Shopping for towels.

 I miss mall department stores. 

gpointstudio | Deposit Photos

But first: Let's talk towels.

As I mentioned last week, I'm in the throes of a partial bathroom remodel. Not only am I swapping out the vanity, but I had the ginormous builder-grade mirror cut down and put in a frame I bought at the same consignment store where I bought the vanity. The frame's finish didn't match the vanity, so I painted it the same color as the laundry closet doors, which is more or less the same color as my favorite bath sheet, which I bought from Amazon so long ago that it's not in my purchase history (I must have ordered it under an old email address). Which is to say that I could use a new bath sheet.

You wouldn't think the assignment would be hard, but you'd be wrong. First, there's the question of color. The paint is Behr Adonis. It's a medium blue that leans toward turquoise; Behr calls it "a clear aqua". Try to match that just by comparing photos on the internet, and you will rapidly descend into madness. I think of aqua in general as being fairly pale, plus a lot of so-called aquas lean way green. Anything called "turquoise" can also be too green. I thought I'd found a decent color match with this towel (even though it was billed as "aqua") -- and it is a decent match, color wise, but the towel feels like you're trying to dry off with cardboard.

Then there's the question of thickness. Some towels are plush, but some plush towels are so plush that they don't fit into all the crevices, if you know what I mean, plus they take forever to dry. Thinner towels dry faster, but some can be too thin. I thought I had this licked when I found a waffle towel at World Market and bought two hand towels to try them out. I like them a lot; they feel thick but dry really fast. But they don't come in bath sheet size. Highly-rated waffle towels are hella expensive, and the definition of "waffle towel" is sometimes baffling at a lower price point. (Sorry, LL Bean, but leaving out the loops in little squares in your terry cloth does not make what you're selling a waffle towel.)

The answer -- as it is with other fabrics and virtually all yarn -- is to see the merchandise in person. You need to touch it to judge the weight, and you need to see the color without shade-shifting electronics in the way. And you -- okay, I -- also need to give up on finding a waffle towel in a non-boring color and at a non-eye-watering price, and just get a regular terry towel in not-blue but maybe in a fun pattern.

Which is how I ended up at Dillard's this afternoon to look at their selection of Pendleton spa towels. ("Spa towel" is apparently the chic name for beach towels these days.)

Of course I headed the wrong way at first and ended up touring every other department before I got to home decor. But it reminded me of how much I used to like browsing in nice department stores. The pandemic shutdown did a number on in-person shopping, and retail has yet to recover; maybe it never will. But there's something soothing about wandering through departments of curated merchandise in an environment where there's carpet underfoot and the lighting is not too bright. Big-box stores have their place, and so do warehouse stores like Costco. But it was so pleasant today to peruse stacks of neatly folded towels and have a nice assistant tell me to just let her know when I was done looking because she'd be happy to ring me up right over there. And she did. No waiting! And no self-checkout!

Anyway. I ended up getting this towel. My eyes only watered a little at the price (I suspect looking at those chichi waffle towels online wore me down). If I'm satisfied with it, I'll probably get another one or two in different patterns for guests.

***

I can't let this post go without addressing the rumors that have been swirling online about the state of Trump's health. Before today, he hadn't appeared in public for three days, so of course the social media death watch had begun.

As much fun as it is to speculate on whether his team would pull a Weekend at Bernie's if he did die, I just don't see it happening. For one thing, his vice president is reportedly champing at the bit to take over.

Trump does look terrible, though.

I'll just leave it at that.

***

These moments of curated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

A late summer roundup.

A view from my porch.
Lynne Cantwell | August 2025

I'm back, having never been away.

I can explain!

In my last post two weeks ago, I said I would be having carpal tunnel release surgery on my right hand on August 8th, then traveling to greater Chicagoland this past weekend for my high school reunion. Neither of those things happened.

I decided to put off the surgery because of the portable swamp coolers. I wrote about them earlier this summer -- you can go here to refresh your memory, if you like -- but the problem relating to the surgery was that I use a two-gallon watering can to fill them, and I realized I wasn't going to be able to lift it with just one hand. And it has been too hot to go without using the swamp coolers. So the surgery has been rescheduled for the end of September, which hopefully will not conflict with our governor's reported plans to call a special legislative session within the next few weeks.

That explains the surgery delay, but what about canceling the trip? That's because of the Bathroom Vanity Project.

The original vanity was the one the builders installed when the place was built in 1987. It was the same design as the kitchen cabinets, except shorter in height. It was also so long that I had to move the litter box every time I wanted to do laundry. Some previous owner had replaced whatever the original countertop was with Talavera tile: countertop, backsplash, and matching sinks. I like Talavera tile, but there are lots (and lots) of designs, and I wasn't wild about this one. Here:

Lynne Cantwell | 2023

The tile was inoffensive (which was part of my problem with it, to be honest) and some of it was dark green, which clashed with the laundry closet door after I painted it turquoise blue.

I spent a lot of time looking at replacement vanities online. The ones in my price range looked like boxes; the ones with a little style to them were over my budget. So last fall, when my friend Kim was in town, we checked out consignment shops and found this: 

Lynne Cantwell | 2024

It had started out life as an entertainment center. I knew I wanted a vessel sink; this was the right height and definitely did not look like a box. So I bought it and had it delivered, and it sat in my storage closet until last month, when I contracted with the cabinet makers down the street to put it in.

Well. The top is not flat, which I knew, and the thing is not square. Plus I had to have more Saltillo tile put in because the people who installed it didn't pull the old vanity to lay it underneath. (It turned out there was nothing under the old vanity but the subfloor.) Then there was the miscommunication about the sink; I'm going down to one sink from two, and I had the plumbers put the new connections in the wrong place, so that had to be fixed.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it's not done yet. The floor tile and vanity are in, the new countertop will be installed tomorrow, the backsplash will go up Tuesday, and then I can have the plumbers come back. Hopefully it'll be all done by the end of this week. Then I get to spend Labor Day weekend painting. 

The joys of homeownership...

***

This post is already pretty long, but I wanted to mention the death this week of James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family in 1977.

Dobson -- along with Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and creator of the label "the Moral Majority", and Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network and what's now Regis University -- were probably the most well-known promoters of evangelical Christianity in the 1970s and '80s. All three of them espoused the sort of "family values" that include opposition to abortion and the claim that LGBTQ+ people are misled and should undergo conversion therapy. (Conversion therapy doesn't work, has been proven detrimental to those who undergo it, and is now banned in 23 states and DC.) But Dobson in particular is vilified by a lot of people whose parents ascribed to his harsh, abusive childrearing techniques. One blogger began his post with this: "JAMES DOBSON, 89, died this week after a long battle with children." He goes on to say that Dobson's philosophy on raising children was in reaction to that of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who said kids do best when disciplined with love and understanding: "Dobson contended that children were born sinful and must be beaten without mercy in order to secure their bond to their parents and the church, and, of course, to save them ... from damnation." 

A charming fellow. But he, Robertson, and Falwell insinuated their hateful brand of Christianity into the highest echelons of government in this country, and for decades, conservative candidates have appreciated their followers' support. Ronald Reagan courted the evangelical vote. So did George W. Bush. And I'm sure you've seen the laying-on-of-hands memes featuring the current occupant of the White House -- a man whose behavior is in no way Christian, but whose supporters claim he was sent by God to save the nation.

Dobson, Robertson, and Falwell are all gone now; Falwell died in 2007, Robertson in 2023. But the poison they introduced into our national discourse has become deeply rooted, and it needs to be uprooted from our government before we can recover from the mess we're in.

***

You could argue that I conceived of The Pipe Woman Chronicles partly as a response to the damage evangelicalism was doing to the nation.

I used to say that I thought Falwell was the Antichrist until Robertson came along. Then I realized that Falwell was the anti-John-the-Baptist.

I hope they're all enjoying themselves now, wherever they've ended up. I'm pretty sure it's not heaven.

***

These moments of deconstructive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Stay away from rabbit holes; and taking a break.

I want to address, briefly, a thing that's made the rounds on social media over the past couple of days. It was sparked by a Substack post (which I'm not linking to because I don't want to amplify it) quoting a guy who claims to be a former CIA agent and who supposedly participated in an NSA forensic audit of the 2024 election. The purported NSA audit supposedly found that foreign interests manipulated the election results and that Kamala Harris actually won the election.

Here's why I think it's bullshit.

geralt | Pixabay

For starters: The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are different federal agencies. The NSA has its own agents. Why wouldn't they use people from their own agency to conduct an audit? Why pick an ex-CIA guy whose security clearances may or may not still be any good?

Second: The feds don't do nationwide audits of election results. Each state runs its own elections and performs its own audits. The graphics you see on TV on election night are pulled from reports provided by election officials in each individual state, and they compile them from results provided by election officials in each individual precinct. Ballots and voting apparatuses aren't even held by a state agency, as far as I'm aware; election officials in each county are responsible for keeping their own stuff under lock and key.

Third: There have been challenges to the 2024 results in several states, and time and again it's been acknowledged that the machines and their software have not been tampered with, and in fact could not have been tampered with. All the challenges were resolved when Biden was still president. Now, this fellow is claiming that some sneaky code disguised as an update to vote-counting software allowed foreign malefactors to mess with the numbers. Really? Really?? Wouldn't the locals have noticed if their numbers changed when they got to the state level? And didn't we go through this with the 2020 results? Except then it was conservatives claiming the votes were tampered with -- and it cost them a lot of money when it was proven in court that they were making it all up.

Fourth: The guy is an author of a book on international human trafficking. His book is available for free. Reportedly it's 900 pages long. I'm not interested in giving him a download, but this poster on Reddit has done it, and here's what he has to say (all syntax issues are the original poster's): 

"This is classic internet conspiracy word salad nonsense. From what I can piece together he believes that the wars in Ukraine, and Gaza are directed by a global mafia that runs Israel, Russia, China, and the United States to name a few of the nations. He ties in human trafficking, slavery, pedophiles, all of it into his global conspiracy. This is the same pedophiles run the world right-wing conspiracies just rebranded by a left leaning audience."

In other words, it's QAnon for lefties. Look up "pizzagate" and see where that has gotten us before.

I could go on (i.e., anybody can get a Substack; anybody can publish a book and upload it for sale; anybody can offer their book for free -- heck, I've done it), but I said at the top that this would be brief. 

What concerns me is the same thing that concerns that Reddit poster: People are taking this and running with it without thinking about whether any of it is plausible.

I know it's tempting to hang onto hope that the disaster we're living through is the result of evil machinations. And social media's algorithms are designed to keep serving us more and more of what we've already consumed; it would be so easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole into a lefty version of QAnon.

But please don't. Step away from the screens, take a breath, drink some water, use the john, and think about how likely any of this is. 

***

I will be scarce here on the blog for the next couple of weeks. This coming Friday, I'm going in for carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand -- something that I probably should have had done 30 years ago. I'll still be wearing a splint on my right hand when next Sunday rolls around, so no blog post from me that day.

Then the following weekend -- assuming all goes well with the surgery and whatnot -- I'll be back in my hometown for my (gulp) 50th high school reunion. 

So let's make a tentative date to meet back here on Sunday, August 24th. I should have lots to tell you about by then.

***

These moments of non-rabbit-holed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and go drink some water. Seriously.

Was America ever exceptional?

Dazdraperma | Deposit Phots

One of the comments on last week's post got me thinking. "I don't ascribe to notions of American exceptionalism," the anonymous* poster said, and went on to list several things that were wrong with the US in the '60s, including racial discrimination, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. 

Of course, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Women were also discriminated against. And in the early years of the 20th century, immigrants who would be considered white by today's standards were thought of as different, lesser races -- including people from Ireland, Italy, and China. Virtually all 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II; many of them, like actor George Takei, were born here.

We have done shitty things to other countries, too. That noted expert Wikipedia says, "The U.S. has engaged in nearly 400 military interventions between 1776 and 2023, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period." That doesn't even count covert CIA actions to destabilize governments, in South America and elsewhere, often to make it easier for US corporations to do business there. The Iran-Contra affair is just one example of us mucking around in other countries' self-governance to benefit ourselves.

But if we could dispense with criticism for a moment, I think it would be safe to say that the US had been considered exceptional around the world -- if for no other reason that immigrants have historically flocked to our shores to escape whatever atrocity was going on in their own countries (whether we caused it or not). (Of course, immigration is still happening today -- although less so, given who's running the show right now and how "illegal immigrants" are being treated by those people.)

And then there's the way other nations, especially those in Europe, have counted on the United States to protect them in case of an act of aggression against them by some other nation -- which is what makes Trump's turnabout in American policy toward Ukraine so hard to stomach. Sure, he's being nicer to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now, but it's hard to trust him when he's changed his mind so many times before. 

We've never been perfect, and I did not mean to imply last week that we ever were. We have a long way to go to reach perfection, if we ever get there; that has always been true. 

But going back to last week's topic: We were the first nation to put a person on the moon, and we're still the only nation to have done it. In that one singular achievement, at least, we have been exceptional. 

***

*This blogging platform doesn't make it easy for folks who comment directly on my posts. Usually I can tell who an anonymous poster is; in this instance, it could be one of several folks. No need to out yourself, sir or madam. I'm just explaining to others who might wonder.

***

These moments of exceptional (in several senses of the word) blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!