In beautiful downtown Goliad, Texas – on Courthouse Square, where Santa arrives promptly at 12:00 … mounted on a longhorn… accompanied by another longhorn – a spare mount, obviously. It’s a long way from the North Pole.
Sgt. Mom
State of the Disunion
Here we are, in the first week of the last month of 2014, and by way of good cheer, I can say that things haven’t descended quite so far into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse territory pestilence, war, famine and death as I had feared some two or three months ago, when Ebola was all the rage in news. People are still falling sick to it, of course, but curious that such news is no longer in the News, capital-N News, run by the professional news-gatherers, whose motto and mission does seem to be comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. Funny old world, that.
Still, certain elements of the current scene do give cause for alarm. Not new alarm, but just the same old abiding fears which spurred me to begin writing books to persuade readers of the virtue of the grand American experiment and to refit the kitchen pantry closet to allow storage of mass quantities of staple foods. At the age of 60-something, I appear to be turning into my grandmothers, one of whom conserved a box of Ben Hur brand cayenne pepper over several decades until it was nothing more than some rusty-red dust, and the other of whom had a two-year supply of on-sale-purchased canned food stashed in the garage. I am trying to advance on my grandmothers’ example, though since I have a vacuum-sealer and freezer. I do wish that I had somehow managed to get ahold of the ancestral can of cayenne pepper; it’s probably valuable now as an antique for the container, if not the rust-red pepper dust therein. Enough for pestilence and famine what about those oldie-but-goodie standbys, War and Death?
Sgt. Mom’s Thanksgiving Bird
Fresh out of the oven – right alongside the other dishes for the feast! Behold, Sgt. Mom’s Thanksgiving bird!
It is, in fact a Rock Cornish game hen, butterflied and baked on a small dish of Sgt. Mom’s rye bread and sausage stuffing. Not everything in Texas is bigger…
What – there are only the two of us, and the HEB was out of fresh turkey breasts. I am sorry, but a whole turkey for two people would have us eating leftovers until St. Patrick’s Day.
A most blessed Thanksgiving to you all – especially to those of us who were working today…
Autumn Tree
Feminists – Doing It Wrong
I have to say this about the sh*tstorm over what is being irreverently termed shirtgate it’s the final and ultimate straw in moving me away from ever calling myself a feminist again … at least, not in mixed company. Ah, well a pity that the term has been so debased in the last few decades. Much as the memory of very real repression and denial of rights in the persons-of-color/African-American/Black community has been diminished, overlaid, generally abused and waved like a bloody shirt by cynical operators (to the detriment of the real-life community of color/African-American/Black-whatever they wish to be called this decade), so has the very real struggle for substantive legal, economic, economic and social rights for women also been debased and trivialized. Just as the current so-called champions of civil rights seem to use the concept as an all-purpose cover for deflecting any useful discussion of the impact of welfare, the trivialization of marriage, and glorification of the thug-life-style in the persons-of-color/African-American/Black community, the professional and very loud capital F-feminists seem to prefer a theatrical gesture over any substantial discussion of the real needs and concerns and even the careers of ordinary women. Women whom it must be said, are usually capable, confident, tough, and love the men in their lives fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.