When I say that you're hot, Karl, that's not what I meant, Hang in there, Gud. Germs suck. So do lousy contact rates on the phone, but I tried.

It's happy birthday to Calli day! I hope it is a wonderful day for you. May the year ahead be filled with delight. If you can give me another couple weeks, I am working on arranging a landslide victory for an accomplished woman to take over the presidency.

I know that my comfort zone is unbridled optimism, but the early vote turnout is a lovely start.

Happy Birthday, Calli!

Yeah, happy Calli day!

Timelies all!

Happy Birthday Calli!

At some point during the shitshow that was last Saturday, Gary removed the screen part from the screen door(maybe because he was extremely upset and was afraid he'd break it when he slammed it next). We have not replaced it yet. Today when we got home from lunch, he opened the main door and stepped through the screen door. I did not realize the screen door wasn't open, and walked into the frame and fell over. My shins are scraped up and sore. Sigh...

Meanwhile, we do not yet know when Mr. S will be discharged from the inpatient unit.(it's the same place he was in the time before) He will be continuing with the partial hospitalization program.

Fire is contained and mostly out now; a few of our friends were in evacuation zones, but we were not.

I'm very thankful it wasn't worse; the wind gets fierce up on those hillsides, and the devastating Oakland Hills Fire is still in recent memory.

I now release the fire~ma back into the wild.

Happy to hear. Again, not the hot you want.

My furnace is working! I keep checking the radiators and they're fine. Of course, we're having temps near 70 during the day, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

My furnace is working!

Huzzah!

May your showers be hot and generous.

I've gone down two rabbit holes recently, and they're both fairly large holes in my knowledge base and I'm wondering how much of a blank spot these two subjects are in Western learning.

1. Chongqing - City in China. I'm just going to pull up the initial summary from Wikipedia to start:

"Chongqing is one of the four direct-administered municipalities under the Central People's Government, along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. It is the only directly administrated municipality located deep inland.

The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria, which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper. Due to its classification, the municipality of Chongqing is the largest city proper in the world by area, though it does not have the largest urban area.

The municipality of Chongqing is the only Chinese municipality with a resident population of over 30 million."

First of all it's one of the four most important cities in China and I've never heard of it.

Second, it's as big as Australia in size and population. It's the only one of the four "direct-administered municipalities" in China which is inland - the other three are port cities.

It's built among the mountains inland so it's a bit like Chicago for interior size/importance, and a bit like Pittsburgh, nestled in the Allegheny valley for its verticality.

It's often described as a very cyberpunk city and parts of it look a lot like Judge Dredd's Megacity. It has the world's biggest Monorail system which runs directly through apartment complexes. It has insane, phobia-inducing freeways that go hundreds of feet in the air.

I started with this Travel vlog: [link]

Bonus: [link]

Extra: [link]

Weird synchronicity - I was walking through Chinatown today and walked past the storefront of one of my old favorite restaurants. Like a lot of Asian restaurants in the City, they are family owned and run and when the couple (usually) who runs it wants to retire, the restaurant closes. Anyway, the new restaurant in that spot specialized in Chongqing's famous spicy noodles.

Are y'all familiar with Chongqing? I was not.

2. The Partition of India. I'm realizing I'm very vague on the details of this hugely important historical event. I know Lord Mountbatten was the decider. I know it happened in 1947, so just after WWII. I'm just beginning to grasp that in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust there were horrific atrocities committed. I know (now) it tried to separate the Muslim population out of India (which had previously lived peacefully with the Hindu and Buddhist peoples) into West and East Pakistan. But these two non-contiguous sectors of Pakistan had a civil war which established Bangladesh.

Are y'all pretty familiar with the partition of India?

I was not.

Simon Whistler did a pretty amazing video about it on YouTube, so I've heard some about it. It ranks up right there with the ass-backwards establishment of Israel in a way that set them up for generations of strife, in the lengthy list of bad political decisions made by the British.

Still have heat this morning! That is not getting old just yet.