February 20

 It has turned into a sunny day but still cold. We should be getting warmer over the next week. I am still recovering from the vacuuming yesterday. My back continues to say it hates me. So far most of my activity has been cleaning up the mess from yesterday in the kitchen, fixing breakfast, putting a few more inches on a crochet piece and screaming at the computer. I don't know why but first thing in the morning it objects to going on Outlook. I try to go in repeatedly and, after the second (or third, or fourth) time trying, swearing all the while, I finally get in. It make me really angry when things don't work--especially when the malfunction is something new. DAMN!!!

Oh well, I have simmered down a bit now. Watching the Weather Channel and thinking, once again, that we are lucky. We have some bitter cold and we had that episode of lake effect snow that gave us five or six inches but we don't have to go out right now. We are well enough stocked for food here and, so far, the power has been steady. Our local power company has done a good job. We did get a text message during the last storm from our internet provider that the internet was out. But they provided a time they expected the outage to be fixed and kept to that time.

Stray thought: Trump has shown that the United States government , at home and abroad, is unreliable. What one administration establishes the next might abruptly pull out of. During Trump 1.0 Angela Merkel responded to Trumps threats and bombast by suggesting that Europe blaze its own separate trail and, with the latest demonstration of U.S. quixotic changes of direction, Europe may be getting serious about doing that. In this country people are beginning to look at what they can do to live without government programs they have relied on since before most of us were born. At some point Trump will find himself a "leader" without a following at home and abroad. I wonder if at some point our fifty states will become forty-nine, or forty eight, or....

Jennifer Rubin at THE CONTRARIAN has a good piece on the consequences of the actions of the current administration.

One of the institutions we all depend on without really thinking about it much is the legal system. But it is also being undermined by the Trump/Musk administration. Barbara McQuade, also at THE CONTRARIAN, describes the problem well.