Anna Richland

A photo showing a tube of Korean sun block and a tube of Crest toothpaste side by side on a tile counter. They could definitely be easily confused. One could for instance put sunblock on one's toothbrush. If one was drinking tequila on vacation, that could happen.

This vacation has been 0 days without an accident.

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I like that thought, a lot. I wrote some things steeped in Beowulf and this really captures what I felt.

Photo of the skeletal remains of a shorebird on a sandy beach. Skull attached to spinal column.

The only part of Seattle I miss right now is ... You.

Because where I am, the sky is blue.

While seeing Gail would be grand,

Honestly, I'm enjoying walking in the sand.

No. He is not a good little soldier, this is some epic sh*t, not true.

Remember when his own unit turned him in for racist tattoos and he got canned rather than activated to guard Congress after J6? That doesn't happen if you're a decent junior officer.

He's been reviled since his ROTC days.

I was very lucky, very fortunate, and very young. Hard to believe how many decades ago it was, when it still seems to have defined my adult life, and yet it's a half a lifetime ago.

I imagine it was a hard couple years (at least) for him to get used to being out?

It's far easier to write about him than talk about him.

My other great uncle, the POW, came back, but I wish there had been assistance for him and many of his generation that was not just alcohol.

As for me, I hit the sweet spot between Gulf War 1 and 9/11. Good times.

I think I'm older than you. This immediately came to mind, bc I branched QM a year later (but went off to law school). Unit from near my grandparents. Hit their town hard.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Qu...

The city with the Incline was going to be my first guess!

(Family from Mon Valley ... )

One side was in a steel mill, then a bomb factory, then Corning glass. And painted houses on the side/during strikes.

The other side had a little bit of college, management in a tool and die factory, and then did a retired volunteer executives thing that took him around the world in the 70s.

Moral injury is real.

The horror my great uncle saw was lessened because he knew that even given dire circumstances, even when he was close to failing his beliefs, he could do the right thing. He just needed a little reminder.

That close to the end, he was fixated on how his war had been.

And from the chair, weeks before his death, he looked at me and said, I am so glad I followed that ordered. I am so glad I saved that German. I did the right thing.

I never found out who his officers were, it was a long time ago, but they saved a Western PA teacher and a forty year umpire.

He told me -- and he was confined to his lounger and wasting away from colon cancer-- he said he hadn't wanted to treat the German, bc his own brother was MIA and he wanted to let the German die.

My great uncle said his LT ordered him to treat the German, so he did.

Dying of colon cancer, he talked to me for awhile about his WW2 experience. His daughters said he'd never talked about it to them, but I was in the army at the time.

His unit had a German POW and he was supposed to triage the guy, give him morphine if he needed it, and he didn't have enough.

My great uncle was a WW2 medic. A really good man, teacher, high school athletic director in Western PA, little league ump for forty years. Pillar of the church. Anywhere I went in the world and heard that Western PA accent in the 80s and 90s, they knew him. Anywhere.

When he was dying ...

It is.

They can't imagine ever feeling shame, and needing to preemptively build structures that will guard against moral injury, because it's not a concept they think is real.

I explained moral injury so many times in conjunction with Rules of Engagement and law of war briefings. It gives an understandable reason to the briefing.

"YOU want to come back and be able to coach little league and still feel, years later, like one of the good guys, not a murderer."

Weapons are weapons. I'm sure they'll accept them.

But do what the CIA wants?

*Shrug*

I hope to God they helped pick up survivors. That is the way we are supposed to do it.

This is terrifying escalation. And given some of the accidents we've seen from our own Navy in recent years, coupled with "no stinking ROEs," the possibility for disaster is unacceptably high.

Looking at birds so much for the past couple days really reset my brain, and I was rocking at manuscript edits today!

Photo of dark silhouette of a tall, leggy bird (a heron) standing in the ocean at dusk. The crests of shallow waves gleam bright white and the water is a study in grays.

Baja California in Mexico is lovely. I just finished a low tide beach walk, with a lot of time lurking in the shallows to let the birds get used to me.

Scenes like this help me a lot, and i think I will paint it tomorrow.

#birds #birdsky #baja #birdsofmexico

Heroes of my WIP keep talking to me about their Christmas plans, but I can't write a Christmas novella until I finish the main book!

I'm very jealous of you right now. I did a bunch of Roman ruins in Macedonia, but Baalbek ... Wow.

That sounds healthy!

Oh f*ck that. I paint all the time. I started with a class meant to produce "artists" w/critiques and the whole thing.

Now I paint w/ a group of supportive women who focus on painting for 3 hours, and then have coffee. One of these caused me to improve and also find community.

Just F that. Paint.

I knew him and Pat. Pat is actually brilliant. Ted, meh, peaked at 19. Rest of us grew and changed, he's still mentally and emotionally the exact same. It's actually startling how ossified his thinking is.

He isn't, though. That's the myth everyone repeats.

He practiced slam dunk stuff in TX with a slew of office support. What landmark, novel or difficult things are actually a result of his skill or leadership? The whole "he's brilliant" is just deference to his puerile debate skills and Haaahvaaad.

Not feel like posting anything for awhile, but I'll still lurk and comment.

Just, you know. I have nothing to say that I can say publicly bc ... Situations.

I understand. I have worked in this field in more than one state.

The point is, elections are extremely local and extremely complex. And something the feds have zero expertise in. And people in other countries, like the post I commented on, have little idea how complicated our election system is.

We are 325,000,000 people give or take.

We vote on everything all the time. We vote on judges. Out west, we vote on specialized taxes for supporting water districts. We vote on school funding.

Elections are run locally, at state, county and city level.

The feds have almost no role in them.

In case you can't read the article bc of paywalls, here he is at spring training in a Sue Bird #10 basketball jersey and astoundingly silly pushed up over his knee baseball pants, photo from the Seattle Times.