adults, of first responders who probably still suffer from nightmares and other symptoms of PTSD.  

And as if the Sandy Hook parents weren't suffering enough, they had to endure the outrageous claims that "Sandy Hook was a hoax." When I was on the hunt for a conservative alternative to Facebook, I was part of such a group and when I mentioned Sandy Hook, the person said, "No one died at Sandy Hook. Show me proof that people died at Sandy Hook." 

I will not name the person that spent the most time tormenting the Sandy Hook families, except to say that every cent this person has should be divided among the families that lost loved ones. 

Seven adults and twenty children died a decade ago. 

Ten years later, nothing has changed.

Instead, we are society that has grown numb to mass shootings. Our ice thaws a bit when we hear about a school shooting. We scream our outrage, we offer our thoughts and prayers, we demand changes to gun laws . . . and then all the feelings die down until the next mass shooting. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What can I say that hasn't been said? Rachel still weeps for her children and cannot be comforted (see Jeremiah 31:15). 

What solutions can I offer that have not been offered?

Like a friend of mine said after yet another mass shooting, "I'm out of ideas." 

The only thing I know to do is remember the victims:  

Nancy Lanza

Rachel D'Avino

Dawn Hochsprung

Anne Marie Murphy

Lauren Rousseau

Mary Sherlach

Victoria Leigh Soto

Charlotte Bacon

Daniel Barden

Olivia Engle

Josephine Gay

Dylan Hockley

Madeleine Hsu

Catherine Hubbard

Chase Kowalsky

Jesse Lewis

Ana Marquez-Greene

James Mattioli

Grace McDonnell

Emilie Parker 

Jack Pinto

Noah Pozner

Caroline Previdi

Jessica Rekos

Avielle Richman

Benjamin Wheeler

Allison Wyatt

In memoriam, December 14, 2012.

May their memory be a blessing.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.