Good morning or good evening, wherever you may be. It is just past 5:00 a.m. in "The City."

Let me be uncharacteristically political by saying that we do have a problem with terrorism in this country, but it is a problem of our own creation. We have too many guns and a 2nd Amendment that purports to protect the rights of nearly anyone to own them. Estimates place the number of guns in the United Sates @ anywhere between 283,000,000 to more than 300,000,000! Fewer households own guns, but there are more guns sold each year. There aren't enough walls nor travel bans to protect us from ourselves.

33,000 people are reportedly slain by guns each year in this country. Homicides, that is people killing other people each year, are more than 10,000 in the U.S., while in Japan, that number is 50, in Germany, Italy, France. and other similarly developed nations, the number is less than 150, and in our neighbor to the north, Canada, that number is less than 200! In the U.S., police officers, average citizens, young people, people of color, and children are all too often slain by guns.

Nearly 22,000 Americans die each year from self-inflicted gunshots, many of them children and young adults! Too often the deaths are children playing with a gun that was carelessly left where they could find it. I know some people might say that I'm like Don Quixote, who according to Cervantes, was attempting to slay imaginary giants. However, when I see young people senselessly lose their lives, I feel as though I too am tilting at windmills and my giants are not imaginary!

Yesterday, several people, including a police officer, were killed by a person with a gun in what has been labeled a domestic dispute in Wisconsin. The silence in the halls of Congress and from the West Wing is deafening! We are debating immigration bans and the building of walls while every day people die at the end of a gun! It will be a long road to a solution if one is ever reached. That assumes that earthquakes due to fracking or air, water and land pollution due to the rolling back of regulations, don't get us first. As George Takei once famously intoned, "Oh My!"

But I'll apologize for my digression now. We have a current temperature of 24° under clear skies. Later today, the NWS has forecast the high to reach 48° under a mix of sun and clouds. After midnight, there is a 50% chance of rain or t-storms. The weekend forecast calls for additional rain. Alas, that's spring in the Midwest.

I thought I had missed the northbound run of the train on Tuesday, but it didn't happen until 9:07 a.m. yesterday morning when locomotives 2019 and 2057 passed by the manse on the RSTL towing 17 CHCs, and 17 DBTCs, one very long.

We didn't do much yesterday other than a walk with the fur-children. some reading and some jigsaw puzzle solving. We did get out later to go to see Young Frankenstein, which I had forgotten was filmed in black and white. I had my huge tub of popcorn and my ginormous cherry-cola, while Mary, did in fact, have just water and that mini popcorn. We had a great time.

Afterward, we stopped @ Sporty's and Papa Murphys™ before heading home to free Ginger and give each of the fur-children their pre-dinner outdoor visits. Later we collectively watched the news, while I watched car shows and Mary surfed the web before we watched my new favorite TV show, Designated Survivor. Then it was time for bed.

Today, I have an appointment for my semi-annual visit to the podiatrist and then we'll enjoy salads in the hospital cafeteria. We are still trying to decide on the bathroom remodeling so we may have to make some additional stops at more big-box home centers in a search for floor tile and fixtures. We had to tell our handyman, John, that we weren't ready to start yet.

That looks like enough ranting and thinking for one blog. The sun will rise today @ 7:42 a.m. and set @ 8;01 p[.m. Ciao.