My wife looked at me with hope. “Did you find my phone?”
“What?” I asked.
She explained. She’d called and left messages. She’d lost her phone.
My phone never rang.
After cursing that, I examined my settings. The phone should have rung. It’s possible it rang and I didn’t hear it.
Anyway…
My wife lost her phone. She thought it happened at the coffee shop. I called them to ask if they had found it. They looked all over as I called the number.
“No, sorry,” Katie told me.
We drove over to the coffee shop to look for ourselves. No sign of the phone.
Then I got a phone call from her phone. Children were making a prank call.
I tried talking to them. I offered a reward. I texted them with an offer to buy the phone back.
No response.
After two days of trying, my wife accepted, the phone was gone. She needed to cancel the service for that number.
She called the support center.
A bot answered. It explained it was a bot and asked her what her problem was.
My wife explained the situation.
“Hold on,” the bot said. A few minutes later, it came back on the line. “Can you explain your problem again please?”
My wife did.
“Please hold,” the bot said. “I’ll be right back.”
The back came back and suggested, “Turn your phone off and on.”
“No,” my wife replied. She explained again: she did not have her phone. Her phone was lost. She needed to cancel the service.
“Hold on,” the bot replied. It went away. My wife listened to hold music. The bot came back: “Turn your phone off and on.”
“That won’t work,” my wife answered. “Let me speak to a human.”
The human had her sorted in thirty seconds. If she had spoken to the human in the first place, the call would have been under a minute.
Instead, she was forced to endure having a bot tell her, “Turn your phone off and on.”
Hot today, but not overly so, with 90 F as the top end. It’s wildfire smoke knocking us down today. Smoke limits the view out the front; we can barely see the valley past the trees across the street, a sight I normally contemplate as I make breafast.
The East Evans Creek has been going on and growing for several days. Started when a car hit a power line, people have been evacuated from several of the surrounding areas.
‘Back east’ as the expression goes, in Pittsburgh, PA, my sisters are complaining about the Canadian wildfire smoke saturating their region. Can’t breathe, they note; gives you an instant headache. One brother-in-law stayed out there yesterday and lost his voice. Surprised that he was out there, as he was stented several years ago and then went through open-heart surgery. On the other hand, he is a MAGAt.
Get ready for more Trump-inspired price increases! Ha, ha, just kidding!
Coffee is already trading at historically high prices. Last time Trump put a tariff on products from Brazil in 2025, the fallout from high coffee prices politically hurt him. So he exempted food, coffee, and oil this time. It’s only things used in construction, like steel and wood. So housing costs will go up. No problem, right?
Today’s song in the morning mental music stream is “American Jesus”. Came out over a few handfuls of years ago. By Bad Religion, it’s an anti-war song inspired when President George Dubya Bush said during the Gulf War, “‘We’ll win, because God is on our side!”
Fortunately, we have Trump, a genius among geniuses, in the Oval House and he’s learn all the lessons from that war because he’s the smartest man in the universe’s entire existence. Sorry, I gagged and puked writing that bit of snark.
May your day go well, your health be strong, and your food be tasty.
Wildfire smoke arrived last night. I couldn’t open us up to cool us down, so the house is warm and stuffy today.
The smoke is from a southern Oregon wildfire that’s a few miles away. The East Evans Creek Fire exploded on us two days ago. Rapidly expanded, it’s already caused some evacuations.
Meanwhile, down south, California has LA wildfires, and there are fires in Colorado and the Utah fires are still going. Besides the US, there are wildfires in Canada, Europe, Australia and South America burning.
Around here, it’s 71 and we’ll hit the low 90s F today. Cloudy but hot. Two days ago, they were telling us it we might get rain. That chance appears to have evaporated.
Big news, saving Trump from doing more under Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! is Lindsey Graham’s death.
A Trump supporter, Graham was all for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that cut Medicare support, insisting that too much was going to insurance companies. But he never offered anything better, basically abandoning the need, letting everyone fend for themselves. With little surprise, Graham went along with Trump on the idea of health savings account, which disproportionately favor wealthy people. Results: we have more uninsured people in the US, part of the expanding problem of healthcare in the United States.
Trump also supported Trump’s Iran war, once saying that if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t open, the US would ‘obliterate’ Iran.
Given his record, it would be a surprise if Graham was against Trump’s ballroom. He was not, and was one of the Senators willing to spend $400 million on the ballroom that Trump said would cost taxpayers nothing.
Other news is about Trump, of course. The Palm Beach International Airport has been renamed for Trump. It’s all ego for him. He likes to compare himself to the great Presidents. He is much like them in many ways, except he’s less intelligent, a liar, dishonest, thinned skin, not very educated, greedy and self-centered, and an egotist who thinks he’s a genius but struggles to speak in coherent sentences.
I feel sorry for those flying into Palm Beach International after the name change. In fact, I’d be worried; everything that gets Trump’s name attached to it begins failing and falling apart. Just look at his business and government record. As POTUS, Trump is a toddler running around breaking everything in reach.
Today’s song in the morning mental music stream is “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Released in 1968, much of what people can hear is the repetition of “Fire!” But when you listen to the lyrics, they get pretty crazy:
Received my biopsy results the other day and saw my urologist today.
The TURBT procedure seemed to get all of the cancer. Didn’t get into the muscle tissue, blood, or connective tissue.
That’s all good news.
My bladder seems to be healing well, based on observations. No pain, clearer urine.
The next steps begin in August, maybe September. After my bladder has healed from its surgery, we’ll begin a series of BCG washes. This is an instillation of tuberculosis bacilli into the bladder. This trains the immune system to attack the disease. It then also attacks any cancer cells which dare to show. I’ll go through that once a week for four to six weeks. There’s a less than 1% chance that I’ll develop TB from it.
CT scans with contrast will follow after the BCG wash protocol to see what shows in my bladder. Cystoscopy if or as necessary to see what’s in there. Three-year follow up program of checking and washes.
First steps have been taken. While it’s all positive to date, it won’t be done for a while. Meanwhile, I’m energetic. In good spirits. Overweight — got to eat less and exercise more, but I can’t exercise properly for two more weeks — but optimistic.
Thanks for all the support. I’ll try to reciprocate to the best I can.
Summer remains in full effect here. While it’s a pleasant, blue-sky 70 now, we expect 94 F to arrive before the sun curves out of sight.
Papi says, that’s okay. Let’s get something to eat, clean up, and take a nap.
With little surprise and total arrogance, Trump insisted on a huge fireworks display for the 4th. Per nature’s rules, that caused pollution which resulted in unhealthy air for We the People living and visiting there. The situation was made worse by the extreme heat the area is experiencing. Saturday’s temperature reached 103 degrees F that day. The extreme heat caused the pollution to linger.
I have “Cinnamon Girl” stuck in my morning mental music stream. It’s dream related. I had three dreams last night and one involved a woman with cinnamon-colored skin. With my wife, she and I were taken aback by the woman’s beautiful skin. She was petite, barely more than a girl. We saw her three times in the dream but never spoke with her. Instead, we would be walking through the throngs, look up and say, “Look, there’s the cinnamon girl.”
So, here is the song by Neil Young and Crazy Horse.
May happiness and joy fill your Monday and carry you into a brighter, better future.
I distinctly remember other times when ‘survival’ was the prize during other times and researched to confirm I wasn’t making things up.
What is most interesting is that we went into ‘survival prizes’ whenever the nation was in a crisis, such as the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and the 2008 recession.
We’re not supposed to be in a recession now or crisis now. Trump keeps telling us how great everything is.
Yet, economists such as Paul Krugman keep noting that people are talking about recession vibes, or ‘vibecessions’. The economy doesn’t have a ‘feel-good’ tone. Instead, what’s manifesting is a ‘feel-bad’ sense.
I have the feel-bad tingles. Although financially secure, whenever I shop for groceries these days, I experience shock about how much prices have gone up.
For instance, Ben & Jerry’s was my ice cream of choice for years. Actually, I was a froyo guy but I can no longer find it in local stores. I still look, though.
I used to get a pint of B&J froyo for under $3. We’re talking about fifteen years ago? This week, an Albertson’s was heralding a sale on B&J pints: almost $8 with a digital coupon.
I flipped. $8 for a pint of ice cream? Has the world gone insane?
It’s not all Trump, but he’s done us a lot of damages.
It started with his tariffs and his crazy insistence that We the People won’t be paying for them. Any who took basic high school history lessons knew that wasn’t true.
We see his damages when we look at the photos of the laughably cheap props created under his eye for the Great American State Farm and the empty fairgrounds. We see it when he shows us photos of tacky gold embellishments on the home of We the People.
We see it when we look at the mess Trump made of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, listening and watching as he squirms, trying to blame others for how it looks, denying what he did and its results.
We see it in the paved over historic Rose Garden and the destroyed White House East Wing. We heard it in the lies when Trump proclaimed it would cost us nothing.
He didn’t realize how much it already cost when we saw what he callously did to the property that belongs to We the People.
We hear it when Trump weaves one lie after another about why he ordered attacks on Iran, how long it would last, and what objectives he’d established and didn’t achieve.
We heard it when Trump talked about how much richer he is now after being back in the White House for over a year.
We felt it when Trump laughed and said, we’re all profiting because the stock market is up, exaggerating that it’s up 85%, because we knew that wasn’t true.
And we knew it when Trump said that he couldn’t fix inflation. We knew it when he said he didn’t care about affordability. We knew it when he said he was a peace president and began ordering attacks.
We knew it when Elon Musk and DOGE made wanton wholesale cuts to government programs established by the government through meticulous processes.
We knew it when Trump’s Congress cut subsidies to healthcare premiums. We knew it when Trump promised not to touch Medicare and then cut it in the monstrously ugly named, One Big Beautiful Bill.
We knew it when Trump’s budget was all about defense, setting a record high, telling us that we couldn’t afford childcare. We knew it when he directed that the United States build battleships, an obsolete weapon system. We knew it when Trump said it was a Trump-class battleship.
We knew it when Iran fought the US to a standstill and closed the Strait of Hormuz.
As we approach our celebration of 250 years as a nation, the feeling is not of being united and free. Nor is it a feeling of hope or patriotism.
Nor is there optimism.
It’s a feeling instead, that we’re in a mess. We’re fighting to extricate ourselves, but we’re torn about how to do it.
That’s the crises we now face, and why survival is now the prize.
Though I laughed, I admit I also gnashed my teeth as I scrolled and read. Trump’s first term was horrible. His second term is a disaster, with assaults on equal rights, good taste, intelligence, and common sense. These toons remind me that he’s an empty person who only cares about himself who makes empty promises to con others.
Here are my top three:
This summarizes not just Trump’s Iran war, but every promise he’s made since he became a candidate for office: empty, empty, empty.
Perfect: the web Trump has trapped himself in. Yet, MAGAts continue to cheer him on.
Disappointed that the Epstein files aren’t on there.
Click on over to Jill to find one that makes you laugh more than you GRRRRRowl.
Ashland, southern Oregon – Wednesday, June 10, 2026.
Warmer today. 56 F now but looking for 80 degrees as sunshine stretches across a clear blue sky.
Papi did his morning laps. I did the same. We meet, a Venn diagram of habit, wants, and needs, then go back to our respective circles.
Gina plies us with news about a hundred things happening. House inspections, furniture removal, cleaners, realtor. Prescriptions for Mom ordered — not yet ready, come back at 3:30! Commenting that she’s sweaty and tired. Informing us that Mom hasn’t said a word about the house. Saw the listing on Zillow but never spoke about it. Instead talks of the assisted living place.
After Gina’s demands at Heritage Grove, they cleaned Mom’s floor yesterday. Gina orders Mom, “Track it. They better do it once a week. Tell me if they don’t.”
Outside of those twenty texts, it’s quiet.
Trump and Iran are heating up their war. Trump makes continued assertions: the war is over. We have won. They have nothing. We are all powerful. I am a great negotiator. I want peace.
But retaliation is the order of the day: they hit us, we hit back — harder. Playground mentality — or mobster?
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
Iran will ‘pay the price’ for daring to fight back after Trump attacked them. The word sounds like lines out of a movie like “Red Dawn”. The movie was about high-schoolers fighting back after the Soviet Union (along with Cuba and Nicaragua) invade a small town in Colorado. 1980s fare. Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, other young actors.
In an ironic aside, the movie’s background is that NATO was dissolved, which encouraged the invasion, an interesting point, given Trump’s position on NATO…
According to Wikipedia, “Red Dawn” began life as a little anti-war movie but MGM wanted a teenage Rambo style approach. The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, helped refine the script.
Today’s morning mental music stream inhabitant is “Invincible.” I’m referring to the 1985 song Pat Benatar performed to commercial success.
Sample Lyrics:
This shattered dream you cannot justify. We’re gonna scream until we’re satisfied. What are we running for? We’ve got the right to be angry. What are we running for when there’s nowhere we can run to anymore? We can’t afford to be innocent stand up and face the enemy. It’s a do or die situation – we will be invincible. And with the power of conviction there is no sacrifice. It’s a do or die situation – we will be invincible.
Michael Seidel, writer 