Dandelyon's Worlds

I was sitting in my car, knowing I needed to get inside the grocery store before they closed to buy milk, but they were interviewing this scientist about looking for life deep under the sea, and sending a robot sub deep under the arctic ice, looking for warm spots due to volcanic vents, and life in those warm spots. He and his associates on the boat wanted to find something creepy and weird, like a three-eyed tube worm. And they found nothing. Across days and time zones they searched. Nothing. Then they got caught in this huge ice flow, and had to--well, flow--along with it. With nothing better to do, they sent the sub down where they were, instead of where they had planned to be--and found life. Beautiful fluffy yellow stuff.

And while I'm listening to this matter-of-fact scientist give long, lyrical descriptions of these fields of fluffy yellow stuff, a car goes zooming down the street, very very fast. Like, he would be speeding even if he was on the expressway. "Whoah! Dude!" I think. Then a cop-car goes whizzing by after him. "Good!" I think, still following the NPR article with most of my brain. The scientist's employees on the boat, he says, are kind of mad at him, because they wanted to find something cool and creepy, like the afore-mentioned mythical three-eyed tube worm, and instead they find beautiful fluffy stuff.

And two more cop cars go by, lights and sirens blaring. And as I turn the car off so I can buy milk before the store closes, two more. I get out and grab the bag with the coupons, and the bag with the cloth bags, and another cop goes by. Then another one as I get to the entry of the store.

I'm glad I got off that road and into the parking lot when I did!

I wonder if tomorrow's news will tell me what that was all about? The chase, I mean. Not the fluffy stuff. The last thing I heard before turning the car off was that the scientists eventually concluded that the fluffy stuff may be the oldest form of microbes on the planet.

It's been a mostly-annoying day, though I did get some writing done, and a whole raft of errands, including unscheduled ones.

The Bad Filk Muse visited me, and I tweeted: My googles are feeding me info, My googles are feeding me lies, my googles are feeding me spambots, oh what a dreadful surprise!

I love Private Health Insurance—NOT! One of the bigger healthcare providers in my part of the country is called Aurora. As of December, I had a pharmacy I liked, a primary doctor’s office, and a provider of CPAP supplies (everything except my allergist) all of whom were, one way or another, part of Aurora. Well, my employer’s insurance, which I remain on courtesy of COBRA, stopped covering all things Aurora. (You can use them as a non-preferred provider, but then you have a higher copay AND there’s a separate deductible for non-preferred providers. That’s right, it’s not bad enough that I have a $1250 deductible before the larger part (but never all) of the cost of my medical care and prescriptions is covered by insurance, but if I need a non-preferred provider, I have another $1250 to pay before the insurance company will pay anything at all to them.)

So I spent way too much time in the last several days, calling Aurora and the new company, working to get to a point where Aurora forwarded my records to the competition AND the competition could find the records, to get a new CPAP mask. That was accomplished just before 4 p.m., leaving me just enough time to drive all the way across town during rush hour on a holiday weekend to pick up the replacement. (In the meantime, the old mask was being held together with waterproof bandaids, which weren’t sticking as well as one could wish. Consequently, I started out the day tired, after waking in the middle of the night to wash off the glue that wasn't sticking and apply a new bandaid.)

I love Private Health Insurance—NOT! Part Two My brother has been running his own little one-man company, which limits the kind of health insurance one can buy. And HIPAA, which protects employees of big companies from pre-existing condition clauses (so long as they don't let their insurance lapse), does nott apply to individual policies. He ended up in the hospital on the last day of his then-current policy. And although he had filled out the paperwork to “renew” the policy well ahead of time, before he got sick, technically it’s not a renewal, technically it’s a “new policy” and has to be underwritten. So now the same company can exclude (and is excluding) the condition that got him in the hospital. So most of his hospital stay and all of the follow-up care aren’t covered.

I love ALL my neighbors—NOT! After too many phone calls, running to two different pharmacies for medications (mine and for My Angel) and visiting yet another different medical provider to replace the CPAP mask and hose, I got to the thrift store to donate the stuff cluttering up my trunk so I can put other stuff in it. By this time I was anticipating being done with errands and silly bureaucracy. However, instead I got to the trunk to open it and found that my rear license plate had been stolen. Since I know no one would have been allowed to do that unmolested in the pharmacy parking lots, that means it happened at home.

Then I got to drive to the district police station, wait around while two women argued about how each other should fill out a small claims lawsuit form (silly women, if they could agree about the issue, they wouldn’t be filing suit). The officer finally told them that each of them can put whatever they want in their own paperwork, and the guy in the black robe would sort it out. Only then could I make my excessively boring report. So now if I drive into Chicago for part of the long weekend, I do it with a little “report of stolen plate” piece of paper in the car, so if some nice officer pulls me over for no plate I have something to show them.

Wild Kittens Three We’ve had a mother cat and her kittens in and out of the yard for some weeks; the kittens recently got bold enough to watch me from a distance in the yard. So I went out with kibble and started tossing it to them, closer and closer. The mother must have been abandoned by people, it didn’t take long for her to put up with me petting her while she ate, and today she was walking right up to the container of kibble and sticking her head in it if I didn’t have my hand over it. The first day I didn’t quite manage to pet the kittens, but today I was petting them enough that I briefly picked each one up. There was an immediate recurrence of skittishness, of course, but not to the point where they didn’t come back within reach for food, and they stayed around for a while, taking their kitty baths, after they had enough. So I can tame them; the question is what to do with them then? I don’t approve of leaving cats wild to breed madly, but can’t simply adopt them.

The photos are of said felines, and of a light outside the police station.  It's a pity I never took any pictures of old, creepy-looking books to go with the following:

The bad elder god muse visited me earlier this week, and I tweeted then too:
A forgotten book ~ yellowed pages in leather ~ why is it lock-bound?
If you find the book ~ Will you dare to break the lock? ~ No one has a key!
If you break the lock ~ will it tell of elder gods? ~ steal your sanity?
Or is it mundane? ~ Just some teen girl's diary ~ Drivel about boys?
The lock's really big ~ Perhaps you should play it safe ~ burn it while you can!

Fireborn: I started to write this a while ago, read a comment by red_trillium , and detoured into doing a rough draft of an upcoming chapter of Fireborn.

So, I caught the episode of Regenesis last night, mostly.  As the episode started, I realized that I was hearing a woman yelling outside.  We looked outside and turned the TV down (the late night shows always seem louder than the daytime ones, even without the fact that different channels and programs have differing sound levels).  There was a woman and a man out there, yelling in Spanish.  Very rapid Spanish, changing my chance of guessing what the argument was about from negligible to nonexistent.  Then the woman started throwing things.  Now, I don't want my neighbors killing each other, even if I haven't met them yet.

So I called 911.  Eventually the Milwaukee Sheriff answered, listened to my tale, and transferred me to the 911 operator.  Huh?  I explained everything all over again, and they said someone would come check things out.  So we watched TV, and I returned to the painting of the open instrument case (it's not really properly a guitar shape) in a much more distracted format than we would have preferred.

She stopped throwing things, though they kept yelling.  They sat on the porch.  They walked around.  They kept yelling.  They sat on the porch again.  They walked around some more.  And they kept yelling.  Twilight zone came on.  We wondered where the police were.  They kept yelling.  Eventually, they went in the house, but left the door open (still yelling).  Finally, they closed the door. 

In all this time, we saw no hint of a squad car or other police presence.

I went to take my now-cool bath, figuring that I wouldn't need to be dressed to talk to the police after all.  It's been hot and muggy, so the water was wonderful.  I was all covered in water and soap when My Angel came in to tell me that they were out of the house again, this time the woman was beating on the pick-up the guy had been leaning on earlier, apparently trying to break the windshield. 

Wonderful.  Angel got to talk to 911 this time; I hadn't seen anything from the bath.

So I finished my bath and headed back to the media room, where we could again watch them yell, and be ready to call for help if one of them actually got hurt before the police arrived. 

They got to a point where they walking back and forth the length of our house  in the street (we're on a corner lot, so they were walking down one street between the street that intersects it and the alley), still yelling.  Finally, the man jumped into the vehicle and drove off.  I heard a sound that suggests she threw something at it as he drove past her.  Finally, she goes to the house and closes the door.  At this point, it is starting to get light outside!

Finally, quiet.

Almost an hour after the second call, and roughly a half-hour after the guy left, a police officer finally called.  He decided that since I had seen no injuries on the woman and the man was long gone, he didn't have to check things out any further at that time.

So, where were the police all this time?  Today's news had the answer--the Mayor of Milwaukee had been to the State Fair, and while he was leaving, heard a cry for help.  He came to the rescue of a grandmother, standing between her and the toddler she was with and a drunken man, who was apparently upset because he'd been told he couldn't see his daughter.  The Mayor called 911, and stood between the agitated man and the woman with the baby, receiving a number of cuts from some metal object and finally breaking his hand punching the guy.  The mayor ended up lying bloody on the street while the drunk guy jumped a fence.  So, apparently all the police in the area were hunting this drunk guy who'd already run away from the scene (having no idea he'd assaulted the mayor), and whose identity they knew.  

Consequently, the police were ignoring domestic disputes that appeared to be escalating into violence.  I'm glad that, as it turned out, we didn't have to call 911 to report a stabbing or gunshot wound!

In other news, my Aunt apparently broke her thigh, not actually the hip, though she still needs surgery to implant a titanium rod into her leg.  And my kitchen sink is still not draining, though the laundry tub is. 

And though the case isn't done yet, it's closer.  Comments on the artwork are welcome, by the way!

For the past few years (no, thinking back, about a decade!) I’ve been going to a small Pagan festival in Minnesota.  The people running it have varied, of course, from year to year, but there’s a core group who are always involved.  The festival is a joy.  I missed this year, due to scheduling conflicts and the price of gas, but last year there were over 300 people – and more than 90 of them were minors, from new babies to teenagers.  Overall, the people are friendly and respectful, the kids are a joy to be around, the workshops are thought-provoking and informative, and old oak grove it’s held in, which mostly hosts mundane concerts, is left cleaner than when the festival started.  The Minneapolis area pagans I’ve met at the festival are friendly, responsible, and gentle.

 

A couple years ago, some of them formed a group for education and social action in the upper Midwest area, though so far, most of what they do happens in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.  Because I was so impressed with these people, and because I would like to have contact with like-minded people year-round, I joined this group.  Mostly, my participation has been reading their e-mail newsletter; the bulk of the membership is still in or near the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so that is where most of the activities have been, including participation in a ritual to support the fight to get the Wiccan Pentacle approved by the Pentagon as a grave marker for Wiccan soldiers, other rituals, and meetings.  As part of their mission of education and information, people can also post information about other meetings, rituals, and gatherings sponsored by other groups.

 

Other than event announcements, the e-mails I've received from them have described things like their efforts cleaning up a stretch of highway (part of the Adopt a Highway program) and volunteering to deliver food to home-bound elders on Christmas.

 

More recently, there were posts informing members of a gathering whose intent would be to pray that the people gathering for the Republican convention be blessed with an upwelling of earth wisdom.  Originally, they talked about gathering outside the convention to pray in public.  Not to protest—to pray.  Eventually, they changed their plans.  There would still be a ritual, and Starhawk would still be invited to lead the prayers, but it would be at another location. I longed to go, but Milwaukee is still a whole bunch of pennies from Minneapolis, even without the car being somewhat under the weather.

 

So, after a pleasant Labor Day weekend, during which I worried some about Hurricane Gustav but mostly ignored the news, the Republican convention, and the computer, I was appalled to come back to posts from my friends about things that mostly haven't been covered in the mainstream news.  One post included a long piece by Starhawk, including this quote: 

 

“All day we've been getting news that the police have been raiding houses, breaking down doors, arresting people, with or without warrants or warnings. We hold the morning meeting in a public park, because our Convergence Space has been raided and closed the night before. Someone says, "We're a community that includes children—we can't clear them out of their own living spaces. Remember if the police raid your space it's important to have someone negotiate with them to get the children out."
 

”I am a tough person. I've been through a lot of these things and in spite of all my efforts to stay open I've grown something of my own protective scales. But those words pierce through them, and I find tears welling up in my eyes. It just hits me, that we're standing here in the United States of America, in the liberal city of my birth, talking about how to protect children from armed police.”

 

Wow. 

 

And my LJ friends include someone who was just biking in the area of the convention, and with about 500 other people, pedestrians, bikers, and motorists (even taxi drivers and their fares) was surrounded by police in riot gear, told they were all arrested (though eventually he was not arrested) and to sit down on the ground or get tear-gassed. 

 

And others share news:

• Five different police agencies stopping a family in the bus they’ve been living in while teaching people about sustainable agriculture, solar power, and the like, without a warrant.  Eventually the bus (worms and all) is impounded in case they can get a search warrant later, and the people, their dogs and chickens (but not the teenage girl’s shoes) are left by the highway, no longer detained.

• Police with warrants that require them to knock and announce themselves battering down doors without knocking

• Award winning journalist and host of "Democracy Now" Amy Goodman was arrested by St. Paul police while covering a protest outside the Republican National Convention

• A warrant read aloud that reportedly allows police to search for items that could be used in a direct action, including not only things like molotov cocktails and match heads, but also computers and x-box systems and x-box games

Am I missing something here?  X-box games? 

 

And how manyhouses don’t have matches, glass bottles, string/twine, rags, and some kind of inflammable liquid (alcohol, kerosene, turpentine, varnish, etc.)? Or other things one could use in a "direct action"? 

 

Also, where is the major news coverage of whatever is going on? Me forwarding these LJ Friends' words to "you" isn't worth much if you don't know them.  Not everything that is written anywhere is true, after all.

But I keep returning to Starhawk's words, and the image later in that e-mail of a young woman held at gunpoint and cuffed in front of her kindergarden-age son, because they were at the place the prayer meeting was supposed to be held.  The boy wasn't hurt physically, that I heard, and the mother had been released--but how good can it be for a five-year old boy to see his mother held at gun-point by the police?

 

You know, even though I have friends who protested in the 60s/70s with their pockets sewn shut, because they didn’t want to risk police slipping something into their possession, I really didn’t expect to hear that friends of mine, or friends of friends, or for that matter, anyone who had not provided clear and obvious probable cause, would be having to worry about how to protect their kids from systemic police violence in this country.

 

Wow. 

I feel speechless, despite the length of this post.