@Humpleupagus@Xenophon@charlie_root@FortyTwo I'm a fat, decrepit old asshole with muscles weaker than a girl. My yearly accomplishments for 2023 include: Taking a real shower instead of washing out of a bucket or washing my hair in the sink
Getting to the toilet and back without using a walker or crutches
Making a bit of food from scratch (did that tonight!)
And Losing a little bit of weight (can't take much credit for that, sitting at the table to eat hurt so much I would lose my appetite)
My New Year's resolutions for 2024 are:
Not feeling sorry for myself
Driving my car
Going to physical therapy and the gym
Visiting the neighbors who have been asking ny wife about me since my sudden disappearance last year
Even if you make a great marriage and have wonderful kids, there will still be bad times, because the bad times are there to make the good times seem more poignant and sweet. Otherwise, good times would just be "normal" and we wouldn't appreciate them so much.
@furgar a local Catholic church here tried to get around the the regulation because they had always left the chapel open 24/7 for anyone who wanted to come and pray. They'd let the homeless come in too, provided they were quiet and didn't lay down in the pews. They had coffee and donuts and coats and blankets to give em once word got out. It grew enough that the County free shower truck started coming once a week.
Covid changed all that. The County ordered them to lock the Chapel up and wouldn't let them hand out food or clothes any more. They were worried about contagion, as if starvation weren't worse than Covid-19.
I know this because I used to make refried beans for the Church. They'd drop me off a 50-lb bag of pintos and a couple of frozen hamhocks once a month, and I'd convert them to refried beans 10 lbs at a time. The Church would then water them down with chicken broth and serve them as soup at night. My "bean soup" was famous. I'm not even Catholic, I just gave a friend (who's Catholic) a couple of pounds of frozen refried beans when I was cleaning out my freezer and it went from there.
No more bean soup for the homeless. I moved and I've been doing poorly this year, so I'm not up to opening the bean factory again. It was a lot of work but I don't regret it. Most of those homeless were friends and family members of people who lived in the town, not people offloaded here from LA.
@olmitch@furgar yup, that's why. They go to where the homeless people are rather than inviting them to the church, because a lot of localities haven't lifted all their Covid regulations.
@charlie_root@Zerglingman@bjeelka@thor Lincoln, Lincoln, I've been thinkin', What the hell have you been drinkin', Is it water? Is it wine? Oh my God, it's turpentine!!!
@Zerglingman@thor being a simpleton, I voted for Democrat senators and for Obama.
January 2nd rolled around. I watched C-Span all day, watching for history to be made. What did they do? They decided not to change the rules, because they might want to use the filibuster themselves some day.
@Zerglingman@thor I got the "shove" in January 2013. During Obama's campaign fir his second term, "ending the filibuster" was a much-lauded talking point. Since I was politically naive, and because my dad watched MSN 24/7, I was very upset about the filibuster, since exactly fuck-all had gotten done the prior Congressional term due to filibusters. The Republican party had even been dubbed "The Party of No" by liberal Hill pundits.
Joe Lieberman was one of the leading voices promising an end to the filibuster. The way it had to be done, he said, was for the dominant party to change the Senate rules on January 2nd, when the dominant party leader had been elected, but not inaugurated. Senate rules allowed rule changes only on January 2nd, the deay before the Congressional term began. Voting for Obama and Democrat senators would mean that the filibuster could finally be ended by the noble Democrat party, according to Lieberman.
@Jonny@graf@charlie_root@p oh, I did too! Soca music. Sometimes it's misidentified as Calypso, but it's not. Have some from one of the greatest, David Rudder: