1/16/24

 Tuesday, January 16, 2024

In bed at 9 but still awake at 10, up at 6. -6°, high of +5°, wind W at 14 mph, 10-18/gusts to 31 mph, feels like -27°, WIND CHILL ADVISORY.  Sunrise at 7:20, sunset at 4:42, 9+22.   

Treadmill; pain.  My right wrist and left shoulder are still sore.  32:14 & 0.75 at 1:30 while watching a long interview of Ian Bremmer on Israel-Gaza.  Later I watched another Intelligence Squared debate on the proposition "Israel is destroying itself by its settlement policy."  The proponents won the debate (audience votes) by about 5 to 1.  The Q & A segment of the program after the formal presentations was very heated not from the audience but from the debaters.

I'm grateful for my warm bed, sheets, blankets, and pillows.  I recall spending a night in a foxhole I had dug in the hills of Quantico and coming down with a high fever and a nasty case of bronchitis by the next morning, forcing me to stay 'confined to quarters' for the weekend and missing liberty in Washington, D.C.  I was the only one in the barracks from Friday night to Sunday evening.  I recall months sleeping on a cot under mosquito netting in Vietnam, 6 months in a tent, 2 months in a corrugated tin hut.  I recall the bunk bed at 7303 S. Emerald and my parents sleeping on the sleeper sofa in the living room.  These memories remind me how fortunate I am with my Stearns and Foster mattress and its accouterments and I am grateful, though fighting off some sadness about my parents' years on that sleeper sofa and its undoubtedly uncomfortable mattress.  The photo is of me relaxing on the sandbag bunker outside the tent I lived in for 6 months in Vietnam.

No surprises in Iowa.  Trump got 51% of the caucus votes and won most handily in evangelical areas and areas with lower income and less education.  In my 'home county' (Webster), Trump picked up 67% of the vote whereas in Polk county (DesMoines), he got only 38%, with DeSantis and Haley virtually tied at 27%.

LTMW at 7 a.m., with the temperature still at 6 below zero, I see no birds at my feeders but a neighbor out jogging on County Line Road.  I can't believe this is a healthy activity.  OCD?  A little later there is an elegant mourning dove perched atop the nearer shepherd's crook and one or more chickadees come to the safflower/sunflower feeder but I can't tell whether they are able to nab a seed.

My trusty Volvo started right away when I took it out for a drive today for the first time in several days.  I drove through River Hills which is a 'winter wonderland' with all the trees and shrubs still covered in snow and ice.