Saturday, February 13, 2016

Randomday

President's Day weekend! A long weekend and my grades are all updated.  Peter drove home for the weekend to catch up with friends, and I'll be taking him out to shop for non-perishable high-protein foods because he's on the crew team now and is worried about the cafeteria bills. Tomorrow Grandma is coming over and I have defrosted the spare turkey from Thanksgiving to roast, and made an apple pie.

Last night Steve and I watched Interstellar. It fit the bill of a recent movie (I wasn't really in the mood for An Affair to Remember) in English (Les Choristes and Like Water for Chocolate were both quite good but I didn't really feel up for another foreign language film) that had some blockbuster appeal but that I had missed when it was in the theaters.  Long movie, but emotionally appealing and thought-provoking.  I am almost finished knitting the button band of my Mint Chocolate cardigan, and another movie tonight and I'll get to start the buttonholes.  

Or, I could work on socks.  I took advantage of the rainy afternoon and sleepy vibe to clean out my knitting bags.  I don't think it has been done for 3 years.  I have 4 hibernating projects, not just 3, and if I'm not quite ready to polish them off, at least they are closer to organized.  A sweater, a summer sweater, a skirt, and the aforementioned Mint Chocolate cardigan.  So naturally, with my big knitting bag containing 3 big projects, but with having just finished a pair of socks, I decided to cast on a pair of socks... more argyles.  They will go in my yellow sock bag.  Then I think I need to cast on a second pair of socks for my second sock bag.  Maybe Stashbuster Spirals, or maybe one of the several skeins of sock yarn needing to be used up.  I should also consider picking something on Netflix with several seasons to binge-watch while I knit.

Nothing is quite so energizing as organizing, or so distracting either.  Oh well, the knitting bag is clean.  First time in years.

"May you live in interesting times." Despite being apocryphal and apparently not particularly Chinese, this curse has been on my mind a lot lately, whenever I contemplate the political situation.  I want to blog about politics, but it's just too anxiety-provoking.  So this afternoon, when I heard the stunning news of the death of Supreme Court Justice Scalia, a figurative cloudburst just opened up in my brain.  So let me talk it through.  Say, Obama rushes to nomination the first transgender Muslim Supreme Court nominee, cursing all Republicans as hopeless obstructionists and triangulating his way to a fifth spot on Mt. Rushmore. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the socialist who feeds the entitlement mentality of the Millennial generation, vastly outstrips Hillary Clinton in the popular vote, but Hillary still claims she is entitled to the nomination because of all the superdelegates pledged to support her as the establishment Democratic candidate.  She happens to be a crook and may be indicted before the convention, but she's still entitled anyway. What if the Supreme Court has to rule on that?  Or the rest of the top-secret emails? Meanwhile, the Republicans are much more democratic; they have no superdelegates to ensure the establishment candidate wins, and Trump, a sock-puppet candidate if ever there was one, who seems to have been spurred to become a Republican by a phone call from Hillary's husband, is promising ever more grandiose walls and spewing ever more vulgar insults, while winnowing down the field of real Republicans, whatever they are.  And the rest of the Republican field? I just don't know them well enough to have an informed opinion on them, because the press has been fixated by the Trump-O-Rama circus for months.  I mean yes, political theater is all very entertaining, but I think as Americans we should value healthy dialogue more than is being typically served up.  And I still think there oughtta be a test.

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