I’m too busy to get Alzheimers. I started 2019 nursing Claudia who joined the zipper club. Fretting about Donald Trump and mulling over a second run against one of his Trumplicans. Planning a campaign to return to the Duluth School Board. Starting a book, one of about five or six I see a clear path to writing. Clearing out my kitchen in preparation for a renovation which has left our old refrigerator standing in our dining room for the last month. Studying French daily. Working my tuckus off gardening without the full assistance of my garden boss. Oh yeah and replacing almost 100 storm windows on my church.
You can see me on the upper right of this Facebook photo. I’m wearing my old Let Duluth Vote shirt which has been a paint shirt for the past few years. I’m the youngster in this trio. I’ve got sixteen months till I turn 70. Mark in the center only has two months to go and Mike on the other side has made it to 77. The other couple helpers we’ve had are also in the same age vicinity including the Mike’s bride, Linda, who took the picture yesterday.
Tomorrow will be my last day at this work until the cool of September when we will tackle another nine of the windows. After that we will probably hire professionals rather than put up five levels of scaffolding. None of us bounce as well as we did sixty years ago.
Tomorrow I’ll put in my fourth day in a row – fifth day out of the last six installing four more and taking down the staging. In the cool of September we may replace nine more leaving us about twenty left to do – the really dangerous ones.
I’ve slept well fortified with advil the last three nights but I just woke up. I crashed at a little after seven tonight, too early, and I was out of sorts. I have just managed to keep my streak of daily french studies going for over 304 days until today. I started at the church at seven this morning and left at 4:30 completely forgetting my French. When a couple hours after my french software’s deadline had past I was not happy. My aim is to learn French not keep up some arbitrary streak but still. Like winning public office, or writing a book I intend to learn to speak French at seventy! Maybe even before!!
A few book orders (donations) are still trickling in from the early June fundraising letter I sent out. I only sent out about 125 letters that weren’t returned by the postal service for changed addresses. I am not quite at a quarter of the sales I need to pay for the book’s printing. I hope the fundraising/campaign letter I’ll be sending out early next week will put me over the top or get me close. That will go to about 2,000 2nd District voters. I’ll need to raise more than book printing costs. I will still have another 10,000 District voters to send my letter too at not quite 50 cents per letter. That’s $5,000 for mailing and $3,000 for printing a book. I’ll probably hand deliver most of them to save on postage.
I haven’t had time to blog much recently. But that may be a blessing. I wonder if my frequent inundation of words doesn’t sometimes overwhelm my eight loyal readers. In checking out my visitor stats tonight I was pleased to see that over 9 percent of my 12,000 visits since August began have lasted over half an hour. I believe my book will be every bit as readable as my blog.
There was just one thing I regret not finding time for this week. Bill Rees sent in a nyaa, nyaa, nyaa, letter to the Duluth Reader on the issue of gun control. I only read his last paragraph that chided gun control advocates for not caring about black Americans who are the most likely to die by gun violence. Mr. Rees wondered if these goody-two-shoes weren’t racist as he assumed they were only concerned about white victims…….although Bill didn’t seem to be all that worried about black victims either. The accusation was just a cheap talking point.
That galled me because fifteen or twenty years ago I wrote a letter to the Trib about gun violence. This was before school shootings had become a weekly event. I don’t have very good access to things I filed away that long ago but I do recall that my letter was directed at the indifference of Second Amendment worshipers, like Rees. I criticized them for their indifference to the appallingly high gun violence in urban centers. And Bill Rees was one of the folks to write a letter disagreeing with my take on what the Constitution had to say about our promiscuous gun ownership. It appeared to me that Bill thought that inner city gun deaths were a small price to pay to secure our gun ownership rights.
Yeah Bill. I do think black lives matter every bit as much as white lives. That’s what I wish I had been able to back up with the old texts in a letter to the Duluth Reader. Oh well, my eight loyal readers got to hear me vent.
How about a book?
