We got a lot of snow in the Boston area, but people seem to be coping fairly well. The building management company have sent people over here to shovel the walks, several times, so I was able to take out the trash and recycling. The forecast for the next several days is for cold, very cold once you count the wind chill. It turns out that I can wear Adrian's old snow pants, which will do a lot to protect my legs from cold and wind. The remaining problem is boots: even with the 3/4 insoles Adrian lent me, they're too loose, including at the front, so I may try putting in a pair of full-length insoles and see if that helps. The other possibility is to go out looking for a pair of snow sneakers, or at least waterproof hiking shoes/boots (though the forecast is for the kind of weather where waiting for two trolleys, and walking from home to trolley to store, is daunting.
I've been looking at Bluesky again, in large part for news and commentary about what ICE is doing in Minnesota and elsewhere. When I've had enough for a while, I click on the "astronomy" feed I subscribed to months ago, so the first things I see are an astronomical pictures.
I did a lot of PT yesterday, and a few exercises today. It feels like I haven't gotten a lot done today, which I think is because I'd been hoping to make some phone calls (not all of them political), and assumed I wouldn't be able to take the trash out today. (The alternative to that walk along the side of the building is a spiral staircase, indoors, but spiral staircases aren't good for me, and this one is tight enough that my joints really don't like it. Cattitude can deal with it when necessary, but he's already going up and down that stair regularly to do the laundry.)
I had a good day today. Biked to the farmer's market, and then went to the new year's party at my gym. I didn't know gyms had parties, but this one was fun. Friendly people, and several bodyworkers offering free 20 min sessions (I got a massage!) and free drinks from the cafe next door.
I biked over to the ad hoc Balkan and Georgian singing group that meets once a month, and we successfully sang a bunch of songs, even ones that were newer to us or that we hadn't sung in a while, like Tsmindao Ghmerto. Felt great!
Then I got home and caught up on the news. Augh! Viaredbird, I was reminded about the Stand With Minnesota site with lots of organizations we can support to help their anti-ICE effort. I donated some money to Just The Pill.
On the plus side, I'm so glad we are collectively screaming about ICE, not just passively letting it happen. So grateful for the people bearing witness, physically resisting, and sending support from afar.
The world is on fire, but after ICE murdered someone else in Minneapolis this morning, I called both my senators and also Chuck Schumer--I called him a coward and said we needed him to do better, giving my old Manhattan zip code. Apparently enough people made enough calls, and Schumer said an hour ago that Senate Democrats won't provide the votes for a funding bill that includes the Department of Homeland Security.
It seems likely that Alex Pritti's murder mattered to people who were prepared to overlook their murder of Renee Good, because it shows that while ICE is profoundly racist, a white man with a gun permit isn't safe either.
I can't do much for my friends in Minneapolis, but if there's something that would be useful, please ask.
ETA: After posting that, I realized I could afford to donate some money. So, I followed the links on Naomi Kritzer's recent post, donated $50 to Minnesota Rapid Response, and bought a bunch of dental floss to a group that was asking for that.
The ICE fascist agent acknowledges her taking video is legal, doesn’t pretend she’s in the way, takes her photo and license plate information for their “nice little database” and declares her to be a domestic terrorist. Micah’s commentary is good, which is why I’m including it.
Klippenstein’s sources say the database is real, and that the fascist agent wasn’t supposed to talk about it. As some of us said, the “war on terror” was always going to be a war on Americans at home, and here it is.
*sigh* I was just reminded that Peet’s Coffee is owned by a larger corporation now (has been for some time). I‘d rather support a smaller company. If you make coffee from ground beans at home, what is your go-to source? Bonus for fair trade and all those other green, good-citizen buzzwords.
There is a general strike called for Friday January 23 in Minnesota. Stay home from work if it feels right, and definitely don't cross any picket lines, including the electronic ones of shopping at big corporations like Amazon, etc. (if you can avoid it).
From my union: "This is a verified page fundraising support for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and Working Partnerships' 2026 rapid response effort to meet the needs of impacted union members, worker center members, and their families..." https://workingpartnerships.betterworld.org/campaigns/support-impacted-union-families
She covers a variety of topics, including how to start preparing for if and when this shit comes to your home state, and the suggestion to talk About immigration, and make it clear you think it’s GOOD.
There's more evidence that the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease: two more natural experiments (in which people were offered the vaccine based on date of birth or where they lived). One of them comparED the older Zostavax vaccine with the newer Shingrix: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/spotlight-on-the-shingles-vaccineagain
As the blogger, Eric Topol says, "If this vaccine was a drug and reduced Alzheimer’s by 20%, it would be considered a major breakthrough for helping to prevent the disease! But as a vaccine, it hasn't reached any sense of being a blockbuster"
I saw this go by on Mastodon, and it stayed with me, so I'm reposting it from Tumblr by nitewrighter. (First few comments are worth reading.)
Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?
The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.
Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.
When we were first discussing schedules, she offered to refer me out, which I did appreciate, except one of her referrals was someone I've already seen who wasn't a great fit for me, and the other is someone I traded with over 20 years ago who's connected with my very estranged ex. Fortunately she's way up in the hills, so I could use that as an excuse for saying she's not a good fit.
Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, “Hard-lock my iPhone”.
I'm training for a 100K bike ride in April, so I'm going out on long hilly rides on the weekends. The weather has been delightfully sunny and warm (if a bit odd for January), and they've mostly been great rides.
However, people seem to assume they need to cheer me on. Maybe because I'm a woman, or because I'm not skinny, or because I climb hills slowly, but I do get there.
Half way up Spruce St., a woman waiting to pull out from a side street in her car gives me two big thumbs up as I approached. I smiled and kept biking. That would have been fine. But she rolls down the window and says, "You can do it!" I said, "This is only the thousandth time I've climbed this hill." She was smiling and nodding, and then her face fell as I said "thousandth," probably because she was assuming I would say, "first." Maybe she won't make as many assumptions next time.
Then, getting close to the top, a couple of guys pass me on mountain bikes and one of them says, "Good job!" I said, "You too!" After all, we had both climbed the same hill to the same point. He looked surprised, because young men get to congratulate middle-aged women, but not the other way around.
Yesterday I biked up the hill, down the far side, and then back up. At the corner of Grizzly Peak and Claremont (the beginning of the steep fast descent out of the hills), there is often a Mexican produce stand, and I like to stop there for fruit, even if it tends to end up bruised on the ride down. This time I bought pistachios and mandarins, and they did better on the descent.
When I rode up, there was an older white dude arguing about his total in Spanish with the young Mexican woman staffing the stand. They started over counting it all up and it turns out she was right (surprising me not at all). He said something about buying fruit for his friend with the nasty flu, and I said I was keeping my distance then. He said, "I didn't touch him or anything."
He had been over on the seller's side of the table, and now he came around and said, "Nice bike." I thanked him and answered his questions about it. At this point he's touching the handlebars and standing quite close to me, blocking my way forward. I paid the seller and said, "Excuse me please." He said, "Why do you have to be so rude?" I said, "I need to go home." He said, "You're being rude!" I sighed and backed up the bike to get out of there. He said, "Why do you have to be so American?" as I rode away.
Reminds me of the time a guy on a bike stopped me to ask for directions on a dark rainy night in Portland. I'm generally willing to help, but it was a wide, empty street and he stood too close and blocked my way, at which point I similarly said, "Excuse me" and biked around him. He called after me, "Don't go! I need help!" Which he may have, but he wasn't going to get it with threatening body language. He had a European-sounding accent and maybe it was ignorance of American personal space, but I wasn't going to ignore my spidey-sense to find out.
This dude at the fruit stand spoke unaccented English, so I don't know if he's from somewhere with less personal space, but I don't think I was the one being rude. I guess wherever he's from, he gets to touch other people's (women's) stuff and take up as much time as he wants.
Their website is god-awful slow to bring up a Next button when you enter your settlement number, to the point where I had tried it in two other browsers and called the phone number (no human available) before I went back and saw it had finally showed up.
The parties in the lawsuit John Doe, et al. v. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc., et al., Case No. 3:23-cv-02865-EMC (N.D. Cal.) (“Action”) have reached a proposed settlement of claims (“Settlement”) in a pending class action against Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. (“Defendant”) and certain related entities. If approved, the Settlement will resolve this Action wherein Plaintiffs allege that Defendant’s websites and mobile applications disclosed their confidential personal information due to third-party software code. Plaintiffs allege that this code was embedded across Defendant’s platforms, including the secure patient portal, and transmitted information to third parties when users navigated these platforms. Defendant firmly denies the allegations, denying any liability or wrongdoing, and denies that Plaintiffs are entitled to any relief arising from this Action. Defendant also maintains that Plaintiffs have not suffered any damages arising from this Action.
Okay, let’s see if I can get this together, shall we? Tried on Tuesday night, but I was too tired from work and the Tesla Takedown Tuesday protest.
Here’s a pic of one section, taken from across the street, call it “proof of fuck you, Elon”:
It may not seem immediately related, but naturally, it all is.
Now. Where. Were. We? Ah yes, the 2026 elections that Trump knows the Republicans are going to lose, and lose badly. It’d take a lot to lose the Senate, but it’s possible, and he – and his MAGA movement – do not give up power voluntarily.
In part one, I provided a couple of action items, of things you can be doing; in this one, I can be more specific about what needs to happen and when.
Before we can get into the meat of that, though, we have to talk about something else: timelines.
This writeup is something like the timeline I think we can expect if there are no other major events that allow him to reach his and his administration’s MAGA goal of declaring insurrection and imposing martial law, either de facto or de jure, through other means, like those he’s trying right now in Minnesota.
In reality, all these potential timelines are intertwined, affecting each other directly and indirectly. But if I’m going to unwind them from each other enough to make them clear to other people, I have to leave those connections out. It’s not really valid to leave them out; it’s just necessary for illustrative purposes.
It also assumes that projections as we have now continue, that the polls don’t swing the other way, that the 86% of people who oppose his plan to attack Greenland suddenly decide it’s actually a good idea, that everybody decides Federal violence against Americans is good actually, that just enough people of colour decide white nationalism is basically okay because they’ll be the exception (spoiler: they won’t be the exception), and so on. Americans are stupid motherfuckers with a shorter memory span than mayflies, so I don’t rule it out. But let’s say that he remains widely hated.
With that framing set, let’s get into the election itself. Most of this will seem awfully familiar to you if you paid attention in 2020; it’s not a new plan. It has some new details, but the broad strokes are identical.
First, Trump will spend as much time as he can afford in 2026 working to discredit the elections in advance. He’s already been doing this, attacking blue states as corrupt, as fraudulent, and attacking mail-in and machine-counted votes. He says he wants to lead a campaign to eliminate both, but particularly vote by mail.
(The interesting part of his attacks on machine counting is that every state uses machine counting, because it’s better! It is straight up better and more accurate. What’s important is to keep paper originals for hand-counting in the event of any necessary recounts, and most states have provisions for that, both machine and, if close enough, by multiply-checked hand counting, which is where you do get more accurate than machine counts, at the cost of high expense, both in money and in time.
This may be a matter of expanding his – and his administration’s – attacks on voting to all states, even red states, as a general attack on democracy and voting. As demonstrated previously, this is now a white nationalist movement, and white nationalism is by its nature fascist. There is a ruling minority fit to rule over society, and all the rest of society must fall into line or else, and that never ends up a democratic state. It’s just fascism.)
Secondly, he will do everything he can to disrupt the election mechanically, via new pronouncements, new executive orders, new court cases, whatever he and his evil crew can manage. He’s already promised he’ll do this, and for once you can take him on his word. It’ll continue. He’s just lost in court again – against us in particular – with the courts shutting down his attempts to break our electoral system, but he’ll just file something new. He’d shut them down entirely if he could – he’s out there saying so – but I don’t think he’ll be able to manage that.
Finally, as votes come in, he will attack slow-counting states (like the Cascadian states, but not just) demanding that their voting and/or counting stop as soon as he and his ruling clique see the best sub-count of results they think they’re likely to see. Given voting patterns, that will mean stops so early that not even votes even cast on the day of the election would be counted.
States will, naturally, ignore this and continue counting.
At that point, his administration will condemn the results as fraudulent. Will there be legal cases? One assumes there will be legal cases. The bigger question is whether there will be ballot seizures by Federal agencies, and given what’s happening with the murder of Renee Good, it seems likely. Besides, they tried some of that in 2020; they will try it again.
Frankly, if you’re reading this, you lived through the last coup attempt and you already know how all this works. The point of the lies isn’t to convince anyone; the point is to keep the lies swirling and the pot stirring so everyone involved or willing to go along keeps pretending the lies about the elections are genuine concerns, or at least worth considering.
Then: remember false electors?
Remember all those fake “alternate slate” electors? Remember those?
Remember how some of them tried to show up in DC to get counted in place of the real ones? Some of them got arrested. Some of them got charged, some of them got convicted, for fraud.
Let’s talk about disputed representation, shall we?
They won’t actually be under dispute. Not in reality. The results will have been announced weeks before, along with the results of many recounts. Court cases will likely have been cleared away, hopefully with some amount of compliance to the law involved.
But all that was true in 2020, and that didn’t stop Trump from trying anyway. He and Vance and Miller and the whole rotten crew will say they’re disputed, and may even try to pretend they mean it.
Since the Senate – not the House – officially opens the new Congress, let’s look there first.
The Senate opens the new Congress because it is the continuing body, with two thirds of its membership returning. It doesn’t have to adopt rules; it can move into action very quickly.
One of the first acts will be for Republican Secretary of the Senate Jackie Barber to receive election certificates from any and all new Senators, which will then be announced by…
…President of the Senate and Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance.
I can’t speak to the Honourable Jackie Barber, but I can most definitely say that unlike Mike Pence, J.D. Vance is fully onboard with these projects. He will not hesitate to perpetrate the treasonous fraud should they decide to go with it.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, there are no returning officers, and the VP plays no role. Instead, the duty of receiving the certificates of election, announcing the new Representatives, and calling the House to order lies with the previous Clerk of the House. Or, if they’re not available, the previous House’s Sergent-at-Arms.
McFarland has seen some shit. I have some doubt as to whether he’d go along. I don’t know enough about McCumber to have any guesses. But I do know that either way, recognition of new Representatives is all in Republican hands.
So. It’s a simple game for four players. I stress again: none of this is legal. It is barely pretending to be legal, it’s a hypothetical plan for an illegal coup with just enough pretence at legality to let people who want to believe in it go ahead and say they believe in it. It’s not about a plausible legality at any point; it’s just about permission to pretend that it’s legal.
Trump et al declare the elections disputed or just fraudulent, and either presses still-open court cases or files new ones in the days before January 3rd.
Citing open cases and/or “clear election fraud,” J.D. Vance either recognises “alternate slate” Senators or simply refuses to recognise any new Senators from “disputed” states, as Mike Pence was supposed to either recognise the fraudulent electors or declare an impasse, and not allow “either slate” from “disputed” states to be counted. And so, the Senate is in session, with a quorum and a Republican supermajority – along with, possibly, several empty seats.
Kevin McCumber – or a replacement we haven’t met yet, still to be appointed – does the same dance in the House. If Kevin gets swapped out late in the year, I would just go ahead and assume that’s for election rejection purposes and that the coup is on.
Regardless, if the House does not have quorum, it cannot do business, so that would be one play. Another play would be to seat false Representatives with a Republican supermajority, seating those few Democrats elected from heavily-jerrymandered Republican states as “fairly elected,” along with the false Republican representatives from Democratic states.
It is quite possible that – citing the arrests of some “alternate slate” electors in 2021 – Trump orders the arrest of the actually-elected Senators and Representatives.
Protests erupt en masse; Trump declares an insurrection, invokes the Insurrection Act, enacts martial law, and we get to see whether the US Army will refuse illegal orders to occupy several American states and oppress the citizenry in the face of a coup, and the last remnants of the old Republic will have been swept away.
…
Christ, this all sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? It sounds like such conspiracy theory bullshit. But I remind myself and you both that this was the 2020-2021 plan, and they almost pulled it off. With someone like J.D. “Couchfucker” Vance in place of Mike Pence, you know the elector count would’ve stalled out. It’s not even a question.
So as thick, as just fucking dumb as all this is…
…we have to be ready for it. At very least, we have to be watching very carefully for the same progress steps as were clearly visible last time. Building up to the January 6th coup attempt was largely visible. I was warning neighbours, who were not really believing me until it happened. I doubt it will be much different this time.
We have to be ready for a national, comprehensive protest if this goes down. A walkout of everyone, on every level. Absolutely nothing can be allowed to be done; no work, no school, no optional spending, no nothing. Pay your rent if you must, but don’t buy anything.
A lot of leftists and posers keep going “general strike when?” THIS IS WHEN, and the time to prep to pull it off is now.
Demanding “general strike now!” as in right now, as I write this, with no prep and no coordination which is so obviously a recipe for failure that at this point I presume they’re opposition ops, roleplayers, or useful idiots. This won’t be some kind of holiday. You will have a new, unpaid job: marching in the streets demanding removal of the dictator. It will not be safe, but it’ll be your new temporary career – as well as mine – despite that. You need to have food stocked up in advance, so you don’t have to worry about bank cards not working. You may need to have water stocked up, but hopefully not. You need to be ready to help people who haven’t prepped for fucking anything because it’s not real until it happens to them. And you need to have communications and networks set up, preferably ones that don’t rely on the internet.
FRS radios, which do not require a license, would be good purchases right about now. Just for one example. Get a HAM license, if you can; the technician license is not particularly difficult. And don’t just buy shit and stick it in a drawer, either. Know how they work. Get used to using them in advance.
But it can’t be just up to individuals self-organising; that’s not enough. States have to be ready for this possibility. States will have to protect their citizens; despite Trumpist protestations, they are not “extensions” of the Federal government. Legally, in theory, it’s the states which are ultimately sovereign; states can dissolve the Federal government without its permission. It’s right there in the Constitution.
That dissolution won’t happen here, not de jure (by law), but it could happen de facto (in reality) for a little while, or maybe a lotta while, depending upon how badly everything goes in this event. States must be ready to act both on their own and in alliance to protect themselves, and protect us, while we all work to protect each other.
Cascadia, in short, may be a necessary reality forced upon us. The New England Confederation may rise from the ashes of history. California may, in fact, über alles for a while – in reality, if not, of course, in name.
If Trump and Vance and Miller et al do this, it’s not just that it will get ugly, it’s that it has to get ugly in order to reverse it.
In some small ways, we’re already there. We’re getting tastes of it now. They’re small samples, limited, but still scaling to the tongue. Minnesota, in particular, is right now having to protect its citizens from the Federal government, which is threatening retaliation and the Insurgency Act in return.
Support Minnesota, help them, participate in walkouts, participate in protests, do whatever is needed, because if we get there, the full-bore version – the version Trump and Miller and Vance and Musk and the TESCREAL crowd so desperately want – will be much, much worse.
All this could’ve been prevented. But we ran out of “easy” ways to defeat it a year and a half ago, having pulled a semi-easy way back out of the fire via the seemingly impossible feat of getting Joe Biden elected President, and defeating Trump’s first coup attempt. We ran out of options to stop it from ever happening almost 20 years ago, in 2007, when the Democrats gave Bush II a pass on his illegal torture regime. We ran out of easy ways to stop this crisis from even starting in 1998-1999, when Christian Fundamentalist political culture took over GOP political culture at the ground level and the money people could not be convinced this was a really, really bad idea despite how many low-level roles the fundies chose to fill.
We no longer have “easy” ways, and we no longer have “good” outcomes. Too much damage has been too long done. What we have instead of “easy” and “good” is hard work, salvage, and, if we’re lucky, opportunities to rebuild.
But we do still have those. By some miracle – and by a lot of hard work by some of us – we still have that much.
If Trump, Vance, Miller, and the rest of the traitors try this, though, and we aren’t ready – we won’t even have that.
Gratitude / Self-reassurance / fighting against negativity bias!
1. The animals seem happy and content. I don't go to the barn every day and sometimes I feel bad about that, but I suspect I'm stressing over nothing, or channeling other stress into this area. The cat and dog make me laugh and are good companions. Again I stress sometimes with Sally the dog, but, it's probably easier to be crabby with her than with my family.
2. The house is reasonably clean, it's warm inside, the hot water is working, etc.
3. I have some friendly and wonderful neighbors.
4. My parents are doing well. My mom is so much better now that she's in the assisted living place rather than the nursing home. Just a huge relief.
5. I got to chat with two good friends today, Jesse and Emily, and it was a real mood lifter.
6. TV I'm enjoying: The Pitt, FallOut, Heated Rivalry.
7. On YouTube I watch the Handsome Podcast almost every single day. This is 3 queer comedians (Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, and Mae Martin) chatting and being silly.
8. I've been playing Terra Nil on my laptop and I can't rec it highly enough. I feel like it is meditative in the best way and really helps my brain chill out. The game play is very similar to Sim City, but instead of building a city you get to reclaim wasteland and turn it into wilderness. Very easy to learn, but challenging enough to keep me engaged. Click-only means it's easy to play in bed with my beloved Left-handed mouse, and doesn't bother my right shoulder. Sound design is relaxing, the graphics are pretty. Minimal reading makes it migraine compatible for me, and i can control the motion. It's not timed. Thank you to my friend eruthros for buying this game for me.
*Last night, I talked with cattitude and adrian_turtle about possible text for my mother's gravestone. I emailed this to my brother today, with a note that these were what I was thinking of.
*I went to TJ Maxx to look for slippers. Disappointingly, there were none that came close to fitting: the ones that might have been in my size were all significantly too tight across the top of my foot. I was wearing thin socks (specifically, lightweight compression socks). It continues to be annoying that not buying slippers (for example) is as tiring as buying some.
*Also, my hips started hurting while I was in the store, so I decided not to look for other things, but headed home with only a quick stop at CVS, and not a grocery store.
*Today was definitely a good day to be outside; yesterday wasn't particularly, and tomorrow is likely to be a lot colder than today (with an afternoon high a little below freezing, so not horrible for January in Boston).
*I got email today from state senator Pat Jehlen, about a bill to ban the use of masks by law enforcement. This is noteworthy because I haven't lived in her district since 2019, and didn't think I was still on her mailing list.
*The skin on my fingertips, and on the rest of my hands, is doing a lot better. I will need to remember to keep applying the serious lotion, so it doesn't start splitting again. However, my shoulder is bothering me, which may be from doing a lot of mousing when I was avoiding using the keyboard.
As is sometimes the case, I only heard about Christie and his part in the anti-apartheid fight after he died.
Renfrew Christie was a white South African scientist and member of the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress. He went to Oxford University and studied South Africa's history of electrification "so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium," he told the BBC. That in turn let them figure out how much enriched uranium South Africa had, and many bombs it could build.
When he returned to South Africa, he was arrested and, after 48 hours of torture, wrote a forced confession, which he told the BBC was the best thing he ever wrote
noting that he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage Koeberg and other facilities.
“And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth” straight to the A.N.C.
Christie died of pneumonia last month, at the age of 76.
I'm linking to siderea's post, which includes the text of the (paywalled) NY Times obituary.
I thought that all the money had been transferred from my mother's IRA account at BNY to my account at Fidelity at the end of December.
Last week, I got a message from Fidelity saying that a transfer couldn't be completed, and BNY needed to talk to me. That message was _exactly_ the same as the one I got in November, so I wasn't even sure this was a real thing rather than a glitch.
After several days of wrestling with phone trees and leaving messages with my advisor at Fidelity, I tried BNY again this afternoon. That wound up being a long phone call, including a long time on hold while the person I was talking to looked things up.
What he was able to tell me is that there is some amount of money greater than zero still in my mother's name at BNY, possibly capital gains on the money they had already transferred. The person I was talking to said he couldn't tell me how much, but that based on this call, I could have Fidelity call BNY and tell them to transfer this money.
But that would be too simple: Fidelity said they would need a current statement on the account. So, back to BNY, whose system is set up to provide information to people with accounts they can log into. The available workaround is for them to send me a request form, and for me to attach a copy of my mother's death certificate, and my driver's license, and then I should have it in 1-5 business days.
In the meantime, I have emailed my brother, who told me that any amount of money still in Mom's name in 2026 would complicate things for him as executor. (I was pleased to be able to email him on December 30 and tell him that the transfer had finally been completed.)
Over the weekend, I was heading out on my bike early in the morning, and saw a small kid's book in the street just off the driveway. I picked it up to toss it to the sidewalk and went on my way.
When I got back, I was pleased to see it was gone, but then saw someone had propped it up on our fence. The next time I was going out, I took it with me and put it in the nearby Little Free Library, even though it mostly has grownup books.
When I was walking home, I ran into a couple with a two year old whom I often see walking up the block, and whom I had chatted with at a recent neighborhood gathering. I saw that the kid was happily clutching the book, and said, "Oh good, you picked it up!" They said he has been obsessed with that character.
Yesterday I was biking home from an appointment, and I saw a phone lying next to a parked car in the street. I pulled over, leaned my bike against a pole, and picked it up. It had a drivers license in the case with the address of the apartment building across the street. There was no way to get in or ring a doorbell at the gated front entrance, but there was a door open around the corner.
The people inside were noisily doing something which sounded kind of like having sex, laughing, maybe just roughhousing, but ... door open? I stood there hesitantly, and a maybe 8 year old kid inside gestured to the other people and they came out (dressed, whew). I said, "I'm so sorry to bother you, but this phone was in the street. Is this (building address)?" They said yes, and they recognized the name on the license and said she's at work. I turned the phone over to them.
I only realized later that it might be unsettling for a Black family to have a white lady come stand at the door. I'm glad I approached them with softness.
So that's two things put closer to where they belong, and hopefully a bad day averted for the phone's owner. Not sure how her phone ended up on the ground next to the driver's side door of a parked car if she's at work.
There are no earlier entries to display. This page displays only the most recent 1000 entries posted within the last 14 days.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redbird![Micah - @rincewind.runthe incredulous "this is bullshit, are you fucking kidding" tone here is a sign that you have turned someone into a lifelong radical against you and people like youthis is a stupid tactic used by stupid people who don't have any other ideas@ Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein.bsky.social - 3hICE agent asked why he's taking pictures of a legal observer's car, replies: "Cuz we have a nice little database and now you're considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that."[still image of a masked ICE fascist standing in front of a sedan]9:46 AM - Jan 23, 2026 Some people can reply](https://solarbird.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-23-at-12.37.01-PM-669x1024.png)
