March 16

 We don't have any errands or appointments today so we can relax at home. The appointment with the eye doctor went well. I do need new glasses and they are on order. But, in a sign of the times, they won't arrive for about 18 days. I remember when we expected a 7 to 10 day lag. 

And CNN has an article which might be another sign of the times: U.K. supermarkets are setting limits on how much customers can buy of fresh vegetables, essentially rationing the supplies. This time of the year, Britain gets those warm weather veggies from Spain and Morocco. But those areas have had very hot weather followed by a freeze. The Spanish tomato crops were down 20% from last year. Another area that normally supplies a large part of the U.K. market is suffering from high fuel costs which have forced farmers who used to grow those veggies under greenhouses to close most of them. The cost of the fuel to heat the greenhouses exceeds the price they can get for the crops. And the fuel costs/shortages also limits the availability of fertilizers because natural gas is the major component in producing commercial fertilizers.

I saw a snippet on the morning news/commentary shows where a right wing writer (who I hadn't heard of before) who utterly failed to define "woke". It wasn't any surprise to me that she couldn't come up with a definition because I thought for some time that it has become a short hand way to express their opposition to anything so-called conservatives don't like. Don't like Disney opposing some silly measure the governor wants to enact?--they are a woke company and they will be punished. Don't like drag shows?--enact laws prohibiting them labeling your opposition as woke and supporting groomers. Don't like the Federal government guaranteeing the deposits of a bank the Feds took over?--well simply dismiss the bank as a woke institution that should have failed no matter the collateral damage. What every you don't like is simply woke and you don't need to explain why you don't like it. And you don't have to respect the people on the other side of the issue. Actually the interviewee did say something that was relevant: the notion that "woke" means holding the idea that society needs to be "reimagined and reordered to create new hierarchies of oppression." She seems to assume that society doesn't need to be reimagined or even questioned and that the reordering would establish new "hierarchies of oppression" which would somehow be worse that the "hierarchies of oppression" that exist now. Obviously she does think there are such hierarchies since otherwise we wouldn't be establishing new ones.