Day 321…
Wearing a mask outside during these very cold days has proven to be a great way to keep warm. It turns out that wearing two masks keeps your face much warmer than just wearing just the one does.
I have a distinct memory of a Halloween when I was young, and I dressed up as Casper the Friendly Ghost. I must have been seven or eight years old at the time.
My store-bought costume came with a molded plastic face mask. I remember trick or treating with that mask and having the chin continually fill up with the condensation from my breath. Periodically, I would need to empty it out. It was so warm and uncomfortable with the mask on that I ended up keeping it up on top of my head and only brought it down when we got to someone’s front door.
Oddly, it’s one of the most vivid memories I have from that time in my life. I can actually still feel the cold puddle against my chin. Almost every time that I am out walking, it comes back to me. Every so often these days, I still have to lift my masks up over my bearded chin to cool it down and dry it off.
We are due to get some snow flurries any minute. Outside, it is dark and rather dreary. Inside the apartment it is chilly enough that the cat has forsaken me and is curled up right against the radiator.
There are very few things these days that break what has become our routines. The cat can count on one of us being in the apartment nearly all the time. There are definitely times when he seems sick of us, but for the most part he seems happy to have us as permanent laps to sleep on.
I have a bit more patience for it than Michael does. I’ll adjust my position either in bed or on the couch to make him more comfortable, Michael usually won’t.
The cat is not the only one who seems happy with the routine, I think that, more or less, both of us are too.
Periodically, discussions about various work projects pop up and my first thought is, “oh I hope that this doesn’t happen too soon.” Not that I wouldn’t take a job now, but if it doesn’t happen until spring, or summer or next fall, then that’s OK, too. Of course, most everything that has gotten discussed recently has ended up being pushed off, but at some point, something actually will stick.
A variety of things are circling around March or April, so, in my head, whether they happen or not, that’s what I am aiming for. If the pause continues beyond that, I’m fine. If it happens before that, however unlikely that might be, I’m going to have to really make an internal adjustment.
At the very least, I want to have finished scanning and organizing all of my family documents and pictures by the time I start working again. I am trying to do at least an hour or two of it every day. It’s like losing weight, which I am also trying to do. It takes time and it’s hard to see any immediate results.
Looking back over a week or a month, though, and you can see how things have added up - or been subtracted as the case may be. Having this seemingly endless stream of days has been perfect in terms of accomplishing long term goals like that.
It took a few months for me to really get in the groove of it. At the beginning of the pandemic, things were so uncertain, and all of this was so new that it was hard to really focus in on anything. The time leading up to the election and, beyond that, to the inauguration was so fraught that it never occurred to me to think about the future. Now that the government is seemingly in place and starting to be rebuilt, however, there isn’t enough going on in the present to prevent me thinking about what’s to come. I am ready to let the prospect of the future in.
The prospect of it, mind you, not the actual future. Not just yet.
In the meantime, though, there are still some interesting things happening.
When the Founding Fathers created the Constitution, they envisioned that most of the business of the House and the Senate would be passed by a simple majority of its member’s votes.
There are several exceptions to that that they stated explicitly. Conviction on impeachment charges, expelling a congressional member, overriding Presidential vetoes, ratifying treaties and Constitutional amendments would all require a 2/3 majority in both houses to pass.
Alexander Hamilton fought against the idea of the 2/3 majority, or super-majority, requirements in other regards.
“The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus, the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.”
The very first US Senate created a rule that a simple majority could vote to end a debate and therefore vote on the question. Aaron Burr, however, argued that it was an unnecessary and redundant rule and convinced his fellow Senators to vote against it.
This then left open the possibility for a filibuster.
A filibuster is when a Senator tries to block or delay a vote by extending the discussion of it. Senate rules allow any Senator to speak on any topic for as long as they choose.
In the classic film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart, who plays a naïve Junior Senator from an unnamed western state unfairly thought to be guilty of graft, famously filibusters for 25 straight hours before he passes out. His doing so eventually leads the actual corrupt Senator to finally admit his guilt in regard to a fraudulent land scheme.
The filibuster is a favored tactic of the Republican Senate Minority Leader. He used it countless times during Obama’s terms in office to obstruct and delay legislation.
Going into this new Administration, Republicans, who had been in the majority still controlled all of the Senate committees. The now-Senate Minority Leader was unwilling to give that up, in large part because he was afraid that if he did, Democrats would vote to abolish the filibuster. Because the Senate is now evenly divided, in theory he could have fought to keep the committee memberships status quo. He may or may not have prevailed in that.
In 2000, the elections ended up with the same identical split in the Senate between the two parties. Members of both factions, at the time, agreed to a power-sharing deal whereby committees would be composed of equal members from both parties.
Yesterday, after two Democratic Senators signaled that they would not support abolishing the filibuster, the Senate Minority Leader agreed to implement a similar power-sharing arrangement to the one that had been established in 2001.
The Senate committees will now be evenly divided which, maybe more than anything else, will require them all to actually work together. Moving forward, both sides will want to achieve things and this, at lease, ensures that they will need to compromise on some things if they want their own legislation to get through the process. Abolishing the filibuster is not off the table, but at the moment there do not appear to be enough votes to do so.
The snow has started. It’s going to start to warm up a bit this evening, so I don’t really think that any of it is going to stick. The trees outside our windows are waving in the wind and the flakes are swirling around like mad.
All of that means that my walk this afternoon is going to be… challenging.
The cat is back in his usual midday spot on the bed near where Michael is working. He knows that I am going to leave soon, and that Michael will still be here. He doesn’t always need to be ON one of us, but he does like being at least near one of us.
He can sleep through almost anything. Most of the normal noise we make doesn’t bother him at all. Even when we get loud, if it is something that we do every day, he doesn’t even twitch an ear. It’s only if something out of the ordinary happens, like one of us dropping something, that he’ll startle.
Nothing much startles me these days either. Very little keeps me from following the same schedule more or less every day.
There’s comfort in that.
As days like this accumulate, I can see the trend of things being accomplished continue. Slowly but surely. It’s satisfying and I’m fine with doing it for a while longer.
The windows are rattling. The wind is actually whistling. Two masks will be great out there today in the blowing snow.
I wouldn’t go out without them.
❤️....always thought a fillabuster was a term for inclement weather...maybe it is
yes, the snow stopped and love how my two masks keep me doubly safe & warm!
xx