people are getting on the blogs these days; 24,000 or so saw this one last month, so i want to welcome you if you are new. this particular blog has lots of things on it and i actually wrote a book with some of its stories; mostly however as you see it has my ramblings where i try to keep a sharp mind amidst the daily fog of raising twelve kids in modern america. i keep to small letters to distinguish that i am deliberately in free-form and not professionalizing it for sale or anything else.

24 thousand? that's quite a bit. let me also direct you to the template, which has links to other blogs, and to the lighthouses, which, if you click on them, will always or usually take you to another interesting blog. my main press is a blog; so is my quaker press.

all this is important because seeing all the social media moguls, from facebook, twitter, amazon and the like, lined up behind mr. "truth social" made me sick and severely cut into my motivation to keep pounding the social media and leading people to it. if they are all behind this president and his death camps, they can have him and i'll find another way. now here's a good question: are the blogs any different or better? they're free and have been sitting here for years. this one is one of the oldest ones "out there" and just has tons of things on it, though like i said, mostly my own rambling. i could theoretically make them much slicker and harvest some of these 24 thousand views and turn them into views of my books, which even today doon't sell a whole lot. obviously i'm missing something here. what that is, is that i don't have a commercial bone in my body, but i like to be out here on a kind of public square just running my proverbial mouth, and having it just be a record of my vitriol or my fantasizing. because i do these blogs (there are 28 of them) mostly for myself, and to develop my own ideas, i've managed to keep them going for a long time.

the world has become very hot, sunny, glaring, uncomfortable. we got some mowing, but that's hot too. the car runs hot. i should wait 'til night. and i feel about fireworks about the same as i feel about the circus. they can have it. unfortunately when you have kids, not to mention twelve of them, there's no way you can say, "we won't bother this year." You have to join in a small town gathering

of course they started early, and the pets are already alarmed. such is the season.