Dear President Trump,

It’s been a fairly odd day so far today, but even still I don’t have much to report. It rained again all morning and after the rain showers let up the mountains stayed hidden behind a thick bank of clouds so there wasn’t a reprise of yesterday’s majestic mountain show. On the bright side, though, when I was driving home from work I saw two very large hawks and one huge eagle, which makes a total of five hawk- and three eagle-sightings in the last week. I tend to make Laura nervous when I see hawks and eagles when I’m driving, but she wasn’t with me for any of these sightings and I think I did pretty well not scaring anyone. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but I find seeing these big birds somehow comforting, like the world is not as far gone as I often worry it is.

Today is actually a day off from work so having gone into work for a couple of hours is part of why the day has felt so odd. I had a couple of time sensitive things that came up after I’d left for vacation and since there wasn’t much going on at home I just decided to buckle down and take care of them. Maybe the universe was giving me a little reinforcement for being a good thing with the hawks and the eagle.

Looks like you officially have the day off too, or at least that you have no official anythings scheduled. Are you hanging out at Mar-a-Lago for the duration, maybe trying to tick the charges for those golf trip bills up past the $120,000,000 mark? I thought you were within striking distance of that amount since I saw the figure $118,000,000 somewhere not too long ago, but I just found a website devoted to tracking your visits to various Trump golf venues and it’s up to date through yesterday with the grand total tagged at “just” $115,000,000 (https://trumpgolfcount.com/) so even you probably can’t rack up $5,000,000 in charges in just a few days. Please don’t attempt to prove me wrong on that one.

The other odd-day thing today is that a huge chunk of Northeast Seattle lost power for an hour this afternoon. Fortunately it was still daylight and the sun came out for a nanosecond during that time so it wasn’t too bad. We just didn’t know how long it was going to last and since the power company had only a vague message posted saying that they were investigating the reason for the blackout, I was busily trying to figure out make-do dinner options and how to get a letter off to you. As it is, the power is back on, the clocks reset, and everything is back on track, including Laura’s access to Twitter. In addition to some whacky stuff about how a “neural net” computer finishes Christmas carols very, very strangely, she read to me about your sleaze-oid machinations in Argentina where you dropped the tariffs against them while they were considering your trademark applications and then put the tariffs back in effect after they granted you the trademarks. If you stooped any lower, you’d be eating tarmac.

Ok, since I clearly have nothing much to say today, I’m going to stop after the usual blessing.

May we be safe from twisted sleazes.
May we be willing to track POTUS’s big and (relatively) small transgressions.
May we be healthy and strong through the holidays.
May our lives unfold peacefully.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson