Anthrax and HCl

It was a tough weekend, scrubbing old dried grout from my raw slate tile fireplace with a solution of hydrochloric acid. Big rubber gloves, goggles, no boots though, I was able to persist for about 3 hours each of both days and now it is almost complete. I just have a couple of small spots I want to hit again to make them as clean as the rest of it. It looks really nice and next I’ll mount a simple plank mantle which should finish it off nicely. Next we build a fire and hope nothing falls off.

Monday wasn’t much better. I was tired and cranky but when I got home I had a couple of homebrews and since KG and Ronnie had some errands, I was able to spend some quiet time putting myself right. I slept well and feel entirely better today.

Interestingly, or otherwise, I’ve been thinking about 9/11/2001 again and someone asked me recently how such a big secret as the government knowing it was about to happen (if not actually perpetrating it themselves as the evidence suggests) might have been kept. So many people must have known something about something, if it were the product of the intelligence agencies, how could it have been so neatly swept under the rug? One thing that comes to mind is anthrax. The anthrax attacks followed the 9/11 attacks so closely that, as traumatized as we all were, they seemed like just another part of it, and maybe they were, though a rather more closely targeted part of it. The intended victims of the attacks were media figures and politicians, notably Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Had either of the Senators died from the attacks control of the senate would have passed to the Republicans and a stern anthrax warning to the press to keep quiet about the whole monstrous affair certainly didn’t go unnoticed. I’m not exactly saying that’s what happened but I’m a student of alternate realities and as they say, a man’s gotta believe in something, and of course, the official versions of events certainly don’t add up. Check out this list of cases.. ‘Get in line, sit down, and shut up!’ has been the motto of this entire administration pretty much from day 1. It’ll be nice if this country is ever again a republic or a democracy.

That said, it is Thanksgiving week and KG and I are serving dinner to the Schmidlaps. It wasn’t on our list, really, but they didn’t have any other plans and, in spite of having some low-level plans for a quiet day together, we both felt as if it was the right thing to do. So, we’re making a turkey and a few fixins. If we can keep out of trouble it’ll be a good thing, they display their resentments at times when there are no other witnesses. We also are hosting the entire fam-damily for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations and it will be much nicer to do that without a bunch of nasty words floating around in the recent past. Yes, it would also be nicer to do it without nasty thoughts as well, and that is my holy grail and I have to do it in my own head first and then I have to be patient and loving with the others to help them do it. And then flowers bloom.