Ultimate Political Jedi Master

This month I will be celebrating a very particular birthday. With my new health insurance, I am now eligible for a program that enables me to go back to the YWCA.

I am absolutely overjoyed about this. I had to give up my Y membership when my job was cut in half with the pandemic, five years ago, and I've missed it dreadfully. I dug my Y membership card out of a drawer (I even had an old towel card that still had some punches left on it) and presented myself at the Y membership desk with my new Silver Sneakers number and was duly reinstated.

Now I regularly use the treadmill, rowing machine, weight machines, and especially—oh joy—the sauna. I am sore, because I have not been diligent as I should about using weights, but I am determined to do so now.

This is definitely one perk that has come with growing older.

Background: a sauna. Underneath the sauna light are the words "Eliminating racism, empowering women, YWCA. In front of the sauna bench is a rowing machine. Hand weights rest on the sauna bench. Lower center: A silver sneaker.

Silver Sneakers



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

On Thursday I had another surgery, a balloon dilation of my supraglottal laryngeal region. I also had a rhinoplasty to remove bone spurs from my nose. Right now I look like the aftermath of a hockey fight.

Healing is better than I'd feared! I am really, really tired, sleeping 10 hours a night and also napping 2-3 hours in the afternoons, but I figure it's justified.

I went to the Hands Off protest on April 5. The one I attended was a smaller one across the river in St. Paul, but not the one at the capitol--that one drew about 25,000 people, I understand. I chose to go to a closer one, where I hoped it would be easier to park, and that indeed turned out to be true. naomikritzer was there, too.

The weather was cold and breezy (I'll know next time not to big a big flimsy card for a placard, because the wind kept trying to take it away like a sail). But the sky was a brilliant blue (I used it at the background for this collage).

There were several hundred people there, and I saw no counter-protestors. Many cars honked in support as they drove by (although one yelled out the window, "Get a job!" and I thought to myself Dude. It's a Saturday.). We all interspersed our chants with friendly chatting. We all found comfort in our solidarity of purpose and trading of experience. What can we do?

I made the deliberate choice, which I never have before, to blur the faces in the collage other than my own. What a strange world we are entering, where that feels necessary.

The headline in today's newspaper read, "Students With Visas Live in Fear," and I thought about the quartet of Norman Rockwell paintings "The Four Freedoms," especially the one entitled "Freedom from Fear." How have we come to this point, where we are losing these basic freedoms?

Image description: against a brilliantly blue sky background, various people hold protest signs.

Hands Off



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

 Some news and commentary outlet just published a story about how eggs were so expensive right now that Americans were turning from dyeing Easter eggs to dyeing marshmallows or other substitutes. OK, fine, whatever, I thought. And then I got to this sentence:

“This is such a great idea!” one person commented. “No one eats the colored eggs, so these will actually be eaten!” 

What the whatting WHAT?

So I have to ask people. If you grew up dyeing Easter eggs, did you eat the dyed eggs?