Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Caution: Living with Lions
from Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office
Recently, neighbors in your area have reported mountain lion sightings or encounters. This can be a dangerous and frightening situation. With the increased cold weather many animals are preparing to survive through the winter. Help us and Colorado Parks and Wildlife by being diligent to protect yourselves, your children and your pets/ livestock.
To reduce the risk of problems with mountain lions on or near your property, we urge you to follow these precautions:
1. Place livestock in enclosed sheds or barns at night. Close doors to all outbuildings since inquisitive lions may go inside for a look.
2. Make lots of noise if you come and go during the times mountain lions are most active: dusk to dawn.
3. Install outside lighting. Light areas where you walk so you could see a lion if one were present.
4. Closely supervise children whenever they play outdoors. Make sure children are inside before dusk and not outside before dawn. Talk with children about lions and teach them what to do if they meet one.
5. Planting non-native shrubs and plants that deer often prefer to eat encourages wildlife to come onto your property. Predators follow prey. Don’t feed any wildlife!
6. Encourage your neighbors to follow these simple precautions. Prevention is far better than a possible lion confrontation.
To read more on living in mountain lion country, or what to do in the case of an attack, please visit the link below:
Pre-op physical yesterday. EKG within normal parameters. Dr. Gidday walked me through the pre-op questions including one which wondered if I had dementia. When I asked her how I would know, she laughed, slapped my hand, “Everybody says something like that.”
I’ve seen two movies in the past couple of weeks, Dr. Strange and Arrival. I saw Dr. Strange in 3-D. Fantasy and science fiction still have my attention after all these years. Dr. Strange was fun, great CGI, a cast that includes Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch, and the Dr. Strange origin story.
neither is the heptapod language. Time is more flexible than we think, malleable. No Randy Quaid flying his jet into the mothership, no Luke flying his fighter into the weak spot of the death star. In fact, no onscreen violence at all with the exception of an explosion, a brief one. Though you won’t understand unless you see it, Arrival is about the power of language.
And, improbably, it will be Thanksgiving next week. There is no hint of over the river and through the woods weather to stimulate that Thanksgiving feeling. We may get a storm on Thursday. That would help.
Racism. Is complicated. Very complicated. And, yes, I believe all white Americans are part of its grip on our culture. I’m going to try to boil down a very thorny subject into a few words, see if I can convince you that you are part of the problem if you’re white and live in the U.S.
Slaves did not vote, but if counted as full persons for population purposes they would have given slave states and the whites who did vote greater representation in the U.S. House. This would have unbalanced power between the North and the South.
They also had an unearned advantage in their social status as at least higher than that of the slave, the three-fifths of a person enslaved. This unearned social status gave low income whites, often share-croppers, a psychological and social boost which had nothing to do with their personal merit. They were better, at least, than those who toiled without compensation and freedom. That unearned and undeserved lift in personal status persists in the minds and hearts of all white Americans.
The civil war, you might say, shows the inherent goodness of the north and the hostile debasement of southerners. You might say that if you don’t factor in the unearned economic and social advantages even northerners gained from the enslaved. You might say that if the wreck of reconstruction hadn’t resulted in Jim Crow laws throughout the south. You might say that if you hadn’t grown up near Elwood, Indiana which had a sign at its city limits, No Niggers In Town After Sundown. This was taken down only after the civil rights act in 1964.
How have all these terrible realities managed to remain in place? Because those with power rarely give it up willingly. We white Americans, through our avoidance of these issues, have capitulated to the structures already in place. Why? Because those structures: biased employment choices, biased voting requirements, lack of affordable housing, lack of available health care, still unequal education, are on the fringe of our lives, happening to someone else, some other African-American self. And to fix them would cost us in taxes, in our unearned advantage in employment, in our ability to control local and state and national elections.
Working on homeowners insurance right now, a fraught topic in the red zone. The red zone, which I have mentioned before, is the area in Colorado most likely to experience wildfire. Jefferson County, our home county is the long, narrow county which abuts the southwest side of the Denver metro (gray blob, high center right). We are smack in the middle of Jeffco’s redzone.
Final activity for yesterday was changing the oil in the snowblower. If you have any mechanical aptitude, this is probably not worth mentioning. In my case the material world and I struggle every time we come in contact. I did get the job done, but it took much more thinking and jiggering than it might have. Example: to drain the oil the snowblower has to be tipped over on its side, but not fall over. That meant balancing the snowblowers unwieldy bulk with my legs while my arms prevented it from tipping over all the way. The result was dependence on my knees for backward stability. And that left one isn’t working so well right now. Gave me a couple of interesting moments.
Saw my doc yesterday about my knee. She gave me a referral to Dr. William Peace, an orthopedic surgeon. I called him and got an appointment for this Friday. Kate and I watched a video about knee replacement. It was helpful. Somewhat. The biggest new information I got was that the new knee lasts about 15 years. I figure I’m in a lighter use period of my life so I could get a full 15.
Yesterday included three separate trips into Evergreen. First, I took Kate in for the morning Rosh Hashanah service at Beth Evergreen. Then, I came back to answer questions, be available for the electrician and the painter. At noon I went back to pick up Kate and eat the after service lunch with her. All these trips included waits in two spots on Brook Forest Road for culvert repair. Stop. Slow. Stop. Slow.
There were kugels in aluminum pans, bagels with lox and cream cheese or chopped egg, fresh cut vegetables, fruit. Paper plates and plastic forks. Lots of eating and greeting. Some very short skirts. Some men carried small cloth pouches containing prayer shawls and yarmulkes. Kids ran around,
Went to my first meeting with the Evergreen Writer’s Group last night. Formed in August of this year this group meets in a used book store, Where The Books Go, in Evergreen. There were four of us last night. I sat and listened since I had not understood the mss submission process. Just mechanics.
The clouds are at 8,800 feet this morning. We’re surrounded by and inside them. A foggy start to the day.