Back Again

I feel like I have ditched class for months and have just come back. You have to start somewhere after not posting for a long time.

A lot has happened since the last post. My grandmother passed away on January 22. She was with it to the very end. Yesterday would have been her 98th birthday. I just got a call from one of her nieces who didn't know she had died and was trying to call her in the nursing home. It makes me feel like a complete heel that I didn't let her know, but there are so many people in the Russell and Hiebert families, it is almost impossible for me to contact everyone.

I realize how much my grandmother was helping me with my mom. Grandma Fay was my eyes and ears at Sunny Acres. My mother can't speak, so grandma watched over her and let me know what was happening. Now I'm alone and it is a lot harder. It is even difficult to visit my mother. Most people when they lose a loved one who was in a nursing home never have to go back after they clean out the room. In my case, I have to go back and back again because my mom is in the same room. I shouldn't be complaining because my poor mother has had to face the loss every day, whereas I can come and go.

We had a service for Grandma Fay at All Saints' Episcopal Church. The flowers were beautiful and my friends and lots of nursing home staff were there with our family.

Somehow I have to pick myself up.

Peace,

Susan

Back to Blogging Due to Flu

It is a wonder that anyone can keep up a diary/blog. You have to give a hand to Samuel Pepys http://www.pepysdiary.com/ A lot of what we know about his time period is because of his meticulously detailed diaries.

I'm back, but mostly because I now have been felled by H1N1, formerly called "swine" flu. I realized the last time I had flu was before I was married in 1975, so as I said on facebook, that means I should be good until I am 93.

Why do I feel that Congress is fiddling while we all burn? They are dithering about a healthcare bill, while people who could have been vaccinated if Congress had appropriated enough money for vaccine or getting terribly sick and some are dying. (Note: I am not dying of the flu.) I honestly don't care if we spend money on making vaccine (someone will have a job) and some people don't get vaccinated (I wish they would, but I do not support forcing vaccinations). It is unforgivable that preventable disease is occurring. Vaccination is one of the few absolute ways to stop contagious diseases. Anyone who wants to be vaccinated should receive the vaccine. Period.

I'm tired now and need to get back to Day 4 of my flu. More later.

Onward and upward

Is it Summer Yet?

Rain, rain, rain. It has been raining almost every day since June (or maybe May). July has been declared the rainiest July ever and the weather reports say whatever you have had in July will continue in August. Depressing.

I have been busy with the Chelmsford Farmers' Market www.chelmsfordfarmersmarket.blogspot.com So far we have been lucky and the clouds have parted for us from 2-6 pm.

What else is on my mind. Lots. Too much. Will a health care bill finally pass? Will we have universal coverage in some form or another? I'm sick of waiting. The naysayers have had my whole life time to have it their way and it didn't work. It is time for a change.

What is really rich is hearing the right attack Obama for the economy, the war, the whatever. W had 96 months to crash everything and anyone who disagreed with him was virtually labeled anti-America. Now Obama is in office for 6 months and they are saying he is a failure for not fixing every thing and there are the nutcase "birthers" trying to "swift boat" him.

Listen up everyone, W and company drove the bus into a very deep ditch and getting it out isn't going to be easy or quick.

More later.

Nursing Home Blues

Two years ago in June, we moved my mother and grandmother to a nursing home in Chelmsford. Although it is a beautiful place and they have a beautiful room with two huge windows at the end of a wing, it is still a nursing home.  My grandmother is 97 and chipper.  She reads the newspapers, watches her third new team - The Red Sox (after her real home team, the San Francisco Giants, and her interim team, the Kansas City Royals), and very sadly, she watches her own daughter suffer from a stroke, seizures, and now a broken hip.  My mother fell and had "an in place fracture of the left femoral neck".  A wonderful surgeon place pins in to hold the bone in a 20 minutes surgery.  Everything looked great until an aide at the nursing home was moving my 114 pound mother from the bed to a wheelchair and somehow my mother feel on her knees.  The pins held, but the bone is now displaced and she has to have a partial hip replacement.

Now mom has to go through a major surgery.  She is aphasic and not with it much of the time.  I know she understands a lot, but how I am going to explain this to her isn't clear.  I can't leave her in the hospital by herself with strangers before the surgery, so Monday will be a long day for both of us.  I just don't want her to be afraid.  She was always a stoic person; I only saw my mother cry after she had dealt with a crisis, never in an emergency.  Who knows how she felt inside?  Who knows how she feels inside now? How I wish I could take this on for her so she didn't have to suffer.  My younger brother and I and our father were her whole life.  We can't go back, but if I could have anything for my mom, it would be to have my dad back and for them to be together again.  I have to try very hard to be in the present and not look back.  Easier said than done.

For the present, laundry is calling, so I'm off. 

Newspaper Disaster

I am heartsick over what is happening at the Boston Globe.  I love newspapers.  I love everything about them, the paper, the ink, the advertising (not the stupid color inserts, the real advertising), the fact that I can carry them around with me and tear out the things I want to keep or remember, and most of all the news reported by real trained reporters.  I worked for the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal as a "New Assistant" more than 30 years ago.  I saw how the best reporters in the business did their jobs and how intelligent they were.  From what I see happening at the Globe, those days are long gone.  Now all we hear is how in trouble the Globe is (along with lots of other papers in this country) and about layoffs, cutbacks, boo-hooing about how the internet is cutting into the readership, blah-blah-blah.  Well, after the latest boneheaded move by the Globe, I am ready to cancel my subscription, although I know I won't because I can't bear to be without the paper.  

Awhile back the Globe decided to publish its "Weekly" editions on Thursday as well as on Sunday.  (First bad move.)  My guess is that they did it to compete with the Community Newspapers which are published once a week on Thursday in the surrounding towns.  For example my paper is The Chelmsford Independent.  These papers print the same kind of stories the Weekly editions printed.  Maybe this move looked good at first, but clearly it didn't work because they have just stopped printing the Globe NorthWest and have divided us all up between North and West.  Smooth move Globe guys.  Now Carlisle, which is contiguous to Chelmsford, and Concord, which shares a state representative with Chelmsford, are in the GlobeWest and Chelmsford is in the GlobeNorth.   When you look at the towns and how they were split, it certainly looks like the division was made by someone who doesn't remotely know the area.  

Here's another gripe.  I called Customer Service because I received the GlobeWest instead of GlobeNorth today, the roll out day for this new and decidedly unimproved paper.  Guess where the young woman was who took my call?  Manila.  As in across the Pacific Ocean.  Now I'm really angry.  We are not talking a multinational corporation.  We're talking the Boston Globe which thinks it is the paper of the Hub of the Universe.  ARGHHHHHH.

I have no idea who is making these lame brain decisions at the Globe.  Here are two things I think they need to take into consideration:

1.  Who is their readership?  Stop looking at all the people who say they read newspapers on-line.  Look at who is really buying and reading the paper.

2.  What do they want to read about?  I want to read about my community and the communities surrounding me.  I want news about state and local government and information about community activities in my town and the surrounding towns.   

The Globe is driving me away from the newspaper by taking away the local news that I need to know about and getting rid of the local calendar info and putting it all on-line.  There is no doubt that getting information on line is fast, but nothing replaced having that paper to stick in my bag and carry around.  As an aside, my huge fear is that movie theatres will all stop advertising in the paper.  (The Tyngsboro AMC  stopped advertising.)  BIG mistake.  There are many times when we are out and either a show is sold out or we decide at the last minute away from the house to go to the movies.  I whip out the trusty PAID listings and look to see where we can go.  This does not mean that lots of people aren't taking out their phones and looking things up (I have an IPhone, but I still want that newspaper and will pay for it).  It means there is more than one way to deliver information.

It almost seems as if the people who own newspapers want them to fail.  Maybe the shake-up in our economy will bring about a renaissance or maybe that is just the romantic in me speaking.   Time will tell.

How can anyone keep up? Here comes Lent

How anyone has the time to really keep up a blog isn't clear to me, unless they really want to be a writer/commentator.  There are so, so many issues in our families, towns, states, countries, the world, the universe that it is impossible to stay on top of it all.

Lent is coming right up.  It is a chance to reflect and try, very, very hard to not be distracted by the unnecessary.  Yesterday afternoon my husband and I were talking at lunch.  We were discussing current events and he asked, "What is important in life?"  (We were discussing big philosophical questions over tacos.)  Without a lot of thinking, what popped out of my mouth was, "Love yourself, love your family, love your neighbor, take care of the animals and the plants, the earth and the sea.  That pretty much says it all for me."  You can decide for yourself what is important if you go back to those precepts.

Peace.

Where Have I Been?....

Once again life got away from me.  This blog is just an electronic diary that someone may stumble on via the ether now (or later) rather than by digging through all my old books when I'm dead and gone.  I suppose most people blog or write a diary for themselves, not really for anyone else.  It is the one place there isn't any editor/English teacher looking over your work and you can say pretty much whatever you like.

The last month has been mostly working on getting the opera Hansel & Gretel up for Illumination Opera.  It took all my waking hours, but now it is over and there is more music to learn, Christmas is almost upon us (Lessons and Carols Sunday - my favorite service of the year), and all the dreary house chores are still waiting for me.  How I wish with all my heart that I was like Martha Stewart.  I have suddenly realized that I have such a great imagination that I have imagined how nice the house could be so well that I don't feel like I actually have to DO anything to make it happen.  It is pretty daunting anyway when you have to do it all yourself.

There are so many things to write about seriously, but I just can't today.  Here's what I want to know now:  Why is Jennifer Aniston in our face everywhere, everyday?  She must have the greatest publicist on the face of the planet.  I have not seen any indication this woman has any real talent at all.  Other than having snagged Brad Pitt and having had the incredible good fortune to be on Friends, she has done nothing of merit that I know of, but she continues to be thrust in our faces.  I sure wish the little boy in the Emperor's New Clothes would show up and point out (I started to say that she was naked, but apparently she just posed nude for GQ, so that would be pointing out the obvious) how little talent she has compared with thousands of other actresses. After World Peace, Ending Famine, etc., my wish would be for Editors all over the world to come to their senses in the new year and stop featuring JA or anyone else whose fame is just being famous.  Don't tell me about how JA has become a great humanitarian because there are lots of people who have been walking the walk for a very long time who are more deserving of press.  

That's my rant for the day.

Onward and upward

History Has Been Made

I am so proud of my country and couldn't let this historic night pass without saying how much I wish my father could have seen Barack Obama become President of the United States.  He would have been so happy.  We would have been dancing around our living room.  

Now we have to get to work. 

God bless America.

Hair On Fire

The NYT reports today that the President says privately it is a darn good thing he is the decider during this economic crisis.  This from a man who ran his own oil business into the ground and I don't mean he drilled with success, just the opposite.  According to the story today, Bush had to be told that he needs to reassure people that everything is going to be o.k.  Imagine the POTUS needing to be told he needs to be a LEADER.   In a truly bizarre twist, the fact that he hasn't may be a sign that he actually KNOWS that everything is not going to be o.k.  

All the people we have been told were the great financial gurus are spinning like dervishes. Everyone's hair is on fire and no one knows where it will all end.  So why should the Decider? 

We were in California last week.  Boy, do I miss my home state, even after 33 years of living in the east.  My daughter-in-law said there is a German word for the place where your heart is...Heimat.  That place is definitely the Bay Area. If the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, I think the best place to be would be there.  You can actually sit with the windows open this time of year, no air-co, no heating.  Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine...did I mention sunshine?

Anyway, back to financial inferno.  On the plane back home the movie was "Kit Kittredge".  A kid's movie set in the Depression.  It is all about home foreclosures.  Have we gone back to the future?  Are we going to have to start taking in roomers (we do have three empty of people bedrooms)?  I have low-grade fear.  You know that thing that is always there, even when you aren't thinking about it.   I have always said that if we go down, everyone will be going down with us.  We got out of the market and moved to cash just before the first crash.  Not because I'm brilliant, but because my husband is.  He also cashed in so we could purchase our first new car in more than 10 years (we drive cars until they drop and I have bought junkers to drive in the snow) literally a month before the crash.  If he hadn't done that, we wouldn't be driving that Highlander Hybrid that's in the driveway.  We are very, very, very lucky.  I fear for us, but not as much as for those living on the edge.  When the "Decider" made his first calming speech a couple of weeks or so ago, who did he blame for the troubles?  Here are his words:

"Easy credit - combined with the faulty assumption that home values would continue to rise - led to excesses and bad decisions...Many borrowers took out loans larger than they could afford assuming that they could sell or refinance their homes at a higher price later on."

I don't deny that this is part of the problem, but I don't think the collapse is because of people trying to buy homes or flip houses. I'm still trying to figure out how the banks can give you only 2% interest on savings, charge 24% interest on your credit cards and lose money.  Somebody has some splainin to do. 

My last comment is about an interview with a broker on NPR.  In essence he said he wished Paulson would just shut up because everytime he made a comment the market went down.  I'm not waiting for any comments from the Decider.  The election can't come too soon...VOTE OBAMA-BIDEN.

One Debate Down...

Tonight was the first debate.  I'm sorry to say that I am disappointed in my candidate.  He let McCain interrupt him and he also kept saying that he agreed with McCain.  The Republicans will certainly use that to their advantage.  All in all it lacked energy and was, frankly, boring.

The most exciting part of the night came after the debate when Biden did the follow up.  He was dynamic, energetic, positive.  And then who spoke on behalf of McCain? Uh, that should have been his running mate, right?  Nope.  She is missing in action, so who stepped in?  Rudolph Giuliani. 

How pathetic.  The Republican VP candidate can't be allowed to speak on her own.  Get this:  a friend told me that given McCain's age, health problems, etc., actuaries say there is a 66% chance Sarah Palin would become President in McCain's first term.  I'm with Jack Cafferty, that does scare the hell out of me.  God help us all.

When will he learn?

Here I am back thinking about Clinton.  Bill, not Hillary.  Would Bill just shut up?  Could he just say nothing, if he can't say anything nice about Obama?  He continues to give aid and comfort to the Republicans that we don't need right now.  Has he forgotten that he was the leader of the Democratic Party?  Has he forgotten that he got us into this mess?  Has he forgotten that the Republicans have used every dirty smear they could think of against him, his wife, and his daughter?  Now is not the time to say anything, and I mean anything, that could possibly be construed as positive about McCain and Palin.  Just STOP calling McCain "my friend."  McCain is most certainly not your friend Bill.  He is an acquaintance, but not a friend.  Those swing voters, you know, the ones who voted for you, are needed now.  Any bit of praise you give to McCain/Palin will be an excuse for those voters to say to themselves, "Well, Bill thinks they're ok."  The First Dude doesn't need your advice, so just keep it to yourself.

  

Spontaneous Patriotism

Last night was the opening of the Metropolitan Opera.  The performance was simulcast in theatres all around the world.  Before the performance began, the evening started with Maestro Levine leading the orchestra playing The Star Spangled Banner.  Here's what happened in Lowell, Massachusetts:  the entire movie theatre audience rose and many sang our national anthem.  I don't know when I have felt more connected to my country.  No one told anyone to stand.  It was spontaneous, by choice, and moving.  No announcer said (like at baseball games), "Please rise for the singing of the national anthem."  I wish just that act of patriotism could be shown on television so people who think those who attend opera are unpatriotic snobs, etc. could see otherwise.  It isn't just country music fans who love our country.

Oh yeah, and Renee Fleming was the diva to end all divas and sang pretty darn well too...

Throwing her daughter under the bus, continued

Well, well, well...someone else thinks Palin threw Bristol under the bus...read on...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bonnie-fuller/sarah-palin-she-has-chose_b_123282.html

Here's the quote:

--No wonder getting pregnant in high school is truly a girl's worst nightmare, points out Atoosa Rubenstein, the founding editor-in-chief of CosmoGIRL! magazine, and later the editor of Seventeen magazine. Bristol Palin should have "the protection of her mother right now and not be paraded around as a platform. She should have had the privacy to make her own difficult choices and now she has to support her mother's ambitions and policies regardless of what she wants for herself — she's been thrown under a bus," believes Rubenstein.--

Republican racism, hyperbole, downright lies...

Only the Republicans could turn a black kid working hard and getting a good education into a negative.  Phyllis Schlafly said on NPR that Obama is "elite" (and she wasn't saying it in a good way) because he went to "$17,000/year prep school" (I have no idea whether that is true) and an expensive college.  Sarah Palin on the other hand "has worked with her hands."  You have got to be kidding me.  This is racism plain and simple.  I guess black boys shouldn't be going to good schools.  But on to the GOP Convention...

Remember all that "family privacy" Palin was demanding?  Well, she flew in Levi Johnston, father of the illegitimate yet to be born child of her 17 year old daughter, to parade in front of the convention and the television cameras.  Palin said her family was like any other.  Uh, I think not. 

Was last night the most strident, vicious string of speeches ever?  How do they get away with the lies?  Huckabee said that Palin received more votes for Mayor than Biden did for president.  This is not an opinion statement.  It is a fact statement, but the problem is that it ISN'T TRUE.  It isn't even remotely true.  The Washington Post has the numbers.  Biden 63,157.  I think that is more than the total population of Wasilla which now stands at 9780.

Mitt Romney railed on about the "eastern elites."  What the heck is he?  Let's see, how about the ex-Governor of MASSACHUSETTS with a networth according to Money of $202 million dollars.  On top of that he is a Havard grad, you know, that "elite" school in Cambridge, Massachusetts not England, the same one Obama attended. (OK, here's a logic test for Schlafly Republicans:  If Obama is an "elite" because he attended Harvard and Romney attended Harvard, what is Romney?)  How much more "eastern elite" could you get?  I guess he loses the who has the most houses contest with McCain though because as I recall, he has a home in Belmont, MA, a lake house in NH, and a home in Utah.  That's only three to McCain's 7, 8, or is it 9?  

Giuliani?  What can I say.  He was the same Giuliani who LOST and that speech showed why.  The perfect lead up to Sarah Palin, the best speech reader ever.  She said NOTHING about what she and her running mate will do.  Nothing about the economy, nothing about health care, as Giuliani said, NADA.  There was nothing there but rhetoric.  Let's hope she doesn't get to play the double standard game when her lack of substance is attacked by saying, "You bad man, how can you attack a girl?"

Finally, if there is anything that could energize Democrats to GOTV, last night was it.  Now to find the Nashua, NH,  Obama-Biden office... 

P.S.  I started writing this on the 2nd, but didn't post until the 4th.  Somehow blogspot is determined to show this as being posted on the 2nd.

  

 

Palin Throws Daughter Under Bus

The hypocrisy of the Republicans will never cease to amaze me.  The soon to be nominated VP candidate Sarah Palin threw her daughter under the bus.  Why?  Because there were stupid nasty rumors that her Down Syndrome infant was really the child of her 17 year old daughter.  So what would you do if "they" were saying things like that about you?  How about nothing or if you felt like you really, really had to say something releasing your hospital records or maybe some photos of you after the birth of your child.  But no, this wonderful, bright woman decided to out her 17 year old daughter with the news that the girl is 5 months pregnant.  Oh, and we were also assured by Palin that her daughter would be marrying Levi, the father of the child.  Oh and THEN she said the family needed privacy.   Sort of like the guy who kills his parents and then asks for the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.  What narcissism.  I repeat, she threw her daughter under the bus for her own ambition.  Shameful.

Lowest Common Denominator

Sarah Palin.  How in the world have we ended up with this person as the Republican VP candidate?  How could McCain pass over the truly qualified Republican women such as Kay Bailey Hutchison, Olympia Snowe, Condoleezza Rice, Liddy Dole for a woman who, as my friend told me yesterday, is a governor of a state that has fewer people than New Orleans AFTER Katrina?  Does he think that all women are interchangeable?  When she invoked Hillary Clinton in her first speech, I was speechless.  The only thing she shares with Hillary Clinton is gender, but that isn't a reason to vote for anyone.  

Our world is a dangerous place.  It isn't the world of 1949.  No amount of wanting it to be will make it so.  We need the best, the brightest, the most educated as our leader.  We don't need the lowest common denominator as President of the United States, which means the VP can't be the lowest common denominator.  John McCain has endangered all of us with his choice of Sarah Palin.  

On top of it all, she has a 4 MONTH old infant with Down Syndrome.  What is she thinking?  So much for Republican "family values."  Although she is against a woman's right to choose, she has chosen to leave her infant to go on the most grueling campaign trail in the world.  Fathers can certainly take care of babies and I assume Mr. Palin will be taking care of baby Palin.  That's great.  That isn't my point though.  As a mother, although my sons are grown, I can't imagine leaving them when they were infants to go on the road for three months, not when either of them were 4 months old.

This isn't a job where you can work late hours, but come home.  This is leaving home and family behind.   In my opinion this is not a responsible choice and it reflects the narcissism of the person making it. 

Olympic Fever

How have I stayed away from writing with so much going on in the world and my life?  I guess I have just answered the question.  The Beijing Olympics kept us glued to the television set for what seemed like a month.  I never thought I would be riveted by a big swim meet, but who knew those races could be so, so exciting.  China was just a great big stereotypical picture postcard thanks to NBC.  Nothing about Darfur, no repercussions for underage gymnasts (wasn't one missing a baby tooth???), and forget about them telling a little 7 year old girl that she wasn't pretty enough to be on stage, but her voice was.  That pretty much did it for me.  The real gold medals should go to the architects of the "water cube" and "the bird's nest."  I have no idea whether the structures worked for the participants/attendees, but they were beautiful on the television screen and left me wondering why all stadia are as fabulous looking.  Hmmm...maybe it takes a lot of virtually slave labor?

Mamma Mia

So, up until now I have avoided going to see the ABBA musical Mamma Mia!  I sort of looked down my nose at the whole idea.  Tonight I went to see the movie and loved every silly second of it.  Here's what I say to all those snooty movie reviewers:  This isn't some deep intellectual film. When you have lived a real life and are middle-aged, you might get it.  Until then just shut up and go review deep angst ridden movies.  Meryl Streep and the rest of the cast clearly were having a lot of fun and the audience I was sitting in was too.  I haven't laughed or felt happy in a long time and this made me bounce my way out of the theatre.  

Oh, and one more thing:  Pierce Brosnan sang just fine.  This isn't opera (and I know opera).  He carried his tunes and did the speak-sing thing a few times and it worked. 

I'm glad I went. 

Baseball and culture

Well, Manny just struck out again. The Red Sox are not looking so hot right now. I am now going to go on my "baseball as a reflection of society" rant. The Boston Sporting Globe, er Boston Globe, just had a story about how women wearing pink Red Sox caps should be stoned to death. It didn't really say that, but it may as well have. The jist of the story was that only the "real" fan had a right to root for the Sox. Anyone was new, who hadn't been rooting for the Sox since they were 5, was a poseur at best and like I said, should be stoned to death, no, spit on and kicked into the gutter. I'm a native Northern Californian. I can't imagine anyone in Giant's territory having that kind of attitude.

Today, top of the news, Manny pushed a Red Sox employee down because he couldn't get 16 tickets for a game. Puhleeze. How I want to love Boston, but it is so, so hard when stuff like this is going on. I have lived in New England for 22 years and I am still looking for general civility. It is like the lowest common denominator has become the norm. It became real to me with the "Yankees suck" T-shirts. If my sons had walked in wearing those shirts I would have fainted. Actually the biggest shock was when I was in the Stop and Shop and saw a woman standing in line with her teen-age son and she had on a T-shirt that actually had the "F word" printed on it. I want anyone reading this to think about their mother wearing that across her chest. What has happened to our society?

It's late and I could go on and on. I will let it rest for now and just pray that civility returns.

A Little Night Music - a non-political post

For the last few months I have been working on a production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. There were some trials and tribulations, but we finally got it together for our three performances at Indian Hill Music Center. I was very, very, very lucky to be able to play Desiree Armfeldt, something I never thought would happen. It was the most delightful experience with a wonderful, totally believable cast. To tell the truth I have never liked the one song Desiree sings, Send in the Clowns, but when it is heard in the context of the show, it makes complete sense. I still don't think I would like to perform it without the dialogue because the few words that Fredrik speaks are so, so heartbreaking.

How I wish we had more than three performances. Our ensemble was just becoming an ensemble and it was over...