Boxing Day

First, apologies to the people I just found embargoed in spam.  Why does it do that?  Some comments come through, others don't.  Really, I am making an effort to check more often, but with a memory like a sieve, I forget.  Mea culpa.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day.  We were out for a hike.  Here is a group of cactus we saw.

Have you ever looked at something at thought, was it always like that?  We would do that a lot in downtown Seattle, when a building would go missing.  Was that always an empty lot?  Generally no, they had torn something down to put up something newer and more boring.  There is a rock formation that we see when we ride the trail across the desert.  I've just noticed that part of it seems to have fallen off.  Was it always like that?  We're going to have to walk over there and look at the surrounding dirt to determine if it's a new rock fall, or an old one.  Look at the big lump sort of in the center, and then off to the left, is the fragment in question.

Today we changed the furnace filters.  The HVAC is in the ceiling of the garage.  It's not ideal, but it does free up floor space in our tiny garage.  One always wonders why they built such tiny garages in the land of giant pickup trucks.  Anyway, the filters are in the hall ceiling.  A grate swings down and the filters fall out.  When we closed on the house, Frank the realtor, told us to have the system running to prevent that.  We did not believe him, that there was enough negative pressure to hold two filters up.  We were wrong.  After fiddling with the filters and the grate and trying to get it all back in, we turned on the heat.  Like magic, the filters went up, stuck to the frame, the grate closed and all was well.  So, please make a note of this for the next filter change.  We made that way harder than it needed to be.

I screen scraped this off twitter.  I have no idea what this person is talking about.

Clearly I am losing touch with my culture.

Recently in the news:

The orange menace wants to take back the Panama Canal, buy Greenland, and annex Mexico and Canada to be new states in the US.  What's next, the Suez Canal?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now saying the US needs to issue more H1B visas for tech workers.  Essentially their argument is that US citizens aren't smart enough to write the code for their projects.  More likely is the fact that someone here on an H1B visa can't change jobs.  So, they are advocating to create a strata of people with no leverage to negotiate higher salaries or more time off or anything.  Indentured servant comes to mind.  Apparently there is some discussion in the republican party, and push back against the two DOGE members.

Putin has shot down another commercial airliner.  Communication cables are being damaged in the Baltic Sea.  There is a rumor that NATO is contemplating closing the sea to Russia.

He hasn't even been inaugurated yet, and the world seems to be running off the rails.

That's it.  That's all I have to say.