Tag: autobiography

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Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-05-12

Portable greenhouse with roughly 700 plants started from seeds.

This week was hit or miss regarding weather. Some days were drop-dead gorgeous with ambient temperatures in the low 70s and blue skies filled with large, cumulus clouds. Other days it rained and rained and rained. Conditions were never that good to get the garden planted because there was too much moisture in the soil. The portable greenhouse is filled with seedlings ready to go into the ground.

Feeling Alone in the Universe

There is nothing like looking at the sky to make us feel alone in the universe. The sky was exceptionally cloudless Saturday night when I was out to watch for the aurora borealis.

Northern lights, or the aurora borealis, were visible around the area, just not near where I live. I explored the neighborhood to find a place with a broad expanse of unobstructed sky so I could attempt to view them. I stayed up late to witness the phenomenon, yet my naked eyes couldn’t see it.

The forecast was “very likely geomagnetic storming will persist through the weekend as several additional Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are in transit to Earth’s outer atmosphere…” It sounds scary, yet it Earth doing what it evolved to do.

Instead, I looked at the stars on a clear spring night and contemplated the meaning of being alive. It was more blessing than curse.

Hall of Fame Awards

My friend Bill invited me to join him at the 2024 Johnson County Democrats Hall of Fame Awards event in Coralville. He was being inducted for his long political activism as business manager for an electrical workers union. I was happy to sit at his table during the event.

I flipped the program and saw the list of past Hall of Fame honorees printed on the back. So many friends were inducted. A significant number of them died since their induction. I wouldn’t normally go to an event like this, yet am thankful for the opportunity.

Trump Trial in New York

I’ve been following the Donald J. Trump trial for election interference. He was indicted under New York law for falsifying documents to avoid publicity about an affair with a woman who made adult films. My standby code of living is if you are male and don’t want people to know about an affair, keep your pants zipped. It seems clear from the trial the 45th president has no regard for the rule of law. A highlight this week was when his lawyers asked the judge to lift the gag order so he could respond to the woman with whom he had the affair. The proper venue for doing that would be for him to give testimony in the trial, the judge ruled. The prosecution is nearing the end of making their case.

Immigration

I have more to say about immigration. I started re-posting two of my old articles about it on Saturday. It turns out I wrote a lot of them since beginning this blog in 2007. Around 2010, I worked with a group of clergy to get the City of Iowa City to declare itself a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. That’s the opposite direction our current government is pursuing. Never mind that the city did not adopt such a policy. It has been a bug-a-boo among Republicans for a long time. Immigration is something about which everyone has an opinion yet few are willing to resolve its problems.

Kitchen-Garden

With my spouse gone for the week my cooking has been different. I made pizza, a casserole, sandwiches with French-style bread, and tacos my way (which is spicy). I cooked through this phase and am ready for her to return this week. On Sunday I bought a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream from the local grocer and ate it for dinner.

Jack Daniels Whiskey

I have a fifth of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey in the house. I’ve had it for many years and it is half gone. This week I poured some over ice and sipped it until the ice melted and the liquid was gone. The main benefit, other than a brief, fleeting, alcohol buzz, was that I slept through the night for seven straight hours. I did enjoy waking with the realization I slept through the night. Whiskey has gotten too expensive to buy, so I plan to make this bottle last.

There are a lot of moving parts in my current life with the biggest being to get the garden planted. After plot three, there are four more to go. It seems like a much bigger job this year compared to last. I’ll keep at it.

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Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-05-05

Lilacs planted shortly after moving to Big Grove Township in 1993.

The week began with delays getting into the garden. Life’s exigencies required attention and garden work was pushed back. There was also rain. There is time before last frost, but not much of it.

Dental Care

Tuesday began with a dental appointment. My dentist sold his practice to a large dentistry operation in 2017. I don’t like outlasting medical practitioners yet as a septuagenarian it happens more than I want. The new group, a large company based in Waterloo, seldom treats me with the same practitioner whether it be hygienist or dentist. Each appointment offers a different vibe and I don’t like it. I mean, I’m used to dentists practicing on their own or with a partner or two and not a constantly revolving carousel of practitioners. I don’t know their business model, yet I suspect the pay is low and the assembly line style of operations yields a lower cost for the owners. It is not patient-centered care.

Trip to Des Moines

It rained on Thursday, making it a good day to take my spouse to see her sister. The rain let up west of Williamsburg and water was standing in Iowa’s neatly rectangular planting areas. Looks like farmers had been in the fields and maybe planted some corn. As we progressed into Des Moines, the state capitol construction scaffolding had been removed from the smaller domes. It was an uneventful trip. The longer I drive, the more I like that.

District Convention

The First District Democratic candidate for Congress was not present at Saturday’s district convention in North Liberty. Iowa political districts are designed around the congressional seat and I have an old-school expectation of hearing from the candidate in person, and getting a chance for a brief side-conversation. I have become a dinosaur. It was not to be.

Absent the candidate, I’m not sure what, besides necessary elections to the state and national conventions, we accomplished. The morning was consumed by a presentation from a third party grassroots group, and an explanation about why we would be using ranked choice voting for the elections. We would likely have saved time if we had skipped these presentations and gone directly to voting.

The third party person gave a presentation that divided campaign work into three buckets: Grassroots groups who would do much of the work around getting voters to the polls, county parties responsible for centralized communication, fund raising, and party organization, and candidate campaigns, which work mostly on their own to secure votes needed to be elected. This division is both useful and problematic.

Do people need something to do in a political campaign? Beyond making sure one is registered to vote and casting a ballot, one can get involved with campaign work, if interested. When Iowa lost first in the nation status after the computer application debacle in reporting results to national media in 2020, we also lost funding from the candidates who spent heavily in the early states to garner attention for their campaigns. Likewise, because Iowa Democrats are in a significant minority, expenditures from the president’s national campaign are not expected. There is work to be done, yet it isn’t clear how such work should be described and assigned to mostly volunteers.

Endemic to the current party structure is a misdiagnosis of key issues to a campaign. More than anything else, politics has gotten local. In Big Grove Precinct, the electorate is divided. During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won over Joe Biden 671 votes to 637. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton 575 votes to 529. Barack Obama won here in both 2008 and 2012. My precinct has a divided electorate and has recently been won by both Democrats and Republicans. While new people moving to our area lean Republican, the key issue is how does an organizer build a Democrat majority at the polls, recruiting votes regardless of party?

A speaker at the convention looked around the room and suggested the dominance of white-skinned, grey-haired delegates is the problem with the party. Whatever. Had rain not been forecast during the convention hours, I would rather have been working in our yard. The trouble, as I experienced recruiting a replacement for my position on the county central committee, is literally no one is willing to do the work to provide steady volunteer work for local Democrats. That’s a much different problem than skin tone and hair color among people willing to show up on a spring Saturday.

My problem at the end of this week was it was May 5 and so much work remained to get the garden planted. We may have had the last frost and I simply don’t realize it. I am determined not to be distracted during the upcoming week.

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Living in Society

Sunlight, Birds Singing

Trail walking in April 2023.

A walk on the state park trail is respite from working at home. These days I take the auto off property once or twice each week. The rest of the time is spent working at home or walking on the trail. A person needs sunlight and bird songs for many reasons. It is as close as it gets to feeling a part of nature.

We need respite.

A high school student came to the door seeking cans and bottles to return for the deposit — a fund raising project for the school band. We don’t consume much that comes in containers that can be redeemed for a deposit. I went downstairs and found a case of empty ginger beer bottles and turned them over.

I also found a case of Mexican beer with 15 bottles left from last summer. On hot days, I’ll ice down one or two to drink when I work up a sweat. This is enough to last into June.

These April days are slipping through my hands and there seems to be little to do about it. The garden seedlings are too many for the available indoors space and I haven’t been able to muster energy to assemble the new, portable greenhouse. Been feeling a bit punk, and that’s not helping either.

I spent part of Thursday morning unraveling loose threads that inhabit family lore. Here is how that passage ended.

Family lore is William worked in Mine 74 and in the Cherry coal mine. Other family lore suggests he didn’t mine coal but had an office job from a young age.

Inconsistent and incomplete tales are part of a problem with family stories. It affects how an author writes a modern narrative. In a later chapter, I present two very different stories authored by Mother in the form of a letter and email about the day I was born. We must consider such stories and proceed based on conflicting information, even when both versions cannot be true.

My view at this writing is Grandfather’s declaration of being a miner on the 1910 and 1940 U.S. Census records, my personal experiences with him, explanations from family about how he came to have black lung disease by inhaling coal dust in the mines, and the government awarding Black Lung Benefits based on his health, confirm he worked in the mines. I proceed on that basis.

We tell stories about our lives and repeat them. They harden and become the stuff of legend within a family. Just as Mae told and retold the story of her aunt and the piano, Mother told and retold the story of Grandfather being a communist. By focusing on family lore, and hardened stories, we tend to reduce how much we know about parts of our lives we didn’t directly experience. Expanding the universe of knowledge about our lives is the goal of this book.

Despite feeling punk, behind in the garden, and lacking energy, it felt I got something done. The idea in this passage is to weave explanations about complex and conflicting stories in the autobiography, one in each chapter. It is an improvement in the narrative that is possible. The purpose is to give the reader a guidepost on how to interpret what I write as they read it. I’m not aware of anyone else who writes this way. Will see how it goes.

I will soon need to get outside again for brief respite.

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Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-04-21

Photo by Jessica Lewis ud83eudd8b thepaintedsquare on Pexels.com

Garden vegetables overwintered: cilantro, spring onions, kale, collards, and garlic. The garlic grew where it was planted last year, so I will pull it before tomatoes go into that spot. Main crop of garlic is about 12 inches tall. The last order of tomato seeds, cucumbers and squash arrived via USPS on Saturday. The shift from indoors to outdoors work is evident this week.

Electricity Outage

On Tuesday a big storm rolled in and took the electricity out for a brief moment. It was enough to risk losing the edits I was making on my autobiography. Luckily, my computer saved my then current work in the browser and I was able to restore it, rename it, and proceed on. Losing a day’s edits is unwanted, but a writer can recover from that. Luckily, because of technology I don’t understand, I didn’t lose anything when electricity failed and the CPU and screen died.

Optometrist

This week I had my annual appointment with an optometrist for a diabetes screening. It is remarkable how many tests and the diversity of equipment they used for this exam. With a special camera, the attendant took a photo of my retinas. There was almost no change to note year-over-year. I’m clear for another as far as diabetes is concerned until the next appointment in 2025.

The optometrist has been mentioning cataract surgery as a future possibility for the last few years. The thing is, while I experience some vision deterioration, the amount of change does not affect everyday activities like reading and driving. If doc recommends it, I am going to delay until there is some kind of actual problem. The annual screening is fine.

He wrote a new eyeglasses prescription, which I will not fill because I like my current glasses and the improved vision they provide.

Robotic Approach to Health

I had a robo-call from my prescription drug insurance company. The machine left a message on my mobile device. When I called back, it was a robotic reminder I needed to fill my prescription, accompanied by warnings about following doctor’s orders. The pharmacy had some kind of robotic reminder system that previously prompted me to refill my prescription. The reason I didn’t refill was my nurse practitioner quit when the university bought the private hospital system. He hasn’t been replaced. When I called the temporary clinic the next town over to discuss, they asked me how many pills I had left. Because of the robot, I had plenty to last a couple of weeks. When I get down to five pills, I’ll phone so they can reauthorize.

In the meanwhile, I met with a group of pharmacy students who suggested an over the counter drug instead of what I was taking. I have been thinking of stopping the prescription drug and self-treating. Did the robots know, and hence their concern?

Mushroom Hunters

While walking on the state park trail I encountered some neighbors I’ve known a long time. They were off trail and I asked if they were looking for mushrooms. Spring Morel Mushrooms are a well-loved delicacy in this region. He answered that was what they were doing. I stopped walking and we talked. The drought is too much for the mushrooms to grow, we agreed. When I hit the turn-around point and returned, they were both gone.

Another Edit Pass

I see an opportunity to improve the draft of my autobiography. When I started, my main concern was getting a story framed on a timeline. Now that it’s done, I want to emphasize my development as a story-teller. I hadn’t envisioned that when I began. I made some changes to the first chapter and now need to follow it through to the end. It was like something nagged at me. Now I know what it was. With gardening season here, I’m not sure how the new edit will be worked into the schedule.

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Writing

End In Sight

My recipe book opened to apple butter.

I spent the last couple of days re-writing the end of part one of my autobiography. I am getting so close to finishing the narrative, I can visualize the printed book. Soon I’ll be proof reading for spelling and punctuation, setting margins, and picking a font.

It is the story I want to tell about my first 30 years. Some history, some background, some new writing, and many recycled passages from past writing. More than anything, the narrative is grounded in the reality that was my experience living through it. Writing chapter titles unleashed an avalanche that got this phase of the book finished six months earlier than I recently thought.

I can go into gardening season with the end of this project in sight.

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-04-07

Organic juice section at the grocer on April 7, 2024.

It was a punk week as far as weather goes. Rain and snow kept me mostly indoors. My exercise log shows more indoors workouts which are never as much fun as walking on the state park trail. I managed as best I could.

Women’s Basketball

Sunday I turned on the television and found ABC which was carrying the NCAA Women’s Championship basketball game. Iowa lost to the University of South Carolina 75-87. It was the first time I tuned into a college sporting event since I watched the Iowa football team get shutout by Washington, 0-28 in the Jan. 1, 1982 Rose Bowl. The moral of the story is I shouldn’t jinx the luck by tuning in.

Our high school class reunion planning group was talking about women’s basketball at our meeting this week. I suggested we find one of the women who were leaders in high school to lead the formal program we have planned. One person asked if we had a women’s basketball team. Perhaps there would be a leader from there. We didn’t. We graduated high school before Title IX was signed into law.

Editing the Book

I finished the final rough draft of the first 38 of 62 chapters in my autobiography. This thing may not drag on until summer. My conclusion is I have been over the text so many times, it has become the story. There were some chapters that needed work, but it is a much better draft than what I finished last year.

One lingering concern is including long passages from my journal in the narrative without editing. Some of that writing is a bit rough. When I started journal writing in 1974, I was not very good at it. My argument to myself is that it is better to show the work than sand off the edges in a new narrative. In part, that is to show my progress as a writer in a work intended to showcase my writing. The long passage I wrote in France was particularly rough, yet it serves as an example of how my journal writing started. For now, I’m leaving it in.

The other question is about passages written about long ago events since I started this blog in 2007. There may be a case to just rewrite these. At the same time, they capture a moment in time that would vanish should I re-write them. I left them in at this point.

End of Life Planning

I read Mary Ann Burrows new book, The Last Hurrah: A Living Workbook for a Happy Ending. The book is about end of life planning, but not the kind I expected. She defers to others the tasks of financial and legal advice and writes mostly about how to turn our last days into a celebration. If someone knows me, they know I am not a big one to celebrate moments or have a big to-do about life’s events. The biggest events in my life were our wedding and its two receptions, and our child’s high school graduation. We had gatherings for them. So many of my good friends have died already, I’m not sure who would be left and in good enough shape to travel for a celebration. I started keeping my own obituary a number of years ago. It is pretty bare bones, and that’s the way I like it.

Clear Organic Juice

I went to the grocer to find clear organic juice for my spouse. She wanted organic apple juice, which wasn’t available. In typical (for us) form, I started sending images of various ingredient labels and products. I offered to get non-organic apple juice. In the end, I phoned her and said, “I’ve been waiting in this juice aisle and am starting to get thirsty.” We gave up and I brought home boxed vegetable broth instead.

It was unsettling to be unable to dig in the garden because of inclement weather. The seed potatoes appear to be doing well, and the seedlings are growing. Here’s hoping the coming week find me spending more time in the garden.

Categories
Living in Society

Creativity With Cameras

Kodak Instamatic 100 Camera. Provenance unknown.

Editor’s Note: This is a chapter from my autobiographical work in progress.

By 1962 I owned a camera and used it to photograph our neighborhood. It was an early form of creativity that stayed with me all my life.

I walked north from home on Marquette Street and took snapshots of the Levetzow’s holiday display at the intersection with High Street. They owned Model Dairy Company and at Christmas filled their whole yard with lighted Christmas decorations. On the southwest corner of their house was a large crèche. To its right was a lighted display of Santa, his sleigh, and reindeer. We viewed them as an affluent family, such affluence being on conspicuous display at the holidays. They had a kid-sized model of their dairy delivery van, although none of us local kids got to drive or play with it.

I photographed the holiday display at the house across the street to the south. This was a rental through which families moved frequently. Eventually, a young Joe Whitty and his family moved there when he worked at the nearby Mercy Hospital bakery. He later opened his own chain of pizza and ice cream restaurants called Happy Joe’s.

Using a camera was an inexpensive way to have fun. Because the process took so long, it seemed more creative: requiring thought, editing, and an ability to understand the camera viewer and how it would relate to the finished print. I did not crop many photos at first but accepted what the processor developed.

We posed for pictures with my film camera. I gave more thought to each frame than I might today because the results were not immediately available. There were only so many shots on a roll of film, so it felt necessary to get the framing and pose right. It was a process of experimentation and of managing expenses. Developing film could take a while, depending upon when the entire roll was exposed, and when one could get it to the drug store to be developed. Photographs were special and I believed they would have enduring value.

There is a photo of me in my altar boy cassock and surplus, one of us kids bowling, and many posed photos of all of us in the foyer. One favorite foyer photo is of Mother and Father dressed up in costumes to go out on New Year’s Eve in 1962. The following January, I captured my sister’s birthday party during which we all danced the twist. Mother took some of those shots. My parents had just begun listening to long-playing records at home and had copies of popular LPs by twist artists like Chubby Checker and Fats Domino.

In 1963 I began buying color film. Pictures survived: of Easter, my sister’s first communion, a trip to the park, Father standing next to the wrecked 1959 Ford. Mostly they were posed and signified a special event.

Mae was an influence on my photography. She purchased inexpensive cameras at the drug store and used them to record moments with the family. After researching the Polish community near Wilno, Minnesota, I came to believe her behavior with cameras in the 1960s had its roots in the inner cultural and spiritual realm filled with drama and emotion I described previously. The surviving photograph of her sister Tillie’s confirmation is one example of this. The desire to pose and capture a photo was something creative I didn’t understand at the time. We were plain folk and when we got dressed for church, or to attend an event, it was a big deal. Mae wanted to capture those moments on film, consistent with her Polish upbringing. It’s a natural impulse that presents an interpretation of who we were. Of course, we always wanted to put the best foot forward in these constructed frames.

Because photography was a technology with numerous steps, and there was a cost of film and prints, I don’t have many photos from my earliest days. However, I have a lot by comparison. The ones that survive tell me who I was and inform us about our family culture. They are an important part of remembering who we were. From that early time, I began thinking about how to narrate my life using a camera. There is a direct creative thread running from 1962 to the present and spun on my use of cameras.

Categories
Writing

Snow in the Grove

Garden seedlings watching it snow from indoors.

Precipitation was forecast all day Wednesday so I did my exercising indoors. On Tuesday, I went to town and bought a Powerball ticket. I understand the odds of winning are against me. Most days I fail to match a single drawn number. Other days, I don’t buy a ticket. At least we can depend upon it snowing in early spring.

I’ve been working on our high school class reunion. We missed the 50th because of the coronavirus pandemic. We scheduled a 50th-ish reunion this July. The former classmates on the planning committee are all great.

When I think of high school, I return to the most dominant feature: the death of Father in an industrial accident on Feb. 1, 1969. Dealing with his sudden death occupied me during the remaining 16 months of school. It was a brutal and clear demarcation of my life. There was a before and an after which defined who I was, and who I would be.

High school was no fun. I checked things off while in school. Tried out for football and swimming and didn’t make either team. Played intramural basketball with some of my nerdy friends plus the one Hispanic person in our class. Sang in chorus all four years. Was inducted into the National Honor Society. Was on the stage crew. Got a part time job after school at a local department store. Bought a used Volkswagen Beetle to get around and began driving it to school. Practiced and played guitar, taking lessons from someone not far from our neighborhood. While this seems bucolic as written, whatever was pleasant about it vanished with Father’s death.

I was lucky to form a new group of friends after Father died. They helped me through a turbulent time. My new friends helped me cope with finishing high school, and getting through college. Not to mention their help with the pressures of a society in transition in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

I had only begun to discuss how I would live my life with Father when he did not return from the meat packing plant. He didn’t have any suggestions as we discussed college and beyond. I enrolled in engineering classes at university but couldn’t master calculus or the slide rule. Without my new friends, I would have drifted into oblivion. With their help, I graduated in four years with a degree in English.

It is good to remember all this about high school now. For that, the reunion and its planning will serve. I still have friends among former classmates. I enjoy thinking about them while stuck indoors during this spring snowfall. It will be good to see them again. The odds of that are better than winning the Powerball.

Categories
Writing

Turning a Corner

Draft chapter page April 1, 2024

With chapters of part one of my autobiography named and numbered, it feels I turned a corner from being stuck, to completing the narrative this year. As soon as I typed them all and shrunk them to fit on a single page, it became clear what I had to do next to produce the first volume.

In naming the chapters I re-read part one. The narrative seems sound. The story has defined beginnings, middle points, and an ending. The ending leaves enough suspense to engage readers until I finish part two. Finishing part one this year is definitely possible.

The next step is to return to the text and make a “final rough draft.” What that means is to edit chapter by chapter and resolve any open issues through editing. I had a tendency to defer open issues until “later.” With this phase of the writing, there will be no “later.”

On Tuesday I finished the Dedication, Preface and Chapter One. The early chapters have been worked the most so editing should proceed quickly. There are 62 chapters, so if I proceed with due haste, I should have a finished final rough draft by Labor Day. Some of the later chapters were rushed last year in the interest of “completion.” They will need more work than earlier ones.

Once the final rough draft is finished, I plan to find a reader or two to provide feedback. Many thanks to the three early readers. I don’t want to wear them out with this project so I’m picking new ones. I will also price a professional reader to go through and make suggestions. If I can afford it, I’ll go that route. Following the readers, there will be corrections, more editing and hopefully a “final” product..

At that point, I will need to weigh options. While there is finality in “final rough draft,” is a book ever really final? If any changes are needed — a chapter added, narrative clarified — that will be the time for it.

Once I settle on the narrative, formatting is next. The hodge-podge of cutting and pasting that produced it will have been pasteurized by then. I can focus on making paragraphs, quotes, punctuation, line spacing, chapter breaks, and spelling consistent throughout. This is a kind of work that should feel good when finished, but will be a bear while going through it.

I will need to decide what to call my maternal grandmother. I visit her character at least ten times in the narrative. She was referred to by her birth name Salomea,* nickname Mae, Mae Robbins, Mae Nadolski, Grandmother, and Busha over the years. This will be the time to decide usage so readers recognize her wherever she appears..

While we don’t know exactly what this year will bring, I’m hopeful that by early 2025 I will be holding this book in my hand.

*Footnote: It seems possible Grandmother was named for Salomea of Poland, a princess and queen during the 13th Century.

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-03-10

Garlic on March 5, 2024.

Garlic is up in the garden: yield looks pretty good. Somehow building a brush pile escaped me this week so I need to get cracking on that. Many robins and other birds have arrived. Lilacs are beginning to bud. All signs are present for an early spring.

Class reunion

Nothing can sober a person like figuring out who died from one’s high school class. For my class of 1970, our research shows 42 of about 260 classmates have died. That is in line with what insurance company actuarial tables suggest should be our experience. It doesn’t make dealing with those deaths any easier. “Who died?” was the most frequently asked question at our 40th reunion in 2010 so the planning committee is front loading work to have a better answer this time.

When I work on the organizing committee for a reunion I’m more likely to attend. My main interests are finding out what people have been doing during the years since we graduated, planning the event, and catching up on news. I would not likely attend if I wasn’t on the planning committee. The event is in July, dubbed the 50th Reunion (Delayed) because we canceled during the coronavirus pandemic when our 50th would have been.

Charlatan

I finished reading Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock this week. It is a well-researched and easy to read book about early 20th Century medical practices and associated quackery. Dr. John Binkley, the charlatan, is reminiscent of B.J. Palmer, son of the discoverer of the chiropractic principle, who lived in Davenport. Palmer started the first radio stations west of the Mississippi River in Davenport and Des Moines, paraded elephants through the city streets to advertise the chiropractic principle, and had a museum called Little Bit O’Heaven at his chiropractic school. The museum had artifacts collected during his global travels. While chiropractic thrives into the 21st Century as a respected medical profession, its trajectory in the early years is tied to that of the goat-gland charlatan depicted in this book. Worth reading for this and other reasons.

State of the Union

I viewed video of the entire State of the Union Address. It took me multiple segments to get through it. Biden did an excellent job, of the kind I expect from a Democratic president. I also viewed video of the Alabama housewife (and U.S. Senator) who delivered the Republican response. They have nothing! Seriously, Biden got criticized for having a campaign TikTok account. Do Republicans not know about the numerous objections among users to federal attempts to regulate TikTok? OMG! Governor Kim Reynolds made a press release reacting to the State of the Union with a tepid response. Why did she even bother if she had nothing to say? Republicans really do want to take the country backward.

Hope your week went as well. Cheers!