Pretty pictures, priorities

This is a screenshot from my cell phone of screen shots from yesterday and the day before. I have an hour before I leave to drive up the northshore with by better half to see what Global warming has done to Gooseberry Falls. I am very keen to organize and write this book for campaigning. I’m reasonably confident that once I have it in hand my campaign will have the fuel to take off. But as with every other race I’ve made I am working hard not to forget that home and hearth comes before rushing around to preserve home and hearth for everyone else. Thankfully this has been such a productive week that working all day today on my book seems to be something I can set aside.

But let me tell you about the images above.

On the left is a picture of a plastic plate that was a cover for a wall mounted vent from my house. Claudia brought it to me yesterday morning as I was about to tear into the book. I only had to see if it belonged to the vent above her bedroom window. I checked it and there was a big round hole for birds to come nest in. With our ridiculously Trump denied global warming it almost seems like the birds might want to start building nests now when we should instead have two feet of snow on the Ground. So, I poured two hours of searching the internet for replacement parts, getting a ladder out of a garage where it was hidden behind a pile of things brought in from the patio for the Winter and clambering up and down and and and…..

I got a call from my brother who is recovering from having stents put in his hearts blocked arteries like I did two Valentines Days ago.

By the time all that was done it was time for me to watch a noon showing of the 2018 season of the charming Brit series The Great British Baking Show.

By the time that was over I only had a couple hours left before I had to begin cooking my wife’s Birthday dinner. She did most of the work.

So after waking up from a particularly good night’s sleep with ideas on how to focus my book and after listening to an NPR story that confirmed my conviction that 60% of America is desperate to save our Democracy this seems like a good day to work on that book. It looks like it will be tomorrow. But, as you recent readers know I’m trying to put a blog post in regularly and I have 50 minutes before departure to tell you what is in my screen shot of a screen shot.

I send screen shots to my Flickr Account all the time just in case I might use them for a Reader Column or a blog post. I did managed to put the taped together mess over the hole to finish that story. So there are three maps on the screen shot. I found those on a random time waster about interesting maps and indeed they were interesting. From left to right they are mostly green yellow and red. The Green on the leftist map are the nations where homosexuality has been made legal. The Red map of America is a map that shows where landlords can kick gay tenants out of their houses. Wherever Republicans and evangelicals live gays are under attack even if the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal.

The Yellow may shows the varying degrees of non Christian life in Europe. The less yellow in a nation the fewer practicing Christians there are. I’m sorry the detail on these maps has been lost but you can make some judgements even so on the fuzzy maps above.

The image on the left second row is a Brazilian ad for condoms showing Donald Trump encased in protection. A high school friend sent this out on Facebook with two other dictators Putin and either a Korean or Chinese dicator similarly trying to fight their way out of a condom.

The last is a screen shot I took accidentally when I tried to read a story from the archives of the Mankato Free Press about a peace march I was in in 1972 which I wanted to consult for my series on “My 1972.”

Ah good. I still have forty minutes before I take off and I’ve finished this post. I’ve just checked my blog stats and I’m still keeping my daily 1000 plus visitors except for a huge drop yesterday when I was preoccupied. Hope I come back today. Hope Stauber’s supporters are looking at this knowing I’m still coming for their pocket lint. As the James Brown song says: “I’m feeling good.”

About the author