Hawaii beckons

I have lots to say but it's almost noon and I still have not fixed the cell phone or taken the awards to Brinks or picked up the prescriptions or cleaned the house in preparation for going to Hawaii.

I'm a lazy slug. But I have redone the notes for the end of the chapter so that when I get back from Hawaii I won't have to figure it out all over again from scratch. I'm still a little bit unhappy with the last tedious meeting, but I think it will be easier to see what to do when I actually get there. I am looking forward to being done with this chapter, because I'm itching to write the next one, with the epidemic and the flood and the girl gang fight and the teenaged childbirth and the fallout of genocide from twenty years before.

Here's something I have suddenly begun to worry about. I'm writing this story in which a bunch of small countries get toigether to form one new, not-quite-state political and economic entity after a protracted regional war -- or maybe a protracted series of regional wars, how can you tell -- not because of the conquest by one or some of the other countries but because of political and economic agreements which are made in reaction to the period of the war. I used to worry that I couldn't think of any precedent for it so I couldn't check my assumptuions about what kinds of things would happen.

This morning I realized that there is a precedent, and it's really quite different from what I'm working with -- Europe. Probably I was unconsciouly thinking about Euopre all along, but I didn't realize it until this morning when I was yelling at the BBC while I was driving around. I was yelling at the BBC because right after each of the referendum failures in France and the Netherlands they collected a lot of quotes from people saying that it wasn't united Europe that was rejected, but the "Anglo-Saxon model" which appears to mean privatization, the consolidation of corporate power and erosion of workers' rights, but today they were maundering on about people questioning Europe and about people being impatient with their governments for dragging their feet on "economic reforms" (which appears to mean privatization, the consolidation of corporate power and the erosion of workers' rights) and causing high unemployment. In other words, the BBC has quietly, without acknowledging it, turned 180 degrees on their interpretation of the referendum results. They are entitled to change their interpretation, but it's dishonest to use weasel words to do it and to not come out and say "Yesterday we were thinking A but today we think B" -- with a proper explanation of why they think so. ANd they shouldn't present opinions as facts, which they were doing today.

Honestly, if I were European, I'd be for a more united Europe, and probably for a European foreign minister and constitution, and I'd probably have voted no in the referendum too, because the thing does look dodgy and there's time to come up with a better one.

Anyway. We went to see the big stinky flower at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers and it was set to tropical conditions in there and I worried about pushing a big girl in a wheelchair for four miles in it and then decided it was not a real problem. And we also looked at the rest of the COnservatory -- very nice exhibit on pharmacological properties of plants and where they come from, in which I got to hear Nigerian ladies rhapsodize about the tastiness of bitterleaf, a plant which is more comonly known for its strong medicinal properties. And then we went to Clement Street and had porridge.



I think this is a correction, rather than this much of an addition. But still.

57,916 / 75,000 (77.0%)

or

57,916 / 80,000 (72.0%)