Bush is scheduled to give his State of the Union address on Tuesday. I doubt if I’ll watch him. I don’t need any more reminders of how disillusioned I am by life on all levels these days.

I can’t even get the Sunday edition of my local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, delivered the way it should be. It took me seven phone calls and six weeks to have them get the Sunday paper here the first time. And they still haven’t put up one of those tubes for newspapers delivered to rural customers. They leave the paper on the side of the road in a plastic bag. I’ll make phone call number eight tomorrow and give them one more week to get the tube up. Otherwise I won’t renew my subscription.

There’s a commentary by a local resident in the paper today, however, that deserves mention because he quotes the words of General Dwight D. Eisenhower 45 years ago as he was ending his term as President of the United States.:

‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this … endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. …

Today … the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. … and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Whatever happened to that kind of moral Republican leader??

And here, on the home front, she washes paper plates, folds up sheets of paper towels and makes neat piles of them in her dresser drawer, keeps wanting to dance, takes out her hats (of which she has boxes) and reorganizes them. She needs something to do, something she can do. I ordered a “pencil by number” kit of flowers and hope that she might occupy herselp with “coloring.” We can hang up what she finishes on the porch.

I’ve been giving her iron and B-12 pills, and she seems to be stronger physically, even though she still sleeps away half the day. What the hell, she has nothing more interesting to do.

This week I will get a massage and a hair cut — not from the same person, of course.

I sit by my window and wait for a sunny day.