Trixie, my trike
YOU CAN’T SEE THE WIND, BUT IT’S THERE
It is curious to me that it can get so very hot for a week or so – and then go back to reasonable, at least in the mornings, when the world is still heading into summer.
As the world goes around the sun, it gets hotter in the summer and then colder in the winter, but the small variations from day to day often seem to come from nowhere.
The husband has a touching belief in weather predictions. He thinks that what they say will happen, will happen, and seems disturbed when it isn’t dry on a day he intended to put down fertilizer that required dry grass.
Me, I believe, maybe, what’s happening in front of my nose.
Today’s trike ride temperature was supposed to be a balmy 72°F – but it was very windy, and the shorts and short-sleeved shirt I wore could have been replaced by something heavier, especially since I tend to slow or stop a lot because I’m trying not to exhaust all my energy – and lose another writing day, an all-too-frequent occurrence.
I had a bad night Sunday night – so I didn’t get out for my ride yesterday, because by the time I got up (9:30), it was already way too hot for me.
So I was extra careful this morning, and managed to go for a ride while the housekeeping ladies were here, and got blown around more than I had expected.
I had to change my route
Davis landscaping crews have altered my last two rides. I don’t know why they have to block the entire greenway path for longer than two vehicles. Most times you really can’t change the route you’ve chosen, because you can only get on and off the path at given intersections.
However, walkers and runners, even with dogs, can just slip around the trucks and trailers. The trike and I are much wider, and not really suited to going on grass or slopes – which also take more energy to navigate.
So, as I came upon another blockage this morning, I had to figure out how to get home on city streets I don’t usually use.
And it was somewhat longer. And I am more wiped out than I planned.
But getting out is necessary.
I just hope I can recover enough to finish 28.5 – I finally figured out how to handle what could have turned into a plot hole, and then one more (28.6), and Chapter 28 can go to the beta reader, the lovely Rachel.
It is frustrating to need exercise to stay even remotely well, but to find that every single trike ride can cost me a whole writing day. There’s got to be a happy medium in there somewhere.
How has the weather altered your current planning?
Are you going to watch the livestreaming of the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge on June 20 and 21? The kids and I intend to.
liebjabberings 
Sorry you’re having a tough time with the obstacles. I can imagine your aggravation.
I don’t do well with heat, and I ferreal will weed at night.
I am 46 and I’ve noticed that in the last five years or so, the weather can completely dictate my agenda. It’s raining? Good time to iron and read. It’s hot? Maybe shopping would be good. When the weather is lovely, I take advantage and garden.
I do share your husband’s feelings about the weather predictions though. Like, I’ll get mad it hasn’t rained or if it rains earlier than predicted. I’ll feel jilted when the low overnight shifts from 52 at 10pm to 57 at 5am.
Planning is my natural tendency, which is how I’ve learned to be so adaptable!
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The weather models are constantly getting better, what with better data and faster computers to analyze and predict – and they are still a thousand orders of magnitude apart of being able to model completely.
There is no way I’m getting into a computer-driven car, knowing what I know about how they crash.
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Mentor bought a car in fall of 2018. It’s so ‘safe’ with all of its ‘safety features’ it’s made several of its own decisions and as a result, she is eager to change cars and frequently drives her older one. 😦
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Scary, I would think, to have the car take over from you. EVEN IF it saves your life or property.
It would be making decisions based on someone else’s input, or worse, on input mixed together from a whole bunch of people.
If I thought it was more reliable than me, but it is a big assumption.
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Yeah, no, Alicias over bots any day 😉
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Have you ever had a disastrous computer crash?
EVERYONE has. The PR people need to take that into account, and address it, and tell us how they have so many redundant computers that we’re ultra safe.
I’ve seen no such advertising.
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Excellent point!
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I’m ready to be persuaded – after all, I’m a scientist – but it’s going to take a lot BECAUSE of what I’ve seen with computers.
The younger generation may be able to ignore the crashes and the failures on their phones and computers, but for some of us older folk, that’s the norm (and why we have backups up the wazoo) – and we come from Missouri.
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LOL! All valid points!
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It’s a balance act, but I’m thrilled that you’re so close to completing chapter 28. Bravo!
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Thanks.
Every day it’s hard to get started, for two reasons: my brain needs to kick on, and I know it will be intense once I start.
Many people have a bit of trouble with beginning when they know they are about to turn themselves inside out!
I get over it – because how many sudokus can you do once you notice you’re getting fast (they’re my speed-check)?
I’ve learned not to sweat it – only rarely can I DO something to speed the process. Yesterday was one such time – 3rd Diet Coke (I rarely allow a third) did the trick, and half the scene flowed out of the hole in my brain.
It’s interesting, because I also watch myself doing it, and dealing with the sluggishness. If I had the energy I’d write THE book: how to write with a damaged brain. But I have little interest in non-fiction, so it probably won’t happen.
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-grin- I hate to break it to you, but these blog posts are a form of record keeping. You’re actually writing bits and pieces of your how-to without knowing it. 🙂
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All of these bits and pieces – from a long correspondence with a friend in Australia via emails, to my comment, to the blog posts, to the snippets in my Production file for each and every scene in my books – are what I call my accidental autobiography.
If I’m coherent when I become famous, I’ll donate them to my alma mater or something. Digital is easy to store.
I’m already very careful what I say about some other people, especially those I love.
But there are already millions of words.
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Yes, my blog is my not-so-accidental autobiography as well. When I started it, I made a conscious pact with myself – I would talk about /my/ passions even if no one else in the world gave a flying fruit bat.
I don’t talk about intensely personal things; if anyone’s desperate to know they can marry me and find out the hard way! Joking aside, these writings of ours are as much a part of our legacy as the fiction we create. They’re our little slice of immortality.
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Marriage is many things, but it does not always produce a soul mate – Pride’s Children is dedicated to my husband, for his massive and continuing patience – but he’ll never read it. He’s a Youtube news and documentaries, The Economist type; not a reader of fiction.
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I’m divorced so I’d better not comment. Your Hubby does sound supportive though, just not a fan. 🙂
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He gets his fiction from TV and movies, neatly acted out. Many people prefer that. TV was crappy in Mexico when I grew up; I naturally gravitated to whatever I could find to read in English. Different backgrounds.
School in the States seems to kill the reading instinct in some students. I don’t know – I never went to school here until the end of college.
And I homeschooled my kids – another accident: I was ill and at home, and it was either use my limited energy to deal with schools, or teach my kids in three hours what it would take them ten in a school.
Was the right choice for us. They all started out reading a lot; I don’t know how much fiction this generation – and our three kids – get now.
There’s still a huge market for fiction, so authors are still relevant – which is lucky for me, as I don’t have the energy to be a TV writer, even if they let anyone over thirty into their bull pens.
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I loved TV as a kid but then at the age of 8 I had an op on my eye and wasn’t allowed to watch TV for 3 weeks. I thought I’d die. Then I noticed that the doctor hadn’t said anything about books so in sheer desperation I started to read. Been devouring books ever since. By contrast, the Offspring almost didn’t learn to read because of the ridiculous way it was taught in primary school. Mum bought a book on syllables and hey presto. [I was qualified to teach French, not English, but you make do]. Long story short, the Offspring is a voracious reader as well. I’m going to be a grumpy old teacher and say that the education system in both Australia & the US sucks. There. I feel so much better now. 🙂
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The educational systems waste enormous amounts of time, are pitched at the lowest common denominator, are political footballs, and turn many kids off learning – because they can only allow for one modality at a time.
Most people can’t afford to homeschool their own. Many are not capable. But it was perfect for us – and, with their local homeschool group, gave mine countless opportunities to participate in competitions they wouldn’t have qualified for in school. I’m content.
Whether I would have done that if I hadn’t been ill is unlikely, though I would probably have stepped in to fill defficiencies.
But the whole school system is INEFFICIENT, and it steals time from the bright kids unless they are very lucky.
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Yup. The education system we’re used to is inefficient because it isn’t actually focused on education. As this pandemic has shown, the push to get schools to reopen has been fundamentally to allow parents to return to work [assuming they have jobs to return to]. The pious bullshit about kids needing face to face teaching in a classroom is a lie. Some, particularly brilliant teachers can actually /teach/ a classroom of 25 – 30 kids of various capabilities – I know coz I trained under one – but most cannot. Most struggle just to be heard.
Disclaimer: whilst I don’t consider myself to be the best high school teacher ever born, my kids did learn but…every class I taught was a high energy performance designed to keep their interest while they learned the lessons of the day. That ‘performance’ takes a lot out of you, which is probably why most teachers don’t do it. I truly believe teaching should be a vocation.
Ahem…end rant. Anyway, the very best way to teach anyone, old or young, is one-on-one. 🙂
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To know the actual facts behind what is happening to our public education system, I recommend you start by reading Diane Ravitch’s books and blog.
The teachers are not responsible. Outside forces like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Wal-Mart Walton family, ALEC and a lot more are. This sample is the tip of the iceberg.
It’s complicated and has been going on for some time. When President G. W. Bush signed the “No Child Left Behind” bill into law, it got a lot worse and kept escalating.
https://dianeravitch.net/
If you are willing to learn what is going on, maybe only one of Diane’s books would be enough and that would be “Slaying Goliath”.
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That ship sailed years ago for me, and I don’t have the spare energy it would take. They do it their way – and I don’t like the way children incarcerated with their peers for years turn out. Mine didn’t have any trouble differentiating from their parents and moving on in the world but the thought that American would put up with having their kids not want to walk with them at the mall (and the many equivalents of that) was not the way I wanted them to grow up.
It doesn’t even take preaching at them – it just involves not having them spend every minute in a place they have to defend themselves – by merging with a clique.
Fortunately for me, I guess, I was the American who didn’t fit in with her classmates in Mexico, and I was too tall? too clueless? to be bullied much, so they just kind of ignored me, and I spent a lot of time reading. The Girl Guides were a good group for me – the girls who were more interested in makeup, hair, nails, and their future husbands didn’t usually even try the Guides.
We co-existed peacefully, especially since my four younger sisters fit in much better.
And then I went away and became a physicist and got a PhD in Nuclear Engineering, and was fine – different aims in life.
I homeschooled my own – and have not a real teacher bone in me, not for educating large numbers of other people’s children. That’s a vocation. I don’t have it. There are some wonderful teachers out there.
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I did not find my way to a classroom as a teacher until I was thirty. I left the middle management private sector job I had and went to Cal Poly Pomona in 1975 to become a public school teacher.
To earn my credential, I ended up in a full-time teacher training program called an Urban Residency. Urban Residencies put teacher trainees into schools with high rates of childhood poverty with a master teacher. Adele Stepp was a great master teacher. What I learned from her served me well for the next 29 years. After the 1975-76 school year, I substitute taught for two years and worked in a half dozen school districts. The calls usually came at 5 in the morning.
Along the way, I ended up in two long-term substitute teaching jobs that eventually led to a full contract at a middle school that was considered the most dangerous school in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County. Giano was surrounded by violent street gangs. Even the police would not patrol those streets at night.
Eight years later, I transferred to another middle school in the same district for three more years. Then I moved to the high school in the same area where I started out. The grade school where I was an urban residency teacher in training eventually saw its student going to that high school.
I stayed there for 16 years often working 60 to 100 hours weeks. Twenty-five hours a week in class with my students and the rest of the time correcting student work, planning lessons, attending meetings, calling parents; it is a long list.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan released a report called “A Nation at Risk” that blamed the public schools for just about everything. Right about then, we were into teaching kids to become critical thinkers, problem solvers and life long learners by focusing in guiding them to love reading books. “A Nation at Risk” was responsible for taking any power teachers had away from them and sent the schools in the wrong direction leading to where they are today.
“Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report
Nearly a quarter-century ago, “A Nation at Risk” hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong. …
https://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
Since 1983, the attacks and lies about the public schools and teachers never ended. Then in 2001, when President G. W. Bush signed “No Child Left Behind” into law, and teaching got a whole lot worse.
I am so glad I retired in 2005. I still have friends that are teaching though, and what I hear from them tells me I would have died from the stress if I had stayed in the classroom.
What people like Bill Gates, the Waltons, the Kochs, and Eli Broad have done is led to a shortage of teachers because young people in college are hearing the horrible things that are being forced on public school teachers and that when those horrible programs block children from the joy of learning cause more problems, the teachers are blamed.
Almost everything that is wrong with our public schools was started from the top in 1983, and trickled down and overtime until that trickle turned into a river in 2001 with “No Child Left Behind”.
When I retired from teaching in 2005 after thirty years, I decided that if I was told I had to return and teach again, I’d volunteer to become a human bomb instead. The CIA could send me to Afghanistan so I could blow myself up in the middle of a group of Taliban leaders.
Being a public school teacher these days is like being a victim of the Spanish inquisition with mental torture in place of physical torture.
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Wow. You certainly have the experience – and the battle wounds.
My husband worked the last 11 years before retirement (after being a an industrial researcher for a specialty chemical company for 22) as the sole physics and chemistry teacher in a specialized STEM public high school in Edison, NJ.
It was probably the best environment for him teaching – but he worked an awful lot of extra hours to do it. And the school district supported the school less and less as time went by – so he was happy to retire. I thought he’d at least finish the school year, but he’d had it.
In 1983 I was childless, and working at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab in fusion research – we had our kids late, and then I came down with ME/CFS at a physics meeting – and never got better.
So I’m not a good person to know about schools; but it seems the school district supervisors and such get all the money and do little of the work.
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I have little to nothing good to say about district administrators.
During my 27 years under a full-time contract, I worked under about 10 principals. One was great. Two were good. Two were monsters and one of the monsters I called Hitler.
The one I called Hitler was hired by one of those district admins I called Sauron to get rid of me but that backfired and I ended up getting rid of Hitler with help from the LA Times, the teachers’ unions, the ACLU and a couple of other nonprofit education groups that defended teachers and teachers that taught high school journalism and at the time I was an award-winning journalism teacher. My journalism students were picking up writing awards all over the place, locally, regionally, nationally, and even internationally.
All those awards helped save me, because I was also outspoken. When I thought district admin or a principal was doing something stupid or wrong, I confronted them publicly. They hated that.
A VP at the high school that was a friend warned me the year before Hitler was hired that Sauron was out to get me. Another teacher, also a friend, had friends that worked in the district office and they leaked to him that the district admins were holding meetings trying to figure out how to get rid of me but they were afraid of me at the same time.
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They seem to need to use their ‘power’ because they don’t deserve their salaries – they add nothing to education. Irritating to see the nepotism and the favoritism and the complete lack of accountability.
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I agree totally. If teachers were in charge like they are in Finland, our public schools would be a whole lot better.
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The very worst part is that every single municipality in this country has its own school board, superintendent, secretaries – a complete waste and a huge spending of money on personnel. I read the school board minutes once out of curiosity – and found it amazing bafflegab.
There is no need for 100 or more third grade curricula – one per school district – in a state!
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I do not know about the other states, but California developed a statewide curriculum for each grade level a few years before No Child Left Behind. Every teacher at each grade level for every subject was provided with a guide. But then No Child Left Behind came followed by Common Core, and that ended and testing became king followed with endless test prep instead of real teaching.
All the problems always trickle down from the top. It’s like the billionaires and elected officials behind this tragedy are pissing on the teachers and kids and laughing at us as we drown.
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Thanks for the links. I’m actually not American, I’m Australian, but our education systems tend to follow education ‘theory’ from the US.
Having taught here in Australia, I agree that the system is largely at fault. But. I’ve also worked with some appalling teachers who chose teaching for either financial reasons – tertiary degree paid for by the govt in exchange for a 3 year commitment to teach – or because they saw it as a soft option. A whole lot stayed in teaching through inertia.
Apologies to all the dedicated teachers out there. I know you exist. I just wish you were more visible, and had more of a say in what children are taught.
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“I’ve also worked with some appalling teachers who chose teaching for either financial reasons – tertiary degree paid for by the govt in exchange for a 3-year commitment to teach – or because they saw it as a soft option.”
We have teachers that went into education for the same reasons. They are recruited by an organization called Teach for America (TFA), but TFA recruits are only required to teach for 2 years and if they make it (about half leave before they finish the two-year contract), they get a cushy job working for an elected official at the state level or someone in the U.S. Congress or move into administration at the top of a school district where their job is to do all they can to destroy the public schools so they will be closed, the teachers’ unions broken, and the teacher profession abolished, and our children turned over to publicly-funded, private-sector charter schools or they will get vouchers that let them go to religious schools.
I think TFA is at work in other countries, too. Maybe there is a Teach for Australia branch. TFA recruits college grads, gives them a few hours of training with little or no time actually learning how to teach, and then throws them in public schools. TFA gets a lot of funding from ultra-conservative, fundamentalist religious, right-wing billionaires like Betsy DeVos, the billionaire Trump put in charge of the U.S. Department of Education where she has worked full time to do saw much damage as she can to our public schools. Besty the Brutal inherited her wealth from her billionaire parents and never attended any public schools that she hates.
There is a book called “The Teacher Wars” by Dana Goldstein and in Chapter 10 she compares teacher training programs and ranks their quality by the retention rate several years later. about who thirds of TFA recruits are gone and never return to education while 80 percent of teachers that went through Urban Residency training programs are still in the classroom a decade later and they are still working in schools with high ratios of children that live in poverty. The minority of TFA recruits that stayed in education usually transfer to public schools that teach children from the upper-middle class. Only a few TFA recruits stay to work with children that offer the most challenges to teachers. Children born into poverty arrive at school with a lot of baggage and challenges.
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My husband, a PhD in Physical Chemistry with 22 years experience in industrial research, obtained an alternate route teaching degree in NJ. It was valid only in NJ, and allowed him to begin teaching physics and chemistry immediately. The principal of his school, who built the special STEM public high school, had mostly alternate route teachers with long histories in STEM in the commercial world, people who worked at Bell Labs, etc.
They were free of the bs that comes from regular route teaching, but were unfortunately subject to administrators in the school district who had the usual path and qualification.
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Long term professional teachers looked askance at administrators thinking they might have started out as failed teachers that could not manage a classroom of children so they moved into administration. I knew a few when they were teachers and they couldn’t teach or control the learning environment in their classrooms that were almost always in bedlam.
An administrator at any level had to earn the trust of professional teachers because too many of them were incompetent and/or brutal dictators that thought all decisions should start with them and everyone below them follow directions without complaint.
I worked under one really great principal, and he ended up retiring early because he had a stroke. The stroke was caused by stress, and his doctor told him that if he stayed in education it would kill him. His name was Ralph Pagan and he was the principal who offered me my first full contract for the 1978-1979 school year. Ralph believed that teachers should make the majority of decisions at the school level, and he supported our decisions. He organized us into teams to make lots of decisions from curriculum development for each academic subject area, to discipline and retention (students held back or not).
Ralph’s philosophy is what Finland does with its public schools. Finland has a national curriculum but leaves it up to the teachers and their school site teacher teams to decide what to focus on from that national curriculum.
Finland does not use high stakes tests or require high stakes test to rank and punish teachers or students to determine if children are learned. In Finland, the teachers are trusted and treated and paid like professionals just like Ralph treated his teachers.
What we didn’t know was that Ralp was under immense pressure from the dictators in the district office to abandon his management style and adopt rule from the top down like a total autocrat.
During my years with Ralph, he turned what was considered the worst middle school in the San Gabriel Valley into one of the best.
I never worked with a principal like Ralph again. Some were okay. Some were mediocre and a few were downright evil and used their means to cover up their incompetence.
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TFA doesn’t ring a bell with me, but apart from a couple of years as a tutor, I’ve been out of the mainstream of teaching for a long time. Back in the day, bonded teachers were sent out to rural and regional schools where most people didn’t want to go.
Btw, that brilliant teacher I mentioned? The one who supervised my first ‘teaching round’? She taught at one of the poorest schools in Melbourne. Very high proportion of migrant children from a poor socio-economic background. Sadly, teachers like that are few and far between. I know I was a good teacher, but the system killed it for me, not the kids.
I’m now in my 60s and starting to believe that online learning may end up being the most efficient way of teaching kids. It’s how they learn already when they watch youtube videos on gaming or whatever else interests them. The key, of course, is to /interest/ them. -shrug-
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Online learning is failing miserably in the United States. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/online-learning-fails-deliver-finds-report-aimed-discouraging
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I would have LOVED to do my own learning online.
It is necessary for kids to have a reference – so that if they get stuck, there is someone who will help them get unstuck quickly. Kids need to learn to learn this way – I think they can under the RIGHT conditions. The wrong ones are worse than useless.
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Ah now that’s interesting, but that report is about online tertiary level courses, not secondary level courses. Here in Australia we’ve had distance learning for decades to cater for kids in remote rural areas where the nearest town could be 300 km away [and still not have a school]. It works well because the kids have radio access to teachers who can answer questions as they arise. I wonder if that is part of the reason online tertiary level courses are less effective? Or perhaps it’s the quality of the course material. People seem to learn quite effectively from online material when they are motivated, or entertained. I suspect the sector will evolve, especially now that the pandemic has made ‘normal’ forms of learning less desirable.
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When I was still teaching, the high school offered on-line classes being conducted live by a professor at a local college. The students that signed up for these classes that would count as college credit and for high school graduation had to go to the high school library to attend that class.
The professor was alone in his office and the students watched him and interacted with him or her on a screen linked to a computer. I don’t know how large the class sizes were.
I have read that most of the online for-profit schools in the US will have one teacher for hundreds of students in one of his online classes and in some cases, these online schools have been caught creating ghost students that do not exist to get more public money. They also reported that every student signed up attends every class. In the U.S., schools are paid by attendance. If a child stays home, no money for that kid that day.
An audit found that the actual number that signed up for the private, for-profit online class was way below the total. The HS graduation rates for online high schools are the lowest in the country, something like 15 to 30 percent.
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Ouch. That’s bad. Over here, most of the online learning at high school level [not counting remote learning] only started as a result of the pandemic lockdowns. Private schools do provide their own online classes, but they are paid by parents. The Catholic schools are a little different as they are paid by parents and also receive some govt funding which makes them a ‘hybrid’ system.
At the tertiary level, however, there has been a lot of rorting going on as for-profit operators sign students up without providing much in the way of real teaching…or qualifications. Some of these fly-by-night establishments do provide online courses but most have bricks and mortar classrooms. Not sure how they’ve coped during the pandemic.
I think we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If the system in the US is being scammed, then the authorities should crack down on the scammers. And they should also audit the teaching programs to ensure that students are receiving at least a basic standard of instruction. How that should be done I have no idea. Are schools administered by the Federal govt in the US, or by individual states with Federal oversight?
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Nothing will change until we get all the Scammers out of the White House and the U.S.Congress.
To do that we have to get rid of Donald Trump and all the scum he filled his administration with.
We also have to vote out as many Republicans as possible and get a progressive or liberal majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. The GOP (Republican Party) enables Donald Trump and these scammers.
It’s complicated.
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Yeah. Forgive my being blunt but…the rot certainly seems to go deep. 😦
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Hopefully, the rot is not deep enough to be terminal.
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We can’t give up on our entire experiment in democracy just because of one administration, no matter how damaging and destructive, or it wasn’t worth as much as we thought.
Granted, the scope of the damage, with modern weapons (and no war!), has been astronomical, but there is still hope.
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Most people hope that things will turn for the better. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t, at least during our lifetimes. Maybe in a few generations, after everyone that thinks like Emperor TrumpEekStan-ThinSkin is long gone, it will get better.
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It has definitely shown a deep racist rot in our society, to go along with the sexist and homophobic rots.
These things should have been handled after the Civil War.
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After the Cold War, there was still President Ray Gun and then two Bushes followed by Trumpty Dumpty.
Didn’t thinks get a bit better under Bill Clinton and Obama?
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Obama was stymied on every front by Moscow Mitch – he used his power to prevent bills from even getting voted on. And from having Obama appoint a Supreme Court Justice.
Obama exhibited great grace under pressure, but he could have done SO much more if the Republicans had not been in charge of Congress – and such d*cks.
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True, Moscow Mitch did everything possible to block Obama from accomplishing anything.
Now Moscow Mitch is doing everything he can to enable Trump to become president for life.
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Fortunately, DT himself is visibly failing. And MM is getting old. Maybe they will tidy themselves away naturally.
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How about tiding them away in a tiny little cell inside a prison for a decade or three?
If Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme that fleeced the rich and famous, how long will TD and MM get for treason, fraud, et al?
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“Wouldn’t it be loverly!” Instead, he’ll probably get a pension, and Secret Service protection for himself and his brood of vipers.
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Do the children and grandchildren of presidents also get Secret Service protection for life? I’ll have to Google that to find out.
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Amen.
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My blogs an ‘accidental autobiography’ as well! 😀 … funny how that happens. 🙂
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High Five! lol
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I wonder if RUNA would help with your energy. If you haven’t heard of Runa Energy Drink, they offer some flavors with no sugar and only one ingredient. In the afternoons when my energy leaks out and I drink a RUNA with no sugar (they offer some flavors with sugar – I avoid those like they carry COVID-19), I get a boost and can work for another hour or so. After I finish, my recovery time is shorter, too.
Whole Food carried RUNA a while back and then dropped it probably because it wasn’t as sweet as most of the very unhealthy energy drinks most people buy.
The next three paragraphs are all copied and pasted:
Runa LLC is a privately held organic Amazonian beverage company that processes and sells guayusa. … A certified Benefit corporation, Runa purchases guayusa directly from indigenous farmers who own their own land in a model following Fair Trade principles.
Guayusa leaves contain various beneficial compounds linked to potential health benefits. This Amazonian plant is rich in antioxidants and caffeine that may promote weight loss, blood sugar regulation, and improved mood and alertness. Its tea is safe to drink and serves as an excellent alternative to coffee
Runa Clean Energy is an all-natural tea-based energy drink made from Amazonian Guayusa Tea. The energy drink version comes in two flavors: Original and Berry. They are carbonated and seek to provide consumers with a natural alternative to other energy drinks while providing twice the antioxidants of green tea.
https://runa.com/products/
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I think those of us with CFS have tried EVERYTHING. Our cells don’t manufacture energy fast enough. Energy drinks don’t help. If they did, we’d buy stock in these companies, and corral their product.
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