But with the inauguration of DT's second term,
this year was not a year for that,
so I'll start with . . . my favorite image of 2025:
Strategic Silliness
BELOW
Left: "Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are." --Accidental Czar: Vladimir Putin, by Andrew S. Weiss
and, Right >
My print "No tengas miedo/Don't be afraid" on Denise's door
_________________
Summer Doll Camp involved stick-raft and God's Eye making
And––Toys Recreate Paintings
The Raft of the Medusa, by Théodore Géricault
("It's just pretend."--Penny Cooper)
And on we go, into the NEW YEAR...
Chazak ve'ematz/ Be strong and of good courage!
_____________________
Previous Year-End Reviews (2013–)
"Shortest jury duty ever," the jury den-mother manager announced yesterday, as she told us we could leave the jury-pool waiting room-- and never return.
We'd been told we'd be in the pool for two weeks--
(waiting to be pulled to serve in courtroom trials)--
and we'd only been there 3 hours!
Because it was the week of New Year's, however, no cases were going to trial. Either the litigants had all settled (we'd been told this might happen) or the judges had cleared their slates.
At first I was elated. FREE, free!
I''d cleared my week, so I could choose to take an unpaid holiday, or not.
And then I was bummed:
I'd kind of wanted to experience a trial and be helpful to our justice system, which is heroically holding out against DT.
And then I was relieved:
what'd really worried me––besides having to listen to gruesome testimony, if I'd been put on a criminal case––was having to come to a decision with eleven other people.
I expect I would not have enjoyed my internal reaction (seething silently) to the group process.
So, all told, it's probably for the best.
I showed willing to serve (helpful in itself), and then didn't have to.
Girlette Frankcolumbo will be awarded a Good Citizenship Badge and it has been determined (by the ‘doll pool’) that I will be too. (I must construct these.)
I am taking today off.
I feel low, though. . . Post-holiday slump and the deflation after plans fall through (even if that's welcome).
I want to go lie on the ground at the lake and recharge, but it's cold (10ºF / –12º C) and it's snowing lightly. It's pretty, anyway. I will put on my snow pants and go for a walk.
Or go back to bed?
________
UPDATE: I put on Queen's Greatest Hits and that perked me up.
Rock n roll, everyone!
I’m starting jury duty this morning.
Frankcolumbo came along for her Good Citizenship Badge.
Below: “We are very high up!” 24th floor
No doll may be seated on a jury though. And no knitting needles allowed. (For safety. 🙄 I do see that they are pointed objects, but so are pens.)
I happened to have some sticks in my bag though, and of course they didn’t set off the scanner, so if I’m here tomorrow, I’ll bring yarn and make God’s eyes.
I’m happy (“happy”) to support the justice system. I do kinda hope I’m dismissed before my full two weeks, but at least there are windows.
bink gave The Best Answer this morning at coffee to the question,
Why would you––as a soul in the astral plane––possibly
have chosen to incarnate here, in this time and place on Earth?
She thought a minute. Then she said,
"I wanted to win the Participation Prize."
I love that so much!
"I showed up, AND I played the game...
even though the rules in the rule book were totally confusing,
and half the pages were ripped out."
I told bink she should design a Participation Prize cup.
She said she would consider that.
"The cups should be made out of tin cans," she said.
God, yes.
> > > Have you an answer, dear Reader?
Saturday round-up
1. Early morning coffee with Chomm, an old friend from church days. We talked about the new year...
"2026 is probably going to be hard, but if you only have hope when things are easy and going well, that's not hope."
______________________________2. Work was good. I set up new end-cap displays, replacing Christmas stuff--glad to see it gone, after two full months.
I like being out on the floor (instead of in the back, sorting and pricing, about 75% of my time). The shelves always need organizing and sprucing up, and most volunteers are, surprisingly to me, not very good at it. There's always a lot to do--and I do enjoy the design work.
BELOW: These 'magic' books sold right away, $3.99 each.
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BELOW:
Pottery mugs from the Renaissance Festival
A collection of beautiful wood walking sticks
Bouquet of 1970s rubber-plastic mushrooms, grapes, & peanuts (!)
Isn't it funny how our incarnations shape our reality?
Our outer selves might not match our inner selves very much--or at all, and we have to deal with that, however we do that (or try not to).
After work, I really wanted to go out for a beer, but I'm practicing not drinking alcohol. When I stopped eating added sugar, beer became a somtimes-replacement treat.
And this holiday, sometimes too often.
So, (same as when I stopped eating added sugar), I told myself I could have anything else instead.
I went to the laundromat burger joint and got fries. (Salty-fat treats are weirdly not a big problem for me--I didn't even finish them all.)
Do you see what I saw?
42! My ticket number, and the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Hitchhiker's Guide, ya know.) My fries came with a MESSAGE FROM THE UNIVERSE!
The absurdity made me laugh, and that set me to rights––even more than the fries did.
4. Thought Experiment:
Why Would You Have Chosen This Life?
Sticker on a trash can near my workplace:
HAIL MARY full of Grace
KICK I.C.E. out of This Place
Mary stands on a snake labeled ICE--traditional iconography, based on God telling the serpent in Genesis that the seed of Eve "shall crush thy head".
This sticker reminds me, I haven't yet put up my "lets hold hands" prints. Largely because the weather has been damp,
and they are paper.
I do continue to put up God's eyes, and they continue to be taken at a slow rate, so the fence is still ringed with these bits of brightness. And the wool yarn and natural sticks weather very well!
(I'd run low on sticks, but I found a lot when I went to the lake for the Marching Parade.)
I hung these on the fence yesterday.
The Marching Band Parade
Waiting around to line up...
On the move.
Human fingers are the limiting factor in Winter
Photography.
I'd wanted to do more parade set-ups, but my fingers got too cold.
I'm glad I only had a short walk home to warm up.
Sending out bounteous love to you all this Christmas morning, Precious Spirits!
bink made amazing presents to give at Christmas Eve dinner last night: Glass-mosaic bottles of light.
"Herod the Great was known for two things:
First, his brutality. (He even executed several members of his own family, including his wife.)
Second, his ambitious building projects, including rebuilding and expanding the massive Jerusalem Temple. This is the basis for his being called “great.
-- via
___________
Sister sent me this passage from a book of writings by the physicist Richard Feynman that I'd given her for Christmas.
He says, to begin to truly understand Nature, we must "look at the thing".
1. Assembling the Marching Band.
They are going to parade on the Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi River tomorrow, Christmas Day!
I am making sure their instruments & SHOES are firmly attached, because it might be windy out. For the first time ever, besides tiny rubber bands I am using a touch of Elmer's glue for security.
It will be a big production:
only about a third of the band members have assembled so far:
To amazing friend, a Trekkie true and kind,
With hope for all and others on your mind
May Christmas light your course through space and time
Live long, prosper, and may your stars align!
I got kinda choked up about this.
As I just was saying, city life (or any life) can be wearying and ugly. Darwi's poem calls up the BEST PART of me that is a Trekkie.
Star Trek always posited that Earth went [will go] through a near-apocalyptic war (wearying and ugly) before we get to the other side, where Kirk and Spock and Picard, et al. live--a world (if not a universe) of peace and cooperation.
We may not see the other side,
we are only called upon to keep the faith.
This cheers me up. Just...
March on!
Hold on! Maybe use some glue.
Knitted feather collars, by Alice Starmore of Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. alicestarmore.com/textile-art/feathers-layers
I laughed to see the site "IsMercuryInRetrograde.com" also works as "isMercuryRetrograde.com"
(no "in").
ANYWAY... No, Mercury is not retrograde. But I've sure had some communication cock-ups recently.
1. I had to reformulate and reorder my 2026 calendars because, weirdly, somehow I'd put them together with last year's format, so the dates were all for 2025. Though it was my fault, the company MIXBOOK.com reprinted them at 75% off--and reimbursed my shipping costs.
Mixbook has always delivered good customer service.
And their reps are friendliest!
It only occurred to me this year that they are AI --
I recognized their unflappable friendliness when I talked to ChatGPT.
[Update--I actually asked the guy--he says he is a real human!
And I believe him because he didn't reply to the email I wrote Friday night until Monday morning--AI would have replied in seconds.]
Oh--here's a communication gone right:
my efforts to talk to my sister as if I were a friendly AI works,
and, in the way of human psychology, it works ON ME too.
I look for something good I can say--(it has to be a true thing)--and amplify that--
and not only is it received well (OF COURSE), I feel better too.
Sigh.
Do you ever resent how . . . programmable we are?
The good side of that is you can use that to help yourself--
like me finagling the bad feelings I had texting sister.
A favorite fact: Placebos work . . . even if you know they're placebos.
So, we can create our own, for our own benefit.
________________
2. Then I've had THREE miscommunications with county services.
I expect that's the fault of the County and/or the PO.
I have to re-connect with them.
Not a big deal, in theory, but this--communicating with agencies--is the sort of thing I have a neurotic fear of.
"Neurotic", I say, because it's usually easily resolved.
But it can be unpleasant if the person on the other end is stressed.
I actually welcome AI assistants because they are never stressed, being MACHINES, and so they are pleasant to deal with.
Humans are not machines.
We should never have set up a civilization where 'Customer Service Representative' is a job.
We have royally fucked ourselves there.
I felt a piercing pain looking at pictures from knitting/textile artist Alice Starmore on the Isle of Lewis (Outer Hebrides, Scotland). (I was looking at the Isle of Lewis because GZ had directed me to dollhouse and textile artist Tom Hickman there).
One of Starmore's Hebridean Yarns:
I didn't tidy up much for the Solstice tea party yesterday--
cutting the fire-fighter drop-hole in the dollhouse took too much time.
I decided:
This is it. I am going to STOP trying to reestablish order before people come over, even Official Guests.
Why bother?
Having yarn and toys and art-making supplies and books scattered all over is not a bad thing.
In fact, it's a good thing to me: I love being around other people's doodads and projects.
As long I clear places to walk, sit, and set down tea cups, that's good enough.
I've carried the ghost of my mother trying to please her mother:
My mother used to set me to helping her clean our house when my persnickity grandmother came to visit--down to washing the baseboards along the wall.
It never worked:
My mother never felt secure in her mother's approval, or love.
For all the ways her life frayed at the ends, I always felt loved by my mother.
I've got plenty of insecurities, but I've got that, like a pearl from a fairy tale.
Use it, Fresca!
And my room looked so fun yesterday, actually. (My mother would love it.)
bink said the Playground Dollhouse fits right in, and it does:
III. "The Turn"
My coworker Totter is facing an awkward turn in her life,
like the famous corner in the Rose Bowl Parade,
where marching bands have to execute a tight right-hand turn.
As Totter and I drove the dollhouse to my place,
we talked about our worries for the future.
All legitimate, very real pitfalls--finances, health––all certain to fail in various ways.
And I heard myself say to her,
"I am going to trust that good things will happen."
She was silent, and I felt this statement hanging in the air like a fart.
What a foolish Pollyanna thing to say! I thought.
It's been bothering me that I said that, so baldly.
My mother raised me on tales of the Holocaust.
It was her model of human psychology:
You are a villain, or you are innocent.
(A perspective very much in vogue right now.)
It's untrue, but anyway, believe me...
I KNOW bad things happen.
I have seen us, my species, do bad things up close and personal (and not forgetting nature).
I do bad things.
ENTROPY WINS.
And yet, I am standing by this:
Good things have happened, do happen, and will happen.
And maybe the best Good Thing is that I (we) will be able handle Bad Things,
in whatever way suits us best.
Bands take "The Turn" at the Rose Bowl Parade in many ways.
Here (1 minute), below, Stanford band members run around the corner––
a fun and funny mad scramble:
