How do they do that, Lee?

It's sort of a cross between an x-ray and a cat scan. You don't have to be inside the tube, since they were only checking my spine and hips and the imaging device can be focused there, but they made me lie down and strapped my feet down so I couldn't move them out of pigeon toed position.

I've been idly searching for indoor planters for succulents, and I think I must own Totoro and Catbus: [link]

Sounds uncomfortable, Lee, but I hope you get good results.

So I did get a bunch of work done, but still need to finish it up. And kids both got their homework finished before dinner, so they get to file the weekend as a win.

nice, shrift!

We are all the time trying to train people (coworkers, that is) to put important information in the subject line

Our ED titles all his emails as "First name here". Boss man doesn't read past the first two words, gets bored or sees something shiny, never looks at it again, declares you never sent it, admits he doesn't read them, and doesn't apologize. He does this with texts as well. It's four words!

When I was in school our social studies/history teacher would show us a video of the "I Have A Dream" speech every year on the 15th. This year I was happy to hear that my son's 5th grade teacher showed it to her class on Friday, which was of course the 15th.

I've taught this and we have watched it. I also have shared a NYT piece that looks at how the most famous part of the speech is improvised. [link] The part he had prewritten was very different in tone and rhetoric.

But what you can see in the video is after Mahalia Jackson says, "Tell them about the dream, Martin", Dr. King puts the speech aside on the lecturn and from there his language changes. So cool.

Those planters are super cute.

I hope you get favorable results, Lee.

I do not want to move onto cleaning out my kitchen drawers. Maybe I will put that off. I am also having trouble getting myself psyched up to go out to dinner, but if I am going to try all the restaurants participating in Restaurant Week I really need to.

Maybe if I start with feeding the cats I ca keep that momentum going.

~ma for quick and excellent results, Lee.

Aims, those pictures just fill me with joy. I love seeing you with your kids.

I also have shared a NYT piece that looks at how the most famous part of the speech is improvised.

We were talking about that today, Kat.

In the last two weeks I've read two novels that envisaged dystopian futures driven by climate change, The Bone Clocks and The Water Knife. In the former, it appears only in an epilogue. (On the west coast of Ireland. Seems the main trouble was the loss of power from fossil fuels, which I found somewhat unconvincing for the damage wrought.)

The latter is set entirely in said future, in the American Southwest. In its future, the region has become pretty much bone-dry, and the only water source for everywhere from Colorado to California is a somewhat depleted Colorado river. The states have all turned on each other, Texas has collapsed and Texan refugees have streamed into neighbouring states, and the federal govt won't intervene for anything short of civil war. (There's a religious group within the Texas refugees who believe prayer will save them from the effects of climate change. They're called Merry Perrys.)

The bit that has me raising my eyebrows is that in both books, while the West is in slow collapse, somehow China is doing just fine. It's exporting technology, establishing outposts with their own systems and security, and people are hankering to move there. China has suffered huge environmental damage from its rapid growth. Beijing's water table will be completely exhausted within 20 years, climate change is likely to deplete the Yangtze and other rivers therein. Most lakes are too polluted to drink from. It's still massively reliant on coal, which is rapidly running out. And it has an oppressive government with an uncertain grip on the regions, with tens of thousands of incidents of civil unrest per year. And that's today. If the world does get hit as badly as these books make out, China isn't going to survive. It'll break up into regions a lot faster than the West does (and on past history and its current level of militarisation, probably dominated by warlords). If there's a dystopian future ahead, China will collapse well before the West does.

Not sure what to make of it cropping up in both books. It feels a bit Japan-in-the-Eighties, which isn't entirely comfortable.