Address Update

This is the updated blog address for the woman who had the horrible experience at a hospital.

http://www.but-first.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation.html

Hopefully, changes will be made in the system as a result of all that's being done.

Don't I Wish I Could Have Said It This Good?

GOP: it's just like high school
By Garrison Keillor In print: Wednesday, September 10, 2008


So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves.

They are coming out for Small Efficient Government the very week that the feds are taking over Fannie and Freddie, those old cash cows, and in the course of a weekend 20 or 50 or (pick a number) billion go floating out the Treasury door. Hello? We didn't just fall off the coal truck.
It is a bold move on the Republicans' part — forget about the past, it's only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be — and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to.

John McCain has decided to run as a former POW and a maverick, a maverick's maverick, rather than George W. Bush's best friend, and that's understandable, but how can he not address the $3-trillion that got burned up in Iraq so far? It's real money, it could've paid for a lot of windmills, a high-speed rail line in Ohio, some serious R&D. The Chinese, who have avoided foreign wars for 50 years, are taking enormous leaps forward, investing in their economy, and we are falling behind. We're wasting our chances. The Republican culture of corruption in Washington hasn't helped.

And a former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26-million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, "I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hard-working people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battleaxe you."

In school, you couldn't get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don't uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

I must say, it was fun having the Republicans in St. Paul and to see it all up close and firsthand. Security was, as one might expect, thin-lipped and gimlet-eyed, but once you got through it, you found the folks you went to high school with — farm kids, jocks, the townies who ran the student council, the cheerleaders, some of the bullies — and they are as cohesive now as they were back then, dedicated to school spirit, intolerant of outsiders, able to jump up and down and holler for something they don't actually believe. But oh, Lord, what they brought forth this year. When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who's had three bouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, a hustling evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, not counting Canada, has set foot outside the country once — a trip to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed a refueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She's like the Current Occupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.
© Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved.

Evening Thoughts

And so another week is well underway and it's been so beautiful! with lots of sunshine and a cool breeze off the Sound. We may have to wait for summer, but it is well worth the wait!

Even though I don't get out and run around as much as I use to, I love sitting at my desk where the sunshine pours through the window and I can see the fruit trees, the bushes and shrubs -- everything has luxurious amounts of green and different shades of many colors.

And if I try, with just a little effort, I can, for a few hours put aside the darkness of our political landscape, the horrors the woman in New Mexico went through that I wrote about yesterday and updated today. Hopefully, calling attention to this criminal negligence will force some kind of change where others won't have to suffer the same cruel neglect and abuse.

So, this evening, as with many, I try to catalog the good things, the beautiful things, the laughter, the pleasure that are there for me to enjoy each day -- as there are for all of us, we just have to take the time to look. All it takes really for me is to focus on those things rather than the headlines of the day. Not that we ignore them, that will only mean they'll get worse, we have to speak out, we have to stand up, but in order to do that we have to take some time to feed the soul, nuture the spirit. I try to do that every day. I use to just run around like a mad woman, pulling my hair and screeching at -- for want of another audience -- my two faithful dogs, Mojo and Sam. They would just close their eyes and try to ignore me, it always surprised me that they didn't put their paws over their ears. But, hopefully, now I've found better ways to deal with the good and the bad and the ugly, and that's by writing about them -- all of them, because there is the good as well as the others and we need to give that equal time.

So, I turn on the music, pour my one glass of wine for the evening, enjoy the magnificent sunset and look forward to tomorrow.

Smile for the Day!

Why can't we get along with those different from us?
Think maybe we could learn something from this
dog?

Follow-up to Medieval Medicine

The lady who experienced the gross, outrageous treatment that I posted about yesterday, has started her own blog and you can read her account on the following blog:

Part 1 can be found at http://www.blogger.com/ and Part 2 at http://www.blogger.com/. She is home writing Part 3, etc. as we speak.

Things started at the Plains Regional Medical Center, and continued at the Curry County Adult Detention Center; then on to the Eastern New Mexico Medical Center in Roswell, NM.

Very interesting--she found out that there are 3 new protective custody rooms in the Emergency Room but the staff chooses not to use them and to send mentally ill patients to jail for reasons known only to them.

One of the Best Stories of My Life

After reading Bobbie’s post today on Almost There, then reading the New York Times and Bob Herbert’s piece on McCain’s health care plan, I decided I didn’t want to look at today, write about today or even think about today. So, I chose to look back at a time in the early 80s and a job that I never expected to get.

We raised our kids in Montana, where my husband was stationed at Malmstrom AFB. When my kids first started to school I had taken a teaching position in the same Catholic school they attended. I didn’t teach any of their classes, of course, but it was fun because we could go to school together in the mornings, come home together in the afternoon and we had the same holidays and shared the same school activities.

Once they moved on to public middle schools, I worked at the library for a couple of years and enjoyed that simply because I got to be around books all the time and books have always been one of my favorite things.

But then one day I saw an ad in the newspaper that tweaked my curiosity. It was regarding a position with a new program in Montana. It was for a director of a local facility for a project called Independent Living, designed to help people with disabilities be able to become more integrated into the community. It was something I felt strongly about, something that I felt needed to happen for the disabled and so, although I knew very little about disabilities and knew no disabled people in the community, I knew I was more than willing and able to learn. So, I put in my application. Three days later I had my first interview.

The project was being directed by a nun, Sister Helen, out of the program's office in the state capital of Helena and she was looking for directors for Great Falls and for Billings. The interview went well and I met a disabled man, Jim Clark, who worked in the local office of the state employment department. He would be working with the new project as well.

I had to admit that I had no experience with the disabled, but that I was willing to learn and that I felt very strongly about the need for such a program. However, no one was more amazed than I was when three days later I was offered the job and I had to ask them why they had chosen me. Thinking about it later, their answer made perfect sense – I didn’t know what many involved with the disabled, considered impossible, I didn’t know what the usual excuses were for why the project’s goals were out of reach, I didn’t see why it couldn’t be done. They didn’t hire a disabled person at the time because there weren’t that many that would even be able to access and do much of what had to be done – that’s how bad conditions were at that time. The plan was to put the entire project in the hands of the disabled once the immediate goals were achieved. I knew the job probably wouldn’t last more than three to four years, and I was more than okay with that as I felt the disabled should, indeed run their own project, but I was excited about being able to help get it moving.

They also hired me an assistant, a Vietnam veteran who, due to wounds he received there had developed epilepsy and had been unable to find work in spite of having a degree in business. His name was David – one more David in my life in addition to my husband, David and my son, David. The next three years were three of some of the best and most exciting and rewarding years of my life.

Our first task was to find and furnish an office with separate space for both David and I. Once that was done, we set about locating as many of the disabled in the Great Falls area as possible. We got lists from hospitals, care givers and state offices. We visited one on one with as many as possible. We set up meetings where the disabled could come and voice their needs, their hopes and we began a list of things to accomplish. Things like providing parking spaces, with parking meters low enough for them to reach from a wheelchair, ramps to enable them to cross streets, attend church; go to movies, access the working environments so they might be able to get jobs, doors wide enough to allow wheelchair entrance into restaurants, stores, offices. It was a daunting task and we met a lot of resistance, excuses why it could never happen.

But over the next three years it did happen, as we set about to educate the public about the disabled. We met with business owners, city officials. We even took part in a school program in local high schools where we brought people with different disabilities to meet with students, to tell them their story about their disabilities, to answer questions. And gradually we began to see such incredible and wonderful changes not only in the disabled community, but in the entire community as they began to accept the disabled as needed and viable members.

Looking back and seeing how much has changed for the disabled over the past twenty-eight years gives me one of those warm, fuzzy feelings just knowing that I had a small part in making that happen for a lot of people in Great Falls, Montana.

Mother Nature at Her Finest!

A beautiful way to remember the summer! These pictures were taken at the Dahlia Festival near Hillsboro, Oregon.
Thank you, James!




It's been a lovely spring and summer and while fall has it's own beauty, I'm a little wistful as always as the summer draws to a close.

Want a Little Satirical Entertainment?

Check out this website.

http://www.peteyandpetunia.com/VoteHere/VoteHere.htm

A Matter of Urgency

As hard as I try to find uplifting and beautiful things to post -- and I do post some of those, too -- I end up coming back to the nightmare of politics because I hate to see our country heading down the tube and if, "we the people" lose this election, that is exactly where we're headed.

The New York Times Op-Ed Section had an insightful and scary picture of the politics of today written by Frank Rich and I think his insights into this election are all too true – chillingly true. America had better wake up. NOW! Last week people were asking if Palin is qualified to be so very close to, not just the vice-presidency, the presidency itself. Now it seems a more likely question is, what kind of president would Palin be?

Rich says, and I couldn’t agree more, “It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory”, whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.”

Even though I was too young to be actively engaged in the politics of the late 1940s, I do remember the fear mongering of Joe McCarthy and how we were all told to see our enemies everywhere. Guess what? That’s the same pitch Republicans, McCain and Palin are using all over again. The same old game to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay, urbanites, not to mention blacks, who threaten to take away everything small-town folks hold dear. Well, guess what “small-town folks”? They are using you and they do not share your values. They are after power and control and this country cannot afford another eight years with them in the White House and more of the same.

As Rich says, “This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it’s too late. But in framing this debate, it isn’t enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president – like Iraq – invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush’s right.

As Republicans know best, fear does work. If Obama is to convey just what’s at stake, he must slice through the campaign’s lipstick jungle and show Americans the real perils that lie around the bend.”

In other words, people, wake up, pull you head out of the sand, pay attention to what is happening in this election! We only have 127 days to move our country towards real change – change that matters, desperately.

Dawn in Monument Valley Arizona

The Monument valley trading post belonged to a man named "Goulding". He went to Hollywood in the early twenties and sold some movie makers on the idea of filming westerns on location in Monument Valley and when the production companies came out, they stayed at the tourist cabins that he had by his Indian trading post (this was in pre-motel days). In some of the John Wayne movies buildings from Goulding's lodge and dining hall complex were used as props. The building that you see in the photo was the trading post (on the first floor). The Gouldings lived on the second floor. This building served as post headquarters at the fort in "Fort Apache".

Here's a site that tells you more about Harry Goulding and his wife "Mike". http://www.silverstage.net/gouldings.htm

She was helping to restore the trading post to what it had once been years ago. Peace, tranquility and vastness best describes Monument Valley. I think we could all use a little peace these days.
Thanks to Dale for sharing all his good stuff so that I can share it with you.