Day of the Gamelan, 5th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Helios): The world is apparently too busy too have time for me right now.

I got a call this morning (8:00 am!) from my HVAC service company saying that they needed to reschedule the annual maintenance we had planned for today on my home air conditioner. Due to work load, they won't have anyone available for at least two weeks. No worries though, it's working fine and I can easily wait until their next available date of April 2 for the work.

While driving around last night on errands, the "check engine" light in my car came on. It's probably nothing - the car runs fine and the internet assures me the light's usually just a malfunctioning sensor. But since today became unexpectedly free (I don't need to wait around for the HVAC guy), I decided to take the car to Mr. Goodwrench to check it out. But instead of just the "check engine" light coming on, the whole dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree this morning. There was no available light that wasn't fully lit, but the car still started and drove fine. I took it straight to Goodwrench.

Who apparently doesn't have time for me either. They said they could get to it tomorrow "or the next day." Lots of people apparently dropped off their vehicles before me I was told, and they're slammed. I pretended I was going to take my car elsewhere in that case and finally got them to concede to looking at the car by tomorrow or maybe even later today. At least to run a scan and diagnostics to see what the lights are trying to tell us. I walked home from the garage (.75 miles).

But meanwhile, I'm without a vehicle in a very car-centric city. Luckily, I'm retired and don't have anywhere I'm required to be, at least for the next couple of days, and have enough groceries in stock to see me though the better part of the week. I can also walk to some nearby markets and restaurants.  

It's close to 5:00 pm (quitting time) right now as I write this, so it appears they're not getting to me today. Maybe the world will find time for me tomorrow.             

Krakatoa Day, 4th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): We're fucked. Last Wednesday, Lee Zeldin, the former Long Island congressman appointed by Trump to head the EPA despite a lack of environmental experience, announced plans to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. In announcing the rule changes, Zeldin claimed he was “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” 

Last month, three former EPA Administrators published an op-ed in the New York Times warning of the likely environmental harm the Trump administration imposed by freezing funds, cutting spending, and firing more than a thousand Federal employees. 

After Zeldin's announcements last Wedensday, the former Administrators issued a follow-up statement on Friday,  saying the proposed rollbacks endangered the lives of millions of Americans and abandoned the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment. They said the plan to undo environmental regulations “sets the country on a course that will cause irreparable harm to Americans, businesses, and environmental protection efforts nationwide.” 

Former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who led the Agency under Barack Obama and was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden, called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”

Zeldin’s intention to undo environmental protections was nothing short of a “catastrophe” and “represents the abandonment of a long history” of EPA efforts to protect the environment, according to William K Reilly, who led the Agency under George HW Bush and played a key role in amending the Clean Air Act in 1990.

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink." 

Zeldin also announcement that EPA is going to reconsider a scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The agency’s 2009 finding is a bedrock of US environmental law and has been the legal basis for most of EPA's actions against climate change, including regulations for motor vehicles, power plants, and other pollution sources.  

"If there’s an endangerment finding to be found anywhere, it should be found on this administration because what they’re doing is so contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency is about,” Whitman said. She and the other former Agency heads were stunned that the Trump administration would even try to undo the finding and other longtime agency rules. If approved, the rule changes could cause “severe harms” to the environment, public health and the economy, they said.

Zeldin "now seems to be doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry more than complying with the mission of the EPA,” said McCarthy.  Environmental protection and economic prosperity were not mutually exclusive, the three agreed, saying strong regulations had enabled both a cleaner environment and a growing economy since the agency’s founding 55 years ago.

Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, rolled back more than 100 environmental laws in his first term as president. He campaigned on a promise to “drill, baby, drill” and vowed to ease regulations on fossil-fuel companies. In this current term, he has frozen funds for climate programs and other environmental spending, fired scientists working for the National Weather Service, and cut federal support for renewable energy.

Reilly said he feared that Zeldin and Trump would return to a pre-EPA era when industry was free to pollute virtually at will, filling the air in many cities with dangerous smog and rivers with industrial waste. “I wonder if the malefactors are going to give us more burning rivers,” Reilly said in reference to the 1969 incident in which Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire, spurring passage of the federal Clean Water Act and creation of the EPA a year later during the Nixon administration .

Among the changes proposed by Zeldin are plans to rewrite a rule restricting air pollution from fossil-fuel-fired power plants and a separate measure restricting emissions from cars and trucks. 

Biden, who made fighting climate change a top priority of his presidency, had said the power-plant rules of his administration would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting the reliable, long-term supply of electricity that America needs. Half of all new cars and trucks sold in the US will be zero-emission by 2030, he pledged. Zeldin and Trump have incorrectly called the car rule an electric vehicle “mandate.″

The EPA also will take ease rules restricting industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins and the “good neighbor” rule intended to restrict smokestack emissions that affect downwind areas. Zeldin also targeted a clean-water law that provides federal protections for rivers, streams and wetlands.

Environmental group have said the moves would result in the greatest increase in US pollution in decades.

Day of Doldrums, 3rd of Spring, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The severe weather system that spawned tornadoes and thunderstorms across the Midwest passed through here (Atlanta) last night. The storm, which had killed a total of at least 36 people, was part of a huge cross-country system that dropped hail as large as baseballs and produced tornadoes. The system also caused wildfires driven by hurricane-force winds, and dust storms that led to crashes that killed at least 13 people in Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.

It passed over my house a little after midnight last evening with loud thunder, spectacular lightening, and whipping winds, but was over in a matter of minutes. Rain and high winds still persisted for several more hours, but nothing more dramatic than the higher end of our usual thunderstorms.

The storm had me spooked. Not only am I still PTSD'd from the tree that fell on my house during Hurricane Zeta in October 2020, but I've seem many other trees fall on other houses both before and after that. The forecasters were warning of the kind of storm seen "once in a lifetime" and even confirmed that one tornado had touched down about 20 miles from here, although its track passed northwest of me.

I prepped for this storm. I put fresh batteries in my flashlights, gathered together all my candles, and filled jugs and containers with several gallons of water. The main bath is the interior-most room in my basement-less house and I figured I might be spending the night in the tub, so I set up several candles in there and made sure a lighter was right next to them. A waterless bath by candlelight.  How romantic.

I even turned my car around in the driveway in case I needed to make a rapid escape without the time needed to turn around later. While I was doing the later, my next-door neighbors saw me and invited me to ride out the storm with them and some friends of theirs in their basement. I took them up on the offer.

The power went out around 12:30 am, but not because of the usual fallen trees but a power surge that blew at least three transformers. We watched and saw the flash of sparks and heard the loud booms as they went off in sequence, one, two, three. 

But as I said before, the storm quickly settled down, although the rain and some wind continued. I was back home by 2:00 am, and the power came back on by 5:30 am.

So things are rarely as bad as our imagination makes it. But that doesn't mean that bad things don't sometimes happen. It's just that we imagine them more.

Day of the Palisades, 2nd of Spring, 525 M.E.. (Castor):  I still bow to no king.

Lee Zeldin, the Republican congressman with little environmental experience but nonetheless named by Mumps to be the Administrator of the EPA, has cancelled $7 billion of climate research grants. He claimed he was driving a dagger through the heart of "climate-change religion" and ushering in "America’s Golden Age.” He further claimed the mission of the Agency was not to protect the environment but to make it more affordable for people to buy cars, heat their homes, and run businesses.

That is not correct. The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect the environment. And Lee Zeldin is not doing a very good job of it.

On Wednesday, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge who was the presiding judge over Mumps' criminal trial over the January 6 insurrection before the case was dismissed after the election, is ruling on a case over the research grant cuts brought by Climate United, which coordinates investment in clean energy projects. Chutkan told the government's lawyers they needed “some kind of evidence” of wrongdoing to back up the cuts, and asked, “Can you proffer any evidence that [the grant] was illegal, or evidence of abuse or fraud or bribery – that any of that was improperly or unlawfully done, other than the fact that Mr. Zeldin doesn’t like it?”

Marc Sacks, a government lawyer, said, “The determination is based on the information contained in the termination letter.”

Chutkan told him, “That’s pretty circular.” She also said, “I don’t have the credible evidence that’s required."

The hearing ended without a ruling or temporary restraining order, but Chutkan told both sides to make new filings by Monday evening. Climate United is to amend its lawsuit and the government is to provide information regarding any alleged wrongdoing.

By the way, speaking of climate change, there was a sandstorm during this year's Iditarod dog-sled race (a sandstorm!), and a massive storm system with multiple tornados that has already killed 17 in the South is heading toward my Atlanta home as I write this.  

Maelstrom, 1st Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Happy Spring! We're finally here according to the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar.  I took my daily walk today (11 miles - a Polk!) in shorts and a t-shirt as the temps were in the upper 70s.

I'm proud to note that no Georgia Senators voted today in favor of the Republican budget bill, unlike New York so-called Democrats Schumer and Gillibrand. Also siding with the Republicans were John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both of New Hampshire, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada,  Gary Peters of Michigan, and Angus King of Maine, who's technically an independent but caucuses with the Democrats. 

Gillibrand's been on thin ice with me for a while, ever since she teamed with Schumer to force Al Franken's resignation. Fetterman, this year's version of Joe Manchin, doesn't surprise me, but I expected better from the rest. Shame!  

 

The Silent Guest, 73rd and Last Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Atlas): I got my test results back from Tuesday's doctor visit, and apparently I'm healthy. Fuck, death might have been the only way out of this Trumpian horror show in amerika.

My glucose level, which had been a high 179 mg/dL a year ago, is  now a low 53 mg/dL. I attribute the drop to my low-sugar, low-carb, low-fat diet of the past year. Similarly, my A1C fell from a prediabetic 6% a year ago down to a "normal" 5%. I don't have diabetes!

Also, a side benefit of that diet is my weight has gone down from 220 to 167 pounds, a 53-pound loss in a year. Actually most of the loss occurred over a seven-month period between last April and November.

Finally, I also had my PSA screening done, and my PSA came in at 0.78 ng/mL, the low end of normal. So I don't have prostate cancer either. Fuck! Is there no winning?    

I may have to take up cigarettes and heroin to escape Trump.  

 

The Numb Recall, 72th Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): I went full Tyler today, a 10-mile walk along the Chattahoochee taking in the Cochran Shoals and Sope Creek loop trails. I'm at 50 miles now for the month of March, far beyond the Carter 39-mile challenge, and 216 miles on the year.

Mumps, I now realize, is an existential threat to me. I'm retired, and I rely on my life savings in my IRA and 401(k)s and on Social Security to support me. But with Mumps recklessly destroying the economy with his ridiculous, feckless, on-again/off-again tariffs, he's tanking the stock market and the money in my accounts is rapidly evaporating.  He's also becoming increasingly vocal about ending Social Security. I could survive on my savings should Social Security disappear, or I could rely on Social Security should my savings evaporate, but I can't survive losing both. 

On top of that, he's already conceded that, yeah, another recession may be coming. I can foresee the kind of double-digit inflation occurring here that has made the currency virtually worthless in other countries, so on top of losing my income and savings, I may be looking at radically escalating costs - for everything from food to power to gas to basic services.

It's not far-fetched to imagine that should all three occur (stock market crash wiping out my savings, Social Security getting discontinued, and double-digit inflation rendering the dollar worthless), I could be homeless.

Ergo, Mumps is an existential threat. But at least I'll have the reassurance that multi-billionaires won't have to pay high taxes.   

Day of the Rains, 71st of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Elektra): Doctor's appointment today. I'm fine, just a routine follow-up exam for the hypertension experienced back in 2023. As part of the procedure, the nurse who took my vitals asked, "Do you experience any depression?" 

Are you fucking kidding me? If you're not depressed, you're not following the news very closely. You're not looking at the stock market or the balance in your IRA or 401(k) account. You're not aware that Mumps, after gutting or attempting to gut the civil service, is now looking at your Social Security and Medicare to cut next. You're not paying attention to the way amerika's turned its back to our former ally in Ukraine and have signaled to Russia it can do "whatever the hell they want" with the rest of Europe, if not the world. You haven't seen the end of representative democracy, a free press, and civil rights here. You haven't yet realized that "liberty" now means "privilege" for wealthy, white, patriarchal plutocrats.

"Yes, you fucking bet I'm fucking depressed!," I should have told her, but instead, in the interest of just moving things along, I said "no" and left it at that. Who's got time to explain all that other shit? I came back home and sat my 90 minutes of alternating-day meditation.

I'm waiting for my lab results to come back and tell me whether I'm healthy or not.           

 

Day of the Lamb, 70th of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Saturday, I tried to extend my usual neighborhood walk by taking in some surrounding streets and was disappointed to see that my typical 5.8-mile loop came in at only 7.3 miles, an Andrew Jackson. Today, I walked the exact same extended route with the same surrounding streets and all, and at the end walked an additional 1.0 mile (a half mile down the Beltline and back). Despite the additional mile, my phone registered only 7.6 miles, another Jackson.

However, this brought my total mileage for the month of March up to 40.4 miles, a Ronald Reagan, and completes my Jimmy Carter 39-Mile Walk Challenge.

I do plan to keep walking despite this triumphant achievement. Another 7-mile walk will bring me up to the current despicable administration, so Wednesday I'll be sure to head to the Chattahoochee that day for my 10-mile loop trail to bring my total up to the 50th President, whomever that should turn out to be. Jasmine Crockett? Taylor Swift? Willow Smith? Charlie Kirk?

The High Winds, 69th Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Just another day in Paradise. Livin' the dream. La vida loca, baby. 

Nothing else to say today. Maybe think of something tomorrow. 

How are things your way?   

Day of the Roots, 68th of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I walked another Jackson today, although I honestly thought it would be longer. I improvised a new route today - Beltline Trail to 26th Street, 26th to Peachtree Street, Peachtree to Peachtree Battle, Peachtree Battle to Northside, and then around Memorial Park, around Bobby Jones Golf Course, and back on the Beltline. I was fully expecting at least a Tyler but had to settle for a Jackson, which was still better than Thursday's Monroe. The good news, though, is that it brings my month-to-date total up to a Franklin Roosevelt for the Jimmy Carter, 39-Mile Walk Challenge.

Daylight Savings starts tomorrow - apparently, it's Spring Forward Day today. Or tonight. Or tomorrow. Who knows, really? But longer days mean more hours I can walk, and maybe start to get in some more Tylers on my alternating-day hikes.

In keeping with my tradition of bashing Mumps each day, I'll conclude with this: Orange Man bad!      

 

Day of the Fronds, 67th of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Atlas): In the first six weeks of the Mumps administration, the president has attempted to end almost every protection for the environment that has been put in place over the past decades. From the Orwellian deletion of “climate” from government websites to the declaration of a national “energy emergency” even as the US drills for more oil and gas than any country in world history, it's as if we're now living in some sort of alternate reality, 

Mumps' approach to dismantling environmental protections has already been far more extreme this second time around, including the mass firing of EPA staff, the scrapping of climate rules, the freezing of scientific research, and the fast-tracking of oil and gas projects without proper reviews. They are dismantling the very apparatus built over a generation to protect our clean air, water, and a livable climate. 

The pollution unleashed by Mumps' actions will be felt by generations to come, who will have to live on a dangerously overheating planet. At its heart, the climate crisis is a human crisis, and the tearing apart of environmental protections have real-life consequences. What about the family living next to a coal plant? What happens to the people waiting for the lead pipes that provide their drinking water to finally be replaced? What about the indigenous tribes seeing oil pipelines pushed across their land, the disaster-hit households unable to afford skyrocketing insurance costs, the people fleeing worsening wildfires and floods, the kids struggling with asthma from air pollution?

But at least we'll always have the "gulf  of amerika."