If you’re like me, you have what you call your  “Fuck Putin” money that you have sitting around, waiting to be spent on something that will help Ukraine and Ukrainians while the idiots we have in Washington wring their hands over whether or not they can send missiles and fighter jets to Kyiv, because doing so might make the Russians really mad at us. This week I heard from a friend of a friend who has a friend who runs a small hotel in Romania that is taking in refugees from Ukraine. The hotel has a capacity for 39 guests, and they started out with 5 Ukrainians, then 22, and now they are up to 45 and they are not asking for help, but this friend of theirs, who is a friend of a friend, put a message out, so that’s where my “Fuck Putin” money has gone.

If you don’t have a friend of a friend who has a friend who runs a hotel in Romania, I’ve read that you can go onto AirBnB and make a reservation for a stay in the lovely sovereign nation of Ukraine, send payment, and add a note to your host that you will not be showing up for this visit but please use the money towards helping his/her fellow citizens. I’ve read that this is very effective.

I know we all want to do something immediate, personal, and useful for Ukraine. 

Remember when we thought that hanging chads was the worst thing that ever happened to our country?

In other news, I want to update you all on the book that I received anonymously for my birthday. Thank you, Citizen Reader, for the extra-ciriccular help wth my Korean language studies!

The good thing about  books is that they take my mind off of the horrible situations at home and abroad. Yesterday I was so depressed and weary of the world that I picked up a book — a novel — because I was too dispirited to drink or eat, and I read the whole damn ting in a day. I haven’t read a book in a day since the 1990s. 

The book was Olive, Again, the  sequel to Olive Kittereridge (the best selling Pulitzer  Prize book of 2008, which I have not read) by Elizabeth Strout. Top Cat chose it for me, I don’t know why, but I really liked it. I might even go read Olive Kitteridge, but I don’t know…two novels in one year…yeeesh….

Here are my two take-aways from Olive, Again:

In a conversation about faith between two non-believers, one says that the “duty” of being human in a seemingly points universe is: “To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

A man, contemplating the loss of a happy first marriage and how he ended up in a boring second marriage, and the apparent dissatisfaction and compromises and sheer nuttiness of self and the people around him: …it came to him that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that  gaping darkness were choices that required respect…”

Me, I study Korean and paint pet portraits and collect Blue Jay feathers. These things bring me a pure joy. What do you do to keep yourself in a safe place from the solitary, nasty, brutal, and shortness of things?

Oh, well, for now, there’s no avoiding it. Let’s check in on current events:

The mayor  of Vilnius, Lithuania  helped paint this on the road that leads to the Russian Embassy there:

The Mothproof Georgia is a statue erected in 1958 to celebrate the 1500th anniversary of Tbilisi, the capital.

The reason neither the US nor Nato can declare a No Fly Zone over  Ukraine is because according to the rules of war (yes, there are actual “rules”) the only combatants can declare No Fly Zones so, gif the US or NATO were to declare such a thing twould be tantamount to declaring war on Russia and for some reason, nobody wants to do that.

This is who we should be fighting for:

Speaking of the traitor weasels of the Republican party…

The American-instigated Canadian Trucker protest shit show in Ottawa ended when Ottawa police deployed pepper spray and stun grenades to disperse crowds, towed away over 70 vehicles, and arrested 191 people, bringing a total of 389 charges against 103 of them .

The Canadian Trucker Alliance issuing a statement that said most of the protesters had no connection to Canadian trucking. . .

. . . and some U S truckers took a similar convoy to Washington, DC, to protest a federal mask mandate — but there has never been a federal mask mandate. . . 

. . . although the actor Ricky Schroder said he was willing to die for his freedom to protest something that doesn’t exist and how Joe Biden is raising the price of gasoline and the Bible something blah blah blah.

I  could run a weekly blog on nothing but Republican bullshittery. but let’s keep it down to this for now:

BTW, it’s not a mobile home — it’s a shack with a rusted tin roof that is rented out to campers in the Appalachian Mountains. Meadows doesn’t own the shack, and he has never visited it. his wife, Debbie, stayed there a day or two in the Fall of 2020.

After Trump lost the election, Meadows was one of the most influential Republicans claiming without factual evidence that widespread voter fraud had taken place. (He reiterated those claims in a recent memoir.) In late 2020 and early 2021, he e-mailed  the Justice Department, urging it to investigate claims of voter fraud, including claims that courts had previously rejected.

DBTW, Meadows used this voter registration to vote int he 2020 presidential election. BTW,  it’s a federal crime to provide false information to register to vote in a federal election.

This would not be the first time that Meadows seemed to mislead the public on the matters of his credentials or his real-estate holdings. For a long time, news outlets, apparently relying on his official House biography, reported that Meadows had earned a B.A. from the University of South Florida, though he actually received  an associate’s degree. And Meadows appears to have violated congressional ethics guidelines by not disclosing his ownership  of a hundred and thirty-four acres in Dinosaur, Colorado, which he ultimately sold to a nonprofit that aimed to use dinosaur bones in an effort to prove the literal truth of the creation story in the Book of Genesis.

God, I hate these people.

Anyway.

I am long past the age when I’m looking to advance myself in some coporate job setting but these still resonate:

OK, so that’s that for the news and outrage for this week. What should we do now? Laugh to keep from crying?

OK, we’ve covered cats for the week. There’s another thing I need to discuss, concerning the future of my blog. I got a bill from the host of this blog, Go Daddy (they monitor my domaine  for hackers and malware) and to keep this thing going under their supervision for the next three years is going to cost me $720. American dollars. I have no intention of paying that. I’m told that I need to act in two weeks so, if you check in here one day and it’s dark, it will be because Go Daddy pulled the plug. 

You all have my email, right? In super-secret code, may email is my full name at yahoo dot com, so if we need to stay in touch feel free to contact me if this thing should disappear. 

As I type this, it is Wednesday afternoon of March 9 and I’ll publish this on March 10, a day early, because I’m going to be busy (see below) this weekend, but I must tell you that it’s SNOWING on the north shore of Long island today!

Big, fat, fluffy flakes. I did not expect this. It’s going to snow all day, accumulation being around 1 – 3 inches. But this much i know is true:

Have great weekend, everyone.

My Korean husbands, BTS, are holding a live concert in Seoul, South Korea and they are broadcasting it all over the world to select theaters. So I will be sitting in a darkened, sold-out theater on Saturday, awash in the best way I know of keeping the solitary, nasty, brutal, and shortness of things at bay. I do hope you all have something similar in store, to remind yourself that there is still, despite a ton of evidence to the contrary, some beauty and gentleness and love in the world. 

And dogs. There  are dogs: