Hey, Vancouver, Was That Really Necessary?

    Watched a little of the Stanley Cup final last night. Congrats to both sides on a well-played game. Unfortunately, someone had to lose, and in this case, it was Vancouver. Boston won.
    The disappointing part: rioting. In Vancouver of all places. I woke to reports of smashed windows and overturned cars. Why? Because the Canucks lost. Not because of some lamebrained social policy or a tax increase, but losing a hockey game.
    It garnered attention. I flipped around at the top of the hour. The damage was serious enough that the story bumped Rep. Weiner's porn star friend a couple of notches down the pecking order. And this was over a hockey game.
    Yes, it's a bitter disappointment. But can you imagine what would happen if they'd put that energy towards protesting something more life changing?

Saffire, Karma, and Elizabeth Edwards

      Hee, hee, hee. Are you acquainted with Saffire? A/K/A The Uppity Blueswomen? You should be. They told a lot of truth for a lot of women in their 25 year run. My favorite song? (readers with delicate sensibilities, plug your ears) "Bitch With a Bad Attitude." ("I'm turning you into the IRS; I'm telling the cops where you keep your stash.") It gets played once a year on my NPR station's Mutha's Day blues special (the day before Mothers' Day).
      Hee, hee, hee. You know about Karma, right? As TV sage Earl Hickey put it, "Do bad things, and bad things happen. Do good things, and good things happen."
     Hee, hee, hee. And you know about Elizabeth Edwards, wife of ex-senator John Edwards? The one who passed in December? The one whose final days were an example of grace under fire between her life-altering illness and finding out that the former Senator Edwards had started a relationship with a staffer while she was undergoing treatment for cancer? And had a baby with the staffer? And lied through his teeth about it? And faces a trial for having misused campaign funds to hide his mistress and child?
    Well, one of Elizabeth's loose ends that she was able to tie up before her departure was this  video telling everything that she knew. Her friends have handed it over to prosecutors.
    Hee, hee, hee.

Congratulations, You're a Boy!

    Maude Almighty, here we go again.
    Go to your favorite search engine and enter Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) lewd pics.
    With all due respect, Rep. Weiner, you don't post pics like that in an online album. What made you think that you wouldn't get hacked as you claimed?  You don't send pics like that. You just don't.
     MS in psych aside, I will never understand what goes through the heads of people who feel compelled to take pics of themselves and send them out. It's the high tech version of flashing, nothing more or less. Get kicks from it? As long as both parties are of age and concent,  that's your problem. But sending pictures of your boy parts or girl parts to an unsuspecting recipient is just plain creepy.
     Unemployment, floods, and the fire about to take out the border regions between New Mexico and Arizona. Ok. Rep Weiner, put it away now so that we can focus on these, please.

Tuesday Thoughts

   Trying not to get sucked into the hype over the Casey Anthony trial. You know, the one in Florida with the mother who didn't call 911 for a month when her daughter disappeared? With the defense lawyer who's trying to blame Casey's father and saying that the kid drowned in the swimming pool? Puh-leeze.....

    Nondescript Memorial Day here. I want to remember my mother at the piano, my father in the kitchen, and my three grandparents drinking egg nog. I don't visit graves. They're all at a considerable distance. We went out to lunch, The Spouse played with his tractor, and Oakley and I played fetch. I'd rather have people remember me by staying in the moment and enjoying life. I also have directed a friend who's a retired lawyer to have John Prine's "Please Don't Bury Me" played at the after party thrown by the people who knew me best.

    So. What do I want for lunch today? I'm craving peanut butter. I have some lovely Kashi microwavable meals. Oakley will have kibble and a little yogurt. He's doubled in weight since he came home in February.

    Life goes on.

     

Random Rainy Sunday Thoughts

    If a cat always lands on her feet, and toast always lands buttered side down, what happens if you butter a cat?
    Just had a green sky t-storm pass through. Why we weren't on the t-storm warning I'll never know.
    Oakley's going to be nine months old tomorrow. Brittany and Beagle. And Lab and Great Pyr. Let's call him an Aquataine hound and have done with it. The cute, it makes me squee, likely adult weight of 70 pounds or not.
    Feeling the time warp. I go to Meijer's, a Michigan-based chain where we did most of our shopping when I was a kid. Timelessness. Am I in my teens, am I in college, am I somewhere in the jungle of mid-life? It all blends together as I look at t-shirts.
    Trying to convince The Spouse that Oakley wants a cat for his birthday. Pet ownership would teach him responsibility. The Spouse gives me The Look.
     Let's do this: Palin and Bachmann in '12. We'd have a few years of chaos, but it would get better from there. Our foremothers fought for them? Lady have mercy on us.

Life Happens

  So I'm poking in my notifications on Facebook this morning. Mrs. R. had laser surgery on her eye yesterday. She's doing well, joking about the beams coming out of her butt. LOL. Get to a comment from someone saying that they're praying for her.  In her response, she told him that was kind of him, but that her daughter in law, S. needs the prayers.

    Uh, oh.

    Mrs. R's son J and I have known each other since we were in kindergarten. She and my mom were the PTA at our elementary school. We'd recently reconnected through the mixed blessing of Facebook. That was the good news. I clicked over to his page. The bad news: his wife S. had been diagnosed with cancer about 18 months ago. She'd been doing a great job of living with it until the last week. Suddenly, she started sleeping 20 hours a day. Hospice has been called in. Maybe, maybe a month, but no one is holding their breath. 

    I just lost it. For S's impending departure and not getting to know her better; for J and his agony and the weight of single parenthood getting ready to land on his shoulders; for their three daughters at the ages where a girl needs her mom to explain the intricacies of womanhood. 

     S is the same age as my own mother was when she went on to the next world, somewhere around the 50 mark. A very different set of circumstances: my mom's heart could no longer bear the weight of her sorrows and just broke. J and family have known that S's crossing was a real possibility for a long time. No easier, though, when it actually happens.

     Longterm, all will be well. Mrs. R and a cadre of other friends' moms stepped up and did what they could to fill the bleeding gap. The girls have her for their grandma, and two standup aunts in J's sisters. J has a wide support net, one big enough to keep him from falling as he walks the valley of his grief for his soul mate. It will take time, but there comes the day when you realize that you're still here and still breathing and that life has been going on and the time to go along with it has arrived.

    So for now we wait. We lift prayers for the best, we light candles for a peaceful leavetaking. Cruelly ironic that this happens the weekend when so much blossoms into the full swing of life. 

    But all seasons change, and some more unexpectedly than others. It it what it is, life happening as it does on its own terms. 

      

       

Nine Days and Counting, or Not

    Oakley and I found a new-to-us trail at a local forest preserve. It's the right length for an eight month old puppy to drag walk his guardian and be relatively calm afterwards. In between pulling sticks and dandelions from his jaws rested moments of unity with the natural world, moments of eye contact with does, the scent of pines warmed by the sun, the soft haze in the sky.
    Home again. Checked Facebook, and saw several links to stories about the new date of the end of the world, May 21, 2011. At least that's how the people at a small fundamentalist radio network see it.
     I hate to tell them this, but Jesus was supposed to return when I was in college. Living some 20 miles from a military base with nukes makes it a bit easier to believe, and when one of your roommates goes to a church into prophesies, well, at the least it makes you wonder.
     Wonder I did, indeed. We had Reagan baiting the then USSR, throwing Cold War rhetoric over the fence like so many Molitov cocktails. At the time, I first thought, "screw school; if I die, I'm dying by the lake." I still got through with a B average. And got mixed up with a manipulative, needy, emotionally abusive piece of work because I was so scared of dying without a man in my life. And went for a time to a church in the denomination of my childhood with a pastor who was kinky for end-of-time theology.
   The Spouse is of a very different religious background than me. The pastor acted as if I had become engaged to a child molester or worse when I asked if he'd be willing to perform the service. I knew that my leave taking from conventional religion had arrived.
    It's taken a lot of time to undo the damage and not have a cold thread of dread crawl through me when natural disasters or wars break out. One of my Facebook comrades observed that the people who believe in this prophecy must be pretty miserable if they want to just walk away from everything, or get swept up by a greater force.
     How much damage is being done by this escape hatch fantasy? Not just in terms of giving up on life on this side, but to relationships?
     I know that there are two people out there whom I hurt deeply by getting involved with the above-mentioned piece of work, and "I'm sorry" doesn't begin to cover it.
    Time and nature are the great healers, for me, anyway. After spring will come summer, et al. And then the ball will keep rolling along.