Catching up here—weekend before last I went home to Sparta to see my mother, pictured below having Wisconsin classic Friday night fish fry cocktail, a brandy old-fashioned sweet!
She was toasting that fact that Gavriela had just finished her mid terms and was headed out on a much deserved spring break with friends!
We had a BLAST! We stayed up far too late Saturday night with my cousins David, Z. and Suzanne Hoffman. Oh boy, must share this story. David regaled us with the story of a lifelong Democrat who has, sadly, been sucked into Qanon but has remained true to her always over-the-top self by migrating to the far right reaches of Qanon and embraced the beliefs that JFK, JFK Jr., his wife Caroline and, I am guessing, probably Elvis, although I am making that up, are all still alive and are coming back to save us. At the side of you-know-who!
”David, what did you say when she told you all that?” I asked. Because she was telling him in all earnestness, to help educate him.
”I just looked at her and said, ‘I hope they’re all still alive.’” He said.
I am nominating him for the UN. Then he told me that he’d told the whole story with additional wild details to one of his college roommates.
”That’s what happens when you let baby boomers on the internet,” the roommate told David. I howled.
Even though I’m a baby boomer. David, the youngest of my cousins, is not.
Anyway, that is how the weekend went. Lots of fun. I went to church at Fort McCoy with my mother and at the coffee hour afterawards learned that LaCrosse has established No Mow May—for the bees. Hmmm.!
I stayed until Tuesday so that I could work as a poll observer. The polling station at the English Lutheran Church in LaCrosse was really well run, much more efficiently and professsionally than my old polling place on West 73rd back in New York, where the poll workers were kind of crabby and bickered with each other.
One guy using a walker knew everybody there and had them all in stitches as he made his way from check-in to picking up his ballot and then past me.
He slowed and looked at me. I was wearing a “Poll Observer” sticker.
”Are you with the UN?”
OMG. Worth the otherwise boring morning.
Wisconsin’s April elections are for judges, school board and municipalities.
Sadly, a school funding referendum in the Sparta schoool district designed to fill a $2 million gap over the next two years caused by the Republican legislature’s freeze of school funding failed. In part, I belive, it was because of an aggressive campaign that was mostly name-calling by some right wingers. Two direct mail campaigns. Supporters of educating kids just put up a few signs.
But narrowly. I see opportunity here. I have to see what happened in neighboring school districts.
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