Tag: JusJoJan

SoCS: Top of JC’s Mind

I started Top of JC’s Mind in September, 2013, and, sometimes, I like to take another look at some of my older posts.

It’s an eclectic blog with lots of topics and you could rummage around in old posts, too, if you like.

Sometimes, I am looking back for specific topics or events. There are also threads that weave in and out over time.

For example, I wrote a lot of comments on the eventually successful campaign to keep shale gas fracking out of New York – which had a brief, ugly reprise in the more recent effort to add CO2 fracking to our state ban. There are also renewable energy posts, including posts on heat pumps, solar panels, and EVs. We are proud to be an electrified household powered by the sun!

There are poetry posts, including posts from my residencies with the Boiler House Poets Collective at the Studios at MASS MoCA which began in fall 2015.

I’ve written quite a lot of COVID/pandemic posts. I’m humbled that one of the local historical societies has been printing those posts to place in their archives for possible research in the future.

The most poignant posts for me are the ones that involve my family. I wrote about my parents in their final years. Those posts were helpful to me at the time as a way to process what was going on but are also good to look back on from time to time.

While I’m admittedly not a great photographer, I’ve tried to include some photos. It’s handy that, during the years of Top of JC’s Mind, we have had family living in Hawai’i, and later, London. Even an amateur can take decent photos in those settings. I also like to take photos in the western Massachusetts/Southern Vermont area where I lived as a child and teen.

So, I invite you to take another look at Top of JC’s Mind.

Or a first look, if that is more applicable…
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Concsiousness Saturday this week is “take another look.” Find more information on joining us for SoCS and/or Just Jot It January here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/01/23/the-friday-reminder-for-socs-jusjojan-2026-daily-prompt-for-jan-24th/

Welcome, 2026!

After a rough 2025 for many of us, I hope that the new year will bring an increase in peace, security, freedom, and safety for each person.

We began our new year’s celebration yesterday with a midday dinner with son-in-law L’s parents. So much delicious food!

We opted to return to our hotel early in the evening before things got rowdy. We figured we could watch the festivities in Central London on the television if we managed to stay awake. I’m sure at E and L’s new home in East London there will be a lot of banging on pots and pans at midnight, along with personal fireworks. Granddaughters ABC and JG napped in the afternoon so they could be awake for the arrival of 2026.

They followed the Filipino tradition of having a bowl of 12 different, round fruits to welcome the new year.


This marks the first post for Just Jot It January 2026, an initiative organized by Linda Hill of the “Life in progress” blog. You are welcome to join in the fun at any point and can find details on her blog. I’ll write a bit more about it as the month goes on.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

One-Liner Wednesday: the purpose of practicing art

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Kurt Vonnegut

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays and Just Jot It January! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2024/01/10/one-liner-wednesday-jusjojan24-the-10th-so/ 

One-Liner Wednesday: doing your best

“Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.”
~~~~~ Sandra Day O’Connor
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Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January and/or One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2022/01/26/one-liner-wednesday-jusjojan-the-26th-2022-enchanted-snowfall/

political parallels?

We were in London when the United Kingdom had their election in December, so we saw some of the television coverage of it.

As we know, the Tories (Conservatives) won, Boris Johnson retains his post as prime minister, and, at midnight tonight Brussels time, the UK will officially leave the European Union, a process shorthanded as Brexit.

Right after the election, some pundits who were looking at this as possibly predictive of the upcoming United States elections later this year, posited that the lesson learned was that you can’t have a very liberal person representing the opposing political party.

That was not my takeaway from the situation. I was, instead, stuck by the parallels between UK and US politics, despite the differences in our governmental systems.

First, you have a similar urban/rural divide. In the US, the Democrats are stronger in urban areas and are represented by blue on electoral maps. The Republicans are stronger in rural areas and states and are represented by red. In the UK, the divide between Labor and Tories is similar, but the map colors are reversed.

Of course, the electoral map in the UK is much more complicated as there are more parties involved, such as the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists. There is a real danger that Scotland and Northern Ireland, who do not want to leave the European Union, may in the future vote to leave the United Kingdom. The United States is not about to break apart depending on the outcome of elections.

Another similarity is that the pivotal elections that brought us to this point were influenced by the Russians. Both the Brexit vote four years ago and the 2016 presidential election won by Trump are known to have suffered interference by Russian operatives. A number of GRU officers have been indicted in the United States for their election interference. (The GRU is the main intelligence agency in Russia.) Both the Brexit vote and the 2016 presidential election were close votes. There is no way to quantify the influence of the foreign interference, but it does call into question, in such close votes, if foreign interference tipped the scales.

Both the UK Tories and the US Republicans are historically conservative parties. They had certain principles that they held for decades. They have both turned away from those principles to follow an unconventional leader. In the US, this is sometimes referred to as a “cult of personality.” Any party member who disagrees with the leader is either badgered into falling back in the party line or leaving the party or not running for reelection.

I was also struck by how often Johnson and Trump are called out for lying. This is very distressing. In the US, it has led to some people denying facts in order to believe the lies. Some people even contend that there are no such things as facts or truth. This is dangerous, not only in politics but also in other topics. “Believing” something does not make facts disappear.

No one knows what will happen next in either nation. The UK leaves the European Union tonight, but there are no permanent plans in place for what that looks like. As I write this, I’m listening to the arguments for and against subpoenaing witnesses and documents in Trump’s impeachment trial. Even though most people think they know how the trial will turn out, no one knows what additional facts will surface and how the public will react.

Uncertainty seems the only constant.
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Today is the last day of Linda’s Just Jot It January. We hope you have enjoyed it – and joined in if you wanted! You can find out more about Just Jot It January here:  https://lindaghill.com/2020/01/31/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-31st-2020/
Remember that Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday and Stream of Consciousness Saturday are ongoing. You can learn all about those on Linda’s blog, too. Thanks, Linda, for joining us all together for so much fun!

finished and unfinished

The opening statements are finished.

The presentations from the House managers (the prosecutors) and the President’s counsel (the defense) are finished.

The two days of questions from the senators and answers from the teams are almost finished.

Tomorrow, there will be votes to consider hearing from witnesses and obtaining documents from the executive branch. The vast majority of US voters want there to be witnesses and documents as part of the trial. Many of us have been called to jury duty and know that fair trials always have witnesses and documentary evidence. Unlike presidential impeachments of the twentieth century, this one was not preceded by a special or independent counsel investigation, so there were not tens of thousands of pages of documents, depositions, and testimony already assembled. In the current impeachment, this was compounded by the blanket assertion of the president that he did not have to turn over any documents or allow any testimony from anyone in his administration. This is totally unprecedented. During the impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon, he directed all of his staff and Cabinet to testify before the Congressional committee and turned over documents. Some of the staff went to prison because of their wrongdoing. When the Oval Office tapes were revealed and Nixon tried to not turn them over as evidence, the Supreme Court quickly ruled that they must be turned over to the Congress. Hiding evidence of a corrupt act is also a corrupt act.

Still it appears that the Republicans want the trial finished this week before the Super Bowl, the Iowa caucuses, and the President’s State of the Union address.

If the Republicans vote to not have witnesses called and vote to acquit, the trial will still feel unfinished. More evidence will come out in the days and weeks ahead and people will rightly ask why the evidence was not presented at the trial. They will also rightly ask if the senators upheld their oath to do “impartial justice.”

When things are left unfinished, there is a sense of unease.

I think uneasiness lies ahead for the US.
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Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January! Following prompts is not required, but I chose today to use the prompt “finished.” Find out more about Just Jot It January here:  https://lindaghill.com/2020/01/30/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-30th-2020/

One-Liner Wednesday: dinosaurs!

“T-Rex ate meat!”
~~~ how my two-year-old granddaughter ABC greeted the choir, the priest, and random parishioners at church last Sunday
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Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday and/or Just Jot It January! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2020/01/29/one-liner-wednesday-jusjojan-the-29th-2020-doggy-boo-boo/

Badge by Laura @ riddlefromthemiddle.com

vanishing likes

I joke about not looking at my blog stats very often, but there is one stat that winds up in front of me every time I post, my Top of JC’s Mind Facebook page.  Every time I look at my Facebook timeline, my page’s “like” number is in large numbers at the right. 

It’s hard to miss.

I was stuck at 99 for a looooong time.

When I finally got to 100, one of my personal Facebook friends admitted that she was tempted to unlike my blog page as a joke!

She didn’t – and I did make it up to 103 for a while, but, now, I am down to 101. Knowing that many people have left Facebook in recent months, I’m not taking it (very) personally, but I am in danger of dropping below 100 again.

Oh, well.

(Not so) easy come, easy go…
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Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2020/01/28/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-28th-2020/

 

Sightseeing in London

Last month, my spouse B, younger daughter T, and I made our first family trip to London to visit daughter E, her spouse L, our granddaughter ABC, and L’s family. After almost three years of waiting, E’s spousal visa finally came through and she and ABC relocated to London in October.

Yes, I am horribly late posting about the trip. I came home sick and had a hard time shaking it and there were holidays and technical issues – I am notoriously bad at dealing with photos – but I’m hoping to get out a few posts in the coming days.

We arrived in the UK on Saturday and did central London sightseeing on Sunday, after attending mass the church where Larry serves as organist and director of the adult choir. We had bought advance tickets to ride the London Eye, also known as the Millenium Wheel.
London Eye

It was nice to see some of the historic London landmarks from above. Here is the Palace of Westminster, where Parliament meets. You can see the clocktower which usually houses Big Ben shrouded in scaffolding as part of the ongoing restoration project.
Parliament

Two-and-a-half-year-old ABC was much more impressed with the boats on the Thames than the buildings!

After our ride on the Eye, we grabbed some lunch and went on a walking tour. On future trips, we may try to tour some of the buildings. We anticipate many trips to London in the future!

Because daylight hours are short in London in the winter, as we walked in the area of Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, we were able to see some of the holiday lights.
London holiday lights

In Trafalgar Square, we were drawn to the sculpture on the Fourth Plinth, part of “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” by Michael Rakowitz, a US artist of Iraqi ancestry. It is a replica of Lamassu, a protective deity from the gates of Nineveh in 700 BCE which was destroyed by the Islamic State in 2015. This sculpture is made from 10,500 empty date cans; dates were once a major part of the economy in Iraq, but 90% of the 30 million date trees have been destroyed in the long years of war. Rakowitz is trying to recreate all the art that was stolen from the museum in Baghdad or destroyed at sites across Iraq.  The art on the Fourth Plinth changes every couple of years and this sculpture will be replaced in 2020, so we were fortunate to have seen it.
Lamassu sculpture in London

As we were walking in the Piccadilly shopping district, I was delighted to see this building with Advent calendar decorated windows. It is Fortnum & Mason, a fancy department store. We went in to browse a bit, but it was so crowded we could barely move. We are definitely not used to that!
Advent calendar F & S

It was fun to see some of London with holiday lights. While we expect to visit frequently in the coming years, I don’t know how often we will be able to go in December. Time will tell…

Photos courtesy of B
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Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2020/01/27/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-27th-2020/

 

 

the other side

Because I want to be informed, even when it is scary, I listened to the first day of Trump’s defense in the impeachment trial.

It was puzzling.

A lot of what the president’s team spoke about wasn’t related to the case. It seemed that they were bringing up a lot of different issues in order to distract from the evidence that the House managers had presented over the three days of their presentation.

There were also a number of instances in which the defense would quote a certain person’s testimony and say, because that person didn’t know a certain piece of information, then it must not be true, failing to note that another witness or piece of evidence did provide that information. They also complained about there not being proof of such-and-such, which would be either proven or disproven if the administration hadn’t blocked all document requests and subpoenas for testimony.

It’s also confusing when the president’s lawyers try to draw parallels between this impeachment investigation and prior ones that had had a justice department investigation prior to Congressional proceedings. Other things are just strange, such as the defense saying that Congressional committees need a vote in the House before issuing subpoenas and/or document requests. Congressional committees routinely issue document and testimony requests in their oversight investigations.

If I, a citizen with no legal training, can notice these things, how can the senators, many of whom are lawyers or who have staff with legal expertise, fail to notice these problems?

I don’t know if the president’s team will make more sense in the next two days of the trial or not, but their first day is not at all convincing.
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There are still a few days to join in with Linda’s Just Jot It January! Find out more here:  https://lindaghill.com/2020/01/26/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-26th-2020/