Y'all know about the okey-doke, right?

Don’t let people turn you around. Because they’re just making stuff up. That’s what they do. They try to bamboozle you." - Barack Obama to an audience in Sumter, S.C.




...it's getting on high summer in my garden and everything is in full bloom.

You can see the strain of the extremely hot season on the edges of the flower beds, but in my retirement everything has been faithfully watered early in the morning before the blistering sun arrives.

I've been retired since the first time the felon fool in the White House right now was lording his stupidity and corruption over all of us; diddling and wallowing in self-pity and delusion as the nation was becoming sick and dying in droves.

My two sons had been living with me for a couple of years and I was doing the thing where I was gearing up to pushing them out of the nest, again, when the crisis hit. We naturally drew together and protected each other, making our home more of a homestead, more of a cooperative enterprise.





None of that protectiveness could be relaxed during the Biden years because the anxiety, as well as the economic consequence of the maga man's mismanagement of the nation was still evident and pernicious in so many ways. But we had hope with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and we had concrete progressive changes enacted and moving forward.

It was all we could do to just put our house in order and look forward again, much like our nation and government, after Trump's first term. It was almost unbelievable how hard Trump fought to remove protections against the consequences of his own fecklessness and deliberate diversion fro the spread of Covid.

In fact, removing protections and assistance Americans have demanded, fought for, and enacted over the 20th century and beyond seems to be, not just the consequence of Trump's malfeasance and destruction, but the actual goal of all of the abandonment of Americans by his federal government.

Their goal, insidiously, seems to be to knock Americans off of own enterprises and efforts to maintain ourselves and prosper. That should be our main pursuit right now; to make certain this loser and his accomplices don't throw us off of our own game, play us out of position.




Obama broke it down:



It's also important to remember that, while we certainly need keep our attention and advocacy firmly fixed on what Trump and republicans are tearing down, we need to keep focused on what what is essential to maintain our own lives and prosper and continue to petition our government to do the same.

I don't profess to know why Trump and republicans want to keep Americans down, but you can bet it's in their own personal interest, They've become militant about the way they impose their will on the country, and we need to be just as active in opposing those cynical and corrupt efforts to dominate and subjugate Americans for the benefit and enrichment of an autocratic few.





So, we've retreated to home and are busy maintaining it. What once may have seemed an adjunct to our lives has become something even more essential and vital. And there's even more of a sense that this will be an inherited thing now, not just a nice place where my wife and I settle in after several decades of hard work.

We've closed in and ramped up the vegetable garden, with some success, but we're not exactly farmers yet. Still, there's some comfort in having a few years of veggie gardening behind us, with lessons learned and adjustments being made daily.

And there's the birds and the squirrels living and raising families off of the same seed I scatter every day on the path. I can't quite figure out where those small sparrows and squirrels went; just these abnormally large and round ones running and hopping around now.





The possessive finches are back, but for now they've settled on the old bird house another finch family abandoned years ago with the entrance pecked-out too much to keep out predators, but their eggs safely ensconced inside underneath a tangle of twigs.

The cardinals look to have lost their first try at offspring in the upright, towering oakleaf hydrangea out front. It's not an unknown spot, and an easy target for other spiteful and territorial birds like the finches. Cardinal dad was explaining all of that to my wife and I last evening for about 15 minutes in a branch above us. After our few words of sympathy, they seem to have settled back in among the branches and large leaves and appear to be giving it another go.

Hummer is here with a rival, of course, and they're battling it out most of their time in the garden to make certain the lobelia and other flowers they like aren't advantaged by anyone but their sweet selves.

They also like the trumpet vine, the crocosmia, the phlox, the lantana, the honeysuckle, and, suprisingly, getting a few drops of nectar from the base of the flowers on the rose-of-sharons which are a species of hibiscus.





I'm getting ready to cover the flowers in the front yard that are at risk of having their season end abruptly by an opportunistic deer in the night. No need to cover the plants out back because, I've encircled the interior of the yard with livestock strength black mesh. None have intruded, except an amazingly persistent bunny from hell who was systematically eating all of the newly sprouted plants right to the ground.

I eventually lured the rascal into a hav-a-hart trap with a sprout of kale growing in a three-inch pot, and released it down by a nearby lake. Crisis over, so far, and it'll soon be time when I just open it up all again for their taking.

I usually turn the hose upside-down out back while I'm taking the covers off the front yard in the early morning, and put the sprayer on 'mist' so that the backyard becomes a botanical garden rainforest for the cardinals and other birds who like to stand in the spray to shake off the bothersome mites that ceaselessly vex them.

I'm looking forward to all of that again tomorrow, just taking things in a little bit at a time, not expecting to be able to fix and make everything better all at once. Just making certain my house's affairs are in good order, and looking to see what happens with this political nonsense we're dealing with today.

Home and family first. Politics second.

And, don't fall for that okey-doke.





small slideshow: https://i.imgur.com/x7G8q0r.mp4