Furniture and Bad Politics

Greetings Earthlings.  How are we all doing, four days before the end of democracy?  I will miss the old days.  

We have reached the end of furniture acquisition.  I gave up on ever finding a cool TV table, realizing that in the mid-Century, televisions came in consoles.  Then they ended up on heavy tables.  So I bought fake wood and metal.  I like it, it's a good height (20 inches), doesn't have a back so the router went in easily.  I have been unable to take a decent picture of it, so here is one from the website.  We would still like something along the lines of a server/side board/buffet with drawers since we are so sadly lacking in storage.  Maybe next year, maybe not. 

I will say, that this flat pack had the best cushioning I have ever seen.  They used honey comb cardboard, and separated everything well.

Today's key learning is that there shall be no art behind glass.  Between the sky lights and all of the windows, it's difficult to not get a reflection.  Canvas art for the win!  I had a 16 x 20 print made at Snapfish.  I have to tell you, print quality is astoundingly good.  Here is a photo I took of the print.  You can see my arm reflected at the bottom.  In person, I can read the sign for El Charro on the right in the back ground.

Here it is on the wall.

Today we did manual labor.  I sat in the dirt and cut out pieces of a dead shrub to make it shorter, and we rearranged rocks in the dry stream that were dislodged when the irrigation leak was fixed.  Jim completed round two of picking up the fallen leaves from our two trees.  They have a lot of little tiny leaves.

As we all learned in civics, there are three branches of government in the US, the Legislative, Judiciary, and Executive.  They are separate and equal, at least that's how it's supposed to work.  Yesterday, the Speaker of the House (who lacks a spine) called Rep. Mike Turner into his office and fired him from being chairman of the House Intelligence Committee because the orange menace told him to. It's not supposed to work this way.  The president is not supposed to interfere with the workings of Congress.  Of course, the speaker, having no spine, did as he was told.  This is bullshit.  All it would take is for two Republicans to change their affiliation to Independent, caucus with the Democrats, and they could put an end to the reign of terror.  But they won't.

Additionally, the orange one is taking credit for the cease fire between Hamas and Israel.  President Biden had been working on this for 15 months.  The pub-tards are giving all the credit to the orange.  When the hostage swap fails, they'll blame Biden.

Then there is this.  RFK Jr. has been nominated to run Health and Human Services.  This is what he thinks.  Stupid, just stupid.

Here is a giant cactus in the neighborhood.  Look at the size of it.  The arm coming off near the ground is not usual.  That arm has put out another arm.

That's it, that's all I have to say about things.

Sunset, Art, and a Seed Pod

It's been "cold" here.  Cold is a relative term.  Nights have been in the low 30's.  Wednesday the wind was up all day, skies were gray, and we got zero rain.  Other parts of the city got rain, but nothing for the Tucson Mountain Park area.  Very unfortunate for the cactus out in the desert.  

Thursday we had enough clouds for a sunset.  This is the first time since we got here in November.  December used to be the month of pink skies, but not this year. Clear and severe skies have been the rule.

We have new art.  I have two canvas arts from two different vendors.

This is from easycanvasprints dot com.  It's good.  What's really good is that they don't use thick wood for stapling the canvas.  The wood frame is 3/4 of an inch (roughly) thick.  The advantage to this is that more of the subject stays on the front of the art.  Definition is pretty good, they have redeemed themselves.

This one is from snapfish dot com.  It's a good print, but their wood is 1 1/4 inch thick.  The front protrudes out further, and more of the subject matter is on the side of the frame.  Definition is good, but when I was thinking about another canvas, I was taken aback by how much of the image is lost to the sides.  A print in portrait orientation would be better here, but most of my photos are landscape. 

I'm blogging this so I remember where they came from.

Yesterday we worked on the back yard.  A lot of dead stuff was pulled off the plants back there.  Jim was cutting down the seed pod spikes off some very messy plants. They send up a spike, it flowers, and makes pods. 

This is the plant (in the foreground) that's growing wild in the yard.

Anyway, the pods are nice looking.  There are five small black seeds in there.

Angus put up a link to a nice story this morning.  It these times of hate, vitriol, and misinformation, this is a lovely article about hedgehog highways and citizens' attempts to keep them alive.  Article is here.

That's it, I have nothing more to say, especially about the orange menace.

Furniture and Meta

I googled the name plate in the drawer of the new to us night stands.  They're made by Uttermost.  I pretty much hate their web site, it's one of those that's always moving.  Bad user interface, bad!

Last night I was looking at my phone and I found the Uttermost Hanford night stand on the web. I found more on them on the laptop.  Here is a screen shot.  Make sure you notice the price for one.

The screenshot is from this page.  They have a magnifying glass if you want to zoom on the "weathering."  We don't have that, and I'm pretty happy about it.  All we got was someone spilling a solvent on the finish which is easier to hide.  We don't have the aged iron pull because it broke.  We have a new round pull, which works fine.

This is the name tag in the drawer.

So, not bad for our first foray into second hand shopping.  

As you may or may not know, Meta has removed fact checking and replaced it with community notes.  From The New Republic we learn the following:

Users on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will also be allowed to refer to women as “household objects or property or objects in general,” Black people as “farm equipment,” and transgender individuals as “it,” according to an updated version of Meta’s hateful conduct policy that crossed out the prohibitions.

It's a good article, worth reading.  Zuckerberg's policy change has led to this being posted all over Bluesky.

Ok.  I'm done now.

Furniture and Weather

Monday we went out east to The Girls retail store.  They run estate sales, and also have a second hand store.  They have a lot of stuff, some better than others.  We finally have night stands!  I've been all over the internet since we got here, and I am shocked to see what passes as "furniture" these days.  Night stands are particularly bad price performers, they have drawers, drawers are expensive.  Anyway we got night stands, at last  They're wood.  Something bad happened to the finish, it looks like they were sprayed with something.  A strategically placed place mat solves the problem.  I have no idea how old these are, clearly not modern styling.  Don't care, we like them.

A place mat from Target covers the spots.

We also got an art.  It's a huge, heavy piece.  There is a large piece of glass, and a wood frame.  It's doing an excellent job of covering up two really unattractive wall anchors.  It's a little high on the wall, but the wall anchors have been covered.

It's a big print.  Getting it up on the wall was nerve wracking.

The night stands were $88 for the pair, and the giant art was $16.50.  Second hand for the win!

Yesterday we rode, good thing.  The weather today was abysmal, very windy and cold.  Yesterday was windy, but not as bad, and the sun was out.  It was a gorgeous day.

That is the back of Jim's helmet.

A few clouds really moderate the light, makes things pretty.

You know what else comes in flat packs?  Lamps.  Refer back to the photo of the art over the bed with night stands.  Those lamps came flat packed.  The shades come collapsed and you use your thumbs to push the frame up and shape the shade.  Today a new floor lamp arrived.

Here it is, bringing light to the living room.  For what ever reason that I am sure I don't understand, the builder did not install a ceiling fan with lights.  There is zero light in the ceiling.  Eventually we'll get a fan with the lights, but thus far I don't know what to buy, and I need someone to install it.  We've never done that and I don't want to.  This photo is from the website, my phone does badly with lamps that are turned on.  It has dispelled the gloom in the corner.

So, that's it.  The orange menace continued on his path to world stupidity today.  Nothing to see there.

Wild Life and Corruption

We have had more wildlife in the back yard.  The other day, we woke up to this on the back patio.

The irrigation system runs early in the morning.  A critter had bitten into a drip line.  Apparently there is pretty good flow in that particular drip line.  The bitten part is circled.  Fortunately we have plugs, were able to get it to stop.  We don't water anything there, so it's no big deal that it's now no longer in service.

Later, we had deer trucking down the street.  They're wary of people, but they're ok with grazing on the orange trees.  They're Mule deer.  They're called that because of their large ears.  Frequently they're referred to as Mulies.

This is a cactus flower bud.  There are several on the plant.

It would be nice if they would open while we're still here.

More bougainvillea beauty.

This is an agave, which bloomed, and is now dead.  They put so much in to flowering, that they die.  It's not really a good reproductive strategy.  This is a difficult photo to take, too much sun.  The reflection on my cell phone screen is such that I don't know what will be in the photo.  I think this was the third trip up the hill to try to get all of it in one frame.  Previous attempts would have the top but not the bottom.

View of Golden Gate from the back yard.  Our neighbor has had her lemon trees covered since we got here.  I don't know if she's protecting them from deer or potential freezing temperatures. 

So, the orange menace will be inaugurated on the 20th.  Flags will be at half-staff to honor President Jimmy Carter.  Guess who has his panties in a bunch over this.  Yes, it's the orange one.  He thinks he's being singled out.  He's not, when Richard Nixon, another famous crook, was inaugurated, the flags were still lowered for Harry Truman.  

One of the republican goals is privatization of Medicare, in the form of Medicare Advantage.  The New Republic did an excellent article on why this is a bad idea.  It costs more than standard Medicare, and they with hold treatment when it suits them.

Perhaps that’s because, as the Journal’s investigations found, Medicare Advantage insurers routinely pad their government reimbursement requests with spurious diagnoses. For example, an astounding 66,000 Medicare Advantage patients were diagnosed with diabetic cataracts even after these patients had surgery to correct them, making that diagnosis, in the Journal’s words, “anatomically impossible.” In other instances, patients whom Medicare Advantage insurers reported as HIV positive received none of the recommended treatments. If a doctor failed to furnish a desired diagnosis, insurers dispatched a nurse to the patient’s home to find one. Medicare Advantage insurers also conned veterans into enrolling in the program even though they were already covered adequately by the Veterans Administration health system, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be superior to private hospital care (something else the public is reluctant to believe).

I, personally, do not want to be on Medicare Advantage.

Ann Telnaes has written a sub-stack on why she quit the Washington Post.  She had been there since 2008 as a political cartoonist.  Her cartoon about billionaires taking a knee to the orange menace was pulled. by her editor at Bezos' instruction.  So she quit.   Open the article, you can see the offending cartoon.  She was right, that's what they're doing.  The numbers do not lie.

That's it!  I'm done.

Many Photographs

Today I have mass quantities of photos.  I do have things to say, but I am still thinking about them.

More art has arrived.  The three small canvases on the right are new.  They are at that particular height because they're covering up holes left by the previous owner.  I would have centered them on the vertical height of the niche, but then the holes would have been visible.  Probability is low that we will ever paint this wall.

These are the individual canvases.  This one is grainy, which I expected, since the original was cropped way down.  It's an agave we used to have at the other house before the guys doing the pavers hit it with a front loader, repeatedly.

Blooming agave down the street from the old house.

This one surprises me in its lack of crispness.  It was not cropped, and had lots of pixels.  I got them from Easycanvasprints dot com.  I've ordered one more from them.  If they don't do better, I will not use them again. 

The dressers are looking less like hotel furniture and more like some where people live.  Yesterday we went to a restaurant supply store for some small bowls to sit in a tray that used to have plant pots in it, so that I have some place to put my watch, the wedding rings and etc.  Then we got frames at Walmart.  Amazon frames get pretty bad reviews.  The Walmarts aren't bad, and we did curbside pickup so I did not have to go in there.

See?  People live here.

I love the middle bowl.  It was the only one left, or I would have bought three.

All of my people pictures are backed up on a hard drive in Spokane.  So I went with the prints I brought with me.

The sunset is from the Ten Star house. 

This is Beau.  His owner got him four years ago on Boxing Day from a foster home.  He's a cool dog. Very placid.  He reminds me of Olga.  We see them walking in the neighborhood a lot.

Our citrus trees are making food.  This is a pink grapefruit - it has really thick skin.  The oranges are also ready to eat.  Lemons, not so much.

Former President Jimmy Carter has died, at 100 years old.  He was a remarkable man, both as a president and post presidency.  It's unfortunate that all of the people claiming to be christian couldn't be more like him.  He left the Southern Baptist Convention because of their position that wives had to obey their husbands.  For him, that was a big deal.  Flags will be at half staff for 30 days, including the day during which the orange mango will be inaugurated. 

Happy New Year to you all.  It's nice not being in the RV park where we spent so many years.  The nearby residents of the neighborhoods were seemingly unaware of the laws of gravity when they would shoot guns in the air.  Really, they did that.

That's it!  That's all I have to say.