What a Waste

These two tax refund checks arrived in the mail the other day. We keep hearing about government inefficiency and huge backlogs at the IRS as well as at various state agencies, but they certainly got these in record time since our taxes weren't submitted that long ago. It probably cost at least twice the princely sum involved just to process everything and send it.....One of the checks came with a suggestion that we submit everything online and have the refund deposited directly we just take everything to our accountant who submits it.

Speaking of government...there are so many investigations, lawsuits and inquiries against our former president and his minions that one can only shake one's head in wonderment that he is still walking around a free man. The surreal part is the amount of power he still has over a good part of the Republican party and that some of his minions who actively participated in the Jan 6th insurrection are being chosen in primary elections. Midterm elections are predicted to tip in favor of a Republican majority in the Senate which will give them even more power to run roughshod over the will of the people. The pace of enquiry is so slow that it is hard to imagine that any of us will still be around to see any kind of justice served. I've given up trying to understand how anybody can see him as anything more than a common criminal....

I've discovered a new podcast called 'Against the Odds', so as I cut triangles I can listen to tales of climbing K2, or the cave rescue of the soccer team and their coach in Thailand. The former did not end well for anybody, but the latter was a fascinating story about what went on behind the scenes of an event most of us remember that did end well. I wonder what kinds of repercussions those kids have now from such an experience?

Figurative as it is, the colors and design of my quilt have become a way of working through all the fires we have been through since 2017. It seemed a good way to show that even out of bad things, something good could come. My Berkeley friend and quilting mentor lost her home in the 1991 Berkeley/Oakland hills fire. It graphically depicted flames yet was still quite beautiful. I don't have her skill either for quilt making or for the  literal so I'm sticking with abstraction.