not a very good time for writing; too much happening on the home front. a pair of twins happened upon our lives and filled them up. i am retreating ok, sitting with my puppy ok, getting some peace yet still mangled up with the angst of dealing with young lives so badly torn asunder, still unable to relax and, say, upload a photo, or write a story, or better yet a chapter in my book.

in the end we put a seven-year-old in the hospital for several reasons. one was she had almost killed her twin sister, right in front of a social worker. that put it out of our hands, really; but there was more, and in the end we couldn't handle the both of them when one was so out of control. what i'm saying is that there are strong forces at work hoping that we don't spend the next ten years dealing with another mental illness when basically that has been our entire lives for many years, and i for one am exhausted. i try to keep such things out of this blog, but if you're trying to figure out which of my kids i'm referring to you are probably right that it was probably this one, and maybe that one, and that other one too. it's been one after another. and even the totally sane and together ones take it out of us.

enough of that. let me just say that a folk tale, the beauty and the beast, is what i should be worrying about, and i will get back to that as soon as i can. and meanwhile it's spring.

last night was st. patty's day; the hospital was full, people parked in the hallways, people mangled themselves up, apparently, with drinking and whatever they'd been doing being a bad combination. this morning, much quieter; people at the hospital were friendly and a little more relaxed. i'm not sure how much of a burden it was, working st. patty's when it's so busy, like new year's eve, but everyone was professional, if dressed in green, they were still at least doing their jobs.

i however, though not having drunk a drop of alcohol, am totally drained, exhausted, spent. will try and pull it together, and give you a better report.

sunday morning and the house is full of the energy of the seven-year-old twins, the second of whom we took in last week. the first has been with us a couple of weeks and has already changed our lives significantly. but it turned out they were somewhat connected and there was no way to just stand by and watch the second one be shunted from foster home to foster home with trips to the er and hospital in between. so we took her in too.

the pets are of course most alert and responsive to the change of circumstances. there's a little puppy who's been confined to my room because he almost got his head bitten off by the big one, and he's overjoyed at having young girls around to play with and tug things. they come in after him every once in a while because they can't resist the fact that, being small, there isn't much damage he'll do even if they tug him too hard. i'm a little overprotective of him, knowing he won't back down in a fight with a larger dog and also knowing that he will snap at them if they tug him just a little too hard.

we actually had a police incident last night. i came home from door dashing and the second twin was in a kind of rage. she was tearing around the back yard, throwing things, trying to climb the fence, swinging away at my wife who was trying to restrain her. my wife didn't want her to go back into the house where she had apparently thrown things and broken them, etc. the problem was that she wasn't calming down at all and she was resisting all attempts to restrain her. her older sister for a while was helping her but then calmed down and was not really getting involved. but even after we brought up the idea of having her taken away she wouldn't calm down. i advocated for calling 911. for the most part i guarded the gate, keeping her from running down the street, trying not to be the one restraining her. it was remarkably easy staying calm, even after the police officer arrived, even though in some ways i'm at the end of my patience. the police officer was smart and focused straight on the little girl, telling her that kids need breaks to calm down. In the end she calmed down. maybe it was the police uniform. maybe she just needed to see how we all responded to a crisis.

it is this kind of excitement i can live without. there is a natural tendency for two seven-year-olds to feed off each other and get wild very easily, and to some degree that comes with the territory. we knew going in that it would push our limits. we may have to put our foot down though to make sure she's placed somewhere else. it could very easily push us both over the edge if we don't.

they are sweet, and very cute, in their better moments. their older brother, who we've had for more like three or four months, helps to the degree that he can. i think he's more than familiar with girl-wildness in the house, but really hasn't had much in the way of guidance in how to distract and divert them in crisis situations. our sixteen-year-old was very helpful and, in spite of limited skill in other areas, actually was able to focus right on what was important and help the non-aggressive twin come back from panic and hyper-activity. at their age, hyper-activity is their response to many things. one can't blame them for being a little excitable in the circumstances.

their biggest problem is that they keep seeing their mother regularly, and she tells them she loves them super-much but then they can't come home with her. that's because she apparently beat them very badly more than once and there were other signs of trouble being investigated. i can't really claim to know much about the details and shouldn't be putting them all here in any case, so i'll only say that for whatever reason they're not ready to return the kids to their natural parents, though they have made it possible for them to visit as often as the situation allows. and this has sometimes turned out to be too often.

a terrible cold settled in and gripped me for about a week, and also another disaster: my keys simply disappeared from the peg. i was unable to door-dash (didn't want to anyway, being so sick), and we had to have the car towed to moline where they put in another key, almost five hundred total for tow and key job. i was angry about it all week. i figured there were four of us - me, my wife, a son, and his friend, who could have inadvertantly (or advertantly) taken it from its peg, but eventually i had to accept the other three's accounts that it wasn't them, and in fact they never turned up anywhere, nobody was trying to use the garage or house key in the middle of the night. only my wife and i can even drive the honda, it being stick-shift and all. it was all very confusing, missing keys not turning up, and i just had a kind of constant anger which i guess i still have. but we got the car and now at least i can dash. making a tiny bit of money is like my only solace in this situation. and my only psychological escape.

the first came on a saturday so i did all my amazon ratings and my blog visit counts - blog visits are up but as usual i blame it on the weather. there are actually thirty-seven of these, some barely alive, and some totally dead but i keep track of them anyway, and this one is the leader, the one that is totally me, that i post on no matter what.

i'm in a general malaise ever since i saw all the social media boys lined up with their good friend that they elected or got elected or whatever they did. one side of me wants nothing to do with social media anymore though here i am blabbing away anyway, partly because i love blabbing away and don't reallly believe i can hold it in. so i'll let you in on a secret - i'm actually quite radical but i don't believe one can advertise that anymore without risk to one's life and family. but i have other venues where i can express myself and probably will. my temptation is to write in the dust on my car's back window (which i don't use because the main rearview mirror is broken), something like "love that price of eggs do ya?" but i don't even do that. someone will smash my poor little car and i don't want that. it's better to just let the obvious reality come crashing down.

the winter is finally breaking up - yesterday was cold but i think even that is about gone though who knows if it will stay gone. i have a lot of work to do and don't have to rely on social media to make a living or anything else. though i must say, some of my best friends are on there, around the world, writing and doing other things. i'll continue to support friends and family. may even keep kindle unlimited so i can read all kinds of things which i really enjoy. but for my own books, i'm thinking of stressing getting out of the loop and being a little more independent. maybe even stop keeping track of my ratings, and just let them drift. i am, after all, more than my amazon image.

it's a bleak day out there; it's been. snowing since last night, off and on, with it on at the moment, snowing pretty hard but not amounting to much. it will die off in a couple hours, then get very cold, then stay that way and then get colder, according to the weather station. i guess we shouldn't be surprised.

i lead a pretty busy life, usually dashing in the cold, running stuff out to my son about three miles away, sometimes three or four times a day. in this case we made sure he was well-stocked and i don't think he'll pressure us to go to the y, even though obviously on a bleak day it would be good to get some exercise. the driving is bad but i did it anyway, got up, went out there, drove some poor girl over to their house. three miles of pretty bad roads and then three back home again. the bad part is she'll probably need a ride later, and it won't probably get any better.

it's lincoln's birthday, and that makes me smile inside as i remember a history of living in illinois eighteen years before going out southwest. it was a classic stray-dog holiday, because the state honored lincoln but not presidents, and nobody knew it, so they put their garbage out on the wrong day and garbage on the curb for a few days brings the stray dogs. this year, celebration of lincoln is pretty much finished, since we're all about veterans and mlk these days and something has to go. but a nice big snowstorm means they called off school and everyone is sleeping in and not going anywhere. that's what a holiday is supposed to be.

in my promoting i'm really in a funk, just don't feel like getting out on social media at all. not facebook, not bluesky, not x not nothin'. i watch the government being dismantled like a demolition project and it makes me sick, the last thing i want to do is go out there and say hey buy my book. at least half of these people voted for him and what's worse, my people don't really like amazon, and all my ads lead people to amazon. i'm beginning to think it would be better to go entirely indie, away from amazon, yet it's such a staggering operation that i can hardly imagine it. amazon has made it easy - print on demand, only the ones i want for myself or someone else, no waste. i can't imagine how it would work if i really cut that cord.

more later...the night clamps down, traffic stops, but i have one more trip - to pick up the girl, three miles each way. wish me luck.

a week or two into my andrew jackson project and i'm wracked by self-doubt and uncertainty.

first, the gathering and reading was relatively successful. i hauled four or five books out of the library, and opened up one on the computer and one on the phone, and the one on the phone went so well that i'm already quite a bit through it even with a fractured life and more distractions than ever. it's a relief to delve into history when everything else seems so chaotic and democracy is tumbling down.

on the other hand, jackson was himself a racist and a violent one at that, so pretty soon i got to the creek massacre and the battle of new orleans (where i am now) and things will clearly not get better as he will be responsible for the trail of tears and other atrocities. and that leads me to question: do i really want to put my energy into writing about such things? on the one hand it's good to be a historian, to be able to say with authority, i know the differences between jackson and trump, jackson didn't rape anyone, etc. but i can do that by reading alone. writing is trying to put myself in that group of about two dozen biographers who have all taken a crack at his life and tried to put their own spin on it. my spin would of course be unique and would hopefully take the others into consideration. but at the rate i'm going it would take me more like eight or nine months, not two, to really know what's out there. that's a lot of time pondering ruthless racist ethnic cleansing.

one of the rules i've had and stuck to is to write what only i can produce. only i care about my great grandfather, for example, and can pore through crinkly copies of the magazine he produced in 1897. i've put that project aside (it was stalled anyway) but now i'm thinking - it's better, for my own writing, to create unique though admittedly non-best-seller books. the problem is that under financial distress it becomes harder to relax into non-profitable things and i feel the pressure to create something that, even only gradually, would bring in some income to someone sometime. i'm a little discouraged on that front too. if it takes eight months to write this, and then it needs other similar ones to truly get off thhe ground, how is that helping anyone? i'd be better served writing a novel if i can just focus on it long enough to finish it.

the hardest thing about the jackson project is that i can't really write anything yet, and won't be able to for quite a while. i have trouble picking up print books these days and getting information out of them, but have trouble taking notes on other things too - in other words, time is catching up to me on my quest to become a true, careful, methodical historian.

it could be that i started out by going in the wrong direction. i chose jackson because i already knew quite a bit about him, and i do. but he's a guy that has a couple dozen biographies already - some three volumes - and reams and reams of historical scholarship. if i started with a guy like harding there would probably be far fewer biographies; therefore i could have a unique product fairly quickly. i don't feel the need to be exhaustively thorough, but rather just accurate, and to be like a gateway for people who want to study an era or the management of the government throughout a period of time. i delved into the early 1800s to get my mind off what's happening today, and it worked, but how much government-management can a person take? every time i get back to the news it's some other government office being dismantled or put to the wrecking ball, so that trump can give his millionaires another raise. does reading about the massacre of the creeks help this? no not really. nor would reading about harding helping sell the government off to his business cronies. it would just show that what we're going through isn't completely new.

so i have an existential crisis about how i could be spending my time, besides driving kids around. ayubba.

things are picking up since a little girl was dropped in our household, a temporary foster child but nevertheless #12 and a sister of #11 who we fostered a little bit ago. while #11 is 16 years old, almost through high school, this little girl is still in elementary and has a long way to go, so we might not be her best option, me being 71 and all. for her it's like being brought up by your grandparents. but we're her fifth or sixth placement in less than three months. could be trouble.

on the writing front i started a project to write a biography of andrew jackson. i did this because delving into the 1820s is one way of not becoming too grieved at the wrecking ball that is being used on our own democracy today. jackson was also a fighter, a power-grabber, but he was more of a man of the people, and never raped or assaulted women as far as i know. he also was a soldier, not a draft-dodger, but enough history, the point is, by knowing a little of this, and lining them up a little, i can put them in perspective and get on with my life. i find that ten or fifteen minutes of the 1820s is enough to help with the fact that i will have to, and will, read the daily news one way or the other.

more later...

recent trip

-cochlear implant report - three months have come and gone and i went to iowa so they could examine my progress. they measured my hearing, both with and without, and said i was doing as expected and all was well. researchers did a number of tests and actually provided me with a hotel room in coralville so they could do more tests. at one point one researcher asked me how it was going, and i said, pretty well, and he said, i was nervous about asking because i asked one person and they broke out in tears.

so here's a more accurate overall picture. this device connects to my head by magnet and sometimes comes loose when i take off a sweater or brush my arm against by head. the device has a battery that i charge every night and that lasts almost fourteen hours; it's kind of a pain if my day lasts fourteen and a half (which it does) or fifteen, but the alternative is charging it during the day or switching over to another battery midstream which is difficult but not impossible. when it runs out of battery it makes annoying beeps and then simply dies. i have to get used to this.

there are plenty of times when i am using only the CI (on the left), or only the old hearing aid (on the right), and therefore know how much i catch with only one of them. in general my brain is becoming more accustomed to relying on the CI because it's better for picking out exactly what people say. the hearing aid is simply an amplifier for what is already unclear. they told me that in a year the right will probably be ready too but they'll take it as it comes and not make plans; also, that it takes about a full year for me to adjust completely to using and relying on a CI but that I am on the path to doing it.

deep under my skull an implant is picking up electric signals from the device and transferring them to my brain which is now responding to electric signals as opposed to just noise. the part deep inside my brain actually responds to other things too which means i get some signals from moving my hand near my ear, pressing on my ear lobe, etc. it's kind of like picking up radio waves in your fillings. these signals used to scare me in the shower because i was afraid my CI was still on, but it wasn't, wasn't anywhere near it. these sounds are not too bothersome but they couldn't explain them and said they would do their best to find out. i'm just curious - how can simple air movement, for example drying my hair with a towel, or pressing my hand on my skull, activate that little electric prod down there. it doesn't affect my daily life that much though, so i'll drop it.

as a door dasher i'm often in the situation when i'm in a crowded room and still have to hear what somebody is saying to me. often it is, "there's a drink with this too," or "don't forget the barbecue sauce," but whatever it is i need to hear it. i do better with the CI than with the hearing aids. i'm back in the game, so to speak. which was the point.

it's cold, very cold. like ten, or less, and i don't think it will last long, but it has lasted a while and i think some people are becoming a little loopy. it's hard to live with this stuff. for example, when i woke up this morning, there was a brand new inch of snow on the ground. it was hard to tell how badly it messed up the drivers outside my front window; they seemed to be going their usual 35 in spite of it, and in spite of the fact that it's a brick street, sometimes quite slick. i watched them for a while. finally i got out in it. the driving wasn't all that bad; most of the main roads are pretty clear, hard-salted. but it was unpleasant. cold, slippery, iced over in many places - especially the side streets.

the sun came out and gave us a hand - it melted and dried a lot of the snowy fluff on the street that would have otherwise frozen into ice. another day or two of sun and it'll be back to normal.

but what is normal? here we are in mid-january. normal is bleak. it's winter.

i'm about to put the beginnner's guide to quakerism out into the world. it's a pamphlet; actually i have been printing it for four years. it was written primarily by maurine pyle, an old quaker friend of mine who died, maybe two or three years ago. i printed it at home for a while but my printer got worse and worse. finally in frustration i put it on amazon, but then i found a printer who would do them for cheap. other printers ignored my inquiries or have just sat on it for a while. that's how you can tell they don't really want to do it. it's radical religiously - they already know that without reading it - and maybe in their hearts they just don't want to be cranking that kind of thing out. but a press i found was willing to do it - and ship it from oregon. i'll work on setting it up tomorrow.

in the bitter heart of winter, i think of my parents. both died in january. i'm not even clear on the exact dates - my father, i think, on the 20th; my mother, a few years earlier, on the fourteenth? not sure, but that would make my mother's date tonight. we were there when she took her last breath. her mind had preceded her. she no longer knew who we were. she heard a car just outside, waiting to take her; she wanted to go with.

las cruces at that time, mid january, is actually quite pleasant. that's whhy people go to live there. at night it's cool, maybe a nice breeze. didn't matter, we were in grief. my father at the time was actually angry. how can you be married fifty years and have somebody not know who you are. well it happens, it happens in nature, that's how it happened. he got over it; he even had a girlfriend, but i think he was still angry. you can't take it personally; i tried not to.

went out to drive out to my son's trailer; it's three miles. sooooo cold. i didn't feel like hanging around. one of the kids wanted a ride somewhere to pick something up. sorry, it's after ten, i don't want to make one more trip out here. it's toooooo cold. the street was solid ice. it was still; nobody outside or around. not sure my son likes it out there. but it's really hard on us when he's in here. everyone is trying to figure out how to make it in this world. it's not easy when it's ten degrees. saw one lady walking; another was homeless, at the caseys. ouch. i'm glad i'm not them.

it sometimes seems like a cruel world. more accurately, it's just a world where if you don't know anyone, it seems really cold. slowly we've come to know the place. it's just a town. it will hopefully feel warmer, as time goes by.