Category Archives: Third Phase

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Plants, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Minding the Gap

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Two ayes for two eyes. Clearer, some fuzziness. Supposed to go away. Easy to read computer screen. No pain. Tony’s. The clerks at Tony’s. Kate’s wrist improving. This mythic sky. Fall. Courage. Sadness. Springtime for inner work. The days and nights of the year’s last half. The harvest. The rut.

Come into me, spirit of Fall. As I drove down Shadow Mountain yesterday, the golden glory of autumn Aspens against the evergreen Lodgepoles, all on soaring Mountain sides, this prayer came, unbidden. Soon my hand moved in a waving motion, like the sageing rituals of the Lakota, wafting the vision of Fall I could see into my heart, into my soul.

Judaism emphasizes kavanah in prayer. Intention. I wondered, what is the intention of this prayer? Why has it come to me?

Minding the gap. That’s the intention, I understood this suddenly, too. The gap between my self-understanding as a distinct and separate living being and the World outside my car window. It is a false understanding, made to appear real by the mind we carry and the body that is its vehicle. I am part of the Fall, part of its courage and sadness. Part of its springtime for Soul work.

The Great Wheel turns. We live through its Seasons. Its Seasons live through us. Invite the Season into your body, into your Soul. Live within it, not as an observer only.

Then. The Mountains. What do they mean? Strong. Hard. Tall. Shansin make me strong, hard, and tall like Black Mountain, like Shadow Mountain, like Conifer Mountain. Raise the mountain in me, let it support and define me.

Then. The Aspens. Make me aware of the living links I have with friends and family. Like the Aspen Grove. Interleaved. Sharing nutrients and knowledge and warnings. Then, no, not like the Aspen Grove, as the Aspen Grove. Help me feel the rootlets of these Aspen, these Lodgepole supporting me, feeding me, making me aware of what’s coming.

Why these prayers, these meditations, came to me, I can’t say. They were powerful and sank into me, radiated back out of me. I was one with the Fall. One with the Mountains. One with the Aspen Groves.

The Great Wheel has within it the learnings we need. And, apparently, will grace us with them when we need them. Blessed be.

Music, Myth and Story, Politics, Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

The Plastic Hour

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Fall: RBG Moon, Mars, Orion, and Venus in the morning sky

Friday gratefuls: Savannah, nurse at Cherry Hills. Dr. Gustave. Sandy, the nurse anesthetist. Right eye cut and healing. Zeiss. Alan. The intraocular lens. Those who invented, designed, and made it. Annie and Sarah. Kate, her wrist calming down. Carne asada from Tony’s.

Right eye patched. I see Dr. Gustave today at 10:30. A familiar routine. Even with the right eye still dilated, I can see the words I type with clarity. Not before, not without glasses. And, even then, fuzzy,

I feel younger. Silly? Yeah, but I feel it anyhow. I’m ready for a bonus round with life.

Wondered what it meant to have Johnny Nash, the singer of “I Can See Clearly Now”, die in between the surgery on my left eye and the right one.

Checking on the idiot. Give me a sec. OMG. He’s worse. Prosecute Biden and Obama. A rally in Florida on Sunday. Won’t debate virtually. Going out in public when he should still be in quarantine. No boundaries. No sense. Aarrggh.

George Packer writes for the Atlantic. In the Plastic Hour, he wrote himself into hope after dispirited articles: “We are living in a failed state”, “Failure is a Contagion”. and, “The President is winning his war on American institutions.” He’s brilliant and has a feel for this time we’re in. Recommended. And, if you read it, what do you think?

Aging, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Feelings, Health, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

RBG and Mars

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Fall The Full RBG Moon and Mars

Saturday gratefuls: Kate’s better breathing, stamina. Easy Entrees Oktoberfest meal today: Pork Schnitzel, Bavarian Pretzels, and German Cucumber Salad. Prosit! Sukkot. The Sukkah is up at CBE. Harvests all round the world. Confirmation on masks, social distancing, staying away from crowded enclosed spaces. My new lens. My new cheaters. Fall. It’s courage and sadness.

The alignment this morning of the full RBG Moon and Mars happened just over Black Mountain, a bit to the northwest. Beautiful in the early morning sky. Mythic, too. The warrior God of ancient Rome and the warrior Woman. Anima and Animus. The full power of masculine and feminine writ large. A good time to remember that this miserable administration has only a few weeks to its reckoning.

No. I don’t relish Trump’s struggle with Covid. Not when I view him as just a man. I neither wish nor celebrate suffering on anyone. Sure, I might joke about it, but in the end, no.

As a scumbag President, cheerleader for the Proud Boys and the Klan, as a misogynist, a racist, a mocker of the disabled, and as an ignorant man in a job that requires learning though, I’m glad he’s sidelined. May he be out of the picture long enough to ensure his defeat.

Saw Dr. Gustave yesterday. Still at 20/25 for distance. He seemed disappointed. I’m not. Things are so much clearer. Colors are brighter. The World has a certain freshness to it. It seems younger. Cataract surgery gives me a boost mentally.

Had to sign permission for my right eye to get cut. Acknowledge that I still had blurry, hazy vision in it. Forms and checklists, scheduling. The usual morass of American medicine.

I won’t rant. I won’t. Yet, for all the questionnaires, all the releases signed, the same ones over and over, the system, well, no, not a system, the chaotic, entangled delivery of medical care here in these United States, medical care itself is often thwarted rather than delivered.

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you may recall my struggles with the axumin scan and subsequent imaging. Kate still has no wheelchair. She went in Wednesday and got prepped for an unnecessary procedure, called off before it was about to start. Why? What caused her shortness of breath that has now abated? Will we get a referral to Dr. Taryle to answer those questions? Unclear.

The referral system demanded by insurance carriers is at the heart of all this trouble. It’s the way we curb medical costs. They say. It’s the way they guard their profit margin, I say. Wish we could just get Marine One to pick us up at our front door and deliver us to the doctor or the hospital. That we could get the same kind of care as the President. That all of us could get that kind of care.

Delay, denial, and skepticism are the main tools of this failed institution. Sure, there are doctors who know what to do, hospitals that deliver excellent care, but how can we access them? The burden of making the system move too often falls to the sick one. This is cruel and inhumane.

Hoping for a massive and radical change in how Americans receive medical care. Vote. That’s a start.

Aging, Colorado, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

WTF

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Family, near and far. Friends. Ancient and new. ADT. Androgen Deprivation Therapy. It’s not just Lupron anymore. For Charlie H. 27 degrees this morning. The Denver Post. Decompensation in full public view. The orange excrescence. Dez and the wheelchair. Kate. And her anger.

What a long strange trip it’s being. Geez. Took Kate to Swedish for her thoracentesis. We found the ambulatory care unit hidden down a corridor tacked on to the main building, but leading further, past the ACU. Hospitals are often like English buildings with various floors built at different times, different buildings, too, then all stitched together with elevators and hallways.

I wheeled Kate into Room 9, really a small stall covered with a curtain, where Alice, the nurse, cared for Kate. Alice. Hmm. They hooked Kate up to the hospital oxygen, took her blood pressure, and her O2 saturation. We’d already decided that I would go eat breakfast, so I left for the cafeteria.

Where there had been a number of tasty options, there were now breakfast burritos wrapped in tinfoil, fruit in cups, some with yogurt, scrambled eggs in small plastic containers. I went with the breakfast burrito and blueberries buried in yogurt.

Not bad. I stayed in the cafeteria awhile because it was big, airy, very few tables spaced far apart. Not many people. Safer. Weird to think about personal safety in the hospital, but. Covid.

I find a place in one of those hallways connecting two buildings, no one there, but with a convenient, lonely chair. Kate called after about twenty minutes.

Come get me. I’m done. Oh. It was before 10:30, the time of her procedure. Huh. I got up and walked down the ACU corridor again, past medical oncology, and cardiac testing reception. Wondered briefly what it was like to spend your working life in such a dismal looking space.

When I got there, Kate surprised me. The ultrasound tech came and said there is no pleural effusion. What? She had an IV in, four pokes, she has terrible veins, and she looked angry. As well she might. We’d come in Friday evening, about an hour and a half round trip, for a drive up Covid test. Then we’d come Tuesday for the ct scan. Another hour and a half plus the contrast, and a long ride across other corridors and into other buildings to find an available cat scan machine.

Now we’d come in a third time in six days. Parked. Gotten tested at the lobby with the temperature gun, received green and white pre-screened for Covid wrist bands, checked in, schlepped to the ACU. Kate had been hospital gowned. a sheet gotten for her to cover up, and a nurse had taken four tries with a very sharp needle to insert an IV. Then, nada.

Alice. Indeed. We’d gone down the hospital looking glass.

We have an appointment with Taryle for next week. WTF, doc?

Also, still no wheel chair. We’re renting one. Though. Dez, Lisa Gidday’s nurse, says she’s on it. I believe her.

Aging, Dreams, Family, Feelings, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate

Springtime of the Soul

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Thoracentesis. Valet who got our car from a distant garage. The imaging employee who found an unused machine for Kate’s catscan. Phase two of the three stage plan done. Remembering to take out the blue foam. Clear vision. Michaelmas yesterday. Cool morning.

Michaelmas. The Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael, he of Lucifer ejecting mythic fame. God’s great warrior. Also the name of the first term in British colleges and universities.

But best of all, the springtime of the soul. Rudolf Steiner. The growing season has finished. The external world had its glorious moment at the Fall Equinox, the celebration of the harvest. The body will be fed.

We turn our attention inward after Michaelmas. The nights grow longer, the angle of the sun shortens, and the days grow cold. Courage and sadness. A touch of melancholy encouraged.

When we drove down the hill yesterday, golden leaved Aspens had burst out among the Lodgepole Pine green. Framed by a typical clear blue Colorado sky the beauty made me gasp.

The beauty, the chill in the air. We know its brevity, like the beauty of the young. Those Aspen speak from the sides of Black Mountain, Conifer Mountain, Shadow Mountain. We are done now. Good bye. See you on the flip side. Their golden glamor a farewell to summer.

We know it. Many falls. The outrageous, over the top color of a Midwestern fall. The remnant of the Big Forest, the one that stretched from the east Coast to the Plains. Before the modern era a squirrel could travel tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Great Plains without ever touching the ground. So much melancholy in those colors, the abstract landscapes of a vivisectioned ecosystem.

Piles of Leaves in the yard, on the Forest floor. Running, jumping, landing in the piles. Dogs racing into them, through them. Do you remember, as I do, burning Leaves in the street? An acrid smell combining with earthy wetness. A strong seasonal memory.

One day soon Winds driven by the Cold slumping down from the Arctic will strip them all, Maple, Oak, Ironwood, Elm, Ash, Locust, Hickory, Sycamore, dislodge their Leaves and the tree naked against the coming winter. The Aspen gold rush will disappear and only the ghostly gray-white of their Trunks and Branches will remain.

A woman I learned ritual craft from thought this denuding of the deciduous Trees might explain Samain and the Celtic belief that the veil thinned between this world and the next during the transition.

Kate’s sister Sarah married Jeremiah Miller. A painter. Before I met her, Kate bought two of his very large paintings. One hangs in our bedroom. In it the Sky is a gunmetal blue and its complement of cumulus Clouds show as reflections in a Pond. Both Sky and Pond show through a Forest of bare Trunks and Branches, a before Winter comes scene we see all year.

This turn of the Great Wheel follows the gradual waning of the Light until the longest Night, the Winter Solstice. What better time for introspection, for the Soul to rise?

May this season of the Soul’s Springtime give you what you need for the next months and years of your journey, your ancientrail.

Aging, Coronavirus, Family, Feelings, Friends, GeekWorld, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Minnesota, Mussar, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Paying the Price

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Monday gratefuls: Groveland. The Ancient Ones. The ancientrails of wondering and friendship. The Darkness. The Stars, now steady. Kate’s stoma site. Getting clear and healthy. Kate. Just Kate, always Kate. Exposure. Fear. 28 degrees this a.m. The Gold in them thar Hills: Aspen. Magwa, the hero Rat. The clan.

So what happens to me. I over prepare. I go deep but the subject has only so much time. I’m disappointed. Did I give them anything? Did I intervene too little? Was I defensive? Will they want me back? Especially yesterday with It’s Beyond Me.

Zoom of course. Perhaps my choice of style, a discussion rather than a straight presentation. The inherent ambiguity of the topic. Felt off when it finished.

Also, I need this. I need to try something new. Learn something new. Be in this zoom moment as an actor, not only a passive observer.

Watched Social Dilemma on Netflix. The second of three documentary recommendations from the ancient ones. Again, not much new. Still, disturbing. I’m writing this in Firefox, using duckduckgo as my search engine. I practice good hygiene on Facebook and still love the old friends and Irish Wolfhounds. I heard the young, bright manipulators, but did not hear the path forward. Unless it’s regulation. Which is a duh unless you hate regulation as evil government intervention. I’m for it.

As I changed Kate’s bandage yesterday, we talked. I’m wondering how we can lift ourselves out of, or away from, this medicalization? I mean, I don’t want to see you as a patient all the time, but with all these appointments and treatments, it’s hard. Our life is not that. Yet, it is.

Right then, Rabbi Jamie called, wondering how Kate was? She mentioned this thought I’d just had. He listened. He had some time before Yom Kippur and wanted to connect with some folks. They miss us. We’ve been absent even from zoom mussar for over a month.

Covid. Makes all this hard. Kate can’t go to Patchworkers or Needleworkers. We don’t go to mussar at CBE. Or, services. Or the occasional program. It will soon be Sukkot and the booth is up, but we’re not there to participate. Yes, this is life now. Yes, it has its price.

God, this is cheery.

Anoka County, Garden, Great Wheel, Hydroponics, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Plants, Science, Shadow Mountain, The Move, The West, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Gardner Me

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Kiss the Ground. Netflix. Not a huge fan of documentaries. Not sure why. I love fiction, not non-fiction books though I read them from time to time.

But this one. Recommended by long time friend Tom Crane. Didn’t say much new, maybe nothing for me, but it pulled my heart. Reminded me of who I’ve been. Who I’ve left behind.

Gardner me. That guy that used to spend hours planting flowers, amending soil, weeding the onions and the beans. Cutting raspberry canes back for the winter. Thinning the woods. Thinning the carrots and the beets. Lugging bags of compost. Bales of marsh hay. Planning flower beds so there would be something blooming during the entire growing season. Hunting for heirloom seeds.

I had plans. I read books about adapting gardening techniques in xericulture. Thought about this idea and that. Read a lot before our move. But, then. Prostate cancer and a cascade of other distractions. Divorce. Arthritis. Kate’s troubles.

The whole horticulture act slipped into yesterday. And I miss it. Even the cussing at the critters. A notable reminder. Heirloom Tomatoes. Oh, my god. I buy them when they’re good. Five bucks a pound. I eat them like the fruit they are as a fruit. The taste. So good. No comparison to those raised for mechanical harvesting. Not even the same thing, imho.

Our carrots and beets and leeks and garlic and beans. Our honeycrisp apples. Granny. Plums. Cherries. The onions drying on the old screen door in the shed Jon built. A basement pantry filled with canned vegetables, canned fruit. Jars of honey from Artemis Honey.

A greenhouse. That’s the only way I could return to gardening. I’m no longer strong enough for the kind of gardening we did in Andover, Minnesota. I’d need plants on a bench about hip height. But I’m seriously considering it. The dogs. Yes. Kate. Yes. But, plants, too. Our own food on our table. Nurturing plants. I’m sad I left it behind.

We’ll see.

Aging, Family, Health, Science, Third Phase

Apres

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Kate. Our ancientrail of man and woman together. Dr. Gustave and his wife, the artist Lindsay Smith Gustave. The cataract, the eye. Its evolution from one-celled life. The hand and the eye together. Art. Seeing and making. UFO’s in Ode’s mind. The threat to our democracy. Our opportunity to act.

In the car to see Dr. Gustave. One day after. Bright light. Eye still dilated. Colors more intense, more clarity. Less sfumato. In closing the dominant left eye, the one with the new lens replacing its cataract, I can return to the sfumato that the cataract created. Damned if I don’t prefer it in some ways. Aesthetically it’s pleasing to me, the gentle blending of colors, their slight smokiness, which I couldn’t identify before. Guess I’ll have to high these eyes to a gallery of Renaissance painting after the second one’s done.

You had an extra large cataract. Yes! So I take out a cataract shaped like a walnut and I slip in a lens shaped like a plate. When the two sides of the eye close over the plate, there can sometimes be a fold. If you get a straight line in your vision at night, that’s the fold. No matter. If it’s still there, we’ll just laser it out.

This morning, here in the loft, as I look at my banks of track lighting, they have a lance of light through them at about a sixty degree angle. It does not impair my vision. We’ll see.

My distance vision is already 20/25 and will get to 20/20 in time. I could watch TV without glasses last night. This computer screen is far less fuzzy than it was on Wednesday.

At the lower left of my left eye, I have a sensation of light. Not a big deal. If it hung around though…

No resistance work for a month. Can do aerobics. No heavy lifting. (see the resistance work) Not sure what I’m gonna do with the Chewy order when it comes.

Watched a live, real time video of cataract surgery last night. Takes about 8 minutes or so. Involves slicing the mature organelle into quarters, then vacuuming them up with a teeny vacuum. The lens slips in through a tiny incision, unfolds, then gets straightened out, flattened. The edges of the eye right there are polished to prevent problems later.

All this time a retractor has the eyeball served up like an over easy egg. John, the nurse anesthetist, told me not to fight the retractor. I didn’t. Didn’t even know it was there.

Surprisingly tired both Thursday and yesterday.

Around 4:15 p.m. Kate and I drove into Swedish hospital. She had to get a drive up Covid test before her catscan on Tuesday and the draining of the fluid on her lungs the next day. Really hope this gives her some relief, She needs it. Meanwhile the stoma site has begun to heal. Almost normal looking.

Aging, Health, Science, Third Phase

Aarggh.

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Friday gratefuls: Alan. The Tesla experience. The kind folks at Cherry Hills Surgery center. The Latina who placed my IV and gave me enough eye drops I thought I was being waterboarded in a minimalist way. Savannah, my nurse, who kept giving me warm blankets. John, the nurse anesthetist. And Dr. Gustave, eye surgeon. My dominant eye, now pirated. Kate, for her encouragement and support. Tom and Paul for notes yesterday. Cheri Rubin (Alan’s wife), too.

I was back home by noon after going down the hill with Alan in his computer on wheels, as Tom calls the Tesla. At a recent cosmetic visit to repair dings Tesla replaced, at no charge, the car’s whole motherboard and added software updates. One of them added the ability to read signs and, I think, included reading speed limits. Very, very cool.

At the surgery center I filled out the usual absurd number of forms which got added, I assume, to the absurd number of forms I had already filled out. I got more forms on the way out. How many trees died for my eye surgery?

Pre-op was a series of bays separated by curtains on a snaking metal fixture attached to the ceiling. One interesting feature. I got to keep my clothes on! I guess the head is far enough away from the rest of the body.

My legs went on a triangular pillow and my head rested on what looked a hell of a lot like a mortuary head rest. Similar to Chinese pillows. Savannah gave me drops. Then the Latina, whose name I did not get, came and gave me more drops. and inserted a needle into my left hand.

I felt bad for her. When I asked her to repeat something because I was deaf in that ear (left, the side she was on), she said, “Oh. that’s o.k. I’m Hispanic and people say I talk really loud. So that’s sort of normal for me.”

“I know a lot of loud Caucasians.” I wanted to tell her not to denigrate herself, not for me, not for anybody, but I didn’t. She was quick, efficient and cheerful. Good at her job.

Savannah, my nurse, would have been at home in Minnesota with her blonde curly hair and blue eyes. She had an unusual amount of eyeliner, emphasized by the mask. Are you in pain? Not yet.

More eye drops. And, then, a much longer than 20 minute wait. Staring at the ceiling, considering all the eyedrops, where did they go? What would I do when I get home? No, be here. Do deep breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Reverse that. In through the nose, out through the nose. Variations.

Thoughts of aging, maturing cataracts, the disturbing article about the upcoming election I finished in the waiting room. Cataract surgery as a metaphor. Wait, they’re cutting into my EYE?

Dr. Gustave came. What are we doing? Why doesn’t he know? Taking a cataract out and putting in a lens. I agree. Which eye? Geez. That, too. The left. I agree. Are we going for the distance correction or the reading correction? Distance. I agree. He was agreeable.

John picked up the ball by asking questions I’d already answered twice. Any drug allergies? No. Bad reaction to anesthesia? No. Anesthesiologist questions. He wanted to anesthesia in the sun. Which seemed unlikely to me.

In the operating room a name I know from astronomy loomed above on a robotic arm. Zeiss. That makes three robots who have been critical parts of my health care: the DaVinci, the preying bird of radiation, and now this Zeiss. It looked far more delicate than the other two though bulky, or blocky.

After that John hooked up the versid and I leaned into the drug, falling away. Mostly. I could see during the operation. In the eye that was being sliced and diced. I saw three large purple gangly things, topped with white. Felt pressure, some pain part of the time. Not long, maybe twenty minutes.

Recovery was fast. A Latina, older than the one before, took me by the arm as if we were about to walk down the aisle, and led me to the car.

Alan asked if I spoke pirate now?

A clear plastic shield covers my left eye. I still see circles and haloes around lights, but I can tell already that the vision is clearer, more distinct. Much more on an eye to eye comparison. And, yes, the white’s are much whiter.

A bit achy since I had to sleep on my side or back and I’m a stomach sleeper. Other than that, ok. I go see Dr. Gustave today at eleven. Driving there is the test of the eye, I suppose.

Anyhow. Done for now. No lifting heavy objects. Might mean I can’t exercise for a month. Arrggh, matey, not what we wanted.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Cooking, Dogs, Family, Friends, Health, Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

I Can See Clearly Now

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Alan. Dr. Gustave. Kate. Angelique. Rigel. Kep. The night sky. A decent night’s sleep. Cool. The Denver Post. Life. In all its forms. Animacy in its unexpected forms. The turning of the Great Wheel. Old friends. The buck in our yard yesterday afternoon.

A Mule Deer Buck jumped our fence yesterday afternoon to eat Grass. Kep and Rigel were outside, wandering around the back, too. Just us animals here. No barking. No disturbed looks from the Deer. Yeah, we all live up here on Shadow Mountain. Our place.

Alan’s coming by at 7:30 to take me to the Cherry Hills Surgery center near Swedish Hospital. Old cataract out, new lens in. Dr. Gustave at the robotic controls. With Kate’s multiple medical procedures, appointments, conditions this surgery seems ho-hum. I’m neither excited nor fearful. Gonna go do it. Come home.

Go back on October 8th. Repeat. Tomorrow I have an appointment with Dr. Gustave. Post-op. Another on October 2nd. Then, post op the 9th. And follow up on the 14th. Then, a month after that. Lots of miles for a better way to see the world. Way worth it.

Used gift cards to buy more easy entrees for Kate. More meatloaf. Mongolian beef. A salad. Easier for me, what Kate wants to eat. Perfect match.

Tomorrow at 5 pm we go to Swedish for a drive thru Covid test. This is for Kate prior to her catscan on Tuesday and the thoracentesis on Wednesday. Hope all this provides her some relief from her extreme shortness of breath.

Continuing the medical theme. Kep sees a doggy dermatologist next Thursday. The last two times we’ve had him defurminated he’s broken out with serious hot spots, lesions on his back. We need to figure this out so we can have him groomed. Otherwise his hair piles up around the house.

Speaking of Dogs. Brenton White, the kind man in Loveland who is caring for Murdoch, had a small tragedy. Seventeen days ago he brought home Mocha, a very cute chocolate lab puppy. Murdoch loved him. They played together. Then, two nights ago, he died. Heart. Likely a congenital anomaly Kate believes.

The Atlantic Monthly sent out an article by e-mail yesterday. Said it couldn’t wait for publication. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s about November 3rd and the potential democratic crisis. The Election That Could Break America.