Great photos.

A beautiful sunrise here and headed to 60 today. It's my SO's B'day. We're going to hang out by a campfire and enjoy part of the day. I've got a pasture raised ribeye thawed and two wild caught salmon fillets along with sweet potato, fresh salad, and beans I cooked yesterday. We'll have our usual yogurt, nut, and blueberry treat for dessert later.

I know we are lucky to eat (and live) so well. Odd in these times of unrest.

Drove my old truck to town yesterday. I just swept the last of the manure out of the bed the day before. It's been sitting under an open shed at the barn all winter, and was filthy. After Trade Day, I went to the self car wash and cleaned it up, brought it home and dealt with the inside too. Now I need to do the same with my regular ride, the little geo tracker.

I rigged up an electric hoist to pull the camper off during winter. Last year I insulated the aluminum top with left over Styrofoam. I plan to use thin cheap carpet to line the inside later this week or next. All in preparation for the FL Folk Fest in May when we'll camp for a week.

No news this AM except these personal anecdotes. Hope all is well in your neck of the woods.

I have a small thumb piano we picked up on one of our trip to Africa. It is homemade from a can (looks size of tuna can) with wooden top and metal prongs. Has a nice sound but have not learned to make much real music from it.

Weather is shaping up this week to be outside more than in and so that is my plan. The birds are up and moving around so should be a great time to be outside!

Thanks for the ot and the art. I really like the Vorja Sanchez piece. It looks like a place I would like to be. In this era of a supposedly 'great reset', ( which doesn't sound like it will be so great for most of us) I want to play a role in what that reset looks like. I want it to be a place I would like to be. How can that even happen? Can any of us even hope to play a role? Your quote above;

It’s taken fifty years of cunning, wicked effort to drive out fearless hope and transmogrify it into hopeless fear. But it cannot last. -- Steve 'O

indicates how damaging and corrosive our society seems to many.

I don't think we can 'hope' for a better future but I would very much like to help and try to 'make' a better future.

This article from https://www.publicbooks.org/the-future-is-not-a-solution/
speculates on how to we imagine and understand the concept of future and how we might effect a future that is good for us, one we might like.

...since spring 2020, there has been a global desire to understand precisely what is next, how to navigate uncertain futures as well as adapt to long-term changes. The pandemic, according to the writer Arundhati Roy, is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

I like the idea of a 'portal' because it implies stepping into something better. The problem with that though is that 'something better' is not guaranteed.

But merely stating that the future will be better or different does not make it so. Ultimately, transformative social change requires a deeper understanding of power and the politics around the futures field and, even, vastly different understandings of temporality and how the future is defined. Thus, “Who gets to Future?” is an essential question—especially, as we step through the portal, and reinvent our lives anew in the years ahead.

So, how might we move beyond status quo futures and toward more pluriversal futures? Black futures? Feminist futures? Queer futures? Trans futures? Crip futures? Working-class futures? Asian futures? Indigenous futures? And multispecies futures?

To echo what some have often said here, what we individually do now, reverberates and helps create the future. That's as close to hope as I can get.

In sum, the future is not out there. It is not a solution to today’s problems. Rather, it is within each and every one of us, in all of our varied human (and nonhuman) existences, as well as together in relation, imagination, and continued struggle to understand ourselves.

Thanks again QMS, hope all is well with you and yours.

The media has created a reality distortion field where Americans are kept totally unaware of whats really happening in the areas thet control our economic lives.

"Sure, you may be getting rich off of Big Pharma dividends, but the reason you have is because of GATS, which promised developing countries "market access" to the US business world, for them and their services and workers. In short, jobs. Jobs currently being hoarded by US firms. Thats where your riches, came from, decades of broken promises".

Our country is being stolen by a slight of hand that's takes advantage of our ignorance on trade matters. Not all of us can be rich, the Horatio Alger myth is no longer true.

The odds are against our young people whose ability to get essential training has been stolen by GATS and its privatization of the sectors our government in its wisdom globalized. Likely killing our labor force's future. Yes, highly unionized service sectors were targeted.

Before we know it the jobs that keep bread on families table will be gone and a good chunk of the country will literally be starving. No incomes, no places to live, no futures. They wont be wanted because when employed US Citizens wages would have to be higher.

Americans, Thank you for your service!
Goodbye.