Tomorrow I’m going to be heading up to TN, and then IL for a 12-day trip. Every fall I try to get up north and see some leaves changing, so that’s part of this trip. But I’m also going to get to spend some more time with my mom in TN.
After my dad passed in 2014, my sister and her excellent husband sold their house, and mom sold hers, and they bought a nice two-story place together. Mom had her own set-up on one floor – kitchen, dining room, two bedrooms and a bath – and everything has worked out great.
My sister and her hubby are taking a trip to see his family in up-state New York, leaving in the middle of next week. Mom is 84 now, and her Alzheimer’s has been progressing, so she’s not really up for long trips or staying alone. So I’m going to pass through on my way up to hang out with the cousins in IL for a few days, and then come back to TN, where I’ll get to spend a week with my sweet mom, while Rhonda and Jimmy are on their New York trip.
My better half is not able to make the trip with me, but Cassie the Wonder Dog is looking forward to going up and seeing her grandma, plus her two dog-cousins, Raven and Edgar. (Yes, my sister is an Edgar Allen Poe fan, as one should be.) And I’m looking forward to taking mom on a bunch of day trips to see some Fall colors, do some window shopping, and eat at some mom-and-pop places in the small towns around there.
Mom is still in good spirits, and the blanks in her memory are uneven. A month ago she moved upstairs, because she’d left her stove on several times and was starting to “sundown” in the evenings. Now that she’s happily settled in upstairs, she doesn’t remember that she lived downstairs for the last 7 years.
But all my sister or I have to do is sing the first line of her Ottawa, IL high school fight song from 70 years ago (The first line is, “Crimson and white, we’re moving onward!”), and she’ll join in and sing both verses to the end.
The last several times we tried to play cards with her, she said she’d forgotten how. But we reminded her of some rules and started a game, and it gradually came back to her. About five minutes in, one of us had missed our bid and started leading trump to screw up everyone else’s hand too, and mom said, “Oh, dad used to do that all the time, and it made me so mad!”
She looked about 20 years younger when she said that.
She still remembers her family, and all of us, and dad, and a lot of Bible verses. She remembers a lot of funny stories, and a lot of tough times that she and dad lived through. She has a lot of friends at her church, and she’s surrounded by people who love her.
We could all do a lot worse. Death is coming for all of us, but mom is hanging in, and she’s facing her decline with grace, and grit, and good humor. And I get to spend a week with her all to myself. With any luck we’ll create some more memories, and if she can’t hang on to them, I’ll remember them for both of us.
Also, I should be able to talk her in to writing Rhonda out of her will, and leaving everything to me.
HA! I kid because I love.
Speaking of things in decline, how about Biden’s performance, and the Dems’ election hopes?
The last monthly inflation numbers before the election have come out, and — hold on to your hat –the “experts” are surprised that they are “worse than expected.”
Which makes a string of 20 consecutive months of surprised experts and their inaccurate expectations.
Biden asked the Saudis to not cut their oil production, and they replied with whatever is Arabic for, “Stick it, Brandon!”
Which lead to a great Daily Caller headline: “Biden’s October Surprise is Even Higher Gas Prices, Experts Say.” It’s almost like he doesn’t understand how an “October surprise” is supposed to work.
Or how counting works. I’m sure you saw his brilliant opening when he addressed some union guys last week: “Let me start off with two words: Made in America.”
That quote leads me to this week’s entry in my new “Find a Mirror” series.
GOP congresswoman Lauren Boebert is working on her black belt in lib trolling, so she posted a tweet saying, “Two words: Let’s Go Brandon.”
Predictably, a clot of lefties who wildly over-estimate their own intelligence fell all over each other to be the first one to stomp on the self-beclowning metaphorical rake that Boebert had laid out before them. (And yes, “clot” is the correct collective noun. A murder of crows, a pride of lions, and a clot of lefties who over-estimate their own intelligence. You’re welcome.)
George Takei – whose only contribution to society was playing a bit part in a campy tv show for 3 seasons 60 years ago – tweeted, “She can’t…count.”
Anti-gun irritant David “Publicity” Hogg said, “Three words: You’re an idiot.”
A lefty talk show host whom no one has ever heard of named Chip Franklin speculated that Boebert is either “dumb as dirt or just unable to count.”
Former Obama and Biden minion Jon Cooper said, “That’s THREE words. She’s such a friggin’ moron!”
It’s so satisfying to see half-wits like that get out-played by someone they think is super dumb! If any of them were better men, when they discovered their mistake, they’d be sheepish enough to actually be chastened by their self-own.
Guys, you were actually right, for just a moment – someone who announced “two words” and then said three words would actually be just what you said. An idiot. A moron. Either dumb as dirt or unable to count.
That’s YOUR guy! He did that. And YOU got outwitted by dopey ol’ Lauren Boebert!
Find a mirror!
Finally, let’s close with a quick round of “compare and contrast,” this time with crime-fighting ideas and results in blue and red states.
If you’ve been following the crime stats in Chicago, I hope you’ve been doing it from a distance. Because otherwise you’d be dead right now.
It turns out that allowing murderers to murder and robbers to rob while simultaneously stopping police from policing has produced one long crime wave. (Experts shocked! Again!)
The latest trend was captured in a Chicago Sun Times headline which I swear to you I am not making up: “After second shooting in a week at a Chicago police facility, top cop says department looking at making stations safer.”
That’s right. Criminals have lost interest in committing crimes in darkened alleys or abandoned buildings. Now they’re going into POLICE STATIONS and aiming guns at cops!
You can read the story for details, but the most shocking one to me was that both thugs in the two different incidents were only wounded, rather than killed.
I’m no police procedures manual writer, but I’d think the protocol for this kind of situation would be pretty straight forward:
“In the event an armed criminal comes into a police station full of cops and aims a firearm at them, please follow these three steps:
1. Every officer present should empty his or her magazine into the suspect.
2. When all weapons are clicking on an empty chamber, the senior officer on site should say, “Cease fire.”
3. The most junior officer on site should then find a mid-sized waste basket and place what’s left of the suspect into it.
Now to the free state of Florida, where every piece of plywood in the state is festooned with messages such as “You loot, we shoot!” and, “Try to Loot, I’ll Eat your Face!” and the Governor (peace be upon him) reminds potential looters that this is a 2nd amendment state.
Result? Very little looting. (Experts shocked! Again!)
DeSantis also spoke for most of us when he reacted to the news that the Parkland school shooter received a life sentence rather than the death penalty:
“The only appropriate sentence for the massacre of 17 innocent people is the death penalty. That the jury had a single holdout refuse to authorize a capital sentence represents a miscarriage of justice…. And so I was very disappointed to see that. I’m also disappointed that we’re four and a half years after these killings, and we’re just now getting this. You know, they used to do this he would have been executed in six months.”
Cut to me, doing my Meg Ryan impression during the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally.
“Yes! YES! YESSSS!”
Sure, there were some flaws in old-timey frontier justice, with its tendency toward, “catch him, try him, and hang him” in a fortnight.
But is everybody okay with our current system, where the leading causes of death on DEATH ROW are old age and natural causes?
Apparently Chicago Mayor Fright-Wig River Carp and Illinois Governor “Round Mound of Unsound” Pritzker are.
DeSantis isn’t.
I know whose side I’m on.
It’s been a long 14 years, but the election is in 28 days.
Martin Simpson 
This is the comment I made that got taken down on Facebook with a warning:
Praise abundantly to you and your sister for taking care of your mother.
I’m glad you’re not going into Chicago since crime worsens by the day.
I was so hoping Joe’s 2 words were going to be “I resign”
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