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…for some work, but in my break I’ve called my state rep and the house oversight committee. I’m a bit concerned by the fact I got through. Last time I tried to do this, I spend the day being redirected from engaged tones to voicemail to mailbox full errors.

This time I got straight through.

I’m hoping this isn’t a sign that people are losing momentum on the issues at hand and just that it’s the end of the week so most people have got through.

As a reminder, if anyone needs guidance on things to do: there’s a spreadsheet here.

It’s not like I couldn’t get to work, but the campus is closed, which is quite annoying as I have stuff to do. So instead I’m stuck at home with not enough of my stuff (I should have brought more work home with me, but I seriously didn’t expect it to be closed today).

Bah.

So I’m unsure if our house progress is going to be one of those things where making progress is going to feel like a sisyphean task, or whether its like we’ve shoved a glacier enough and now it’s going to move inexorably forward.

I doubt the latter, but it does feel a little like we’ve managed to get the glacier moving. Today our septic plan was submitted to the county, along with payment. Now what happens is they go out to the land and hopefully assess it as being fine. What I’m hoping is that they don’t get all overexcited about the culvert that drains into our land and decide to get all “this is wetlandy”.

If they do that I’ll be very unhappy, given the number of times that I went down there before hand and said “is this wetland? is there any way that you could consider it wetland?”

But I’m going to cross my fingers, toes and any other thing I can think of.

In other house news our copy of the LEED book arrived, which is filled with exciting novel materials that make me go “ooh, perhaps we could build with that”. Almost invariably (from past experience) this is followed by “just after we win the lottery”… but hope. Eternal.

Incidentally, I’ve turned off the Tumblr-duplication. So blog -> Tumblr is still on, but Tumblr -> blog is off. That’s because it was hammering my little webserver (and appears to have consumed a vast amount of space)

So we’ve been pretty settled on the house design for a while. It didn’t thrill either of us, but we were pretty happy with the general thing.  Then we watched the entire 2016 season of Grand Designs. And we remembered that a big part of why we want to build is to create something interesting and novel. Something with some degree of integrity. 

And while find may end up finding that we can’t do anything near as interesting as we’d like, we’ve now spent days trying to find a way to do something more architecturally interesting. 

So if anyone knows a good architect (or student)  who’s something to fill their time… And isn’t too painfully expensive… Point us in their direction,  eh.

One of the things which concerns me about the situation here is American exceptionalism. See, America is exceptional, it is unique. But then so is every other country. Every country is unique and different and a special little flower. Some things are better here, some things are worse.

The US has been responsible for some great advances, and some terrible things. It is populated with humans who are just as great and just as flawed as every other country. And it worries me greatly that people seem under the impression that an autocratic dictatorship couldn’t happen here, because the US is in some way special and different.

I hate to be the one to break it to you all, the US is just as capable of slipping into an autocracy as any other country. As Masha Gessen said, the institutions will not save you. So it is time to start fighting, because the signs are really, really not good.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I mean, I know there’s been sporadic posts, but my old frequent posting schedule has gone by the wayside. That’s mainly down to the new job, but some of that is not being sure what to say. I mean, talking about what’s going on in my life seems pretty… well, lacking, when I’m looking at what’s going on in the US and the UK at the moment.

Looking at Ursula Vernon’s post she captures the utter insanity of where we are at the moment. To paraphrase: “bought gas masks for protestors, did some gardening“. It’s terrifying. As I’ve got older I’ve become increasingly aware that I’m not white. It’s something that I was aware of as a kid, that faded into the background through the 1990s, where we actually seemed to be making progress.

And now we’ve arrived in 2016, and the UK has actually voted for a surveillance state, and to attempt to take itself into being some kind of third-world pariah on the edge of Europe, led by a racist and a buffoon. And the US has voted for a racist can of tango, who’s brought with him actual neo-nazis. And we can call them the “alt-right” if you prefer, but either way, they’re horrific.

And I have a list of US people to call, although last week when I tried I got busy-tones and full voicemail boxes. But at the same time we’re booking a rental car and a hotel so we can go and visit my mother. And I’m reading about protestors being treated like they’re in a war-zone but I’ve just come back from seeing friends for thanksgiving, and spending hours in Powell’s looking at books.

Never has my world history felt so close. I feel Mr Ross, my history teacher’s explanations of the rise of fascism in Germany as terrifyingly present. I feel wary and on edge. And I watch as people excuse and say we should wait and see. We don’t need to. We let him show his colours. It’s not what he says that worries me, it’s what he does. Journalists don’t seem to have got that yet. They report his words like they’re meaningful.

But they are just noise. Just pacification. It’s like when my friend read the antibiotic guidelines to a baby who’s mum had disappeared from our ER. He was settled by the soothing noises, the words themselves were immaterial. Trump utters these phrases that soothe and console, but his actions speak to a truth that will tear the US apart.

It will not make America great in any sense of the word. It’ll make him rich, and drive people to poverty, despair and destruction. It’ll rip and lay bare divisions in society. And it leaves me feeling hollow and scared.