Tuesday, 8 November 2016
Although it was an annoyingly windy day, we decided to get one more fall clean up job done in the afternoon.
Anchorage Cottages
Wind gusts of thirty miles an hour plagued us by blowing around everything we clipped.
Long Beach
We had time to tackle the garden by Kabob Cottage (me) and the south side of the police station (Allan).
Allan’s project was a windy one:
Right under the police captain’s window, flattened and grown through with roses, Allan found a dessicated but still stinky dead raccoon. Someone probably put it there. We turned that problem over the to the city crew when I realized how odiferous it was. They dealt with it promptly. I will spare you the rather interesting photo Allan took of it.
While we worked, the city crew was busy putting up Christmas lights, their goal being to have the whole town extensively decorated before Thanksgiving.
There are four planters north of where we worked that we have bulbs in waiting for. I was pleased to see they had been dug into to try and find an electrical problem that must be fixed.
at home
I worked on the blog post about Klipsan Beach Cottages journals as the first election results trickled in. As the evening progressed, I kept blogging and checking the news, till we finally settled in to watch the telly news. By then I knew the electoral college was hopeless for Hillary. I had come to actually love her from reading about her extensively after my hopes for Bernie were dashed. I don’t demand that a person be perfect and flawless before I love her and I had felt she would accomplish much good, and that anyone who carefully researched the many attacks on her would find her to be someone who had been falsely maligned on many counts. I had been filled with real horror and disgust by her racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic opponent but I had never underestimated his ability to rile up the masses.
By 11, or maybe it was midnight, we watched a cooking show instead. Or Allan did. Because I was fairly quiet about it, he did not know that I couldn’t see through tears brought on by the realization that so much of social justice and environmentalism I had supported since age 12 was very likely about to be dismantled. Everything that matters to me had been on the line. It felt like an assault. I almost wrote everything other than gardening…but…climate change affects gardening in a major way.
Three hours of sleep followed. Frosty, who has never slept with me before, slept right by my head, purring in a way that did not help me sleep and yet was comforting.
My mother was conservative. But I can tell you right now, the minute D.T. insulted her hero John McCain, she would have been done with him. When he said of sexual assault in the military, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”, she would have been done with him. She was a Marine in WWII and she WAS sexually assaulted in the military. When he made a joke about the Purple Heart, she would have been apoplectic. I wish I could talk with her about it.
1995 (age 71):
Nov 8: I started piling new wood. Some pieces big enough for chopping blocks. I guess I’ll have to order split wood in future. If Robert doesn’t have time I’ll have to hire someone to split it although Del offered to help me. NICE MAN. [Robert and I visited mom for 3 or 4 days each fall to do chores for her.]
Started hemming the new slacks I have had for months. Then the shopper came [newspaper circular with ads]. Pansies and mums for 39 cents! I dashed in and bought 4 full trays (64 plants). I may go back for more plus some mums.
1997 (age 73):
Nov 8: It was such a beautiful warm sunny day so I went out and worked in the upper part of the Tam area, cutting back, weeding etc. I got about a third of the Tam flower bed done.
It is hard to see an up side at present.
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So far still impossible. Maybe glimmer of hope is more closeness among other equally horrified locals. But that does not do oppressed people a bit of good…so far.
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