And Congress did...

For context, I sent a variation of this letter to both my senators and my representative this month, sometime after Renee Good, but before Alex Pretti. If you'd also like to write to your Congresscritters, find out who they are here. Feel free to use the basic points brought up in this letter -- but please use your own words. I believe that's always going to be more effective than passing on someone else's thoughts.

 * * *

Dear Senator,

You happen to be one of my Senators, for whom I voted to represent me in Congress. So let's chat for a bit, shall we, about a small fraction of the things President Donald Trump has done and what Congress has done in response, in the last year alone.

Trump sent Elon Musk and his band of DOGE hackers to "clean up" the "waste, fraud and abuse" in government, rather than doing it the way all sane administrations have done in the past, by conducting a government audit. They broke dozens of useful organizations in the process, including USAID. I've lost count of how many people around the world have starved to death because we summarily yanked food aid to them with no warning. And Congress did nothing.

Trump famously loves "the poorly educated," and to that end he is dismantling the Department of Education and threatening to yank the funding of our world-class research universities unless they bend the knee to him. And Congress did nothing.

Because he presumably couldn't get the military to act against its own people, Trump spun up ICE under the Department of Homeland Security as a band of masked thugs who seem to answer only to him. They have been given a budget exceeding the total military budgets of most other nations. They've done fun things like assaulting and deporting non-citizens without due process, refusing to identify themselves, hassling and assaulting citizens, firing on peaceful protesters, and now murdering an unarmed woman by shooting her directly in the face. And Congress did nothing.

Starting in April, Trump has yanked tariffs around like they're his own personal hot and cold taps, claiming the fig leaf of "national security" to raise the price of everything on every American and make every working day in the United States absolutely unpredictable. His unhinged on-again, off-again tariffs have ruined the American economy, damaged a generation of American farmers, and ground the engines of industry down to an anemic trickle -- and then he has the chutzpah to lie to our faces about how the price of our gas and groceries is getting better, as though his saying so somehow MAKES it so despite the evidence of our own eyes and our wrung-dry bank accounts. And Congress did nothing.

Tariff monies haven't been enough to satisfy Trump, so he has turned the White House into a revolving door of grift, Hatch Act be damned. All anyone, from any organization or government, need do is waltz in and offer Trump a shiny golden cookie of some kind to get a favor done. And because he always wants more cash and cookies and fawning praise, he is constantly whinging about being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he will never deserve or receive, offering to level Gaza so it can be turned into a seaside playground for the rich, threatening and bullying some of our nation's most trusted allies, including Canada and Denmark, trying to get them to cede territory to him solely because he demands it. And Congress did nothing.

He has ditched our allies in Europe as Putin leers hungrily at Ukraine, forsaken Taiwan as China sharpens its bayonets, winked at Netanyahu as Israel commits genocide, and otherwise made America smaller, less powerful, more insular and more focused on grabbing other people's territory in its own hemisphere. And Congress did nothing.

He threatened, cajoled and otherwise bullied everyone in Congress into passing the Big Ugly Bill, which has looted the pockets of the poor and middle class in order to further enrich the wealthy (including himself, of course). And Congress? CHEERED.

He shut down the government for weeks rather than even talk to the Democrats in Congress, cynically pulling food aid to the poorest Americans and financially starving members of the Armed Forces, who went unpaid during the shutdown. And Congress, instead of fighting him, rolled over and capitulated.

He has, through inaction and the vague promise of "concepts of a plan," allowed subsidies for the Affordable Care Act to expire, causing health insurance costs to absolutely skyrocket for the average American. He's allowed Robert F. "Brainworm" Kennedy, Jr. to destroy our public health measures. He's taken the right to choose away from American women and is actively stoking the fires of bigotry against trans people. And you know what Congress did about it? Nothing.

Trump is manifestly one of the unhealthiest presidents in modern history. I don't care what his prevaricating staff and lackey doctors say; anyone with a brain and a pair of eyes can tell he's seriously unwell, both physically and (increasingly) mentally. He is incapable of sticking to the point in a speech, he is incapable of staying awake in Cabinet meetings, and he is increasingly incapable of making sane or logical decisions -- throwing tantrums (and, if rumor is to be believed, ketchup bottles) rather than attempting to reason or think his way out of a crisis. He should be removed from office for his utter incapacity to lead. But you guessed it, Congress. Did. Nothing.

He has been so afraid of the presumably vile stuff in the Epstein files being made public that he's fired back at his most loyal voters, played hide-the-whoremonger with Ghislaine Maxwell, dribbled out highly-redacted sections of the files rather than fully complying with the law, has attempted to smear people he dislikes, torn down the East Wing of the White House, shut down the government, and literally tried to provoke war with Iran and Venezuela -- without getting permission from or even informing Congress of the decision. And guess what Congress did?

Trump undermines the rule of law every day. He does whatever he can to run the country by executive fiat. He has snatched the power of the purse and the ability to declare war away from Congress. He makes friends of our enemies and enemies of our friends. He is making all of us poorer, sicker, less educated and more afraid, each hour he remains in office. He is a mentally unstable stochastic terrorist; far from holding the highest office in the land, he should by rights be serving time in prison for numerous felony convictions. You are a member of a co-equal branch of government, meant to enact the checks and balances that keep despots like Donald Trump from doing many of the things he has already done. Yet every day, as one of our designated representatives in government, you come to work, collect a hefty paycheck and sumptuous benefits, and -- YOU. DO. NOTHING.

What kind of calamity will it take to shift you? Another pandemic? A nationwide general strike? More Americans being summarily executed in the street? Perhaps a major American city being leveled with nuclear weapons by one of our erstwhile allies?

At risk of sounding disrespectful to a duly-elected official: GET OFF YOUR ASS AND DO YOUR JOB. NOW. Before Trump decides he should just run everything from the Oval Office and doesn’t need a Congress any more.

Furiously,

Soozcat

Older than dirt!

Yep, it's that time of year again, and this time I decided I'd put together a cake to illustrate how old I am!

Yes, it's a forest floor cake!

This one was kind of fun to put together because literally NOTHING was made from scratch. The cake is a chocolate ganache mini sheet cake from Trader Joe's. To make "dirt" I whizzed up some cacao nibs, then some hazelnuts, then a few Joe-Joe cookies (TJ's answer to Oreos) in the food processor, and sprinkled bits of those all over the cake. The "twigs" are chocolate baton cookies and the "mushrooms" are Japanese mushroom cookies. And the "moss," which I wish were a little darker and more clumpy, is Malaysian pandan snack cakes processed into crumbs. I guess I could have added some chocolate rocks and some frosting leaves for greater authenticity, but I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out.

Plus it was delicious. I've never had so much fun eating dirt.

Ants

We live in a home built the same year Star Wars released, and it's slanting toward winter in the Northern Hemisphere, so that means one thing: ant season.

Say hello to our leetle "friends"

If you've ever had to deal with ants in your living space, you know they get into everything and can be nearly impossible to eradicate. Most other insects you can just swat, spray or trap and be done, but ants are different. They live in large underground colonies; the ants you see are merely advance food scouts for the entire colony. If you kill them, the colony just sends more scouts. Further, as it gets colder outside, the colony sends scouts into warm human homes where food is always plentiful.

We think the ants are coming up from the crawl space under our home, but we can't figure out where the colony is, and at the moment we can't afford to pay an exterminator.

So it's time to use some strategy. And bait.

Fast-acting poison isn't the best choice against ants -- as mentioned, if you kill the scouts, the colony just sends more -- so it's more effective to use ant bait. Ideally, if you have sugar ants, you need a sweet bait that contains borax, a slow-acting poison. When the scouts find this bait, they can't get enough of it. (A few actually climb into the bait station and drown in the stuff, it's so good.) Then they take their hoard of delicious poison back to the colony. They feed it to other ants. They feed it to ant larvae. And eventually, if we're lucky, they feed a lot of it to their queen.

At first it seems like you're just giving the ants free lunch, because the number of scouts actually increases as everyone goes to the bait station to fill up on the new food source for the colony. But then things start to shift in the anthill. You see, borax makes it impossible for ants to digest food, so they eat and eat and eat and are still constantly hungry. Eventually, when the queen has been fed enough poison, she starves to death -- and the entire colony dies with her.

So, to reiterate: the best way to destroy a colony is to freely offer a substance that tastes like real nourishment, is delicious and plentiful, and is perniciously toxic, slowly making it impossible for the colony to digest anything that's good. And if you can successfully poison the colony's leader, everything else dies.

I can't help but think there's an analogy to be found there somewhere.

The return of the devil pepper

If you do it more than twice, it's a tradition, right?

Halloween has become the time of year when we make special festive stuffed peppers, aka "devil peppers." They're relatively inexpensive to make, and even with my very limited jack-o'-lantern carving skills I can usually still carve some middlingly good devil pepper faces.

This time I bought some tall, skinny peppers, so I opted to fill them boat style instead of top-off style. I wasn't sure how the change of filling style would affect them, but I'm actually quite pleased with the way these turned out.

Y'r Obedient Servant, the Anxiety Devil Pepper

Happy Halloween!

How we got the Charlie

Here is what I think happened.

Late in 2018, someone's pet cat had a litter of kittens. I suspect they were unexpected, but initially welcomed by Mama Cat's human family because honestly, who doesn't love cute little kittens?

Time passed. The kittens' eyes opened. They explored their small world, began to play and tussle. Slowly they were weaned off Mama's milk and began to eat solid food. They were even cuter than they'd been as helpless newborns. And they were loved.

More time passed. The kittens became more independent. They started to range further, play harder. They grew larger, reaching sexual maturity. The females went into heat. And, crucially, the males began to spray stinky urine to mark their territory.

And suddenly they weren't quite as lovable as they'd been as tiny kittens.

Or perhaps it was something more dire. Perhaps Mama Cat's human family didn't have enough money to feed them all. Maybe they'd lost their jobs or were moving out of state. Whatever it was, the humans decided the litter had to go.

I picture them all being bundled into the car during the summer of 2019. Driven some distance away from where they lived, probably at night. And then, close to a city park, they were dumped out of the car and the humans sped off, leaving the teenage cats to fend for themselves in a huge, strange, unfriendly world.

Some of them, no doubt, promptly became snacks for the coyotes who lived in that neighborhood. Some may have died of exposure. Others were likely run over by cars when they tried crossing a busy street. But at least one survived by staying hidden during the day, catching small prey or scavenging in human garbage to fill his hungry belly.

This one, a brown mackerel tabby boy with white ruff and paws, was good at catching mice and rats and ate whatever else he could find. He was always hungry. He itched constantly from fleas, and he stunk because he never had the time or space to give himself a proper bath. He was miserable. But he was alive.

Then one evening as the dusk and cold came on, he found a cardboard box with a hole cut in the side, under the eaves of a human house. There was a cozy shirt inside the box. Maybe it felt enough like his old home to be comforting. He slept there for the night and disappeared again during the day, his survival instincts kicking in as soon as the sky began to lighten.

He returned to sleep in the box for two nights, and on the third night there was another, stranger box placed nearby, this one made not of cardboard, but some kind of tough fabric and hard steel wire. Inside the box was the delicious scent of little silver fish in oil. The tabby boy was always hungry and the fish smelled so good that he forgot to be cautious. And when he entered, the box snapped shut behind him.

The tabby boy panicked. His time on the street had made him scrawny but muscular, and he fought with all his might to get out of the trap. Including dragging the fabric cover into the trap with him and gnawing several holes in it. But the trap held. And in the morning the people in the human house, who had been looking for their own missing cat for over a month, found him there.

They scanned him for a microchip. They looked for a collar. They put up signs all around the neighborhood, at the cat rescues and shelters, and at the vet's office indicating they'd found a cat. They fed him, combed all the fleas out of his coat, cleaned him up, had him altered, and took care of all the vaccines and other preventive medicines pets are supposed to receive. No one ever came forward to claim him.

And so Mama Cat's human family never found out that the 10-month-old male cat they dumped by the side of the road in 2019 would grow up to be the best, sweetest Charlie-cat ever.

Their loss.

It's our handsome Charlie boy, all grown up!

Sorry, it's been a minute

As the little banner in the sidebar points out, this blog is written by a human, not an AI. And this particular human is very, very tired.

What's it like to live in the United States right now? In a word, exhausting. Every day we're jerked around another corner by the madman at the wheel, all of us hoping against hope that he won't plow us all into a brick wall just for funsies. And even as I write this, I recognize that many other people with less social currency than Captain Midnight and I are having it SO much worse under this regime that it seems boorish even to complain about what we've experienced.

Perhaps I'm so tired simply because I know it's all likely to get far worse before it gets better. And I don't know if I'll live long enough to see things improve.

Since November 2024 I have thought, very seriously, about moving to another country. Let's just say there are some logistical issues with the idea. We used money from the sale of my family home to put a down payment on a house in 2022, which means we're tethered here by a mortgage. While Captain Midnight has looked into overseas employment, it's been difficult to find jobs outside the United States where he could command even a small fraction of the salary he was paid last year, and I've been out of the regular workforce long enough that I don't have much by way of useful skills to recommend me as an immigrant. Then too, I'm both a Type 2 diabetic and a bariatric patient, which means I'd have to choose a country where the medications I need to survive are readily available. We're both in our fifties, which means emigration to certain countries is simply barred to us (places like New Zealand, for instance, strongly prefer young families with children). Finally, we stay anchored to the USA because of numerous family members and friends. We're both loath to leave the nation we were raised in, even though it's becoming increasingly difficult to recognize.

I did attend one of the many Hands Off protests that occurred on April 5. That was, actually, quite cheering. The nearby small town I went to had so many protestors in attendance that the main street was completely blocked to vehicular traffic. I know that at least some of the people there voted for our current Dear Leader, so I have hope that the cultlike attitude toward him and his ilk is starting to sour. We'll see.

Blam This Piece of Crap Day: cancelled for 2025

If you can blam the piece of crap that is the current situation in the United States of America right now, well, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.