Tuesday update - Edited to make it less schizophrenic

Ratty Watty
I've already posted the details in ratties about Ratty Watty actually snuggling with me for a couple of minutes last night. To have him relax on my chest while I pet him is wonderful! He didn't even pee on me!

Family Reunion
My sister wants to know how many people are coming to her house in less than two weeks for our family reunion. Only one aunt and one cousin have RSVPed so far. That aunt has volunteered to call everyone! Yay Aunt Billie!

Yesterday's adventure post
Yesterday's post about exploring the abandoned armory bunker has started a MEME! If you want to get onboard, Post your own experience in your journal and link it back to mine.

post office frustration
I couldn't get the post office machines to accept my money yesterday, so a certain package didn't hit the mail until today. My boss let me buy postage from the postage machine here at work and Michelle was going to drop it by the post office on her way home at noon. When are post office machines going to accept credit cards??????

Health vs coffee
I've had to give up coffee. Last week my gut started giving me big trouble when I drank a cup. I seem to go through this from time to time. The last couple years of night school before I got my AA in CIS were tough. I was working full time plus some and taking at least two classes at community college. One was programming that always ate as much time as I had to give it. The last year it was a full time class load. Thank the powers that be for independent study! To keep my grade point up to the 3.75 I carried required more time than I really had so I lived on coffee. About the time I graduated, my gut rebelled and I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. I had to stop drinking coffee. Tea didn't cause the problems. I learned to meditate to deal with the stresses behind my IBS, and it went away. I love coffee though. So I tried a cup now and then with predictable results. Finally one day I drank a cup and nothing happened except that I woke up. Wheee! I've been drinking coffee now for about a year. My shrink wants me to switch to tea. Now my gut agrees with him. Back to tea. At least tea is good for me!

Tweaker II the cat
As soon as Eric and I decided young Tweak was ours, he stopped hanging out at our house. He still comes by sometimes, but he isn't living in our yard anymore. Last night Old Tweak walked in the front door! I said "Hi Tweakers!" and he stopped, ready to run. So I looked away and said quietly "It's all right Tweaker boy." Then I peeked back at him and saw him look over at Scamperdoo. He looked ready to run from her, too. Then he saw me looking at him again and ran away.

An LJ community I joined
I joined a new community over the weekend. imissmydad is exactly what I needed. Reading and posting there got me to cry some deep healing tears Saturday night. A whole community of people who had Daddies! Not sperm donors, not Dads, we had those wonderful special men who are Daddies!


I'll post again after work! With the socio-economic topic I wanted to explore yesterday.


** hope the headings help to make it less disjointed. Consider this post to be a newsletter with several different articles! **

Oh! and here's a link to a funny email I got. The picture wouldn't go through everyone's server, so I put it on a webpage.

Serious topic: I'd love your thoughts.

The socio-economic topic I was going to post about yesterday was about American jobs moving overseas and Poverty in the USA, are they related?

This whole train of thought started when I listened to a talk radio program on my way home from work on Friday. The host was insisting that the whole problem was caused by high school students who decide not to attend school anymore. He wanted to assign blame to their parents, the teachers and the law enforcement people who don't force these kids to go to school. The specific group he was using for an example was from a report about the Oakland schools. Their dropout rate is higher than any other in the bay area. He didn't address the fact that Oakland has a higher number of parolees per capita than any other city in California. He didn't mention that gangs pretty much rule the roost in the poorer areas. Drug use is rampant, the murder rate is horrible, and the mayor can't get more funding to hire more police and fire personnel. It's a very tough situation.

But to blame poverty on dropouts is to oversimplifying the whole thing. Why are these kids dropping out? Has our educational system become so distant from the reality these kids live every day that they can't figure out what good it is? Maybe. I felt that way in a middle-class school back in the 70s when we still had music, art and drama. I also think it's because a lot of them have no hope. Their parents have no hope so they numb out leaving the kids on their own, sometimes brain damaged from being prenatally exposed to drugs. A few make it out. More power to them!

On another level, if you look at how our society is going for the last 20 years, it's clear that unless you're an entrepreneur or damned lucky that any employer is going to look at you as a commodity rather than a person, to be brought in or layed off at a whim. They started with our poorest people. The ones who weren't educated but wanted to work with their hands putting products together. It was hard work, but it was honest work. There was satisfaction in it and the companies would keep good workers until they retired with a modest pension. Loyalty went both ways. Then the almighty dollar became more important and the plants were shut down. Pension plans disappeared without a trace leaving the people who were depending upon them to work into their 70s just to survive. It was cheaper to have things made in poorer countries without the rules and regulations about safety and health. This trend has accelerated with the higher skill level jobs all the way up to engineers and our economy sinks lower and lower all the time. Why is unemployment so high? Because they moved the jobs to other countries to save money. Money seems to be more important than people these days. Corporate greed is running rampant and destroying the very fabric of our society. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about this for very long.

But even as I say all of that, I think about the economies of the countries now doing the work. Their standard of living is rising, or so I hope. In a way, we're finally sharing the wealth. That's a good thing as long as slave labor isn't involved. We've been spoiled here in the US while others starve. That's not right either.

So here I am as usual in a grey place. I hope someone is getting a benefit from all this beside the grossly overpaid CEOs.

Arianna Huffington

Has anyone else noticed that Arianna Huffington sounds like the Gabor sisters? ROFLMAO! I just tried to find an audio clip of her voice and found this animation on her campaign website! Arianna cleans up the Special Interest Brothel! OMG! IT's hilarious!

Also, I added it to the bottom of my first post from lunch time, but in case you'd already read my disjointed post here's some humor that cracked me up!