The King Was In His Counting House

That's my sign saying,
"Honk if you love democracy"

At dinner on June 14, 2025, the day of massive rallies nationwide against the excesses of the Trump regime, I discussed events with the Common Household Husband.

Me:  Alt National Park Service estimated, at around 2 PM, that attendance at today’s No Kings rallies had already exceeded the 5.5 million for the Hands Off rallies.  That’s nationwide, and only half-way through the day.

CHH:  But was it more people than attended the 2017 Presidential inauguration?

Was it more people than watched Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg address on public TV?

Was Frederick Douglass in attendance today?

Me, lamely:  Um, was it more people than the number of tacos served at Mar-a-lago?

CHH:  Were there any taco stands today?  Was the taco the official snack of the No Kings rally?

- - - - - - - - - -

On No Kings Day I went to a small, unpublicized sidewalk rally 5 minutes’ drive from my house.  Because of annoying but non-life-threatening health issues, I couldn’t go to a big rally in the city.  I didn't have time to make a new sign directly related to the No Kings theme.

Despite it being unpublicized, there were more than 60 people participating.  We stood or sat and held our patriotic pro-democracy signs and our US flags for an hour, and then went home.  My arms got sunburnt.  My soul was rejuvenated.  Most of my political activity this year has been calling/writing my US Senator.  A rally is a welcome change from that singularly unsatisfying but necessary kind of communication.

This chart doesn't include any activity in June, because I've been too busy to update the chart.

This year the blue section in the above chart means a hell of a lot of letters and phone calls to my US Senators.  Mainly saying “WTF, dude?!”  One of ’em rarely shows up for Senate votes but has time to travel to a foreign country to suck up to a would-be autocrat/genocide purveyor.  The other spends his time sucking up to our home-grown would-be autocrat and amassing bitcoin.  Both have proved worse than useless.  

My goal was to communicate to at least one Senator once a day but that has proved unsustainable.

Democracy is not saved yet, but it isn’t gone either.  The clown-king has almost installed himself, but not yet. 

For the love of democracy, if you can, please call/write your Senators to stop HB1 the One Big Butt-ugly Billionaire Bailout Bulls#!t Bill.  If the clause in it concerning judges passes, we are one more step closer to autocracy.

Happy Flag Day

Book Review: A Midwife's Tale

 A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  

464 pages (main text is about 400 pages; the rest is appendix and notes) • first pub 1990.  Pulitzer Prize winner in 1991 in the History category.

(For the full First Lines May 2024 edition, follow this link.)

When our children were ages 7, 5, and 1, we all accompanied their Dad (the Common Household Husband) on his business trip to Toronto, Canada.  Daddy went off to his scientific conference all day, while I attempted to drive around an unfamiliar city to take the kids to museums.  We converged as a family in the evening, lining up in our one hotel room like sardines, with no energy left except to watch TV.   The family-appropriate show that we found was a reality-type show (maybe this one?) about a family that lives for a year in a house without any modern conveniences.  The women spent all day just trying to keep the dust at bay.  I can’t remember what the men did.  The family’s existence seemed exhausting and bleak.  

This is the closest I have come to being
a Pioneer Housewife.

The book A Midwife’s Tale, which my sister-in-law, a midwife by training, recommended to me, had echoes of that TV show. 

It's a historical treatise, meaning that the author examines a primary source, the diary of a midwife in (what would become the state of) Maine in the late 1700s-early 1800s.  The historian is able to take the terse diary entries, amplify them with the history of the time, and weave it all to tell the story of a strong, hard working woman.  

The historian author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, was the first to publish the now-famous phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history," writing in a scholarly journal in 1976.  In 2007 she published a book with that title (it’s now on my reading list).  She is a Pulitzer- and Bancroft-Prize-winning historian, a feminist, and a Mormon.

A Midwife’s Tale shows that in late 1700s America, a midwife provided not only her medical skills at a birth, but also her skills generally as a healer.  Martha Ballard attended to many ailments in her community. There was no shortage of additional non-midwife tasks – combing flax, weaving cloth, raising crops, managing livestock, giving birth to and raising her own children, and all of the management of the family and household.

 

In that era, extramarital sex (as evidenced by the resulting pregnancy) was a common thing and not as severely dealt with as I would have thought.  The knowledge of the time said that if a woman pregnant out of wedlock was asked, during the process of giving birth, who the father was, she was incapable of telling a lie in that moment.  It was part of the midwife’s job to ask this question and record the answer.  Often, the birth occurred and then the named father married the mother.

 

Midwives had dominion over the birthing process until forceps were invented, and then doctors (men) horned in on the process.  Doctors (men) also invented the latest up-to-date medical techniques, such as bleeding a patient.

Men working in the kitchen.
My father (on the left) is squatting Pakistani style
(a skill he learned as an infant and child) and
my brother is attempting the squat.
They are shelling nuts or cardamoms
or something for the biryani.

 

I was surprised not to find more in this book about abortions, but that might be for several reasons:

 

The illnesses are sometimes described obliquely.  Often Midwife Ballard would write that the person was “feeling unwell” which could mean: in labor, sick with a sore throat, infested with worms (yup – trigger warning!), or sick with just about anything.  There could be a number of euphemisms used to describe abortion.  (But Ulrich does not say anything about abortions or contraception.)

 I didn’t read the appendix first.  There are 8 pages listing the medicines used by Martha Ballard.  Some of these have uses listed such as

Hops: “bring down the courses”;

Pennyroyal: “deobstruent, particularly in hysteric and other female complaints”;

Rue: Used to promote menstruation;

Maybe the use of such herbs could denote an attempt to end a pregnancy?

 

The late 1790s to early 1800s in the territory of Maine was an era of contention over property rights (between factions of White people – the native population had already been forced away) with some shocking violence, as described in this book.

 

A few other tidbits: It seems that the Boston Tea Party was not the only instance where white men dressed up as natives in order to cause trouble.  Debtor’s prison was a thing, but the debtor could roam the town (to work, eat, drink etc) as long as he stayed the night in the prison.

 

When quoting the diary, the historian maintains the variable spellings of the original text, which makes for slower reading, but at least I didn’t have to try to read 18th century handwriting.  The prose sometimes got a bit dry, but overall I found it to be a fascinating portrayal of a woman important to her community.

Me doing my bit for women's well being. 
Can you tell I was (and still am) furious?

A Pre-Passover Lament

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Seder plate with origami shankbone

The Parable of the Wise Maidens and

 the Foolish Middle-Aged Woman

The holiday of Passover shall be like this:  It shall be one week before Passover; there remain only six days before the feast.  The wise maidens shall take their lamps and their flasks of oil, and seeking out the matzo meal and the eggs, shall begin to prepare the feast. The foolish woman of the Common Household shall confess she has not whipped one egg white, nor soaked one matzo, nor formed one single matzo ball.

The wise maidens have already filled their pantry with the unleavened bread that is Kosher for Passover, while the foolish woman shall go late to seek provisions, and find there remains not one box of Passover matzo.  Lo, all twelve boxes that the grocery store had on display have all been bought by the more savvy maidens who were actually paying attention and looked at their calendars.

Though the Lord God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them in six days, the foolish woman will be hard pressed to see how she can create even one seder meal, with all the requisite parts, in six days.  Her soul shall wax weak and her bones shall be vexed.  She shall spill forth her remorse in a blog post, thus confirming her status as the Queen of Procrastination. 

In days of old, the Common Household Mom would gird her loins and form her battle plans for the Passover meal in the month of Adar. Lo, even before the Purim costumes had been dreamed of, she had mapped out each meal of Passover.  A full three weeks before the Exodus from Egypt, the Common Household freezer would burst in its abundance of Passover bagels, lemon squares, and chicken soup.  Like the wise maidens, she was ready for the feast.

But behold, says the Lord, I am doing a new thing on heaven and on earth.  Half the point of this holiday is that The People left the land of slavery in such haste that they had to bake their bread into forms very like square pieces of cardboard with evenly spaced perforations.  As in days of really old, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, I the Lord will give strength to the weary.  O foolish woman, despite your nasty cold, you shall rise up and begin to whip the eggs.  You shall ask your son to bring matzo that is Kosher for Passover from another town with a larger Jewish population. You shall have the strength of an unicorn, or at least enough strength to make the apple-matzo kugel that is the joy of your husband. 

You shall no longer eat the bread of idleness.  Truly I tell you, you shall not eat bread at all, for eight days (or maybe seven, but who’s counting?).  You will make ready your chariot and get to the store to buy your brisket and matzo ball mix.  You shall find succor in the story of the Israelites, who trusted that whatever journey lay before them, God would be with them. 

And so it is for both the wise maidens and the foolish middle-aged woman:  keep awake, for, at least this time, you do know the day and the hour:  Friday at sundown. 

                                                                                           - The Book of Exertions, 12:1-28

Sometimes with this child, one has to be precise.

Update:  I did manage to get two boxes of Passover matzo, so we'll have enough to get by, if Son isn't able to come through with the out-of-town matzo.

Saying Kaddish for Viktor Frankl

On Friday night I said kaddish (the Jewish mourner’s prayer) for Viktor Frankl, a man I never knew. Just privately without announcing his name, because that would raise too many questions.

Two years ago Facebook asked us to post “ten books that have affected me.”   Usually I have at least heard of the books people mention, if not read them myself. My friend MM said her list included Man’s Search for Meaning.  How is it that I had never heard of this book?  Perhaps because part of its focus is Frankl’s psychology theory, and I didn’t study psychology.  

Finally, this summer, I got around to reading it.  Light summer reading it is not!

The first part of the book describes his experience in Nazi concentration camps and examines the psychology of what happens to prisoners in those conditions.  It’s a short book, 154 pages, but because of the subject matter, it’s not an easy book to get through.

Frankl describes the horrors that he went through in a way that analyzes what is happening to him and the other prisoners.  The prisoner’s psyche descends, as he enters into that prison system of humiliation and death, from shock to apathy, an “emotional death” of sorts.  The struggle to maintain a sense of self-respect became necessary for life itself.

Frankl’s theory of psychology, “logotherapy,” is derived from the Greek word logos, “a Greek word which denotes ‘meaning,’” according to Frankl.  He contends that the primary driver of human motivation is the search for meaning, rather than the search for pleasure or power. 

I remember two cases of would-be suicide… Both used the typical argument – they had nothing more to expect from life.  In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.  …. .  A man who… knows the “why” for his existence will be able to bear almost any “how.”  (p. 88)

I am unqualified to judge Frankl’s theory of psychology.  But I can point out that in the 1920s and 1930s, before the age of 30, Frankl was already working at helping to prevent suicide.

1930   He organizes a special counseling program at the end of the school term, whereupon, for the first time in years, no student suicide occurs in Vienna.                               www.viktorfrankl.org

With the invasion of the Nazis into Austria in 1938, Jews were forbidden to treat non-Jewish patients.

1940 – 1942 He becomes director of the Neurological Department of the Rothschild Hospital, a clinic for Jewish patients. In spite of the danger to his own life he sabotages Nazi procedures by making false diagnoses to prevent the euthanasia of mentally ill patients.    www.viktorfrankl.org

In 1941, with full understanding of the fate that he faced, he turned down an immigration visa to the US so that he could stay with his aging parents.  In 1942 he and his whole family were arrested and taken to the camps.  His wife, unborn child, parents, brother and brother’s wife were murdered in the Nazi camps.  The only other member of his family to survive was his sister, who had escaped to Australia.

I was amazed to learn that after World War II, Viktor Frankl chose to return to Vienna.  He became the head of the Vienna Polyclinic of Neurology.  His second marriage was to a practicing Catholic, so it was an interfaith marriage.  He spent many years as a professor of neurology and psychiatry, and was guest professor at a number of US universities.  He died in 1997 at the age of 92.

So I, a Christian woman, said the Jewish mourner’s prayer for him because he was a person who cared for and about others, in spite of everything that happened to him.  The original title of his book was:

Nevertheless, Say "Yes" to Life:

A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp

Evisceration

Five-gallon bucket with motivational message.

Last Saturday our house had an emergency colonoscopy.  Dr Roto-rooter determined that the house needs a full intestinal replacement.  Disembowelment.  Evisceration. 

Nasty house abdominal symptom, found
in our basement last Saturday. This is
Not Good.

During the past two weeks some things have happened that make me feel that I and my loved ones have been spiritually eviscerated.  Basically, it’s been a truly shitty two weeks.  I’m devastated, angry, perplexed, and appalled. But I am not going to say anything more about that, because:

"I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you!
And now... well, being a Christian woman, I can't say it!

After we handed over large suitcases full of money to the plumbers, the process of disemboweling our only abode began on Tuesday with the jack hammering of large portions of the garage floor.  It took the workers all day.  I discovered that jack hammering affects things in other rooms.

This is what I found in the basement, which
shares a wall with the jackhammered room.
This is where I store extra food, which just
 leapt off the shelves!  Fortunately nothing broke.

Our jack-hammered garage floor

I am really glad I didn't waste any time sweeping
 the garage floor this spring, because they just turned it into this.

The project has proceeded apace.  It seems if you pay people enough money, they will do the job quickly, using space-age techniques where possible.  It’s Friday morning, and we have all new sewer lines in the garage.  We did not find any interesting things, such as casks of Amontillado, beating hearts, or cats, under the floor of the garage.

New sewer line in this direction

And new sewer line in that direction

A photo showing how thick the garage floor is,
with (given the week I have had) what might become
 my new morning beverage, included for size comparison.

Also, there is a new sewer line running from the powder room to this main sewer line.  That job was done without digging, using a technique involving a cloth sleeve impregnated with alien sinews.  The sleeve is inserted in the existing pipe, inflated and then some alien juice is added at which point the alien sinews become as strong and as solid as iron or PVC pipe.  This new pipe can never be destroyed because it is from outer space.  Or maybe it lasts exactly five years, which is what the length of the warranty is.

Today, they are doing a similar alien material procedure on the sewer line leading from the house to the municipal sewer.  I will bet that in five years we will be looking for Sigourney Weaver to help us fight the aliens that will be born in this sewer line. 

I left the house this morning before the plumbers arrived, but came home while they were working on this.   The process apparently requires that the cloth pipe be ironed before being installed.  This is the first time in six years that an iron has been used on our property.  The length of cloth pipe they need ran the entire length of the driveway. 

The neighbors are all highly amused by all this
drama.  Just wait 'til it's their turn!

Dalek in our basement.
Run, before it exterminates you!

The procedure also required them to bring in this Dalek, which I found sitting in front of the clothes washer.  Since Dr. Who is unlikely to show up anytime soon to protect me, I am clearing out and taking myself to a place where I can finally get a cup of hot tea, a mark of civilization which, for me, requires the presence of another mark of civilization, that is, a working bathroom.

Dr Roto-rooter called the substance “resins”.  But I am pretty sure the material is alien.