Omigod

I'm probably the last to hear there is a swell of support building for Dick Cheney as a presidential candidate in the next election. If this isn't the strongest possible indicator of the lack of intelligence AND common sense of our vast right wing population, I don't know what is. If this is even a vague possibility, I am ashamed to claim my nationality as an American.

This is a man who has no interest in the plight or interests of Americans, and admits it. This is a man who was busy building up pointless and futile war activity for the last eight years and literally breaking the bank which magically caught up with us immediately upon his leaving office. Meanwhile, he made millions (if not more) off the government contracts with Halliburton, in which he has a major financial interest. But of course, THAT wasn't a conflict of interest. The guy lives in a flack vest where literally everything bounces off, including accountability, guilt and conscience.

If the educated, sane segment of the American population doesn't have the balls to stave off this kind of activity, or equally bad some aspect of a Palin/Cheney ticket, this country will deserve what it gets and I will truly HATE living here.

Don't Rain On My Parade

Thanksgiving means different things to different people. I look around my neighborhood and know for some it is just another day like any other. I drive by the mission on Grand Avenue and know there is line of hopefuls believing they will get something better than soup handed to them today. Then I see houses down the street where there are 10-12 cars bringing extended family together. The latter will be similar to my version of this holiday.

People frequently talk about the excess of food and drink that occurs on this particular holiday. They also talk about the eternal football games that are the perfect backdrop for naps after the gluttony of dinner. However, slowly but surely parades are beginning to grow in popularity. I don't know, they represent times of innocence to me, like "Miracle on 34th Street" when the right to believe in Santa Claus was the hot topic. They aren't video games, they aren't computer applications, they aren't boob tube programs, they are old-fashioned events where people walk for miles to entertain the crowds. Yes, most of us only see them on tv, but you catch my drift.

I've decided not to indulge myself in the Black Friday mahem that tomorrow will bring. If I don't have to work, why in the world would I want to get up at the crack of dawn? Maybe when I'm retired (I'm saying that alot these days) but not when sleep is so precious. It's almost like that's when my real life will begin...I hope.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

I could just as easily have called this post, "Accountability" but I think the word is over-used, not the concept mind you, only that particular word. It seems like as tension increases, stress increases, money gets tight, people lose their jobs and bank balances decline, most if not all people are busy trying to figure out who to blame. Because it sure as heck can't be their fault, right? They didn't vote for the last president (twice), and they didn't invest their 401(k) balances in the most risky funds, and they never overspent their budget or overcommitted their income so one of their predicaments could be their fault.

Parts of their bodies may atrophy over time, as they spend more and more time sitting at a computer or in front of the "boob" tube or video games, but it will never be the case with their index fingers because they are way too busy pointing them at others.

And not only are they busy pointing their fingers away from themselves, but people become defensive if you even begin to mention the fact that some of their issues were self-actualized. I call it defensive to the death. They will go to great lengths to prove they weren't wrong, but that everyone else was.

These same people are so closed-minded that there is no viable way you can explain reality to them, their reality truly is that they are always right and the rest of the world is simply out to get them. They have a true victim-mentality with a capital "V".

Personally, I can't imagine being perfect. In fact if I think back, I can't think of a single day when I haven't made a mistake, in fact usually more than one. It may have been in the form of turning the wrong way on a street, getting in the wrong line at the grocery store, paying too much for something, giving the wrong answer to someone, missing a deadline, being late for a meeting, you name it, I've done it and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

The thing that really amazes me about all this is that it's quite liberating to admit you're wrong. It's almost like you can't move on until you do. Just imagine having all those unaddressed mistakes piling up in your subconscious until you eventually lose your mind (or your cool at a minimum), with the pure weight of them. Fortunately I'll never lose my mind for that reason, although I'm certain I can find others.

Life is a Drag

I remember when this comment was the "in" thing to say but I was never really sure what it meant. Right now though with everything going on, I think I finally get it. Between work and work and oh yea, work, it's a real drag. The closer I get to seeing hundreds of people retire, the draggier it gets.

I was just counting how many weekends there are until Christmas, yikes! Not nearly enough would be the answer. It's like time has become quicksand and I'm having trouble staying on my feet. I'm starting to sound like a hopeless case, I'm not, I just need to get one of my numerous projects "across the goal line", to reuse an overused metaphor. Too many things started but not finished drives me bananas.

So, of course, I need to get to one of the many.

On My Own & Loving It

The house is quiet, I can play whatever tv show or movie I want, I can eat or not when I want, I can not get dressed all day, I can do the laundry when I want, I can workout when I want. Hm, there seem to be alot of "I wants" here.

I guess that wraps it up! At least for the next two days.

Getting To Know You

Have you ever simply sat with a friend and gone through pictures representing the last 30 years of their lives? I just did that with a friend I only get to see about once a year and I feel like I know her so much better as a result. See, it is worthwhile to take all those photos and organize them in such a way that you can still remember 30 years later where you were and why. In the space of two hours we traveled to Italy/Tuscany, Greece, Spain, The Baltic Countries and in various Oregon places. It was a great evening.

Just ask Deborah Kerr, she recommended this kind of evening musically about 50 years ago.

Berlin Wall = Epiphany

One evening in 1967 when I was 16, I remember watching Walter Cronkite CBS news when he shared a story of a 16 year old boy who had tried that day to escape from East Germany (Communist) to West Germany (Democracy) by crawling under the barbed wire fence. You see, in some places along the border between the two countries, the wall was composed of barbed wire. That was how the Germans lived, with that obvious division of their country.

Unfortunately, he was spotted by one or more of the East German guards who promptly shot him when he was halfway across. But of course, they didn't kill him. So he laid there crying out for help while bystanders (whoever they were) stood by and watched him slowly bleed to death, knowing they would end up in the same condition if they tried to help him.

As I listened to Cronkite relay this story, I was immediately transported to that field where I could feel the grass under my body and the barbed wire above me, grabbing at my clothes, slowing me up. He was my age and now he was dead. This story hit me really hard, I was crying and I was very vocal about how I felt saying to the room at large, "The world is going to hell (you need to understand my parent's had a no-swearing-allowed home)."

My dad immediately proceeded to yell at me, saying I didn't know what I was talking about and I had no business talking like that. He tried to shut me up while insisting I believe his particular version of the establishment's dogma (that's how we thought back then). Well, I was having none of it then and am having none of it now. We fought pretty much every night about whatever I said, if he said, "Black", I said "White", that's just the kind of dysfunctional relationship we had.

This morning when I heard my husband say it was the 20th anniversary of Berlin Wall being destroyed, today (this is where the epiphany comes in) I realized that single event had been the turning point for me in becoming my own person. From that point on I believed what I believed and followed my own heart. In fact, I would go so far as to say if my parents supported something (like Nixon for President) my views would be at the opposite end of the spectrum and still are. I realized that as an American I was getting fed just as much propaganda as any communist country and wasn't going to sit back and accept that.

So why didn't our history books cover our disgusting and unforgiveable treatment of non-Caucasian races like the Japanese internment camps for instance, why didn't our history lessons cover our complete and total annihilation of Native Americans, why didn't our history professors admit that our form of democracy wasn't "invented" by our forefathers but instead they pirated the same approach to government that was used by those same Native Americans who had been living here for countless years before we intruded upon their territory. The list goes on and on. Are kids today being told the whole truth, in all it's garish ugliness?

I watch so many of the young people of today sit back and accept whatever pablum they're given by the press and/or their religious leaders. Bad things come to those who meekly accept and don't question. Bad things that can take all sorts of forms. I hope I'm wrong and there's more backbone out there than is obvious.

Scrapped Memories

I'm in the midst of capturing 4"x 6" snaps of all the countries crowded around the Baltic Sea as viewed last August. I keep telling myself I shouldn't make up these books full of photos and associated memorabilia, instead I should keep it all on a disc. However, the fact of the matter is, it's no fun to sit at the laptop and look at photographs with no accompanying captions or touristy books or postcards purchased at that site. I seem to need to be able to have this pictorial representation or all is not right with the world.

There are really only two problems with this approach. One is that I'm completely out of room to store them. The second is that it takes me a month of Sundays to get them done. I suppose the cost of all the stuff should be thrown in there somewhere but that's a distant third. The really irritating part of this is everytime I buy a scrapbook and then try to purchase additional pages for it, the scrapbook companies pull this crap on you and flip back and forth between two and three-hole punched versions. This of course means that I'm sitting here with a book now and no refill pages to complete it. As Lucy would say, "Agh!"

It won't be that many years before I'll be unable to take these great vacations. I figure at that point I'll have these beautiful books to pull into my lap and let them take me back to the high points of these special trips of a lifetime.

So, it's back to the scrapbook grind, to try to make a little more progress.

Is It Fraud or Just F**k the Consumer

So, I get a voice mail from my mail order pharmacy telling me there's a problem with my credit card (Chase). This has happened a number of times before when their fraud unit decided the amount or nature of the purchase being requested was "out of the ordinary" and they insisted they had to talk to me before they would let it process. This has been a pain in the you-know- where each time and I've done everything I could do to give them comfort that these purchases are all mine.

In this case, I gave this credit card information to my mail order pharmacy at the beginning of the year (when I was stupid enough to enroll in the HSA Plan). They send my prescriptions every 90 days or so, which means they have used this same card each time. Well, sure enough last Friday I got another one of these calls on a prescription that I'm now out of (requested it a week ago) and this delayed it even more.

So this morning I got up an hour early to try to go into work early but ended up on the phone between the pharmacy and the credit card company during the entire stinking "extra" hour.

I ended up just giving the pharmacy another credit card number. When I called the customer service number on the back of the credit card it immediately routed to their Fraud unit and I was immediately suspicious. The lady who finally answered informed me that someone had told them that my card had been compromised so the account had to immediately be closed and any charges that came in on it were denied. Hence the pharmacy's experience and apparently there was another charge where the same thing happened but I haven't figured out yet what charge that was.

My boiling point had now been reached when I said, "So when were you going to tell me about this?" She fumbled around for a minute then said, "Oh there is a letter in the mail." I said, "And in the meantime, I look like I don't pay my bills as I blissfully use a card that YOU have closed without notifying me." I said, "So who reported this fraud because it wasn't me?" Of course, she couldn't tell me that, only that it might have been any one of a number of people or groups.

Then she says, "New cards for a new account will be issued to you." I said, "No, they won't." "I now have to figure out all the vendors I need to notify that this account number is closed and I guarantee once I've done that, I will not be using it again." Then she says, "Oh, we don't want you to close your account over this." I said, "Too bad, I just went through a similar nightmare with this a year ago when my bank closed my checking account (one of 500,000 accounts who experienced the same thing) without any notice to me and I had charges bouncing all over the place." (In that case it was 2 1/2 weeks before I even got "the letter".) "I WILL NOT GO THROUGH THAT AGAIN!"

Can I just say, "I HATE BANKS!"

Short But Sweet

Maybe I should have called this "Misconceptions" instead but I only have two things to say. First, who would have ever thought just listening to two pro basketball players could make me cry? Well, when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson talked about their close friendship that's exactly what happened. Apparently they have co-written a book to tell those who are interested about their shared basketball experience.


I don't know that I'll read the book but their story on Sunday Morning moved me to the point of tears, especially when Magic himself cried.


I'm reading a different book now about why the pyramids were built. It doesn't matter where the ancient edifices are located, it appears in this book like they were all built for the same reason: to produce energy. I'm just barely into the first 20 pages of the book but if this is indeed the case, your next question should be , how did all these different people on continents thousands of miles away from each other in different centuries know to do this?


It's an intriguing thought that I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to answer. Although, we are able to determine many more ancient facts now than we could 20 years ago. I would imagine in another 10 or 20 years there will be new discoveries that would boggle my mind if I knew of them today.