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Finally, a reason to smile.
Sunda’s Insights
Sunda’s Wandering Thoughts
Planning for Easter Brunch is underway. I am fortunately a passive participant. My wife keeps me apprised of developments. She was searching for some Easter-themed drinks. I found some for her. She rejected them. I did find Chocolate Bunny Coffee. She laughed at that.
“Prude wants to have a Prosecco bar,” my wife says. Prude and her hubby, Carl, are hosting the Easter brunch for the third consecutive year.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I’ll chat with her. The brunch is getting big. Twenty-seven people are going to be there.”
“Twenty-seven.”
My wife nods in confirmation.
I do the math. “That’s almost twice as usual.”
“I know.”
My wife gives details of new invitees. Many are people I don’t know. I’ve heard about some of them via my wife’s recounting of ‘Tales from the Y.’ The main characters are all members of the Y, like my wife, and they bring a guest, like me. Most participate in Mary’s exercise class. Mary is celebrating her 50th anniversary of her class next year. The Y wants my wife to organize something for them. Mary’s exercise group has given birth to multiple friendships and activities, including a book club, New Year’s Eve gatherings, and nights out to go dancing.
“Deborah is in charge of the coffee,” my wife says. She’s talking about the brunch. “I mentioned the Chocolate Bunny Coffee. She laughed but said she is not buying that.”
I’m not surprised. Deborah takes her coffee as seriously as I do.
“Mary told me that she has champagne left from a party at her house last year that she’ll donate,” my wife says. “I told her it’s supposed to be Prosecco. Mary said that Prude told her that you and I are going to be there at 10:30 to help set up.”
“We are?” I helped with that last year. Everybody prepares and brings food. A buffet is set up in the kitchen and dining room. The drinks and coffee and dining tables are outside.
“I don’t know,” my wife says. “I’ll talk to Prude.”
I have to decide what to make. Last year I made a potato casserole. It seemed pretty popular. I don’t know what I’ll make this year. I was thinking about a French toast casserole.
Maybe I’ll just buy a fruit tray.
Floofkensian
Floofkensian (floofinition) – Originating with or reminiscent of an animal. Origins: Charles Dickens, English Novelist, 1858, “A Tale of Three Kitties”.
In Use: “Floofkensian habits often endured for Jerry long after his floof’s departure, such as looking for them when he woke up in the morning or came home from work or shopping. Years passed before he finally and totally shed those habits.”
In Use: “Dickens left his mark on the household. By the time the rescue puppy passed away, floofkensian routines like afternoon walks, sharing food with the housefloofs, and sleeping with a furry warm body against you was firmly entrenched.”
Saturda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
The Trusk Regime elitests are at it again. They’ve already well-established multiple double standards.
Like, there is one set of law, justice, and order for everyone except the wealthy. There’s another for the wealthy. Now Trump and the Grand Ol’ Trump Party has established that they put themselves above the law, even the law enforcement standard meant for the wealthy. Look at Trump’s Oval Office crowing about how much money he made his cronies after his tariff pause. Tsk, tsk, tsk, the people bellowed. Isn’t that illegal insider trading? Not if you’re part of the Trusk Regime.
How ’bout that pesky law that established that the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff’s requirements. The law said the nominee must have been a vice Chief of Staff or a chief of staff, of the Air Force or Army, Commandant of the Marine Corps, or Chief, Naval Operations. Besides those rules, he the nominee was commander of unified or specified command, that was accepted.
All of those are four-star positions or higher. Trump wanted a loyalist in there, so that law and its requirements were dismissed. Yet, the compliant Congress installed the retired three-star who Trump wanted. Yeah, that’s good news.
In the latest example of do as I say, not as I do, the Trusk Regime is requiring scientists, biologists, etc., to clean restrooms. If you recall, the Trusk Regime fired 1,000 national park service employees. That was a ‘money-saving move’. That meant that there was no one around to man the gates and clean the parks and clean the restrooms. So that genius called Trump and his surrogates decreed, hey, let’s have the high-priced professionals hired for their research skills go clean the shitters.
See, I wouldn’t have a problem with this, but I haven’t seen the Trump administration doing the same. How many White House staff has been cut? Why isn’t JD Vance and Elon Reeve Musk cleaning the West Wing toilets once a month? Why doesn’t Trump order noted drinker and partier Pete Hegseth or his three-star pet, John Dan Caine, to clean the Pentagon latrines? Peter Navarro should be put to work cleaning Mar-a-Largo’s bathrooms for Trump. Kristi Noem has time to cosplay as a border patrol agent on government time; surely, she can take time to clean some toilets, too.
Or is the Trusk Regime and his minions just too elite to do such work?
So Hilarious
I shared this with friends. Some replied, “I wasn’t really sure this was satire. Because, you know, Trump.”
Indeedly do, we do understand. Trump can be a nutter! He often says things that prompt many of us to respond, “Whhhaaattt?” Then we embrace the task of dissecting his crazy verbiage to understand what he’s saying and then struggle to pierce the insanity for truth, logic, and reason.
LucN over at Daily Kos gave us a pitch-perfect youarthere performance of the Donald, and it is so funny, I felt it incumbent to ensure others read and enjoy it.
Trump’s plan to introduce honeybee colonies to public school cafeterias goes spectacularly awry
So, read and enjoy! Laughter is good for you, you know.
The Real World
The weather was lively but not overly warm. Kind of late spring with mild summer suggestions.
The weather change ordered a wardrobe shift. My go-to coat for the last five months was now too warm and heavy. A perusal of closet offerings later, I was donning a zippered dark blue fleece piece.
Not worn for so long, finding it surprised me. I thought I’d gotten rid of it. Has to be twenty years old. Yes, I told myself, believing that I remembered buying it at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto when I lived in Half Moon Bay. Plenty of pockets. “Of course,” I imagined my wife saying. “It’s a man’s garment. If it was made for women, it wouldn’t have any pockets.”
Yes, the lack of pockets in women’s clothing was one of my wife’s peeves. After putting on the fleece, pleased that it still fit well, I dove into the pockets. The thing has six. One inside zip pocket over my right breast. Two inner pouch pockets lining either side of the zipper. An outer zipped breast pocket on the left, and two zippered outer vent pockets.
I started going through them. A pen. Wadded, dusty tissues. Tightly folded five dollar bill, kept company by two weary ones. A wrapped cough drop. Mask, as we wore during the pandemic. A quarter and two dull pennies. And a hard, small thing.
The hard small thing was dark gray. Plastic. Looked almost like a small car key fob. I didn’t recognize it. No markings on it at all. One center button. “What the fuck?” I asked the air.
My mind squirreled through my maze of existence, trying to place this thing. Failing that, I searched my memories for when I’d last worn this garment. Must have been during the pandemic. Because there was a mask, right? That made sense.
Frowning with deep concentration, I held up the gray thing and pressed the button and listened. I heard no sound. I pressed it in again, holding it in, raising it to the side of my head as I did.
Dizziness swept me up. My head lolled left. The urge to puke scaled my body. Lips tight against retching, I reached for a piece of furniture to hold myself up. Missing, I fell to my knees with a thud that shook the room. Trying further not to puke, I dropped to all fours.
“Got you, got you, got you,” I heard.
Who? my brain queried. Legs in jeans were to my vision’s right. “Who?” I wanted to voice but knew that I couldn’t without puking.
The gray thing was on the floor. I must have dropped it. A hand went for it. Dark blue fleece covered the arm.
I knew that fleece.
I was wearing that fleece.
A face showed up in my eyesight. My face. My hazel eyes were bright with humor. “It’s me,” the other me said. “Remember me?”
Belatedly remembering, I lunged for my other self.
I nimbly danced away with laughter. I looked up. Red darkened my vision. My eyesight was a tunnel that was growing smaller. The last thing I saw was my finger pressing the gray thing’s button.
Then I was inside it, looking out.
“You bastard,” I shouted. I knew what had happened. I didn’t know how I’d manage to get the gray thing into my pocket. Maybe I left it there. But I should remember. I must have blocked my memory of what happened before. I did now know that I was the visitor. I was the alien who had occupied that human body who I knew as me.
And now, it had been reversed.
Raising the gray thing, I looked at it at eye level. A grin sprawled over my face. “Now where should I put this?” I asked. “Clearly a pocket is not the best place.”
I watched. Nothing else I could do. Humming, I carried the gray thing with me inside out to the garage. I began realizing what I was going to do. I said, “No. No. Don’t. Wait.” I knew I didn’t hear me. I knew I wouldn’t care.
I picked up a shovel. Screaming inside, I listened as I went outside and dug a hole. A short drop followed, then I bounced around as the gray thing landed in its new home.
The light fell as dirt dropped in on the gray piece. I looked around my new place. Not as bad as I remembered it. A suite of rooms, replica of the place where I had just lived as a human.
Memories began returning about how everything worked here. It was not the same as the real world. Moving fast, I ensured the doors and windows were closed and locked.
As I said, it’s not the same as the real world.
Twosda’s Wandering Thoughts
I’m in shock.
I tell my wife, “I’m wearing over eight hundred dollars worth of clothes.”
She looks me over. “Gold-plated underwear?”
“That wouldn’t be comfortable nor practical.” I reconsider the gold-plated undies for a few more seconds. “How would that work?”
“Why are your clothes so pricy?”
“My socks,” I admit.
I’m wearing my compression stockings, as the medical ‘they’ likes to label them. I received a statement about them last night. Review, sign, return. Custom made in Germany to help me cope with lymphedema, the statement reveals that each stocking costs $366.
I explain this to my wife. “Good thing that they’re paid for by Medicare and Tricare for Life. I would have never bought these on my own.”
“No. You’re not comfortable with a pair of shoes that costs over a hundred dollars,” my wife says.
This is true. Fashion doesn’t interest me. I like to be practical. Today’s shoes cost me about sixty. They’re several years old. My jeans are a pre-COVID purchase. Forty dollars. My shirt was bought at an outlet store for $25, I think, over ten years ago. My Columbia fleece is even older. I think I bought it for $40 on sale. Other than the stockings, my undies are the newest things on my person.
Four more stockings are on the way. $366 each. I think about getting a safe to keep them safe.
I begin typing on my computer. Goldplate underwear for men is available at Kohl’s, a search result says. I click on the link. It comes up with gold-plated stainless-steel chains.
Just as well. I don’t think I’m up for gold-plated underwear.
Twosda’s Theme Music
The weather disappoints me. Sunshine awoke me. That’s faded. Clouds rolled in. Yesterday afternoon turned into a rain marathon. I hoped it rain itself out.
It’s not raining now. It’s just not my idea of ‘nice’. That term for weather has gained a narrower scope as I age.
Not just the weather disappointing me. Papi fractured my sleep with his complaining and in-and-out capades. “Are you getting revenge because we took you to the vet yesterday?”
The cat miaws back. Not his usual sound, which is an extended, “Eeeeppp.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” I tell him. That’s true. “It was for your own good.” Just as Mom used to tell me about almost everything upsetting me as a child.
The vet wants us to have the cat’s teeth worked on. “She’s aggressive about having his teeth worked on,” my wife says.
“She was the same with Tucker.” Tucker had all his teeth removed. “Poor Tucker.”
“He was happier after his teeth were taken out.”
Papi’s teeth estimate is $1900. It shocked us. “Should we do Papi’s teeth?” I ask.
“Let me think about it.”
That’s just how Mom used to say no.
Besides those things, recent SCOTUS rulings have me wringing my hands. Also, I read an article about how surprised financial advisors and stock brokers were that Trump actually went through with the tariffs.
“We’re stepping into the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro-American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime,” gushed the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman in December.
“I don’t think this was foreseeable,” a mournful Ackman posted on X on Monday. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount.” What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos.
But it was foreseeable. Those of us who didn’t vote for Trump readily foresaw it.
I’m disappointed that Ackman and his kind didn’t foresee it. I’m disappointed that he didn’t believe us when we told him this was going to happen.
BTW, this is Twosda. April 8, 2025. It’s 52 F outside. Partly cloudy. It might rain.
The Neurons are playing “Lithium” by Nirvana in the morning mental music stream. The song was released in 1991. I was still a military member then. Just arrived back to the U.S. in Feb. that year after almost four years in Germany. I was assigned to Onizuka Air Station in California. Some good years were had there.
Nursing coffee, I hear a squeegee sound. The cat runs his wet pads on the door glass when he wants in. “Swqueek swqueek swqueek swqueek.” Sunshine is up. So is the wind. I let in the cat. He turns to me and says, “Merow?”
It’s One or Another
Daily writing prompt
If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
I write fiction. I love writing novels. I don’t work so much on publishing them afterwards. Writing them is the fun of it. Fiction writing always lets me be other characters.
Today was typical. As I worked on the novel in progress, I was several characters. A mashup of genres, I told the muses that all genres are welcome in this tome. So, today, one of the principle characters in the scene was the talking dog, Sly.
Sly is a small dog. His name is short for Sylvester. Besides talking, he’s a thought reader. His owner is Instant, a rock and pop star who uses magic to enhance her performances and control her fans. They live on a starship named the Stellar Queen.
When Sly was introduced chapters ago, he came in to give specific warnings and revelations. When I thought about his voice and tone, I began imagining my father’s words coming out of Sly’s mouth. Thereafter, Sly’s behavior model is my father. Later, I realized with a start, Dad’s nickname among some of his friends is Sly. Kind of trippy. I named the dog before ever thinking about his behavior.
I think my favorite character in the novel, though, and the one who I would prefer to be, is Ari Four. As part of his modelling,another fictional character inspires him. That’s Uhtred of Bebbanburg, son of Uhtred, played by Alexander Dreymon in a television series called The Last Kingdom. The television series is based on a series of novels by Bernard Cornwell. Uhtred is based on some history, and Cornwell’s distant forebear. Besides sometimes acting irrational, staunchly adhering to principles when others urge him to abandon them, Uhtred is bold, loyal, and decisive. He’s willing to fight.
Ari Four is always urging, “We must do this now.” He speaks forcefully, as Uhtred would. If someone else is about to pull a sword, Ari Four will pull his first. That’s the thing about fiction writing. Like fiction reading and watching movies, plays, and television shows, you can let yourself be someone else for a while.
Even if it’s just your father, the dog.
Michael Seidel, writer 