Elderly friends do not always just gently fade away into a nursing home, in my experience they make quite a ruckus as they go. My best friend here in the twin cities of Bloomington/Normal, Illinois was Kathy McKinney, who was a retired newspaper reporter/editor for the local newspaper, The Pantagraph. In the decade that I knew her we shared an interest in the arts, animals, walking around out in nature, and analyzing people. Our master's degrees were in sister subjects, mine was sociology and her was psychology. We both enjoyed writing. She was very good at it. I am not bad myself. We had a lot of laughs together. Kathy and I did fun activities together until in her early 70s when she

My paternal grandmother Throcky (Carla Margaret Throckmorton) was almost a full century ahead of her time in many ways, for example, she pronounced schedule and coupon the same distinct (incorrect) way that millennials do today. Instead of speaking schedule with a soft sibilant "s" followed by a hard "ch" as in school, she spoke schedule with a harder "s" and skipped the "ch" all together; just like the young one do today, like a slurred "said you all" As for coupon, she started it with a "coo", omitting the influence of the "u" that really should make "cou" sound like "q". It was annoying to me to the point of embarrassment, but she was resolved. She seemed to feel it was daring to speak

Caption: The Color Viridian Is My Least Favorite by Annmarie Throckmorton 2019 Caption: Annmarie Throckmorton Wearing Veridian Roses (with grubby sleeves from art class) Annmarie Throckmorton At The Senior Center Expressing That Getting Old Isn't As Much Fun As They Told Me It Would Be. 2009

At the time the comet Hale-Bopp was brightening high over Earth's horizon*, I was a contractor working at Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing, of America, Inc. My project was to create new, plant-specific teaching materials for an apprenticeship program that my supervisor was developing. I gathered technical information primarily by interviewing machine operators, mechanics, electricians, and foremen, then I wrote standard operating procedures within each of the six maintenance departments of the plant: Trim & Final, Production Tooling, Press Plastics, Paint, Body Maintenance, and Utilities. The manufacturing facility was located at the edge of the small college town of Normal, Illinois, adja

I usually do not buy girly things because I prefer standard issue upon which to establish my own creativity and art. But this twinkly pink pen caught my eye and as it was only a dollar I bought it to put in the plastic pocket of my briefcase to add a touch of femininity. To keep track of the little pen until I got it home I went to put it in my blouse beast pocket, a muscle memory from half a century ago when men's shirts had breast pockets into which they could clip their pens and very occasionally I could find a woman's blouse with a breast pocket. I wore them even though I was mocked as unladylike for it. I never went so far as to fit myself out with a plastic pen pocket protector lik

When I first moved into my very small mudbrick house with a wattle and mud roof, and a packed mud floor that the US Peace Corps had rented for me in my assigned village of thirty some identical very small mudbrick houses, the first wife of the village chief shyly stopped by and apologized for the fact that my house had no door on it. I did not care as I had brought nothing of value with me other than my good intentions and hopefully the US Peace Corps financial backing for projects I might do. The other houses in the village had no doors and I wanted to live as they lived because I thought that would facilitate my understanding of them and my work with them. I was very naive not to realiz

There was a photograph in the Columbus Dispatch newspaper of a girl carrying firewood for long miles across a desert somewhere in Africa, and it reminded me of the women in Mali, West Africa whom I saw working, always working to maintain their mud-brick homes and their desert-like fields. (Frankly, I rarely saw Malian men working, perhaps they worked inside where it was cooler, perhaps they did not work.) With the newspaper photograph as my model I painted this watercolor of a Malian girl gathering firewood to cook her family's evening meal instead of getting an education as all little girls should be able to do. I did not anticipate posting my painting on this website so I did not retain

As my avatar AdroitWaterBear I posted two satirical comments on the Mark Dice channel, in response to his dissing of Senator Elizabeth Warren in "SHE'S THE GREATEST!" Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7MeBOUvf4k&t=116s Social Security will not run out of money because senior health care is so bad we are dying off early, and politicians know this. Democrats say social entitlements run out in 16 years, but they also say the world ends in 12 years so they got it covered. Not withstanding the Democrats' proclamation of the imminent end of the world, and apparently oblivious to the pending insolvency of many social entitlement funds that they nonsensically project to follow said end of th

So far this year the most excitement on earth for me has been off of it, i.e., the Chinese landing on the far side of Earth's moon. Hearty congratulations! Caption: NASA's LRO image of the far side of moon, 2011 Caption: 中国国家航天局 China National Space Administration's Chang’e 4 spacecraft approaching the lunar surface, for soft landing on January 3, 2019. Chang'e is the name of the Chinese Moon goddess. For short video showing actual landing, see https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/01/13/china-releases-more-images-from-far-side-of-the-moon/.

Caption: An Easter card of gratitude from my mother who knew that she was descending into dementia in 2012. She wrote to me, "Love, Mother - Thank you for being you." This was the first time that she ever annotated a greeting card to me. She appreciated the daily care that I was providing to my parents that allowed them to spend their last years in their own home. I am proud to have been a good daughter to my parents.

The photograph says it all. This little girl has little to nil hope of improving her mud-brick city. Why? Because it has no infrastructure for her to grown up in and there is nothing there for her to work with, and she must sell sweets to live. She will probably never make great her country of Mali. Why? Because she cannot even get an education, and she must sell sweets to live. Power brokers, king makers, nation builders, and other powers that be will really have to step up their game to make Mali safe, livable, and profitable. I am embarrassed for the mighty, to see them fiddling around in the world where the work is so easy, in Europe, the Americas, the Orient, and so on. Where is

After I was medevaced from Peace Corps service in Mali, West Africa into a half dozen painful, debilitating operations, I returned stateside with only my dreams of Africa to comfort me. I was plagued by my comprehensive knowledge of the many things that needed to be done to help the good people there, things that no one could do there without serious nation-building from the powers that be. My feeling at the time was that the people that I knew in Mali also needed to be medevaced out of Africa, away from the poverty, disease, and lack of any infrastructure. I grieved that I could not return to try to help in any small way that I could. But I could not. Caption: Annmarie Throckmorton at

Only the wealthy few in Mali, West Africa can afford this stew of potato, onion, tomato, peanut paste, beef, and fish. The name of the stew is pronounced "tigadiganun", I do not know how it is spelled in Bamanankan, the national language in Mali. It is very tasty. I learned how to make this stew when a fellow US Peace Corps volunteer told me that a wealthy Malian family had noticed me and wanted to join in on my appropriate technology project. I agreed to consider expanding my work so they sent an invitation to me to spend an afternoon at their home and then to have dinner with them. In retrospect I realize that they intended that I sit and talk business with the heads of family, the men

Hospitals tend to release poor patients too soon, and I was no exception. Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota saved my life, but they left a nasty scar on me and some loss of function, which in retrospect might have been resolved had I had money to stay and endure more operation(s). As it was my financial benefactors, Mayo Clinic and the United States Peace Corps, the latter in whose service and upon whose moped I had been injured, discharged me from care and service respectively, but strangely stipulated that I must return to my family. (What is it with the powers that be that they want women returned to their families, is that their only sense of order in the world with regard to women?

While I was at Mayo Clinic* in Rochester, Illinois in 1981, I had to wait several weeks between my operations five and six to restore function that I had lost in a moped accident while in United States Peace Corps service in Mali, West Africa. One day I felt a little better so I got up out of my bed at Mayo Clinic and took a short shuttle ride to a nearby park with a pond and sat in the afternoon sunshine feeding the ducks a loaf of bread that the hospital cafeteria had given me for them. I was so overcome by all of the painful operations I had recently undergone that I was soon ready to go back to my bed, but as I boarded the next shuttle, a youngish foreign woman followed me onto the shu

AdroitWaterBear posted on Mr Reagan, at "Jussie Smollett | George Soros | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez", 04-15-19. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShFZ8QCCiss&t=2205s Socio-psychopath Soros* is not very sophisticated, he is merely recreating the destruction and chaos that he saw the powerful Nazis inflict when he was a boy. It excites him to now be the one who is so powerful, every other motive is not even a close second. The Nazis were white so taking power from whites is his ultimate pleasure. My guess is that he has brain damage in the areas governing empathy, compassion, and understanding social interactions. He does not understand or care about how people feel, his life is a wor

AdroitWaterBear posted on Youtube to Black Conservative Patriot, at "GUESS WHO IS CURRENTLY IN EUROPE HAVING SECRET MEETINGS THAT UNDERMINE OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT?", 04-06-19 Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlOxLaZ5nW8&t=125s Obama now has that nose in the air, dismissive head swagger that self-indulgent people have when they know they are doing something wrong but do it anyway, because it makes Obama's small self feel big to stab the American President Trump in the back. Be careful it doesn't rain justice for treason, Obama, because you'll drown with your nose up there like that. (This being in reference to Obama's authorization of spying on President Trump in a blatant attempt to

In the past few weeks assorted difficulties confounded my life. I had to drive to Chicago, Illinois for yet another miserable hearing in my late father's loss of leg due to nursing home neglect lawsuit, and this time I kept falling asleep at the wheel on the return drive home, to the point where I had to stim by shrugging my shoulders repetitively or tapping my forehead to stay awake. Soon afterwards I had the mumps or some other disease (brought into the courtrooms at the Richard J. Daley Center by its unvaccinated international clientele?) that swelled up my throat and cheeks until I feared for my life, an illness made all the more frightening by bloody ejecta from my nose and southern m

Remember when there used to be three sizes of toothbrushes, child-size, adult-medium, and adult-large? Now instead of adult-large toothbrushes there are weird options like "high", "reach", and "novelty giant", but where is "large"? Did large toothbrushes go the same way that the hard bristle option went when dentists decided they wanted to clean our teeth and bill us instead of letting us use a firm toothbrush to clean our own teeth, all pulled from stock? Men typically have larger hands, ergo they typically need larger toothbrushes. And steak dinners in nicer restaurants used to come in three sizes, King-size, Queen-size, and something like Next-In-Line size, recognizing that while men w

Is it assault when a man, who is much, much larger than you, strong-arms knives into your unwilling hands and pulls you into him, trying to make you stab him? YES, and that is what that evil, disheveled, shambling old man who drugged me into marriage tried to do when he came back early and found me packing my car to leave him. It was the first time he had left me alone in weeks, I think he went to get drugs, and he was very angry to find me trying to leave him. He put kitchen knives in my hands and tried to force me to stab him. I threw the knives away as fast as he put them in my hands, then with the shear force of a desperate woman I threw myself away from him, and I got outside. I dr