Month: September 2025

Watching a woman rant about how the only “right” thing to do is to cut her parents out of her life because they don’t have her political views made me sick. It made me miss my parents all over again.

More than anything else the left has done to my country, the unending hate dividing families is the most evil. It seems to flow in only one direction, from the left against the right.

My parents were right leaning until late in their lives. They drank the Obama Kool-Aid and were lost. They talked about the Republican candidates as evil, horrible people. The only “news” they watched was CNN.

During Trump’s first term, it got even worse. It was a constant repeat of CNN talking points and hating on Trump.

I quickly learned to keep my opinions to myself in political areas. I loved my parents. Their political stance did not change that, nor did it split them from me.

My wife has been fighting this for longer than I have. Since her father passed, most of the family older than her have gone full TDS. She doesn’t express her opinion.

Because I am who I am, I don’t need to talk to my friends every day. A year can go by, and then we are together as if it was only yesterday. One of my friends, and Ally’s best friend, contracted TDS during Trump’s first term.

We continued to be “friends,” but couldn’t talk freely around her because of the hate that spewed from her when anything Trump was mentioned. The reason she became a Trump hater was because of Dobbs. According to her, her reproductive care had been stripped from her and her daughters.

The state laws didn’t change. Her access to abortion hadn’t changed. Her daughters’ access to abortion hadn’t changed. She is postmenopausal, so she can’t get pregnant. Her eldest daughter is married and busy making babies. Her youngest isn’t sexually active with men.

For her, the issue was that if her daughter was raped, and if her daughter conceived, and if her daughter wanted an abortion, and if her daughter lived in a state that had banned abortions for rape survivors, her daughter would have to leave that state to get an abortion. Because the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a state issue, it was Trump’s fault for putting his pick of Justices on The Court.

After Trump was elected to his second term, she posted that if you voted for Trump, she couldn’t be friends with you. She has been written off. Not because she has TDS, but because she kicked us to the curb for not agreeing with her political views.

I’m watching postings from people in New Hampshire on local groups. Everything “bad” is Trump’s fault. The school system’s business administrator appears to be responsible for the school system being short more than $5 million. It’s Trump and the MAGAot’s fault for not wanting to fund schools.

It is MAGA’s fault for electing a Republican governor. Nobody bothers to notice that the elected school board, which oversees the business administrator, were all elected by them. And they all appear to be Democrats.

But the blame goes to the Republicans.

If you are anti-gun, I don’t hate you. If you want to take my rights away, then I will fight you. Hate requires too much energy to engage in. Yet it seems to drive the left.

There was a church shooting. As soon as the media reported it, the left started yelling it was MAGAots. They blamed me and you because we own guns. And they hate on us.

I’m reading The Red Badge of Courage with one of my ESL students. The civil war pitted brother against brother, father against son, neighbor against neighbor, but the level of hate for family and friends didn’t seem to be there. Yes, soldiers and civilians were disgusted by the other team, but I haven’t read about brothers disowning each other because of the side they chose.

And the left continues the battle to fill our lives with hate. They keep telling us who to hate, and the left listens and falls in line.

Happy September!!!

We’re doing our best to eat healthy around here, but we also want food that tastes good. I love soup (hubby not so much, but oh well), and with the cooler weather arriving, I plan on making a lot of soups. You can pack a ton of flavor into soup that is almost calorie free, where making the “regular” version of it would blow your diet to smithereens. So soup, here I come! This one tastes sort of like the innards of a lasagna, honestly.

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 large onion (finely chopped)
• 2 cloves garlic (minced)
• 1 lb lean ground beef
• Salt and black pepper (to taste)
• 14 oz can chopped tomatoes
• 6 cups shredded cabbage
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• ½ tsp oregano
• ½ tsp thyme
• 1 bay leaf
• 5 cups beef broth
• Parsley (chopped)

Pre-heat a soup pot to medium-high heat and add the olive oil. Add in the chopped onion and cook for 2-3 minutes until they have slightly softened. Add in the garlic and let it cook for about 30 seconds, or until fragrant. then, add the ground beef, salt, and black pepper. Cook for 7-8 minutes, breaking the meat apart with a spatula.

Add in the chopped tomatoes, shredded cabbage, paprika, garlic, onion powder, oregano, thyme and bay leaf. Mix it all together very well. Pour in the beef broth, stir it, and let it simmer for 25 minutes or so until the cabbage fully cooks. A little longer is okay, as this stuff only tastes better as time goes on.

Season with salt and black pepper to taste. Garnish with parsley before serving.

Notes:

I put shredded cheese on the table to add some fat, because this soup does NOT have a lot of it. I did drain the ground beef before moving on with the recipe. You could add a dollop of cream cheese to this, or some spicy peppers, and it would still be good. If you switched out the tomatoes for one of those 14 oz cans of tomatoes and green chilies you can get in the Mexican aisle, then topped it with tortilla strips, you’d have Mexican tortilla soup. All I know is this stuff was delish, a huge bowl of it is only about 300 calories (if made as written), and maybe not even that much.

The project list keeps growing.

• Mud the hallway so the wife can paint it after it’s been stripped to the drywall (and then some).
• Finish building the joiner’s chest. This has subprojects:
  • Finish planing the first end to thickness and avoid knots in the future.
  • Sharpen the plane irons for the new planes
  • Finish smoothing and jointing the boards on hand to create the top, front, back, and other side.
    • Repair the broken saw handle.
    • Take the handle off the saw panel.
    • Clean the saw panel.
    • Sharpen the saw.
    • Preserve the saw.
    • Reattach the handle.
    • Repeat for the crosscut saw.
  • Get the rest of the lumber needed
  • Finish the required sides and top.
  • Smooth and plane to thickness the bottom boards.
  • Rabbet the bottom boards (learn how to cut nice rabbets.
• Fill the joiner’s chest in an organized way.
• Build a new 6 board chest for Ally to use in reenacting.
• Build a couple of stools.
• Create a new nut and screw for the leg vise at the Fort.
• Install and configure a new Ceph node to replace an existing node.
• Upgrade the Ceph cluster.
• Build, populate, and configure a new Ceph server.
• Make the new “managed” switch do switching stuff.
• Move the current switch from the internal net to the DMZ
• Loose more weight
• Exercise more.

Boring, but it just keeps growing, and after my wife reads it, I expect her to add to it.