Sidetracked Charley

As the family saga goes it was all about a small pox vaccination. My mother thought the resultant scars were ugly so appealed to the family doctor to put mine on the underside of my arm. I was a lot less than a year old at the time Mother was scheduled to be flying with me on a military plane to join Dad in Rome. Eager to get away from all the relatives she planned well ahead for the vaccination so it I got sick it would not delay her departure. Two weeks later I had not shown any sign the vaccination hat taken. The site looked like an insect bite and Mother carried a certificate from the doctor that I had indeed been given all shots necessary for international travel. Sometime mid Atlantic I became seriously ill. And by the time we touched down in Rome, at the civil and not military airport I was running a fever of 104 and covered with welts, and very dehydrated. I had what custom officials believed was a full blown case of Small Pox. Which was confirmed by not having the stand...

Storm Coming I live in a Blue state. But in a very rural area (Red), visited by many people from Texas (Red and Fundie). And I am an artist and an introvert who lives rural. Especially in the winter the majority of my interaction with others is on the internet where I get to largely pick and choose who I interact with. But there is a storm coming. If the weather bureau got it right this time. I picked up a house bound friend and we ventured to the local market filled with visitors and shopped for some comfort food and snowed in with no power supplies. The safety pins on my lapel were getting some angry looks. Some of them were still wearing Trump campaign buttons. We escaped to the soup aisle with the tiny section of organic soups. To shop organic we have to go over the mountain, but a storm was coming. So we contented ourselves with organic baby spinach and a few organic soups, fire starters, some bottled water just in case. I admit I am not fond of this chain store which bo...