A few weeks ago, I went up to the Fort at #4 to use their warping board. I have a warping board, I just do not know where it is. I could make a warping board, I didn’t want to spend the time to do so.

On the way up, I stopped to pick up some more yarn for the warp. I have some yarn for the weft and I intend to spin more and have my wife dye it.

They didn’t have what I needed in stock. While the clerk went down to the warehouse to get more, I was introduced to the fiber club. This was three or four older women who had been working in fiber arts for some period of time.

“YES!” I thought, I was going to have a chance to learn something about spinning or weaving, or fiber prep. There must be a wealth of knowledge there.

But first I had to teach them how I clean my fleeces before combing or carding.

Then they wanted to know why I combed my fleeces, they had tried, but it didn’t work for them.

So then I ended up teaching them how to comb the fibers.

And I taught them how to put the flocks properly on the comb so that they aligned correctly.

When the clerk finally arrived with the rest of my yarn, I had spent the entire time in teaching mode. I had learned more about teaching. I hadn’t learned anything new about fiber prep, spinning, knitting or weaving.

At The Fort

As we drove into the fort to offload, the blacksmith waved at us. I figured this was meant that I would get a chance to play at the forge. It has been years since I was in a position to do any blacksmithing.

As I drove out, there was nobody at the smithy. Darn.

Back to Ally, in the house. I start combing some wool, just to keep my hands doing something. Shortly, our blacksmith comes in.

It is a younger man. We get to talking, and it is cool to hear about his skills.

We started talking about types of steel. The neat thing is that I know which steels I want and what their characteristics are. He was telling me the composition of the different steels. Amazing. I gave him some references to metal sources that he might be able to use.

He is primarily a blade smith. I’ve seen too many so-called “knife makers” to think it has any real meaning. Hell, even my brother makes knives. So I took the “trust, but verify” path.

Later, I went over to the smithy with him to sharpen a froe and to get him started on making a reproduction to use in the jointing shop.

It was interesting because this froe blade had seen some “repairs”. By repairs, I mean that somebody had wielded strange metal to the tip and maybe along the entire cutting edge.

Sam was using a file to sharpen and kept asking me if I thought the metal was hardened. It is a sort of test. People who work with metal can feel how hard a metal is based on how it files. He was doing a very polite test.

Then I was invited to actually do something at the forge.

Before I began, he taught me how to create a good, hot, fire. This is something I’ve done. But a method he used, of reaching under the fire to lift it, causing the crust to crack, is something I didn’t know how to do. I’ve always cracked the crust with my poker.

He wasn’t teaching, he was just doing.

Next he put a piece of iron rod in there to let me work it. On my first heat he couldn’t handle my lack of skill. I thought I knew what I was doing, I did not.

In 30 seconds, he demonstrated four or five things I was doing wrong. I learned.

I was intending to make a J-hook. There was a call for lunch, so he finished it up quickly, with me watching and taking mental notes. It was a wonderful learning experience.

History

After lunch, I was peopled out, I had worked with some visitors, now it was time to escape the people. I headed to the truck. Except, my keys are back in my jacket. Not with me in my 1700s garb. I go to see Sam at the shop.

After a bit, some visitors came to see what he was working on. The then proceeds to give a 30-minute lecture on trade knives of the 1750s. How they were made, what the differences are, why they were made the way they were, and who would be using them, and why.

He had manipulatives (knifes without handles) to show the visitors. He explained each type clearly.

I’ve been collecting knives since the 1980s. I learned more about knives in general, in that 30 minutes, than I have in the past 40 years.

It is wonderful to have somebody to learn from.

There are many left-leaning people out there. Many are broken. They cannot see what is in front of their faces and refuse to accept any fact that is counter to their current world view.

These are the people that can look you dead in the eye and tell you that calling you a racist piece of shit is just fine, but it is unacceptable for you to call them ignorant. This is why their riots were “mostly peaceful” while the January 6th protests and walk through was an “insurrection”.

There is another class of left — leaning people who aren’t really into calling you names. They are just so deep in the left bubble that they cannot believe that what you say could possibly be the truth. These are the people that watch nothing but CNN and will report what CNN says as being unbiased and fully truthful.

It is these people who still believe the “fine people on both sides” hoax. They have never seen anything to indicate that it could be anything but the truth.

There are the evil ones, who know exactly what they are doing. They are willing to lie to accomplish their goals. And are greatly offended when they are called on it.

The remaining are what I like to call “thinking leftist”.

These are not as uncommon as you might believe. They are often silent, they seldom get in your face. If you challenge them to check a primary source, they will. If you give them sources, they are willing to view them.

The Bubble of the Left

There is an information bubble that exists for everybody. This is the set of sources for news that we are presented with. It is how we get our information. It is from this body of information and opinion from which we build our world view.

Back in the olden days, there was a TV show called Murphy Brown. It was a show about a hard charging investigative journalist and news anchor.

She also happened to be female.

A strong female lead that was “believable”.

This isn’t a joke, “women are just as good as men in every field,” it was a profession where sex did not matter.

Single Mothers

What the character did was to have sex, get pregnant and decide to keep the child. Becoming a single mother.

This was a huge political message, though most didn’t understand it. Even today, most people consider it to be a major milestone in taking the stigma away from being an unmarried mother.

The biggest predictor of being successful in life is having a two parent family unit. There are so many things where two parents can accomplish something, while it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do it as a single parent.

Back in my single days, divorced from my first wife, she would sometimes decide I could have my kids for the week. This was always highly disruptive. I had to find temporary childcare, or I had to take the week off.

I always made it work because my children have always been that important to me.

Being a single parent is hard, difficult, all consuming, and will cost you more than you expect. If you are male, it might even be worse, it is harder to get help as a single father.

So what Murphy did, was she made it “ok” to be a single mother. Dooming hundreds of thousands of children to lives of hardship and lowering their chances of success.

This is part of that bubble. “Think of the single mothers.”, “Single mothers are so amazing.”

No, they are losing. Not always their fault. But those are the facts.

Firearms

Ignoring the magic technology of most procedural cop shows, there is a political message in most of them: All Guns Are Registered.

The scene: the duty room of NCIS, Washington, D.C. Abby has come upstairs with the identification of the type of firearm used in the latest murder.

“He was killed with a 9 mm slug from a Glock 17 with a 6-inch barrel,” she dutifully reports.

“Ge me a list of all owners of Glock 17L’s,” Gibbs says.

Ten minutes later, he is presented with a list of names which are then reduced to just a few, depending on plot needs, to investigate.

I have a few firearms that are registered with the state police of Maryland. That’s because they do not have anything to stop them from creating such a registry. Every firearm sold by an FFL in Maryland requires you to fill out an ATF-4473 plus an MD-4473.

The state is not allowed to keep records of the ATF-4473 information. Indeed, they request for that background check only states who you are and what type of firearm you are purchasing, pistol, rifle, et so forth.

The MD-4473 is sent to the state police, and they do keep a record. There are also waiting periods involved.

I have personal knowledge that they have a registry. I had purchased a featureless AR-15 during the assault weapon ban. That required the MD-4473 and a waiting period.

No big deal, I didn’t understand. That information bubble at work.

When the D.C. Sniper was killing people, they were having a difficult time tracking the sniper down. They were able to determine that the bullets were coming from a .223/5.56 rifle. They even suspected that it was an AR-15 platform.

I, personally, received a call from the MD state police because I owned an SUV and I had purchased an AR-15 platform rifle.

Impossible without a firearm registry.

Abortion

I would have a hard time finding a single show or opinion piece in the media that was pro-life. Even in the cases where there are characters who are pro-life, they are almost always portrayed poorly.

Take a look at how the annual March for Life was covered. (is covered?) The organizers estimated attendance at 650,000 for 2013. The media reported it as “tens of thousands”. The pro-abortion groups protesting the march normally get more media attention than the march itself.

It isn’t uncommon for a small pro-abortion march to get significantly more media coverage than the largest pro-life march.

The amount of positive coverage of pro-abortion positions makes me cringe.

Women’s Reproductive Health Care/Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood is an abortion business. While they claim that only 3% of their services are “abortions”, you need to dive into what “services” are. Services include handing out literature or condoms, answering calls, and all the other myriad things that are just part of being a business.

In 2014-2015, the received over half of a Billion dollars from the government. Every cent of that is fungible. That means that they had millions of dollars from us that freed up money to fund abortions.

When the federal government looked into shutting down that flow of money, they went into overdrive. The selling point was, “If Planned Parenthood shuts down, there will be no women’s reproductive healthcare.”

There are more women’s reproductive healthcare clinics in my state than there are Planned Parenthood clinics. The difference, most of them offer real women’s healthcare. Teat squishing, pap smears, and all the rest of taking care of unique women’s health issues.

Misc

The list goes on and on and on. Everything from gun owners are fat, stupid, and ignorant to people who watch Fox News are not as smart as the rest of the smart, to their elite know better than you.

Laughter

Ally went on a rant last night. What was she ranting about? The stupid Kamala ad which says that the wives of conservatives can vote for Kamala without telling their husbands. That conservative/Republican wives are just robots of their husbands.

It wasn’t a great video because she was so upset she was fumbling her words. I think the strongest message in the rant was, “…give me a break.”

At morning conversation, she started ranting about it again.

And I broke out in a giant smile.

“Stop laughing at me!”

Ally was a thinking leftest. She took the blinders off a short time ago and is seeing everything with newly cleared eyes.

For years, I’ve been listening to her responding to my indignation over things the left has done. And for years the response was always the same, “What about this thing that the right is doing?”

No matter who the Republican candidate was, she found a reason to disapprove of them. Of course, she couldn’t go to the Democrat candidate because they were just horrible. So it was always a third-party candidate.

For years, I bit my tongue so that I wouldn’t go too far, “can’t you just accept that they did something evil, bad, or stupid?”

She couldn’t.

The reason seemed to be that she was fearful of what “The Right” was going to do. They were going to take her rights away, They were saying mean things about people. They stood on the wrong side of an issue that she was passionate about.

Watching her accept her own views without those blinders has been invigorating. It makes me smile, every day.

And yes, she would have ranted at herself of a year ago. And the person she was a year ago would have written this Ally off as evil, bad, stupid, and moronic.

So smile and laugh. It feels good.

There are two main options, should the shit actually ever hit the fan: bugging in, or bugging out. Yes, there are variations to both of those, but that’s essentially your two choices in their most basic form. I’ve talked about bugging in a bit, and about hiding in forests and building shelters and such. But what about bugging out?

If you’ve decided (for whatever reason) to leave your home during an emergency, you have to address the issue of travel. Near as I can tell, you have a very limited number of methods to travel in the average bug out situation:

• your vehicle
• a non-motorized method of transport (ie a bicycle, unicycle, scooter, skateboard, etc.)
• riding an animal (horse, llama, sheep, yak, whatever)
• walking

Your vehicle, be it a car, truck, camper van, or motorcycle, is probably your first thought. I know it’s mine. My car already has a bug out bag in it, and in winter there’s always a 72 hour survival bucket stashed in the back, just in case. Your vehicle (other than the motorcycle, for the most part) is also a type of shelter, somewhere to be secure with doors locked, out of the rain and wind and snow, with at least somewhat comfortable sleeping arrangements. You can also cart things with you in a vehicle, such as food, clothing, emergency shelter like tents and tarps, first aid items, and weapons with ammo.

There’s a major drawback with vehicles, though. They run on fuel. If you run out of fuel, you stop. Now, if you carry a siphon kit (and I do recommend it, because sucking gas out of a tank without one is a very unpleasant thing indeed, and no I don’t want to talk about it), you can remove fuel from other vehicles. If the movies (and images of war torn countries) are reliable, you’ll probably find abandoned cars and trucks at the side of (or in the middle of) the roads. These can be checked for abandoned fuel, depending on your situation, and you can take from them if they have any.

You can carry extra fuel with you, though you may want to be careful about how you do that. You shouldn’t really carry fuel inside a vehicle, and if you have it on the outside, you’re advertising to everyone that you have fuel to spare. Whether it’s FEMA, desperate parents, or raiders, you could lose that extra fuel if you stop. Disguising it (fuel canisters inside empty suitcases?) might be your best bet, along with securing them with locks, and protecting yourself and your gear using firearms.

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Networking

This week has had a few successes. I was able to upgrade one node to 10 Gbit/second and to hand it some more disk. Everything seems to be working. More upgrades are slowly happening.

Physical, OpenVSwitch, OVN, Oh My.

Physical networking has many different levels. The easiest, which most people deal with, is Level2 or L2. At L2, you plug cables in, and it just works. It really is that simple.

There are some exceptions, the L2 switch might not support the speed that you want, or you might need power on that port, but by and large, it is simple.

Level 3 devices start to get a bit more complicated. Cisco has made an entire business model out of making Level 3 devices.

The difference is that a L3 device provides routing. Modern L3 devices also provide services, such as DHCP or SNMP. It also should have some routing protocols implemented, but this is not required. There are so many features that it gets complicated fast.

OpenVSwitch was designed to provide both virtual and physical packet switching. Instead of using cables, it uses programming, called logical flows. The cool thing is that these logical flows can be pushed down into the network interface to run below the kernel.

OVN or Open Virtual Network is layered on top of OpenVSwitch, but does not require OpenVSwitch. As long as all you are doing is building and looking at switch and router configurations, there is no requirement to actually interact with OpenVSwitch

OVN has a “north” and a “south” side. On the north side, you define logical devices and how those devices are interconnected. A process is tasked to convert those logical devices and interconnections into datapaths and logical flows on the south side.

Another process then converts those datapaths and logical flows into open flow. These are what do the real work.

Now the fun part. All of these pieces need to talk to each other and all the communications paths are configured.

I have something working. Maybe it is right? It is closer to right than I expected.

But how do we get there from here?

Which takes us into the world of routing. I’m learning about OSPF. Which caused me to have to relearn about multicasting. Which isn’t working for me yet.

Regardless, my network knowledge is better and getting better.

Monitoring

I wondered through one of the node areas yesterday and noticed that one of the KVM’s had been left active on a node. Normally, I want them turned off so I don’t get screen burn in.

On the screen were some disk errors. This is a not good thing. These leads to going back to the monitoring game.

I’ve been studiously ignoring Prometheus for years now. I took the plunge, and it isn’t as bad as I first thought it was. Now to figure out how to use Grafana. It is powerful, but I don’t have the insight I need to know how to do things. That’s next week’s learning task.

Piles of Garbage

If the left didn’t have double standards, they would have no standards at all.

The latest example of this is that a comedian, who’s routine is to insult people, made a joke about Puerto Rico. It didn’t go over well with the audience. Part of that is a lack of context.

It appears that a few years ago a hurricane went through and blew tons and tons of garbage into the sea. Since that time, it has been washing up on the shores. The people have to clean up the beaches constantly, leading them to have a running joke about living on an island of garbage. Note: This is a second hand story.

That’s not important. What is important is that the left seized on this to claim that every person associated with Trump, like you and me, is racist and hates Puerto Ricans.

Never mind the name-calling that comes out of their people, every single day. They have attempted to label us with every vile label they can come up with. Nazi comes to mind.

The hit pieces had just come up to speed when Joe stepped into it with both clown sized feet. He was recorded as calling Trump supporters “garbage”.

Yeah, that really happened.

The short videos have been laugh-out-loud funny. In addition, people have taken to wearing garbage bags to vote. It can’t be a political statement because the media and the White House are claiming that Joe didn’t say what he is on video saying.

In an epic troll, Trump arrived at his rally in a white garbage truck with “Trump” on the side. He wore an orange hi-vis vest into the rally and proceeded to poke fun at himself.

Tuesday is your last day to Vote!

Go VOTE!

The Trumpet Calls of Battle

The left is prepared to do violence if Trump wins. The Right is in FAFO mode. The magazines have been topped off. The firearms cleaned and put away.

It could get spicy out there, people. Keep your head on a swivel.

Have you spotted anything hinky?

People acting like poll workers that aren’t? Cops obeying pseudo poll workers? People being told to leave the lines to vote?

Hundreds of reports of that sort of thing happening in PA.

For years, I’ve been hearing about how Republicans are calling for some horrific or ridiculous thing.

I’m reminded of the days when Glenn Beck was the voice. You would hear, over and over again, how he had said terrible things.

If you search YouTube, you could find those videos. Those videos were maybe 30 to 60 seconds long.

All of those videos contained the same things. In other words, with thousands of hours of audio, the left could only find a few minutes of questionable audio. Plus, it often turned out that the audio was taken out of context.

The left runs on emotions. Unfortunately, they are not good with joy and excitement, they always fall back on fear and hate.

I had the misfortune of listening to a short clip of Obama stomping for the Democrat candidate for governor of NC.

The clip was about a minute. There wasn’t a thing that came out of his mouth that wasn’t a lie. It was all accusations of Trump, conservatives, Republicans, and anybody else that wasn’t in lock step with his wants.

It was worse than when Kamala’s people make a statement.

Kamala’s people just dropped an ad suggesting that conservative women have no agency. That “the only place they have a choice” is in the voting booth. It was disgusting.

I am not married to a robot. I’m married to a living, breathing, thinking, thoughtful, and beautiful lady. She listens and makes her own choices. Until the debate with Biden, she wasn’t going to vote for Trump.

At that point, there was nothing I could have said to get her to vote for Trump. She had to decide herself.

Hate is a powerful emotion. It is much easier to get people to hate than it is to get them to love, like, or enjoy something.

That has been the Democrat playbook for as long as I have been aware.

In 1964, LBJ aired the “Daisy” ad. The emotion he was looking for was fear. Fear that Goldwater would start a nuclear war, while he, LBJ, was only going to send boys to Vietnam to die. Oops, he didn’t say that last part.

There have been so many hoax hate crimes. The reason is that actual criminal actions based on race are very low. Sorry, that is whites acting in a criminally racist way towards others. Blacks often act in racists ways towards Whites, and it is just accepted.

Fearmongering on the Left has been about abortion. There are 50 states. Each state gets to set their laws, regarding abortion, according to how their people want, via their legislators.

So why are so many women screaming that Republican’s are going to take their “right” to an abortion away. They never had a right to an abortion. A right is something you have from existing. Everybody has it.

If abortion is a “right” then the mother OR the father should be able to choose to abort.

When they scream about their right to an abortion, what they are really screaming for is access to abortion services.

There are a few states that have put in strong anti-abortion laws.

The left is screaming about those. They search high and low for something to go wrong. The first person they found to shove a megaphone in front of was an abortion for a child.

She was transported out of the state of Ohio to have the abortion done. She was raped. The rest of the story includes the fact that the mother’s illegal alien boyfriend was the rapist. That she went out of state to protect him from the law.

And that there was an exception in the Ohio law to cover that type of case.

That is who they held up as an example of horrific outcomes from anti-abortion laws.

They scream that horrible things will happen. So they find a victim. Who was the victim? It was a woman who wanted an abortion rather late, not “late term” but not early in her pregnancy. Her social situation had changed.

She opted for a surgical procedure. Then didn’t allow enough time to get to her appointment. Almost as if she weren’t the sharpest crayon in the box. She was late, they couldn’t do the procedure. She agreed to have a chemical abortion.

She did no follow-up care. She waited until very late to seek treatment for the sepsis that she was suffering from. The hospital she went to didn’t do the required abortion to remove the dead baby from her in a timely fashion.

At the clinical mortality review, it was determined that she would have survived if she had received treatment at the hospital without the extended delay.

Now, the findings of death review panels, mortality committees, and clinical mortality reviews are closed. This is a place where doctors can feel free to say that somebody fucked up, badly. That a doctor’s error killed somebody.

This is who got the megaphone. A woman who didn’t keep her knees together. That got pregnant out of wedlock. Who’s baby father left her. Who waited until then to decide to abort her baby. Who didn’t seek treatment. And who was dead as a result of medical malpractice.

Is she an example of horrific anti-abortion laws killing women? Not in the least.

When Ally and I were talking about the “push for outlawing birth control”, my response was, “you’ve got to be kidding me. Nobody is pushing to outlaw birth control.”

When she posted, you replied that you hadn’t heard a push for banning birth control.

But Ally has heard it.

And that’s because somebody is shoving a megaphone in front of somebody. Who are these people? We don’t know. What are the odds of them getting a bill passed to ban birth control? Nonexistent.

But it adds more volume to the fearmongering. Look, The EVIL Republican’s have not only taken your right to reproductive health care away, now they won’t even let you use birth control!”

That megaphone is being used to chase the sheeple right of the edge of the clif.

So here I am. The waters have retreated and I’m standing on dry beach, and all these new people are standing around and near me. I’m being welcomed, and it all seems very friendly. I want to let my guard down. I really do. But damn, folks, it’s HARD.

Recently, I had a conversation with Chris about birth control. We all know that “just don’t have sex” doesn’t work, and hasn’t worked since before written history. I was explaining that to me, it just makes sense that if you want a low abortion rate (which I do), then the answer is to have effective, inexpensive, low side-effect birth control. Preferably, you want several types, too, so that people have choices, and so that men and women both can be involved in being responsible.

I pointed out that there are many people on the Right who advocate eradicating both abortion AND birth control, and I want to know why. Why is that so important, to remove birth control from people? It makes no sense to me.

I admit, I may have said to Chris that a good portion of unwanted babies (via rape and incest, for example) all have come about because of men. Women don’t rape men and then get upset over getting pregnant (or there are so few that I’ve not only never read about it, I’ve never even heard a whisper about it) and become so emotional that they require an abortion. That makes men the problem. This is, of course, a grand simplification of the issue and removes franchise from women, which is not cool. But the idea is there, and it’s not a wrong idea, it’s just that it’s too vague as currently stated. Chris’s response was, of course, that men who commit incest or diddle little girls should be fed through a wood chipper on low speed, feet first, wearing a tourniquet. I heartily agree with him on that one.

But that doesn’t address the birth control issue. The worst part is, I don’t even really know how to ask the question, or what to say to get a reasonable (ie truthful, meaningful, statistically relevant) answer. How many people on the Right are interested in legislating or otherwise taking away the right to use birth control? This is not a question about paying for it, by the by. I know there’s insurance issues and all that. That’s not a part of what I’m after here. For the purposes of this line of questioning, you can assume that everyone pays up front cash for their birth control. How do I find out whether the Left is correct about this issue?

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As I contemplate another deep dive into a legal case, I realize how thankful I am to Justice Thomas.

Our Second Amendment protected rights had been eviscerated. Most of the country was under the suffocating opinions of gun hating inferior courts.

If a stated wanted a gun control law, they passed it. Challenges were always dismissed. To listen to the gun grabbers, everything that was done was constitutional because everybody knew that the Second only protected the rights of the militia.

In 2008, the Supreme Court issued the Heller opinion. In a five to four decision, the court found that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. Even Justice Stevens’ dissent says it is an individual right.

Of course, this didn’t stop Justice Stevens from joining Justice Breyer’s dissent

This case was much closer than we hoped for.

There is a good reason the court did not take up another Second Amendment case (outside McDonald, which was an easy, “Yes, the Bill of Rights applies to the states, morons”) for 14 years. We would have lost. And if we had not lost outright, the opinion would not be strong enough to protect our rights.

In 2022, we had a strong majority on the Supreme Court. Not a majority of Republicans, but a majority of Constitutionalist.

The Court issued a powerful opinion in Bruen. It slapped down the inferior courts. It set clear guidance for how to adjudicate Second Amendment challenges.

The inferior courts had a meltdown. We have judges who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, claiming they are too stupid to understand the Constitution. Judges who have decades of training and practice in reading old laws and interpreting them, correctly, claim that the plain text is unclear.

This is not the fault of the Supreme Court. This is the fault of those rogue inferior courts.

I worked for an incompetent lead analyst for a couple of years. One evening, I found him still at his desk, programming. He was trying to do something in FORTRAN. I explained that what he wanted to do wasn’t possible to do in FORTRAN. He insisted it could.

I wrote a short C function that did the task that FORTRAN could not. Gave it to him to use. This would have allowed him to complete his program without any architectural changes.

When I checked in with him the next day, I asked how the function worked for him. He reported that it had worked, but he had done a redesign, so he didn’t need that function.

To this day, I believe he made that change to exclude me from having participated in the project. He was a rogue, inferior programmer/analyst.

Rogue inferior courts will twist and squirm to avoid the clear guidance of the Supreme Court, when they don’t like the outcome.

The remarkable strength of Justice Ginsburg, was her ability to find law to support her positions.

From President Obama, we got Sotomayor. She has grown into her position, but she has never been a strong justice.

We also got Elena Kagan, a Justice so corrupt that she felt that there was no conflict of interest in sitting on a case that she had worked on as a member of the Obama staff.

Those two “powerhouses” don’t come close to the idiocy of Ketanji Brown Jackson. This is a person that can’t find case law, regulation, or original meaning in anything that goes against her agenda. She writes as if the Supreme Court should be writing law, not following the law.

The Three!

Neil Gorsuch was our first win. He has done a good job for the Second.

Kavanaugh was our second win. He is doing an ok job for the Second. I’m not sure of him, but so far, so good.

Amy Coney Barrett is our third win. I believe she could become the next Clarence Thomas.

Conclusion

Next Tuesday is the day our Constitution set as the date to vote for our President. A week from today, we should know who our next president will be.

Please, PLEASE, vote.

The most lasting wins from the first Trump presidency were the amount of reform that was done to the courts. We do not want to have Kamala replace Thomas. Imagine another Ketaji Brown Jackson replacing Thomas. It would be years before we could recover.

VOTE!

I love the sound of this song. Here is the movie version:

And a very pure version:

Last week I cooked up a turkey breast that had been lurking in the freezer for a while. It was a lovely treat, and we really enjoyed it. However, with just a few of us here at the house these days, even cooking up just a breast is a bit much. I decided I would make turkey pot pies out of the leftovers, some of which we’d eat right away, and some that could go in the freezer. The grocery store was sadly lacking in pie crusts, and I’m just not great at making them. So I decided to try Turkey a la King, because it was sort of an inside out turkey pie. The end result was incredibly delicious, and we really enjoyed it! I hope you do, too.

Ingredients

• 4 tbsp butter or margarine
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1 medium carrot, peeled, finely chopped
• 1 stalk celery, finely chopped
• 5 tbsp all-purpose flour
• 2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
• 1-1/2 cups milk (oatmilk also works)
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1-1/2 lbs cooked turkey breast, cut into 1″ chunks
• 1 cup frozen peas or mixed vegetables
• 1/2 cup mashed potatoes
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• Warm biscuits or puff pastry shells for serving

In a large skillet or cast iron pot, melt the butter over medium high heat. When the butter is bubbling slightly and is completely melted, add in the carrot, onion, and celery. Cook for about ten minutes, until the vegetables are softened.

Add in the flour, and quickly stir to coat all the vegetables as evenly as you can. Immediately whisk in the broth, milk, and salt and pepper. Add the liquid slowly while whisking rapidly throughout, to achieve a silky smooth finish. This part should take about five minutes to complete. Add in the turkey, potato, and peas, and stir occasionally until the dish is warmed through, about ten more minutes.

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt butter. Add mushrooms, onion, carrot, and celery and cook, stirring often, until softened, 8 to 10 minutes.

Serve the turkey mixture over top of the biscuits or puff pastry shells, and sprinkle with a bit of fresh minced parsley for color and flavor.

Notes:
So traditionally, this would be made with 8 oz or so of sliced mushrooms. I didn’t have any on hand, so this is my version of the more traditional recipe. I used an old fashioned biscuit recipe for this, but you could do any biscuits, including the “quick” ones on a box of Bisquick.

If you find that your finished product isn’t thick enough, you can fix it in one of three ways. First, you can use the traditional route, which is to make a roux in another pan and then add the roux to the boiling turkey mixture. Stir well, and it should thicken. Second, you can make a slurry (a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch with just enough cold water to make a thin paste) and add that to the boiling turkey mixture. Stir, and it should thicken up. The third, and inarguably the easiest method, is to add a teaspoon or so of potato flakes to the mixture. Simply sprinkle potato flakes on top of the boiling turkey  mixture, and then stir. Continue to add more potato flakes a little at a time until the desired thickness is achieved.