Late August In Anchorage: It Gets Dark Again At Night And There Are Raspberries

I took out the garbage tonight at about 10:30pm and it was dark!

It's the end of August and in 30 weeks it will be the equinox when everyone, everywhere gets the same amount of light.  Then those of us further north, get more and more darkness.

But it's also the time when I can go out into the backyard and pick raspberries every day.

There's lots to write about.  I've been trying to imagine what it's like to be in Houston these days.  We are seeing lots of pictures of roads turned into rivers and someone posted a picture of a guy catching a fish by hand in a foot of water in his living room.  But it's not like everyone in Houston has been washed out of their homes.  It's just that the media focus on the most dramatic scenes.  The Guardian reports that:

"More than 2.3 million people live in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. Tens of thousands of homes in and around Houston are semi-submerged and thousands of people have sought emergency shelter from the wind and rain. Officials estimate that 30,000 residents are likely to need shelter."

My calculation says that 30,000 people is 1.3% of Houstonians.  I'm not hearing much about the other 98.7%.

And it feels like we're in a constant bombard of craziness from, it's not clear.  Trump supporters?  Russian bots?  Right wing propaganda mills?  A combination?  So many counter attacks to take the attention off of Trump, to try to put anti-trumpets on the defensive.  To let them pass unanswered leaves some people vulnerable to believing the nonsense.  Things like "where was Obama during Katrina?"  (He was representing the state of Illinois in the US Senate.)  But to have to keep answering everything takes our eyes off the really important and damaging destruction of the Trump administration.  Like dismantling the State Department.  Is that part of his instructions from Putin?

Netflix has the Manchurian Candidate.  If you've never seen it, you should.  If you have, it's time to see it again.

I haven't had a chance to write about my short jury duty call.  I got called for a jury, along with 59 other potential jurors.  Jury selection took two days and 30 potential jurors, including a current state legislator.  Eventually they got 14 (two alternates), and I was never more than an observer of the jury selection.  The legislator didn't make it onto the jury either.

Remember the number above - 1.3%.  The media want sensational stuff to get your eyeballs for their sponsors.  And that's true for all the news, not just Harvey.  Remember, for every person who gets shot on any given day, over 300 million people didn't see or hear any gunshots.  But those stories aren't as interesting.  So don't let the news get you down.  Just turn it off and go for a walk or a run or a bike ride.  Get into a park or a garden or the woods or by the ocean or other natural waterway.  Take advantages of what you do have and be kind and loving to those who don't have.