They grow like weeds, or blossom like orchids. Good words about America.

Oksana and I find it delightful and amazing the way Marianna's personality is developing. We are paying better attention than we did with the first couple. Last week Marianna noticed me getting ready to go out the door and she picked up one of my shoes and handed it to me. Well done Marianna! I asked her for the second one and she gave it to me as well. She is very attuned to the world around her.

Eddie and Zoriana are attuned to her as well. All three of them will get on the big double bed and romp as I read bedtime stories. I sometimes have my heart in my throat as little Marianna mixes it up with the other two, but somehow they all know how to avoid serious injury. Granted, one kid or the other cries every five minutes, but an experienced parent knows how to tell a cry of "that's unfair!" simply meant to attract attention from one that indicates real injury. I so consistently ignore Zoriana, or more specifically tell her to simply stop crying, that I would think she would appreciate the futility of the exercise. So far not.

Marianna, at 14 months, shows a sense of humor. When daddy does something absurd, like look at her upside down, she laughs. Zoriana loves to thrust books in my hand for me to read. The same ones over and over – How the Camel Got His Hump, We Love Bunk Beds and others of that type. I often express my exasperation at doing the same thing over and over again, but to absolutely no avail.  So, I will hold the book upside down and read it back to front, or garble it as How the Hammel got his Gump, bowdlerizing the story with Spooner-isms. Sometimes I will add lines to the story, including the kids in the narrative. Zoriana will sometimes petulantly tell me to "do it right", but she generally enjoys it.  Eddie begs me to juice up everything I read to Zoriana.

This is quite different from my previous experience. My former wife, for all of her many virtues, has no sense of humor, or at least no appreciation of mine. Neither did the kids. I cannot think of anything either of my older daughters found funny. My firstborn, Jack, once characterized downsized canines as "dropkick dogs." I repeated that line endlessly – it's the only funny thing I can remember him saying.

Eddie and I continue making progress in the Smithsonian visual encyclopedia of geology. As for most kids, writing remains the stumbling block. And within that, thinking about what to write. I was the same. Two days ago I asked him to write something about what he has learned of geology – tectonic plates, weather, climate – whatever. The whole day dragged by without him doing anything. He said it was too hard of a topic. I offered to give him a list of four alternatives with the assurance that he would pick one. He was repulsed at the idea of writing about getting along with his sisters. I forget what the other two topics were, but he finally decided to write about boats.

We're using a modern approach. He dictates to Dragon NaturallySpeaking, puts the document in Word, runs it through spell and grammar check, and then goes through manually fixing his errors. That produces a fairly reasonable product.

Boats have been around for a long time and a lot of people have tried to improve them. The first boats were dugout canoes made by burning out the inside of a log and cutting it out with a hatchet-like rock and using sticks to scrape it out.

They tied logs together to make a raft. They figured out how to put planks together to make big boats that carried bigger loads and had less friction with the water. They figured out they could use wind to push the boat so they made hybrids of sails and oars because they could sail only with the wind. When the wind was blowing the wrong direction they would pack up the sails and paddle the boat. Later they figured out that if they put the sail in the right direction, let’s imagine that the wind is blowing from the side, you put the sail at an angle to the wind so the wind got turned around and would push the boat forward. After that they started really sailing around the world.

The Spanish and Portuguese had the best boats in the beginning and they were trying to sail along the coast of Africa till the Cape of Good Hope and then up the coast of Africa on the other side of Africa and then go to India to bring back home goods to sell in Europe that was one route. Another route was to sail along with the westerly winds in the Hadley cells in go down in the Ferral cells past the Cape of Good Hope and then go up the coast of Africa to India. However there is a problem that when you go into Hadley cells you crash in to what’s now called South America and not long after that Columbus in the north Hadley cell sailed across the Atlantic to discover America.

As you can see, he integrates what he has learned of geology and history into his writing. I told him gently that not every reader is going to know what Hadley cells are, but we're not going to worry about that for now.

Zoriana has kind of dropped out of the kindergarten this month during the lockdown. I could get her there and back, but she enjoys being around home. I spent four hours with her Wednesday going over a Ukrainian ABC book. It's a mutual learning effort. I can read the Ukrainian, and I have a dictionary to figure out words that I don't know, which appear about every five pages. Zoriana is learning the language by ear, and she knows pronunciation. It is a phonetic language – for the most part it is spelled the way it sounds. However, syllable stress is very important in Slavic languages and it is not marked in the text. I'm trying to learn. Between reading and doing jigsaw puzzles we have a pretty good time together. I will have to say that I am extremely grateful to Anna for giving her attention when I have other things to do.

I'm going to say a good word about Americans. Churchill said, you can always count on Americans to do the right thing – when all else fails. Using OSHA to enforce the vaccine mandate was egregious overreach on Biden's part. I was pleased that the truck drivers, airline pilots, air traffic controllers and others got together and made it clear that they didn't like having medical procedures forced on them. I was pleased again that so many of our state governments pushed back and put enough pressure on Biden through the courts that OSHA rescinded the vaccine mandate. Now that the tide has turned, I do not think it will go back.

This is a triumph of federalism. I am sure that the founding fathers would've hoped for more, and sooner, but something happened. I compared this with the European Union, in which individual governments seem to be in the thrall of an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels and Strasbourg. National governments in many cases appear to be total captives of the pharmaceutical companies. The mandates in Austria and Latvia are chilling.

Another thing I like about the United States is our alternative press. I have reported about authoritative books on the origins, mechanisms, effects, and characteristics of Covid 19. The books also describe pretty well the ways in which the pharmaceutical companies, media, regulatory bodies, elected officials, billionaires and businesses have gotten together to make the vaccines very difficult to avoid. We don't have total freedom of the press in the United States. We are losing more by the week. Nonetheless, many good people such as Peter McCullough, Joseph Mercola, Robert F Kennedy Junior, Peter and Ginger Breggin, Alex Berenson and others are being heard. There are many good and informative videos by people like Judy Mikovits, Bret Weinstein, Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Michael Yeadon, Stephanie Seneff and others. They are definitely not on YouTube, but their heavy-handed suppression of a discussion about Covid 19 has spawned a slew of alternatives sites: Bitchute, Rumble, Newtube, Brighteon, Odysee and a host more.

Other countries are doing okay. Germans Reiner Vollmilch and Wolfgang Wodard have done a great deal. French Nobelist Luc Montagnier has weighed in. Great Britain has Paul Joseph Watson and theexpose dot uk. Canada has globalresearch dot ca and the hilarious, snide, beautiful and wonderfully intelligent Whatsherface. But I think Americans can be justly proud of the industry of our alternative media.

I was pleased that I got well over 100 hits on my Substack Site after my last post. Disappointed, however, not to get letters from you. Here's a link to my email. The stuff I posted was rather deep, analytical and intellectual. One of you readers responded with this video that hits you right in the gut. Professional athletes dropping like flies in the middle of games. I challenge any and all to convince me that the video isn't real, or that young people in top condition flop over from heart attacks all the time.

That's the news from Lake We Be Gone, where the men are strong and, God save them from the injections, may stay that way; the women are good looking in every day clothes without even trying, and the children love school when daddy's teaching it.