we have a Postmodern Jukebox concert next week.

I went to their show here in November. So Fun! (I, however, did not wear an adorable, vintage-styled skirt, as it was November, and an outdoor venue. On the water. And I was technically recovering from pneumonia. Many layers were worn!)

Feeling like we are on the brink of world war via conflict with Russia is not the kind of nostalgia for my childhood I like.

Yeah. Actively fearing nukes is not something I missed.

What -t & Trudy said.

I have an appointment this afternoon for an ultrasound (pelvic) to see if my ladyparts are the cause of my current anemia. So that should be fun. Although one or more of you (can't remember exactly who) gets credit for amusing my doctor - when she was warning me what sort of ultrasound she was ordering, I said, "Oh! Dildocam." She had never heard it before.

we have a Postmodern Jukebox concert next week.

I went to their show here in November. So Fun! (I, however, did not wear an adorable, vintage-styled skirt, as it was November, and an outdoor venue. On the water. And I was technically recovering from pneumonia. Many layers were worn!)

We went to one of their shows on Halloween one year, and the band was encouraging people to come in costume, so I wore my fleece unicorn onesie (though I kept my hood down during the show). Tim wore black leather pants, a dark red velvet smoking jacket, and devil horns.

Ha, dildocam! Just had one of those before my surgery. They gave a choice of tech doing it or DIY. I went ahead and did it myself since that was an option.

We went to one of their shows on Halloween one year, and the band was encouraging people to come in costume, so I wore my fleece unicorn onesie

Onesie would have been an excellent (barely) post-pneumonia choice! I wish I had thought of it - or that the band had encouraged it 2 weeks after Halloween.

I remember seeing the devil with pet unicorn pics! Or was it unicorn with pet devil? Either way y'all were super cute. As per usual.

Hope you get answers, Epic! Anemia sux.

Yeah. Actively fearing nukes is not something I missed.

Yup. I thought that was a weird childhood fear, like my fear of the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz.

I am watching Heather Cox Richardson live now talking about this.

I thought that was a weird childhood fear, like my fear of the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz.

I still remember being a child and terrified the first time I watched the Wizard of Oz. And probably the next few times too! Family watched it every year, and I dreaded it.

My little sister was scared of the flying monkeys, and I think we didn't watch Wizard of Oz because of that.

I thought that was a weird childhood fear

I thought it was a rational fear that we all shared but there was no reason to talk about it. I did hope there was less chance of it actualizing these days, although never zero, of course.

Almost thirty-four years ago now, in the summer of 1988, my paternal grandmother took me on a trip up the Dnieper River with some of her chapter of the Alameda County Gray Panthers (of which I was the youngest member for quite a while.) The trip was co-sponsored by a local nuclear freeze group, SANE/FREEZE. We flew to Odessa/Odesa, and took a riverboat up to Kiev/Kyiv, with pauses in towns along the river and an excursion to the perimeter of the 30km exclusion zone outside of the (then very recent) reactor disaster at Chernobyl. I got to practice a bit of the Russian that I'd been studying at Berkeley, and learn a little bit of Ukrainian. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I will be thankful for it for the rest of my life.

All of these Ukrainian place names -- Karkhiv, Kherson, Cherkasy -- all of these are places where my feet have touched the ground. My heart is breaking today, and I am not resigned.