My cat is yelling at me again. The reason my cat is so upset  is the speech recognition program I am using.  The program is stupid.

I need to use this because of the increased pain in my hands.

I haven't been using blogger or face book because of the pain in my hands.  Speech recognition was supposed to make things simpler, but instead even with very expensive headsets, its certainly been a nightmare.

I take pains to enunciate very clearly when using voice recognition with a spendy headset. However, no matter what I say, this program takes one out of every two sentences I speak and turns everything into gibberish.  If I relax instead of enunciating, what gets printed on paper is probably phonetic Martian, as spoken by a denizen of the Andromeda Confederation and then printed on toilet paper with off-market printer ink.

So, if you can't read this, blame the goddamned cat.

Ollie Plays the Piper

Playing the Piper -- A man walked into a bar pulling a wagon on which was a huge a salt water tank with a cute little octopus in it. He bellied up to the bar, with the wagon behind him, and announced, "My octopus, Ollie, can play any musical instrument you hand him and I have 60 bucks that says you can't stump him." A skeptic handed a violin into the tank and after examining it for a few seconds, the octopus played "The Flight of the Bumblebee." His partner tossed an olive into the tank and Ollie snatched it and ate it; and the skeptic handed over 60 dollars to the fellow with the wagon. Next, an accordion was dropped into the tank. Ollie grabbed it excitedly and fumbled around it briefly, then played "Lady of Spain" on it.  His shill collected another 60 bucks and backhanded him a fish fillet which was grabbed and eaten tout de suit. An ocarina elicited a British hornpipe,  the man collected another 60 and Ollie nibbled down a pickled starfish.  In barged a fellow with a set of bapipes. Ollie grabbed the instrument and began to fumble with it; his movements become more and more frenetic, with more and more splashing and the splashes going higher and higher. The seconds became minutes while the thrashing and splashing continued. A few minutes stretched into almost half an hour. The guy who'd brought in the bagpipes said to the guy with the wagon, "Well, give me my 60 bucks, dammit." Ollie's owner said, "Not, gonna happen, bub. As soon as Ollie figures out he can't fuck it, he'll play it, and when he does, I'll owe the little bastard a a double order of bouillabaisse."

Water Wings and Other Things

This is the second very cold, more overcast than usual spring here where I live.   Luck starting anything from seed last year and some this year has been ludicrous.  Things just end up mildewing and never sprouting, from *wet *cold.  Temps have hovered just above freezing at night for a month longer than usual, making this the coldest spring in WA state recorded history, colder than last year, which was dank and mildewey enough.  Climate change has begun here.  Today it started out promising and has finally turned to heavy rain. 

I had 11 tomato plants going, only two of which were actually red tomatoes -- most being black, yellow or green or striped varieties, and between the wind and the fact that they're too small to take advantages of the cages, it's a wonder they didn't all snap off and blow away.
My late tulips are beaten to shreds, as are the anemones and the blooming poppies I bought.    All the pots in the garden -- huge ceramic things-- show sprouts from summer bulbs, and from assorted perennial wildflower starts that sprang up from seed nearly 2 months after they were sown in them, but onenever knows.  I have over fifty TINY little poppy sprouts, some Icelandic and others oriental, but they're literally less than 3mm high and almost invisible.  If the heavy and large raindrops didn't beat them do death, the water pouring into the 10 gallon ceramic tubs may have floated them up and then into runoff and up and over the lip of the huge pots.   Poe, my granite crow got pelted hard enough to wash the redwing blackbird poop off his head.   I aquired Poe to startle the robins out of my garden, because they were snarfing ittty frogs, not just worms, and I LOVE my frogs and want them in the yard.  Robins are stupid.  Redwings, on the other hand, NEW Poe wasn't animate.  He's kept the robins out, however.

If this doesn't revert to a more normal weather pattern, the nurseries around here are going to have to start selling immature plants with water wings in order to make people go on and buy them.

::sigh::

Briefly on bin Laden

Everyone and his mutt probably has blogged copiously about Osma bin Laden having been found and killed.  It's been 9 years and 8 months since 9/11/2001, give or take a day or two.

How nice that President Obama kept that promise.  That turd from Texas who's more or less my age didn't keep HIS promise.  He had no intention of doing so. The last plane out of this country before the no-fly edict was locked down after the 9/11 attack was BUSH FAMILY'S MAKING SURE BIN LADEN RELATIVES GOT OUT OF THE COUNTRY ON A PLANE.  They're all friends, all old bidness associates, and are still in bidness with one another as I type this.  You don't bite the family of the hand that feeds you your ill-gotten gains by embarrassing them by hunting down and killing one of their relatives, even if that relative is a sociopathic murdering embarrassment.

So, getting back to President Obama.  He hasn't kept his promise to us in this country.  He didn't clean up the banking industry.  He's sold women and our rights to our bodies down the fucking drain.  He's appointed NO ONE to cancel out the Constitution hating SCOTUS judges and pawns of facist multinational korporations, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia.  Obama's appointees VOTE WITH THEM, as often as not.  Obama's Atty. General, Holder, has smaller balls... and a lot less potent ones, than a field mouse.

Okay, I'm the person I've been waiting for.  So are all progressives.  Or so that's what Obama tells me.  *I've been doing MY job, standing off korporations as well as I can, harranguing my legislators with one-issue letters and calls on issues of importance to me.  I've done the same on human rights.  HE's muttered once or twice impotently and then signed utter raping bullshit into law, god dammit.

So what has killing bin Laden done?  It kept a promise.  It won't make much of a dent in terrorism, abroad or at home.  Most of the terrorists in this country are home grown.  They're teafuckingBAGGERS.  They're goddamned racist Republicans.  They're Christian extremists, facists, anti-constitutionists, luddites, antiscience, deniers of global warming, KORPORATISTS.

And they commit erosions to my poor beleaguered nation's constitution and governmental transparency daily, continue to wage occupations abroad to get oil to line their pockets with, continue to stall any kind of green technology unless they can dismantle it or rape it to the point that no individual can afford it, continue to make it impossible for the middle class and the poor to afford decent health care and preventive care, and continue to lie about it, completely baldfaced.

God dammit.
 

Musing

I wonder what Merry Maids charges to degrease a waterbed?

I Wish I'd Known Haylee Fentress

Something happened this week which really bothered me. Two 14-year-old girls from Lynn, Wisconsin committed suicide. One of them is someone I was related to, though I had no idea of her existence. Her surname is the same as my middle name. She was chubby for her age. She had red hair. She had been bullied at school because she was "fat." During a sleepover at her mother's house, she and her best friend left suicide notes and killed themselves.


The town these girls is from at less than 150 families in it at the time of the 2000 census. It seems inconceivable to me that the people in that town, the adults at least, could possibly have been unaware that they were being bullied. It seems inconceivable to me that the adults in that town didn't know exactly who was bullying those little girls.

The television coverage particularly on NBC television has consisted of denials on the part of the school board in nearby Marshall that they were aware of any bullying, and assurances that there would be grief counselors standing by for the students.

Where the hell were counselors when these girls needed help? Why didn't anyone on that school staff step in and stop the bullying? Why, when she was the target of bullying, was the girl who shares my name expelled from school the one time she fought back?

Even in a consolidated high school where students from several small towns attend, I still find it inconceivable that the faculty and administration were unaware that those two girls were being bullied. By expelling the victim, the school system has shown the nation that it deals with problems by blaming the victim and sweeping the wrongdoers acts under the rug.

It passes me off beyond belief.

Well, what the hell. Wisconsin is the home state of that sociopathic bigoted bitch, Michele Bachmann. I suppose it's to be expected.

However, I STILL wish I'd known her.  I put up with a lot of crap in grade school.  I had a weird name.  I was smart, but I was too people-stupid to hide it.  My mother wasn't a part of the established social circles in the school district and that left me with no mother-friends, children of other mothers the same age.   Everything I felt showed on my face, and *that invited bullying.  My mother made a lot of my clothes.  Most other kids' mothers did not make their clothing.  That left me open to ridicule, though frankly I thought my clothes were better made than store-bought... they were, but the point was not to "stand out." 

I survived public shool, but I'll guarantee you that I hated most of it.  Maybe if I'd known this little girl existed, if I'd known any of her family in Minnesota, had been in contact with them, there might have been something I could have said which would have made her feel less despair than she and her best friend, both felt.

Then again, would having the same name as a little girl be enough to bridge a 48 year gap in our ages, let her feel she could have picked up the phone and called me or Emailed me and asked me to call her.  Had I known her family, would her mother have resented my saying or doing anything? 

I'll never know now.  My name, my given names, have been a source of irritation at times in my life, and at others a source of uniqueness.  To see and read that someone sharing my very unusual name committed suicide -- ended that name, fills me with such sadness. It's as if a piece of me just removed itself.

And yet, I never met her.  Now no one will meet her, will see the promise on her that all youth carries.

And that breaks my heart a little more than it is already broken. 

I wake up so many mornings, go to sleep so many nights, aching with age and less than perfect health, bone tired, alone except for the cats.  I'd love to have given her some of my years, because I've had a bunch of good ones.  I just had to survive a decade and 2/3 or so of privileged asshats and clueless morons to get to the point that I could start having some good years. 

As I said, it pisses me off.  Pisses me off to tears.

Albatross

From a Daily KOS article (permanent link http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/07/953664/-NE-Woman-denied-abortion,-forced-to-watch-baby-die ), a woman in Nebraska was forced in December of last year to watch her infant die shortly after she was through with her forced gestation.   Woman-hating anti-choicers are horrible sh!ts.

The motherfvcker (term is ACCURATE in what the law did emotionally to the woman in the article) who rammed that legislation through should have been forced to not only hold that infant for the 15 minutes of its life, he should have had to wear the remains around his neck for six months, EXACTLY like a rotting albatross, as penance.