Marking the 250th; mainstream Democrats' nerves; and my reading challenge is done.

Lester120 | Deposit Photos

It's the day after the 4th of July, and even though most of the big stuff is over, the weekend lingers on. So happy Independence Day, y'all, and happy 250th to the USA. 

A lot of Americans don't feel like there's much to celebrate on this anniversary of our nation's birth, especially given the shitshow that Trump has made of the nationwide celebration. I remember the bicentennial in 1976; Watergate was not long behind us (Nixon resigned in '74), and it seemed like our political system was healthy and had stood up to the rule of law. It felt like we could go on, like we could continue striving for that more perfect union the Founding Fathers talked about.

Today, not so much.

But: I'm not a huge follower of astrology, but I've happened upon several astrological forecasts of late that indicate we are heading for some kind of upheaval, likely this month. But I have a sense that there's already an upheaval ongoing, and it has to do with the success of democratic socialist candidates during this primary season.

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I can tell you this much: the moderate Democrats who have kept a lock on their party for years (into their dotage, in many cases) are freaking out. A few days ago, Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic wrote a piece about how "Marxist-Leninist organizers" have been infiltrating the Democratic Socialists of America since Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential candidacy and are poised to take over the organization. He says the DSA has begun supporting "militant anti-Zionism" and is otherwise aligning itself with communist organizations. And he compares the use of "Democratic" in DSA to authoritarian regimes around the world that use the same word. Pretty scary stuff. (The Atlantic has a stiff paywall -- a subscription is $89 a year, which is why I dropped mine several years ago. I'm accessing the article via Apple News.)

The Atlantic, despite its reputation as liberal-leaning, went with this piece at the same time that conservative columnists at the Washington Post and headline writers at the Wall Street Journal are either dropping "democratic" from references to democratic socialist candidates altogether or being wibbly-wobbly about it: sometimes they refer to them as "democratic socialists" and sometimes as just "socialists", as if the two terms are synonymous. Which they're not.

(Chait, by the way, is reportedly a progressive, but he's also Jewish, which might explain why he's sensitive about the whole Zionism thing.)

The founding editor of the DSA's Jacobin magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara, published a response to Chait's piece, which you can read here. (There's no paywall, but you'll have to give up your email address to read it.) The gist of it is that Chait is misreading the DSA's history, that it's a big tent that allows people who hold a lot of leftist viewpoints to join, and that there's a through-line from the DSA's founding to its stances today that Chait is misreading.

We're also in an atmosphere where Trump, at Mount Rushmore Friday, conflated democratic socialism with communism and claimed America is under attack: "You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both."

I mean, one expects that out of Trump, who lies all the time. And conservatives have equated socialism with communism in their diatribes for generations; it's a short step for them to rope in democratic socialism and equate that with communism, too. But that Democrats are working so blatantly to discredit the DSA is new.

Here's my view: The Democrats in positions of power really like it there, and they will do anything to stay. They have been biding their time since Trump 2.0 began, telling us they have no power in Congress right now so they can't do anything to rein him in, thereby hoping to encourage a groundswell of blue votes that would win them control of at least one house of Congress, and ideally both, this year. 

The groundswell has built, all right, but it's not the one they wanted. People on the left are sick of Trump's self-dealing and other shenanigans, and they're sick of Democrats' mealy-mouthed responses to it all. They want fresh faces with fresh ideas. So they're voting for younger candidates who espouse democratic socialist views, even as those candidates run as Democrats.

It's not happening everywhere; some democratic socialist candidates are losing their primaries. But it's clear that the successes they've had are scaring the pants off the Democratic leadership. And New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani's successes for the little guy are only making it worse. His speech on the eve of Independence Day has received a fair bit of news coverage.

Some commentators see democratic socialism as the left's equivalent of MAGA. It's true that MAGA started as a collection of disgruntled far-right voters who, juiced by Fox News, coalesced around Trump's candidacy. Democratic socialism is attracting disgruntled far-left voters, and in that sense, I guess, they're similar.

Could democratic socialists take over the Democratic Party the way MAGA has taken over the GOP? It won't happen this year. But by 2028? If they find a candidate with something near to Trump's charisma, I think it could happen. I'm not seeing anyone who's that much of a rising star yet; Mamdani is a naturalized citizen, so he can't be president. But a lot can happen in two years.

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Oh! I nearly forgot. I finished reading Underground Airlines. I pretty much gave the background for the story last week, so I'll just say a couple of things. First, it turns out that I could have used it as my book set in Indiana; a bunch of the action happens in Indianapolis. Second, it's a terrific read. Third, I get why it attracted the criticism that it did: here's a white author writing about the Black experience. But I think it was pretty sensitively handled, and anyway, c'mon, it's alternate history. The Black experience in the world of the novel can be different than what's happening in the real world today. That's the beauty of speculative fiction: imagining how things might be different.

I haven't sent in my results yet, but it's on my to-do list. Maybe I'll get a sticker or something. I'll let you know.

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These moments of bloggy prognostication have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy barbecue leftovers!

Summer reading progress and a new crafty project.

I said I would post about my IU Summer Reading Challenge progress last Sunday, but I lied. I went out of town last weekend, and the preceding week got away from me. So that's what's on tap for this post. 

By skipping last week, I also missed out on mentioning that here in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice was last Sunday. So blessed Litha and happy solstice to everyone! 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

From here on out, the days will get warmer, but the amount of daylight will be decreasing a little bit each day. (The news is better for folks down under, of course; last Sunday was their shortest day of the year.)

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Reading Challenge news: In our last episode, I reported on the first two books I had finished. Since then, I have read three more:

• For a book set in Indiana, I picked Annie's Quilt, the first book in the Amish Quilts of Indiana series, by Sarah Price. It's a romance, which is fairly far out of my typical wheelhouse, but I liked it. Annie is a young Amish woman who lives in Shipshewana, IN, in the northeastern part of the state near the Michigan border. Her life revolves around church, friends, family, chores on the family's dairy farm, and her job at a fabric shop in town. She dreams of marrying a fine Amish man who's not a farmer because she knows how much hard work is involved in farming and she wants to keep her job in town. You can guess where this is going: a handsome young man, a cousin of one of her friends, comes to town; they fall in love; she thinks he's aiming for a trade; it turns out he's a farmer (oh no!); but it all comes right in the end. I found it well-written and an easy read.
• For a travel memoir, I waffled. I started with Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon on a friend's recommendation, but found it too slow paced for me right now. (I might be a little anxious to get this challenge over with.) So I fell back on my original goal of a travel memoir written by a woman and picked Let's Not Play Small: A Memoir of Divorce, Healing, and Reinvention Through Solo Travel by Dawn Ritter Fischer. And I had problems with it. For starters, I'm not the right audience for this book; the author describes it as a "book to inspire women to travel solo. An invitation to step into the unknown and uncover the extraordinary within themselves. A summons to absorb the life lessons and embrace the self-discovery that arrives when we dare to do the uncommon." Unfortunately, this mission statement doesn't show up until page 272. I've already done a fair bit of solo travel, including some international trips, although I haven't chucked it all and gone full-tilt nomad as she has, so her exhortations to not "play small" throughout had me sighing in resignation. Also, the book could use better editing, including cropping out her repeated use of "little did I know" foreshadowing. Full disclosure: I skipped the bonus section with tips for the nomad life. When she actually wrote about her travel experiences, it was a decent read, but otherwise the book wasn't for me.
• For a slow-burn romance, I read This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, the pseudonym of a husband-and-wife team. This is a terrific book, y'all. It's a portal fantasy. A woman named Maggie is yanked out of our world and dumped in the world of an unfinished fantasy trilogy, the first two books of which she has read and re-read to the point of being able to quote large chunks of them from memory. She immediately knows where in the story she has arrived, and she's able to rise in society by "prophesying" what's going to happen next. Of course she gets involved with a duke in disguise; eventually she figures out who he really is, and then you get into the typical "I'm super attracted to you but you lied to me so I can't love you except I do" slow-burn dance. But it's all very well done. This is the first of Andrews' books that I've read; apparently there are Easter eggs galore for their fans. It's also the first book in a series, and I'm already jonesing for the next one. (Here's hoping they don't leave the series unfinished...)

Since my goal to complete the challenge was six books, I only have to read one more. It needs to be a book that I meant to read last summer -- which I'm translating as "anything sitting unread on my Kindle that I didn't buy this year". I'm still mulling over that choice. But the winner may be Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, published in 2016. I recently saw it mentioned on some listicle or other, and it turns out it's been sitting on my Kindle for who knows how long. (Amazon knows how long; I bought it at the tail end of 2016.) The genre is alternative US history. The premise is that President Lincoln was assassinated before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War never occurred, and slavery is still legal in four Southern states. It got a lot of praise when it was released, as well as some criticism because the author is white and is describing Black experiences. I'll let you know what I think.

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Besides traveling and reading more than I have in several years, I've also hatched a plan for a new craft project. 

I have finally admitted to myself that the window shades in the bedroom and office/craft room drive me crazy. They are honeycomb shades, but not the nicer kind; the shade material feels kind of like cardboard, and the giant metal strip at the bottom bangs loudly against the window frame in a breeze. They do open at the top and bottom (which I didn't discover until about a month ago), but honestly it's not a feature that's a dealbreaker for me (evidenced by the fact that I didn't discover they could do it until about a month ago). 

Nice honeycomb shades are spendy, as I learned when I replaced the blinds on the fabulous wall o' windows last year. I thought maybe I would prefer Roman blinds for these rooms instead; if nothing else, there would be less hardware to clank against the window. Of course my windows are not a standard size, so they would have to be custom. So I did a little looking around online. Even at sale prices, custom Roman blinds are almost as spendy as honeycomb shades.

But they're just big fabric rectangles and some dowel rods, I thought. How hard would it be to make them?

Long story short: we are going to find out. 

I've already ordered all the fabric. For the office/craft room, I'm getting a William Morris willow print in a performance linen that will match the Ruggable rug I use as a chair pad at my desk. For the bedroom, I'm going with a midnight blue swirl pattern in a sateen finish. The lining fabric is also on the way, as is the hardware for pulling the shades up. And I've been looking at videos for assembly directions. (I've been laughing at the ones where they're drawing lines on the fabric and cutting the pieces out with scissors. Have these people never heard of rotary cutters?)

Anyway, stay tuned.

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These moments of reading and crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!

Free art in Santa Fe.

I'm writing this on Friday because this weekend is the Spring Festival at El Rancho de las Golondrinas and I'll be volunteering in the dye shed all day Sunday. Here's hoping I don't have to amend this post with comments about some crazy thing or other out of Washington.

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I feel fortunate that my last couple of jobs have been in virtual art galleries -- and by "virtual", I don't mean iPads or something, I mean actual art on the walls. At the New Mexico State Capitol, aka the Roundhouse, where I work now, the art is open to the public, plus there are a couple of spots that feature rotating exhibitions. And it's all free, which you can't say about the other museums in town (ahem).

When you first come in the east side visitor's entrance (which is all torn up right now due to construction, but if you go around the fencing, you can get in through the ADA-accessible door on the left), if you go straight ahead, you'll see a cool textile exhibit by local artists. 

This first piece fascinates me; it's called Patches of Blue, and it's by Michelle Jackson. She must have stitched the squares together on tear-away interfacing. Presumably someone could wear the jacket. I mean, it wouldn't fit me, but someone could wear it. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Then there's this piece. It's called Frisky, and it's by Stephanie Lerma. I saw them bringing it in when the exhibit first opened; it's at least four feet wide by four feet tall, and I thought then that it wouldn't be out of place at Meow Wolf across town. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

That's just a taste -- there are a bunch more cool pieces. This exhibit will be up through December.

If you go back to the entrance and take the elevator up to the fourth floor, you'll be at the governor's office. There's a little rotating gallery behind the reception desk. A couple of years ago, I posted about an exhibit there of sci-fi-related stuff from the New Mexico Museum of Space History. The current exhibit features pieces from the collection of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, some of which have never been on display. I love this one: it's by Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga/Nez Perce), and it's called Buffalo Fields Forever: To Infinity and Beyond. It just strikes me as quintessentially New Mexico.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

One more: This bronze statue is by Estella Loretto (Jemez Pueblo), and it's called Morning Prayer. (She's the same artist who created Earth Mother, the statue outside the Roundhouse that I use for my Facebook avatar when the legislature is in session.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

This exhibit moves out sometime mid to late next month, so if you're interested, you'd best get a move on. But even if you miss it, you can tour all the art hanging on the walls in the public areas. And did I mention it's free?

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My summer reading challenge is moving right along. I'll have an update on that next weekend.

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

Technology is here to help us. Yeah, right.

I was today years old when the USB-C revolution came for me.

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It occurred to me this past week, when I was finishing a book for the IU Summer Reading Challenge (update on that in a sec), that my Kindle Paperwhite seemed to be running awfully slowly. Page turns weren't as crisp as they should have been, and searching for a book in the online store was pretty much a nightmare. 

Do you remember that meme about Microsoft Explorer? There are several variations, but here's one: Someone is leading a cheer amongst Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari. The first question is, "What are we?" "Browsers!" three of the browsers reply. "What do we want?" "More speed!" the same three browsers say. "When do we want it?" "Right now!" those same browsers say. And Explorer finally yells out, "Browsers!"

Shopping the Kindle store on my Paperwhite was like that. 

So I checked my purchase history on Amazon. Come to find out my device was an 8th generation Paperwhite, purchased in 2017. (I also recalled that I bought it then because someone had swiped my previous Paperwhite off my desk at the law firm, but never mind that.) The newest Paperwhite is generation 12.

It then occurred to me that maybe I hadn't been so keen on reading lately because my old Paperwhite was making the process less than pleasant. So I shelled out for a new one.

It arrived yesterday. It's a titch bigger than my old one, so I've ordered a new case. And I discovered something else when I went to plug it in for a full charge: the plug is different. My old Paperwhite has a micro USB port. The new one has a USB-C.

Micro USB on top, USB-C on bottom.
Lynne Cantwell | June 2026

I vaguely recalled Apple being in a kerfuffle with the European Union a while back over its proprietary Lightning port. Seems the powers-that-be in the EU got tired of needing different cords and chargers for different devices, so they forced Apple to switch over to USB-C as of 2024. What I missed back then was that the new law applied to other tech devices, too -- including Kindles.

I regarded the new cord for a minute, and then I texted my daughters. I'm the only iPhone user in the family; they both switched to Android several years ago. And they confirmed that their current phones take USB-C cables. "You'll be using that, too, next time you get a new phone," Kitty said.

She's right. The new iPhone models all come with USB-C ports. Thanks a lot, EU.

Don't get me wrong -- I am all for standardization. It's just that I've gotten whiplash from all the tech changes I've lived through: for audio, vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to vinyl again; and for video, Betamax (anyone remember that one?) to videocassette to DVD to Blu-Ray to streaming to the gods alone know what will come next. And that doesn't begin to cover all the different connectors for different devices and purposes.

If USB-C is the final iteration for chargers and cables, okay. One port to rule them all! I just hope it stays that way. I'm tired of buying new tech just to keep up.

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I am going to have to keep at least one micro USB cable, though; my ancient Anker five-charge portable battery still needs one for recharging.

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Oh, right. The reading challenge. I have finished two books this week! And that was on the old, slow-as-molasses-in-January Kindle, too.

(I debated whether to resurrect the Rursday Reads blog for this project, but it hardly seems worth it for only six books.)

First, Heinlein's The Door into Summer: Published in 1957, this is sci-fi for fun. The novel opens in 1970. Dan Davis is an electronics engineer who is a genius at developing robots that make life easier for human beings. He hooks up with a partner, Miles, who has a head for business, and they get along swimmingly until they bring in Belle Gentry to be their bookkeeper. Belle pulls a grand con on both of them, swindling Dan out of his share of the company. Dan drinks himself into a stupor, then decides that he and his cat Pete should take what's called the Cold Sleep -- suspended animation -- for 30 years and wake up in 2000. Belle screws that up for him, too, or so it seems; Belle reengineers Dan's plans and Pete runs away. When Dan wakes up in 2000, he discovers he is flat broke. It takes him a while, but he hatches a plan to time-travel back to 1970, rescue Pete, and make sure Belle doesn't get all his money, after all. 

Here in 2026, it was entertaining for me to see what Heinlein got right about 1970 (not much) and 2000 (even less). This was written well before his Lazarus Long period, so while there's misogyny in the book, it's not as bad as Heinlein got in his later years. I ended up enjoying it.

The second book I read was Wok Walk by Melissa Bowersock. This is volume 50 in her series featuring an ex-LAPD detective named Lacey Fitzpatrick and her husband, a Navajo medium named Sam Firecloud. Together they investigate cases in which a dead person's spirit stays earthbound for some reason; between Lacey's research and Sam's talent for contacting those spirits, they are able to get them to move on to the next world. In this volume, the client is a family who own a Chinese restaurant. The patriarch is shot to death, out of the blue, on the back stoop of the restaurant while on a smoking break; as Sam discovers, even the victim doesn't know who killed him or why. The police, too, are stymied. Eventually the truth is uncovered, the shooter is not who I expected, and the family members are able to get closure on more than just the patriarch's death.

I'm not gonna lie: One reason I like this series is because the books are short. They are more like novellas than novels. But I also enjoy the dynamic between Lacey, Sam, and Sam's children, and it's fun watching the kids grow. And the horror is usually minimal. Plus Melissa is a friend and fellow Indies Unlimited contributor, and she writes well. What more can you ask?

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So that's where we're at. Next up is a book recommended to me by Kay Robinett, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews. I'm not sure whether I've read anything by Andrews before, but Kay loved the book, so I'm going to give it a whirl. I'll report back. 

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These moments of technological blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. I promise to keep reading if you will.

Tricking myself into reading more.

I have a confession to make -- a terrible one for someone who used to write books and read all the time: I've fallen out of the habit of reading.

I don't exactly know when it happened, but I think I can trace it back to when I went full-time for the Legislative Council Service three years ago. Reading and correcting hundreds of pages of other people's documents per day, a lot of them pretty dense legalese, makes reading for pleasure less fun. Instead of picking up a book, I've been doomscrolling all day and watching TV every evening.

This is not healthy, I know. It has also made me less fun (I am not going to go back and count the number of blog posts I've written about stuff I first learned about on Facebook -- I just know it's a lot). So when my alma mater, Indiana University, sent me an email about the university's first-ever summer reading challenge, I clicked the link for the kit before I could overthink it. 

Stolen from IU's website. Somehow I don't think the school will care.

The kit contains the rules, a page of bookmarks you're supposed to print on cardstock and cut out, a log for keeping track of the books you've read, and two bingo cards: one for kids and one for adults. Here's the one for adults: 

Also stolen from IU's website.

Hopefully you can embiggen that enough to read the prompts. One of them is "A book by an IU alum"; I considered filling that square with one of mine, but that seems hardly sporting. I also think it would be cheating to use one book for multiple categories, but the rules don't explicitly prohibit it (I expect they will next year -- I can't possibly be the only person who has thought of it).

You can get bingo several ways: the traditional across, down, or diagonal, or all the red spaces to make a trident. I think I'm going to go for the diagonal that goes top left to bottom right: a book set in Indiana, a book you meant to read last summer, a book about time travel, a slow-burn romance, a fantasy novel, a travel memoir, and the free space (let's not get crazy - I'm easing back into the habit). I've already got my fantasy novel lined up -- my friend Melissa Bowersock's newest, Wok Walk (the primary category for her series is detective fiction, but there are plenty of fantasy elements, too) -- and for the time-travel novel, I'm using Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, which Amazon says I bought for my Kindle in 2014 but I don't think I ever read it. I started it yesterday, and it's not ringing a bell. (Then I looked over the challenge rules and realized, whoops, I'm not supposed to start reading 'til tomorrow. I didn't get that far into it, I swear!)

As for a book I meant to read last summer, my Kindle is chockablock with books I haven't read. I'll just pick one of them for that category. Surely I meant to read them all last summer, right?

That leaves: a book set in Indiana: a slow-burn romance: and a travel memoir. I could ask Mama Google for listicles, but I'd rather know what you guys are reading. So if you have a favorite that would fit any of those three categories, let me know.

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I mean, I could cheat and use one of my books for the one set in Indiana. Or reread one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. But I should probably read something new.

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"What the hell," you ask, "do a trident and a buffalo have to to with a Midwestern university?" 

The trident is the shape of the IU logo (which I had never noticed before this, and certainly not when I was a student there in the late '70s).

The buffalo, I believe, comes from the state seal of Indiana, a description of which is set out in statute as follows (we here at hearth/myth are determined to provide more information than you ever cared to know): 

Indiana Code: IC 1-2-4-1

Sec. 1. The official seal for the state of Indiana shall be described as follows:

A perfect circle, two and five eighths (2 5/8) inches in diameter, inclosed by a plain line. Another circle within the first, two and three eighths (2 3/8) inches in diameter inclosed by a beaded line, leaving a margin of one quarter (1/4) of an inch. In the top half of this margin are the words "Seal of the State of Indiana".

At the bottom center, 1816, flanked on either side by a diamond, with two (2) dots and a leaf of the tulip tree (liriodendron tulipifera), at both ends of the diamond. The inner circle has two (2) trees in the left background, three (3) hills in the center background with nearly a full sun setting behind and between the first and second hill from the left.

There are fourteen (14) rays from the sun, starting with two (2) short ones on the left, the third being longer and then alternating, short and long. There are two (2) sycamore trees on the right, the larger one being nearer the center and having a notch cut nearly half way through, from the left side, a short distance above the ground. The woodsman is wearing a hat and holding his ax nearly perpendicular on his right. The ax blade is turned away from him and is even with his hat.

The buffalo is in the foreground, facing to the left of front. His tail is up, front feet on the ground with back feet in the air, as he jumps over a log.

The ground has shoots of blue grass, in the area of the buffalo and woodsman.

(Formerly: Acts 1963, c.207, s.1.)

There's been a lot of discussion about the imagery over the years. Here is what I can tell you: the tulip tree is the Indiana state tree; Indiana entered the Union in 1816; and the rest of it seems to be in honor of the nation's westward expansion, with the pioneer fellow chopping down trees and chasing the buffalo away. (There actually were bison in Indiana at one time.) Describing the sun as setting rather than rising has been a topic of discussion since the state's inception; one fellow in 1819 insisted the sun was meant to be rising east of the Allegheny Mountains, which pioneers had to cross to get to the state. 

Sure, Jan. If those mountains are the Alleghenies (which are part of the Appalachians), that bison is running toward Minnesota.

Here's the seal. Judge for yourself. 

Alancotton | Dreamstime.com

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These moments of habitual reading blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yay, reading!

How to tell that an "investigative journalist" really is one.

First, I hope all my US readers have had a great, relaxing Memorial Day weekend. Mine has been busy, which is why I'm posting today instead of yesterday. The last day of a three-day weekend always feels like Sunday, anyway, right?

The reason for the day, of course, is to honor those who died in service to our country. So let's take a moment to do that -- and to hope that we never have more war dead to remember.

sframe | Deposit Photos

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Now then.

Y'all have no doubt heard about the Jeffrey Epstein connection to New Mexico. He owned a ranch in southern Santa Fe County dubbed Zorro Ranch, and reports are that terrible things happened there, including possibly the murders and burials of two girls. It's been known for quite some time that several top New Mexico politicians, including former governor Bill Richardson, were Epstein associates. At one time, the state attorney general began an investigation into the goings-on at Zorro Ranch -- but in 2019, the US Department of Justice asked the AG to stop its investigation and hand over all of its evidence so the DoJ could combine it with their investigation. The New Mexico AG was supposed to get the evidence back when the federal probe was over.

The feds then proceeded to bury their investigation. To date, New Mexico has never gotten its evidence back. In February of this year, at about the same time that the New Mexico House of Representatives' Special Investigatory Committee looking into Epstein's connections in the state held its first meeting, the current AG reopened the state investigation. 

All that is easy enough to confirm with a web search, looking at legitimate websites and reports from legitimate journalists. That's what I just did. Alas, some folks who are opining on the Epstein investigation are kind of sketchy.

There's a woman who's been making a splash on Facebook by posting stuff about the Epstein connections in New Mexico in the "I'm just asking questions" vein. I am not going to share any links to her Facebook page or Substack -- I don't want to give her any more publicity than she has already received -- but her first name is Alisa, and I bet if you did a little spelunking yourself, you'd find her.

From what I can tell from what I have read of her work, she is doing Google searches, using them to make connections in her brain, and publishing that as truth without confirming it with anybody.

Folks, real investigative journalists won't publish this kind of thing. The rule has always been that you need at least two sources to confirm a rumor before you publish it. I know that got kind of lax during the era when reporters were essentially assigned to the Twitter beat -- i.e., they would read Twitter all day long and write news stories based on newsmakers' tweets -- which is why I hated that trend so much. It's lazy journalism.

But at least tweets from newsmakers come straight from the horse's mouth, as it were -- not from somebody making associations based on results from web searches and publishing them without verification.

Here's when I knew she was full of shit: My employer, the Legislative Council Service (LCS), released a request for proposals (RFP) on March 13th with the aim of hiring a law firm to "provide legal and support services" to the committee. Now, I work in the Proofing Department. We proofread proposed legislation all year long -- but we proofread other documents, too, including letters, legal memos, contracts, and RFPs. And what we do is confidential, which means we can't talk about it unless and until it's made public.

The RFP (you can read it yourself here) set the timetable for accepting proposals and picking one or more offeror. Here is Paragraph 2(E) of the RFP (it's on page 4 of the PDF):

E.  Selection of Offeror.  The final selection of an Offeror shall be made by the LCS.  That selection will be publicly announced on or after April 10, 2026.  Offerors selected to perform the work and those Offerors not selected will be notified in writing via email by the LCS.  Selection does not constitute an obligation to contract with an Offeror.  The LCS reserves the right to contract with the second choice and then the subsequent choices if contract negotiations fail with the final Offeror. (emphasis mine)

Here's the thing with contracts: Let's say you want to buy a house. You find one you like and put in your offer to the seller, right? The seller can refuse your offer for any number of reasons, but let's say your offer is accepted. Do you sign the contract that day? Of course not. The acceptance of the offer only starts the contract negotiation process. Your mortgage company checks your credit; the title company makes sure nobody else owns the house and that there are no outstanding liens against it; you get a home inspector to go through the place with you and tell you what needs to be fixed; and so on. It can take weeks. And at any point in the process, either you or the seller can say nope, the deal is off for X reason.

That is what is going on with this paragraph of the RFP: Selection was planned for the week of April 6, and then the contract negotiations started. The parties could decide whether or not to accept the terms as offered, or they could continue to haggle. No announcement would be made that it's a done deal until it's a done deal -- in other words, until the contract is signed by both the successful offeror and the LCS. And the LCS said right there in the RFP that if the deal with their first choice fell through, they could contract with somebody else. I mean, they could even say they didn't like any of the offerors and send out the RFP again.

So. About two weeks after the April 10th deadline for selection, I read a Facebook post by Alisa complaining that it's been two weeks and there's been no announcement and I'm just asking questions but WHY HAVEN'T WE HEARD ANYTHING?

By that point, at least one iteration of the contract had come through our department. So I knew three things: 1) an announcement was likely imminent; 2) either she hadn't read the RFP thoroughly enough, or she didn't know enough about contract law, to know that two weeks is nothing in a contract negotiation; and 3) she was just causing trouble to have something to write about. 

Oh, and she also called a guy on our staff the LCS's "Chief Procurement Officer", when in fact his official job title is Project Coordinator. (This is a ridiculously easy thing to confirm; the job of every state employee is listed on the state's sunshine portal. Including mine. I'm a Proofreader II.)

Since then, she has gone on to attempt to besmirch the reputation of at least one committee member. She has also complained that nobody official will talk to her and has suggested that because of that, something nefarious is going on, the committee is just political theater, and (I'll let you fill in the rest).

I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but it's possible nobody official will talk to her because she's already proven herself to be, dare I say it, full of shit.

In a Substack post on May 12, she claims that her Substack is in the top ten rising for US politics. I have no way to confirm that, but I can tell you that as of today, it has dropped to number 26. Not the direction you want to be going, I don't think.

The Special Investigatory Committee is having its next meeting at the Roundhouse next Monday. The agenda states the members will meet with the media after the meeting is over. I'd be interested to know if Alisa shows up. As a real journalist, that's what I'd do.

***

If she gets wind of this post, I hope she contacts me. I'd be happy to put my resume up against hers. Heh.

***

These moments of bloggy bullshittery have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay sharp!

Ancient paganism in a land of orthodoxy.

Athena and Poseidon fight to be Athens's patron deity.
Lynne Cantwell | Athens, May 2026

I'm back from my refreshing two-week break. Folks who follow me on Facebook already know that I spent most of it gallivanting on a ten-day bus tour of Greece (although "land tour via motor coach" sounds classier). Unlike the European river cruises I've been on, this one was sparse on churches, partly because the country is mostly Greek Orthodox (their churches don't seem to feature the ostentatious wealth of European cathedrals that Americans like to goggle at) and partly because the country is rife with ancient pre-Christian ruins.

We toured a lot of those ancient ruins. Like, a lot of them. It seems like you can't dig anywhere in Greece without hitting the remains of an old Greek temple or Roman villa or something from an even older culture. But at every site we visited, there has been an effort to save at least a semblance of a temple to a god or goddess. Clearly the gods were important to the ancient Greeks.

Which is why I was shocked when our guide at Olympia, the site of the original Olympics, baldly stated that nobody in ancient Greece ever believed in the Greek gods. She said that the gods embodied the virtues that each person was supposed to aspire to, but people didn't actually believe they existed.

Seriously? Then why go to the trouble of building all this?

The Parthenon in Athens, dedicated to Athena. Other temples on the 
Acropolis are dedicated to other gods.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Hera at Olympia.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Zeus at Olympia. Hera's temple was built first.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Info about the temple of Athena at Sparta. There's not much of the temple left.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Temple of Apollo at Corinth, one of two structures the Romans didn't destroy.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

These people went to so much trouble to carve, shift and stack thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone and marble to honor beings they didn't think were real? Are you crazy?

At first I thought maybe what our guide was implying was that the ancients were misguided and only the Christian god is real. But now I think she was coming from a Christian-centric view not of the gods' existence, but of the nature of religion.

John Beckett has said many times that in its broadest sense, religion is about what you do, who you are, and whose you are. Christians have their Bible, Jews their Hebrew bible, Muslims their Koran; those books lay out the official tenets of their religions. The ancient Greeks didn't have anything like that. For them, moral authority came not from a religious text but from artworks, stories, and plays about their gods. 

The photo at the top of this post is of a sculpture that once adorned the Parthenon. It tells the story of how Athens got its patron: Athena, the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and crafts, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes, vied for the job. Poseidon brought up a spring of salt water, which the citizens deemed useless -- it wasn't like they could drink it. Then Athena caused to grow an olive tree. The citizens were thrilled -- they could eat the olives, use their oil for all manner of things, and use the wood for homes and tools -- so they adopted Athena as their goddess and named their city Athens. Using John's definition of religion, residents of the city were Athenians (who they are). Athena was their patron deity (whose they are), and so they honored her (what they do). They didn't need a bible to lay all that out; instead, they had things like this sculpture on the Parthenon. 

And they had theater. Although of the 1,000 or so plays written by Greek and Roman authors, only 83 survive, 46 of them Greek. Some we know about only because another author mentions them. 

Modern Pagans don't have a bible, either. What we have is what's left of the ancients' stories and plays about whichever gods and goddesses we follow. Like the ancient Greeks, we're not obsessed with what we need to do to get to heaven; instead, we're focused on doing the best we can in this world, right now.

***

I am a Pagan polytheist and animist. I follow and honor gods and goddesses from several pantheons: Mokosh, the Slavic goddess of the earth and of weaving and spinning; Brigid, the Irish goddess of weaving, smithcraft and poetry; Lugh, the Irish god of light; Morrigan, the Irish goddess of sovereignty and war; Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and justice; Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy; and Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. 

***

The only Greek god I follow is Athena. But I poured a little offering of water at each temple we visited anyway. It felt like the right thing to do. And I think the gods appreciated knowing that some folks still honor them.

***

Three observations before I wrap up: 

1) I found it interesting that Athens, the ancient city-state that prized democracy and the arts, is now a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta, the ancient city-state that prized military order, has a population of only about 20,000 people today. The modern city is built atop the old one, and what remains of ancient Sparta is not well preserved; the Bronze Age site of Messene is better developed, and extensive excavations only began there in 2007. It almost seemed to me like the Greeks don't care to emphasize Sparta's violent past.

2) While touring all these ancient sites and seeing so many big chunks of temples in pieces, I thought of all the home-improvement TV shows in which some guy screws something to something else and says, "That's not going anywhere." I could almost hear the ancient Greek stone masons, echoing down the ages, saying the same thing. (In the case of the Acropolis, it didn't help matters that the occupying Ottomans were using the place to store gunpowder; the attacking Venetians lobbed a mortar shell into the building in 1687, blowing out pillars on one side and destroying the structures inside.)

3) The Acropolis Museum in Athens is worth a stop on its own. Of course, the topic of the Elgin marbles came up during our tour. In the early 1800s, the seventh Earl of Elgin "acquired" from the occupying Ottomans a bunch of statuary from Greece, including a haul from the Parthenon. He eventually sold everything to the British government, which put it on display in the British Museum. Our guide in Athens was confident that the marbles would eventually be returned. Negotiations over an elaborate swap of the marbles for other Greek antiquities have been ongoing since 2021, but the sticking point is that the Brits say they were legally acquired, while the Greeks say they were looted. Personally, I think the Brits are stalling.

***

These moments of opinionated Greek tourism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. C'mon, England, give that stuff back to Greece already.

Another near miss for Trump; and a shower lighting dilemma.

Gods ding it, he's done it again. I had a nice, breezy little post planned for this week, and then Trump sucked all the air out of the room again by showing up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and maybe attracting a shooter. So I will address that first, and then I'll add a shortish version of my breezy little post at the end. 

***

I feel like the best thing I can do right now, when so little is known -- and when, let's be honest, we don't know how much to believe of what either the administration or the pundits are saying -- is to answer some of the conspiratorial questions I've seen online today.

• How did the alleged gunman (hereinafter AGM) get his weapons to DC from California? He took Amtrak. Security is just not as crazy on passenger trains as it is on flights. I don't recall ever having to step through a magnetometer before boarding an Amtrak train. (But you can bet your ass that will change now. Thanks a lot, AGM.)
• Okay, but how did the AGM get his weapons past security at the hotel? He was a hotel guest. Think back to the last time you checked into a hotel. Did you have to pass through a magnetometer at the door? No? Neither did I. If the AGM checked in sufficiently ahead of the event -- say, sometime Friday -- the security checkpoint for the dinner probably wasn't even set up yet. And he wouldn't have had to get past that until Saturday night. Plus which, guys, it's a hotel. They host a lot of big events, not to mention guests who have nothing to do with any of the scheduled events. Setting up a security perimeter at the hotel entrance would be a massive inconvenience to everybody with business there that has nothing to do with the correspondents' dinner. Now, I've seen reports that they have in fact done this in the past. If so, why didn't they do it this year? I have no idea.
• All that said, how did the shooter get so close to Trump? He didn't. The International Ballroom at the Washington Hilton is two floors below the main hotel entrance. The hotel's website has a fun interactive map that allows you to fly around their event space; click the Explore 360 Tour button on this page. It's been a few decades since I attended an event there (the Congressional Correspondents' Dinner used to be held there until it got too big), but I think I recall taking the escalator down to the ballroom. From what I've seen online, the security checkpoint was on the Terrace level, which is between the main floor and the Concourse level. Plus, y'all, the International Ballroom is huge. It seats more than 2,500 people, according to the hotel's website, and the dais is on the opposite side of the room from the doors that attendees come through. So the AGM would have had to get past the magnetometers on the Terrace level, down the escalator, past more agents who were no doubt stationed in the Concourse foyer outside the ballroom, and then past all the journalists at all the guest tables to get to the dais where Trump was seated. He was tackled outside of the magnetometers on the Terrace level. That doesn't seem that close to me.
• Was the whole thing staged? It's possible. It would have required TFGA's handlers to find a willing patsy, suggest he take Amtrak and stay at the Hilton, and do it all without bringing Trump in until the last minute so he didn't give the game away. Reportedly, it wouldn't have been the first time that Trump was kept out of the loop on an important issue.
• If it was staged, why? I doubt it would have been all about Trump's White House ballroom plans; he talks about them at the drop of a hat anyway. As a pivot from the Iran war and the Epstein files, and as an effort to bolster his historically lousy approval ratings, sure. As a commercial for his ballroom? Nah.

That's enough for now. Let's move on to my breezy little post.

***

I went ahead this week and bought ceramic tile for the shower walls! I brought it home and loaded it into my storage closet yesterday. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

I've also bought porcelain mosaic tile for the shower floor. I've been wanting to use the star-and-cross pattern on something for ages. Each of these little tile is 2"x2". (Note that this sample came chipped and cracked; I've checked the actual tiles, which were packaged much better, and they seem okay.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

So anyway, yeah, the wall tile is dark, so the shower is going to be dark -- like a cave, almost, once the shower curtain is closed. Not that I ever want to be on trend, but maybe I am. (Go here and scroll down to number 5.) But it means lighting is a concern. A lot of people have can lights put in so that their shower is daylight bright. (Others do a sun tunnel, but guaranteed that my upstairs neighbor would not be amused.) But I want to preserve the moodiness.

The only light in the shower right now is this battery-operated light, plus whatever filters in above the shower curtain. It would be fun to have a starry sky, and you can get kits that allow you to make one by sticking fiber-optic lines through a suspended ceiling; alas, they require a projector concealed somewhere that's not wet. Another solution I've seen is to have an LED light strip installed at the top of the tile. That looks like my best option, but it would require hiring an electrician. So I may just stick with my battery-powered light.

If y'all have any other suggestions, let me know. I've yet to begin shopping for a contractor, so I have lots of time.

***

Heads up that I'll be out of pocket for the next two weeks. See y'all back here on May 17th.

***

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

In which Clarence Thomas has it in for progressivism.

"Hmm," I thought a few minutes ago. "It's Sunday. I owe everybody a blog post. What should I write about? I could write about Pagans and Earth Day if I'd gone to the event I was aiming for yesterday, but instead I slept in...

"Maybe I could rant about the annoying trend of long, long Facebook posts that people are resorting to because Facebook will throttle the reach of any post with an off-Facebook link in it. Except I think a lot of folks saw my Facebook post about it yesterday. Why beat a dead horse?

"Wait. When was the last time I did a current events post?" <checks post history> "Holy cats, not since March 1st? And that was only a glancing blow! And there's so much there to talk about -- the Iran war that Trump has declared he won too many times to count, Trump's whining about his ballroom, Trump and Vance picking a fight with the pope over Catholic doctrine, of all things...

"I know! I'll write about Clarence Thomas!"

*** 

Why yes, those scales are tilted to the right.
quarta | Deposit Photos

You may have missed it, what with all the usual noise coming from the general direction of the White House. But this week, Justice Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. He started out talking about the Declaration of Independence, this being the 250th anniversary of its signing and all. But then he went off on this weird diatribe about how progressivism is going to doom the United States to failure. No, really. The New Republic quoted him: 

Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration's principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. "As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure," the justice warned. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

"Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life," Thomas continued. "It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever."

Wilson is not the most famous president to be associated with progressivism; that would be Teddy Roosevelt. But Wilson was an academic, which automatically makes him a target of those who love the poorly educated. Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, stronger antitrust laws, and a ban on child labor -- none of which made him popular with the rich. 

Wilson was president during the nation's first Gilded Age, when rich industrialists were remaking the country to suit themselves. (As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observes, we are in the nation's second Gilded Age today. It wasn't a good thing for the working class then, and it isn't today, either.)

Thomas went on to draw a line from progressive policies in Germany, which Wilson supposedly based American progressivism on, to -- wait for it -- the rise of Hitler. It gets wackier from there; I recommend the New Republic article I linked to above, if you're interested. 

What interested me more than Justice Thomas's rewriting of history was that at the beginning of his speech, he greeted one of the attendees: Harlan Crow. Yup, that Harlan Crow: the GOP megadonor who has showered Thomas and his wife with vacations and gifts, including buying from Thomas in 2014 the house where Thomas's mother lived in Savannah, GA, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to renovate the property -- a transaction that Thomas somehow forgot to list on his mandatory financial disclosure form.

People are prone to telling themselves all sorts of myths to justify their actions and to maintain their lifestyles. In that respect, the rich are no different.

***

These moments of self-serving blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Tax the rich, already!

In which I go for Baroque.

Sorry. I had to.

I know some of y'all already thought I was weird because I like opera. It gets worse: I love early music, from the very earliest monophonic stuff like Gregorian chant to the Baroque composers Bach and Handel. And yesterday I got a chance to expand my experience in that playground by attending a concert here in Santa Fe featuring songs from Spanish Baroque composers. 

First, let's set the time frame. If you've ever heard anything by Bach or any part of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, you're already familiar with the biggest musical names of the period. The Baroque period ran from 1600 to 1760, give or take, or about the time when North America was being settled by Europeans. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, to give you another benchmark. Here in New Mexico, settlers had begun to come up the Camino Real from Mexico City and make a new life for themselves on the Spanish (later Mexican) frontier; the Pueblo Revolt, when the local Native Americans had enough of Spanish rule and kicked them all the way back to El Paso, happened in 1680, smack dab in the middle of this period.

Back in Spain, Diego Velázquez painted this in Madrid in 1656: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The painting is called Las Meninas o La familia de Felipe IV. ("Meninas" are ladies-in-waiting.) It's a little tattered around the edges because it's actually a 3D "postcard" that I picked up when I was at the Prado in Madrid: you flip it over, fold it along the creases, and look through the little portholes to get the 3D effect. The little blond girl at the center is the Infanta Margaret Theresa, who was five years old at the time. The artist depicts himself at his easel on the left; the mirror on the back wall shows the images of the Infanta's parents, King Philip IV and his queen, Mariana of Austria; and in the doorway on the right stands the queen's chamberlain, to whom the artist may have been related. In short, it's a fun painting with a lot going on.

Which is a pretty good description of Baroque music, too. Just listen to one of Bach's fugues. (Start the video at 2:47 if you want to skip the tocatta at the start.)

Anyway, this concert featured songs by a bunch of composers I'd never heard of before. One of them is Sebastian de Murcia. This piece wasn't on yesterday's program, but it gives you a flavor for the sound, anyway. (The instrument being played in the video is a Baroque guitar. It's smaller and fancier than a modern acoustic guitar and has nine strings instead of six. I found a guy on YouTube who gives more information on the Baroque guitar. If you're as nerdy as I am about ancient music, you may find it as fascinating as I did.)

If we were playing the "which historical era would you want to live in" game, the Baroque would be pretty high on my list. Anyone want to join me?

***

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

Think magic is impossible? Maybe we've just been taught to believe that.

Happy whichever spring holiday you celebrate! The redbud tree is not as showy as I'd hoped it would be -- just a few blossoms are adorning its trunk. But it had a tough maiden year in my garden, and I'm hoping for more blooms next year. At least it's leafing out. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Other flowers are doing better, including these volunteer violets (the little johnny-jump-up kind, not the African kind). Volunteers are my favorite flowers.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

My daffodils are done for the year, and so are my grape hyacinths. I'm debating whether to put real money into plants this spring; I still don't know whether my deck will be dismantled this year to fix the bad framing job the roofers did in rebuilding it, and if that happens, I'll basically lose whatever's planted in the beds. Might just stick with volunteers this year.

***

Anyway, for most Christians, today is Easter, a sacred day on their liturgical calendar. One of my Christian friends shared a post on Facebook about how Jesus would be treated if he showed up in America today. The original poster basically said that it wouldn't end well, because so many purported Christians would object to the things he actually is said to have believed and done. I think that's true. Regular Americans today who try to embody Jesus's teachings -- healing the sick, ordering the moneychangers out of the temple, exchanging swords for plowshares, and so on -- are often not treated well, to put it mildly. And Christian nationalists have zero use for the idea of welcoming strangers and treating them as actual human beings.

I'm not Christian, as I've said, and while I see where the original poster is coming from -- and even agree with him -- I see an even more basic problem: We, as a society, have lost our belief in magic.

If any holy person or prophet of any religion arrived in today's world, I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn't believe them. Wouldn't believe they were who they said they were. Would call them a crackpot. Would call the cops on them. Would have them committed as mentally ill.

But what if they proved who they said they were by performing miracles? It might get them committed faster. Or we'd dismiss it as a trick, or Photoshop, or A.I. Because by and large, we've had our belief in miracles -- in magic -- beaten out of us. Magic and/or miracles might have happened in olden times, but not any more. Certainly not today.

The Church has only itself to blame. It bought adherents at a cost, and one of the things it did to win believers was to decapitate magic. It did that by declaring anything not officially sanctioned by the Church the work of the devil.

People are moving away from the Church these days, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Because the Church trained us to mistrust our own senses, and that mistrust has become ingrained in Western culture. Oh, we don't say magic is of the devil anymore, or rather most of us don't, but we still feel uneasy when we see it working. Now we're more likely to say that a thing is impossible. Or it's a trick. Or there has to be an explanation; we just haven't figured it out yet.

Think of all the movies that have turned on this plot point. Here's one: God returns, right? Maybe as George Burns. And nobody believes him except a grocery store manager played by John Denver, and the guy's life gets a whole lot more complicated as a result.

You laugh. I mean, I sure did when I saw the movie. But I laughed partly because God's reception was so plausible. 

I'm not saying we should all give every scammer and con artist we run across the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying maybe materialism doesn't have the answer to everything. 

***

To be clear, I do believe in science. But I also think there are some things that are real, but science dismisses them out of hand.

***

These moments of bloggy magic have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!

Why it's important to get tile samples.

It's spring (it must be -- I finally remembered to swap the winter front door wreath with the spring one), and this old woman's fancy has turned to finishing the bathroom remodel.

Some people celebrate warmer weather by buying seeds and bedding plants; I celebrate by dreaming about ripping out my combo bathtub/shower and replacing it with just a shower. Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that I finished remodeling half of the bathroom (two-thirds, if you count the laundry closet makeover) last September. When I posted about it back then, I included copious photos; if you scroll down in that post to the pic of the vessel sink, you can see the tub/shower alcove in the mirror. The tiles are a tired beige. The grab bars are positioned weirdly and look like they belong in a nursing home. I'm pretty sure the tub had an apron front, but somebody covered it with a four-inch-deep extension in a tile that doesn't quite match the original tile color and that blocks the laundry door from opening all the way. Presumably the extension's purpose was to provide a wider seat for someone getting in and out of the tub. But then somebody later added glass shower doors, and the bottom track for the doors ruined the wider seat.

In a perfect world, I'd have a newly-tiled shower with a minimal threshold, a bench, and a nicho for shampoo and stuff. (In a perfectly perfect world, I'd make it a steam shower, but there is literally nowhere to put the steam unit.And then there's the installation cost and maintance and haha nope.) 

I could have one of those prefab acrylic things installed over the old shower tile. But I want a bench, and I can't add one until the tub is gone. And how, I ask you, would prefab acrylic shower walls look in the same room as my fabulous bespoke vanity? They would look stupid. It would look like I'd given up. And I am not giving up!

So I'm entertaining myself by haunting websites and ordering tile samples. The samples do pile up, but they're cheap as vices go, and supposedly you can do crafty things with them. And they are essential for planning a remodeling project over time. 

Take, for example, my kitchen countertops. When I first started looking online, I fell head-over-heels in love with a solid-surface product from Formica called Bottle Glass Quartz. (It's not actual quartz. That's just the name.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

But no one would even sell me a sample, let alone make me kitchen countertops out of it. Okay, that's not strictly true; one local place said they would make me kitchen counters, but the price would have been astronomical. I realize now that most dealers were hesitant because they'd have to order a whole slab, and who else would want such busy countertops in a so-not-neutral? They'd be stuck with the remnant forever. So I sucked it up and ordered a different solid surface pattern from Lowe's.

Then last week, I was looking on websites for tile samples, and lo and behold, one place not only carried Formica Bottle Glass Quartz, but they had samples! I'm no longer in the market for countertops, but I ordered a sample for old times' sake.

Boy, did I dodge a bullet. Here's the sample of the love of my life, along with one of the Terrazzo Sea Glass I settled for: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The stuff I was dying to get would have been too gray and too dark for my windowless kitchen. The pattern I settled for brightens up the room and goes great with my oak cabinets.

The moral of the story: Don't fall in love with tile - or a countertop - until you see the sample.

***

To be clear, I think grab bars in a shower are a splendid idea; I just don't like the nursing-home vibe of the ones in there now. So I ordered nicer ones this weekend.

***

I did, in fact, find the perfect tile for my shower walls in this latest batch of samples. Somewhat unbelievably, the color matches my bespoke vanity. However, this is about the eighth perfect shower tile I've found over the years, which is another reason I just need to get the project done already.

And then I can figure out what to do with all those tile samples...

***

* Nicho is the Spanish word for niche, and a common term around these parts, especially for folks who lean Southwesterny in their decor. 

***

These moments of bloggy design fatigue have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!

Who owns Pedernal?

I took some time off work this past week -- a staycation that mostly involved cleaning the house, which I hadn't done in far too long. But I also visited the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum to tour an exhbit that I've been meaning to get to since last fall: Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country. The museum worked with several Pueblo artists, whose ancestors have been here in New Mexico for thousands of years, to provide works that intersect with O'Keeffe's work.

The painting that the museum has been featuring in its advertising for the exhibit is one by Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi) that riffs on one of O'Keeffe's pelvis paintings. O'Keeffe used the hole in pelvis bones as a frame, usually to view the sky (I have a poster of one where she painted the moon framed in this way). But she also painted one where the bone is red and the sky is yellow. Namingha takes this colorway for his Disaster #8, converts it to values from the Air Quality Index, and uses it to depict a mushroom cloud rising above the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire.

It's striking, and it speaks to climate change. But a more prevalent message was the Pueblo artists' reactions to O'Keeffe's love of Cerro Pedernal, the mesa she painted almost 30 times over her years in New Mexico. Here's a work from Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) that doesn't look like much: a pot, broken pottery pieces, and some brown dirt: 

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

It's called Did Georgia Pray? The exhibit card explains the significance of the work:

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

Hopefully you can click on the photo to make it big enough to read. The artist talks about how she produces her work in a sacred manner, praying for the land at each step of the way. She wonders whether O'Keeffe did the same. And about Pedernal, she says: 

Georgia once said, "It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it."

But this is Tewa Nangeh -- our land! We do not own it. We pray for it. 

So, I ask again: Did Georgia pray?

Did O'Keeffe hold the land sacred, or was she a clueless white person? Some of the artists in the exhibit make the point that O'Keeffe almost never paints people; as a sort of proto-Modernist, shapes and contrasts were her jam. But these Puebloans wonder whether leaving people out of her art diminishes the importance of their people and themselves -- to the point of erasure.

It's not like white folks haven't been trying for more than a century to erase Indigenous folks from the West.

It gave me a lot to think about.

*** 

Speaking of prayers, though, my favorite piece is this one by Elisa Naranjo Morse (Kha'p'o Owingeh, aka Santa Clara Pueblo), called A Prayer Making Its Way. 

Photo: Lynne Cantwell 2026

That's a badger, one of the six directional guardians of Pueblo spirituality. I hesitate to say much more because I couldn't find info specific to Kha'p'o Owingeh spirituality on the internet (and that's probably by design). I did find a fair amount of info on the Zuni guardian animals because that pueblo sells figurines of them as artworks, and it's possible that Kha'p'o Owingeh beliefs are similar. 

With that disclaimer out of the way: For the Zuni, there are six sacred directions: east, south, west, north, the earth deep below us and the sky above us. The badger is their guardian of the south; he is known as a healer, but can also be tenacious and aggressive.

I liked this one for the colors. But now that I'm looking at it again, I see that Badger is carrying the prayers of his people away from a disaster. I'm sure it's no accident that this is hanging close to Namingha's Air Quality Index-coded mushroom cloud and right across from Hinds's pottery.

That I didn't understand all that to start with might put me in the same clueless-white-person category as O'Keeffe. But I hope not.

The exhibit runs through November 1, 2026.

***

Some of y'all may be wondering about Zuni Pueblo's guardian animals. Here you go, from a shop here in Santa Fe that sells fetishes:

• East is the white wolf;
• South is the badger, as I said above; 
• West is the blue bear;
• North is the mountain lion;
• under the Earth is the black mole; and
• the sky above is the eagle.

And the people of the pueblo are at the center.

***

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