Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers lays (sic.) on the field during the second half of an NFL divisional playoff game against the New York Giants Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012, in Green Bay. The Giants won 37-20.

And I just don’t feel that good. I tried 10 minutes of yoga rest – Savasana – prone yoga, on the rug I keep next to my stand-up computer terminal, though I supported my head and kept my knees up – and I think that helped.

It’s tempting to sit down and read the apps, but I think I’ll try to stay upright and grade a bit before collapsing into my chair. Of course, I’d rather be writing about food, but as Tim at Lottie + Doof just pointed out, food writing seems a little superficial at the moment. And they’re with us in Wisconsin, too -

Messy desk with chair, applications, water, coffee cups, peanut butter

Click for the full size image

My iPhone picture of one of the tractor drivers taking his own iPhone pictures – video of the crowd

John’s online polaroids of the crowd

On Tuesday I made a chicken & zucchini casserole, from my Pittsburgh community garden cookbook – the Great Tomato Patch cookbook that of course is on WorldCat because Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh cataloged it. It’s one of those recipes that I made-from-scratch-ified, using mushroom sauce in place of a can of cream of mushroom soup, and home made croutons in place of stuffing mix.

Chicken zucchini casserole that I ate for early dinner at 4:30 on the night I had to stay at work till 8:00 p.m.

On Wednesday I cooked the 1/2 pound Snug Haven spinach I’d bought at the previous Saturday market, in garlic butter and threw in some leftover gnocchi and a couple of mushrooms that didn’t go into the sauce for the casserole.

Spinach with gnocchi and mushrooms

Now I’m home on a break from the protests – I was downtown at 8:00 to help serve the farmers’ market breakfast. Mark came down to meet me, and we went up to the square in time for the tractorcade, then we massed with the librarians outside the central library, and marched around once. I gave all my cookies away, and then my foot started hurting, and I felt like I just had to take a break. So we brought the car home, and the spinach-gnocchi mix made a pretty good omelette. I’m starting to feel like I have the strength to look up bus times and head back down there. The crowd is supposed to peak at 3:00.

My protest rig - oatmeal carton drum & drum stick & sign

I made cookies again, oatmeal raison, and I added chocolate chips, using the recipe from under the lid of the box of Quaker Quick Oats that I inherited from Al when he moved apartments last fall. It’s the recipe their Grandma (dad’s mom) used to use, and I borrowed a trick from her, loaded all the cookies back into the empty oatmeal carton, and took it to the Capitol with me.  I grabbed a beat up drumstick from the basement (two kids played drums, plus even though John plays guitar, his band used to practice here), and after I gave away the cookies I had a drum. The cookies came out a little flat, especially the first two trays, baked before the oatmeal had a chance to soak up – note  to self – chill this dough before baking.

We missed the big name speakers, and the local disco band, but we saw a lot of musicians we know – it was International Fest at Overture, and they were all running back & forth from indoor gigs to outdoor protest.

I heard Michael Moore on the radio this morning, and he had a tailored-to-WI version of the three big lies, you know, the ones that usually start with “the check is in the mail” and include things like “you can’t get pregnant from this”.

Michael Moore’s three big lies for the WI protests:

1. Wisconsin is broke
2. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
3. The Packers need Favre to win the superbowl

Yeah!!

R.E.M, January 2011

So I took the bus from work to Trader Schmoes, and bought a bottle of wine, wanting to have a nice drink after work with snacks. And ended up coming back with salami and cheese and nuts to go with the good bread I made, pondering the eternal question, why does Trader Schmoes, snack central, have only crap olives?

Mark decided to walk for coffee, leaving me to read the New Yorker with my appetizer course – and hey, we (Wisconsin) are Talk of the Town this week.

Madison in the New Yorker

Look, there’s a Union Cab logo on the fridge way in the background.

Sarah Palin look-alike at the Feb. 19 rally

From my most politically savvy friends -

Heike posted this joke to from the Capitol last night:

A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”

Steve posted this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op ed, “You heard it here first: Tax the rich and solve budget shortfall – JSOnline”, by Marc V. Levine, professor of history, economic development, and urban studies at UWM, and founding director of the university’s Center for Economic Development.

Says it all.

And I think this view of the Sarah Palin double was taken by Andy Kraushaar.

two weeks of protests in the state capital hadn’t swayed his resolve to eliminate most collective bargaining rights for most public employees.

Last week, I was thinking that the stuff I was reading in the straight press was starting to sound like the Onion. But today, there’s a NYT Op Ed by Frank Rich, that lays out the Republican conspiracy in no uncertain terms. It is so NOT about the money – or at least it not about the negligible amount of money that would be saved with Walker’s so-called budget repair bill. This whole thing is about making the rich richer, and deregulating and privatizing everything.

I have to believe it has to be at least in part because so much of this is getting outed on facebook – there were only about 12 of us in the whole country who read the article in the New Yorker about the Koch brothers – probably I should post it to my profile, right now.

Speaking of which, time to head downtown to march at the Capitol.

Ne plus ultra stainless steel beaucoup $$ dish drainer

One of the first things I did when I moved to Wisconsin in August of 1977 was go walk the picket line at Madison Newspapers, Inc., where the printers were on strike, and the editorial union, the writers, went out in support. The technology changed and the company didn’t give the workers a chance to retrain, they just laid them off. Like many labor issues, it was complicated – the Madison paper got bought by a bigger company; the unions never shut the paper down completely – in the end the strike was a failure, the unions were de-certified 5 years later, and technology has marched on.

For a long time, I’ve been pretty dis-enchanted with unions, feeling like their glory days were over, along with the manufacturing industries in the US. I gravitated to co-ops, because it seemed like a better business model. But I am a public employee, as instructional staff at University of Wisconsin, I’m not represented by a union, but there are various governing bodies like the Academic Staff Assembly, and associations, like MASA, that represent me.

It’s restored my faith in unions to watch what’s happening here at the State Capitol – this article loads slow because of all the comments, which devolve into people calling each other trolls.

It’s not the money – it’s the bargaining rights. If Gov. Walker’s “budget repair” bill passes, my paycheck will go down by about $350 per month – I’ll be paying $208 for my health insurance – I really don’t mind that – and putting $258 into the Wisconsin Retirement System. I mind that more. So far, the WI retirement fund has been well-managed but I just know Walker’s gonna fuck around with that money. Plus, I already put money into my own TIAA-CREF, and it’s a better investment – so why should I be forced to invest in WRS, too? Isn’t it like the horrible “Obamacare” deal the Republicans have been whining about – if they don’t like the idea of being forced to buy health insurance, why should I be forced to pay into retirement, especially if that money’s not going to be there when I retire? And, that extra $350 will come off my taxable income (or at least the $208 for health insurance will) so I’ll be paying less taxes – I’m not a financial genius, but I thought taxes are a government’s best way to raise revenue – so seems to me that reducing my taxable income is NOT in the state’s best interest.

I took 6 dozen cookies down on Saturday, when the Tea Party was there, and handed them out in about 17 minutes. I thought since the Fox News was calling us thugs, what could be more UN-thug like than a 55-year-old librarian with a bag of cookies. And all I saw was politeness, and funny signs – even the Madison police department thanked us. Much more civil than the comments on the news articles. My favorite, that I didn’t get a picture of, was a Walker supporter’s sign that read “Runaway Dems, Your Fired” and nearby, “Free Spell Check for Tea Party Signs”.