Category Archives: 2025 Archive

SCAMMED

POSTED: DEC 1, 2025

I was talking to a friend over a month ago who was wondering if he had been scammed. I was chatting with him again this week and the confirmation that he had been scammed was all he could talk about.

Scamming has become an ever-present component of daily life today. Now I am not talking about the big security breaches that occur from time to time that result in our information being shared and potentially then turning into some big problems later. While these can be devastating at the time for the most part the organization that was the victim of the breach is the one who will correct it or provide compensation for the problems that ensue.

No, I am talking about the scams that we may as  individuals unwittingly entered into. In some cases, it is those times when we have incorrectly clicked “download” or “scan” or any other click trick that is presented and we are now into a world where we have let someone into our digital financial world. Most of these online scams are “pure” scams – there really is no service or product that will ever be delivered, but we are paying for.

But long before the cyber scams out there and what still dwarfs that industry in scale is the conventional unfulfilled or over priced contract scam. Whether it’s the old time door to door sales where a slick sales guy convinces the 1950’s homeowner they need a new vacuum or the similarly slick sales guy in 2025 who convinces the homeowner to get their furnace ducts cleaned, carpet cleaned, eavestroughs blown out or water heater replaced and either the service never occurs or the water heater that is replaced is very overpriced for the model it is.

Recently a friend who was concerned about her water quality was looking at a water softener and a reverse osmosis system and solicited a few quotes. One of them was from a very nice young guy representing what looked like a very legitimate business.  After doing some water testing in her home and demonstrating his extensive knowledge of the topic offered her a package that would cost just short of $10,000 CDN  but would include a ten-year supply of cleaning products!  The same system she put in with another installer for less than $3,000 CDN and is happy to buy her own cleaning products.

There is also a category of this that is the classic renovation scam. In this one the sums are large and the scammer wants lots of funds up front, and actually shows up and starts to do some work but at the point where most of the materials should be showing up on site the contractor is making excuses about the supply chains or the weather or his bad back. These operators will keep making up excuses for not coming back until they stop making excuses and are just not available. The amounts are usually just under the amount that is beyond the tipping point of the recovery costs as all legal fees, court costs etc. are expensive and these operators have usually shielded themselves legally as well. So do you spend $10,000 on legal fees to get a judgement against the contractor for $15,000 that he will probably never pay? Most people will not pursue it given that math. And the scamming contractor continues on with his program scamming others the same way.

It is exactly this kind of scam my friend was caught in. A contractor who was recommended by a acquaintance, was “able to fit the project into his busy schedule” on the basis of a really short build time where the materials would all have to be ordered immediately, and he could pull in some trades for a quick job if they were paid a portion ahead and the whole job would be done over a couple of weeks. So my friend paid out a lot of money for the materials and the prepayment to get the trades during a busy season.

And then…. almost nothing happened. My friend was livid and hounding the contractor to get the project going as all the dates for various components were now being missed.

And then…. almost nothing happened. But finally after a lot of conflict,  the contractor showed up and got a bin on site and started to dig the excavation. But almost as soon as he did this he also requested another tranche of funds as the contractor was in a financial bind and did not have enough cash available to pay the final bill on the materials ordered and their delivery was imminent. My friend foolishly complied, and also paid more money toward some other exterior painting services partially because the contractor also was talking up a medical ailment that had held him up from completing another job and my compassionate friend fell for this lie.

A month after the whole project was to be completed based on the original schedule but had hardly been started…..again, nothing happened. After another big fight with the contractor my friend was able to get back $2,000 from the contractor as the deposit on the painting as it was now late October and the exterior painting season in Canada had passed. My friend hoped this would be a reset on the relationship and the project would now progress but after three months of these delays from the original start date, began to gear up to start the legal process against the contractor.

The roller coaster ride of wondering if he had been scammed, but hopeful that something would occur, was heightened as small bits of the excavation were being completed each day and it was clear the contractor was just trying to stretch it out. So he prepared a Demand Letter for the contractor and the day he was ready to present the letter…. a big ready mix concrete truck showed up and the floor was poured. My friend was shocked but very pleased and keen to have a meeting with the contractor to talk about the next stage. But the meeting for looking forward to the next stage did not happen. The contractor showed up for the meeting looking for more money for the work that had just been done, even though it had already been paid for. The contractor chattered on about cost overruns and premiums charged for concrete in the cold weather and because my friend had been so compassionate about the contractor’s health previously it was shared that he had stage four cancer. My friend did not need to review the medical records to know this was more nonsense from a person who had set out to scam him from the beginning, and threw him off the property and changed the locks on the house and began the legal process.

You might think to yourself that my friend is a bit of an idiot and not familiar with contracts, with human nature or with construction.  But while he certainly did exercise bad judgement with this person, he is quite seasoned in renovations, construction, contracts and dealing with contractors. If it could happen to him it could happen to all of us.

Since starting the process of chasing the contractor for the funds provided other victims have come out of the woodwork. The person who had recommended him originally, and had been pleased with the initial work the contractor had done for her was also later scammed. Fifteen product suppliers are all owed money, and a group of property owners in one new housing project who were also all scammed at the same time have now surfaced.

To my knowledge I have never been scammed. That relates partially to rarely having much cash or credit available, and also partially because I live a very modest life. But to hear my friend who has now been down this road, I understand how it can change a persons perspective. Some people will never recover from a scam – financially or psychologically. And often there are other scammers who will sweep in when it is learned that a person has been victimized and offer to help for a fee – another scam.

As so many things challenge my notion that the world is a wonderful place and is getting better, more of these disappointing trends appear. But it’s a beautiful day, we have consistent winds today and I am going to round up a few friends and take En Plein Air out for a sail.

Django

THE WORLD SERIES

Posted, October 31, 2025

As I write this the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays are gearing up for game six of this years World Series. As a person with one foot in Europe and one in Canada and having grown up in Canada of course I am rooting for the home team. The truth is, it is our only professional baseball team in Canada at this point. And that is a bit of comment on the whole nature of this being a “world” final sporting event. Outside of the United States and central America the sport only exists in pockets around the world and has had a long legacy of being challenged as an Olympic sport as a result. Not dissimilar to basketball in that regard. So the name World Series is somewhat aspirational in nature but as it is a business they get to call it whatever they want. It’s not that different to some places in the world with replicas of the Eiffel Tower claiming to be the largest Eiffel Tower in world. Sorry kids, there is only one Eiffel Tower.

Like other Canadians I am totally enthralled in the fight and hoping “our” team, which usually consists largely of Americans, Cubans, and many from central America will defeat their team of similar national heritages, with a couple of Japanese players as well. Not a lot of Canadian Content in what many are dubbing our “national” team.

For some it also has a political layer. Canada is under siege from Mr. Trump and his tariffs and threats to take over Canada and make it the fifty- first state. It has hurt us a lot, and to have a Canadian team be potentially winning this very American of games is a sweet irony.

We also ignore that as a professional team, these players may at times be a “team” but ultimately their agents will remind them that at contract time they only negotiate one on one.

But these points aside, I do love to watch any sport that is played at a high level. And this is certainly an example of that. I don’t know much about baseball but watching what some of those pitchers can make a ball do, is only a bit short of the cartoon pitches where the ball goes around the batter a few times before finding the catcher’s glove.

I was sitting watching the game and found myself having to google various terms of course. I started with slider and the references were all to hamburgers, another American thing.

Like everyone else who is enthralled by this competition right now, we know in our hearts and minds that the horrific treatment of Gaza continues, that Putin has not let up in Ukraine and that most economies are struggling. But that gets turned off for a moment while we focus on this. It is like the few times I have been sitting in procession of cars travelling from the funeral home to the graveyard and watching kids playing, birds singing and people seemingly not realizing I have lost a loved one. We all live in many worlds and for our own mental health need to have some things that give us pleasure, even when we know the bigger picture may not be as rosy. My parents told me stories from some happy times from their youth as kids and when when I looked at the dates involved realized it was in the Depression.

As the underdog, the Blue Jays are similar to that championship Toronto Raptors team from a few years ago. A few veterans, some rookies who had been cleverly acquired and more than a few overlooked seasoned players on a comeback. This is the team fighting the all- powerful team with the funds to buy the best players in the world. Sounds like a movie script to me. Probably a Hollywood production but shot in Canada.

Go Jays go, and Happy Halloween!

Django

SIMPLE & COMPLEX

POSTED: OCT 1, 2025

I like simple…. I  like complex….

But my relationship has changed with these two concepts as I have aged.

The two terms are not as binary or mutually exclusive as I once thought. Most things exist in both realms but sometimes the significance of something is whether you choose to evaluate the complex elements or ignore them for the simple impact or big picture. All about the forest and the trees at times and at other times very much about the trees.

Part of what looking at the complex gives us is depth as we dive in the various layers of almost anything – whether it’s the detail of a design or the hidden reasons for behaviour. And another key component of complexity is context. Yes, our old friend context is always critical and in any equation with many factors, it is that context that matters.

As I age, I see this distinction in simple and complex in almost everything.

Electric cars are better than gasoline powered cars when it comes to carbon emissions. But dig deeper and depending on the source of the electricity to go into the car battery (eg generating electricity from coal vs generating it from solar or wind power) plus the loss of power in the transmission of the electricity from source to the location of the charger and associated environmental damage from that transmission, plus the issue of the extraction of minerals to create the batteries, plus there is no current way to deal with the batteries once they come to the end of their life, and we realize the real environmental equation is not so simple.

Or you can respect a person for one set of skills and in simple terms consider them a friend but dig a bit deeper and you may not respect them for their life choices.

During an election a few years ago, I asked a friend why he had a particular politicians sign on his lawn. He explained that he had followed the politician stand on many key pieces of legislation and did not agree with all the policies of the party that the politician represented, disliked the politicians ambition and a variety of his personal traits.  But on balance – it was simple – the other candidates were worse.

My head spins today when I watch the news. I once believed I understood the world, with its simple truths, and complex issues but today realize it was probably my ignorance that led me to the conclusion that I understood it. The wisdom to come to that conclusion I think like most things is both simple and complex. As I bury friends and watch the world decay, the complexity of it is right before us and we have access to dig deep into almost any topic very easily, but I find myself valuing more of the simple things. A nice day, homemade jam on a fresh baquette, a nice chat with a friend or a refreshing swim. I can choose complex on my time and on my terms.

Django

LOVE

POSTED: SEPT 1, 2025

I am quite intrigued by language, and as I am really only proficient in English that is where I spend most of my adventures in exploring words and wordcraft.  One that is a perennial favourite for me is the word LOVE.

Now I know that many other languages tackle the broad notions that the English word Love covers by breaking it down into other words or variations on a word, so that would be a more sophisticated way to go. But English – no way, we use it as a positive emotional catch-all.  It relies on the context to put things in perspective. So you might love your grandpa and love a cheeseburger but it is the context that we have to apply to know that you don’t love them in the same way or on the same scale.

It is also interesting how putting a word before or after it gives it a new set of meanings – making love, for example is not necessarily really about making or love.

As a result of this broadness of application, the significance of the word is often diluted as it is so overused, whether in the sale of consumer products or as a general term for affection of some kind.

But that same broadness of application and dilution in some contexts makes it more special in some contexts. In the dating world (yes, I am dating myself for using such a term) the word is not used lightly as it has profound implications. So all of the throwaway references to loving the new soap you are washing your clothes in or loving the new improved garbage bags, may be liberally used in all contexts other than the person who you might actually be in a relationship with, but not want to add that layer of seriousness or commitment to. So, the word gets tucked away for such purposes only to come out when triggered.

And why am I riffing off on such a subject today? Well, an old friend I ran into on the internet and we got to chatting. Some backstory might help to understand her relationship with the word love. I knew her as we were both working in the kitchens of cruise ships fifty years ago. Yeah, fifty years – a while back. And in the mid 1970’s relationships were quite fluid, where the level of commitment was a very wide spectrum. But within that love the one you’re with world, people still would find themselves in committed wonderful deep relationships. So my friend, on a few occasions in her life had encountered men who chose to share with her that they loved her. And on each occasion once her partners opened that can of worms they could not handle her response. As soon that as soon as one of those lads would reference that he loved her she would be out of the relationship. She would also be in a mess, in that she had valued the person and saw a future with them but the word had a real stigma for her. I never knew why and one of the guys who was a fallout of this phobia I knew quite well and he was so messed up by the rejection, left the cruise ships and joined a cult. Yes, another strange characteristic of the times.

I was never really close to her and have not kept in touch very well over the decades so it was strange for her to relate to me why she had a problem with someone expressing their love for her. I had made up in my imagination that it might relate to a bad experience with a stepfather or weird uncle and learned that yes, it was in fact a family relationship not the kind my imagination had conjured up. No, her problem stemmed from being a real monster as a kid, much like myself, and hearing from her mother throughout her life that she was loved. From an early age she realized the statement had an unsaid back-half of the sentence like “I love you, …..despite being a mean-spirited little bitch that has caused nothing but pain and hardship for your father and I and your siblings”. When she dropped rocks off an overpass onto the windshields of the cars below at twelve and trashed a corner store at fourteen and stole a car and then crashed it in her later teens, was all before she really ramped up the bad behaviour further in her late teens, each time her mother would start the conversation at the Principals office, Police station, or hospital with I love you or You are loved.

But I realized that after all this time, her sharing this with me, a person who she had not chatted with in about a decade, was an indication that she was moving forward, understanding her emotions better and putting it all in context. We are all just trying to figure ourselves out, and some issues take longer than others.  She was also happy to chat to find out if I had an email for that mutual friend from decades ago. It was not to reconnect in some romantic way but to explain to him why she had treated him the way she did and to apologize. Good for her.  I did not have an email but sent her the contact for someone who I expected would have it.

Django

ETHICS & THE KISS CAM

Posted: August 1, 2025

A couple weeks ago at a Coldplay concert outside of Boston, a couple were seen on the Jumbotron (kiss cam) in a warm embrace. It was heartwarming to see two people enjoying themselves at the concert and in their enjoyment of each other. Then the fellow ran off when he realized they were onscreen. Chris Martin “called it” of course… either very shy or in an affair, and before long this was all that was on the internet. Apparently, it was more important than the slaughter and starvation by Israel of the people in Gaza, or the relentless bombing of the Ukraine by that regions war criminal, or the dismantling of the last shreds of equality in the United States with One Big Shitty Bill.

The world was seemingly mesmerized by what turned out to be a tech executive with his company’s head of HR. It was quickly revealed that he was a married person so beyond the obvious inappropriate unethical corporate behavior this was also a personal moral failure.

But what intrigued me was the coverage that followed over the next several days with many commentators suggesting that what someone does in one aspect of their life is not relevant to their corporate life. There is a term for people with such ideas – stupid.

If a person is prepared to cheat on their most significant partner, and ignore the honesty needed in the most important of relationships, we can only expect that they will also be prepared to cheat on items with similar gravitas – business partners, their taxes, their finances etc. Now I am not trying to put  ignoring a  parking meter as the same as murder, but the decision making that goes into an immoral or unethical decision, particularly an ongoing set of immoral or unethical decisions and the deceit that is required to maintain the coverup, is a decision maker you don’t want on your team, or managing anything, let alone investors money, or the security of your personal identity.

I certainly have made mistakes in how I have dealt with others at times as well. And I don’t know this fellow’s situation and the nature of the relationship he has with his wife. What I do know is that when I see the level of discourse on whether it should affect how we think about him as a decision maker, it is another piece of evidence our society is falling apart, and that there is a growing percentage of the people we share the planet with who are very confused about how to conduct themselves and interact with others. Perhaps this is how we ended up with Trump.

Django

CANADA DAY

POSTED: JUNE 30, 2025

Canada Day, JULY 1,  has always been a big thing to me. Like many Canadians I have had grandparents who were from somewhere else, and at least one parent who had chosen the country to call their new home.

We have gone in phases of course with many who will hyphenate their heritage and loyalties, Italian-Canadians, Irish-Canadians etc. but today with the threats to the country so real, and the challenges so great, it is exciting to see most of us just dropping that hyphenated portion and be proud of the country we have chosen.

Like the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems, some of our own making. Top of that list is our conflicted history with the Indigenous Peoples. But I think we are on the right path to reconciliation, even if it is early going.

I will be celebrating the day with a lot of Canadians and Canadian supporters on En Plein Air, here in Malta. I will be doing some cooking of course. There will be maple syrup, and various Canadian products. Its hard to source many of them in Malta but there will be a lot of Canadian Wines and Beer and some Alberta steak and some seafood from the Maritimes. The only thing I wont be serving is Poutine. I have always just found the combination of fries, gravy and cheese, gross. The soundtrack will range from the old stuff – Rush, Joni, Guess Who, Mr. Young of course, through the years of The Hip, Rough Trade, Sarah Mclachlan and then into the current crop but all in a mix, much like our country.

The attire will include various shirts involving the Maple Leaf, with several hockey shirts in the crowd.

We will end the evening with some Canadian Ice Wine, butter tarts, Nanaimo bars.  The weather in Malta will be a great day and we will probably spend part of it out anchored off Gozo.

I have hosted this party before and with some certainty can set out clearly how the day ahead will go. I can’t however predict the future for Canada, but like all Canadians will have my elbows up, ready for what comes next.

Happy Canada Day!

Django

COINCIDENCE

POSTED: JUNE 1, 2025

Any regular visitors to this website know that I don’t understand exactly how everything works in the world. There is some stuff that escapes me – almost everything in the world of science for example! But the other things that often have me baffled, just when I think I have a good handle on them, are the things that occur in life.  Coincidence is just such a notion. Sometimes its serendipity, sometimes neutral and sometimes bad, but regardless of the context I always find it more than a bit spooky.

Ian Fleming wrote (and I am paraphrasing) “something occurring once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action”.  Well, this week I was talking to my buddy Jim and he told me about just such a situation. Actually enemy action is not exactly accurate but some serious overlaps in events.

End of The Road Ukulele Group, Gardens Hotel, Key West

It started with his partner Janice playing with her Ukulele group in Key West about six weeks ago before Janice and Jim made the tough  decision to head back to Canada early. The ukulele players range from professional to recreational musicians who play in various parks, pubs, and at events just for the fun of it. The ukuleles when played en masse are quite a formidable sound. So, a couple of weeks ago after playing in a pub one night for about sixty people and then playing a few days later at an outdoor garden party that was a fundraiser for local worthy cause they found themselves at an evening event to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the HINDU, a fine old wooden hull schooner that had recently been rebuilt and this was the relaunch. Various nautical and sea focused songs were performed and it was a good time. The day had seen all sorts of musical acts, and various tributes and stories about the fine old boat and this was one of the last of the acts to perform.

Now Key West is a small community so it was not really a coincidence that they were playing there as one of the ukulele players was related to the owners.

 

 

End Of The Road Ukulele Group Paying Dockside At HINDU Relaunch

 

What was a coincidence however is that the HINDU was the boat that my buddy Jim and Janice went on in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1978 as part of their honeymoon. I don’t have any pictures of them on the boat at the time but Jim had a couple of shots from their honeymoon trip camping through New England.

 

1978 Janice & Jim Honeymoon Camping Trip

 

I had heard about this fine old wooden schooner.

The reason is that more than one person had mentioned it too me as it was one of the few schooners left that had been designed by William Hand, a naval architect in the United States. The reason it had been referenced to me more than once is that my boat, En Plein Air is a William Hand designed powersailer with a pilot house design. There are only a handful of these boats left on the planet.  This Naval Architect William Hand was much like the architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh in Glasgow who when designing a building, would also design the crown molding, baseboards, casing and backband, windows and lots of little details like little nooks for books or space for a vase of flowers and the furniture for the place.

 

 

 

She is a 1925 gaff rigged schooner, but looks like she was just built. And that’s because of the magnitude of the refit she just went through. Her owners offer sailing charters in the winter in Key West and in the summer in Provincetown.  On her way north during the pandemic at about 3:30 in the morning she hit a submerged keel boat and did significant damage. During the pandemic a lot of owners of large keel boats that were financed were sunk to collect the insurance. The owner of this one had created the holes in the hull and air chambers to make her sink but had neglected to put holes in the water tanks and sewage tanks, that were partially filled with air, so when the keel boat “sank” it was only to just below the surface and when the Hindu hit it might have well been running aground for all the damage done.

So after a long time, and considerable cost  the Hindu is better than ever and has a new lease on life.

I love the fact that in this crazy complex and huge world, there are some things that just continue to have ties to other places, times and experiences and it is those connections that make them all the more significant to us.

Django

 

 

P.S. Just as I was posting this, I got an email from my buddy Jim who is now back in Canada from Key west but wanted to tell me that  he and Janice went out for a sunset cruise on the HINDU, just  a few days before they left the island, for the drive home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think it was particularly poignant  for them because with Trumps declaration of economic war with Canada they will be challenged by the question of whether to return to Key West, a place they love and have friends who are important to them.

QUILTING MEMORIES AND MEMORY QUILTS

POSTED: APRIL 1, 2025

Regular readers of my little posts may recall that last August I did a post on Tulip, the Dutch Sheep Dog who was part of Janice and Jims family and who passed last summer.

Tuli had been a wonderful part of the family and at one point in the grieving process last August their daughter Jade came up with the idea of making quilts from Tuli’s scarves. To some this may sound like an ill-conceived plan, but not in this circumstance. You see as a very long-haired dog, grooming (brushing out that long hair) is necessary every week, so fifteen years ago when they decided to get another long haired type, Janice and Jim contracted with a local groomer to bring her in every week. Most weeks would just be a brush out and every two or three weeks would be the more complete “spa day”. LOL.

The groomer they chose had a policy that any dog in for grooming regardless of the type of service, would go home with a little scarf around their neck. A nice treat for a pup who occasionally goes to the groomer. But in Tulips case, even with them going south for a few months in the winter, where that Key West groomer did not put scarves on the dogs, fourteen years of weekly scarves creates a lot of fabric. And of course, its not just fabric, they were scarves that Tuli would wear and that family members would have memories of her.

But lots of fabric scarves don’t make a quilt without some effort. That pursuit is one that Janice, who studied fashion design, had her own fashion label and continues to have textile art as part of her art practice, has down. She had made many quilts in the past and vintage quilt patterns are ones that have been part of her inspiration for her painted pieces. She does abstractions of quilt patterns with acrylic paint on Baltic birch panels or vintage ironing boards.

So they set off to learn to make quilts with their mom. They both had a background in art and design but neither of them had ever used a sewing machine or learned any textile art techniques. From August to December 2024 they worked away on their quilts every Sunday with their mom while Jim would work on dinner and get them coffee and help out where needed. The process had much in common with an Irish Wake. As they would work on their quilts the stories of Tuli’s life would spill out, some with laughter, some with tears.

By late December when Janice and Jim packed up to go to Key West the quilt tops (the detailed part) of each of their quilts were finished and all that remained was for them to start up on the project in the spring when their parents would make it back to Toronto.

But parallel with this exercise Janice was doing one of her own. It started much later than Jade and Jason as in the early weeks she was teaching them techniques, but by the middle of autumn Janice was at it full time, hoping to finish in time to enter an art show in Key West.

That art show she has been in before, called From A Woman’s Hand.  It is held at the Custom House Museum, a fine old brick structure that is home today to a lot of key west historical art and memorabilia including a significant collection of Mario Sanchez Intaglio wood carvings. I will do a piece on that at some point.

So the quilt was finished and lovingly packed up for the trip south and shortly after arriving she learned the judges had liked it and it would be in the show, running from Mid January into April. Here are some images from the show.

Custom House Museum, Key West

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Django.

THE TURN

 

We all know the turn. Its that point when everything shifts -often in a significant way. In the book where the protagonist is seemingly losing whatever battle has been waged but then some event occurs and that underdog is now moving ahead.  Optimists look for the positive upswing, pessimists know there will always be a downswing.

In the ebb and flow of most things the turn occurs and when it is a dramatic turn well that’s something we can’t take our eyes away from.

Usually most of us will have an interest in some big world events that are going well or not, and at the same time some personal things, health, happiness, financial security, love, that will be going well or not, but the whole thing is a mixture of some aspects getting better and some getting worse. It keeps us on an even keel psychologically.

But every now and again a lot of stuff will turn so powerfully bad that its hard to see the elements that have remained positive.

Donald Trump has really shaken me.  I am losing count of the new American States that Trump is musing about annexing: Canada – 51st , Greenland – 52nd , Panama Canal 53rd , Mexico 54th , Palestine with Gaza as 55th and West Bank as 56th or are they to be 55A and 55B?

And this of course to be part of the United States that are not really that “United”.

And how are these states to be treated – like they currently treat Puerto Rico?  YIKES!

While this is going on down here on earth, the Musk Monster is musing about which planets should also be annexed.

And those employees at USAID who had dedicated their careers to trying to have a positive outreach for the U.S. are now about to be unemployed. The incremental inroads the United States has made in outreach in a treacherous world over decades was wiped out with the stroke of a sharpie. This is one of the organizations that kept events like 9/11 from happening much earlier. At this point every month of hardship created by actions like Israel and the U.S. destroying Gaza is pushing more young men to be prepared to die for the cause of fighting America.

So why am I going on with such a perspective that is all about the negative. Well, there is not much that is positive right now. As I age, I am increasingly seeing friends health change quickly. One day they are thriving and the next struggling to survive from one condition or another. Another big example is climate. In a relatively short period of time our planets health has swung from coping to perilous.

Oh, oh, I can feel a metaphor coming on……

 

THE TURN

Newfallen snow,

Lovingly rolled,

And assembled.

Now reduced

To a tophat

And carrot

In a pool of water.

 

 

But perhaps I have just tuned in to the movie at the wrong point. Things were bad, then they got worse, then another level of worse …… and now perhaps…… the turn.

Django

THE LOSS OF A FRIEND

Posted: Feb 1, 2025

This business of learning to be a human is tough work.  Last week I turned Seventy-One and I am still learning the right and wrong way to be. At my little birthday celebration, a friend of many years decided to say some very upsetting things to me and about me. She had consumed a good amount of alcohol but that just loosened her lips – the thoughts were already swirling around in her brain before she started drinking.

I was gutted. She was not a partner or sibling or child of mine or one of the people who I would put in my top five closest friends. But she certainly was someone I saw as a friend, enjoyed her company and respected her thoughts.

The loss of someone who matters to you is a big deal. I have had friends who are divorced who are living happily today in a new relationship but still feel the loss of the marriage, and the loss of the shared memories with their old partner. For some it has been compartmentalized and they move on and focus on the here and now, but for others that loss moves with them like a shadow.

Friends with siblings they are estranged from, or children or parents they are estranged from often are like this.  I have seen it with one of my buddies who became estranged from his sister and never reconciled before she died. The pain of that just lingers, and I can’t imagine kids not having a relationship with parents or vice versa.

Now I am not talking about the cases where someone has turned out to be a monster or who has willfully set out to harm the other person but most of these situations are not that – they are very conventional, garden variety disputes between people who otherwise would have an ongoing relationship.

So how do I learn from this and move forward? Well, the adult thing to do is to apologize to her for whatever it is that I said or did to make her so upset. I am quite opinionated and at the drop of a hat will opine on many topics, some of which I really do know about and can add some value to the conversation and others, well not so much.  The friend who was so upset with me is much the same. When our thoughts are in sync, its fine but at times if not in sync the dialogue can go off the rails.

I did try to apologize at the time but she was too worked up so will try that again at one point so we might go forward with some level of relationship. But with that said, some things once said, can not be unsaid, so while I will apologize for whatever it was that I did to upset her, I know the relationship will never be the same.

In a volatile world with so many challenges ahead of us, it is our relationships that are more important than ever, and I am starting my seventy- first year down one, but the silver lining is for me that in future this experience has taught me to dial back sharing my opinions as often or with such vigor. It is important to learn from every experience.

Django