Tag Archives: Yes we can

Classic Mug Shot

Posted on by
3
When we travel, my favorite souvenir is a coffee mug. I drink from my Amtrak mug and remember the trip on the Empire Builder. I sip from my lobster mug and remember Nova Scotia. Whenever I finish a major project, I like to pull out my “ducks in a row” mug to show that I do, indeed, have all my ducks in a row.
Here’s another mug, a historic mug, that I must have.
Remember when President Obama said, “I can’t go around with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead!”? When he released the long version because his short version wasn’t good enough for the conspiracy theorists, he told reporters that he didn’t have time for this “silliness”. He had more important things to do. A few days later, he announced that Osama bin Laden had been found and killed. Ahem.
To thumb my nose at those who still don’t understand that Hawaii is one of the United States, the Democrats have come up with the perfect mug.
We’re headed toward the midterm set of elections, and I still use this mug. I noticed a few around the campaign office in 2012, and I’m absolutely sure other progressive voters are still using theirs. It reminds me to assume nothing when it comes to other people’s knowledge – or lack thereof.
Disclaimer: I am active in progressive politics, including Organizing for America, but I was not paid or sponsored in any way for this post. This mug was too good to pass up.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

A New Team Name for Washington, D.C.?

Posted on by
1

I might just like La Petite’s suggestion the best. Keep the name, change the mascot to a potato.

But if the owner won’t put his money into spuds, he could try these suggestions, also from La Petite.

  •  Washington Lincolns — mascot, a stove pipe hat similar to the cheesehead
  • Washington Congress — Instead of practicing, they just stand and argue.
  • Washington Georges — white wig, false teeth, I can see it now!
  • Washington Minutemen — slogan, You musket to the end zone!

How about:

  • Washington Gridlock – along the same line as Congress, see above
  • Washington Eagles — oops, the Eagles are already taken. How about the turkeys?
  • George Washington Bridge – ooh, that’s closer to New Jersey gridlock than Washington
  • Washington Patriots — oh, wait, they’re already in Boston and call themselves New England.
  •  Washington Weebles — they wobble, but they don’t fall down!

Meanwhile, whatever will we eat when the Packers formerly known as Acme play the renamed football club?

Well, readers, what do you think?

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Fun With Unique Pots

Posted on by
Reply

The mainstream shops are getting the idea that people want to garden on their decks and porches and in small spaces. I bought a pair of strangely shaped pots designed to sit on a deck railing. At the moment, one holds a basil plant that was getting overpowered by the other three in the bigger pot. The other holds lemon basil seeds.

I came outside after a rainstorm to find standing water in the pot with the transplanted basil. The other one was wet, but not soggy. Chuck and his power drill came to the rescue.

Pot needs holes? No problem.

Pot needs holes? No problem.

We watched the excess water drain from the bottom. The basil looks much happier.

Unfortunately...

Unfortunately…

The railing showed its age and snapped. I moved the pots to another part of the deck; now we’ll just wait for Chuck to have time to replace the wood.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

The Kindness of Family

Posted on by
1

In the style of an old-fashioned neighborhood barn raising, my family dug holes and spread dirt and got sweaty and otherwise put themselves out so that I can play in the dirt again.

digging dandelions for bunny

digging dandelions for bunny food

Spreading soil and compost

Spreading soil and compost

In fact, it’s looking pretty darn good now. I filled one section with tomatoes already. Step by step, I’ll have a garden again.

And I’ll thank my family the best way I know how — with jars of the garden bounty, later on.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Cooking the Old Fashioned, Newfangled Way

Posted on by
1

I subscribe to the feed for a cooking blog called How to Cook Like Your Grandmother. The trend in kitchens has been swinging in this direction for a while, away from mixes and pre-made frozen foods, back into cooking from scratch. Once in a while, when I’m just not capable of cooking (for whatever reason) we’ll go back to the old frozen pizza. Most of the time, though, we make the effort to put something good on the table and into our bodies.

Chuck was exhausted from a weekend of travel. Amigo was happy and tired from a weekend of travel. I was a little better off, but not much, just ten days out from a very scary and exhausting hospital experience. I’m still scrubbing off the bandage marks.

To put supper on the table, Chuck went out to do a whirlwind grocery shopping trip. Bunny food, a few other necessities, and a fully cooked rotisserie chicken were on his list. Meanwhile, back at the O.K. Chorale, I grabbed some frozen corn (frozen last summer when it was fresh), a small container of frozen red and green peppers, and tossed all of this into the steamer to cook. Somehow, even as wrecked as we felt, we put a decent meal on for supper.

Afterwards, I took a few minutes to be inspired by How to Cook Like Your Grandmother, a post still sitting in my inbox. . Tired, but not willing to quit quite yet, I took the bones from the chicken, the veggie water from the steamer, and a couple pieces of onion and I made a chicken broth. I had to be in the kitchen making lunch for tomorrow, so I rationalized I might as well get a broth simmering while I worked.

It was worth it. The broth looked thick and tasty, I got my lunch packed and a couple of options onto Amigo’s shelf in the refrigerator, and then diced up a little lettuce and tomato for the next night’s tacos.

When I’m tired and running almost on empty, sometimes I make the best use of my time. When everything is said and done, I can relax and go to bed knowing I’ve put in a good effort to feed the family and we didn’t even need to resort to frozen pizza – yet.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Resilience

Posted on by
1

The term resilience came up in one of Erica Diamond’s posts on her blog, Women on the Fence. A guest blogger talked about her cancers – two bouts with two different cancers – and the strengths she discovered while fighting for her life.

The CEO of the company that oversees my teaching job is showing her resilience against cancer – also for the second time.

The first time I heard about resilience was in a training for teachers. We were learning about families with drug and alcohol problems, how to recognize the problems, and how to help the children get the help they needed. Our training showed that resilience comes in many forms and it can be developed and strengthened.

Resilience is a strength, the strength to hold on and survive. It’s more than recovering from influenza, although influenza can knock even the strongest person off her feet for a while. It’s more than getting through that last class for the advanced degree, although that certainly takes strength and endurance.

People who are resilient are not the ones who win all the time. Those folks on the top have strengths, too, but they haven’t been tested. Those who show resilience get tested and come up and out of the test stronger than before. And somehow, resilient people keep a sense of humor.

What doesn’t kill me may make me stronger, but even more than that, every time I find humor in a difficult situation, I win a small battle.

Readers, how do you show resilience? Where do you find strength when the going gets tough?

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

And More Awareness

Posted on by
2

Today’s political climate is scary in that so many seem to have forgotten the fights that have already been fought. Seeing so many attempts to return women to a marginalized group (I can’t bring myself to say “minority”) reminds me of a story from not-really-so-long ago. The original title was “Being a Woman”. Here it is, courtesy of Grandma Daisy. 

I almost posted a quiz – a list of feminist slogans and quotes along with a list of years, with an opportunity for readers to match the two. Instead, I offer you an chance to reminisce about creativity in the feminist movement. Remember the Barbie Liberation League? In the 1990s….Grandma Daisy does this sort of storytelling best, so here she is.

Oh, children, your world is different, thank goodness. I lived through a fascinating and yet difficult time we called the Women’s Movement, or Women’s Liberation, Women’s Lib for short. We reminded lawmakers and voters that we are people, endowed with basic human rights along with our, ahem, voluptuous figures. To put it bluntly, we didn’t need balls to make good decisions about …. oh, your mother is listening. I can’t say that in front of you young ones., so back to the history behind the story. We had rallies, we held demonstrations. We ran for office ourselves instead of waiting for men to take care of our needs. We worked to pass laws that protected our right to make health care decisions.We built awareness of the importance of birth control and how much that birth control meant for our freedom, our liberation. We fought for equal pay for equal work. Laws passed, medications improved, but attitudes were harder to change. 

Sometimes women got creative to make a point. The Barbie Liberation League was one such example. We females were determined to be good students and make it “cool” to be smart. Math and science were supposedly men’s territory, so girls had some catching up to do. Adult role models like teachers and nurses pushed us young ones to go farther, higher, faster into the world of advanced math and sciences. 

Barbie dolls. You know the doll, right? Of course. They’re at the bottom of your sister’s closet with the rubber ducky and the worn out blankie she won’t throw away. Barbie, the doll with the unrealistic figure (39-21-33 at 6 feet tall were the proportional measurements, if you’re into trivia) was a favorite of many young girls. Girls knew she wasn’t realistic, but some tried too hard to look like her and became anorexic. A doll for a role model? Well, it happens.

When the Talking Teen Barbie came out, she had a limited vocabulary. Unfortunately, the people who programmed and recorded Barbie’s phrases had been in a fog throughout the entire women’s movement. Take a look at these examples.

Will we ever have enough clothes?

I love shopping!

Math class is tough.

Wanna have a pizza party?

In the old toy store aisles, G.I. Joe was a parallel type of doll, er, action figure, on the little boy side. His vocabulary was macho and tough – what they called “all male” back then. 

This is going to be rough. Can you handle it?

I’ve got a tough assignment for you!

Mission accomplished. Good work, men!

The Barbie Liberation League took action. They bought Talking Barbie and Talking G.I. Joe from toy stores, swapped out the voice boxes, and then repackaged the dolls and returned them to the stores. Little boys and little girls got Barbies that said, “Vengeance is mine!” and G.I. Joes that suggested, “Let’s plan our dream wedding.” When Joe proclaimed “Math class is tough”, it sounded ludicrous.

Well, darlings, that was the point. If a man couldn’t say it without sounding idiotic, why should a woman repeat that phrase and internalize that philosophy? Talking Barbie wasn’t pulled off the market, but the feminists and the Barbie Liberation League had made their point. Being female didn’t mean being less intelligent. It still doesn’t. 

Anyway , my grand-precious ones, some day I’ll tell you what we did when the guys at our college claimed that women couldn’t play jazz. Hah! We showed them, all right. Now go practice your trombone, and I’ll tell you that story later. 

 

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

The Second in the series: Awareness Encores

Posted on by
1

This post originally aired about one year ago. Since then, the magic number of prevalence has become 1 in 67, up from 1 in 88.

It’s April, again. Autism Awareness Month. Now that autism numbers are estimated at 1 in 88, shouldn’t we already be aware? Shouldn’t we as a society be moving on?

Moving on beyond awareness means learning about each other, neurotypical or on the autism spectrum. Even under the old numbers of 1 in 166, the estimates indicated so many children and adults with autism that “normal” needed redefinition.

Awareness, people, is not enough. Awareness is a low form of knowledge, and knowledge itself sits down low at the base of the learning pyramid. Awareness means knowing that the student sitting next to your child in class might have autism. Knowledge and understanding come around when that child responds to gestures of friendship, perhaps awkwardly, yet making a step toward joining the social peer group in some way.

Awareness? Awareness means slapping a multi-colored puzzle-design ribbon magnet on the back of the family minivan. Understanding means that when the minivan next to yours at the red light is moving back and forth propelled by the rocking of the teenager in the front seat, you notice but don’t judge. You might offer an understanding smile to the driver if the opportunity comes up. By refraining from negative comments, a parent provides a role model for the rest of the minivan passengers.

The “R” word is also still active, unfortunately. The word Retarded hasn’t been in active use for educational professionals in decades, but it still turns up in verbal put-downs. Awareness means knowing the label Retarded is unacceptable. Knowledge and comprehension would show that anyone with limitations in learning faces enough challenges without getting their diagnosis tossed around as a playground insult.

I wore my “R” Word t-shirt on the appropriate day. That’s my awareness activity. To bring it to a higher level, I vow to stop and comment when I hear the word used: stop and educate those who would otherwise redefine a person in narrow boxes.

Now it’s time to take Autism Awareness to a higher level, too.

 

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

The Awareness Series: let’s move on, already.

Posted on by
3

From fall of 2012 — I still feel this way. The first in a three- day series, Awareness Encores.

Breast Cancer Awareness is all over the networks – at least it’s all over ESPN, NFL Network, NBC, CBS, and Fox Sports. Guess it yet? The NFL is blowing the horn to the tune of Pink – massive pinkness in the most macho of arenas.

Pink Gatorade towels. Pink shoe covers. Pink wristbands. Pink cleats, chin straps, and ribbon decals. Pink whistles for the (real) referees, for heaven’s sake. And why?

The purpose of all this pink on the turf is supposed to make all NFL football fans think about breast cancer. Be Aware. Know it’s there.

I can’t help it. My inner cynic is screaming “Enough with the pinky dances already!” My inner cynic, for those who don’t know, is very tuned in to breast cancer in the realm of early detection through mammograms. I’m more than aware of radiation studies, chemo, reconstruction – you name it, friends and family in real life have lived it. Yes, Mom, my latest mammogram was once again normal.

Before readers denounce me as a Bah Humbug, my inner cynic must look into its own wardrobe for two (at least two) pink t-shirts designed by an art teacher who was raising money for the Avon Walk in Chicago. I also own a pink polo shirt with the Green Bay Packers logo on it and the famous pink Packers baseball cap pioneered by Deanna Favre. Both of these items sold out quickly, and not just for Deanna. We still liked Brett back then, but we who bought pink knew a significant portion of our purchase money would go toward breast cancer research.

Well, readers, you might recognize my tone already. I have contributed to breast cancer research through purchases of t-shirts, baseball caps, and just simply by donating to sponsor my amazing friends who walked the walks. So why, why would I complain about the wealthy NFL putting its pink on parade to bring attention to breast cancer for Breast Cancer Awareness?

I complain because awareness is the lowest form of knowledge. Awareness means we know it exists. Awareness means, hey, look at that guy, he’s man enough to put on pink wristbands. This pink thing must be important. What does the pink stand for again?

Awareness doesn’t mean understanding, public support, private support, or personal support. The biggest anticlimax is that all that pink doesn’t mean financial support.

I’ll pose a few questions.

The NFL plans to auction off pink gear to raise money. How much will they raise? How much do they hope to sell? What percentage of the proceeds will actually become donations? And to whom will those donations go?

How much did Gatorade spend on those towels? I’d venture a guess that it could have funded many mammograms for women who don’t have medical coverage. Those dollars might have made up for some of the bucks that Susan B. Komen foundation tried to pull from Planned Parenthood – money that funded just that.

How about those pink whistles? Cute, huh? Cute, however, doesn’t pay the bills when a woman is recuperating from reconstructive surgery. Putting the bucks directly into a fund for follow-up care would go much further than the whistle-stop campaign.

The hot pink shoes, wow, they really show up well on TV hoofin’ their way toward the end zone or during a dramatic kickoff or punt return. But again, at what cost? How much good could that money do if it were used for research toward saving lives?

Okay, NFL, you know I’m a fan. I’m a true blue green and gold cheesehead shareholder type. I’ll keep watching games, pink or no pink. The token pink, though, still irritates me.

Let’s see the teams and their officials and their coaching staff wear the regular colors and have the organization instead make a more-than-token donation to breast cancer research. Maybe when public groups like football teams move beyond the pink ribbons and towels we as a society can admit that research and treatment will gain more from a sizable infusion of cash than from muscular young men sporting hot pink shoelaces.

Until then, maybe I’ll stick to listening to my beloved Packers on the radio for the rest of October.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Intellectually Vulnerable

Posted on by
1

Intellectually Vulnerable — I saw the term on Facebook, of all places. The complete phrase read, “…trying to sell his snake oil to the intellectually vulnerable.” Intellectual snake oil — that’s another interesting term, combining the two in the sentence.

Snake oil, according to Merriam-Webster, is “any of various substances or mixtures sold as medicine usually without regard to their medical worth or properties.” A vulnerable buyer might pay for this snake oil and get stuck with a worthless product.

The snake oil on the market today doesn’t come in a bottle. Today’s snake oil is more a collection of misinformation, often talk with no action or talk that has no basis in fact.

Back to Merriam-Webster. Intellectual snake oil, ideas without merit, sound wonderful because they sound simple. The vulnerable might think, “Yeah! I like this! It’ll solve all the world’s ills in one shot!” But no. Nothing is ever that simple. And those that are vulnerable might also be those that are hurt by the simplistic faux solution.

Where is this heading? Tuesday, it’s headed to the polls – at least I am. We have a school board to elect and a new City Council member for our ward, too. I can’t quite bring myself to use the term “alderperson.” It sounds so impersonal.

I think I’ll make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m NOT intellectually vulnerable; and I vote!”

Share and Enjoy !

Shares