I drove to Chicago this past week for another hearing on my late father’s loss of leg lawsuit due to nursing home neglect. It was an overexertion as usual, and it seems to take me longer to recover each time. In addition to the usual deep aching caused by overexertion, this time my nerves were strangely jangled, even several days later. What on earth causes that? My case files (≈ 35 pounds) are now too heavy to lift in and out of the wire cart that I have been using, so in a pique I left them at home, and this drew exasperation from the Judge as I am required to produce from these documents for his review. If I cannot carry the case file, how can I prosecute the case? The answer is I c

A couple of decades ago, friends and I went to the Missouri State Fair which has been held in Sedalia, Missouri since 1901. In the evening, in a dark corner of the fair, I noticed a rinky-dink little ride that looked about a hundred years old but electricity became common in the United States in the 1930’s so it was probably only a half-century old. It was a handmade spinning wooden wheel with a dozen small platforms for riders to lie flat, belly down, and be spun around. The wooden boards were hand-welded onto a bent framework of metal tubing, and my first impression was that someone should report it to whatever agency regulates carnival rides, because as the faded wheel of the ride spun

Half a century ago, when I was a young adult who still had much to learn about the world and what was in it, I took a little pick-up job. The job was for a couple of days in a dingy little office located in the seamy side of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. It entailed copying and collating brochures touting financial products or maybe it was for promoting property investment opportunities. I read the brochures but they were incomprehensible to me. At the time I did not realize that I should know what I was actually doing, I probably thought that my job was simply to do whatever task was assigned to me. So when the two owners asked me to stay on and help hand out the brochures on street

When I was a young woman I learned that breastfeeding could provide immunities and other lifelong health benefits to an infant, and I wondered if I had had that benefit as I had no recollection of it. I asked my mother if she had breastfeed me, her firstborn, and she shuddered, she actually shuddered. Then she looked away from me and softly, heartlessly asked, “Like a vampire sucking my blood?” I was shocked but not surprised at her unnatural feelings. I knew my mother very well. She was an atheist, a nihilist, a poo-pooer of occultist nonsense, and she was speaking metaphorically, but it still hurt me that she did not nurse me. In fact, I have no recollection of my mother, or my fathe

When my elderly mother asked me to buy her erasers, I did. Does that make me a bad daughter? I knew she wanted to nibble on them and eventually eat all of them. It was a compulsion for her. When she asked me for erasers I had been taking care of her for many years, because she was no longer able to drive, to shop, to meet her own needs. She whined for erasers like a neglected child whining for treats. I considered carefully before I bought a couple of erasers for my mother. I did not want to give them to her out of anger because she had eaten the erasers off of all of my school pencils for years, until I was old enough to use a ballpoint pen and learned to cross-through mistakes. It w

When I am feeling low, and my heart is heavy with sadness, I give something to someone. I give a friend my attention. I give kind words to a random stranger. I tip the waitress five times what she expects. I give away a possession (jewelry, tools, food) to an acquaintance. This never fails to brighten my life. Caption: To Mend Your Broken Heart Try Mending The Heart Of Someone Else by Annmarie Throckmorton 2018

I recently got another letter from the United States President. Even though it is a form letter, it is still very nice to get acknowledgment from the President for my support. The letter was probably in response to my on-line comments on 09-07-18 at https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/, in which I said: America should have gotten a refund for all the shoddy products China dumped on us for decades, is it possible to do the national equivalent of bankruptcy to discharge that unfair debt? That is the second reason I voted Trump, I hoped he would do this. The first reason I voted for Trump was because he is a hard-hitting yet polite-enough businessman, which is not easy. And I got what I vote

For thousands of years male genital mutilation has maimed men. It is past time to stop this sexual assault on humanity’s precious sons. STOP Male Genital Mutilation NOW. “An estimated one-third of males worldwide are circumcised. The procedure is most common among Muslims and Jews (where it is near-universal for religious reasons), in the United States and parts of Southeast Asia and Africa.” Source: Wikipedia.com Notice that circumcision is not prevalent in Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, South America, or other places where society gives people a real choice in the matter. The social pressure to circumcise can be overwhelming, as I found out when I begged my sister not to circumcise he

There was a well-intended invasive weed removal group of volunteers active in San Diego in the late 1990’s, who claimed to have city and/or country permission to remove plants that they consider to be “weeds” from non-private property in residential neighborhoods. The definition of a weed has always been a plant that grows where people do not want it, that is a plant with the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This year’s weed might be next year’s treasure, but it was still at risk today. Not understanding the full dynamics of the event, I joined up with a work party for an afternoon of “weed” eradication. It was not this group, but something similar: http://ucsdcki.

On May 18, 1980 when Mount St. Helens in the State of Washington erupted some say it was the most disastrous volcanic eruption in the recorded history of the United States. It also created some of the most beautiful sunsets. I took this photograph in Arizona, far away from Mount St. Helens, where even there the skies were made fiery by volcanic gas, aerosol droplets, and ash injected into the stratosphere. I was sitting wordlessly in the desert when this sunset took over the sky. I reject the very unwelcome and dangerous person who deceived and drugged me to be with me at that moment. I claim that evening when the sky was overtaken by the volcano as mine and mine alone. That sky was aw

By the time that I was fifty I had a large toolbox full of all the tools that I needed. These were tried and true, good-quality tools. I acquired my tools one at a time or in small sets, keeping the ones that worked well until I had just the variety of tools that worked for me. Among the standard tools I had expensive specialty tools, for upholstering, wood-working, glass-cutting, ceramics work, geological specimen collection tools, and much, much more. Then one day thieves walked into my home and walked away with my life’s tools. My half-century collection of tools was gone in thirty seconds. My father gave me money to buy replacement tools to comfort me. But they were irreplaceable.

My father was a railroad enthusiast, and when we were a young family we went on numerous rail excursions. Our favorites were steam locomotive drawn trains, for nostalgia, the noise, the dramatic smoke, the jostling, rhythmic motion of it. Later in life I took a boyfriend with my father on one of those old-time train excursions, and one of them took this photograph of me at the steam locomotive museum. Both behaved badly no matter how I tried to make them play nicely, so the next time I went by myself. Caption: Annmarie Throckmorton At The Ohio Railroad Museum 1974

If you doubt it, read this blog. Every word is true. Caption: I Have Had A Complicated Life. collage with my photograph by Annmarie Throckmorton 2018

One day when I was a young woman I drove along a northern Arizona interstate highway through a large Indian reservation, on the way to somewhere, coming from somewhere else, I do not recall the where, when, or why of it. I did not drive onto the reservation as I perceived it as private residential areas in a sovereign nation of American Indians, either the Apache (Indé), Hopi (Hopituh), Maricopa (Pee-Posh), Navajo (Diné), Papago (Tohono O’odham), Pima (Akimel O’odham), Yavapai, Yuma (Quechan), or some other. I stopped for gasoline at a station along the interstate within the reservation, and I was tricked out of my credit card by some teenaged Native Americans who distracted me then snatche

My Blog flotsam and jetsam has forced a paradigm shift on me, a fundamental change in how I view myself, in my underlying assumptions about who I am. My intention with my website inthetide.com was to place my lifework online, as a record of how one person lived in the twentieth century. I thought that my life was a fairly good example because I noticed that the things that I did and that happened to me also were being done by and happening to people around me. I write, I create art, I want to display my work, so voilà, here it is. However, my Blog flotsam and jetsam, in particular my posts thereto of Broken Branches, Broken Life Chances, have forced me to shift how I view myself, from a c

Mind Garden, 13 hours ago Why do we make a human being stand out in this for our viewing pleasure? AdroitWaterBear, 13 hours ago Mind Garden. It is stressful to watch, but the pressure changes out in a storm like that are exhilarating. That's why you often see half naked young men out in it, it's slightly dangerous and very fun. Mind Garden, 10 hours ago AdroitWaterBear 🐬🐬🐟🐋🐳🐠⛈ AdroitWaterBear, 1 second ago Mind Garden. Like flocks of birds fly away from stormy skies or nestle down in microhabitats like tree crevices, I imagine schools of fish and marine mammals in a storm try to swim away or go down in the water column to where the water is calmer. Those that cannot swim fast enough

Given a choice I would be taller, willowy, and scented like honey. I would have lips that had just kissed Cupid. My eyes would glimmer like twin pools of a summer sky. My hair would be sunshine. My eyebrows would be arched like the wings of a bird in flight. I would have dimpled hands and feet without blemish. My body would gleam with young health like a water nymph at play. To not be what I want to be is puzzling. It seems mean. And now I am old, and what charms I might have had, have escaped me, which is even meaner. Caption: Old Me And My Cane Puzzle by Annmarie Throckmorton 2018

In my lifetime, during the last half of the twentieth century, urban public spaces have changed in harsh ways, such as: fewer public drinking fountains, fewer public restrooms, fewer couches for ladies to rest in restrooms, and fewer benches for anyone to rest in public. It used to be that America felt like a place where the sky is the limit! Now, without these basic public amenities, people are not welcomed into urban public spaces with water and a place to sit, to play, to relax, to rest. This is especially hard on the elderly, but also on the youth. Where are we to gather? It is important for everyone’s health to be outside in the invigorating fresh air and vitamin D enriching sunshine

If I do not post examples of the work that I did, no one will know what I was capable of doing. (Phogenix ceased operations over a decade ago.) As Senior Technical Writer/Photo Illustrator from 06/01 to 04/02, I was contracted by Aerotek to Phogenix Imaging (a joint-venture subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard and Kodak) to document research and design of prototype high speed printer. I worked with mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer hardware designers, programmers, and circuitry builders to write or co-author manuals and job instructions. I provided step-by-step photo illustrations for many of these documents. I diagrammed and captioned the photo-illustrations to create clear, i

Siddiqui means The Truthful in Arabic. Siddiqui became my hero when one day, while on a break at work, he quietly told me that he had hiked hard for months across the harsh desert that stretches across northern Africa, and then he traveled far to eventually reach San Diego, California, USA. I had been a US Peace Corps volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa so I knew a little about the hardship that had meant for him. We were sitting in the breakroom at Phogenix Imaging, LLC*, a small, joint venture of Kodak and Hewlett Packard (HP) which was charged with creating the kiosks that are now prevalent in drugstores for printing out variously sized photographs from personal computer memory devices. S