Sunday==break time.
The other night I made the best tacos. They were Taco Salad Tacos. What made them worthy of the name?
Nowadays I often"fry" tortillas in the oven. So when I was making this dish, I sprayed a large cookie sheet and put in three corn tortillas (they can over lap, it doesn't matter) and cooked them a time until they were a little crisp around the edges. Then I folded two of them and kept the one flat. After the taco meat was prepared, I made the tacos in this order. Lay a tortilla on a plate, add cut up lettuce, tomato, onion and add a little salad dressing of your choice...add the meat, add half the third taco broken up, add hot sauce, add cheese, add sour cream if you like. (I like but I always forget it nice though it is.) Do it again with the other taco. What makes these tacos pleasant is the little broken up pieces of lightly 'fried' tortilla, than which there is no pleasanter substance.
Polenta Cornmeal came about because I was trying to buy Italian yellow cornmeal as it is not Genetically Modified. *
I could only find quick-cook polenta, so today I made a little bowl of polenta, salt, soda, lemon juice and milk, mixed it all up and baked it at 400 degrees on a well buttered cooky sheet. It came out thin, round and brown around the edges like a giant sugar cooky. I cut it in eighths. It was too salty, one, and it was a little grainy, two. Which means that cornbread needs that wheat flour that's in it in order to smooth out the results. However, it is edible and I am having some for my lunch with the gravy from the Meals on Wheels dinner. And I didnt want to put in any wheat.
* Genetically Modified in this instance probably means that the corn genes were melded with the genes of a poison that will kill the insects that eat the corn. Think about that. It is not supposed to hurt us folks, but here is how it kills the corn insects: it blows out their little insides.
Recently you may have read of Leaky Gut Syndrome. This is what it is. Those little teeny genes of GM corn/ insecticide are supposed to blow out little teeny holes in our intestines, allowing food to leak out and causing all kinds of heck in our body cavities. I don't know; I'm just sayin'. I look for foreign corn meal with no GM attributes.
Today in church, wardrobe attributes were confused. I myself started the morning in a light crepe shirt, which I returned to sender and preplaced with a tee and a warm jacket before leaving the house. A few wore the pale and jaunty remnants of midsummer (and looked cold), and a few had gone back to suits and ties or a combination of summer/fall that just didn't look right. It's warm out now, but it wasn't at seven, plus it was dark dark dark. The sun has now come out; a stew is simmering in the slow cooker I purchased at the Home Avenue Goodwill on the way home after church, and all is well here on Fairway Court, thanks be to God. YAZZYBEL
Good evening. Here I am writing about the Aurora shooting again.
I have heard some news items about the psychiatrist of the person whom I call "the shooter."
She is a person of position in the faculty of the Medical School, and has the responsibility of treating 12-20 students in the Medical School who were in need of psychotropic medication. What did students do, and how did they get through med school, before there were psychotropic medications to carry them along?
I'm sorry. I am a veteran /survivor of the psychiatric practice in the United States. I never have had to be treated, thank God, but my son did. I know but too well how medications are routinely prescribed for these unhappy youths, and what the awful results can be.
I think the psychiatrist and the Medical School of the State of Colorado should have to give long and explicit explanations as to what went on with the young man who killed twelve and wounded many others, garbed in garish clothing and apparently in a state approaching zombie-ism, emotionless and cunning. He spent quite a bit of time rigging up his apartment too, with explosive devices in order to harm the first responders who went in. These processes, setting up the killings, and setting up his apartments, for death-dealing, can't have been accomplished in a short time. What was his psychiatrist hearing? What was she thinking? How much did she perceive of his deep distress and the awful turnabout of his mind that put him on the path to horrible death?
We can't know yet. Perhaps she will gain some insight into her oversight. I am sure she is crying and distressed deeply now. It's terrible to have to stand in the aftermath of tragedy.
More of my thoughts about psychiatric medicating as they come up. And perhaps then, I'll shut up and go back to tacos which is what I was going to write about yesterday. YAZZYBEL
Well, the people of Aurora, CO, are carrying on with the help of the television industry. It is almost too awful to watch, all the grief and misery, and all the focus on the terrible incident---the argument about firearms and the Second Amendment--what the President said and what the Nominee said.
Here's what I have further found out about the shooter. He wrote a book or comic sketch of stick figures being shot by somebody. This is called "telegraphing," calling attention to one's plans before they come off. Does the shooter want someone to stop him, or is he daring people to figure him out before he does something terrible? In this case, since the writings apparently were not opened or paid attention to before the fact, it is all a guess. The ploy was a dud.
Some psychiatrists in his graduate program have made pronouncements, mainly, from what I have grasped, "I knew nothing. I know nothing." Doesnt anyone who worked in his immediate vicinity have any clue as to what he was really like, what he was thinking about anything? We won't know until the dust has settled and the complete story has been written, which brings us to a situation that has eerie recollections of another recent story: the Penn State coverup of a hideous reality in its midst. It is very likely that the 'truth' will never be made public, as to who knew whom or what, unless one fluke comes out of the dark with some claim on the public attention, which doesn't seem likely if this guy was as withdrawn and solitary as he appears to be. His parents are laying low; apparently they are 'cooperating' with authorities, but if they are saying anything valuable it is not for public ears, yet.
It is possible for a young guy to be solitary and withdrawn, and still be a normal person? Yes, but I am sorry to tell you that it is normal for a human being to have deeply dark impulses and thoughts. What makes them worth acting out is the question.
That is all I have to say about Aurora at this point.
We know nothing except for the grief of the American children, young and old, who were present at that debacle or who suffered terrible losses because of it. Perhaps I'll be moved to write more about it later. I have nothing new to say, I know. Maybe about the medications...YAZZYBEL
Good morning. I am just back from church and must be about my business of amalgating all the different thoughts, images, and plots from Absolom! Absolom! before tomorrow night at the book club.
So this is not the best time to organize my thoughts about the shooter in Aurora, CO, as they are just about comparable to the thoughts in Absolom!Absolom! However, I will try to start, and continue on in the days following if possible.
In the nutty night time, I heard a theory that this shooting might be
(1) all part of a master conspiracy where these shooters are all trained and set up by the government
(2) all part of a master conspiracy where these shooters are all trained and set up by the one-world organizers
with the idea that both groups, USA government or world government, are trying to destroy us.
Let's leave conjecture aside and tell what we know at this point. He was brilliant. He had 100 cc. (or whatever unit is used ) of vicodin in his blood when it was taken and anylyzed. (One of the commentators said that that amount would put him out of business: that it is a huge amount to have taken). He was a neuroscientist who was engaged in research to what aim I am not absolutely sure. He was a loner. He had no friends or associates. He had recently separated or been separated from his education program. He had recently purchased from the internet and had sent to him at home or work about 30 thousand dollars' worth of arms or ammunition. He had wired his apartment in a fiendishly (prejudicial word) intelligent way so as to kill the first responders who presumably would break in. Today is another day, and I am sure new disclosures await me on the TV as I drink something cold and prepare slowly to settle down with Wm. Faulkner.
He had parents, and they were not poor. He grew up apparently in ill-fated Poway, a beautiful little community with a lure for tragedy. (A SD suburb.)
I am thinking of those poor parents, who in this light certainly are poor, the poorest of the poor. If they have the intelligence of their son, they have long awaited a day like this, having with all their intelligence and resources absolutely no way to do anything about a possibility they await with cold fear.
So, this is all I will say today, and I will indeed have to expound further, perhaps Tuesday. But for today let it be said.
I kept hearing about the precise organization and coordination of the responder teams in Aurora which did indeed make an amazingly competent and heroic showing after the fact. My question is this: WHERE are the precisely organized and coordinated teams of doctors, caregivers, neighbors, friends or lack thereof, employers, educators, whom we need to start working at saving some of these desperately ill young men (mostly) before they ruin their lives and the lives of others?
It's a mind-boggling subject, though, isn't it? But as I looked at the wacko face of the shooter as first projected on the screen, and then the touching portraits of the very young student with big hopeful eyes, it makes me sad and it makes me mad. What happened in those years between? Why didnt someone care enough to step in and invite the guy to a chicken dinner or a game of golf? Why did the people to whom he consistently refused all social contact assuming they asked and he did--why did they not have some way to alert (who?) as to what might be going on inside that head, not to say that apartment? Oh, it's too confusing. I am going back to Absolom! Absolom! in desperation. YAZZYBEL
I grew up in a culture that never thought twice about one's right to bear arms. Of course, it was mostly men's right to bear arms as opposed to women's, but women had the right too and the right to learn the skill of handling a gun. When I went to camp I learned to handle a small rifle and was danged good at it. I still have my little badge from the NRA.
Arms are out there. We should not be a nation of sheep who don't know the first thing about a gun. If we are, we stand completely vulnerable to the multitudes of knowledgeable bad guys who are capable.
That is not the statement of a kind hearted liberal, nor of a good Christian. Who said that? A person who feels that we live in a treacherous world where nobody is looking after us, where nobody can look after all of us all the time no matter how high their intentions. Therefore, we must deal with the matter of armaments like we do with many other things. We acknowledge the truth as clearly as we can see it. And we act. Or, as now, we worry.
There is something wrong in our country when a ton of weaponry, ammunition, guns, automatic assault weapons can be bought by any one person over the internet and in stores, over a short period of time.
At least we know there's no truth to the rumor that our every move is being monitored by the powers that be, because nobody knew that a sick young man was purchasing all this stuff for some awful reason. We'll deal more about the sick young man that did the buying, tomorrow. Today, let's stick to guns.
Should we all be carryin'? Looking at the facts, guess so. However, look at George Zimmerman who was a good guy in his own books and who had the legal right to bear the armament he had, and the legal right to use it. He tragically, mostly for himself after the young dead guy, made a mistake in the name of justice or self-salvation or whatever, and popped that young kid in one unthought moment. Or thought moment.
Think of it, if we're all carryin'....think of the rain of bullets that would have ensued on top of the rain of bullets that Mr. Holmes sent off. Ditto, the same in Arizona when the young man shot so many people at the political meeting at the supermarket. Odd, when you think of it, that nobody in that crowd was carryin', Arizona being what it is. But suppose ten of them had been armed and disposed to take down the shooter. A maelstrom. Maybe somebody would have dropped him right off, maybe not. If nobody's sure who's who, and who's shooting, what's to stop one gun-bearer from shooting another gun-bearer in the heat of the moment, even if they're both dedicated to eliminating a crisis situation?
No, I don't think universal carrying of weapons is the answer, but universal proscribing of them is not an answer either. I don't know the answer. What is the answer? YAZZYBEL
Hi, I have little to say today.
I feel so sorry about the tragedy unfolded today in Aurora, CO, where a young gunman let loose a volley of death and destruction upon a theater full of hapless people, mostly young people probably, who were there to watch a movie.
I am horrified to hear that the youngest wounded person is a baby of three or four months. Who would take a baby to a midnight showing of a loud, violent movie? The same persons who would, if they hadn't taken him, leave him home alone in his crib while they reveled in horrifics at the show.
Some young person today said that he saw a family with several young children cowering in the theater. Why were they out there anyway? Why would anyone take children to such a film, and in the middle of the night?
Yes, I know--I have gone off on a tangent of the plot as I often do. But the whole scenario, and we haven't even gotten to the tragedy of the loco shooter, is just too typical of the nut-scape of today's America for me.
I know that the young man is psychologically unhealthy. Apparently he was going for a doctorate at a university but had been deflected from his purpose. I guess we will hear how, if not why, these steps in the grim plot evolved, over the next few weeks. And then we will forget about it and throw another few boxes of cheese balls to the kids and tell them to shut up and get in the car, we are going to the show.
Something is really wrong with our whole system when forty and fifty year old persons never live at a level over junior high school, in their minds, their aspirations, their ideals. Grow up, America--but how are you going to do that, when nothing in your life has prepared you for what you have become?
YAZZYBEL
Good day. I have been readin' and studyin' on Absolom!Absolom! by Wm Faulker all day, so my mind is running in apocalyptic circles. (Book club coming up, you know.)
A friend of mine the other day said she'd sampled my blog but in a nutshell had found it too full of day to day trivialities. Well, sorry, but my life is full of day to day trivialities, and I should blush to say it perhaps, but I like it.
But sometimes a larger theme looms up, and that is what I am coming to yesterday and today.
Let me begin by saying that I am a Democrat by registration, and by persuasion (my husband persuaded me,lol) . No, I see much of life through the lens of Liberalism and cannot see anyway to look at human kinds of subjects.
However, though I did vote for Barack Obama last time, and cried with emotion when he won (thinking that it meant something in the turbulent history of this nation), I am profoundly disappointed in his conduct of the office ever since he took over, put in Rahm Emmanuel as busybody in chief, and put in Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geitner to further bring our financial fortunes to their knees. Obamacare (I dare to say it) has been the crowning blow, and I did hear with my own two ears when Nancy Pelosi say with charming careless ease, "We'll just have to pass it to know what's in it." What fatuousness.
Let's get it straight. I am not against Socialized Medicine, horrible though it may be. I am not against over-taxing the rich. I am against blowing away the post office and the public schools; I am for improving them and making them work.
But I am not happy with the President. If he has just been sparing us from the horrible economic axe that is bound to fall, he has done wrong. We should have been trying to bear it rather than passing it on to our children. I feel that if there's been a mistake in the books, it's best cleared up as soon as possible. The President has either colluded with the "Real" Powers that be in our world, or he is an innocent nitwit as the Republicans say. And don't even get me started on the subject of the derned Illegal Aliens. (That's a Texan speaking.)
Mitt Romney cannot win the office of President. I cannot believe he has a snowball's chance in heck of winning. What do people think they are seeing in him that I'm missing? And believe me, I'm looking. I see a mist, a vapor, a smoke and mirrors that isnt even very entertaining.
I suggested Jeb Bush because he is, I've been convinced since early spring and the scarecrow parade of GOP candidates occupied our screens, the only person who can pull a Republican presidency out of the void. I do not like Jeb Bush. I don't like any Bushes. I will not vote for him, but lots and lots of others will. And he will win.
I don't care any more. If he gets in, we will see a fascist government beyond any imagining we've had so far. The schools and the post office will go down the drain. Rummy and Cheney will be clowns compared to their next counterparts. But I am so disillusioned as to the quality of (pick one) citizenship, leadership, education, awareness, intelligence, character that we see about us from high to low that I am beginning to think that it might be what our country needs: is asking for, in fact.
I don't want to go to the old folks' concentration camp. It won't be fair. But something has to be done with intelligence and zeal pretty soon--or there won't even be old folks' concentration camps or any other kind: it will be just death and destruction on all sides. Sounds pretty grim? That is the way I think when I am not thinking about cooking, books, music, little birds twittering in the trees, and family stuff.
SO, if the Republicans want to win in November, they will proceed ASAP with the idea I expounded on yesterday. If they do not want to win, they will continue with the status quo and we will know that they really didn't want to make things different, after all. YAZZYBEL
Good day.
It's time for me to make the prediction that's been brewing in my cerebrum (if that's where predictions are brewed) ever since early spring.
Here it is.
(Drumroll)
At or slightly before the Tampa GOP Convention, Mitt Romney is going to discover himself unable to run for the presidency as the Republican canditate, whether because he got pushed off by his party, who surely can't like waffling any better than the rest of us, or because he discovers a family or personal emergency that precludes his serving his country in a public capacity.
To save the day, JEB BUSH is going to step up. He will be nominated, and will accept the nomination.
And, P.S., JEB BUSH will win the election.
YAZZYBEL, Seeress
Good afternoon.
My mother had the great gift of her Scotch-Irish ancestry: she was a great storyteller, one of a huge long line of loquacious folk who could hold you spellbound while she talked away.
On a visit to her in the late part of life, before she became ill with cancer, she delighted me once, saying, "Linda," (she said that with a beautiful Texas music that held me in my tracks) "Come over here and bring up a chair and I'll tell you a story." What pleasure.
That story as with most of her later life recountings was pure gossip, but she invested her tellings with imaginary detail that convinced any listener...until you realize that she was repeating a conversation between husband and wife that took place a mile from her house at two o'clock in the morning, "And then he said, and then she said back.....," well, she had a gift.
She also had a gift for larger prophecy that came to her from an irrefutable source deep inside her. She had not had the education nor the experience to know the great implications of world affairs, but she did. In the midst of World War II, she was able to say with great conviction that the big enemy of the United States in the "future" would be China, not Japan. She said that China and Russia together would create great peril for the United States. Who's to say she was wrong, here in 2012?
She looked upon the relationship between Mexico and the USA with a jaundiced eye, and had no faith in any of it. She's the person who told me that when the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, determining the boundary between the two countries, the Mexicans wanted it to be the Nueces River, not the Rio Bravo del Norte otherwise known as the Rio Grande. She said, as Mexicans began pushing into southern Texas thirty years ago, that they would not be happy until they had taken over that huge land between the two nations and made it Mexico Who can say she was wrong? Of course, it's turned out that they could not be happy until they took over the whole United States, but that was so preposterous that nobody could have thought the way things have evolved.
I have been watching, belatedly, the TV series Lonesome Dove, from stories of Larry McMurtry. It makes me homesick. I too feel far from home sometimes. I am a Lonesome Dove for wild, terrible Texas, sometimes. Real lonesome for it. YAZZYBEL
I have a bathroom with two classes of towels in it: MY towels and GUEST towels. These two classes of towels are not to be confused, in my mind, even though they must share a small bathroom.
I have a lot of really purty little real linen guest towels. They are so lovely. For a while I thought that people didn't use them because they were so pretty and perfect that people didn't want to spoil their looks.
WRONG! I have switched, lo these two or three years, so a beautiful package of printed paper hand towels. They are a beautiful peach color and have an antique print on them of a lovely plant with reddish flowers and plenty of green leaves and twining stems. NICE. So why won't guests use them? I know you don't, gals, because I check every time.
You see, women DO wash their hands after using the bathroom. And they do dry them as best they can, for I have observed this in countless public restrooms on countless automobile trips. Usually, now, it's a ghastly blower, but often it is a paper towel and I know they are used because they are sometimes ankle deep on the floor. (This is the American Southwest, after all.)
So what do people in my bathroom use if they won't use my pretty, cheap (Walmart) disposable and therefore e-coli-free paper towels? They use MY towels. They must surreptitiously dry those damp fingertips on my personal towel; they creep back and find a corner that they think must be clean enough for them to use, and they use it.
All I ask is this: WHY? I am here to make a public announcement: Friends, I can afford a package of Walmart pretty fingertip guest towels more often than every two years! Please help me to use up my guest towels! Please!!!
YAZZYBEL the GROUCHY
goo
Good morning.
We had guests yesterday, friends of my son Benjamin who's here visiting us from Concord. His friends drove down from Orange County and brought their little girl aged three and a half.
What a lovely little creature is she! We last saw her when she was a baby and now she is very much an autonymous person with her own opinions and tastes. She was dressed in an outfit of her own choosing, a really cute flowered sundress, with tasteful additions of Hello Kitty headband, necklace and shoes.
Since I love Hello Kitty I could only admire her choices. And look on in amazement at her beauty, energy, talent, and administrative ability as she ran the afternoon's activities. She was just wonderful. YAZZYBEL
Ben came last weekend and he got a lot of things done for us. It's terrible to have to count a visit by a son as simply productive on the physical plane. But it was nice, heart-wise, as well. It was good to see him and have him here.
He climbed ladders and put in light bulbs. Some were in the house but the big thing is that he bought and installed a lighting system outside the back door to scare away the burglars. He also scoured the house for my missing car keys and my missing credit card. No success there. Something else was also missing--oh yes, checks. I ran out of checks. The checks were ordered but still have not come. The credit card was replaced but I have not remembered to tell my creditors, lol. Better get to it. And the car keys are lost lost lost and will be replaced at a cost we don't want to entertain. You know, they have all those electronic things on them.
Ben left on Tuesday, the 3rd, to return to his Concord home. On the 4th, we received the news that my brother in law no. 2 had passed away in Texas....This is big news in my family because he is the first person of our generation to go on to the big rancho in the sky. Only he went to the big golf course in the sky, no doubt.
I received a message the next day (in that state between sleep and wakefulness) from him, saying that he was still around, going over the details of his life and leaving a message for his wife about how much he appreciated her as he went day by day through the days of their life together. They had sixty three years-worth of days together and she cooked up a storm on all of them until the last two months when he was in a nursing home. He lived the life of a king (because she is a queen) and he is now marveling at the daily life she made for him.
He plans to be present at his memorial this Thursday, but is moving away as the days go by. He was a remarkable person and will always be remembered by hundreds of people who knew him. All the sisters and their families will be there but me and no. 4 and I still think she may show up at the last minute...she lives far away, too. YAZZYBEL
