Diary

Since I'm becoming caught up on settling into the house, don't have much of a social life and am alone most of the time, I may pick up a little in my blog activity. I located the main mouse entry point to the house, which was a hole in the corner of a post on the back porch. From there, they traveled down to the basement. I placed non-kill traps in the basement and caught one to three mice per day for several weeks and released them outside. Ever since I blocked that hole there haven't been any. I do still have at least one mouse in the wall, and it can be quite noisy. The previous owner hired an exterminator who never found all of the holes and used poison, which I don't like. I found three dead mice in the basement. It is unpleasant and time-consuming work eliminating mice, but if you persevere, it's worth it. Actually, it's probably better if you do it yourself, because exterminators have an incentive to fail: if they succeed, you may never hire them again.

The basement here is quite large and completely dry, and I'm using it for storage, since there is no garage and the garden shed is small. My next project is to install some grab bars on the basement stairs, which are long and steep, so that I don't fall to my death when I'm 100. I am going to use grab bars instead of a handrail, because they will be easier to install.

Since the Anne period of my life is over, it seems appropriate to revert to my practice of not writing about my close relationships. However, because I have been reading about female psychiatric abnormalities, it is tempting to write about that in some form. Apparently there are female psychopaths out there, but they often go unrecognized, because they are not physically violent and often blend into their social environments. So, if I wrote fiction, I could write a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, in which Hannibal Lecter's sister, Hannah, moves to a small New England town with her unsuspecting boyfriend. Hannah begins to join all sorts of groups under the pretense of wanting to help, but she always ends up alienating and upsetting the other members by trying to force her agenda on them. Finally, she resigns from each group until she has exhausted all of the suitable groups in town. At that point, in short order, she unceremoniously dumps her boyfriend and moves to the West Coast, where she plans to set up shop again. A large city offers her boundless opportunities. In the final scene, she is shown graciously introducing herself to the members of a garden club in Seattle. 

The next book that I'm going to read is on gender, from the point of view of Frans de Waal, the primatologist. I don't think that de Waal will have any definitive answers, but I have difficulty understanding current popular conceptions of gender and would prefer hearing a zoological perspective to hearing a completely unsupported politically correct perspective. Frankly, much of public language now has taken a politically correct form that I find unintelligible. In order to speak now, you are forced to make certain assumptions, without any examination of those assumptions. To make matters even more confusing, we currently seem to have different schools of politically correct thinking that contain diametrically opposed ideas. At the liberal end of the politically correct spectrum, all people are supposed to have identical abilities, meaning, for example, that if everyone had the same high-quality education, members of academically underperforming groups would perform as well as members of academically high-performing groups. I don't think that there is any research supporting this idea, though, obviously, a better education would lead to somewhat better results. What you don't hear about is conservative political correctness, which isn't usually called that, but is about the same thing. Although I'm completely sick of the topic now, one need look no further than Donald Trump. To a casual observer, it was fairly obvious briefly after he entered office that he was an opportunistic criminal who had nothing to offer in the position. Predictably, his job performance was extremely weak, and, in particular, the economy's performance during his presidency is being compared to that of Herbert Hoover. Incredibly, millions of his supporters believe that he did an excellent job as president. Furthermore, Trump has wasted public resources by diverting the country's attention from national issues to his criminal proceedings. Although there is little doubt that Trump supporters are completely mistaken, there is evidence that similar errors occur in politically correct liberal circles. Some of this may be present in current public discussion of gender.