Tom Brenner

Crater Lake blue

Does Erick have a younger brother they can stand next to Andrew?

Build the typewriter, take apart, build the keytar for display.

A few years ago my wife responded to everyone in her family with the same 3-in-1 set when asked what I might like for Christmas. It was an awesome Christmas.

Brenner!

Four pounds (approximately 20 peppers) of Hatch Green Chiles roasting on a gas grill. The top sides of the peppers are blistered and blackened.

Hatch season has reached Ohio

“Making everyone stunned”

Huh? John Brown was raised in OH, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Salmon Chase were very active in abolitionist circles in Cincinnati. Ohio has many faults, but they were as anti-slavery as anyone.

My Learned League 1DS on Edward Hopper is live today, on what would’ve been his 143rd birthday. Please give it a look if that’s your thing!

An odd historical coincidence: Medgar Evers and Patrice Lumumba were born on the same day, 100 years ago today. Although they were born on opposite sides of the world and took extremely different paths, they would both be assassinated in the name of white supremacy before making it to the age of 40.

How do you stay off the grass at Wimbledon, though…

In OH, the legislature has found or is working on end runs around at least 3 constitutional amendments (gerrymandering, abortion, marijuana). For a democracy to work, the electorate needs to treat working against the system as a permanently disqualifying condition. Else I don’t know how we fix it.

I subscribe to an aviation safety daily email and by far the most entertaining are diversions due to passenger behavior on charters between England and the Med. Covid seems to have put a lot of those operators out of business, but I think that’s the most likely place to witness an inflight brawl.

Several bins for sorting Lego. One bin is sorted by piece shape, another is all one shape, sorted into colors. A stack of more bins is nearby.

I’m only doing this for the little extra pieces, but I bought a bunch of these cheap sorters at Menard’s. I sort by shape (front box) and when I have enough to fill a compartment, that shape gets it own box and I sort them by color (back box).

I established a sorting system for the extra pieces that come in Lego sets.

Oh, hey, that’s my subject line!

(In which several people relate what it’s like to be demolished by future pros and I…get absolutely demolished by a backup JV WR half my size.)

Arise and be merry
And sing out while you can
The world will never see the likes of dear old Stan

It’s a little game I call, “Am I depressed or just paying attention?”

Jim Chamberlin and his team that designed the Gemini capsule came en masse from Canada after they cancelled the Avro Arrow program.

Pro global warming I guess?

There are 123 schools* over $1000! The depth is incredible and incredibly moving.

*almost all of them real, even!

PS: mom passed in November and the estate is still trying to recover the ~4 months of social security payments locked away in Charlie so that we can settle her end of life medical bills.

They’ll find out when payments start bouncing and that means penalty fees and embarrassment and months of sorting out the consequences. Many won’t have family to help and will never fully recover. Some may lose power, and die or suffer without oxygen generators and the like. My rage is white hot.

…who to call. She thought it was a problem with the power company, then her local bank, then social security. Probably she should’ve made an angry call to Charlie, although they likely wouldn’t have helped her. Most seniors aren’t going to find out gently that they missed a check.

I showed her how to revert her direct deposit and helped with bills for a couple of months while we waited for social security to update on their end (it takes a while). This is why the casual cruelty from the Secretary is so galling. My mom didn’t make any angry calls because she wasn’t even sure..

What she was sure of was that she had no idea that by signing up she was agreeing to open an account at this other bank and redirect her payments there. And why would she want that, the bank she’d used on and off for most of her adult life was a block away.

Finally it occurred to me to have her search her email for the name of the bank, and that brought an advertising for a fintech called Charlie, whose shtick is “get your social security a few days early.” She said she might’ve seen an ad and signed up, but wasn’t sure.

Autopay was bouncing because the account was empty. The account was empty because she hadn’t received social security in a couple of months. I showed her how to log in to SSA and we found that her payment had been moved to a small bank across the state. This was a mystery.

Story time. A few months before my mother passed, she called me in an embarrassed panic. The electricity to her apartment was disconnected. At this point she was no longer driving and starting to have trouble keeping track of everything, so we got the power turned back on dug into the problem.

Johnson ahead of Grassley.

Yesterday was Myrlie Evers-Williams’ (his widow’s) 92nd birthday. Ghoulish.