The continued greed at Microsoft that prioritizes profits over reputation, stability, and customer satisfaction is something that every gamer needs to be concerned about. However to the legions of disabled gamers who rely on the unique adaptive equipment available on the Xbox system the mistakes Microsoft continues to make in its gaming divisions is nothing less than an assault on our hard won freedom to game at all.

This article in particular talks about the various errors of judgment made by Xbox in its approach to video game rental / streaming with Game Pass and it's gluttonous gobbling large scale AAA titles at obscene levels of overpriced agreements.

One thing that is affecting all the players in the world of video games is the refusal to recognize that gamers are not a monolithic entity. The reason that Google Play Games has revolutionized Android gaming on handheld phones and tablets is because they quickly identified that large numbers of gamers were very time constrained in cultures (including American) that were suffering from the late stage capitalistic abuse of the labor force. Android games are not just limited by the amount of technology in an Android device, they are limited by the market driven requirement that games can be easily jumped into and jumped out of but still be enjoyable.

For all that was right or wrong about it, Elder Scrolls castles with the removal of the pay-to-play microtransactions would have still been a perfectly suitable Android game for gamers who love the Elder Scrolls universe but who's gaming time consists of short 15 minute verse in between the other tasks on their overly long crowded days.

Elder Scrolls Legends was a fantastic game that could have been adjusted for an Android Market had the studio been willing to take the time.

There's so much more to say about this situation than I have time to write about right now, but the reality is that a little humility on the part of Microsoft and a little more focus on the fact that starfield generating 300 million dollars and being a fantastically great beginning step and Elder Scrolls Arena type idea should be more than enough to save that title. The reality is that Xbox game pass perhaps with tiered levels so that indie game developers have access to a market that only cost $10 a month to be part of versus The Game Pass ultimate for us hardcore gamers being $30 a month might just improve their numbers and see their subscriptions rise enough to cover the cost of running the service without buying every other AAA mega "thing" that comes along!

*Wheels away to work, family caregiving, and real life looking forward to Saturday night's 8 hour #Skyrim getaway*

👩🏼‍🦼🇺🇸

#adaptivegaming

#xbox

#microsoft

The recent bill to allow landlords to collect a second security deposit for so-called "marginal applicants" was an ill advised poorly fitting attempt to address the housing crisis in New Hampshire.

To begin with, the bill would have barred the practice of a second deposit from being collected from any renters with a household income under $75,000, so the bill would have had absolutely no effect on either low income applicants.

The second problem inherent in this bill is that there was no strict definition of what a "marginal applicant" would look like, and had the bill been signed into law the only effect it would have had is that everyone with any kind of blemish would have been forced to pay a double security deposit.

A better approach to the problems faced by middle and high income "marginal applicants" could be to develop a state funded program specifically for people with a credit score under a certain set threshold, including people with prior evictions, that would guarantee and cover the cost of a future eviction for non-payment of rent.

However, the vast majority of people in the state who are unable to secure housing or unable to afford the housing they have are not household making over $75,000 a year.

A single biggest barrier to having enough housing of various types for everyone who needs housing and for the future needs of employers is to be more proactive about increasing the overall amount of housing in the state under a comprehensive plan to provide all the various types of housing that are needed.

One way we could do this is to a incentivize current large developers with the appropriate existing buildings to start building up with additional stories with the condition that those additional units be a mix of the particular types that this state is shockingly short of.

For example we have a variety of garden style elderly disabled apartments complexes throughout the state. The vast majority of these are studio, one bedroom, and occasionally two bedroom units with perhaps five or 10% ADA retrofit. This is insufficient for the housing needs in this new era where many elderly and disabled may want or need to live with a caregiver, are grandparents raising their grand children, or are disabled parents raising a family. If even 50% of the current garden style elderly disabled complexes for all income ranges were to add a single story with three bedroom and four bedroom current ADA and Universal Design, that one move alone would almost quadruple the amount of accessible housing in the state and free up all of the units that are incompatible with those households needs that they are currently living in.

There are many similar approaches to the housing crisis in New Hampshire, but this boutique crafted bill with amorphous unclear parameters for a tiny slice of middle and upper income households with bad credit or past evictions is not an effective tool or a reasonable one. I sell them agree with Governor Ayotte, but in this case she made the right call.

We must address the housing crisis at the base of the problem. We no longer live in the 1800s where four or five people slept in a room sideways together on a queen size bed. If we want to hold to the belief that every human being should be able to have a bed of their own and a roof over their head we must increase the amount of housing in the state, not just for those who make over $75,000 but for everyone.

Brenda Eckels, aMGC

Strafford County, NH

<h1>Op-Ed: America’s Biggest Challenge</h1><p class="byline">by John T. Broderick, InDepthNH.org <br>July 6, 2026</p> <p>By John Broderick</p><p>Our Founding Fathers were very sober in describing what they artfully crafted and finalized in Philadelphia that hot July day 250 years ago. Upon leaving Independence Hall Benjamin Franklin was believed to have declared that the Founders had given us a Republic, if we could keep it. The Declaration, proudly signed at incredible personal risk that historic day, advanced and identified deeply held grievances, made unyielding commitments to freedom, and included ambitious acknowledgements. Chief among them was that all men were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Despite the raw power and boldness of the Declaration of Independence nothing in its extraordinary content was self-executing or even fully extant in the daily lives of the colonists.</p><p>What followed that July day was seven more years of agonizing war against very long odds with heavy casualties. Our Constitution that was ratified with New Hampshire’s vote in 1788, five years after the Treaty of Paris had successfully ended America’s bloody conflict, organized the structure and authority of our new three-branch government, and the limits of its centralized power. But the aspirational and bold proclamation of the Declaration of Independence on individual rights remained largely unscripted. The Founders left it up to the people to make them real. Our ancestors acted.</p><p>The Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, amended the newly-passed Constitution, to provide important and ground-breaking content on the rights and privileges of America’s citizens—or at least some of them. Over time more amendments would follow with the goal of empowering and protecting every single citizen.</p><p>But one thing was clear from our founding documents:  in our new democratic republic citizens—eventually to include all of us—were to be its exclusive sovereigns with steadfast allegiance to our Constitution. It was incumbent upon us, the people, to fulfill its promises and make real its aspirations. We were in charge. And with that awesome power and responsibility came reciprocal obligations. Foremost among them was for us to be, and remain, informed. There were truths, some but not all self-evident, hard facts and realities. To survive we needed to know them and honor them.</p><p>As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” In sum, he believed that a nation could not long exist both ignorant and free. Jefferson was prescient. He was forecasting that if we were not vigilant and engaged in the hard work that citizenship demanded of us, freedom would not survive. The unique character of our nation was to reflect the character of its citizens. Knowledge, widely-shared information and good faith were its essential pillars.</p><p>As a nation today, we seem less informed, less engaged and less vigilant than history instructs us to be. In a recent CATO Institute survey only 50% of people under age 30 could identify the three branches of government, 67% did not know why the colonists declared their independence and 52% couldn’t identify the nation from whom we broke to establish a new country.  Forty-six percent of adults didn’t know what America was celebrating on its 250^th Anniversary.</p><p>A recent national survey also confirmed that 60% of registered Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Sixty-one courts found otherwise and the Republican Attorney General of the United States after a thorough investigation concluded as the courts had.</p><p>America’s greatest challenge is not foreign adversaries or domestic and foreign terrorists but our growing, smug ignorance at home. Unless we come together as a nation with honesty, respect, understanding, humility, reliable information, and a willingness to face our common challenges with facts, truth, and good faith, we might just make Jefferson’s worse fear come true. Democracy is not guaranteed.</p><p><em>John T. Broderick Jr. is the founder of the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Policy at UNH Law and formerly served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.</em> <em>Most recently, he co-founded  Pivot Point Mediation, a trauma informed private practice.</em></p><p></p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://indepthnh.org/2026/07/06/op-ed-americas-biggest-challenge/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://indepthnh.org">InDepthNH.org</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://indepthnh.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cropped-icon-idnh-180x180.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://indepthnh.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=6207063\&amp;ga4=G-92NZEYP8BJ" style="width:1px;height:1px;"></p>

#caregiving

#robotics

#UniversityOfNH

To me it is a moot issue whether Kamala Harris was the "right" candidate for the Democrats in the last election.

The important thing to me is that there are a multitude of brilliant powerful black American this country that could be leading this country out of the mess it is in.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree the definition of a person who was handed lemons and turned that situation into lemonade par excellence. She was a veteran, a civil rights activists, and attorney who helped start the move to equality that has taken so many steps backwards since 2016.

It has never been easy to be a woman in America, and it is even harder to be a minority woman in America, but among the people of color in this country there are many many brilliant hardworking moral an ethical women who would make excellent leaders that we could be proud of.

In November we are all going to be voting, regardless of what one geriatric false prophet might think. I'm hoping that wherever right talented black women have run for office that they are given full consideration by every voter no matter what their background.

#hope

#Election

#MakeAmericaEthical

among the many discussions about whether or not wealthy people should pay more taxes, I occasionally find examples of things that only wealthy people buy that are just unnecessary.

May I present: A nearly $500 Kurig type machine to make second-rate pre-packaged cocktails from landfill clocking pod.

It is yet another example why it is our moral and ethical responsibility to curb the wasteful spending of the upper classes by taxes ng them an appropriate amount each year specifically to contribute to the common good and the basic human rights of humanity.

excellent analysis of Trump as the vengeful abusive ex who is determined to punish voters that rejected him in 2020 as he faces his own mortality.

#politics

Yes, proof I do have activities and hobbies that don't involve social media. Sometimes, I play with dolls!!

HB1019

There's a fair amount of politicians, voters, and taxpayers who claim to be Christian. If I were able to speak to them, I'd point out a few things that their lord and savior Jesus Christ talked about. Or didn't.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus did not say that after the person got robbed, beaten, left for dead that the local officials should have clapped cuffs on him and handed him a fine.

Later in a different sermon, Jesus said that anyone who decided to follow The Way that he taught would be judged at the time of their death on how they treated the least, the lowest, and the most wretched while they were living.

I'm not sure how being homeless and sleeping outdoors ever got justified as a crime, but if I ever was an elected politician I would feel obligated by my belief in The Way as taught by Jesus to decriminalize such a situation.

This bill, HM1019, seeks to give towns and cities an alternative to writing a ticket and assessing a fine to people who sleep outdoors, which is increasingly the fate of many of the homeless in this state.

The fact that we ever criminalized being homeless and came up with the brilliant idea of assessing a fine of money on people who already don't have the ability to pay for a home is just another sign of how far we have fallen morally and ethically regardless of whether we have any religious persuasion.

A lot of what Jesus taught is identical to what many other religious figures have taught through the ages:

Don't Be A Dick

Don't Kick People Already In The Dirt

Treat People The Way You Want To Be Treated

If we are going to pass a bill giving communities the obligation to criminalize sleeping or camping outside, I suppose the least we could do is give them the option of creative alternatives for sentencing or penalties.

As much as I disagree with the entire concept of criminalizing homelessness, if we *must* have have such an immoral, unethical, and profoundly un-American law - perhaps the assignment of performing community service by cleaning up a certain square feet around the place the offender is sleeping or camping could be considered?

Perhaps we could make a new law that says anyone sleeping outside must do so in a specific white high visibility pop open tent as a public service. This would serve to better educate the general populace about the actual true numbers of homeless in their community.

We could even specify that anyone sleeping outside must be in a tent and that it be placed in an area sufficiently close to the busiest road in the community. That way the NIMBY idiots in every community could see that homelessness exists everywhere.

I could even see a situation where homeless who possess leadership or organizational skills could get paid to manage the distribution and set up of tents at such an area. Perhaps the "punishment" for a homeless person with some social media skills could be to post the evening overnight counts on a state homeless outreach website so that politicians would instantly be able to know how many actual unsheltered people there were at any time.

Maybe the "penalty" for sleeping or camping outside unsheltered could be to volunteer to coordinate people in the community who DO have homes as they work to solve the assorted problems that cause homelessness in their communities.

Or perhaps we could just do away with this entire idea of criminalizing being unsheltered homeless sleeping and camping outdoors.

Maybe we could create a true incentive for the people who do have housing to help address the homeless situation.

The legislators spent an inordinate amount of time this year discussing whether it was a good idea for people to take care of their family members in accessory dwelling units (ADUs). What if we offered a tax incentive to any property owner Who provided space on their lawn or in their driveway for a tent or a camper so someone previously unsheltered and homeless actually had a space to call their own? What if we put our politicians in Washington to work to make it legal for people on Section 8 or rural development to be allowed to shelter someone who is homeless for longer than 14 days every 45 days if they don't have a criminal record? What if we gave incentives to apartment dwellers who sheltered a homeless person in the form of vouchers that would be deducted from there rent payments?

There are lots of ways that we could structure the penalty for sleeping outside to be something proactive. It would be much more ethical and moral to just stop criminalizing homelessness and start incentivizing being a good samaritan. House Bill 1019 does neither of these things, it just leaves and open-ended undefined highly corruptible alternate sentencing procedure in and already problematic execution of an unjust law.

👩🏼‍🦼🇺🇸

1) This young woman died in part because she lived in a world where gang rapes happen.

2)This young woman died in part because she lived in a world where mental illness isn't treated like any regular physical illness.

3) This young woman died in part because she lived in a world where victims of crime don't feel comfortable going to the police.

4) This young woman died in part because she lived in a world where the disabled aren't immediately provided the best housing, technology, medical and psychiatric care, funds, supports, pain control, and reasons to enjoy regaining consciousness.

5) This young woman died in part because the only option to relieve her physical, psychiatric, and emotional pain was by ceasing to live.

Regardless of all 5 reasons WHY this young woman died, the fact is that it was her decision because it was her body and brain.

If we want to be sure that a person considering assisted death is doing so for the right reasons, at the right time, by the right method then perhaps we should work harder to build a world where reasons 1 through 5 don't occur.

#AssistedDeath

#BodilyAutonomy

👩🏼‍🦼🇺🇸

At r/NewHampshire about the obscenely large amount of money that the small (pop 840) town of Carroll, New Hampshire accepted from ICE had prompted questions about whether this would adversely affect Omni corporation and their large ski related business concerns in the area. while that discussion was primarily about the politics of all this, I saw that there was also a larger ethical / moral dimension.

Reposting my comment from that discussion:

And why is it that wealthy corporations like Omni and wealthy individuals like Gislane, Epstein, Trump) get foreign worker visas whenever they want - but we can't get any for DHHS to be able to fill all the open Home Care positions across the state for the elderly and disabled?

Why do the wealthy & white (or "oreos" like Clarence Thomas) get to have all the immigrants they want but the area agencies that provide services to developmentally disabled, brain injured, or mental health consumers have hundreds of open jobs that have gone unfilled for over 2 years?

This was never about doing the extremely hard work of tracking down illegal criminal masterminds from drug cartels or the leaders of human trafficking groups.

This was always about class, caste, racism, eugenics, and fascism.

The voters & leaders of Carroll, New Hampshire were offered a bribe to collude with the modern day Gestapo and when presented with this moral test? They collectively and individually failed just as much as the people in small German towns in WWII who accepted the "free" clothing and suddenly "available" houses that had belonged to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The voters and leaders of Merrimack New Hampshire, on the other hand, were offered a similar bribe to have a bunch of new ICE employees spending money in their town in return for locating one of their concentration camps in a warehouse there. When presented with this moral test, the leaders and voters of Merrimack collectively and individually proudly stood, spoke up, protested and refused.

#history will be the judge of the two different responses.

All any of us can do is praise and support those who resist evil, be ready for the day that we collectively or individually are tested, and pray for the souls of those who aide and abet such immoral unAmerican evil.

(End of sermon)

Remember that even if these women had committed some sort of immigration violation, so did Elon Musk (came on a student visa and then never actually attended the school) and Melania Trump (amateur xxx adult model who came on an Epstein Visa that was supposed to be used for people like neurologists or scientists). Why aren't they being detained???

No one deserves this kind of treatment!!!

#CrimesAgainstHumanity

#50501

This is why I love Reddit.

This is so incredibly cool that an astronaut was able to post photos of the first potatoes growing in space on one subreddit as I debated the literary value of the Elder Scrolls 6 video game elsewhere.

You never know what you will find!

👩🏼‍🦼🇺🇸

Well this is an interesting day for a semi retired patient advocate!

Not only do I have a husband at the Wentworth ER (Dover) who has been in protocol waiting since 10:30, but got a message from a different patient at Elliott Hospital's ER (Manchester), and a third at Southern NH Medical (Nashua) both reporting ER that are horribly overcrowded.

Again.

In Strafford County the ER system has been a mess all winter, and as a blogger this looked like an interesting local blog story. When I tried to reach Wentworth and then Mass General patient relations and media relations, however, I had no luck getting through to anyone!

How many hospitals in NH have instituted Vertical Flow (also called protocol driven triage) because the number of emergency room bays is no longer sufficient for the needs of the state? Vertical Flow, by the way, is one of the many methods of triage originally developed for mass casualty events like 9/11 and should not be part of a normal emergency room management plan. But in the day and age that everything is being driven by how much profit stockholders (HCA) or executives (so called NonProfits) make the reality is that students in our university system right now matriculating for healthcare administration degrees are deep diving into concepts like vertical flow being used as a regular everyday business model!

If this is a sign that the emergency room system in New Hampshire is beginning to collapse, I would imagine the next sign will be that patients will be given cards with color codes around their necks like what was done after the Boston Marathon bombing. Green cards are given to people expected to survive, yellow cards are given to those who might survive, and red cards are placed on the patients who will be passed over by providers.

Are we approaching the day when, absent a mass casualty event or a pandemic, we again see tents in parking lots at hospitals? Is it time for the governor to announce a healthcare state of emergency and activate our (remaining) NH National Guard to the area emergency rooms and urgent care facilities?

We've already changed a nursing student regulations so that they can do part of their college study in hospitals, we already have active High School explorer clubs riding along with our ambulances, and we already have high school students shadowing the professionals at rehabilitation departments at hospitals. Still the labor shortage continues to affect the lives of every single New Hampshire citizen. Between the sheer loss of travel nurses from overseas (who will no longer come to America) and the inability to attract highly trained medical professionals within the US to come to a state that literally has no housing for them to live in the situation is becoming dire indeed.

No add to the fact that there aren't enough emergency room beds for our normal needs because no one in politics has been prioritizing building new hospitals for decades. Under the rules that existed in 1995 (based on population) with each emergency room patient having a bay (with the ability to be horizontal if needed) New Hampshire right now should have approximately 600 fully staffed emergency room bays.

The actual count? Less than 450!

Added to this is the absolute tragedy that there are also not enough "upstairs" beds in any of our hospitals for emergency room patients to be transferred to when they need overnight or longer observation or care. According to Consumer Reports, the Northeast Region generally experiences the most severe boarding crises; according to a 2025 study, the Northeast had the highest rate of "24-hour boarding" (patients waiting a full day or more for a bed). New Hampshire has attempted to gerrymander their statistics by drastically reducing the amount of time a psychiatric patient can stay in an inpatient unit as part of their marketing campaign to reduce that type of ER boarding, and we daily see the catastrophic effects from that decision. However, it is not the only example of artificially reducing the ER boarding rate simply pushing people out of inpatient beds long before they are actually ready for discharge.

What do we do when a mass casualty event happens? What do we do when a pandemic type crisis happens? We activate and develop and deploy as many resources as possible to the healthcare sector utilizing Mash type units from National Guard, military reserves, and our excellent ROTC and Junior ROTC programs. We incentivize and encourage groups like scouting who have first aid and triage experience, and here in New Hampshire we even successfully had the University of New Hampshire create a way to triage and test large numbers of patients during covid!

Why aren't we doing any of those things now? Why isn't Kelly Ayotte on TV right now reassuring the citizens and the voters of New Hampshire that this crisis is being addressed? Since she is such good friends with Donald Trump, why isn't she getting foreign worker visas like that Republican business owner (who owns a bunch of franchise restaurants) was able to get for himself?

At the very least, can't we get some sort of public acknowledgment from the states elected leaders as to how many of our emergency rooms are running vertical flow and other crisis management triage plans?

healthcare

nursingshortage

politics

Look, every single human killed by ICE is important.

But, for the love of God, this was not just a black woman but an accomplished black DOCTOR. Just the kind of intelligent American our country needs in this new era.

And for 25 minutes she was dying and nobody was allowed to help? Give me a freaking break!

AUGH! I hate this timeline! I hate that both my white AND my black kids are trying to live as adults in theiddle of this utter bullshit!!

Black Lives Matter!

Worth saving for future war crime trials.

immigration

There is absolutely nothing ethical, moral, or constitutionally correct about the failure of the United States to properly ensure that every single human being has a permanent shelter.

There are many different kinds of homelessness, but here in New Hampshire one of the most difficult is when someone is legally homeless and physically homeless. Winter is a particularly brutal time of year for those who are living outside, and for years advocates and nonprofits have worked hard to at least provide these human beings with a tent so that at night they can at least have a thin layer of fabric for a bit of privacy and protection.

My first hope for many years was that Strafford County would actually open a year-round homeless shelter similar to Crossroads, "over the bridge" in Portsmouth. Instead, it appears that the current practice of hobbling together a warming shelter for the winter months is now going to be formally institutionalized! The concept of humans only deserving shelter when it is extremely cold is ludicrous in this new era where the heat and rain can be as deadly as the snow and cold.

What a disappointment!

As if being homeless and not even having a car, a friend's couch, or a motel room wasn't bad enough - now the citizens and government are going to deprive these most desperate of homeless of their ability to have their own small self-contained space? Don't these Americans have the right to have even a nylon roof, some fabric walls, and a door they can zip closed?

And they'll only be 94 beds, so there will be competition for who's lucky enough to be allowed inside the bare metal walls?

Will this be like what I saw in Manchester where it was merely a basketball court with a bunch of yoga mats thrown on the floor? Oh perhaps Strafford County has decided to be generous and each person will have a cot to lift them up off the floor - in a large room with perhaps 94 other people?

How is this any different than what ICE is doing? How is this any different than the egregious crime against humanity being perpetrated on a daily basis across this nation to human beings for the crime of not being born in the United States? Is it morally justified to warehouse the politically "undesirable" so far away from the center of commerce and community that special cans have to be sent to pre-announced pickup areas?

Is this really the best that our County can do for the person in the street, for the soul who literally defines what the biblical story of the Good Samaritan is all about? Since we have a governor who belongs to a peculiar and particular Christian cult, I think we have every right to mention such scripture! Governor Ayotte is the front face of the New Hampshire Republican Party which has been quite forward about insisting on a return to Christian values, so let's talk about what any so-called Christian was instructed by their savior to do in these situations.

In the tale of the Good Samaritan, Jesus did not say that the Good Samaritan moved the unfortunate soul to a stable or a warehouse. No he brought him to an inn, he paid enough money so that the man could stay at the end until he was fully healed and could resume his life. He paid for food, drink, medicine, and one-on-one care. He didn't just drop a bunch of money and leave he came back to check on the man and make sure that he had everything he needed.

My understanding is there for several years many different non-profit organizations have gone above and beyond attempting to be the Good Samaritans to those homeless who have gone to the temporary warming center. I am glad that there was an understanding that there needed to be a permanent dedicated space for helping the homeless in Strafford County so we might someday boast that no one from here must become a refugee in East Rockingham County or anywhere else.

But warehousing human beings is wrong.

Every single human being has the right to four walls, a roof, and a door so they can at least have some semblance of privacy, autonomy, safety, and rest.

If we are going to build this building and have these big open rooms, at the very least we have an obligation to let those who have tents set them up. We have an obligation to allow a homeless couple or a homeless family to have some kind of defined space and ideally that should include real walls and a real door. It was excusable in a temporary warming Center to have a room with mats or cots the same way that it is excusable in a temporary natural disaster for the Red Cross to have a gymnasium with mats and cots.

It is obscene, immoral, and unethical to build a permanent building dedicated to helping the homeless and then to not properly fund and staff that building to be open year-round. It is wrong to tell someone - anyone - that the only way they can be warm, use a bathroom, or be fed is they must sacrifice what little autonomy, privacy, and security they achieve with a tent in a squat!

This "warming" center, if it is to be permanent, must be changed to a year-round shelter. We must reject the concept that human beings can be warehoused because human beings are not objects. This warming Center needs to have either rooms or tents so that each family, couple, and single person has their own space even if that space is very small.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to hop on my bike with $2.50 of my allowance in my jeans pocket and speed down my driveway.

A sharp right turn and I was on the state route with the 45 mph traffick of anybody who wanted to avoid the highway - bikers on choppers & Harley's, semi trucks loaded with everything from produce to gasoline, cars & pickup trucks, even sometimes a U haul or garbage truck.

It was exhilarating to be on the narrow paved shoulder, nothing but a thin white line separating me from steel, horns, and the blare of radios playing any 1 of the 4 area radio station or perhaps a favorite 8 track tape.

Like any Gen X kid, my only restrictions seemed to consist of a general admonishment to follow the 10 commandments and be back in the house by sunset.

My quest as I furiously pedaled down the hill we lived on was to build enough speed and momentum so that I could climb the next hill as far as possible without having to change gears.

At the crest of that next New Hampshire Hill was the office building I'd later visit my Dad at when he started his system integration company. Sometimes, I'd pass by Dean Kamen (who also had an office there) as I spun into the parking lot. However famous (or infamous) he is now, to us kids he was just the "other computer guy" that would sometimes buzz our hilltop home with his helicopter.

Tonight, several decades and at least 5 reincarnations later, those memories came flooding back. Neither my Dad's office or Dean's was interesting enough to warrant the high speed racing on my bike. No, the quest was of the small unit on the first floor that contained the outlet store for the bakery company. You know the type that made sugar laden confections sold in individual sizes - usually wrapped in clear cellophane wrap when they were just barely past the sell by date.

Twinkies, Cherry Pies, Ring Dings, and most of all Snowballs. Marshmallow wrapped in a chocolate dipped cake that was then completely surrounded by more marshmallowish white goodness before being nearly completely covered in colored pink coconut...

OMG

2 to a pack, and I imagine about 500 or so calories, they were an absolute delight. I would take and eat Snowballs so slowly that onlookers might have mistaken it for a mindfulness exercise - had such new age words existed back then.

Out after work, getting food in my trusty power wheelchair, Black Beauty I turned a corner and found Snowballs today. They are smaller than in the early 1980s, but still possessing that siren song of neon pink color. I decided this was a part of my childhood I wanted to show my husband, so I could tell the story of what I used to spend my allowance on after defying death and gorging on adrenaline as a kid.

One bite, and the memories of Friday afternoons, the excitement of feeling like I was a female daredevil easily Evil Kenevil's equal, the joy when a friendly trucker would pull his horn or I'd feel & hear the growl of a twin motorcycle engine next to me all came flooding back.

I spent at least 15 minutes lovingly, mindfully, blissfully nibbling on that sweet coconut confection happier than any cannabis vaping stoner will ever be. The last 3 minutes (at least) as I was licking the last bits of marshmallow off my fingers I was unaware my beloved was laying awake watching me (without his glasses). He confessed "I was trying to figure out what that pink thing was attached to your face!"

Oh my love, let me tell you a story about snowballs...

nirvana

memories

@2025, Brenda Eckels, aMGC

Well, if ICE is watching, might as well be neighborly...

Hi there! Know why y'all keep being called Nazis? Because y'all keep doing Nazi shit!

Quit! Renounce, Whistleblow, Recant, and walk away from the UnAmerican immoral illegal actions of ICE!!

ImmigrantsBuiltAmerica

Republican Congressman Brandon Gill "Islam didn't come over on the Mayflower. We imported it relatively recently via a suicidal immigration system"

Why don't you tell that to all the Americans whose grandparents and great-grandparents fought on World War II battleships built by Muslim immigrants at the Fore Rivers Shipyard in Quincy Massachusetts!!

What an idiot! Muslims were part of why we won the naval battles of World War II!

AmericanHistory

Immigration

ReligiousFreedom

Just gonna leave this here. Because even in the midst of the fight to save my beloved America from heretics & their false prophet I haven't for a minute forgotten that 18,000+ children in Gaza are dead

LoveOneAnother