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Posts Tagged ‘ICE’

Sun Melts ICE

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Our little Nashville cottage has warmed up. The Pumpkin helped me make vegetable soup. My friend Les delivered a loaf of bread, and we walked across the street to see her majestic ash tree covering her pool; it just missed her porch by a few feet. Another neighbor helped Bob chop up an evergreen that fell on our HVAC. Guess we’ll see if the air conditioning works in a couple of months. We cleaned out the refrigerator/freezer, and replaced whatever food survived their exile to the garage – the free-standing garage we finally got permitted to turn into a DADU (detached, auxiliary, dwelling, unit).

It will have its own address, but we had to sign and swear we would never AirBnB it – those are the new Metro rules. Only for family, friends and climate refugees, we said.

Yesterday with the ice melting, I dug out my trusty hiking sticks and set off for a walk in the neighborhood. It was a beautiful, 45 degree, sunny day. We talked to a new friend with a 10 week old rescue puppy named Harrington. An adorable black lab mix with white socks, he’s named after a Stranger Things character. Since the Pumpkin (who knows all things about Stranger Things) is back in school, I had to look up Steve Harrington. It seems the pup’s avatar plays the stereotypical, lovable jock who was supposed to be killed off in the first season, but won the hearts of his audience. So the writers had to give him a “redemption arc.” And it struck me that with the release of more Epstein files, some very powerful men are seeking the same sort of salvation. 

Let’s not forget that Marjorie Taylor Green warned us about Mr T’s furor over releasing the Epstein files. He didn’t want all his buddies getting into trouble. But the “Epstein Class,” composed of high-ranking government, academic, legal, corporate and even royal people, is just beginning to feel the consequences of their association with a known pedophile and sex trafficker. Like Andrew formerly known as Prince, tomorrow Lord Mandelson will step down from the House of Lords. Some are even calling for his removal from peerage, whatever that means. The British have no appetite for a redemption story. We, OTOH, are always willing to buy into salvation.

After all, Epstein reinvented himself after his conviction in 2008, pleading guilty to prostitution charges. Remember there was a major recession at the time the FL pimp to billionaires got his sweetheart deal. What will happen to Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Bill Clinton, Peter Thiel, Deepak Chopra and Noam Chomsky? The ex-President of Harvard, Larry Summers, married father of six, emails Epstein for romantic advice about a young woman he was ‘mentoring.’ At least he stepped down from his many Board postions. But it wasn’t until they were caught, it wasn’t until the evidence of their fawning association with Epstein became apparent, that we are hearing their excuses. And as every child learns in school, ignorance of the law (if we believe they were ignorant) is NO defense!

Dr Peter Attia, a billionaire longevity guru, is now ashamed of his old friend Epstein. Sorry he joked with him about female body parts. Let’s stop calling Epstein a financier, he was a pimp. The language we use helps to shape our understanding of the world, so I’m re-naming things, like ICE is really our very own secret police. Detention camps are concentration camps where we ship brown people without due process – where we hold five year old children without their mothers. Remember Mr T coming down the gold escalator calling undocumented people rapists and murderers? If we allow the Republican party to call Mr Pretti a terrorist, well then it becomes easier to kidnap and murder people in American cities.

I’m not looking for a redemption arc. I’m looking for sunshine laws to reveal this corrupt class for who they really are. Only the sun can melt the historic ice storm we experienced in Nashville, only the sun can break us out of this chrysalis of apathy. And if you want to help fight our country’s slide into authoritarianism, you can start by attending a virtual meet-up on Thursday of like-minded souls, “Eyes on ICE” https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/event/892452/

 

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A Deep Freeze

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on January 27, 2026| Leave a Comment »

We got the news out of Minnesota later in the day. It was hard to believe, until we saw the footage. An ICU nurse, filming armed, masked DHS agents pushing a person to the ground. Within seconds, Alex Pretti, RN tries to help but is wrestled to the ground and shot ten times. He had his phone in his hand, not a gun.

I felt the country pause.

First Ms Good, and now Mr Pretti. How can this be happening in a democratic republic? The federal agents backed away, they left him bleeding out on the ground. They didn’t call him a bitch, no they called him a terrorist and Kristi Noem was quick to point out it was all his fault. He was a licensed gun owner after all.

And as if to cover our national shame, a sheet of ice, real sleet, snow and ice descended from the heavens. Non-stop snaps and trees popping, breaking, their branches weighed down by ice. We lost our power early Sunday morning, kaput!

The Bride and Groom came over to escort us to their house where a blazing gas fireplace kept us all warm. Bob had cut off the main water valve and drained our pipes. He even drained the tankless water heater. I brought my knitting and a good book.

The Bride made French onion soup. Plus we had leftover potato soup and chicken pot pie. No WiFi but plenty of tasty treats.

A pottery friend came to camp with us after losing power. Then my daughter and son-in-law went next door to check on an elderly couple. Thankfully, she convinced them to move to a friend’s house who had a generator. Their core temps were low and the man’s mentation was faltering.

This is what neighbors do. This is community, We show up for one another. We don’t allow armed thugs to kidnap people, to kill people on our streets.

We’ve moved again to our sweet cousin Peg and Paul’s house. They never lost power. She baked a banana bread and made us tea. Feeling like a climate refugee, Feeling like I don’t recognize my country anymore. Tonight I’ll take a hot shower

Here’s the view from my BirdBuddy

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Health vs Wellness

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on January 13, 2026| Leave a Comment »

This morning I had an appointment with a new physical therapist. Bob calls him a magic man, because he has mapped out what muscles fire and where to create strength. And as I was giving him a short history of my osteoporosis journey, Bob felt compelled to point one thing out…

“She fell last year and broke her neck.”

I had forgotten to mention it. The day before the election of Donald Trump I nearly killed myself. Oops. Did I subconsciously know what was about to happen? Have I blocked it so completely from my mind that all I could talk about was cleaning out the bird bath, keeling over and breaking my clavicle?

The smart bird feeder has been installed on the side of the garage. So far we have two house finches and a Carolina chickadee in residence. It’s actually a godsend. I pick up my phone to a notification that my Birdbuddy had a visitor, and I promptly forget what I was going to do. Instead I watch a video of a bird chowing down, on guard for any other visitors.

I guess this is how we are now, on guard, distilled to a primal fear of being gunned down in the street by masked men. First our president kidnaps Maduro, and then an ICE agent shoots a woman three times in the head for making good trouble.

How can I talk about my fear of falling again, when people I know and love are risking their lives simply by peacefully protesting this totalitarian government? The last time I was protesting at the TN State House, I actually thanked the state troopers for keeping us safe. I looked into their eyes.

But this is different.

We need more Republicans to wake up. When Mr T tells us that only his own sense of morality can stop him, we need to listen. Because he thinks he can get away with anything. He can slap his name on the Kennedy Center. He can demolish the East Wing of the White House. He can buy a country!

Well I’m not for sale. And there are millions of us who will fight for our constitution. We know the difference between a healthy separation of powers and a grifter selling wellness to a fearful citizenry.

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Gray Swan Events

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on January 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I’ve finally chiseled my way out of the ice palace. Last week the state of TN suffered from an extremely long, sub-freezing, snow event. Every day was a snow day; schools and most businesses closed down and since we live in a western, residential part of Nashville, our roads were free for sledding. I didn’t see a plow until the day before yesterday, 8 days after the first snow. The truck tried going up our small hill, which was a sheet of ice at this point, then it backed all the way down our road, beeping its disappointment.

Climate scientists call these crazy weather events “gray swans,” meaning they are predictable and still unprecedented.

“…the way to think about climate change now is through two interlinked concepts. The first is nonlinearity, the idea that change will happen by factors of multiplication, rather than addition. The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.Our climate world is now one of nonlinear relationships—which means we are now living in a time of accelerating change.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/climate-change-acceleration-nonlinear-gray-swan/677201/

In other words, the winds will get faster at a certain altitude as the temperatures rise, and these jet-stream winds will accelerate much faster than predicted. I believe our little storm was a gray swan. The south has never had such a prolonged period of extreme cold – single digit days mixed with snow and sleet. Ever since Covid, I’ve hated using the word “unprecedented” but it certainly applies here.

The heat on the second floor of the Bride and Groom’s house stopped working. My friend, Leslie’s heat downstairs also went out on strike, so we spent an afternoon making soup in my warm kitchen. Turns out Leslie has an old fashioned wooden sled that the Pumpkin enjoyed luging down our street at record speeds.

One night, the Grands had a sleepover – we watched Home Alone 3 with Alex Pruitt instead of Macaulay Culkin. After a slow start, the kids were ROFL. The next morning we had fun watching Watson the Frenchie, aka The Little Emperor, try to retrieve tennis balls we launched into the snow. Also hilarious.

Gone are the days of building snow people in the sun. We had enough snow to build an army last week, but single digit temperatures kept us house bound. Plus, Bob reminded me that nose hairs freeze at 15 degrees. Since I’ve been in full-on soup mode all week, I thought I’d share a most comforting winter sweet potato soup

Sweet potato soup.
1 onion, 2 sweet potatoes and 3 big carrots. 1 big tablespoon grated ginger and half teaspoon cayenne pepper 1qt vegetable broth, 2 cups V8, 1 teaspoon sugar and half cup of peanut butter
Chop n Sauté onion and carrots
Add ginger, cayenne pepper a dash of salt
Add broth and V8 and peeled cubed sweet potatoes
Cook for 25 minutes
Add peanut butter and blend w immersion blender after it cools a little.

Thanks to the Bride for this recipe. Today we are warming up in Nashville, and I’m eager to get out and about. My fear of falling has finally subsided a bit. I hope you’ve all stayed warm and safe through our gray swan.

Grilled cheese and soup

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I (Heart) Nashville

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on July 30, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Who’d ever think these 2 old hippies (the name of a great store in the Gulch btw) would transplant themselves so seamlessly further south and inland to Tennessee? Despite the lack of a beach, Bob and I are continually amazed by the welcoming people, gastronomic delights, and literary events.

Just this past weekend our streets were closed to traffic so people could stroll through Germantown to the Buchanan Arts District – “We have everyone walking, biking and dancing,” said Nora Kern, the executive director of Walk Bike Nashville, “whatever they want to do in the street, they can do it.”

Whoops, did I forget the music?

Tonight I’ll be visiting my favorite bookstore in Green Hills to hear the author of “My Sister the Serial Killer” talk with the author Ann Patchett. An immigrant to the UK via Nigeria, Oyinkyn Braithwaite’s debut novel has been longlisted for the Booker Prize! When one sister is a nurse and the other becomes rather murderous, chaos and charm commence!

“There’s a seditious pleasure in its momentum. At a time when there are such wholesome and dull claims on fiction — on its duty to ennoble or train us in empathy — there’s a relief in encountering a novel faithful to art’s first imperative: to catch and keep our attention” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/books/review-my-sister-serial-killer-oyinkan-braithwaite.html

I’ve finished “City of Girls” and am on to “Mostly Dead Things.” For all my book loving readers, may I invite you to follow Parnassus Bookstore’s blog “Musing” about books, https://parnassusmusing.net/

And if you missed this little headline recently, this tidbit of local Nashville news, you could be forgiven. It happened in Hermitage – a group of neighbors surrounded a car during our deadly heatwave to provide gas, water and food for hours to the father and 12 year old son inside; they were being badgered and interrogated by ICE agents who came to collect them with the wrong warrant!

These same neighbors formed a human chain for them, so they could return to their home where the ICE agents were not allowed to enter or evict them! https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2019/07/22/nashville-neighborhood-responds-ice-agents/1796453001/

Is this not humanity’s first imperative? A tenet of Christian teaching, to help your neighbor? To be empathetic? Certainly not to separate families and then “bear false witness,” by denying our government is creating concentration camps at our border. I was separated from my family at the age of ten months, not by ICE but by a set of circumstances culminating in an automobile accident on the Fourth of July 1949.

My foster parents were my parents’ neighbors and friends. They surrounded me with unconditional love and acceptance. The children lucky enough to have been reunited with their parents today are still suffering mental anguish. They have become detached as a response, and show high levels of anxiety and depression. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/migrant-children-separation-anxiety.html

Mr T’s America is not my America.

My America embraces the refugee; it doesn’t send youth ministries to Latin America on “Mission Trips,” only to reject refugee children trying to cross our border for a better life. My America empowers women to make their own reproductive health care decisions; it doesn’t pass TRAP laws “protecting” a fetus they have NO intention of helping once it is born into poverty. My America passed an assault weapon ban once; it does not turn its back on children being gunned down at street fairs and in schools.

Our cousins were visiting from NY, here is our family at Nashville’s Farmer’s Market. Should I have been thinking of a fast exit, just in case a shooter walked in? Which two of us would push the wheelchairs, who would carry a child?

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