Okay, not exactly my usual sort of post. On the other hand, I know some of my friends are involved in canine rescue, and as with many things, the further the word spreads, the more likely it is to actually do some good. This is copied verbatim from a friend's FB post.

11-20-2009: Dairyland Greyhound Racetrack in Kenosha, WI will be closing on December 31, 2009. 900 Greyhounds need to be adopted or they will be euthanized. Please help me get the word out; there are only 6 weeks to get this task done. Contact Joanne Kehoe Operations Director P: 312.559.0887 Or Dairyland Race Track Adoption direct at (262)612-8256 Please repost this to your FB & help these dogs.

ETA: Another friend has done more homework than I did, and sent me this:

I went to the web site, and true the facility will discontinue running December 31, however the kennels shall remain open and the hounds will be adopted out and / or returned to owners and breeders. The site also has pictures of dogs ready for adoption now. Euthanization is a last resort so the 31st is not the drop dead date for these hounds."

Before it was renamed and repurposed, this was Armistice Day. It was the day when all the carnage of WWI came to an official end, set aside originally to remind us all of the cost and horror of war, so that those fields would never again be fertilized by human blood and sacrifice.

It was a war that gave rise to the poetry of Wilfred Owen, when the very men fighting it could say that "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country" was a terrible lie to tell to "young men hungry for some desperate glory". (Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen) They called it "The War to End Wars", and they believed it could be.

It wasn't about the men who served; it was about keeping the memory of the reality of war alive, keeping their sons from ever having to face the guns and the gas again. That isn't to say we shouldn't express our appreciation of what they have done and are doing to those who have served. Absolutely we should, and I do. We don't think of them enough, nor give them credit for what they do out of our sight every day. But we should also remember the original intent of those who established the holiday. It wasn't about those who served in war. It was about the value of peace.

This is my personal favorite poem out of WWI. Like Wilfred Owen, the author was himself in the service. He was killed in action in November 1917. He was 24.

In Memoriam

Private D Sutherland killed in action in the German trench, May 16th, 1916, and the others who died.

So you were David’s father
And he was your only son
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone
Because of an old man weeping
Just an old man in pain
For David, his son David
That will not come again.

Oh, the letters he wrote you
And I can see them still
Not a word of the fighting
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year get stormier
And the Bosches have got his body
And I was his officer.

You were only David’s father
But I had fifty sons
When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the guns
And we came back at twilight -
O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.

Oh, never will I forget you
My men that trusted me
More my sons than your fathers’
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride
They could not see you dying
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant
They saw their first-born go
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low
The piteous writing bodies
They screamed “Don’t leave me sir”
For they were only your fathers
But I was their officer.”

Written by E A Mackintosh

Part of my son’s homework today was to illustrate the phrase “catch a bus”.

He drew a figure leaning back against a taut rope, the other end of which was tied to a bus. I’d heard of calf-roping, but bus-roping?

And then he wondered why I laughed so hard.

I am not certain of the exact sequence of events. I know a cat was either involved or witness, because she came running out of the bathroom at a rate normally reserved for flight from cat-eating monsters such as vacuum cleaners and repair people. Seeing her mad dash, and hearing strange sounds continuing to emanate from the bathroom, I went to investigate.

What I found was water spraying wildly from a join in the pipe leading from wall to toilet, unfortunately on the wall side of the valve. That meant that the only way to stop the spray was to turn off the main valve to the house. Yeah, that's right. No running water - again. In the approximately 2 minutes it took from feline flight to valve closure, there was about 1/2 an inch of water covering a substantial percentage of the bathroom floor.

So I have called the landlady and left her voicemail both at her home and on her cell, and called her plumber to get on their list for tomorrow. It will get fixed; it always does. But I must admit I am getting very tired of plumbing crises.

Our calico cat, Miss Cloud, is always trying to get Outside. She wants to explore the Land of New Smells. So today I decided to try and accommodate her, with some human control of the process.

First I tried putting a harness on her. Trouble was, the harness I'd gotten was too small; I couldn't even get it over her head. I knew she was a big girl, but I guess she's bigger than I realized. So okay; I had a collar. First time I tried to put it on her, she got away before I was done fastening it, and managed to undo the buckle. My son retrieved it from under the chair for me, and I tried again. This time she held still, and I got it buckled. She was calm, so I attached the leash. She wasn't too sure about that, but she also wasn't pulling away, so out the door we went.

I should have tried to see if I could remove the collar without unbuckling it. Unfortunately, Cloud conducted the test for me, with positive (for her) results. One good tug, and there I was, holding a leash with a fastened collar, sans cat. The cat part of the assembly was racing across the lawn as fast as her little white paws could carry her.

My son came out to help, and we cornered and recaptured her. She's back inside, as are the collar and leash. No further experiments will be scheduled until I have a smaller collar or a larger harness - or maybe both.

The Westboro Baptists are at it again. This time they're targeting North Central High School and the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis on Thursday, 9/24/09. They're targeting NCHS for their production of The Laramie Project, a play about Matthew Shepard, the young man who was killed in an anti-gay hate-crime. They need no other excuse to target the JCC than that it is a Jewish institution. The Phelps-A-Thon link takes pledges for each location the hate-pushers are targeting, raising money for the targets for each minute the Phelps Fanatics are out there. Then they send Phelps & Co. a thank you note telling them how much money they raised for the object of their vitriol. That alone is an excellent response.

I also found a link for a do-it-yourself Angel kit, to do something such as Angel Action did in Laramie, Wyoming. I don't know that it's feasible to pull such a thing together in the available time, and can't do it myself for geographical reasons. So I'm tossing the idea to the winds, because that way if it can be done it might be.

I am much amused. A young woman (18), the daughter of a woman I mentored when she was in her teens, just e-mailed me. She has started up her own coven, and was looking into what foods would be appropriate for a harvest festival, as she would be hosting their Mabon Circle. (I keep telling people I'm not the Encyclopedia Galactica, and they keep not listening. But I digress.)

So I did a little hunting, and e-mailed her a bunch of Sukkot recipes. There's a vegetable stew, and roast chicken with root vegetables, and a barley bread with dried fruit, and eggplant stuffed with mushrooms and barley. Best source I could think of for harvest-festival recipes, y'know?

The appliance wars are over, and House Deer is victorious.

The saga began on the Friday before Labor Day. I don’t know where in the appliance code it is written that failure must take place on or immediately before a holiday weekend, but it’s got to be somewhere. I’ve had a microwave die the day before Thanksgiving with a full feast to cook, my oven thermostat go on strike with bread rising and cookies on the tray for a 4th of July party, and my dishwasher turn up its toes while I was making a Passover Seder.

This time, though, they outdid themselves, with two of them dying effectively on the same day. First we found that the refrigerator had stopped refrigerating. The thermometer inside read upwards of 60. So I called until I found a repairman (crochety old man; he really knew his stuff and was both willing to explain and far less crotchety when he found out I would actually listen.) He came out, did what he could, and warned me that it might not be sufficient and why. Then he left.

That accomplished, I went to move towels from washer to dryer, only to find that they were still water-saturated. So I set them to spin again. More water came out, but not much, and the sound was odd. Opened the lid to smell something hot, and found when I moved the towels that the tub was indeed extremely warm in one spot. Tried to move things and check, and figured out that what the last repairman had told me was coming had indeed arrived; the bearings were gone and the motor burning out. Okay then; it’s New Washer Time!

Meanwhile, the refrigerator still hasn’t come back on. Not good. Checked again a few hours later. Silence. Go to bed. Checked again at about 3:00 a.m. when I made my usual pilgrimage, to find that it was finally both running and cold. Yaaay! So as soon as practicable (Monday), I went out and committed an act of washing machine.

I had rejoiced too soon. The refrigerator continued to operate for a whole 48 hours. After that, the freezer worked fine but the fridge wouldn’t chill below 55. (I found that very strange.) That is not a temperature that prevents spoilage, to say the least, so we started helping it along with bags of ice, acknowledging that life support was not a terribly satisfactory solution and that it was simply time to say kaddish for the poor thing. I also started cooking so that there would be no leftovers after I had to throw out a quart of chicken corn soup. And so the next hunt was on. Have I mentioned that appliance shopping is an element in the set of things which is no fun? No? Well, permit me to rectify the oversight. But I finally found one, buying it, in an amusing small-world twist, from the young man who had purchased our house in Indianapolis in January 2006.

So we now have a full complement of working appliances. The washer was delivered last Thursday, and the refrigerator today. I’ve done a whole lot of laundry, and filled the new refrigerator with the things that survived the demise of the old one. So ended the appliance wars. We even won, but as is the case with any war, victory wasn’t cheap.

I could make this article required reading for all the small-minded, mean-spirited, fulminating self-righteous turkey buzzards who are resorting to outright lies to kill universal health care.

Please note: I am not castigating those who are opposed to it for rational reasons, only those who are trying to kill it by having screaming tantrums in public.

1. Please stop playing with the mice so much that you let them get away. There are several reasons for this.

a. Cleaning up mousie remains when they die in places they can access but you cannot is difficult and unpleasant at best.

b. The frantic squeaking at 3:00 a.m. is extremely disruptive of human sleep.

c. It is disconcerting to know that there was a mousie, but that we don't know where it went or what condition it was in.

2. Once Mommy has found the tiny baby mousie that escaped you (it was hiding in the laundry, Cloud) and captured it in a glass, it is no longer yours. It is mine, to dispose of as I see fit. If you can find it after I've dumped it out in the soybean field, you may catch and eat it, but I am not giving you the chance to lose it again!

Human readers: I know the most effective method of mouse disposal would have been to introduce the wee beastie to our septic system, but I just can't do that to something that's looking up at me.

Those of my friends who are fortunate enough to live in Massachusetts can be proud of Congresscritter Barney Frank.

Shamelessly ganked from starcat_jewel

“I like having a wife who, when she can’t come up with anything for dinner, comes up with chicken curry.”

I was listening to an economic report on NPR earlier this week, and they talked about the economic indicators, "adjusted to remove the volatile food and energy sectors."

What sort of nonsense is that? Yes, they're volatile. Yes, they bounce around unpredictably and so skew a nice neat theoretical analysis. But we don't live in a theoretical world; we live with those wildly variable prices. Food and energy are the two things that no one living in this world can avoid. We all have to eat. I'm not extravagant at the grocery (my father in law at one point couldn't believe I was buying healthy food for what I spent), and I'm still appalled by the numbers at the checkout counter. I make a tank of gas last 2 weeks, but I still have to drive. No choice; we live 6 miles from the nearest town with a gas station or a grocery. When the price of gas goes up 25 cents a gallon overnight, we're going to notice it. We use electricity. When the power goes out we don't have running water, because the well pump is electric. Likewise for the A/C. If the choice is between using the air conditioning or making myself ill, I'm going to run it. I'll set it at 75, but I'll run it. Even in summer, we use natural gas; it heats our water and runs the stove.

So how can the economic indicators reflect the true state of anything if they "adjust" them to eliminate the things no one can do without? And how did we come to accept a theory that is so entirely divorced from daily reality?

Box arrived. Box turned out to contain much-desired Lego kit for boychick, a gift in honor of his straight-A report card. Boy opened box. Boy then shrieked "Yes YES YES YES!", while dancing around the kitchen. He spent a good half hour babbling about the wonder of the gift before he settled enough to actually open it. As soon as the shrieks quieted a little I called his grandparents so he could say thank you. He did so, quite calmly, then gave me back the phone and went back to dancing.

Temperature was in the mid '70s, so perfect for my next attempt at bike ride. Got bike out of garage. Heard woeful cat cries; determined Sophia was on roof. Went to bring Sophia in through attic window. Cloud took advantage of open window to join Sophia on roof. Took perhaps 10 minutes to get Sophia in. Took another 30-40 to get Cloud in. End result: it was above 80 by the time I rolled out.

Kidling going stir crazy. I heard wild thumping while drying off after post-bike shower. Called to ask what he was doing. "Trying to climb the wall" he says, quite seriously. "I can't do it. I guess I need climbing equipment." Eeek!

Took kidling swimming. Now engaged in playing with Legos.

If one of my writer friends presented a day like this, I'd say they'd gone beyond the limits of literary license.

It appears that the Powers That Be at the U.S. Postal service are very quietly looking into closing a huge number of post offices and privatizing sorting, delivery, and so forth. They're doing this without public input or publicity. (Gee, I can't imagine why not....)

I've been thinking about this, and it scares me. No one knows more about you than your postal carrier - they know who your bills are from, and whether you're home during the day. They deliver your social security statements. In Indiana, they'll be delivering your driver's license. Professionally, Court documents can be filed by certified mail and it is considered as valid as walking in the courthouse door and handing it to the Clerk. It's the best opportunity for identity theft, just for a start. I want those people screened for honesty and reliability, as they are now, and trusting the lowest bidder not to cut corners on that sort of thing seems to me a recipe for disaster.

It's clearly about the money, but the Postal Service has never been entirely self supporting. It's federally mandated, and receives federal support, and greed should not be permitted to deprive inner cities and rural communities of access, nor all of us of safe and reliable mail delivery.

naamah_darling gives details and provides a link to the Postal Worker's Union website, to weigh in with your representative. I've done so, and now I'm making sure those who read my LJ will see it. It's the United States Postal Service, not the FedEx Postal Service or the Joe Smith Trucking Postal Service, and it needs a whole lot more consideration and discussion before that gets changed.

Per the New York Times: A couple of weeks ago, the Iraqi Kurds quietly passed their own constitution, to be voted on in a later referendum. Our own Veep, already in Iraq to facilitate negotiations between the Kurds and the Iraqi Arab government, opined that the move was "not helpful". In response, one of the members of the Kurdish Parliament evidently said of the Baghdad government "This is a punch in the face. We are fed up with them."

Not so much with the diplomacy, that. Serious honesty points, though.

Our 11 year old son's comment, watching a Star Wars episode on Cartoon Network: "General Grievous has some real anger management issues." When I started laughing, he looked at me and said "Seriously. He does."

You've got to wonder where they get it.

I have a mulberry harvest that doesn't quit. I've not managed that in past years because our tree stands alone in the middle of the back yard, the berries are very high, and they blow down. But my neighbors have half a dozen trees along the edge of their driveway and told us to make free of them. So now I have enough to do something with, but the stems do not want to come off.

So some of you others who harvest mulberries - how do you deal with the stems? Do you precook the berries and run them through a food mill? Or do you just put them in baked goods stems and all? Or take scissors and cut them off one by one? Or something else I haven't thought of?

Inquiring minds want to know! :)

My son and I went for a swim this afternoon, there being little enough else sane one can do when the heat index is in the vicinity of 100 Fahrenheit. He and another boy about the same age decided to play tag. Since tag with only 2 isn't much fun, they asked me to join them, which I did. (Old age and treachery triumphed, but that's another story.)

So at one point I was pursuing my son. The other child quipped "Keep your friends and family close" to which my son responded "and your enemies closer." The lifeguard and I both laughed, and the boys grinned. I was thinking that he had picked up that concept a whole lot younger than I did.

Or not. About 15 minutes later we were getting dried off in preparation for the drive home, and he said "what does that mean, Mom?"

"What does what mean?"

"What Luke said. 'Keep your friends and family close and your enemies closer.' What's it mean?"

I explained it, but I'm still chuckling.

"I'm not saying it's hot out, but I ran into Satan in the parking lot and he said he was going home to cool off."