Thank you! All good news appreciated!

I hope these survey results are correct. The young people (18-29) I deal with in my classes are either apathetic or easily led by misinformation on social media. I fear for our Republic. Every now and then I find one who thinks independently and can see more of the whole picture through their own diligence at finding the truth.

Sorry to invoke your ire, Fred. Mariner gets his news from more than a dozen proven to be reliable news sites on the Internet and deliberately doesn’t watch broadcast news from Fox to Msnbc and everything in between.
The difficulty here is that one must take into account several perspectives at once. For example, Russia’s economy is about the same size as Italy’s. Putin is loosing favor with Russian citizens. Russia has a lot of land that is useless so agriculture isn’t a strength. Putin needs the agricultural base that Eastern Europe provides. He is a dictator so he can prioritize national strategies as he wants. He may well invade Ukraine but the West cannot afford to put a global, internet-driven economy on the line for Ukraine.
What the West can do is shut down Russia’s small and weak economy. As mentioned on the blog, this is difficult for the EU because of fuel dependency.
Putin is an unsophisticated bully. In the long run, this confrontation will only hurt Russia, war or sanctions.
Another perspective makes Putin a mere nuisance because he distracts the US from another nation whose economy is larger than Italy’s: China. The US and China are fighting a war that Putin can’t afford; Who will be this century’s leading economy? Who will control global communication? Who will create the dominant world-wide supply chain?
In short, the US can’t afford to play Putin’s game. It is easier and cheaper to shut Putin down with sanctions so the US can focus on China and the Pacific.

You have exposed the conundrum. Peaches aren’t ripe in May, either. The puzzle reflects why I have had 38 jobs in my life. I am top down to my roots while the world is run by bottom up people. Whole corporations are infected by discombobulated premises for existence and labor away at what they’re doing, not why or how.

In a similar vein–I was the secretary for our church women’s group for the past three years. I kept the minutes diligently for all of our meetings and stored them in the historical file that goes back to the early 1900’s when the group started. We disbanded in December. What was the point of all those minutes? What would be the point of keeping them now? What is the point of any work in the end???

I’m not sure if this is relevant to your peach conundrum or not–but it seemed like it when I started telling about it. And maybe that is the point of everything–things are relevant in their own time. The minutes were important until they weren’t, and corporate profit/loss concerns are relevant as long as the corporation exists. So you need workers (and secretaries) to do the daily work and you need top down thinkers to put it all in perspective when they are no longer in the work force!

But nobody needs peaches that are 127 years old.

This is a great glimpse into the life of a bygone era. Who would ever have thought that department stores would be bygone? It makes me wish that I had been a city child with hucksters (and Hutzlers!) and street cars and family all around. Thank you for sharing this!

I find your memories a lot like the movie,” A Christmas Story” with Ralphie. I am amazed at how different your Christmas was from mine growing up even though we had the same father. My memories of Dad are him buying the Christmas tree way too big. Dragging it home on the top of the car. Realizing after we were home that the tree was 3 feet too tall. Dad trying to trim 3 feet off the tree with a hacksaw because he didn’t own a wood saw, which never went well, and attempting to fit a 3 inch trunk in a two inch tree stand.
What were you saying about only remembering the good memories and forgetting the bad? If you’re right, I’m glad I did.