halfway there

I’m hard-pressed to find anything encouraging in the news of late. Trump’s saber-rattling about Greenland is frightening even as it exposes his minimal grasp of history. He claims that there are no documents to substantiate the island nation’s “right of ownership”, despite an easily-accessed 1916 letter from the U.S. Secretary of State acknowledging just that. He further contends that the U.S. has a legitimate claim on Greenland because Americans landed boats there “hundreds of years ago”. Problem is, the Norse Viking Eric the Red sailed there in the late 10th Century.

Aging Orange’s fuzzy (nay, furry) math surfaces yet again, although this instance isn’t as far off base as his claims that he will lower drug prescription prices by 600 percent. If so, the government would pay someone $500 to take a $100 script. Did Trump’s family have to pay as much for his Wharton business degree as it did for his bone spurs?

With the pro and college football seasons nearly done, I have to look elsewhere to soothe my restless soul. That’s not easy in mid-winter, so I’m celebrating that very fact: it’s mid-winter. We’re halfway through the cold stuff. And it’s a milder than usual one, at that. We’ve had a lot of rain but very little snow. Although we’ve been just a few degrees on one side or the other of freezing the last few days, it’s been much warmer than usual the past seven weeks. We’ve even reached 10 degrees (50 F.) a few times.

So I’m going to go honour this auspicious occasion with a cup of hot tea down by the woodstove near my sweetie Jude and flanked by our dogs. Your thoughts and prayers, please, to the brave protestors in Minneapolis. Things could really start hopping south of the 49th come spring.