A delicious christmas eve snowfall that suddenly turned to sunshine, but thankfully worked to prevent my leaving the house. Repeat on christmas day. We are tired after engineering auctions and celebration events and gave ourselves a quiet day. Presents and npr music and football. You have to slow down to realize you're tired.

Some tech updates. Because I could almost for free and because the specs are amazing, I upgraded the little computer I carry in my pocket to a Pixel 9 Pro XL. Better than most computers I've owned, the thing has 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage plus amazing cameras, a display resolution of 1344 x 2992 and a 120 refresh rate. I upgraded Melissa to a better fitbit watch, a Versa 4, also owned by Google. I am happy with my big round cheap Zepp watch because it is all about buying new watch faces and coordinating them with a band. Basic function, highly ornamental, tech playful.

Final rant: Will 2025 be the year we get something better than Roku? This year we moved to all streaming for television. It takes several steps to get to the service and program I want, and I have to remember what options are on what services. In my experience with tech, especially programming languages, when a process is too granular and detailed, something more human-like gets built on top of it and the internal workings are hidden. Like WordPress for HTML or Java for low level languages. We have a wealth of offerings on various streams; now we need a top layer on all that to give me a menu that gets me to something I want with one click. We are using a whole different way to access content, but I want it to feel like the old broadcast TV way of clicking up and down for channels. Get on it, techies.

The last panel went on this week. Now CMP has to upgrade the transformer, and the inverters have to go on. Then the 25 kilowatts it makes will power the library, our house, Kari's chicken freezer, and maybe a bit of the community center. When this is up and running, we will have a model to show people that solar is not rocket science, that it's just something you build with a contractor. Owning your own resource makes more sense than buying into a commercial solar farm. You can make your own solar farm. The panels are bifacial, meaning both side can generate electricity, especially if you put something white or reflective on the ground beneath them.

Michael Moore:

Here’s a sad statistic for you: In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it. 1 million doctors to give care, 1.4 million brutes in cubicles doing their best to stop doctors from giving that care. If the purpose of “health care” is to keep people alive, then what is the purpose of DENYING PEOPLE HEALTH CARE? Other than to kill them? I definitely condemn that kind of murder.

Is the CEO of an insurance company the equivalent of an archduke? Can this start a revolution, at least a tipping point in how we think about universal health care? The hatred of insurance companies seems to be a great unifier; nobody doesn't hate them. And quite the surge of creative memeage. A folk hero is born. Two things push me to angrily share memes online: gun violence and universal health care. Both are laws and policy decisions that all other developed countries have made to save lives. Because the US is essentially an oligarchy--corporations control who gets and stays elected--we cannot make any progress on these two fronts. And we are about to see even more coalescence between corporations and government. There's a name for that. In the meantime, the assassin left a backpack full of monopoly money and some shell casings with messages. Those of us who watch way too many spy and murder mysteries are following clues intently. It's murder, yes, but I don't remember anyone mourning Bin Laden.

Markers: Assad flees Syria; Iran & Russia pull out. Biden gives more help to Ukraine. Auction doing nicely. And Lyndsey Marston has designed library stickers for us!

We Are Listening  by Diane Ackerman

I.

As our metal eyes wake
to absolute night,
where whispers fly
from the beginning of time,
we cup our ears to the heavens.
We are listening

on the volcanic lips of Flagstaff
and in the fields beyond Boston
in a great array that blooms
like coral from the desert floor,
on highwire webs patrolled
by computer spiders in Puerto Rico.

We are listening for a sound
beyond us, beyond sound,

searching for a lighthouse
in the breakwaters of our uncertainty,
an electronic murmur
a bright, fragile I am.

Small as tree frogs
staking out one end
of an endless swamp,
we are listening
through the longest night
we imagine, which dawns
between the life and time of stars.

II.

Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.

In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the Persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.

With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.