Swings (Temperature and Mood)

I was out of town last week - hence, no new posts. I trust you all survived the devastation of not having fresh content from me.

I imagine you all looking just like this.

Full disclosure: I could have written new posts last week. Yes, indeed. I had my laptop with me, and jeebus knows I had time to write, even though I was technically on vacation. It's not as if my days were filled with fun activities that had me gamboling all over the place during the day and falling, happily exhausted, into my bed each night.

Here's the thing. I was staying at my parents' house last week. A house I left exactly twice during my visit. Once was to grab lunch in the McD's drive-thru. The second time was to meet the family at a restaurant to celebrate my Dad's birthday. We all had a nice dinner, did presents, chatted and reminisced, and then we bundled up against the cold and headed out into a full-on freaking snowstorm.

Mind you, just a couple of hours earlier, the handsome, smiling weatherman on TV had told us all that absolutely no snow would be falling that night. The handsome, smiling weatherman on TV flat-out lied. But maybe, technically, he didn't lie. Because very little snow was actually falling. It was instead being driven pretty much horizontally behind a gale-force wind directly into our faces.

It looked a lot like this. Really.

I was driving that night. I was driving a rental car, with my elderly parents in the back seat, on roads with which I'm only marginally familiar, in the kind of conditions that, here at home in Texas, would have literally shut down the city. 

It was an absolutely terrifying drive through a near-solid wall of white. I think my hands finally unfurled from their vise-like grip on the steering wheel two days later.

But that's not why I didn't leave the house again until it was time to go to the airport. The snow, as fierce as it was, was dry and powdery, and the whipping wind blew it all off the roads by the next morning. What kept me inside the rest of my stay was the temperature, which dropped like a manic Plinko ball in the wake of the snowstorm.

Do you want to know how many degrees it was outside?

One. It was one single, solitary, frigid degree.

Shown here: WTF degrees.

I'm not built for that. I'll admit it, I'm not proud. And while I'm amply equipped with protective body fat, it's not rated for one degree above zero. It's rated for "I think I can turn the heat down to 70, as long as I wear wool."

But I'll say one thing for the single-digit trauma I endured. It enabled me to experience a truly impressive temperature differential this morning when I returned to work.

Let me just say that my place of work has never, for a single hour, maintained an appropriate temperature. For most of the year it's abysmally cold. Even in the middle of August, when you'd think a hyperthyroidal air conditioning system would be a good thing, it manages to be so unpleasantly cold that you actually enjoy going out in the Texas heat for a few brief moments before sanity returns.

The one time of the year when it's warm at work is during the unpredictable months of autumn, when you may want a sweater in the morning and a bucket of ice to pour over your head in the afternoon. The HVAC in the building doesn't know what to do in these changeable circumstances, so it just sort of blows out the most random, least appropriate temperature it can manage, as if thinking to itself, "If you can't please everyone, you should please no one."

Also my personal mantra.

Anyway, when I got to work the door to my office was closed, probably to signal to the cleaning crew that the slob who normally occupies it had given them the week off. I opened the door and was greeted by the warm currents of a Santa Ana wind, localized inside my office. It was seriously balmy in there.

I checked the thermostat. Eighty-two degrees.

That is not a comfy indoor temperature at any time of year. Fortunately, by mid-morning the a/c had remembered itself and resumed being an asshole on the cold side of the spectrum.

But I had achieved something pretty remarkable: I had experienced an 81-degree temperature difference in the space of a couple of days. It was a new personal record, I'm guessing. I mean, it's not as if I track how often I'm subjected to utter nonsense like an 80+ degree swing, both extremes of which were exceedingly uncomfortable and annoying. But I think I would have remembered such a ridiculous occurrence, right?

For the record, 1 degree is not nearly as cold as it gets in Wisconsin during the winter, and I've experienced much colder temperatures. Just not two weeks before Christmas and combined with a blizzard that Handsome McForecaster promised wasn't going to happen. Also for the record, any desire I may have harbored to return to my hometown and live in the Midwest again froze to fucking death last week.

The Worst Governor Texas Has Ever Had (Latest in a Series)

 For the last 26 years, Texas has had inept, corrupt, mediocre white male governors.

Our state seal if there were truth in advertising.

Don't get me wrong. Texas has had inept, corrupt, mediocre white male governors for a hell of a lot longer than that. But for four brief, glorious years in the 1990s we had Ann Richards. Unfortunately, she lost her re-election bid to George W. Bush in 1994, and so for the last 26 years I've had cause to lament a succession of money-grubbing toadies masquerading as leaders.

I miss Ann Richards.

G.W. Bush was without a doubt the worst governor Texas ever had. This is what I said until December 2000, when Bush inexplicably was elected President of the United States and Rick "Dick" Perry was sworn in. Dick Perry was a frequent target of mine in the early years of this blog, mostly because he faced the daunting task of being a less competent conservative sock puppet than his predecessor and not only succeeded but made it look easy.

Unlike whatever the fuck he was doing
on Dancing with the Stars.

Dick Perry was the governor of Texas for fourteen excruciating years. After he left office he served as Donald Trump's Secretary of Energy, where he distinguished himself by literally not knowing what the U.S. Department of Energy actually did. He was the worst governor Texas ever had. Except for his successor, the current governor, Greg Abbott.

Here's a thing you should know about Greg Abbott: In 1984 he was partially paralyzed when a tree limb fell on him. He sued the owner of the tree and as a result of the legal settlement currently has a lifetime payout of more than $150,000 a year, which is periodically increased to adjust for inflation. In 2003, as Texas Attorney General, he successfully backed tort reform that severely restricted and capped personal injury lawsuit settlements exactly like the one that has given him a six-figure income for more than 30 years. Obviously, the restrictions were not retroactive.

As Texas governor, Abbott has consistently backed legislation and issued executive orders that have little basis in science, history, or public welfare but that pander to a very specific base: Wealthy donors who believe that exploiting fear, ignorance, and religious mania is the best way to maintain personal power and wealth. Notice that his base doesn't include the fearful, the ignorant, or the maniacally religious themselves, except to the extent that they're persuaded by his well-funded campaigns to vote for him. This separation allows him a certain ideological purity: He only has to support the positions that are deemed most profitable to his backers and therefore, to him personally. The will of the voters is fickle and messy and, let's face it, not terribly lucrative.

And on occasion very, very stupid.

Abbott has signed increasingly draconian anti-abortion laws (that have all been blocked by federal courts). He's allowed guns to be sold and carried almost without restriction. He's cut healthcare and education funding for the most vulnerable and enacted "protections" that discriminate against right-wing boogeymen including marijuana users, gay couples, and healthcare providers. 

Let's not forget that in 2015 Abbott found it politically expedient to jump on the Jade Helm bandwagon. This was a whole-cloth Internet conspiracy theory, which alleged that purely routine military training exercises being held in Texas and other states were part of a nefarious plot to declare martial law and usher in an ill-defined New World Order - all at the behest of the scary black Muslim illegitimate Kenyan President, Barack Obama, of course. The wingnuts who perpetuated this insanity managed to weave Walmart, Blue Bell Ice Cream, China, and rogue asteroids into their online batshittery, and Abbott responded by calmly and rationally...agreeing with them and ordering the military exercises to be "monitored" for the sake of...something. 

Last I checked, we were still waiting for the Chinese to invade America and take our Cookies and Cream ice cream away.

These were supposed to be rolling morgues
during the invasion.
Extra nuts on my patriot corpse, please.

By the way, it's widely accepted that the whole Jade Helm kerfuffle was largely disseminated by Russian troll farms, and that its success - as evidenced by being embraced by the governor of the second most populous state in the U.S. - emboldened the Russians to systematically interfere in the 2016 Presidential election. We all know how that turned out.

With apologies to appropriately-coiffed
citrus fruit everywhere.

Anyway, the fetal-heartbeat bill, which effectively bans the option of abortion before most women even know they're pregnant, is Greg Abbott's latest gambit to consolidate his power and declare he really doesn't care about anything not benefiting Greg Abbott. We know this because he is the same man who enacted tort reform to curb "frivolous lawsuits," but has with this law allowed any Texan to sue anyone who performs or assists in an abortion, even if the plaintiff isn't personally involved in the transaction. It's akin to allowing random citizens to sue a drunk driver on the grounds that they don't approve of drinking. So, not frivolous at all.

This would probably be a more effective
deterrent, and more fun to implement.

By the way, slightly overshadowed by the signing of this stupid bill is an executive order he also issued this week. This one attempts, for the second time, to ban local governments and school districts from requiring people to wear masks to restrict the spread of COVID-19. He issued the first such ban in May 2020, causing such a huge spike in cases that he not only had to repeal the ban but institute a statewide mask mandate in July. He lifted that mandate this past March, but his wealthy backers got awfully pissy that most private businesses and many public institutions kept mandates in place. That's no way to show the masses who's in charge of their democracy.

Abbott can't order Target and Costco to let maskless mouth-breathers perpetuate the still-prevalent virus, of course. So he went back to his previous position of requiring schools, courthouses, motor vehicle departments, libraries, and other public entities to ban protective face coverings. Because he is, as he likes to trumpet to his chronically deluded voters, "pro-life."

Ironically, it's a sure sign that the pandemic is winding down, at least in the United States, that corrupt bozos like Greg Abbott can no longer conduct their various grifts and political shenanigans under cover of relentless virus news. Now he and they have to go back to erecting more traditional smokescreens, like "protecting all Texans (who voted for me and also are not scary brown people or uppity women)." Unfortunately, I don't think the tremendous struggles of 2020 taught them anything except that if they dig in deep enough, they can survive anything to grift another day.

And that's certainly not an attitude exclusive to Republicans or conservatives. There's always plenty of corruption to go around. But Greg Abbott is the current worst governor Texas has ever had, so he's the one I'll keep my eye on. Until the guard changes, or he appears on Dancing with the Stars. A girl can dream.