Science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. Singer (sorry, no shows) & nudist (in my home). Beer, cat, cheese, coffee, pie and wine friend. Left IBM and Silicon Valley for the southern Oregon life but I miss the ocean. We're too far inland. Gotta move.
Four women were chatting at a nearby table at the coffee shop. Appearing similar in age to me, two women dominated the talking. One was short and slender, with fair skin and dark, bobbed hair. The other was tanner and smaller. Smiling a lot, her silver hair fell around her shoulders.
They were talking about toothpaste. Looking up from my writing, I tuned in as the first woman said, “I put a pea-sized amount on my brush.”
One of the other women, heavy, with dry brown hair that came to her shoulders, loudly, sharply scoffed. “That’s not enough.”
The first woman replied, “That’s what the directions say to use.”
The brown-haired woman snorted. “Everyone knows you’re supposed to put toothpaste on all the bristles, from one end to the other.”
The conversation fell still for several seconds. “Anyway,” the first woman resumed.
Ashland, southern Oregon — Saturday, May 16, 2026.
Clouds block the sunshine and dirty the blue sky. Our weather temperatures continue their slow backward slide. Today’s high will be 58 F. Fed by wind gusts, it’s currently a chilly 46 F.
Papi the ginger wonder isn’t happy. He’d like to be outside but, wind. Wind is his enemy. He sat for a bit, feet all together, tail wrapped around him, motionless except for ear flicks. That lasted three or four minutes before he was back inside, washing himself and recovering.
Our weather is better than other places in the US, where a May spring snowstorm is complicating plans.
What did Trump’s visit to China do for the nation. We won’t know for a while. Trump has made some claims about what China agreed to do. We’ll see how much of them are true, and which are just hot air. Remember, Trump has made vows and claims before that carried nothing but his air:
Make no mistake, Trump and his MAGA base are trying to take the United States backwards. In the latest move during the Trump Golden Age of Ignorance, Knox County, Kentucky, schools are removing the historic novel “Roots” by Alex Haley. It’s truly a WTF period for many of us.
Your Trump Quote for the Day:
With Trump’s reactionary thinking dragging us backwards and the weather losing its summer luster, The Neurons plugged “Back In Time” into the morning mental music stream. The 1985 song was performed by Huey Lewis and the News and featured in the movie, “Back to the Future”. Seems right for the day, except the time I want to go back to is before Trump ever ran for office in 2015.
I hope your weekend is progressing well and you keep moving forward in good ways.
Mom has moved out of her house and into an assisted living facility.
A household of things have been left behind that we need to move to sell her house. That includes clothing, paintings, vases, dishes, appliances, furniture, electronics. My sisters contacted liquidators and estate sales businesses to see if they would do it for a cut.
Short answer: no. Not enough of value to make it worthwhile.
I wasn’t overly surprised. Mom has tons of clothing and shoes but none is really vintage. She has furniture but the agents said that furniture is a hard sale these days.
My wife and I talked about this in relation to our own life. Adverse to an estate sale after she passes on, my wife has been doing a slow-roll death clean: a drawer a day. A closet. Organizing, tossing, donating. She used to refer to it as simplifying; now she just calls it the death clean.
It’s one of the places where we diverge on our philosophies. I consider my life busy and frantic enough to do without going through my belongings to see what I still want and want I need to throw away or donate. I do so sometimes, but I don’t make it part of my daily or weekly routines.
This exchange summarizes it for us. My wife said, “I don’t want people having to come through the house to get rid of things for me.”
I replied, “I don’t care. I won’t be there.”
As I walk around the house, I wonder, what would the estate sales agents say to me?
I suspect they’ll tell me the same thing they said about Mom’s stuff.
It was cloudy but the clouds have fade, retreated, moved on. Sunshine is winning the morning, carrying us through the mid 50s now. Today high will be around 70 F.
Trump is returning from China. They apparently didn’t want him, either. We should have sweetened the offer, let them keep Air Force 1 if they kept Trump. Throw in Melania and Colossus Don, Dozy Donnie’s golden Floridistan statue.
Note: “Colossus Don” sure sounds like a mob name, doesn’t it? I can imagine a scene of dialogue about him. “What’s Colossus Don doing?”
“Feeding his fat face, of course. That fat fuck doesn’t give a fuck about nobody but himself.”
Trump is pleased because China agreed to buy more US oil. Krugman pointed out that it doesn’t really help us much as consumers. It raised oil prices in the US. Oil and energy companies are making more money and profits. They’re corporations, so we see the fallout from that in the stock market and the stockholders. Krugman points out that the stock market is owned by a small percentage of people in the US and that foreigners own a chunk of it. Yet we’ll keep hearing about how great the stock market is!
Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! is contemplating a new Iran military operation. Just don’t call it war. Sure, we’re using military equipment and weapons to shoot at others and destroy things while they shoot at our military and destroy things, but that’s not war in Trumpyworld.
In the next move of the non-war, Trump will launch Operation Sledgehammer to see if they can open the Strait of Hormuz, as they were in February, before Trump ordered the attacks.
Trump’s administration also announced they were increasing global humanitarian aid to $1.8 billion after slashing it before. This seems like another Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! move to me. The announcement is one thing; will other nations see the funds? Not under the standard OE — LS! processes. Just grab headlines, distract from bad news, poor economy, Epstein files, etc.
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
“According to a CNN/SSRS poll, 77% of people surveyed said Trump’s policies increased their cost of living. Roughlt two-thirds of Americans said Trump’s policies made the country’s economic conditions worse, according to the poll conducted between April 30 and May 4.” USA Today, May 15, 2026.
My music today is from Led Zeppelin. I watched the Netflix documentary, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” this week. I’ve been a Zeppelin fan for most of my life so it was entertaining to learn more details about them as individuals and how they came together. Jimmy Page was really the force, but all four were intense, talented musicians.
The making and playing of “Whole Lotta Love” consumed the documentary’s final minutes. As a youth, the song fascinated me. I remember listening to that middle ‘avant garde’ section, identifying sounds as it moved around the room, thinking that’s really cool. LOL. The Neurons enjoyed remembering the song, so it’s hanging around the morning mental music stream, so here you are.
I remember listening to it, too, and having Mom and my sisters look at me strangely when I talked about the song. Mom didn’t get it at all. My sisters seemed really jaundiced about what they were hearing as well.
I hope your Operation Epic Friday begins well and improves as the hours progress.
My coffee is here. Time for Operation Epic Drink Coffee.
We bought new tires for one of our vehicles yesterday.
I took a memory train back to the first time I bought new tires after I was married.
That would be 1975. The car was a 1968 Camaro. Sweet, small, fast car. RS, 327 V8, automatic. I bought it for $1100 after I arrived at my first permanent duty station in my Air Force career, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio. Paid cash.
I married later that year. My wife and I have wonderful memories of being together in that car.
Buying new tires for it was a major financial decision. Recaps were cheap, $20-$25 each, installed. But recaps? I distrusted their safety and reliability.
That meant new tires: $40 each.
$160.
Ouch.
We didn’t have credit cards, so we’d need to buy the tires with cash. I had that in savings but that would severely reduce the balance.
I remarked about this to my wife at dinner last night.
She remembered, adding, “Yes, the things we couldn’t afford then that we needed, and the things we buy now, that we really don’t need.”
I paid for the dinner with my credit card. Leaving, I thought, I could have bought two new tires for the price of that dinner.
Of course, I could have bought the Camaro for the price of the new tires I put on the car.
Ashland, southern Oregon — Thursday, May 14, 2026.
It’s blue out there, full of sunshine. Clouds are absent. 50 F with a high in the mid 70s today.
Thunderstorms looked possible yesterday but it didn’t happen. Just as in the previous days of forecasted activity. After the winter snow drought, May is at 3% of its average rainfall.
Our snowpack is at about 7%. While the reservoirs are above 80%, without snowmelt to replenish them, it’ll be a hot, dry summer. Stack the El Nino predictions, many of us are bracing ourselves for a rough year ahead.
Mom’s state is not good. She wasn’t responding to my sister’s texts. Sis called the assisted living facility, Heritage Grove, to ask about Mom. They said Mom went to bed before dinner and had not felt well all day.
On the optimistic side of the board, two neighbors are reportedly interested in buying Mom’s house.
My wife and I had new tires installed. For the record, we replaced a set that we’d bought in 2019. Got 35,000 miles out of them. Not great, not bad.
We bought them at Costco and had them installed there, shopping while we waited. As we were in the Medford area, we decided to eat out and chose the Texas Roadhouse Restaurant. My wife likes the salmon they serve there.
We couldn’t eat there. The way was blocked by ambulances and firetrucks. Wondering what’s going on, we took to our phones to learn. Nothing at the fire department, alert system, social media, or local television stations could give us that info.
This duplicated a Tuesday incident, in my mind. Driving home from writing at the coffee shop, one lane of traffic was blocked off in front of an SOU building on Siskiyou Avenue. What happened? I searched for information after I got home and couldn’t find anything. 24 hours later, the answer came: a woman had driven across the median strip, up a walkway, and into a building, breaking a gas meter along the way.
Miserable headlines fill my feed. When will there be good news? I’m not sure what I mean by good news at this point. An end to wars would be nice, along with a return to normalcy. Normalcy to me is let’s take action against polluting our air and water. Action against climate change. But the cynic in me says that PINO Trump would take credit for whatever and enough brain-dead people would slurp that down and bray about how great Dozy Donnie is that I’d regurgitate everything taken in during the last three days.
But here’s the state of things in the United States nation in one sharp observation someone else made:
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
Paraphrasing, Trump lies, says this isn’t so bad, Biden! Because that worked well previously under Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL!
Enough people with brains are responding, screw you.
You started a war, Donald J “No new wars” Trump.
The economy is a mess, gas prices are rising, all the prices are rising, Donald J “We’ll cut prices on day 1” Trump, and the country is going in the wrong direction.
And you, DONALD J TRUMP, YOU ARE THE REASON WE’RE IN SIX MILLION MESSES WITH NO WAY OUT EXCEPT TO FIRST GET RID OF YOU AND YOUR CRONIES.
Now stop building the damn ballroom and release the damn Epstein files so we can feast on your political corpse.
The Neurons inserted “Mind Games” by John Lennon into my morning mental music stream. This actually came about from Papi’s state of mind this morning. I played with him and his favorite nemesis, the red dot. The play began abruptly. As soon as he engaged, I stopped for about a minute. He kept peeking left and right, waiting for it to reappear. Just as he started walking off, I blinked it back on. Off Papi went, chasing it across the room, then stalking it.
I hope your Thursday brings you some good news and fair winds, assuming you need winds to get somewhere. Like you drive a sail car and need to have wind to blow you along the Interstate.
I was younger, traveling with my wife and a small group. We were in separate vehicles. I knew I was traveling with a group but none of them stand out in memory.
There was a snowy mountain involved. My wife and I were leading the way, driving in an SUV, heading to a site of four cabins partway along our journey. The cabins weren’t our destination but just a stop.
I was driving and we were well ahead of the rest. My wife and I arrived as dusk began. It was on a slope, heavy snow, with large bare and fallen trees. I felt that some paths and parking for the others were needed and set to work doing that. While I made progress, time was limited, and I needed the proper equipment, so I went on.
Reaching a large conference center, I gathered my people. They were a small group – six to seven, I think. A larger conference was going on. I called my people together to talk about what I’d already done and also to note that we needed equipment to clear out the snow around the cabins, but we also needed to move some stuff.
That last seemed important to me. While I don’t specifically know what I was moving, I knew it was big, heavy stuff. Challenging for a small group, I was hoping the other conference’s attendees would overhear us and offer some help.
That didn’t seem to happen. I went back to the cabins with my wife. Arriving there, I now had a red piece of equipment to move the snow away. While I started doing that, I thought I saw some trees smoking.
I examined the trees. They turned out to be short, gray wooden statues carved from tree stumps. I confirmed they were smoking to me and went back to get my wife’s opinion but also to call it in.
She confirmed what I saw. While we were talking about it, a large group of teenagers arrived. They began climbing on the statues. I went over to warn them that I thought the statues were smoking and might be on fire. As I told them this, I pointed out the smoke to them, and then spotted open yellow flames on one of the statues. I then made everyone move away. I also spotted a statue that had turned into smoking black char, telling me that had been happening for a while.
My wife wanted me to go get help. She said she’d stay there but I felt that was unsafe for her and said, “No.” I explained my thinking and she accepted that.
I then went back in and got on a red telephone to call someone for help with the snow removal, getting the students to safety, and putting out the fire. It was both a friend and an authority in charge of such equipment. He began talking, assuming he knew why I was calling. It was noisy and hard to hear. My wife was with me and I told her, “He’s assuming things.” Then I told him, “No, listen to me. That’s not what’s happening. There are three things going on here. Pay attention.”
He promised to pay attention and then said he’d send help.
Michael Seidel, writer 