4/18/2026

Saturday, April 18, 2026

1944 Geraldine Edith Aquavia was born in Oak Park, Illinois

2025  Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration was ready to abandon diplomatic efforts and "move on" if it is not possible to end the war in "a matter of days". 

In bed at 9, awake at 3, up at 3:30.  120/65/62 204.8; 44/31/59/38, cloudy, windy all day.  Pretty wild weather all week.  4 days of storms and tornadoes. 

Ranolazine Morning meds at a.m.  Ranolazine at 4:35 a.m. and 4:45 p.m.  I forgot to take my evening Ranolazine with my attention distracted by incoming storms.  Also forget Trulicity injection.

Geri's 82nd  Birthday.  My toast to her at her 80th birthday:

A few years back, I started keeping a list on my iPhone of 'what I love about Geri and it started with her laugh.  I was listening to her chatting on her phone with one of her friends and she was really enjoying whatever it was they were talking about and she was laughing, a wonderful, deep, exuberant laughter that was a pleasure to listen to, infectious inasmuch as just hearing it made me smile.  

Later I added "sharing her thoughts" and "sharing time" with me to the list, realizing how she has privileged me by that sharing.  I'm the only person in the world she shares so much of her life with.  I have often thanked her for agreeing to marry me.  It's a great and unique privilege married people confer on their partners, a privilege we too often lose sight of as we cope with the daily necessities and distractions of life.

Then I added her devotion to duty.  It sounds as if I were thinking of a soldier or a 'first responder' but in all of the roles she plays in her life, Geri has an innate sense of duty. 'Sense of duty' doesn't capture what I'm referring to.  As a child to her parents, as a parent to her children, as a life partner to me, as a sister to her brother Jim, and as a friend to her many friends, she is true, caring, trustworthy, attentive, solicitous.  The people in her life can count on her for help, for advice, for an open ear and a ready hand, to respect confidences, to pitch in when some pitching in is needed and to butt out when some butting out is needed.  When my twice-widowed father came to live with us, Geri became his best friend at a time in his life when he so badly needed a real friend.  When her older brother lost his wife and his children were spread out across the country, Geri encouraged him to move near us and she personally cared for him for several years.  We should all have these qualities but not all of us do and few have them as innately, as suffusely as Geri does.  This sense of duty carries into all her undertakings, e.g., as an employee, as a volunteer (ombudsman at a nursing home, child welfare investigator, poll worker) and even to our pets.  When our beloved cat Blanche needed to be hydrated by transfusion every day, Geri turned her ironing board into a gurney for her, hung the hydrating solution from a closet door, and served as her nurse.  And Lilly, . . . words fail me.

She is courageous.  She has faced some difficult challenges in her life and addressed all of them head on.  Where many, including me, would have faltered, backed off from a difficult challenge, she has put her shoulder to the wheel and addressed them.  She has guts, tough-mindedness, patience, and an admirable sense of self-respect and determination that lets her succeed at challenges that would defeat many of us.

My iPhone list is lot longer and includes stuff like leading the way when there is tought, unpleasant, nasty work to be done.  She is first to pick up the mop or shovel, not waiting for others, including me, to get at it. But my list is inevitably incomplete.  She is who she is in all her uniqueness.  She is special in large part because she doesn't treat herself as special, as better than or not as good as anyone around her.  But she is very special to me, and she's very special to her family and to her many friends who count themselves privileged to have her in our lives..    

Deborah Kerr in an Actor's Studio interview: “I don't like getting old. I hate it, in fact. I don't know an honest person who likes it. You just thin out and all your energies go toward surviving or moving safely from one room to another. But the mind thrives, thank God. Or mine does. I used to try very hard not to regret it. I thought that regrets were a waste of time, a sign of weakness. I think only the most insensitive of people have no regrets, because in this time, this slower time, your mind goes back to so many instances when there should have been more kindness, more attention paid to others. I missed so many opportunities to be a better friend, a better mother, a better actress. Of course, I can't remember now what I was in such a hurry to get to that I grew so bad at the important things. So I regret and I think. Old age is the big index to the foolish young people we were.

Tornadoes all over the state, from western counties to Lake Michigan, northern counties to Illinois state line.  Flood warnings in Waukesha and Milwaukee counties; flood watches elsewhere.  The ground has been saturted most of the week, nowhere for all the rain to go.  As of April 15, the National Weather Service had issued 154 weather warnings in Wisconsin for severe thunderstorms, tornadoes and flash floods, according to the Wisconsin State Climatology Office. That's more than six times the historical average and well above the previous April record of 123 warnings in 2002.  Wisconsin had also already seen 31 tornado warnings as of April 15, compared to the previous record of 28 warnings in April 2011.  As of April 15, the Milwaukee area had seen 8.03 inches of rain for the month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  According to data since 2000, the last time Milwaukee approached that much rain was in April 2013 with 7.38 inches logged for the month.  This month's weather is not just a one-off anomaly: The severe weather season has been getting steadily longer in Wisconsin for years, according to the State Climatology Office.  Before 1990, Wisconsin's severe weather season spiked in July. In recent years, that spike has spread out from March to September with some peaking between May and July.  

4/17/2026

 Friday, April 17, 2026

1905  Supreme Court held that the maximum work day was unconstitutional in Lochner v. New York by declaring the "right to free contract" implicit in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution

1941 US Office of Price Administration formed to handle rationing

1961 1,400 Cuban exiles landed in the Bay of Pigs in a doomed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro

1969 Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of assassinating US Senator Robert F. Kennedy

2025 Two people were killed and six others were hospitalized in a mass shooting at Florida State University in Tallahassee. The suspect was arrested by local police.

In bed at 9:45, awake at 4:15, up at 4:39  3 blood pressure readings between 4:45 and 5:06, 148/74. 118/69. and 137/59.  Glucose 109. weight 203.6.  What to make of those BPs?

Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Ranolazine at 5:30 a.m. and  p.m.

On Morning Joe this morning, we learned that Pete Hegseth confused Scripture for the movie script in Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's film in which Samuel L. Jackson plays a hit man, Jules, who purports what is supposed to be Ezekiel 25:17, before assassinating his 'mark'"

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.  Blessed is who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children.  And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.  And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

The real Ezekiel 25:17 says:

 And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes: and they shall kow that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my veneance upon them. (KJV)

Hegseth chose the Quentin Tarantino/Samuel L. Jackson version of the scripture when he led his religious service at the Pentagon on Sunday, modifying it to accommodate it to the situation of the two downed American pilots who were rescued in Iran last week.  It seems so appropriate that he chose and appropriated the make-believe Hollywood version of scripture rather than the real thing, since so much about him and his C-in-C is performative art, make-believe. happy horseshit.  Maybe Orange Julius will post an image of himself and Pete aiming their pistols at the heads of opponents like John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, perhaps with a Jesus figure hovering behind them and blessing them for smiting CNN and the 'failing' New York Times

 I've done a lot of sleeping today, dozing off while listening to Audible The Idiot.

Tornado Watch again.  4th day this week.

From two years ago today:  I'm grateful for Emmylou Harris' rendition of Wayfaring Stranger and for Johnny  Cash's who said “The haunting melodies and poignant lyrics of Wayfaring Stranger have the power to transport listeners to a place of deep introspection.”  I can't hear the old gospel song without thinking of my mother, father, and now my sister, 'over Jordan' and myself as the 'sole surviving son.'

I am a poor wayfaring stranger / I'm traveling through / This world of woe

And there's no sickness, no toil or danger / In that bright land / To which I go

I'm going there to see my mother / I'm going there no more to roam

I'm just going over Jordan /I'm just going over home

I know dark clouds will hover o'er me /I know my pathway is rough and steep

But golden fields lie out before me /Where weary eyes no more will weep

I'm going there to see my father . . .

I'm going there to see my sister . . .

 

4/16

Thursday, April 16, 2026

1962 Walter Cronkite began anchoring the CBS Evening News

1993 The jury reached a guilty verdict in the federal case against police officers (two convicted, two acquitted) who beat Rodney King.

2007 Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The gunman killed 32 people and injured 23 others before committing suicide.

In bed at 9:30, and up at 4:10.  128/63/34 119 202.8; 56/56/46 rain, flood watch.

[I deleted accidentally everything I wrote before these words] jowel with neighbors.  More severe thunderstorms expected tomorrow.  It was last August that we experienced about 11 inches of rain in 2 days and basement flooding that cost more than $20,000 to repair/restore.  I'm remembering all those Republicans denying the reality of climate change, the goofy senator from Oklahoma who gleefully was filmed with a snowball during an unusual snowfall and offering it as proof that climate change was a hoax.  The village of Sussex in northeast Waukesha County suffered quite a bit of tornado damage last night, reminding us that it's foolish to think Milwaukee County is immune to tornados.

Rainfall in Fox Point just south of us since Sunday has been 6.27 inches.  In Mequon just north of us, it's been 5.87 inches, so we've had pretty close to 6 inches so far this week, with much more coming tomorrow. 😱

Nesting time.  I bought a big cotton ball at Wild Birds Unlimited a week or ten days ago and hung it on one of our shepherd crooks.  I saw sparrows filling their beaks with the cotton a couple of days ago.  This morning it was pairs of house finches.  I love watching them.  The birds remind me that, come what may, life goes on.  Consecutive days of powerful thunderstorms with torrential rains and gale-force winds, the birds survive, just as they survive (most of them) the bitter weather of our winters.  When the skies clear, they fill their little beaks with cotton, dead grasses, and twigs and prepare for their eggs and coming offspring.

Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace, Molly is the singer in a band

Desmond says to Molly, “Girl, I like your face,” and Molly says this as she takes him by the hand

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,Life goes on, brah, La-la, how the life goes on

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, Life goes on, brah, La-la, how the life goes on.

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevski.  I been thinking about reading this novel for years and finally started it today.   

 

x

4/15/2026

 Wednesday, April 15, 2026

My Mom's 104th birthday

1922 Mary Norma Healy was born in Grand Rapids, MN

In bed at 10 during a raging thunderstorm, up at 4:40 to quiet.  0445 124/66/32 117 204.0; 62/66/52, cloudy.

Morning meds at 9:30 a. m.  Ranolazine at 8 a.m. and p.m.

Wild night of thunder, lightning, and dense rainfall.  The rain started falling after Geri had shut the venitian blinds for the night.  When I opened them to look out on the storm, the air looked like it was solid water, like we were underwater in a submarine.  We went downstaira twice to check the basement, and each time we had a little rain seepage coming in from the window well areas on our west wall.   These increasingly common storms reminds us how dependent we are on technilogical services, especially electric power and internet, which is to say, how vulnerable we are to technology.  I think of this vulnerability today as I read of threats being traded by Trump and the Iranian regime.  Does Trump think the Iranians are without power in cyberwarfare?  or in old-fashioned terrorism, suicide bombers, 'dirty bombs', etc.?  Am I crazy for thinking it is not impossible to imagine the Iranians doing something particularly destructive within the U.S. and Trump responding with a nuclear weapon?  Is that sort of thing beyond the realm of the possible?  I don't think so.   More severe storms expected this afternoon, evening, and night.  I dread it.  Fox Point, our next door neighbor to the south, got 2.88 inches of rain last night. and I suppose we received something like that.  Today and tonights storms will be Day 3 in a row, with at least another inch of rain predicted.  Fingers crossed.

FB today.  Mary Norma Healy was born 100 years ago today in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at the south end of the Mesabi Iron Range.  1922 was the year that saw Hitler’s Brownshirts, the SA, becoming violent in the streets of Germany on their long march to power 10 years later.  It was the year that 30,000 of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome and seized control over the Italian government.  Mary was born just a few months after Crown Prince Hirohito became Regent of Japan on his way to becoming Emperor of Japan in 1926 and just a few weeks before Frances Gumm, later to be better known as Judy Garland, was born in the same hospital as Mary.  Mary’s mother, Catherine O’Shea Healy, had two other children, Cornelius and Donald, and had had a third son, Daniel, who died at birth or in infancy, for Mary’s birth registry listed her as Catherine’s fourth child.  In 1928, when Mary was 6 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production.  Her father never remarried and Mary grew up motherless.  Mary was 7 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and she lived most of her youth in the Great Depression.  She attended Catholic schools in Englewood on Chicago’s south side and on August 3, 1940, she married Charles Edward Clausen, a co-parishioner at St. Bernard’s Church.  She was 18 years old, he several weeks shy of his 20th birthday.  In August of 1941, she gave birth to her son Charles and 3 years later, to his beloved sister, Catherine, named after Mary’s mother, and always called by her nickname Kitty.  In 1944, her husband was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to kill or be killed by Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers on a small island called Iwo Jima.  Her brothers were likewise conscripted and sent off to kill or be killed by the soldiers of Hitler and Mussolini.  Charles survived the battle, unlike 6,800 other Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese who died on the island, but he returned to his young wife emotionally shattered, damaged in ways that lasted throughout his life.  In September, 1947, a 15 year old neighbor of Mary and Charles, broke into their basement apartment while Charles was at work, threatened Mary’s 6 year old son and 3 year old daughter with a knife, and  slashed and sexually assaulted Mary.  The investigating detective described the crime as ‘sexual torture.’ Mary survived the crime against her and her children and, though she suffered her own PTSD, she never allowed herself to become embittered by the many hurts and injuries she experienced in her life.  Like her mother, she died young, at age 51.  Her husband and her daughter are gone now too, and her son is in his 80s.  He remembers her today on what would be her 100th birthday for the love and kindness she shared with a world that so often abused and neglected her, for the love and loyalty she gave to family and friends, for the compassion she showed for all of ‘our fellow men,’ and for the strength and integrity and goodness with which she lived her too-short and too-hard life. Requiescat in pace, Mom.

The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich.  I finished this collection of essays today.  They were all about life in Wyoming - mmotly the the lives of sheepherders, ranchers, and cowboys.  It was published in 1985 and I cant imagine how life in Wyoming may have changed, or not, over the last 40 years.  I was pleased to be instructed and reminded how very many people live lives so very different from the life I have lived growing up in Chicago, indoctrinated by the Church I grew up in and by the military that influenced me for the first 10 years of my early adulthood, and being a lawyer and a law professor for most of my adult life.  How different other lifes are from the lives I experienced among my neighbors at the House of Peace.  On the other hand, I was very put off by the author's writing style.  Much of what she wrote I didn't understand which might just be because of my not-too-bright mind and my poor comprehension, but it struck me that she was always trying too hard to be poetic and original.  I suppose that's understandable since she has published two books of poetry, but it was a big turnoff for me.  I'm surprised that publishers found the essays worthy of publication in book, Kindle, and Audible forms, but, on the other hand, I bought it, read (and listened) to it till the last page.  'nuf said.

4/14/2026

 Tuesday, April 14, 2026

1536 King Henry VIII expropriated minor monasteries

1865  Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre 

1973 Acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray resigned after admitting that he destroyed evidence in the Watergate scandal

1983  President Ronald Reagan signed $165 billion Social Security rescue

1986 Desmond Tutu was elected Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, South Africa

1989 In the Iran-Contra trial, Oliver North's case went to the jury

2020, Donald Trump froze funding for the World Health Organization pending a review for mistakes in handling the COVID-19 pandemic and for being "China-centric."

2021 President Biden said, "It's time to end America's longest war," confirming his decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by Sept 11

2025 Donald Trump suggested deporting United States citizens to the controversial Terrorism Confinement Center prison in El Salvador, despite the unconstitutionality of the proposal. 

In bed 9:20, awakended at 1:39 by my phone with the Tornado Warning below, back in by 3ish, up again at 8, 0300 129/68/62/112 204.2;61/5670/51 with more thunderstorms expected around 5 p.m.

Morning meds at ? a.m.  Ranolazine at 8:10 a.m. and p.m. 

Geri and I moved the bird feeders further away from the house today to keep the squirrels away from them.  One or more of them had been climbing up our screen and leaping across to the seeds, thereby avoiding the squirrel baffle on the shepherd's crooks.  I'm afraid we have driven this poor squirrel nuts with frustration.  He keeps climbing up the screen trying to see if he can leap the great distance to the seeds.  When he tries, he falls to the ground, but he keeps trying.  I'm feeling sad for him, especially since I worry so much about whether I'm creating a dependency on the birds and squirrrels with these feeders.

Critical 1:39 AM IMMINENT THREAT ALERT.  National Weather Service TORNADO WARNING in this area until 2:00 AM CDT.  Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest level of a sturdy building.  If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and lprotect yourself from flying debris.  Check media.

 Geri and I each received the THREAT ALERT on our phones and were out of bed by 1:40.  I seriously considered ignoring it, staying in bed, but thought of Geri in the next room, so I got out of bed and checked on her only to see her up and reading her phone message.  I suggested staying in the hallway, away from all windows, but she wanted to head to the basement, which we did, and where we stayed until 2:05.  It reminded me of a similar situation we experienced in our home outside Saukville, when my Dad had first lived with us.  I remember thinking how ironic (wrong word) it was that he had left Florida, the land of severe weather, to come to peaceful Wisconsin only to be gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to seek shelter from a tornado, which never occurred.  The photo is a muffed shot of Geri in the basement in her pajamas wrapped under a blanket awaiting the 'all clear.'

    Even with the very welcome second round of sleep after the interruption, I'm feeling a bit out of it and loopy/spacey, and probably wont be writing much today, because I'm not thinking very much or very clearly today.  Here is something I posted a year ago today that is worth considering again:

How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me) by Roger Rosenblatt in this morning's New York Times:

It took me 85 years to learn these things, but I believe they’re applicable at any age.

1. Nobody’s thinking about you.  It was true 25 years ago, and it’s true today. Nobody is thinking about you. Nobody ever will. Not your teacher, not your minister, not your colleagues, not your shrink, not a soul. It can be a bummer of a thought. But it’s also liberating. That time you fell on your butt in public? That dumb comment you made at dinner last week? That brilliant book you wrote? No one is thinking about it. Others are thinking about themselves. Just like you.

2. Make young friends

3. Try to see fewer than five doctors.  . . . It’s not the doctors I dislike; rather, it’s the debilitating feeling of moving from one to another to another like an automobile on an assembly line. If the end product were a Lamborghini, I’d be fine. But I’m a Studebaker.  I know all these doctor visits are prudent and inevitable. But when one’s social life consists of Marie, who takes my blood, and an M.R.I. technician named Lou, it’s hardly a good sign.

4. Get a dog. 

5. Don’t hear the cheers. 

6. Everyone’s in pain.  If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. People you meet casually, those you’ve known all your life, the ones you’ll never see — everyone’s in pain. If you need an excuse for being kind, start with that. 

7. Listen for Bob Marley. 

8. Join a gang.  This advice is meant for men more than women, because women are always part of one group or another. The value of socializing comes to women naturally, which is why the world would be better if women ran it. They know how to get along in groups. Men, on the other hand, are solitary, static things. Generals without wars, astride iron horses. They don’t band together naturally, but they ought to, especially when too much solitude leads to self-conscious gloom. Join a gang — that’s what I say. I do not mean a motorcycle gang, simply a group of guys who share an interest. Joining a gang also serves society at large. It keeps us off the streets.

9. On regrets.  They’re part of life. Learn to live with them. 

10. Start and end every day by listening to Louis Armstrong.

My thoughts:  #1 is great advice.  We tend to forget that we are all self-centered.  How could it be otherwise.  We need it to survive, plus we usually can't help it.  I' m thinking of a fearsome poem by Christina Rossetti, Who Shall Deliver Me?

God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself,
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys:

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me,
Break off the yoke and set me free.

 #2 is great advice also but also, easier said than done.  Ditto # 3.  I have my primary care doc, my rheumatology doc, my infectious disease doc, my heart rhythm doc, my physical medicine doc, my mental health doc (worries about geriatric depression and suicide, big VA concerns),  my eye doc, my urologist, and various other on-call specialists.  I'm always living with the question of whether to follow Zeke Emanuel;s advice.

#4.  I'd like to, but Geri's dead against it and she does almost all the 'heavy lifting' concerning caring for a dog, as she did with Lilly.  I sorely miss our Lilly.

#5.  He's referring to Bill Russell's response to his daughter's question about how he copes with all the boos he used to receive.  He said he didn't hear them.  She asked how he could do that and he said it was because he didn't hear the cheers.  He didn't pay any attention to either, just to getting his work done well.

#6.  Terribly important.  It reminds me of the T shirt of the guy at Sendik's: Everyone you encounter is fighting a battle you know nothing about.  How easily we forget, or just don't care.  

#7, The author lived in NYC, in an apartment building with a doorman.  The author walked his dog every morning around 4 a.m.  One morning in the buildings lobby, he hearded a disembodied beautiful voice singing Bob Marley's One Love.  He asked the doorman if he had heard it and the doorman answered, "That was me."  Thereafter, he never saw the doorman without thinking of his wonderful hidden talent and encouraged his readers to wonder about all the hidden talents in all the people we meet in our lives.

#8.  I wish I could 'join a gang.'  Most of my best friends are dead or live in other states.  The author points out how bad we men are at socializing compared to women.  Geri is on the phone with family orl friends every day, enjoying and sharing their company, their advice, their support.  For me, it's only rarely.

#9.  The advice that may be the most difficult for me to follow.  I tend to wallow in my regrets, sometimes to be overpowered by them.  It's why I so often think of W. B. Yeats' Vaccillation, the fifth stanza:

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

#10.  Louie's certainly not a bad choice, or even better, the great duets  by Louie and Ella Fitzgerald.  I guess it's a signifier of my psyche I that gravitate towards the blues, soft jazz, torch songs, and requiem mass music . . . May choirs of angels lead you . . .   See #9.😞

4/13/2026

 Monday, April 13, 2026

1861 After 34 hours of bombardment, Fort Sumter surrendered to the Confederates 

1954 Robert Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist

1986 Pope John Paul II met Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff at the Rome synagogue

2025 Israel destroyed part of the last fully functional hospital in Gaza City, the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which is managed by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem. No direct casualties are reported, but one child is killed due to interrupted medical care. 

2025 During Palm Sunday, two Russian ballistic missiles carrying cluster munitions struck the centre of Sumy, Ukraine, killing at least 35 people and wounding 117 others. 

In bed at 9, awake at 3:20, up at 3:50.  127/62/32 10; 60/53/71/56, partly cloudy day, more rain tonight.  

Morning meds at  a.m.  Ranolazine at 6 a.m. and 5:50 p.m.

What have we come to? Where are we headed?  

Pete Hegseth’s Gospel of Carnage, by Frank Bruni in this morning's New York Times.

I guess a zealot, by nature, can’t hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself.

He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That’s what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order.

He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven.

Not everyone agrees. In this era of the extraordinary, Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump administration’s assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran.

In a social media post on Friday, he wrote: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

That was hardly the pope’s first reprimand. During a Mass just before Easter, he voiced his concern that the Christian mission had been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” And before that, he cautioned that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Pete Hegseth and Robert Prevost, a/k/a Pope Leo XIV, are men, human beings, members of the most destructive species on earth, and each purports to speak for a transcendent Christian God.

Queen bee and worker bee.  Geri is both.  She reigns over our house, making decorating decisions, ruling the kitchen at dinner time, keeping it clean, and generally tending to it when it needs tending.  I'm not irrelevant to domestic sovereighty.  She askes my opinion when partnering input is appropriate, but I almost always defer to her.  I tell her I am uxorious, but not in the negative way the term is usually used, if it is used at all anymore by anyone but me.  Rather, I defer to her because I've come to realize that she has better taste than I do, and about most things domestic, better judgment, but mostly because she does most of the work that is required around the house.  I think it is a mark of respect to defer to her on these matters.  My old partner, Bob Freibert, used to joke had he and his wife Susan had a division of labor understanding in their marriage: he got to decide on the family position on matter of foreign policy and she decided all the other stuff.

I thought of the 'queen bee and worker bee' metaphor for Geri as I watched her this afternoon working on flower pots on our patio.  She had worked hard for three hours or more this morning in the marginal garden on our lot, the one that extends the entire west boundary of our lot.  The temperature was in the 70s and she came in exhausted and looking a bit frazzled from the high humidity.  She wasn't able to nap during the afternoon because of work going on next door, but nonethless, there she was again working outside on one of her never-ending garden chores.  I looked at her through my bedroom window and thought again, as I have so many time, what a prodigious worker she is.

    I took a very short walk this afternoon with "Rachel," my high-boy rollator, from our house to the first east-west street in Mequon and back.  By the time I reached that street, I was SOB, short of breath and tired, so I turned around.  I have no idea how much of that was due to CHF and how much was due to not enough sleep.  Probably a combination of both.  Later, Geri and I had another serious talk about whether it's a mistake not to sell the house and about the daunting issue, if not here, where?  Geri turns 82 in 5 days,  I turn 85 in 4 months.  Quo ire debemus?

4/12/2026

 Sunday, April 12, 2026

1861 Fort Sumter in South Carolina was attacked by the Confederacy beginning the American Civil War

1955 Polio vaccine tested by Jonas Salk was announced to be 'safe and effective' and was given full approval by the US Food and Drug Administration

1963 The police in Birmingham, Alabama, used dogs & cattle prods on peaceful demonstrators

1966 1st B-52 bombing on North Vietnam

2015 Hillary Clinton announced she would run for the President for the 2nd time

In bed at 9 or so, up at 5:20.  131/70/65 113 204.0;  48/40/71/45. rain and wind much of the day.

Morning meds at a.m.  Ranolazine at 6:45 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

It's been a semi-busy day (at least, for me), though by 2:30 all I had really accomplished was about 10 minutes of a VA chair yoga exercise downstairs which semi-exhausted me.  I need to at least try to do these stretches everyday.  I know they are helpful from the simple fact that it is so hard for me to do them because of my  Life as a lump.  I also did a load of laundry, read (in a manner of speaking) the Sunday papers, watched Fareed Zakaria, and made a breakfast of two scrambled eggs with mild jalapeno peppers and two pieces of sourdough toast with strawberry preserves.  I also managed to fit in that crowded schedule 😊 one short nap and one longer one.  It's like the first day of summer today, with a high in the low 70s.  We have the heat off and the doors open to let some fresh air in the house.  I almost took one of my paintings off the basement wall and started to rework it with some flesh-hued glaze, but didn't quite make it.  The painting is not very well done, and I'm afraid of making it worse by tinkering with it, but I'm resolved to try it.  Geri's been outside finishing up her Spring yard clean up, amazing me with her vim vigor, and vitality.   

Viktor Orban was defeated in Hungary.  It's not often that I feel real excitement over the results of a foreign election, but this one thrilled me.  I am reminded, however, of Thomas Merton's warning:

A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything around.  But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances. . . power will pass from one party to another but when the smoke clears . . . the situation will still be the same as it was before.  There will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the other for their own ends.  There will be the same greed and cruelty and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before.  For the revolutions of men change nothing.

Merton overstated his case but he was making a case denigrating revolution ground in human ideology to an imaged revolution grounded in the Sermon on the Mount.