I have three separate posts that I am working on. One about Trump supporters and the Deep South, one about immigration and the Statue of Liberty, and one about art museums.

And I am not working on any of them.

Instead, I have been engaging in my favorite time sink (Facebook) and household chores. I have at least done laundry and cleaned the kitchen.

I am still so very tired a lot of the time. It’s been two months since I was diagnosed with pneumonia; I should be over it already.

I have discovered another time-sink: horse racing. I have always loved racing, but except for the big races telecast on the major broadcast networks, I have not had the chance to see much of it. Enter Fox Sports and Saratoga Live!, coverage of the last four races of the day at the track at Saratoga. I DVR it during the day and watch it at night. (DVRing allows me to skip commercials, walks around the paddock, and interviews with trainers. No trainers give interesting interviews, although I do have a fond spot in my heart for Shug McGaughey.) Since I know next to nothing about these horses, I always pull for the gray one.

Saratoga Live! may lead me into another potential time-sink: researching horse bloodlines. I am fascinated by how in any given race there might be several horses with the same sire. (I have yet to see horses with the same dam; then again, stallions produce vastly more offspring than mares do.) I have yet to succumb, however.

The Red-Headed Menace turned twenty-one yesterday. On one hand, I feel old; on the other, all my kids can now buy me Gewurztraminer for my birthday. There’s always a silver lining.

Level unlocked: Buttercream frosting. This achievement comes courtesy of the Kitchen-Aid stand mixer we got from a friend a few weeks ago. (I had been planning to do a seven-minute or Italian meringue frosting, but I figured that handling molten hot sugar was a bad idea, given my tremors.) Now, if I can only figure out how to keep flour or powdered sugar from exploding all over the counter when I turn it on….

Saffron-Raspberry cake: Take a standard white cake mix. (So I don’t make this cake from scratch. Sue me.) Boil the water required for the mix. Stir in a couple of good pinches of saffron, and let the water cool to room temperature. Cook cake according to directions, using saffron water. Melt raspberry jam in the microwave (I think about 4 – 6 ounces, but I am not sure). Split cooled cake layers, and fill with melted jam. Frost with homemade buttercream frosting.

I am trying not to be terrified about the possibility of Congress and the administration not raising the debt ceiling. I am also worried about a government shutdown, but less so. The long-term damage to the country will be less with the latter.

The days are getting slowly shorter, and the sunlight slightly less intense. I find myself smiling at this.

I talked to a family member in Mississippi a couple of days ago. It was a lovely conversation…. but then again, we avoided politics. One thing I like about my family is that we are capable of being nice to each other, even though they are Trump supporters and I most emphatically am not.

I have been reading Bruce Catton’s The Civil War (see: potential blog post about the Deep South, above). I am gaining a new perspective on a lot of things I thought I knew. Catton is a reliable source, and new ideas are almost always a good thing. While I think it unlikely that a new civil war will break out in the country, according to Catton neither the North nor the South excepted the other to go to war, either.

At any rate, that’s my day. I hope yours is going well, too.