Guntramnus

I admit, I have been trolling for a saint for a while. I just had not found anyone who really captured my interest & I tend to go underground around Saint Patrick's Day anyhow. But the other morning I tripped across Saint Guntramnus. Here is a guy I can sink my teeth into. Most of what I found was not in English, making for tough research. I can read French passably & other languages with a dictionary close by, but that was too much like work so I thought I would just wing it.

First of all, Guntramnus was more or less a typical medieval monarch & not so much a catholic. Or maybe he was a Catholic for his time (I maintain that Louis was canonized for his extensive killing of Jews). The strange stories abound but my favorite is he divorced his wife (no real reason given), she later fell ill &, when the doctor did not cure her, Guntramnus killed him. With his bare hands. Well, a knife to the throat. You can see how he came to be the patron saint of murderers.

Guntramnus was apparently very very sorry afterward, so at least one site assures me he is the patron of REPENTANT murderers. By the way, his wife's name was Mercatrude. I almost want to get a new cat or goat just to name her Mercatrude.

There are other amusing anecdotes about Guntramnus. & then there is the stuff between the lines. He was a king & both his brothers were kings. I am sure they were just charm-all-around & no one touched a hair on any prior king's head. He is credited for keeping his nephews (one from each of his brothers) safe from multiple dowager queen's wrath. If I am reading correctly, the dowager queens in question were the boys own mothers. What happened to their fathers is not so well documented.

For anyone wondering how the boys were in Guntramnus' care in the first place, the terms guest/ward/hostage were more or less interchangeable in those days. If you are still confused (& maybe unclear how three brothers could all think they were king), let me recommend The Lion in Winter. Incidentally, Guntramnus is also the patron saint of guardians.

The last Guntramnus factoid I wanted to share was that in addition to repentant murderers & guardians, he is also patron saint of divorced people. He shares this with Helena (mother of Constantine) & Fabiola. Considering the church only very reluctantly even recognizes divorce & often only by granting annulments, I was pleased there were still patrons to choose from, even among the *divorced*: the guy who is also patron saint for murderers OR the mother an emperor & herself an empress & patroness of same OR the patroness of almost every marital victimization you can name. Like I said, choices.

Picking your poison

Along the edge of our driveway, is a single flowering tree, a tung tree. Eating even one seed can be fatal, making it an unusual choice for a horse farm. The tree itself progresses from lovely flowers through a long season of broad green leaves to a short winter with an unusual silhouette. This tree, about 5 1/2 feet tall when I planted it, was a rescue in its own way. The person who had originally bought it & planted it learned it was poisonous & dug it up. A mutual friend brought it to me.

Her reasons for removing the tree were straightforward, she, like me, has horses on her property & she did not want to risk them. A difference between us is I knew it was poisonous when I planted it. This meant I could plant it well away from any animals that might be tempted, in a place where every dropped seed would be visible (the seeds of the tung tree are not small), any shoot from them easily pulled.

As a result, I can safely enjoy this beautiful tree. & so can the first bumble bee of the season & a variety of ants. What is the expression, one man's poison is another bug's bounty?

Locals only

On Saturday the first part of my vegetable seed order finally arrived. Yes, this is late. I placed my order by check well over a month ago only to learn the company I have dealt with for many years is so swamped by orders they are running 3 weeks behind.

Except for the part where my seeds are running late, I could not be happier. This means more people are at least thinking about gardening & where their food comes from. As for the lateness, I am lucky to live in Florida; if my vegetables go in a month late I am not really going to lose so very many harvest days. Yes, I will lose some, but it is not like I run a vegetable stand.

Besides, almost everybody already knows that I have grave doubts that my plants will last all that long, even in off-the-ground planters. So I am starting many many seeds & handing them out to anyone who wants them in the hopes that some of the produce will make its way back to me. & if it does not, that is not the end of the world either.

So, if you are local & would like some heirloom tomatoes (mule team & costoluto genovese) or hot peppers (yellow scotch bonnets & red peter) or would like the seeds for some hybrid tomatoes or hybrid mild peppers that were sent with a 'sorry you are having to wait message', drop me a note. The eggplant, more tomatoes, & the gourds (long story) should be here by the end of this week.

I am afraid this is open to locals only; I am sorry.

Pea soup

When I woke up yesterday, well it was still quite dark, actually. But by the time there was light, there was also fog. I know for many people, fog in March is no big deal. For me, it is a reason to celebrate.

Fog is almost the only chance water will gather at ground level & give the dusty dusty ground some relief. It is also welcomed by all the animals, but especially the big birds. They would not come close enough for a clear picture, the fog obscured them better than any photo-screw-up I could manage, but they are just past this barn, standing with all their feathers articulated, their heads angled up, their tiny wings stretched leaning into the wave of water-in-the-air.

Spoiler alert: I do not have much respect for people who worry about 'my fair share'.

Several weeks ago I received a Facebook flair from that read: Why do politicians who don't pay their taxes get to spend mine?? Most of the time I ignore this kind of stuff. This is hardly the first "keep your government paws off my hard earned dollars" sentiment that has been expressed near me. This one got my particular attention because the person who sent it does not pay taxes, has not had a job in ?years? & is able to collect a (justified) disability check because of all the people who do pay taxes & the programs those taxes allow to exist.

It put me in mind of a conversation I had many years ago with a computer programmer I worked with. He was complaining that his lifestyle was not an improvement on his parents & that this was the first time in our country's history that this had been so (I am guessing parents in the 1920s & their children who were adults in the 1930s would argue, but none of them were in the room at the time). He was measuring success by the square footage & overall opulence of his home & how many years he had to drive his car before he could afford a comparable new one.

& so I asked him a question (which I thought I already knew the answer to, I admit):

when his wife was recently pregnant, an as-far-as-I-knew perfectly normal pregnancy, did she take advantage of the regular visits & services & medications provided for by our insurance? If such a thing had been available to his mother, would she have considered it a ++ in her quality of life? He never did answer, but I am guessing the answer to both was YES. I later learned the pregnancy had not been normal, there had been a major issue & the issue itself had been discovered during a routine ultra-sound. My point is, maybe quality of life should be measured in more than just the room in which a person watches the best TV that person can afford (or finance).

You don't need me to tell you the latest twist on this particular complaint is "why I am paying for that guy's ____; I lived within my means, why shouldn't he"? It has inspired me to compile a list of things we pay for (well, A pays for mostly ) that on the surface anyhow, mostly benefit some other guy:

School taxes - Let me be clear, we are happy to pay these & think they should be higher. We both believe society as a whole benefits when kids are not roaming the streets like packs of wild dogs & even the career grocery-bagger can read. But the fact remains that people with children have the option of moving their children to a private school & redirecting a portion of public school funds away from this general society benefit & we do not.

We cannot decide that we would rather our school taxes were applied to a local homeless shelter that keeps parents & children together & also provides schooling for both the parents & the kids, but our neighbors can & do get back some money from school taxes & pay their church instead (which has a school their children attend). This is actually twice-irksome; as school taxes here are based largely on local property taxes & these neighbors do not own the house they live in. This means they have not paid in as much in school taxes as they are able to redirect away from the school district.

Health care premiums - Under a previous healthcare provider, we, a married couple with no children, paid the family rate. That means our basic monthly cost to have health insurance was exactly the same as the guy down the hall who had five kids (this was a real guy, by the way. In our small office there was one unmarried man, one married man with five kids & two married men with two kids & us. There was also a married woman with no kids & a married woman with one kid, but they were not on our health plan). All of us (all nine of us, from the first part of the example) were in reasonably good health but the fact remains the consumer of 7/9th of the resource paid 50% of the tab. How many times would you split a dinner check that way before you said "Damn it I had a house salad & you had lobster!"

If you decide you want to spread the cost over the whole office, we paid 1/5th of the bill while using 1/9th of the initital resources, but it was actually bigger than that. In the larger group one child was autistic, one spouse had breast cancer & one employee had multiple back surgeries, but we all had the same monthly fee & deductible. In short, we paid the same amount into a basic plan that we did not use nearly as often. I know because I was the one reviewing the bills that pre-natal care was an option our office elected to pay for (increasing the bill to everyone) & allergy shots were not. Guess which one of these would have been more use to me personally.

We have since changed our provider (nothing to do with this discrepancy) & are now in a plan that is structured differently, although it does still favor families with two children; after that it is pay-per-head. I laugh when I hear people balk at the bill for socialized medicine; as far as I am concerned we have been paying for a form of socialized medicine all this time.

Airfare - our combined weight is, well, lets just say less than 320lb. (& the average weight for men & women in the country is 167.2, so apparently we are absolutely normal). I don't know about you, but I have never been on a commercial flight when at least one person did not weigh in the ballpark of 300lb. I guarantee you, that person did not pay more for a ticket because of body weight. & yet that person will certainly use (fractionally) more resources, every time they fly. I know some big people (I am related to some big people, I love & respect some big people), & I know they gamble that there will be an empty seat next to them (or between them) & that they will be able to take up more room without having to buy that second ticket.

On one memorable flight, a very large stranger was very angry with me because I would not let him raise the arm of the seat between us & squeeze over. He had trouble accepting he had gambled & lost (are there really people who are OKay with being plastered to one side of their seat so someone they do not know can press in on them?).

Many airlines also used to let you take a baby under a particular age at no charge on a flight, so long as that baby sits in your lap. There was a time I flew regularly & I dreaded being pinned in the window seat with a parent & lap-passenger; every time this happened I missed my connection waiting for mom (it was always mom) to juggle the baby & their luggage. Before you assume I did not offer to help, ask yourself how many dry cleaning bills have you have offered to pay after your kid gorped all over the suit next to you; no one ever offered to pay mine. Several did, however, complain loudly that the flight attendants could be more helpful or plentiful... Counting either pounds or heads, most of the time the average Joe Flyer is getting the short end of this deal & has more or less accepted it.

This one has been bothering me more lately because I often fly with a little dog. She rides in a carrier at my feet. That carrier counts as a piece of luggage in my total luggage allocation, so my only other bag costs extra on some airlines. I would be OKay with this (I guess) if I was not already paying the airline over $100 extra per flight to fly the little dog in the first place. There is an element of 'luxury tax' here, I understand that. What I cannot fathom is the passenger-with-baby already getting a reduced ticket who thinks everyone should pay more so she can have more help personally.

Clothing - that's right, clothing. I wear a size 6.5/7 shoe (sometime as a 7/7.5 if the toe is really, really pointy). I have a good friend who wears a size 11. Her shoes use more material, weigh more (therefore cost more to ship), but cost the same as mine. Ditto on jeans, dresses, blouses, etc. Even at my chubbiest, I have never worn the national average size: a ladies 14. But generally I pay the same price off-the-rack as a person who wears an 18. Next time you are shopping, line up a size 10 against a size 18. Depending on the garment, it will be a minimum 1/3rd larger & probably more.

Food - we actually spend a lot less on food than most people because I do not cook beef; I just cannot take the smell, & we do not eat pork (meat being the big part of most grocery bills). But we do pay the taxes that pay the subsidies for these foods to be shipped from large feed lots to processing plants to our grocery store. I confess, this is one why-am-I-paying-for-that-I-never-use-it policy I would like to see change & I do make every effort to buy anything I can locally (not just food, but books & anything else I can. After food & books, there is not much we buy, now that I think about it). Still, we are paying part of the bill to ship a lot of other people's food in.

I realize this all seems like small change but it adds up. & 360+ days a year, I do not mind (OKay, I did mind Fatso bitching about the arms of the seat cutting into him & suggested that next time he buy two seats & maybe this flight he would be more comfortable in the toilet). But really, I do not mind. I do wish, though that before people started ranting about not wanting to pay part of someone else's bills, that they would consider there may already be some one out there subsidizing theirs.

& if that is not enough to make you think twice, there is one group of people in this country who routinely pay higher taxes (often because they are in higher income brackets), have far fewer children than average (& thus are not using either the schools or family health care services they are paying for), & are rarely married (& so pay more in living expenses generally, which is a double-factor here where there is no income tax, but there is a sales tax) & often do not qualify for any spousal benefits, even if they are not living alone.

Rarely married outside of Massachusetts, that is. What happens to the rest of us the day the gay community says "you know what, you are right it is not fair that we have to pay your bills. So we are setting up our own financial system to meet only our needs. Tah"?

//For the sake of this entry, I started looking up our actual numbers. Using the per head model for health insurance alone (if we had paid 1/9th of the office's total monthly bill instead of 1/5th), we would have saved at least 2k every year (or the insurance company would have made a lot more off the whole office). As for the nickel&dime stuff, I bought fabric to make myself a skirt recently: 1.75 yards at $11 per yard. The same pattern size 18 called for 3.25 yards. At this point I decided it would be better to stop.