Thank You, Mr. Trump

This tumultuous year ends with the Dow down in a record(The Dow fell 5.6%. The S&P 500 was down 6.2% and the Nasdaq fell 4%. It was the worst year for stocks since 2008). Trump likes records. He is always either making stuff up, "Highest pay raise the military has every gotten," or he is flat out lying, "Biggest crowd at an inauguration ever." How does anyone know the difference between making stuff up and flat out lying? Sometimes he uses numbers and sometimes he uses his gut.

For the troops in Iraq he just made stuff up out of whole cloth. Anyone who has ever been in the military, been married to someone in the military, had a child in the military, or been a child of someone in the military knows that pay raises are more automatic than by design. Besides that, Trump cannot, despite his own braggadocio, give pay raises to anyone unless it comes out of his own pocket (which with this guy it never will). Any rise in pay has to be voted on by the same group of tired old men who have made government the spectacle it currently is. Beyond that, a 10% pay raise is preposterous. Unless the troops listening to him were completely clueless, even they knew that was a flat out, bald faced lie.

Another lie that Trump's team is spreading is that Melania is the first first lady to visit a war zone. I know that many people are brain dead as far as history goes, but there are multiple photographs and even movie reels of Eleanor Roosevelt visiting troops all over the world in what were far more dangerous situations than Melania came close to. Eleanor was only one of many wives to visit the troops. Eleanor visited them far more often than Trump seems likely to and in far more dangerous conditions, although he seemed freaked out by traveling with lights out. Didn't do him any good--plane spotters recognized his plane.

I have finished the piecing and layering of the current project but because it is so outside my comfort zone I hesitate to have my husband take any pictures yet. It has a tentative name of "Taormina" because it reminds me of seaside Italian towns with its colors of sand, sea, waves, and flowers. But I am not going to expose it to public view yet. I did machine quilt a little bit today--as I expected my trapezius muscles are very tense and I already know I have to figure out how not to catch my basting threads.

My husband has already gotten his hormone antagonist shots. His radiation therapy begins in about six weeks. In the meantime, we bought a different house because of multiple factors including our dog dying and not having enough room for our art. We originally thought that we would be able to remodel the spring house to accommodate the art; then we thought that we would remodel the house to accommodate the art; then we loathed and feared our neighbors in equal amounts to make either of those choices seem ridiculous. So we will be moving again but within the same state this time.  The new project was a very fancy stable, carriage house for a huge estate that was converted fairly quickly in to a private home. It is from 1901 so quite modern compared to our current nearly 300 year old house.

For us 2018 cannot be gone soon enough. If we hadn't had bad luck this year we wouldn't have had any luck at all. I even told my husband I wasn't making o-zoni since it was pretty clear that faint hopes never did have a chance in 2018. One of our sons is carrying on the tradition in SLC however. That's probably because he is getting married this year.

So thank you, Mr. Trump. Your sheer incompetence has left crops rotting in the fields, the Dow ending at an historical low, our allies abandoning us for more reliable partners, but also with a Democrat controlled House and more women than ever before representing Americans.

Happy New Year everyone--it all looks like up from here on the ground.