Beginning to Do My Part

It's been a long time since I've written a letter to an elected official.  I live in a state where all the elected officials think entirely differently than I do, so I've told myself there's no use in communicating.

However, a recent news item changed my mind.  The more I think about it, it's my duty as a citizen to speak up even if I think they will disagree.

After the Moore, Oklahoma, tornado one of our senators was interviewed about the possibility of having safe rooms built in schools.  He said safe rooms can collapse.

This worried me.  So I researched it.  It seems there's a project run by the University of Texas that tests safe rooms and checks on safe rooms after tornados.  They checked all the safe rooms in Moore and none of them collapsed.

So I'm going to write my senator and ask him if he will also check the truth of his statement and if he finds he was incorrect, make a public statement to that effect. 

His earlier statement might have stopped people from building safe rooms.  He is seen as an authority and people will believe him.  So I think he owes it to his constituents to be accurate and I'm going to encourage him to do so.

Reading Has Saved My Life

Amazon.com has read my mind.  I get emails every few days, letting me know about books I might want to read based on what I've purchased in the past.  They are almost always right.  I have a stack of books almost as tall as I am that I haven't read yet.  I am excited.

Most of them are very serious stuff - about health and spirituality.  A few of these new ones are novels - humorous science fiction.  I realize I am a bit odd to still be reading everything I can find on how to improve my life, but since I've learned things in the past that have literally saved my life, I probably will never quit.

Making New Memories

It seems so strange to me how my mind wants to be so passive.  Maybe it's the character defect of sloth.  I made no plans for my birthday (I'm 72 today) and in my mind I was just going to act like it was just another day. 

Well, what I really believe is that there's no such thing as just another day.  It's up to me to make every day count and what's a better day than my birthday to do that?

Too bad it was almost noon before I caught on!  But it's never too late.  So, I'm going to go to a meeting in a few minutes (and another one tonight), get a massage and read a little bit in all the new books I've accumulated.  I might also go over to the Woodward Park rose garden and see how the roses are doing!

1964

I think it was 1964.  I had a baby and a two year old.  It was early in the morning and I wasn't all the way awake.  I had just changed the baby's poopy diaper and went into the bathroom to rinse it out (no disposable diapers in that time).  I saw that my two year old and done a nice poop in the potty chair. 

This presented me with a dilemma - the toilet would only flush once and then you had to wait for the tank to fill up.  So, I thought about the best way to go about this and decided to rinse the diaper first, not flush and then dump the potty.  I was thrilled that I had figured out the most efficient way of taking care of this chore.

Then I thought to myself that it was pretty weird that a smart gal like me had no better use for her mind than figuring out the most efficient way to dispose of poop.  I laughed to myself.

Later in the 60s  when I read Betty Friedan's, The Feminine Mystique, about how motherhood and housewifeing might be too little for all women to spend their lives doing - that all humans had a contribution to make and it surely must be possible for women to be good mothers, homemakers, and still contribute other things to the world, I remembered that morning when I was thrilled about efficiently disposing of poop and understood what Betty meant.

Visitors

I love company.  I love solitude.  In the past week I've had both.  First my daughter and her oldest son and his wife were here, and we took a tour of local restaurants.  We also went to the Farmer's Market and Whole Foods.  Since my dear grandson and his dear wife are "foodies," we had fun.  AND as nearly as I can tell, I'm not any larger.

Then my dearest friend, Eric, was here and our first order of business was to eat at our favorite restaurants.

My treasured departed husband introduced me to the concept of food as entertainment.  I guess before that I thought that it was a good thing to like what you ate but it never occurred to me to raise food to the level of entertainment.  Of course, in my case, there's a downside.  I'm larger than I need to be!