Still Hanging Out in California

Things are not going so well in the United States of America right now. We are experiencing something very similar to what happens in small, poor countries with underdeveloped political systems. A small group of people whose brains are addled by greed and hubris are testing the limits of what the system can stand. They don't care who gets hurt because they are sure it won't be them. But as this photo illustrates, things in life have a tendency to go around and come around.

We were sitting in traffic, waiting for the light to change. Even in our small town, traffic can get a bit jammy on the main thoroughfares. I wasn't driving and I had a camera with me. Also, I liked the shadows on this little house.
It was about a week before the election. We were worried. Our fears were not unfounded. Now we're hearing stories about people who voted before they looked up the definition of tariff.

Last Saturday, I handed a package to the mailman. It was two rolls of film being sent to the lab in southern California for development. I expected them to get there by Tuesday. When that didn't happen, I checked the tracking data and got vague information about the package being late. This went on for a few more days until today, when I was finally able to dig a little deeper. It seems my film made it to Sacramento just fine but instead to being sent from there to Anaheim (the home of Disneyland), it was sent to Jersey City. New Jersey.(2781 miles from Disneyland) By the time I got this information, it had already come back across country as far as Phoenix, Arizona. This would just be a matter of inconvenience except for one thing. Photographic film is sensitive to excess heat. And my film has been wandering back and forth across a large, excessively hot country. Maybe by this time next week I'll find out whether US$70+ worth of film and processing, not to mention non-replacable images, is damaged beyond fixing. Maybe this is the Universe telling me to go back to digital.

It has been an interesting week or so. In a Chinese curse sort of way. There are televised Congressional hearings that make the case that the previous U.S. President committed sedition. The Supreme Court has decided that half the population of the country has no right to bodily autonomy. They also further loosened the gun control laws which incited one wag to opine that life apparently begins at conception and ends at age ten in an elementary school classroom in Texas. The Supremes also decided that Church and State aren't so separate after all, if by Church you mean christianity. And there were hints they would like to have another look at our rights to use birth control and our access to the civil institution of marriage.
This is Bill. He's glad to be a cat.