The Gingersnap has a routine. There’s 15 minutes until she is fed and she has already tapped my arm. Next she will touch my knee and stare up at me while licking her lips. If it were morning and I was in bed, she would do the poke where she manages to hit my forehead practically dead center with one claw.

If that fails, she bounces to various pieces of furniture and shoves things to the floor. Once I get out of bed, she will lead me to the kitchen, frequently looking back to make certain I am following. Once in the kitchen she will stare at her dish stand until I fill a bowl and set it down.

If it’s her evening mealtime, she will come to wherever I am, to do the arm tap and knee touch. If I don’t comply, she will jump up on the counter, desk, back of the couch, or table, and sit and stare until I head for the kitchen.

Right now now, I’m being glared at. How dare I leave her alone for FOREVER with only three bowls of food to last for 78 hours! She could have starved! Of course there was still food in one bowl, but that doesn’t count. The other two were empty! The amount left in the bowl was the equivalent of the amount she gets in a normal feeding, but she could have starved.

I went on a road trip to visit my now closed alma mater, Northland College (1892 – 2025). Keeping the college open was no longer sustainable, even with a reduced curriculum. One hundred thirty-three years and now shut and abandoned. From the outside, it looks like everyone packed up for the end of the week like normal, except the campus was dead silent. No people except for a maintenance person in a truck.

They didn’t stop and ask why I was wandering the campus. Honestly, I might have burst into tears if they had. There were only a couple of empty campus vehicles parked near one of the buildings.

I found a Civics textbook in a resale shop up there. I don’t even know if they teach civics anymore. With what’s happened in the last three elections, I would say that Civics has gone the way of Handwriting, diagramming sentences, and Social Studies, along with Literature, World History, and Geography. We have become a nation proud of our ignorance. The great technologies that were to give us access to the world’s knowledge have made us more ignorant, gullible, and just downright stupid. We now lack the ability to sort out truth from misinformation. Just my opinion.