Jacquelyn's Space

I am so happy it is a new year. I almost broke down in tears at midnight New Year’s Eve. I didn’t think me or my family would make it out of 2020 unscathed but we did, pretty much anyway. My dad had a stroke in December but luckily it was mild. He does have a carotid artery that is 100% blocked (right side) but I am hoping he will be alright with the proper care. He doesn’t have any damage from the stroke that I can tell, though his memory is getting a little bad but that was happening before the stroke. He still moves really well and seems to have his wits about him. He is changing his diet drastically and he quit smoking (so he says). I have hope for the best for him but I worry. I worry about my mother too. She had a stroke in 2019 and didn’t fair as well as my dad. She is home though, and gets around with a walker. She lives in a town so while I do worry about her, I don’t worry as much about her as I do my dad, who is alone in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of 20 acres.

SIGH

So I just found out my brother’s girlfriend is pregnant. Supposedly. TBH the ultrasound picture he posted looks like a puppy. What can I say?

SIGH

But we all survived COVID-19 thus far. My husband and I have received our first doses of the Moderna vaccine. No ill effects from it. We are on our way back to “normal” so to speak. I just feel for all the people that have died or lost family members to coronavirus. It could have been handled so much better. I have a co-worker fighting for his life in the hospital. I wonder, even if he beats it–and that is still and IF–even if he beats it, will he ever get back to normal?

SIGH

But thankfully, we are turning the corner. It’s a new year. We will soon have a new president. There is hope for the future yet.

I am so happy to report that Joe Biden won the election. We did indeed dump trump. It took some doing though. It is unbelievable, how many people still support trump. It depresses me actually. I try to look on the bright side. Biden got 78.6 million votes to trump’s 72.9 million. People came out in record numbers to vote. Well, many voted absentee ballot, voted by mail. Trump and his supporters are up in arms about that. They hate that so many people voted and they try to cast doubt on mail-in ballots. They are crying fraud but they are wrong. They are really just crying because their fuhrer lost. This election was the safest and most secure election in history. Lots of people voted absentee or by mail (not necessarily the same) due to the pandemic. Early voting was opened up because of it. Early voting as I did, and that was by absentee ballot but I actually went to the clerk’s office and filled it out and turned it in. Well, trumphumpers want all those thrown out. Trump refuses to concede the election and has his base all fired up. He has also filed a bunch of frivolous lawsuits in swing states but the lawsuits are going nowhere. Biden has won the election fair and square.

Personally, I am still uneasy. This country needs to heal but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Trump and trumpism has widened the divide and you really can’t talk sense to those that support him. They are, for the most part, ignorant and/or delusional, or worse, are willfully ignorant and just plain mean. They consistently vote against their own interests. Those are the delusional ones. Like the ones that are on government assistance or have relatives on assistance but vote for a candidate that wants to cut “entitlements” and programs that help the poor. They view education as a bad thing, something warded off with the cross and holy water. Those are the willfully ignorant. It is hard to explain, hard to detail. They don’t see the damage “conservative” policies have done to this country over the years. Just give them a tiny tax cut and their happy and cry independence. Cut a few regulations (never mind the future) and they claim manufacturing jobs are here and here to stay. They are blind to the fact that in recent years the Democratic presidents have actually cut deficits and grew the economies. Republican policies have only grown the deficits and hurt our economy. Perhaps not trump, his economy was moving along nicely before the pandemic but it wasn’t really his. It was still growth from the Obama years. Trump cut some regulations, sure, but I don’t know that helped the middle class or the poor. I think it just helped business owners and CEOs.

Trump made us look bad around the world, but his supporters don’t care. They think believe his rhetoric that his foreign policies were awesome. I’ve actually heard good and bad on it. Even if he had some successes, overall he has damaged our standing with our allies. Trump bungled the pandemic response–they don’t care about that either because they don’t believe the pandemic is real.

I was planning on getting up early and voting on Tuesday. I really wanted to feed my ballot into the machine and see it counted. Then I was listening to Barack Obama speak in Flint and he said you can vote today so I got all fired up about voting. Sure enough, my township clerks office was open for voting today. Cool! So me and my husband went down there. We voted. But we voted with an absentee ballot.

Ugh.

Now I am anxious my ballot won’t be counted. Really, there shouldn’t be a problem except that I was wondering about my signature. Does it have to be exactly the same as on my voter registration card that I haven’t seen in many, many years. I don’t have a set signature. Sometimes I use my middle initial, sometimes I don’t. Did I use it on my voter registration card? I don’t remember. I didn’t use it on my license. I know that. And the they saw my license at the clerk’s office. That really should be verification enough. Hopefully everything will be okay and my vote will be counted. I really wish I would have waited til Tuesday though. It’s good that it’s done, in case it’s really busy on Election Day. It’s just that I wanted to see it counted. I want to be 100% certain my ballot is accepted.

Biden 2020!!

Dump Trump

86451132020

It really has been a beautiful autumn. I wanted to write Beautiful Fall for the title but I thought it might set this post up for something deeper than it really is. I don’t have much to say right now, only the usual ranting, ha. I am too relaxed to start that up now anyway. Just wanted to check in to remark upon the autumn colors, fading faster now. I want to carry a camera with me when I work but I am afraid I might get distracted. For instance, I drove by Glenwood Cemetery in Flint today, a couple of times, and the trees are all orange, red and, gold. It was glowing. I wanted to pull my bus in there and snap some shots but alas, I was working. And I only had my phones with me, not my camera.

My husband and I did take a week off at the beginning of October and went up north. We went to my Dad’s house, then to our usual haunt, Mackinac Island for a few days, then back to my Dad’s. It was nice. The best part of Mackinac this time were the sunsets and the spa pool at our hotel. I would have like to have squeezed more into the trip but I was too tired and couldn’t get up and running. We saw lots of color going to and from my Dad’s to Mackinac. Colors weren’t quite at peak at my Dad’s nor on Mackinac. Colors were peaking around Mancelona, MI, Petoskey area, and Gaylord but we didn’t have time to stop. On the way back from the Island we went trough the Tunnel of Trees near Good Hart, north of Harbor Springs. There was barely any color through there but it was gorgeous in Harbor Springs. I would like to go up there again in the fall. Spend some time. Visit some wineries.

My Dad took us along the Manistee River and there we saw some color. It was peak in places, not so much in others. Hit and miss, but I did get some gorgeous pictures. I’ve yet to upload them though.

So we had a nice time, tried to relax, and of course a week is never long enough.

I did get some house cleaning done before we went, trimmed a couple of days of our 10 day vacation to do it. It was nice coming back to a sort of cleaned up place but we do nothing but mess it up again. And I’ve been too tired to care or do much since we’ve been back. I just want to chill so chilling is what I’ve been doing.

“Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.”

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

“I tell law students… if you are going to be a lawyer and just practice your profession, you have a skill—very much like a plumber. But if you want to be a true professional, you will do something outside yourself… something that makes life a little better for people less fortunate than you.”

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

How she would like to be remembered:

“Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.”

May her memory be a blessing.

So I have 2 new computers. I bought one last year (plus a 24 inch monitor) because my old was is, well, old, and full. I thought it would be good enough to game on to. It probably is good enough to game on but I was watching a Sims competition show, started feeling a huge urge to play The Sims 4 and then looked at the specs needed…I began to think the computer I bought wouldn’t be good enough so I bought another, low-end gaming computer. I just hooked both of these bad boys up. The gaming computer is hooked up to our old 32″ bedroom TV and it is awesome! I haven’t really done any gaming yet but I was looking at some of my old files that are on my MSN drive. Old documents from 8-10 years ago when I was doing a lot of writing for school.

That was a mistake.

I read an old letter or email I wrote to my husband’s ex-wife. It made me so mad that we had to put up with that cunt. It still does when I really think back to all that bitch put us through and all that she did to my stepson. Okay. I moved on.

Then I found a piece I had written about my niece that died. Heartbreaking. It still hurts, to look back at that time. I cannot believe all the shit I’ve been through, all the shit that happened then and since.

I found another set of writings having to do with my life as a stepmother…truth be told, it was more writing to the ex-wife. Being a stepmom wasn’t bad–dealing with her, or supporting my husband while he had to deal with her was the worst. But all that pales in comparison to the heartbreak of losing my niece and all that came after. It is just the fact that I’ve been through some shit for so long. So long!

And now it is calmer, at least in my personal life. The world outside is on fire, literally and figuratively. And I must engage with it…because that’s how I am. I must get caught up in it when all I really want is some peace. But then I go back to all the old hurts. I just need to write something about them, do something with the material, the old hurts, and then put it to bed. I don’t know what the hell to do about the state of the world today. I wanna write more productively about that too…but the energy isn’t there. And even if I write about it, nothing ever changes. There is no justice in this world. For all the bad that is done, there is no real retribution.

I should just lose myself in The Sims and call it good.