165 years ago today California joined the Union to become the 31st US state.

94 years ago today my father was born in Fontana, California.

16 years ago today my divorce became official. (9-9-99 at 0909h).

This morning Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth II became the longest reigning monarch England has ever known. HRM is keeping it low-key and would have liked it to be even lower than it is but her loyal subjects are wishful of more overt celebration and are politely disappointed at the lack of pomp being doled out today. 

I am a second generation Californian and I left it forever 41 years ago (6 September 1974). I've lived there a few times since, including in 1977 when my daughter was born in San Francisco - not a mile from where her great-great-grandfather is interred at the Presidio National Cemetery (a Scottish-Canadian expat who served as a US Marine during the US Civil War). So she is a 3rd generation Californian - but she lives in Idaho and has zero intention of ever living in California. We moved back to the Eastern Seaboard in '79. The last time I lived in California was 1984 and '85 when I took care of my dying father - he died at 9:21pm on 21 December 1985, was interred 2 Jan 1986, and by that afternoon we were driving across the Arizona state line on the way to Florida where my then husband worked.

The last time I was in California was September 1999 (just after my divorce was final) when I went out for two weeks to help my best-friend-since-high-school's husband tell her he had lung cancer. He died five years later and I couldn't make the funeral because the financial nightmare the divorce plunged me and Fox into made eating&heating dicey and certainly didn't extend to air-flights to attend funerals.

And now I live in Scotland where today the celebrations (regarding HRM) are so muted as to be utterly absent. About the biggest thing I'm planning today is finishing up a crocheted quilt (winter cometh!) and getting started on the crocheted candy corn trick-or-treat bags for the grandchildren. I'm going to use thick muslin to line the bags so none of the treats fall out. Oh, and I have a dentist appointment this afternoon, and Paul is calling in at an architect friend's office to finalise the details of what I'm hoping will make this semi-detatched cramped little bungalow far more comfortable and considerably less cramped.

News wise, the huge-huge-huge-huge item is the increasing 'migrant' crisis. And it is HUGE - this morning the 'president' of the EU announced distribution quotas will very likely have to be made compulsory as so many EU member states are reluctant to participate in what they consider to be an illegal and overwhelming onslaught of people so culturally different to the indigenous as to almost guarantee there will be 'extreme civil unrest' sooner rather than later.

Anyone not willing to have an entire family of 'refugees' billeted on them are being 'named and shamed' as racist bigots. The EU is saying they're going to impose economic sanctions on any EU member state not willing to accept thousands of these 'refugees'. Any common sense proposals are being dismissed as lacking in compassion and basic human decency; several Germans who've openly protested the insanity displayed by their frau leader have been arrested - here in the UK, a Tory party MP has been pilloried for having made a joke about the sort of 'refugee' he thinks will turn-up at the Scottish First Minister's house (which she claims she will gladly open to a refugee family '...if that's what it comes to...' in an echo of the equally loonie Labour-leader wanna-be ditz whose husband was made redundant by voters in May 2015). Apparently it's not allowed any longer to be honestly realistic or to have a sense of humour.

Our Prime Minister is under enormous pressure from the leftie-luvvie self-hating Brit brigade to fling open our borders to countless thousands of 'refugee's. He's stated we will accept a total of 20000 over the next five years (working out to four thousand per year) with granted five-year limit visas, but ONLY from the camps, and ONLY after careful vetting from the UN, and ONLY to be supported by the British treasury for one year.

I'll be frank - I wish we weren't taking any but if we MUST take in any 'refugees', I want the 20K to be Christian or Jewish only. Britain has too many muslims as it is - even the former Archbishop of Canterbury has said this. But we can probably absorb 4K per year without it being an impossible strain on social and physical infrastructure - any more would be disastrous in ways too numerous to list here.

Many are worried that given some of the arrests and other retaliations, forced billeting in on the cards sooner rather than later - there is a cautious joke making the rounds that we should all immediately downsize to avoid having our homes invaded, er, I mean having the opportunity to share our quarters and financial resources with people we've never met and frankly never wanted to meet in the first place.

Meanwhile, these poor downtrodden and suffering 'refugees' are not only spurning the safe-havens they'd already reached (Turkey) but are throwing down, stamping on, and otherwise scorning any aid being doled out by Christian Red Cross volunteers at the various checkpoints these wonderful migrants, er, refugees are forcing their way through.

And yes, I'm worried this blog post, as obscure and barely read by even my own loved ones (FOX - CALL YOUR MOTHER!) is going to have the polis at the door in a few hours after publication. I've been scornful of Merkel (personally I think she's either got a very sinister agenda or she's gone completely insane and I'm hoping she's 'merely' insane rather than sinister but one never knows until it's too late, does one?), extremely scornful of fascist wanna-be Sturgeon, and none-too-complimentary about any of the leftie loons.

So, yeah, I'm going to be self-censoring in a self-preservationist way going forward. So's ya know. I've been doing it for a while now but will be far more serious going forward - the most controversial thing I'm going to blog about, when I bother to blog at all, will be my growing preference for HiyaHiya crochet hooks (and if you crochet and love aluminium hooks you REALLY have to try a HiyaHiya, they are AMAZING!).

Ah yes dear reader, I'm going to be boring all of you to the ground with my crochet blogging from now on. Politics, local and global current events...you won't be hearing about it from me!