My neighbor

I have a neighbor who has revamped her little lawn and it looks awesome. She has a little dog, pictured. 

Yesterday a new friend did not have a heart attack. Women are a PÍA. Our bodies are weird. Our heart attacks are weird. And no one studies us and so we are also mysteries. So often our medical complaints are dismissed. Fortunately that was not her experience. She had chest pain. She called her cardiologist. She couldn’t get through to a human. She eventually went to the Emergency Room. If you go in with chest pain they see you right away. They did all the tests and she was not having and did not have a heart attack and now she has the comfort of knowing that. No idea what IS wrong with her. They were playing a very nice balancing act of trying to not freak her out but letting her know that if her symptoms came back so should she, immediately. Hopefully some very serious test they will give her in a week at another location will give her some answers. 

Lesson:  if you go to the emergency room try to bring your cell phone charger with you because they may keep you.

Now I’m picturing your husband trying to rush you to the hospital, scared that you’re going to die, and you insisting that he go back for your phone charger just in case. You’re welcome. 

This morning I imagined a headline saying, “church supports trans child” and a child in rural Oklahoma reading it and realizing that a church could show love for a trans child member of the congregation and it hit me hard. 

Tomorrow is a holiday to celebrate the end of slavery. 

The US is under a heat dome this week. It is ok, we experience hotter, I am sure it will be much worse later. 

Did you watch the TV show the Americans? It is about a Russian couple of spies who are pretending to be regular Americans while spying on the US. Well. In Slovenia there were a couple of Russians pretending to be Argentinians but actually spying for Russia. As soon as they were arrested two more suspected Russian spies completely disappeared, shocking their boyfriend and girlfriend who had no idea. Other suspected Russian spies have been exposed across Europe since the Ukraine invasion, in the Netherlands, Norway, Czech Republic, and Bulgaria. This is the biggest spy sweet since the FBI's 2010 "Operation Ghost Stories" that caught 10 Russian spies in America.


There is a nice Guardian article about how the Vietnamese community in Ukraine is fighting the Russians. Tung Nguyen joined his parents in Ukraine when he was 18. He was a body builder. Ukraine let him become a citizen so he could compete as a Ukrainian internationally. He’s been wounded and hospitalized twice. “Before the start of full-scale war, I didn’t know many Vietnamese people, but now they support me a lot. Lots of Vietnamese people wrote me messages of support, people brought food to the hospital,” Nguyen said.


Sounds like Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian city of Vovchansk have begun surrendering.