http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/13/politics/michael-flynn-donald-trump-white-house/index.html

Valentines

Rocket and I went shopping for his agility harness, or any harness at all once I discovered it can be hard to find one for a large, deep chested dog. It's a very nice color and it looks nice on him. It doesn't have as much fabric as the ones on the model dogs the woman showed me on Sunday at the dog fair - however, those were small dogs and the world caters to small dogs and their needs, wants and desires.

Harness options for big dogs do not come in fabric heavy options. If you can find a harness for a big dog you pretty much buy the harness for a your big dog because it fits your big dog. Harness options for big dogs are not  as option-y as the options available for smaller dogs, so I am happy that I was able to find something that fit him. I had to go to two stores to find it. Sadly, it does not match his collar or his leash but the leash I am open to replacing sooner rather than later. And he is not a matchy matchy kind of guy any way.

He loves TV!

Weekend

Me and eighty thousand plus of my closest friends gathered on downtown Raleigh Saturday morning and got our protest on. Again. To think the first time I went to an anti-Trump protest in Raleigh a few days after the election it drew a total of about fifteen people and it was depressing as hell. Really, it was awful.

As it turns out, all the rest of the city really needed to be horrified enough to come out was to just get to know the man a little better. The Women's March made me feel significantly better about the people around me in my corner of the world. but the march on Saturday was a nice shot in the arm.  I'm going to have to start calling my useless representatives again. I may even have to go to one of their pointless Town Halls to remind the cock suckers who they work for. I understand those Town Halls are significantly less fun for them now and significantly more fun for their constituents now that we are actually attending them.

Its nice that I don't have to hate all white people I come across- not everyone I see is a Trump voter, there are a lot of white people who did not vote for him. I can limit my knee jerk hate to just obvious  poor white trash. If I see a truck with a confederate flag sticker on it in the Wally parking lot and I want to say, curse the owners with an itchy crotch, I can feel comfortable doing that and not worry about getting an innocent non-Trump voter on accident.

Sunday I went with Brosky and Alphagal and the kids and the dogs to Puppapalooza to get free stuff and watch the dogs compete. Tiny Esme and my niece won a ribbon for obedience and my sister in law ran the puppy in agility. Here is Rocket watching

Rocket competed in the high jump. Sigh. He did okay. He didn't do as well as I would have liked him to do or as well as I know he could have done and other dogs did much better - in my dogs defence, I would prefer that I be able to leave my dog in the yard and not worry about him casually going over any fence he feels like and time he feels like it. He does have his limits, in my experience, he can jump up to a surface quite a bit higher than he can jump over .

But after watching the agility competition ( such as it was) if I had known you could enter your dog even if they weren't any good at it, I would have entered Rocket! They even let you do it on a leash! Damn! We could have rocked it! It was like a baby course for babies! Little bitty barely off the ground baby stuff! He could have done with his eyes closed! And on a leash to keep him  focused? Dayum! Had I but known!

I did get him into the Urban Agility course the school offers. It starts next Sunday. It looks interesting but it also looks like the kind of stuff we already do, but hey, it looks like fun in a group . I am going to have to get him a harness and that does kind of suck. The last time we did agility a harness wasn't a requirement, not wearing his pinch collar was a requirement and that sucked too.

Friday Cats Blogging

They are both "seeing him in court".

Still Winning

The Shit Gibbon says he'll "See us in court". Thats right, he'll see WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in court. Where WE THE PEOPLE are doing pretty well and  WE THE PEOPLE ARE WINNING SO MUCH BUT WE ARE NOT TIRED OF WINNING. I bet he is tired of LOSING.

Wednesday

Just because it can not be in enough places:

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

Mitch McConnell, You would think he would have been smart enough to just let her say her piece and sit down. She would have said her piece and sat down. The show would have gone on, no one would have cared and no one would have known. Instead the dip shit went too far told her to sit down and shut up and instead he created a martyr. What an idiot. And what a boon for our side! She gets to play Camile for the next forever and he gets to have given her consumption. Good work.

All she has to do and can do at this point, thanks to his asshollery, is sit there and sell tee shirts. Lots of tee shirts. This weekend there will be thousands of signs with that written on it, because we will be out there, again. I hope McConnell and the rest of the GOP is very proud.

And every woman carrying on of those signs who may have been getting tired of carrying her sign and was thinking of maybe not carrying that sign this weekend, because maybe she really didn't want to carry that sign again, is going to gird her pussy hat, pick up her new sign and go out and march again. because she wants to, again. Thanks Mitch!

Tuesday

Yay Tuesday! Whee! All day it was Tuesday! I finished up my latest book: The Daily Show. The Book, An Oral History and tomorrow I am going to start on The Princess Diarist and after that I'm going to restart Razer Girl, the Carl Hiaasen I started and didn't finish . I am hoping by the time I finish up with that one that hopefully David Sedaris' most recent will go on sale and I'll be able to get it and then read it.

Have I mentioned that I hate my two Republican senators? Tillis and Burr? Spinless pieces of  fascist shit. Burr isn't running again and thinks it doesn't matter any more, that he can get away with these kind of choices. He must have wanted to be remembered for something? I'm guessing being Trumps Bitch was not what he was planning on, but that is what he will be remembered for in the books. Sorry not sorry, asshole, you worked for years and this is it for you: Trumps Bitch.

 Tillis committed political suicide for himself and his staff, which I will tell his staff as soon as they start answering the lines again. He is a dead man walking. He could have saved his political future and made a name for himself, but he decided that he was tired of the political life and wanted to disappear . Good work, his term is up in 2020 and he will not be reelected and those little people will be out of work.

Yup. Those poor sad things that staff his offices.  They love politics and they are True Believers in whatever it is that Republicans believe in. It's sad that their futures in the field  are trashed. They worked for him, their reputations are tied to his, irrevocably. They worked for a Trump backer and that is going to be poison for their political futures. It doesn't matter if that is true or not, I want them to think it is. And I will plant those seeds, doubt is a painful splinter and it is hard to get out.

They can save themselves, they can get out and go to work for better politicians. They could change their party and get saved,

Monday

Other than watching a very unsatisfactory Super Bowl, I also went to another protest, now becoming a weekly event,  I'm going to another on next weekend.  Despite a another visit from the bad back fairy, I made some absolutely lovely chicken soup -  even though I bought the chicken broth, it was still good even without the  homemade broth step. I baked the chicken parts myself and defrosted the frozen veggies  and that's worth points.

I attended my nephews birthday party and he can now officially spend the rest of his life bragging that he has been a card carrying member of the ACLU since he was eight years old, damn it! pretty rock solid liberal credentials. He has a adorably precocious hate for Cheeto, it's so cute and I hope he clings to it.   I also got him a nerf gun that shoots actual ammunition that if they hit you cause some discomfort. I don't which one he was more excited about. That's a big lie, he was more excited about the war toy.

I saw it taped on a newspaper box and came home and looked it up online and low and behold it was actually for real. Who knew?  I also did spread the word through instagram and Tumbler  and now here because I am just that kind of gal.
It is real

Friday Cats Blogging

TGIF

I was having such an absolutely lovely time doing absolutely nothing that I forgot that I did have something to do! So, yeah. I did get the trash and recycling out, so I can say I did that so I get a star.

 While I was watching  re-runs of another show,  it came to me that I really do not like watching reruns of  Will and Grace as much as I thought I would. I remembered I liked Will and Grace, but tastes change, I do not need to record all of them when they are aired, and when they air, they air a lot of them. I only need five at a time. They are a good distraction but no one needs hours and hours of those people.

I also decided that I will be attending the protest this weekend.

That was a Wednesday if I ever saw one.

Thanks to all the chaos I have had to limit my media exposure. In the evenings, I watch reruns and during the day I  read books.

I'm not in a complete media blackout, I spend the day checking one site and then another, for a long time I avoided the Politics tab at Fark but I went back. You can't avoid it. I have another protest on Saturday, This evening when I was walking the dog, I ran into a Air horn person  and we  smiled and waved at each other and were like Oh, hey! See you Saturday! like its just a thing we do now,  attended large protests. Air horn was a warm up to get us used to the idea of getting together in a crowd only now the  the crowd is much, much larger only and the stakes are higher than HB2. Maybe that's what air horn was for, a thirty week rehearsal for the real thing.

Books! Back to my books! So far I have have read or actually, reread three David Sedaris books and now I'm reading Anna Kendrick's autobiography, you are forgiven for not knowing who who is, she is an actress who has been in more than several movies that did great box office but that you didn't see if you are over forty, except for Up in the Air. with George Clooney, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She also has been nominated for a Tony,  and done a lot of broadway so she's she has earned some  gravitas.

 I just checked her IMDB page and she was not in The Help, I thought she was, and she is older than I gave her credit for, good for her, I mean like she's only five years younger than I am.
I was going to say. Why is a really young girl writing her autobiography, I mean, yes, she has been working professionally for a really long time and she is funny and very clever and all that but I really thought she was like in her late twenties if she was a day ( she looks about twelve, its a blessing and curse according to her). As it turns out the girl is a grown woman, she is okay to write an autobiography if she wants to.

After I finished Kendrick's book it's going to be on to Carrie Fisher's last one and then I know I have some others stacked up in my Kindle that I haven't read yet or stop reading for whatever reason, I have a nice nest of books to turn to.

I can't avoid media entirely and I don't want to, I just need to not spend a lot of time with it. Wonkette is my friend and I spend too much time at Jezabel, I really like the content,even though I don't like the commenters very much at all, they make me want to troll very hard.Its a good thing I never joined the site and I can't actualy comment myself.  My Facebook feed could give the non-initiated a stroke and my Twitter is angry. I remember when it was just Steve Martin -  Who BTW, has not posted in days and he normally posts constantly, in between writing Tony winning plays and winning Grammys, the man does not sleep! or have a thought he does not share. Lately he has not been in a sharing mood. One more crime to lay at Trumps feet - he has made Steve Martin stop tweeting!

Shopping

So as not spend the entire evening in front of the TV watching M*A*S*H reruns, I spent some of my evening spending money.

I wasn't going out willy nilly,  had a very short, very strict shopping list!   Despite the fact that it was 66 degrees this afternoon when I was walking the dog, it is still winter and tomorrow is February . It is going to get cold again and I am guessing that in that cold that is going to be at least one more snowfall .

My snow boots died and I needed new ones to make sure that in that the cold is just cold. If I don't replace my boots it is absolutely guaranteed to snow, but if I do replace them, there is a good chance that I won't need them. Its like my snow shovel, when I didn't have one I ended up needing it and having to DIY snow shovels to varying degrees of not success and then I finally got a real one and I've only used it once to absolute success - although I do wish I had spluged on the ergonomic version.

So. Did you know that in February that there are limited choices in snow boots available but almost unlimited swim suits to choose from? IN February! Of course! However, the savvy shopper knows where to look and to the savvy shopper goes the very last snow boots in the store. And they even fit.

And after that, I looked down my list to "buy nephews birthday gift" . This was harder because they don't have a section marked "Nephew wants This", I texted his parents and learned he liked nerf (tm) things, I like nerf (tm) things! Sadly, the spesfic things he likes look like massive weapons and I really do not like buying toys that look like weapons. I avoid buying such things but this time it was unavoidable.

Then I had a thought. Nephew is a strong anti-Trump partisan and a junior member of the resistance! if I must buy him a war toy I can also get him a gift membership in the ACLU!  And I did!

Monday

I had an epiphany as I was walking the dog this morning: I really need to put a skirt on.

I picked up this very cool voluminous knit poncho thingy over the weekend and it looked great over a turtleneck and a pair of leggings and boots. My first bad idea were those leggings - they were very badly behaved leggings, they were the first to go, they rodedown!

 The first version outfit will look great over a weekend sometime but in the work environment, it needed a little more coverage, so I added a black skirt and a different pair of black leggings and it looked great in the office.

I'll also have you know that there was a protest this afternoon and it went off without me, I don't want to get burned out on protests. Also, it was a the office  of one of our Senators and it turned out to be a very photogenic picket line and I don't want to show up in pictures at this point, there are still too many McCrory Republicans between me and my check. I need to be careful.

I did avoid the line though, as a practice though, I do not cross picket lines - not that I have had much chance to do so being that I have always lived in "right to work" states where you are not likely going to run across many picket lines to cross. So, for the first time ever, I think, I did not cross a picket line. The dog and I walked all the way around the building to avoid getting in its way.

Good for them showing up though and holding Sen. Tillis to the heat though and I do like the picket line idea, its a new one. It was a good use of not that many people and it looked good for the rush hour  traffic passing by. Good for the organizers.

Another Day another Protest

You go years without having to hit the bricks and then the world comes to an end and you find yourself  singing the old songs again and again and again I have the very bad feeling that we're going to be thrown into our own Ground Hogs Day Hell  for the foreseeable future.

The expected 150, they got 1500.

I went out early and got a good standing place and was shocked yet again when the crowds just did not stop arriving. Raleigh didn't let itself down, we are not happy and we are not afraid. The bear has been poked and it is not going back to sleep. There is a another rally already scheduled for the weekend of the 4th  and there is an even bigger rally long scheduled for the weekend after that. Being angry about politics and  policy is apparently a group activity. Who knew PoliSci could be fun!

But the thing is, its not fun.  None of this is fun. There are real people who are suffering  very real hardships because the cheeto is letting a Nazi make his policy  for him. We are the bad guys and suddenly? So are the British? Gawd! The Germans must feel so confused right now, they are on the moral high ground for the first time ever. I bet there is a nation wide epidemic of dizziness and disorientation. The grandchildren of Nazis are looking down on us. Thank you Cheeto,