a few days later...

I finally had a normal day Thursday. I went to SHARE and was on my feet for four hours and went through three bandaids. I covered the toe with a bandaid because when I am up and walking around on it with shoes (sandals in my case), it weeps and also to spare my fellow volunteers the sight. I didn't go straight to the recycling center to dump the cardboard as I usually do because I had two gallons of milk for my neighbor. We get the milk from the dollar stores that are a day out of sell by. It's still good enough to give out but by next week it won't be. It was a fairly slow day and we had so much left over that Jan was making everyone take milk home. I don't drink milk so I took it to my neighbor who cares for her grandkids in the afternoons. Then I went to the yoga class last night. Stephanie focuses on strength and core instead of a wide array of asanas and there was only one or two times when I had to modify to accommodate the toe and then a quick dog walk after.

It was my night to cook dinner and Friday and I had no idea what to fix but as I was falling asleep Thursday night I thought of a good and easy thing to fix and I'll be damned if I could remember what it was when I woke up the next morning so all day I was in the same predicament. I finally settled on salmon fillets which we have a bag of from Costco. I've cooked them before but I was just winging it and I guess I overcooked them cause I wasn't impressed with my efforts. This time I looked up an easy recipe and they came out much better. 

You may remember that I have a pink trumpet flower plant that I put in the ground and for two years it grew great but didn't give me a single bloom. Well, maybe one. So I took a cutting and it's been in a pot and last summer I got one flower. The one in the ground finally died after two winters in a row with a plunge into the 20s. The one in the pot was brought in for those two winters. Well, it's outside now, has grown a lot and I looked the other day to see it was sprouting buds all over the place after I fertilized it a couple of times. I counted at least 30 of varying size. I'm so excited!

I've been having to water it (and everything else) every day as we are in a drought with high wind many days and today our high was in the low 90s and will be in the 90s for the foreseeable future...in early May. We seem to have skipped early summer and jumped straight into high summer. This is not good.

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The battle over legal abortion continues to rage on FB and Twitter. It's telling that Alito, in his draft opinion, referred heavily on two treatises from a 17^th century misogynist jurist who believed there was no such thing as 'marital rape', who believed capital punishment should be applied to children as young as 14, and who sentenced women to death for witchcraft as if what was common in the 1600s has more precedence than our modern society in the 2000s. Alito also references adoption as a reason for abortion to be overturned, using the phrase “domestic supply of infants” (he actually wrote this in his draft and Barrett concurs with the sentiment) indicating that banning abortion would help childless couples to get a baby as if a woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy should be obligated to go through with it regardless of the expense, time, and damage to her body and life, to provide someone else with a baby even though there are hundreds of thousands of children out there already in need of adoption. Oh but they aren't infants so I guess they don't count.

Red states and conservatives are salivating over what they see as the end to R v W and their soon to be ability to punish and control women with several senators and states having signed on to ban all abortions including ectopic pregnancies which they admit they don't know what they are or how they are treated and an Ohio bill demands doctors re-implant an ectopic pregnancy into the womb, something that is medically impossible. Ectopic pregnancies never result in a baby and will kill the woman if not removed but it's considered an abortion so not allowed. Senator Marsha Blackburn has stated that she thinks only married women should have access to birth control. Several states want to ban IUDs and 'morning after pills' and make it illegal to obtain abortion pills through the mail. Louisiana wants to be able to charge women and doctors with murder for having/performing abortions. Other measures being considered by red states are making it illegal for Medicaid to pay for birth control, making it illegal for a women to go to another state for an abortion where it is legal, deputize residents to sue anyone who helps a woman get a legal abortion in another state or make it illegal to 'aid and abet' a woman to have an abortion in a state where it is legal. I'm sure there are many others. There's been a lot of speculation on how these red states plan to keep track of women's periods and pregnancies in order to enforce these laws ranging from controlling over the counter home pregnancy tests to farming the data from apps that track your periods to forcing doctors to turn over names of women who have positive pregnancy tests (yes a violation of privacy and HIPAA but they obviously aren't concerned with that). So you ladies of child bearing age that live in states likely to pass and enforce draconian abortion laws I suggest you delete the apps now and stock up on home pregnancy tests for yourself and friends you can trust.

The thing that really stands out about these laws banning abortion, their forced birth policies, is that they are all aimed at women. There are no punitive measures for the man who impregnates a woman with no interest in or intent of being a father. Women having sex when they don't want to get pregnant is immoral but men having sex when they don't want to be a parent is just being a good ole boy who scored. And while women are expected to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term and give birth, there are no requirements for the man to aid, support, or be financially responsible for the prenatal care or birth of the baby he was an equal partner in creating.

It's time to fight. If November 2020 was a record in turnout this November we need to leave that in the dust. We need an unstoppable majority in the Senate and hang onto the House as well or this will just be the first hard won right we will lose. They will go after birth control, interracial and same sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, and integration and if they are able to make having an abortion a felony, those women will lose the right to vote.