I just finished watching all seven seasons of The West Wing, which aired from 2000-2007. There is an important lesson in most every episode.

I didn’t have the good fortune of seeing any of these seasons when they first appeared. Those were the years I was working night and day transcribing court reporter notes, creating deposition and trial transcripts. Nearly all had deadlines, and besides, I loved the work. I began in this field in 1986 and continued until I retired. The West Wing years were when I was the busiest, as a scopist for several reporters.

However, now that I have had the chance to view the series, to which Lawrence O’Donnell refers so often, I have had an important education about how things get done. I know not everything was exposed in West Wing, and I doubt that much of it applied to activity during the Trump administration. What O’Donnell and the other writers and consultants shared was how things have normally worked, and hopefully will work again soon.

The series ends on a note that precisely connects to the end of the Biden administration, and the events we are witnessing today. The Bartlet team found itself in a bad spot, pulled into an ongoing hostile situation not of their making. They had sent troops to try and prevent a war between two superpowers. This nightmare situation was passed onto the new incoming administration.

This is precisely where we find ourselves today, as the next president will take office just as Iran and Israel are deciding whether to start World War III. But this time we were a bit more involved in this hostility than I would have preferred. The United States, in a position of having to defend Israel as a sovereign nation, has sent billions of tax dollars and weapons to assist, no matter what Israel’s IDF decides to do.

Will a new administration be able to change this picture? Can we be peacekeepers between Israel and all the Arab nations in the area? Couldn’t we just stop sending money and stuff that makes it worse? I don’t care about defense contractors and their stock prices. Let them build solar panels and storage batteries.

Climate Disasters

I don’t remember any specific episodes dealing with the problems like the ones we have today, with hurricanes and wildfires. I will be happy to be corrected if I missed it.

At this point we are facing both the heated planet with very little hope for change, as well as a noisy and well-promoted bullhorn spouting misinformation. It is doubly dangerous because when bad information is scary enough, it will feed on itself and get repeated.

What Do Old People Do All Day?

 I have seen this question many times on Quora.

Well, I’m very old, so I suppose I’m expert enough to answer.

My favorite quote is “So much to do, so little time!” When one is very old, as I am, it is quite normal to think any time left on the planet can’t be much. In which case, it’s best to complete your bucket list, or start one. Quickly. That’s why most days I am feeling pressured to finish every project I have started. It may be a painting, making a new quilt, watching movies I haven’t seen yet, or looking up old friends to see if they are still alive.  (Usually they aren’t.)

On the other hand, I remember that my grandmother lived to be 98, and that gives me even more to think about.  She spent her last decade in a nice little nursing home in a rural community. They tend to be comfortable. She could still get to the bathroom by herself and to the dining room with her walker. She spent her days reading, writing long letters, and following the British royal family. She adored Princess Diana. She had British ancestors and understood them quite well.  She never got dementia and even wrote a brief autobiography for her descendants before she died.

My father lived to be 95, and he was in a different nursing home. He read the newspaper every day and only died when he fell and received a head injury.  I have at least a dozen ancestors who lived very long lives.

The possibility of living to nearly 100 is scary to ponder, having seen so many people who were not as fortunate as my grandmother. When I visited my dad, I walked through a lobby filled with men and women of all ages, sitting in wheelchairs and simply staring into space, having forgotten who they were. So no, I would just as soon check out sooner than the day I should come to that kind of life.

And then I remember that we often draw to us the thing we fear most, so I work on keeping that fear as well as any others out of my thoughts. The laws of attraction really do work, you know.

My granddaughters wonder why I haven’t died yet, because as I said, I am very old!

(to be continued. I have to go sew now.)

I have finally uploaded the video which shows most of the types of items I am trying to pass on to other creative people. Prices are less than 20% of what you would have paid for new versions.

Please review and if you are in the North Texas area, let me know if you are interested and we can make an appointment. Some things can be shipped.

Very soon I will be posting videos and photos of the hundreds of items I am selling, almost as an estate sale (but I’m not dead yet). Artists and art students will be interested in much of this, particularly if they live near the DFW area. Shipping is so expensive.

Items include papers, markers, easels, collaged items, junk journals, stamping supplies, a Gemini with dies and embossing plates, paintings, old paintings that can be reused, ephemera and assemblage items, two sewing machines, old brushes, rhinestone stuff, bookmaking supplies, PanPastels, paper punches, et cetera, et cetera.

Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I am still painting and writing. I will be making things as long as I can.

June was a long month

This is a post to catch up, starting with a power outage that sent me to a hotel for two luxurious days! All the power people from across the country had contracted so many rooms that the only option was a pricy room downtown, but it was heaven!  Now Houston is going through the same hell we did.

Next on our family agenda was hammering out all the details involved in getting my youngest granddaughter off to college this coming fall. It is certainly more complicated than it was for me way back in 1960. Our student elected an out-of- state school, and with her good grades and hard work, nobody had the courage to argue with her (even though there are umpteen cheaper options here in Texas.)

This household is a busy one. My daughter and my oldest granddaughter worked 12-hour days at the polls during primary runoffs. Despite my apprehension they will work in the fall election as well. 

And now, political nightmares abound

This family is politically astute.  The jibber-jabber since the shocking debate has many of us on edge. I am angry at the people who protected our president from the public, putting us in this position. I knew, of course, there were pundits calling the president feeble and incapable of completing sentences. However, those particular people lied about so many other facts, I discounted anything coming from those sources. So yes, people are shocked. His denial and defense, saying he was selected by primary voters, doesn’t account for the fact that there was no other choice, nor available information we obviously needed. The situation is horrifying.

The wisdom from my metaphysical prognosticators assures us that however it turns out, we will be okay. They have all said 2024 was going to be a year with major changes. In fact, one said clearly that sometimes a situation has to get really bad in order to get the attention needed to effect overhauling a system that doesn’t work.

We know far too many people are apathetic when it comes to politics. Millions of eligible voters don’t bother to vote. My son is one of them. He thinks it doesn’t matter. But he has a good job with a good salary and has no understanding that this can change! 

I tried to explain there are factions who would like to eliminate minimum wage laws and many other protections he takes for granted. Citizens no longer have any understanding of civics and how our government has been working under the present system. 

As a consequence, greedy people have found ways to take advantage of this apathy. The inequities and existing chaos have resulted from a disinterested and largely uneducated citizenry. We know this, and see evidence every day.

Do you realize how many members of Congress received COVID recovery money that they were hardly qualified for? Their stock trades that are clearly because of inside information? And now we have Supreme Court members who don’t recuse from cases where they have an interest?!

All this must change and probably will at some point. It’s unlikely to happen in my lifetime. No one now in office will vote for term limits or to eliminate stock trades or dark money or lobbying. (Maybe Senator Whitehouse.)

We are now in the hottest summer we have experienced so far and surely this will accelerate. Money interests have blocked real efforts to ameliorate the situation. 

We can’t say we were not warned, over and over. 

So maybe the prognosticators are correct and we will see the worst of possible scenarios before change becomes the only choice humans have.

Buckle up. Meditate. Enjoy your loved ones and live in gratitude for anything you have today.

I have a section on my site about books and sites I find valuable enough to recommend, and this past week I have been glued to my earphones and Audible.

I prefer Audible because I tend to multi-task, organizing my office or painting in my studio while I listen. There are two more authors I have to share with you because of the truths and insights they pass on to us.

First I want to tell you about Matthew Quirk, who I discovered accidentally while browsing the political genre. I think the United States has gone so far off the rails that I am always looking for new information or commentary. Matthew Quirk’s fiction is educational, certainly, because of his background and knowledge he gained while working for The Atlantic.

His book, Inside Threat, although fiction, includes enough real information to wake us up to realities we never considered.

Another author I am devoted to following is William Kent Krueger. I have read (or listened to) most everything he has written. This above link takes you to his author page. I began reading his books with the Cork O’Connor series, which is fascinating and inspirational.

However, I have just finished his novel, This Tender Land, which took my breath away. It is an absolute miracle, a book that has to have been dropped into my view by a Guardian Angel! I want to share this novel with everyone I know, here and on Facebook or Threads or anywhere I can.

Because it’s not part of the Cork O’Connor stories, I ignored it for months. The title just didn’t grab me. I read The River We Remember out of a desperate search for a new book, and I hoped This Tender Land would be a winner too.

(I even wrote a review on Amazon, something I rarely do.)

I was so moved by this book that I found myself near to tears about halfway through the book, even thinking maybe I should stop reading it, but fortunately for me, I kept going through the night and the next morning. I am so impressed with the qualities of this author and the wisdom he imparts — particularly through this novel — that I would love to get to know him. I don’t know any other contemporary writer with the degree of insights he possesses.

I hope I have inspired you to read This Tender Land. It will resonate with anyone whose life has contained adversities and growing pains.

So why do I do this?

It is so much of who I am, to be creating something every day that I am miserable if not involved in a project. I have so much still to say, and even have returned to painting. Incidentally, I find that my new paintings are turning out to be the best I’ve ever done.

As soon as these 2024 paintings are photographed, I will post them at Fine Art America, like my earlier ones. Some will be made available for download and printing. But I digress.

In an attempt to make things less expensive, my daughter and I fell for the hype about phones for the elderly and I signed up for the Lively app and the Jitterbug 4.

I am now selling it to someone who might need it.

It turned out to be inadequate for everything I do all day, so I went back to a “normal” smartphone and thought changing my number would be helpful. It could give me a brief break from constant robocalls. But because my brain is apparently not firing on all cylinders anymore, I did the factory reset on the Jitterbug without thinking it through, making the problem referred to above with banks, etc.

Let me share with you the other thing no one tells you about old age: it is folly to automatically assume nothing changes. It is impossible to adequately prepare for how aging will affect any particular individual. Some skills, some abilities will be retained a very long time. And some activities that have long been subconsciously performed may be the very ones that vanish from your mental library.

The best advice anyone can definitely make use of is the one we have all heard.

Live one day at a time, sometimes one hour at a time. There is always now.

And if you screw something up, or have to do something over and over to get it right, that was just another consequence and another lesson learned for today.

In addition, procrastination is often driven by a fear of failure and an uncomfortable anxiety of some kind. Then it might be even worse, if the delay causes a job to be rushed through, leaving behind more errors than if it were done in the original time frame.

I need to read this to myself often. There is a poster in my room where I see it every day, and it says, “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE DONE TODAY.”

It might look like a sign of procrastination, but in my case it is a reminder to slow down. I tend to take on too many projects, and then become frustrated because I’m only one me. (As soon as I win the Lotto, I will hire three assistants.)

So what’s the difference? Taking a break, in summary, is a conscious decision to relax for awhile. I prefer being outside if possible, with Louie and watching the birds while he watches for squirrels. It is a peaceful, wonderful way to end the afternoon, and often gives birth to new ideas.

Oh…

This was a shared moment that transcended political differences (for at least 4 minutes) and should certainly have reminded all of us of our universal experience as humans still living in somewhat of a democracy. Perhaps voting should have been a requirement for seeing the eclipse. We suffer the results because it is not mandatory.

I wonder what the astrologists are thinking, now that we really are into the age of Aquarius. It never occurred to me that Israel and Iran would go to war at such a time. Only certain industries are hoping for a wider conflict. It seems so primitive to me. The eclipse should have given all of us a profound sense of insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. Collective appreciation and understanding might have led to more harmony in the world.

Are you curious about CERN? I am. They are actively banging things together at high speeds, trying to develop mysterious objects and push physics even farther than it has been.

Quantum physics and spirituality offer complementary perspectives on the nature of reality, consciousness and existence. Fortunately we are seeing growing interest and discussion about this connection, and not only on Gaia TV.

If you want a deep dive and to start keeping up with CERN, you can do that here.

Also, continued exploration of Mars by both NASA and China, as well as studying new exoplanets has become important now that most of us know we are not “alone,” so to speak.

More next month.