I'm not going to name the doctor's office where this sign is posted...but out of several things wrong with this....let me just say..."HIPAA."

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Erica with another abnormally long curly fry.

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I've spent the day in twitter jail.

Of course I haven't been stuck in an actual jail cell, banging my tin cup against the bars and playing the blues on a harmonica. I've pretty much been going about my usual business, just slightly more amused than usual.

Here's what happened. I'm sure y'all are familiar with the recent kerfuffle involving Debra Messing. (If not, I gave you a link, so you're welcome.) An absolutely awful shithead from Kansas said he hoped she got aids and died! I responded with, "You first, sweetie."

That seems to be enough to ruffle the feathers of the twitter gods. Apparently, twitter has a rule where you're not allowed to wish harm on people...well, at least not out loud on twitter. Well, okay then. The tweet I responded to is gone, so maybe this was evenhanded. Or not. Who knows?

But here's something to think about: a woman suggested using publicly available, open information to see who was financially supporting a controversial politician. Said politician immediately likened her to Joseph McCarthy Then fans of said politician collectively lost their goddamn minds.

The problem is, neither the politician nor his adoring fans know their history. McCarthyism used the power of the federal government to persecute people suspected of communist sympathies. There was an actual blacklist. People couldn't get work. Some states still require loyalty oaths in order to apply for state employment. (I had to sign one in order to volunteer at my grandchildren's school.)

No one is calling for government oppression of Trump supporters. People absolutely have a right not to work with or associate with other people whose values trouble them. People and groups have a right to engage in boycotts - even though there are efforts to stifle that right, those efforts aren't succeeding.

Because people don't know their history, and/or have reading comprehension deficits....well, they lose their minds over the idea of using public records to make decisions about who to associate with or work with. Personally I think it's a good idea to spend my time and my money with folks who share my values.

Anyway, back to my day spent in twitter jail...yeah, I was rude. Twitter, as a private company, can censor whatever they like. But I'm not sorry for what I said. So there.

Rick Allen's Got To Go

Does it seem like politics is filled with self important pontificating reactionary asshats? Sure seems like it to me. Of course everyone knows about our fascist philanderer-in-chief, but there are some littler fish that are just as disturbing.

I'm sure by now you've heard of the amicus brief (written by Ken Starr....yes, that Ken Starr) that 58 members of Congress submitted to the Supreme Court in a set of similar cases dealing with workplace discrimination.

Rick Allen is one of the ones who signed the brief. By doing so, he is advocating discrimination against decent people just trying to earn a living....one of whom, Gerald Bostock, is a fellow Georgian!

This kind of behavior makes Rick Allen unsuitable to represent the 12th District of Georgia in Congress. We need to make sure he doesn't get sent back to Washington in 2020.

I've never voted for him. Maybe some of my readers (all 10 of y'all) have voted for him in the past. Anybody who has voted for him, I hope you won't do it again.

I personally would vote for a demented possum before I would ever vote for him...especially now.

Amazon Fires

Okay, here's a super simple work to help the Amazon rainforest with the fires. I decided to call down rain to put out the fires.

Weather work is new to me, but as you can see, I try to keep things simple - there's no reason to try to make it look fancy, just the minimum to do the job.

Here's what you'll need:

A map of South America, or at least of the Amazon jungle. (I just printed one from Google maps.)

3 seashells. Or little dishes if you don't have any. (I chose seashells because of the water link.)

2 candles.

Storm water. (If you don't have any, I guess regular water is okay, but try to get the storm water because this is to call a storm.)

A little spray bottle.

Lay the things out like the picture shows. Pour a little storm water in the middle shell (it's okay to spill it) and put a candle in the shells on either side.

See the rainforest on fire. Visualize rainstorms dropping enough water to put the fires out.

Once you have this in your head, light the candles. Now, see water, rainstorms, clouds bursting into downpours. Know that it's happening.

Then use the spray bottle to spritz the candles out.

This can be repeated over and over. It can be redone as soon as the candles are dry. I aim for about once an hour or so. You can leave it set up. I put mine on the dining room table because in my house that's like Grand Central Station - the more people participating, the better! Just leave the water, spray bottle, and a lighter close by so people can take a minute to add their energy as they walk through.

My mom spending quality time with her grandtortoise.

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Early morning selfie!

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Looks just like her mother and sister! Sweet dreams...

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Trees are for hugging. Happy Sunday!

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Shari Dodge

I am a regular reader of medicalkidnap.com. I've been following the Brandon McCreery case and mentally cataloguing all the ways the state of Idaho has been violating both statutes and common decency.

Shari Dodge, an attorney representing Idaho, is attempting to force the removal of information on this case from the internet.

She has complained about the change.org petition asking for Brandon's release. She has complained about the family's Facebook page. Her plan is for Idaho to keep Brandon detained for the next 2 years, until his 18th birthday, limiting his medical treatment options, and keeping him separated from his mother.

Naturally, her behavior is upsetting to decent people.  But she doesn't seem to be able to handle that. So she is trying to use the court to force third parties to remove commentary about her actions.

So, I'm going to post that information here, along with some other information I've found about her. Here goes:

Dodge's photo is the one in the upper right hand corner of the larger image above.

She graduated from the University of Idaho law school and passed the bar in 1996.

In 2005, while working as a prosecutor, she was the subject of a bar complaint involving her lying to the court about a defendant. This complaint was substantiated and she was publicly reprimanded. Wow.

So we have a young man with medical issues who is being forcibly held by the state if Idaho, a prosecutor with a history of dishonesty, a mother being forbidden to have contact with her child, and a judge and child "protection" system that are causing harm.

If you're not at least a little pissed off you're not paying attention.

Here is Shari Dodge's contact information, should you want to tell her what you think:


23 9th Avenue North
Nampa, ID 83687 
208-467-9007

I've messed up my back again so I'm using the kitchen cabinets to prop and stretch. Izzy came to keep me company. (Also dreads make an excellent pillow when one is lying on the floor, fyi.)

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The other day I came across a relatively recent episode of 20/20 that featured the Darlie Routier case. Her two older sons were murdered in 1996 and the state of Texas tried her for murder later that year.

I have my own opinions about the case, but that's not really what this post is about. 

In the majority of criminal appeals cases I've come across, prosecutors try to block DNA testing and other tools that could be used to exonerate a defendant. 

For a really long time, I wondered why. If a prosecutor was truly convinced of a defendant's guilt, it would seem to make sense to want that additional evidence. Prosecutors have a unique role in what many people call the "justice" system. Technically at least, they work for the people in the judicial circuit where they work. They are supposed to get justice for crime victims, not manipulate the system to rack up wins. The Supreme Court even specifically said so in Berger v. United States! (295 US 78)...

Sorry about that...my sometimes naive idealism shows up at the damndest times. Moving along...

A prosecutor's job is trying to put criminals in prison. Wouldn't it stand to reason that a prosecutor should want to be as sure a possible a defendant actually is a criminal? In many cases, the answer is no. This isn't right. 

Any prosecutor who actively tries to suppress evidence of a defendant's innocence - at any point in the process - needs to be considered and enemy of the people and should be shunned accordingly.

Here's a few of the instances I found:

Adam Braseel argues new evidence shows wrongful conviction. Prosecutors say so what?

The district attorney's name is Mike Taylor. He can be reached at:

375 Church St.
Suite 300
Dayton, TN 37321

Phone: (423) 775-4468
Fax: (423) 775-2805




Kym Worthy defends waiting years to release innocent Davontae Sanford

She can be reached at:

1441 St. Antoine St.

Detroit, MI 48226

(313) 224-5777

....more to come....

ocean and storm waters

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Lexi has the chairs set up so she can put on a show tonight. She says she's going to sing and dance.

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Here's something real.

So....I'm working on being authentic and even if this doesn't get read, I need to write it. (I'm not going to promote this post, so whatever happens is what happens.)

My older son was legally my stepson for almost the whole of his childhood.  I had no legal rights to him. My husband made a point to keep reminding me that my child could be taken away from me at any moment...and several times in anger told me to say goodbye to him forever. Of course later I got "apologies." But threaten me once with something that awful and any trust is over.

I had chosen to be his mother. There is nothing I won't do for my kids - no matter what.

The few people who knew at least some of the truth about my life couldn't fathom why I stayed married. It wasn't something I could articulate.

Then I started watching Bones. In season 4 there was an episode called "Doctor In The Den." In that episode Camille the pathologist reconnected with the child of a man she had once been engaged to.

I found the scenes between the two of them utterly heartbreaking. I still couldn't explain things in words...but I can point to that episode and those scenes to get across my reasoning for staying.

I never wanted my son to have a reason to say, "But you left me." So I didn't leave him.

Here's the episode:

My beautiful mama! ❤

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Raise the Age Legislation

Michigan is set to raise the age where teens can be tried as adults.  Here's why I think it's a good idea.

Twelve years ago, at the age of 17, my older son Rickey was involved in a bizarre (seriously bizarre) accident with his then girlfriend in our driveway.

She had her license. He hadn't gotten his learner's permit yet. The car was a stick shift. These parts are important.

They were sitting on the hood of her car, listening to music. The car was off, in neutral, and neither of them could remember later if the parking brake was on.

The girlfriend asked Rickey to change the CD. So he got off the hood of the car and plopped into the driver's seat to do that. Well, he knocked the car into gear or it just moved, or something and she fell off and then the car hit her while she was on the ground. Her arm was broken and her face was all scraped up.

That's when a hysterical  Rickey came in the house to get me. The girl wanted to call her parents instead of an ambulance, and they came almost right away. They told us not to come to the hospital, and that they would call us later. So we stayed home. Rickey was so upset he wasn't able to explain to us what had happened in any coherent way, so I just tried my best to comfort him.

Then a policeman knocked on the door about the accident. To this day I still don't understand why,  but the girl's parents told the policeman at the hospital that Rickey had hit their daughter with the car on purpose. They wanted him arrested.

The policeman demanded a statement from Rickey. Since this was not an accident report being taken, but a criminal investigation, I told the policeman that Rickey didn't have my permission to make any kind of statement.

Then it got ugly. The policeman said, and I quote, "Well, I don't need your permission to take him to jail, and that's where he's going if he doesn't make a statement. He's 17 and that's old enough to go to jail."

I told Rickey to keep his mouth shut, and started explaining to this idiot that you can't arrest somebody as punishment for not giving a statement.

Then it got uglier. He threatened to arrest me for "obstruction" if I didn't tell Rickey to make a statement. That didn't give him his desired result, either.

Please note that my son was in shock, had been sobbing for the past hour, and basically could barely tell you his name. He was terrified of being taken to jail, and the threat to arrest me pushed him over the edge. He wanted to make the damn statement so this jackass would go away.

So, against my better judgement, I told my still sobbing son to write that he was too upset to remember in detail but was giving a statement under threat of arrest. His statement then basically said that his girlfriend fell off the car when he got in it and the car moved.  He reserved the right to amend the statement when his frame of mind was better since he wasn't able to make sense. The end.

I then told the policeman to get the hell out of my house and not come back.

Everything ended up working out okay. His girlfriend insisted it wasn't done on purpose and that she shouldn't have left her car in neutral. No criminal charges. Several days later he ended up giving a coherent amended statement to a different policeman who was frankly shocked at  the way the first statement had been coerced out of us when my son was too upset to even form complete sentences. He called the "crime" a truth is stranger than fiction, bizarre, crazy, stupid accident.

Here's my point:

My son was 17 when this happened. There is no way in whatever hell you believe in that my son should have been threatened with adult jail at all, much less threatened with jail for not giving a statement.

He was a minor, and should not have been threatened in any way for his mother's decision not to allow him to make a statement.

If a person under 18 is going to be legally handicapped by being a minor - curfew laws and other status offenses, etc for example - then the government should not be able to have it both ways.

It's well past time to Raise The Age.

Erica's tea party in T minus 12 minutes!

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