My day has just been made happier: a new "Get Your War On" made me laugh out loud.
posted by Dub at 8:00 AM

My stats for the latest Care2 click-to-donate race say that I have zero friends. Oh, come on, you guys, please be my friend! Click to make a free donation, and while you're at it, sign up and invite other friends. It's all for a good cause. To help other good causes, check out my list of links to similar pages.
posted by Dub at 3:22 AM

I didn't think I would feel under so much (internal) pressure to entertain with Teflon. Oh well, it will get easier.

Weird dream the other day prompted me to do web searches for people from my past. No luck at all with one of them, who might actually be dead (and has the same name as a prison in the Midwest, go figure.) The other one was iffy and not really worth expending much energy on. It's just weird when I get into that mode. Still not sure what it means.
posted by Dub at 4:53 AM

This is just too cute for words.
posted by Dub at 4:01 AM

[This one originally posted Sunday night. We're back on track now.]

What do Youth Pride and Cape Breton fiddler Jennifer Roland have in common? The latter now has a t-shirt from the former, thanks to me. At her show last year, I noticed she was wearing a rainbow-colored butterfly pendant. Coincidentally, I later received a t-shirt from Youth Pride with a rainbow-colored butterfly on it. So at her show Sunday night, I gave it to her. Very cool. If you ever get a chance to see her play, jump at it. She is just fantastic, a delight.

posted by Dub at 5:43 AM

Note: this post actually written Sunday morning (wee hours). Blogger wouldn't let me post it, so I had to start over. Go figure. Anyway:

Needed a public place to blog, for stuff I don't mind people knowing that it was I who wrote it. So here it is.

Today was a very strange day. In the overnight, I delayed reading the news to play Snood and take a shower. The ProJo hasn't been updating its website on a timely basis anyway, so not a lot of point in checking at midnight. I was absolutely stunned to read that Mabel Anderson had been killed in a freak car accident in a parking lot. (Note for those who wonder: I link to the Pawtucket Times coverage instead of the ProJo because the ProJo insists on registration to read their articles, and I'm not cool with that.) Mabel had been in ill health the last several years, and I had figured that she might not live that much longer, but I never expected a sudden and rather violent death like this. Kate and I had an interestng relationship with her. We saw a lot of her since she was on the House Judiciary Committee and was one of the only legislators who actually sat through every hearing. (Really--I honestly cannot remember her ever not being there.) She was mostly anti-LGBT, but she did vote for a few of our bills (like hate crimes) and was on the right side of things like voter initiative and downsizing. The last couple of years, she sought us out specifically on a few occasions to talk. It seemed like she might be coming around on the issues in her own way. And even if not, we (especially Kate) developed something of a friendship with her, more than just a grudging mutual respect. She and I talked some about strokes, as she had suffered one before, and my father has had several. She gave me some advice on a way to help accommodate his diminished eyesight. It was an interesting conversation. Over the years a number of people have had very negative things to say about her, people who probably know better than we do. And I know they were not wrong. But neither were we. I guess she was just a mix of contradictions, as so many people are. In any case, I feel the loss and am shocked at the circumstances.

So that was the overnight news. I did not wake Kate up to tell her that, but I kept checking in the morning if she was actually getting up or not. I knew she would want to know, but I didn't want to tell her if she was planning to go back to sleep because I figured she wouldn't be able to get back to sleep if I told her. Finally she got up, so I told her. Then I went back to sleep. I had asked her the previous night what she was planning to do, and she said she was planning to go visit her great-aunt Margaret, who had been moved to hospice. Well, hours later, she came home and woke me up. It turns out Margaret had died overnight (actually, I think it happened even earlier, Friday evening.) I was shocked by this even though of course I know what the implications of hospice are. I guess it was these two events right together that were just surreal. And then she told me that the Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampshire had fallen down! I had no particular attachment to it, but of course a lot of people did, so it was a big event. These three things together....just too weird.

I may work on Teflon later tonight. I tried to get the name on Blogspot, but although it says "page not found" if you type in the address, it says that page name is taken if you try to claim it for yourself. I guess either it's a private blog or one that someone used to have and took down, and they're holding the name for them. So I picked NewTeflon. Stay tuned.
posted by Dub at 3:52 AM