Unexpectedly, early morning office hours turned out to be a great thing. Not because nobody comes. Nobody comes no matter when office hours are scheduled. But because I’m a lot more energetic and my mind is a lot fresher, so I get a lot done.

Sen. Rounds: “I don’t think the President has an exact position on immigration.”

Because everybody else apparently does. They are not sharing it with anybody but they must have one for sure. Let’s wait and see if somebody will finally reveal what their exact position is.

I’ve been off the news feed since this morning but now I see that finally there’s reason to be proud of Democrats. Six years of CHIP funding is a very big deal. The whole thing feels like they finally have a plan and are in control. This is good.

For lunch I had a cabbage salad, stewed cabbage, and fermented cabbage. The only thing missing was borscht.

The funny thing is that Klara loves this stuff, too. Not the raw cabbage in the salad because she’s too little but the stewed, the boiled and the fermented kind.

Instead of all those articles on people who are still happy they supported Trump, I’d like to see a few on whether people are still happy they supported Hillary. Because I’m not. If I could go back now, I’d just stay with Bernie. I used to be very worried about his complete lack of understanding of Russia, but Russia isn’t even coming up (I mean, in reality, not in the conspiracy theory world), so it’s all moot anyway.

The scariest thing about the government shutdown is the possibility that nobody will notice.

In Spain, when no government could be elected for over a year in an unprecedented political stalemate, the effect of that on the economy was nil. The markets didn’t give a crap. It was happening as I was writing the conclusion to my book, and it was scary to see how fast everything I had been saying in it was coming true.

The smartest thing for politicians to do is to abstain from all of these “I’m going to go away and let’s see how you manage without me” shows. Because increasingly often the answer is “extremely well, thank you.”

Klara has new rain boots. They are tall, bright-colored, covered in pictures of unicorns, and they light up at every step.

This morning as we were getting ready for school, she turns to me and asks, “Mommy, where are my party boots?”

Nobody identified them as party boots to her. She just decided it on her own.

For those who follow the insanity at Concordia, here is a new development. Remember, these cases get publicized very randomly. For every one that makes a splash, there is a dozen you’ve never heard about.

People who experienced childhood emotional abuse are very sensitive to the emotional states of others. Even if somebody tries very hard to conceal what they are feeling, a person with this kind of hard-won sensitivity won’t be fooled. And depending on the nature of the emotional abuse, such people might attribute the emotional states they intuit in others to something they did.

So they live to the constant accompaniment of worry, “He’s sad. What did I do to upset him? She’s irritated. What did I do to bug her?” Usually, whatever the others are experiencing isn’t about them at all but they are locked in the prison of their trauma and don’t get it.

On the positive side, such people work great in careers where you need to connect with others and understand their innermost feelings.

The only really popular (with thousands of likes and hundreds of comments) English-speaking Facebooker I read is a young working class accidental mom of two from Ireland. The rest of the really popular ones in my feed are Ukrainian and Russian journalists. The latter spend most of their time battling the efforts of the FB censorship team that tries to shut them down. There are whole groups of people whose only job is to manufacture reasons for FB to close down these journalists. But when they do manage to publish something, it’s really good. It’s so sad that they have no other platform than this really horrible one.