I thought I forgot to take any pictures

Fortunately I did!
My neighbor made chicken soup for me. 
How freaking loving is that? CHICKEN SOUP. The epitome of love and comfort. 
Thanks to dreaming I had cookies to bring over and share.
Her husband gave her these lovely flowers recently. 
She told me I should read the book James for book club and told me enough about it that I am very interested.

I lifted weights.
I applied for a job with Google.
I listened to a union meeting this morning.
A second judge has ordered overlords to reinstate thousands of fired employees. These employees were probationary employees, meaning in their current jobs for less than a year. The dirty thing is that their termination letters said they were fired for poor performance which meant they couldn’t get unemployment. 
The judge said it was clearly not done legally and the performance claim was clearly a pretext for a RIF and that isn’t how you do a RIF.

The union is doing two things. 
1) They are suing because the executive branch can’t shut down a government agency without the authorization of the legislative branch.
2) This next one is complicated. They can’t sue about the mass RIFing until they exhaust administrative processes. Before we can sue, we have to go to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals from federal employees. We can’t go to them until we’ve been hurt. The RIF is effective April 24, so we haven’t been hurt until April 25. 
What happens if we win? Probably they’ll have to take us back, give us some back pay, and then RIF us properly. Does it matter? Yes. The economy is tanking and will stay bad until we stop starting trade wars and threatening to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama. I … this novel …. We are literally threatening to take over Canada? How is this real? 
So the longer we are paid during the economic calamity, the better. 
Also, there are employees who will be just a month away from getting retirement benefits. 

The next bit of excitement is the continuing budget resolution to keep the government operational. The House has given the Senate a budget that everyone, R and D, views as a blank slate for Trump and Musk to keep doing what they want. This includes cutting everything, continuing trade wars, and - this is offensive so brace for it - telling the District of Columbia that they have to cut their budget to last year’s levels. Due to oddities of how the US works, Congress can control DC but has had a special provision in the budget for decades saying that DC can manage its own budget. DC taxpayers fund DC’s budget. The provision basically says that DC can use its own money to meet its own needs. By cutting that provision, they’ll be making DC cut its budget even though DC taxpayers paid DC taxes. They’ll be telling DC it can’t use its own money for its own needs. 

I do need to read more fiction. Fiction makes more sense than this. 

I digress. It is considered permission to Trump and Musk to do what they want to do. If it is not passed then the government shuts down. Republicans do not have enough votes in the Senate to pass it without Democratic help. Do the Democrats vote for what everyone agrees is a horrible budget to prevent a government shutdown? Or do they let the government shut down in hopes that Americans will recognize that Republicans cannot govern? But wait! There’s more! If the government were to shut down for 30 days, many government employees would be RIFed. But wait! We’re all being RIFed anyway! I know which way I want them to vote but I recognize I have been wrong before. 

I love that Canada and the EU are deliberately targeting retaliatory tariffs against red states, like soybeans in Louisiana which is represented by Mike Johnson. The EU has other countries it can buy soybeans from. 

In 2022 a Czech company, Excalibur, modernized old T-72 tanks for Ukraine. These are old Warsaw pact, Soviet style tanks. Morocco just agreed to donate 30 of their T-72 tanks to Ukraine. Between Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Morocco, Excalibur modernized 120 tanks for Ukraine. After a meeting on Feb 12, 2025, the UK announced it would provide Ukraine with a package by spring to include 50 armored vehicles, including T-72 tanks. The question for the curious was who in Europe might still have these tanks. Maybe they are coming from Romania which might have 30, decommissioned in the 2000s. 

Helping announced a new order for 6,000 HX-2 kamikaze drones for Ukraine. They are opening a new factory in Germany which will allow it to produce up to 1,000 of the drones a month. It has a “robust communication system” which is supposed to make it less vulnerable to electronic warfare. The software is supposed to be more advanced than what Russia has too. Multiple HX-2 drones can form a swarm controlled by a single operator and attack sequentially. The drones are similar to but better than a Russian drone called the Lancet but in addition to the better communications and software, it can go 100 km and the Lancet can go 40-60 km. 

The huge drone attack that Ukraine launched against Moscow last weekend caused fires at all four of their airports and suspended a railway connection between Moscow and Domodedovo. The state controlled media has barely reported on it. 

Russia has an effective air defense system called the OSA. It is believed to cost about $10 million. March 9 Ukraine published footage of drones destroying one near Donetsk. It is thought that Ukraine destroyed five advanced air defense systems in one day, January 6, including two Pantsir-S1s and Ann other OSA. The Pantsirs cost $15 million.