Christmas Eve Round-up

I feel so badly for all the people who traveled to Tucson to spend Christmas with friends and relatives to bask in the sunshine and the low 80 degree temperatures.  These photos were taken Monday.  We took the Trek road bikes out for a flatish easy ride.  As it turned out, that set my recovery from the crud back two days, but it was a nice ride at the time.

This is a house that was being built in 2021.  When we decamped to Spokane, the front yard was not yet installed.  Who ever did the landscaping did a bang up job of it. 

Look at the sky in the background.  It really is that color.

Then we rode over to look at the mountains behind the Sarasota trail head.  Again, look at that sky.

This is from this morning.  It rained all night.  It has rained off and on all day.  It's cold (relatively speaking.)  The kids that made the trip are stuck in the house, none of them are out driving golf carts around and scaring the old people, hopefully the grand parents have an X box.

As you no doubt recall, last February when we were painting soffits, the fruit trees had much fruit on them.  One is visible here.  This is the sum total of fruit from the grapefruit, orange and lemon trees.  Three grapefruits, that's it.

Other houses have boxes of citrus out front, which is an appeal for passers by to please take some because they're inundated.  I do not understand the trees.  We feed them, we water them, what the heck?

The horrible orange man's administration continues its path off the rails.  He has announced a new class of battleship to be named after him.  Battleships are targets in modern warfare, they bring nothing to the table.  However, Hegseth is very excited about this.  

The EU fined Elon for violating their laws under DSA.

DSA Europe refers to the European Union's Digital Services Act, a landmark regulation establishing rules for a safer, fairer online environment by tackling illegal content, enhancing user rights (like non-personalized feeds & ad transparency), increasing platform accountability (especially Very Large Platforms - VLOPs/VLOSEs), and improving content moderation transparency. It aims to protect users, foster innovation, and ensure a single market for digital services, imposing obligations on platforms to manage systemic risks and identify traders, with enforcement by national Digital Services Coordinators (DSCs) and the Commission. 

It was not an amount of money that will hurt Elon.  Anyway, JD Vance and little Marco are just spitting mad about extraterritorial censorship and blah-de-blah.  It's their territory, their laws.  Anyway, they're denying visas to prominent Europeans because they can.  EU should just shut down twitter.  And talk about censorship, no US platform is legally available in Russia, and they're our buddies, right?

47 has sent the governor of Louisiana to be a special envoy to Greenland so that we can take them over.  Number one, Greenland is a territory of Denmark.  You don't send envoys to territories, you send them to the diplomatic corps of the country, which would be Denmark.  They're already acting like Greenland is a free agent.  I am so sure they want to give up free college and free health care to part of the mess that the US has become.  Denmark has summoned the US ambassador to tell the US to knock this off.

Cuba is becoming collateral damage to the US bombing of boats in the Caribbean sea and hijacking tankers.  Oil is not flowing to Cuba, and it's not good. 

We're both better, but not over it yet.  After 5 covid tests between us and a Flu A & B test I'm reasonably certain this is a really bad cold.  

Merry Christmas Eve y'all!