I had six hours to myself today. I can't even begin to tell you what a treat that was! I have been having Tara babysit for about a year now -- she was a teacher at Bear's preschool and is just great with him. I went and got my hair cut and colored, went to pick up Calli's ashes, went to Mervyns (who was having a great, going-out-of-business sale of 40% off and I got some good deals). I went shopping and bought a new blouse for New Year's Eve, went to the Dollar Store and to the grocery store. All by myself! I didn't have to say "No, BEAR!" once! Man, what a treat.
He also had a good day... He went on some errands with Tara, went to the park with some other kids she babysits, to McDonald's for lunch, home to watch a movie... A fun-filled day for him and he didn't hear "No, BEAR!" once either!
Just a treat. I needed to fill my sanity tank up in a BIG way -- haven't had a break since August, unless you count the 3 hours at a woman's church event in late October.
I almost lost it at the grocery store... A woman in front of me just screamed "high maintenance." Perfect nails, perfect hair, expensive handbag, who did nothing but complain - nonstop - to her son who was about 8. At one point, they were moving in line, he accidentally stepped on her toe, and she went on a TIRADE about how he'd RUINED her pedicure that was less than 24 hours old. I mean, it was a spectacle -- she made a HUGE deal out of it. I felt so bad for her son. I bit my lip. Hard. When it was my turn, the cashier looked at me and asked if I was okay. She'd heard the whole thing about the pedicure too. I told her -- if the customer in front of me had said one more thing to her son about how HE ruined her precious pedicure, I was going to lose it. I said my husband died 14 months ago -- I tell ya -- there are more important things in this world than a DAMN pedicure!!! As soon as I said that, she smiled in agreement and the two customers behind me chimed in too! This woman was a flippin piece of work. I felt so bad for her son -- berated because he accidentally stepped on her toe. She needs to get her priorities straight.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
What a week...
I'm sitting here watching a live episode of Oprah, taped this morning, and Gayle King just read an article that appeared in Time magazine. I just found it and want to post it here so I don't forget. What little I heard really had an impact -- reading it in its entirety is even more powerful.
-----------------------------------------------
How Obama Rewrote the Book - Nancy Gibbons, Time Magazine (11/5/08)
Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. Barack Obama never talks about how people see him: I'm not the one making history, he said every chance he got. You are. Yet as he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people's faces. We are the ones we've been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began.
"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible," declared the President-elect, "who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."
Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.
Remember this day, parents told their children as they took them out of school to go see an African-American candidate make history. An election in one of the world's oldest democracies looked like the kind they hold in brand-new ones, when citizens finally come out and dance, a purple-thumb day, a velvet revolution. A hundred thousand people came out in red states to hear Obama; a hundred fifty thousand turned out in purple ones, even after all this time, when they should have been sick to death of Hope and Change. In Michigan, people put an electric fence around their yard sign to protect it. NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station sent a video message encouraging people to vote; they did, from 200 miles up. A judge in Ohio ruled that homeless people could use a park bench as their address in order to register. A couple flew home from India just to cast their ballots. Obama's Ohio volunteers knocked on a million doors on Monday alone. That night, a Florida official locked himself in the Seminole County election headquarters and slept overnight with the ballots to make sure nothing went wrong with the vote. Early-voting lines in Atlanta were 10 hours long, and still people waited, as though their vote was their most precious and personal possession at a moment when everything else seemed to be losing its value. You heard the same phrases everywhere. First time ever. In my lifetime. Whatever it takes.
When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease.
The victory poured down the ballot, bringing along a larger Democratic majority in both houses, though not as broad as some had predicted: Democrats widened their margins in the House and the Senate. The Republican caucus is smaller, more male and whiter at a time when the electorate is heading the other way. But the Democrats did not come close to their dream of a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which suggests that people's hunger for change is tempered by their faith in restraint
When the race was called, there was a rush of noise, of horns honking and kids shouting and strangers hugging in the streets. People danced in Harlem and wept at Ebenezer Baptist Church and lit candles at Dr. King's grave. More than a thousand people shouted "Yes we can!" outside the White House, where a century ago it was considered scandalous for a President to invite a black hero to lunch. The Secret Service said it had never seen anything like it. President Bush called the victory "awesome" when he phoned Obama to congratulate him: "You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life."
John McCain, freedom fighter, has always seen the nobility even — maybe especially — in a losing battle, which takes the most courage to fight. When he called Obama to concede the race, the younger man honored the elder statesman. "I need your help," Obama said, and McCain offered it without reservation. "Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans," McCain told the crowd in a gracious speech beneath the Arizona mountains. "I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face."
Remember this day. We now get to imagine, at least for a while, that the election of Obama has not just turned a page in our politics but also tossed out the whole book so we can start over. Whether by design or by default, the past now loses power: for the moment, it feels as if we've left behind the baby-boomer battles of the past 40 years; the culture wars that took us prisoner and cut us off from what we have in common; the tribal warfare between rich and poor, North and South, black and white; and the illusion, if anyone still harbored it after the past eight years, that what happens in Washington does not affect what happens everywhere else.
"She has gone home," Obama told the quiet crowd in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday night, recalling the grandmother who had raised him and shaped him and died on the eve of his victory. "She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America," he said, and tears we had never seen before streaked his face. "They're not famous. Their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day, they work hard." One day later, Madelyn Dunham's grandson would be the most famous man in the world.
At a moment of obvious peril, America decided to place its fate in the hands of a man who had been born to an idealistic white teenage mother and the charismatic African grad student who abandoned them — a man who grew up without money, talked his way into good schools, worked his way up through the pitiless world of Chicago politics to the U.S. Senate and now the White House in a stunningly short period. That achievement, compared with those of the Bushes or the Kennedys or the Roosevelts or the Adamses or any of the other American princes who were born into power or bred to it, represents such a radical departure from the norm that it finally brings meaning to the promise taught from kindergarten: "Anyone can grow up to be President."
A nation doesn't much need a big President in small times; it needs one when the future is spitting out monsters. We've heard so much about Obama's brand-new voters that we easily forget the others he found, the ones who hadn't voted since Vietnam or who had never dreamed they'd vote for a black man or a liberal or a Democrat, much less all three. But many Americans are living through the worst decade of their lives, and they have anger-management issues. They saw a war mismanaged, a city swallowed, now an economy held together with foreign loans and thumbtacks. It took a perfect storm of bad news to create this moment, but even the big men rarely win in a walk. Ronald Reagan didn't. John Kennedy didn't. Those with the clearest vision often have to fight the hardest for others to see things as they do.
-----------------------------------------------
How Obama Rewrote the Book - Nancy Gibbons, Time Magazine (11/5/08)
Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. Barack Obama never talks about how people see him: I'm not the one making history, he said every chance he got. You are. Yet as he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people's faces. We are the ones we've been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began.
"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible," declared the President-elect, "who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."
Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.
Remember this day, parents told their children as they took them out of school to go see an African-American candidate make history. An election in one of the world's oldest democracies looked like the kind they hold in brand-new ones, when citizens finally come out and dance, a purple-thumb day, a velvet revolution. A hundred thousand people came out in red states to hear Obama; a hundred fifty thousand turned out in purple ones, even after all this time, when they should have been sick to death of Hope and Change. In Michigan, people put an electric fence around their yard sign to protect it. NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station sent a video message encouraging people to vote; they did, from 200 miles up. A judge in Ohio ruled that homeless people could use a park bench as their address in order to register. A couple flew home from India just to cast their ballots. Obama's Ohio volunteers knocked on a million doors on Monday alone. That night, a Florida official locked himself in the Seminole County election headquarters and slept overnight with the ballots to make sure nothing went wrong with the vote. Early-voting lines in Atlanta were 10 hours long, and still people waited, as though their vote was their most precious and personal possession at a moment when everything else seemed to be losing its value. You heard the same phrases everywhere. First time ever. In my lifetime. Whatever it takes.
When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease.
The victory poured down the ballot, bringing along a larger Democratic majority in both houses, though not as broad as some had predicted: Democrats widened their margins in the House and the Senate. The Republican caucus is smaller, more male and whiter at a time when the electorate is heading the other way. But the Democrats did not come close to their dream of a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which suggests that people's hunger for change is tempered by their faith in restraint
When the race was called, there was a rush of noise, of horns honking and kids shouting and strangers hugging in the streets. People danced in Harlem and wept at Ebenezer Baptist Church and lit candles at Dr. King's grave. More than a thousand people shouted "Yes we can!" outside the White House, where a century ago it was considered scandalous for a President to invite a black hero to lunch. The Secret Service said it had never seen anything like it. President Bush called the victory "awesome" when he phoned Obama to congratulate him: "You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life."
John McCain, freedom fighter, has always seen the nobility even — maybe especially — in a losing battle, which takes the most courage to fight. When he called Obama to concede the race, the younger man honored the elder statesman. "I need your help," Obama said, and McCain offered it without reservation. "Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans," McCain told the crowd in a gracious speech beneath the Arizona mountains. "I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face."
Remember this day. We now get to imagine, at least for a while, that the election of Obama has not just turned a page in our politics but also tossed out the whole book so we can start over. Whether by design or by default, the past now loses power: for the moment, it feels as if we've left behind the baby-boomer battles of the past 40 years; the culture wars that took us prisoner and cut us off from what we have in common; the tribal warfare between rich and poor, North and South, black and white; and the illusion, if anyone still harbored it after the past eight years, that what happens in Washington does not affect what happens everywhere else.
"She has gone home," Obama told the quiet crowd in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday night, recalling the grandmother who had raised him and shaped him and died on the eve of his victory. "She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America," he said, and tears we had never seen before streaked his face. "They're not famous. Their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day, they work hard." One day later, Madelyn Dunham's grandson would be the most famous man in the world.
At a moment of obvious peril, America decided to place its fate in the hands of a man who had been born to an idealistic white teenage mother and the charismatic African grad student who abandoned them — a man who grew up without money, talked his way into good schools, worked his way up through the pitiless world of Chicago politics to the U.S. Senate and now the White House in a stunningly short period. That achievement, compared with those of the Bushes or the Kennedys or the Roosevelts or the Adamses or any of the other American princes who were born into power or bred to it, represents such a radical departure from the norm that it finally brings meaning to the promise taught from kindergarten: "Anyone can grow up to be President."
A nation doesn't much need a big President in small times; it needs one when the future is spitting out monsters. We've heard so much about Obama's brand-new voters that we easily forget the others he found, the ones who hadn't voted since Vietnam or who had never dreamed they'd vote for a black man or a liberal or a Democrat, much less all three. But many Americans are living through the worst decade of their lives, and they have anger-management issues. They saw a war mismanaged, a city swallowed, now an economy held together with foreign loans and thumbtacks. It took a perfect storm of bad news to create this moment, but even the big men rarely win in a walk. Ronald Reagan didn't. John Kennedy didn't. Those with the clearest vision often have to fight the hardest for others to see things as they do.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
14 months
Tomorrow will mark 14 months since Steve died.
I just let out a huge sigh on that one...
As the holidays approach, I find myself really missing Steve. I miss "him" -- his smell, his presence, his humor, his wit, his laugh, his strength, his love. Bear has grown so much -- he was 4 1/2 when Steve died. He will turn 6 in just over a month. He's grown up and matured so much -- some, just by virtue of growing up and maturing. Some of the maturity has come from necessity. I simply can't imagine what it would be like to lose your father at 4 years old. I see his loss -- it's profound -- but what must it FEEL like? And how will it feel at 6? 8? 10? 15? 18? I find myself worrying about him in the future, without a male role model to help shape and mold him. My initial concern when Steve died was "will I be enough?" That feeling subsided and I feel like I am enough. But lately, as he grows and matures, I find myself revisiting -- will I be enough? I just don't know.
We're going to my Mom's for Thanksgiving which I'm looking forward to. Last year, it was just Bear and I and a box of Kleenex. I was just numb. This year will be fun. I'm dreading Christmas -- but we'll get through it. I don't know how yet, but we will. Just want to get to January 1, 2009. I'm anxious to see what the new year holds for Bear and I.
I just let out a huge sigh on that one...
As the holidays approach, I find myself really missing Steve. I miss "him" -- his smell, his presence, his humor, his wit, his laugh, his strength, his love. Bear has grown so much -- he was 4 1/2 when Steve died. He will turn 6 in just over a month. He's grown up and matured so much -- some, just by virtue of growing up and maturing. Some of the maturity has come from necessity. I simply can't imagine what it would be like to lose your father at 4 years old. I see his loss -- it's profound -- but what must it FEEL like? And how will it feel at 6? 8? 10? 15? 18? I find myself worrying about him in the future, without a male role model to help shape and mold him. My initial concern when Steve died was "will I be enough?" That feeling subsided and I feel like I am enough. But lately, as he grows and matures, I find myself revisiting -- will I be enough? I just don't know.
We're going to my Mom's for Thanksgiving which I'm looking forward to. Last year, it was just Bear and I and a box of Kleenex. I was just numb. This year will be fun. I'm dreading Christmas -- but we'll get through it. I don't know how yet, but we will. Just want to get to January 1, 2009. I'm anxious to see what the new year holds for Bear and I.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Election
I'm sitting here, watching Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw... I sure do miss Tim Russert -- he had such a liveliness and excitement to his voice when he'd cover campaigns. It was infectious.
I need to remember to buy a newspaper tomorrow -- what a historic election, regardless of how it goes. Steve and I saved newspaper covers from all of the major news stories through the years, put aside for Bear some day. I almost took him to vote with me this morning but I was afraid of long lines and an anxious kid - not a good combination. Now I wish I had. It's exciting -- still don't know which way it's going but I'm heading back to watch NBC and CNN :-)
I need to remember to buy a newspaper tomorrow -- what a historic election, regardless of how it goes. Steve and I saved newspaper covers from all of the major news stories through the years, put aside for Bear some day. I almost took him to vote with me this morning but I was afraid of long lines and an anxious kid - not a good combination. Now I wish I had. It's exciting -- still don't know which way it's going but I'm heading back to watch NBC and CNN :-)
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Halloween 2008
We ended up having a nice time trick-or-treating last night, traveling the neighborhood with our neighbor Amy and her son, Tyler (6 months younger than Bear). Mike stayed back to hand out candy. Here are some recent pictures...
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