Day: May 11, 2025

Birthday, Mother’s Day, and an end to Derby week

jeffcnichols

Beautiful day today. A bike ride among the mongo houses in Mockingbird Valley/Hill. Trying ot get a nap after The Night of the Fox. Shopping for birthday presents for a five year old. Frantically dealing with a lost order for 8 pizzas at Costco just 30 minutes before the party.

Then a party with just a few friends/family in which the kids eat pizza and cake and get even more worked up than we thought possible. The ritual tearing open of gifts – and no, we didn’t limit gifts to two dolls or five pencils, Donny. Here are a few of the VIPs at the party. A motley crew.

After evening visits with family, our spring Derby trip is coming to a close. It’s amazing how aware I now am of the time and milestones passing. I spent 40 years just working and letting the time slide by, mostly unnoticed and uncelebrated, and now…it’s nice to be in the moment. Bad day or good day, it’s better to actually experience it, rather than just do what you must to get through it and then on to the next.

Wildlife

jeffcnichols

Just when I thought Convict Donny’s reign couldn’t get any worse or weirder, this happens. Donny intends to accept a $400M gift from Qatar, a pimped-out 747 aircraft to be used as Air Force One, and then, if/when Donny leaves office, to be transferred to Donny’s Presidential Library Fund.

WTF? A US President and his entourage are going to ride around in a plane gifted by Qatar (!), a successful little Arab country ruled by a family and Sharia law? Perhaps that’s Donny’s goal, to end up like the Qatari ruling family – a permanent oligarchy with oppressive laws on the population and zero constraints on the ruling family. Sounds about right.

Surely, surely Congress will find some balls and not let this happen. Massive security implications, the Emoluments Clause, the obvious bribery of it all. Donny will owe the Qataris something big along the way.

And that’s not all – Donny has been a busy little fuckhead this week. From Patriot Takes:

“5 things Trump did this week: 1. Dined with a Proud Boys leader 2. Said he “doesn’t know” about upholding the Constitution 3. Announced he will reopen Alcatraz 4. Appointed Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as an interim U.S. Attorney 5. Kept the Epstein files safe another week.”

Meanwhile, in local news, we had an unusual sleep interruption last night. A very weird animal noise made sleep impossible from about 2-3am. My first thought was chucacabra, as the sound was something I’d never heard before. Turns out it was a red fox – we’ve seen it in the neighborhood. But last night it decided to run up and down N Galt and make its strange (and loud) barking cough. You can hear the red fox’s cry here. While it’s cool that we have a neighborhood fox, I hope it decides to serenade another street in the future. (Title fox photo by Minette Layne.)

Later this week we head back to Socal for a while. We’ve seen more than our share of rain while here and had some great fun. A birthday party for one of the grandsons today is pretty much the trip’s swan song, then off to the land of no rain. And no foxes.