Well, if Trump is going to make up words, so am I. When you lose the popular vote and still take office, you are an “unpresident”, and the ceremony is an “unauguration”.
First off, an update on uncle Dean. He was all prepped for surgery last week when a final CT scan showed that the suspected leak was actually not what it seemed, so the operation was cancelled and he was moved back to the ward, where he’s been slowly improving. He’s due to complete his course of antibiotics tomorrow, and all being well, might even be home by Wednesday. Fingers crossed…
We had a cold snap at the beginning of last week, with lows of -10 degrees overnight, so I brought in the last plants that had been toughing it out on the doorstep, and we had a few nights of shutting all the shutters. Since then it has improved markedly. We’ve had some gorgeously sunny days and not much below zero at night either. We’ve not even had to light the fire till the evening once or twice.
It’s been mostly quiet at Port 80 as we’ve both got a bit of work on. While Matt continues to chip away at his big project, I have a few sites of my own to be getting on with, including a new one for an art gallery and framing service, based in Boulder Colorado. This was a referral from Matt’s uncle Bud, whose site we redid last year – thanks, Bud! We’re just waiting for the green light from them but they seem keen.
On Friday, we caught up with Manu & Mathilde. We’d invited them to ours to drown our sorrows together following Trump’s inauguration. Apparently they’d had exactly the same idea but planned on inviting us to theirs, so in the end we went there. Also in attendance was Philippe, whom we’d not seen much of in ages. Matt and I had already had a stiff espressotini at 6pm to console ourselves when the unpresident was sworn in. In fact, we even had a further vodka prior to heading out, which was probably not wise or necessary.
Despite the sad reason for the gathering it was a fun evening. They’d decided that as we often eat american here, they’d do a traditional french meal. We had onion soup to start (one of my faves), followed by a sort of chicken pie. For dessert, we had the ubiquitous tarte tatin, which was a particularly fine example of its kind. We often drink wine there, to Matt’s detriment, but had taken some vodka with us this time. This might be partly why we got a little tipsier than usual, particularly Matt who was fairly quiet. Philippe more than made up for this with his usual habit of goading and coming out with maddening ‘devil’s advocate’ type comments just to get a reaction. For all that, he’s still a laugh, but small doses are good.
There’s not much else to be said about Trump being sworn in, beyond the obvious fact that clearly, sadly, no-one took it upon themselves to shoot him before it happened. Silly, but I really was hoping for some sort of upset at the ceremony. As it was, it was comforting that so few people attended his inauguration – far fewer than came to Obama’s in 2009. Even better, twice as many people came to the following day’s protests. Never has an incoming president had such bad approval ratings. I find it important to remind myself of facts like this.
Speaking of facts, Sean Spicer, the new head of the White House Press Office, deserves a mention here because in his very first official address, he eschewed them completely. He told barefaced, disprovable lies. The subject matter (estimated attendance figures of the ceremony) was trivial, but that’s not really relevant. I mention this because in a later interview, a trump advisor sought to defend his statements by describing them, in all seriousness, as “alternative facts”. There really is something deeply sinister in that phrase. Orwell never penned a more twisted one.
Ok, enough talk of the orange man-child and back to the news. Saturday was a quiet day of recovery, and I also used it to work on some new songs I’m learning on the guitar. We didn’t do much on the Sunday either until the evening when we went to the cinema at nearby Thiviers. We saw the film The Arrival, a very good ‘first contact’ story. We also ran into Ute (a mutual friend of Bryan and Carol), who sat with us. We can definitely recommend the film. And on that note, I shall bid you goodbye.