Year in Review: At Least There Were Cookies

This calendar year marked a new low in the total number of posts in this space. There was not much that I felt like writing about when I had time. Politics is fatiguing, and the fact that the United States used the electoral college - a system originally put in place to appease slaveowners - to elect an angry, demented pissbaby is something that will cause harm for years if not decades. Great job, America! The founding fathers really paid it forward. It as if appeasing slaveowners was maybe not a good idea. Go figure.

There is an uncomfortably high likelihood that the most powerful pissbaby in history will lead us to nuclear war, killing tens of millions of people, throwing the economy into a tailspin, and making the Korean peninsula completely uninhabitable. The GOP could do the right thing and remove him from office, but as long as he keeps giving rich people tax cuts and promoting income inequality that seems unlikely.

Two hurricanes blew through the USVI and somehow my uncle's house survived intact. He was lucky, but the experience was so harrowing that he still has nightmares about it, three months on. It turns out that sitting in a house lit by flashlights while the wind outside is blowing sustained winds over 170 MPH for hours on end will leave a scar. St. Thomas and St. John are trashed (literally) and will take years to fully recover.

Hurricane Harvey caused similar levels of damage in Houston by dumping enough rain to cover the entire continental United States under four centimeters of water. That's a lot of water! Houston metro is over 600 square miles of ugly urban sprawl, and the massive flooding did it no favors.

Does the fact that I got a new bike count as good news? I guess it counts as good news for me. There were other ups and downs this year but they do not make for very interesting reading.

See you in 2018.