when we were young, fucking fire hurricane, slow progress

I’ve had enough winter now. One more night tonight below freezing, our coldest night so far I think at 28˚, and that’s it for the foreseeable future (but we all know that can and probably will change) even though it will still get down in the 30s every night for the next five nights and then it’s going to yo-yo up and down between the 30s and 40s at night. Yesterday was cold and drizzly wet. 

Yesterday we started back up at SHARE after being closed the past two Thursdays and we were busy. We served 44 families with food orders. We also gave away lots of winter coats. A couple of the volunteers opened on Tuesday and Wednesday, days we aren’t ordinarily open, for several hours just for that and I think today also.

Yesterday morning I had a message from the son of a man who was one of Marc’s and my closest friends. In fact it was Tommy who initially got Marc and I together (I was dating his roommate and Marc was dating his sister which made Tommy the common denominator) and Tommy who married us all those years ago and we’ve know his son, Tommy (the 4th), from the day he was born. Our friend Tommy (the 3rd) died in 2004 of liver cancer and his som, the 4th, was going through a drawer crammed with pictures looking for photos of the 5 generations of Tommys for his son Tommy (the 5th) to take to school for show and tell when he came across this picture of me which he sent to me yesterday morning. This must have been taken soon after Marc and I were married and it looks to have been taken at our house from the blurry shapes in the background. I was 26. I’d forgotten how long my hair was then.

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We draw ever closer to Doomsday when that convicted felon and rapist and his company of unqualified billionaire goons formally takes over the government while he and his sycophants blather on about using economic and military might to take Greenland, annex Canada, take over the Panama Canal, and this is like the icing on the cake, rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and his idiot MAGAt congresspeople have already submitted a bill enforcing the use of the new name in reference and documents. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is burning to the ground while Trump spews his lies and lays the blame on Democrats, liberals, and DEI. Seriously. Why the fuck won’t Newsom tell Canada to just turn on the giant faucet preventing all that snowmelt from flowing into California. I mean, it can’t possibly be because of climate change and that California is experiencing a fucking fire hurricane (video Jeff Tiedrich posted) and the water is being used faster than the storage tanks with plenty of water can replace it.

But all is not lost. This guy, real estate developer Rick Caruso, hired some private firefighters to save his upscale shopping center while the homes around it burned to the ground. Where the fuck do you get private firefighters and why the fuck aren’t they trying to save Los Angeles from burning to the ground.

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Progress is slow on the new painting but here’s where I am so far.