Category: General

Whoah, said my brain as I spotted the bright red moving truck on the street while I came down the stairs. Someone must be moving out.

Yes, confirmed my neighbor next door: it’s the pink house further down.
They have lived there for 30 years. The time has come to leave the big old house for something smaller, and with support at hand.

Happy Father’s Day to the dads.

 

It’s been 100 days since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. There is no end in sight, say observers of the war.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Wednesday that since the day of the invasion,
4,149 civilians had been confirmed killed and
4,945 civilians had been injured.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says up to 100 Ukrainian soldiers might be dying each day on the front lines in the east of the country.
As of April 16, between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, with up to 10,000 injured.

Russia’s Defense Ministry had said in late March that 1,351 Russian soldiers had died – a lie. Western governments estimate that as many as 15,000 Russian soldiers have died.
(That’s already more than the total casualties over the course of the Soviet Union’s disastrous 1979-89 war in Afghanistan. This war contributed significantly to the collapse of the USSR in 1991).

The UN estimates that more than 14 million Ukrainians have fled their homes.
Some 7 million more are displaced in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s economic output is expected to fall 50% this year.
Rebuilding the country could amount to as much as 500 billion euros (US $537 billion).
Last month the U.N. lowered its forecast for global economic growth in 2022 to 3.1% from 4%, and its forecast for U.S. economic growth to 2.6% from 3.5%.
– Figures from a report by Ann M. Simmons and Courtney McBride in the Wall Street Journal

Here is a puzzle for today, Saturday— Caturday, as ailurophiles like to call it.

Even though I watch almost no cable news programs anymore, it feels as if the news is the same for many weeks at a time.
Are the Olympic Games done? No.
(So the Russian skater blames her grandpa’s meds for her failed drug test. Hard to believe. Shout-out to the IOC for their on-going mismanagement of Russia’s 2014 state-sponsored doping scandal. The Russians should have been banned for oh, 10 years).
Have the truckers in Ottawa gone home? No. Arrest them. Law and order, right, conservatives?
Is Russia going to invade Ukraine? We still don’t know .. but tomorrow is a new day, and time will tell.

bo·de·ga
/bōˈdāɡə/
noun
1.  (in the US) a small grocery store, especially in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
2.  (in a Spanish-speaking country) a wine shop or wine cellar.

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Photos from @Bodegacats_ on Twitter.

That snake-eye brick comes from the LEGO Ninjago 9450 Epic Dragon Battle (2012) set. It was in a bag of used bricks that I had bought. Let’s just say that it represents COVID-19 this fall, still lurking in the shadows.

I watched most of the Djokovic-Zverev men’s semifinal match tonight— just not all the way to the end.
I could not get myself to watch Djokovic triumph over Zverev. No one can deny that the man plays great tennis, but I am not a fan of him otherwise.

Early afternoon, the doorbell rang.
It was Jesús from the lawn services company, inquiring if it’s OK for them to start mowing the lawn again now that spring is here. ‘Of course‘, I said, ‘I was the lookout for you guys, hoping you would start again, soon‘.

The traditional Christmas markets and the stalls with toys, snacks and glühwein are closed, and sorely missed, in Germany.

The official Black Friday is here .. but it’s been ‘Black Friday’ online, every day since at least last week!
One has to wonder how busy the malls were, given their decline even with no pandemic. These days, I don’t even go into the grocery store as a rule. I buy the groceries online and go pick it up. So shopping at the mall was absolutely not going to happen.

Here’s a picture that New York City Council speaker Corey Johnson had posted on Twitter on Monday, after being reunited with his cat Mousse.
Mousse had escaped from an apartment in Williamsburg (the neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York), but was found a few hours later.

“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can: Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is”.
-Former First Lady Michelle Obama, in her speech closing out the first night of the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention

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It was a great speech. That phrase ‘It is what it is’ is a reference to Donald Trump’s dismissive assessment of the state of the Covid-19 pandemic and its destruction of lives and jobs.

Even so, one has to wonder if a single voter in America will be ‘convinced’ by any Convention speaker’s entreatments to vote for Biden, and not for Trump.

You know already very well that Trump belongs in jail — OR you still support him after 3½ years, closing your eyes & ears to the destruction he still sows to this day. 

Here’s a cute picture for caturday, as cat people like to call Saturday.
I don’t know the name of the artist.

Well, the 2020 Easter weekend turned out to be one with no packed church services, nor extended family brunches or shared meals.

I would have loved to go out for a beer for St Patrick’s Day, but it will just have to wait. Everyone has to stay home to fight the spread of the epidemic.

P.S. It is also not a happy St Patrick’s Day in Boston for football fans. Tom Brady announced that he is leaving The Patriots.