YOUR TAX MONEY AT WORK!

Did you know that the government is requiring cities and villages all over America to change their street signs? No more all-capital letters. The new signs must be small case. And the letters are going to have to be six inches high and reflective. One of the supporters of the new law ( and the entity which paid for the safety studies) is 3M...the company which makes the reflective stuff for the letters. Go figure. The government has decided that we aren't safe with the present street signs, and this traffic safety eclipses other community needs ( for example, feeding the indigent.)

I got an idea this morning, as I watched the boys eat breakfast. Some of their bites were too large. As a matter of fact, they let some of the bites hang out of their mouths and chewed bit-by-bit until they had managed the whole piece of food. We need some help here. The boys could choke on a too-big bite. What we need is a government agency to make some guidelines.
It should be simple. We could require every home to purchase a measuring device
( of course they would have to be uniform.) We'll award a contract to a manufacturer and budget some amount...say, $100 apiece for the items. We'll award that extra funding to the states based on population.
Then, of course, we'll need an enforcing agency. We can require every municipality to provide a Food-Bite-Size Code Enforcement Officer. It will add to their financial burden, but we can help by appropriating some funding to help pay for the position.
Then, of course, there's the matter of getting into the homes to make sure the new policies are being followed. But we can amend the Constitution and give the government those powers.
We'll cover the expenses of all this government generosity by a tax increase on the wealthy ( who can afford to pay for their own measuring devices.)Of course, some of the financial burden may trickle down to the lower economic echelons when those wealthy business owners go belly up and lay off the workers, but we'll think about that later.
How about it? Are you on board? Hey! wait! I just found a whole tray of measuring devices in my kitchen drawer. They're called spoons, and I'll wager you have a few of them, too. This discovery could save the country millions, if not billions of added debt. Unless, of course, they don't meet Government standards.

The Reason I Don't Do "Black Friday."

Black Friday—a tradition which I have no desire to begin. Consider the experience of a friend:

Laura (not her real name) entered Wal-Mart at 4:10 am after circling the parking lot for 45 minutes waiting for a spot to open up. The store was packed tight. Shoppers filled every aisle. Laura retreated to the clothing section where there was walking space between displays.
There, on a clearance rack, she saw a dress which she never would have bought; it was clearly something meant for a stick-figured teenybopper. But having some time to kill waiting for the crowds to thin, she took the dress, and a necklace displayed to accessorize it, into the fitting room. She took off her sweatshirt and pulled the dress over her head…which was as far as it would go (willingly.)
Laura made a bad decision at this point. She doesn’t deny this. But she stretched as tall (and as thin) as she could, took a deep breath and tugged the garment down another ten inches. She heard the seams rip, but it couldn’t be helped. To make matters worse, she felt the pull on her own undergarments and realized that the threads from the fraying seams had wrapped themselves around her hooks.
Laura panicked and yanked the hem of the dress up over her head, effectively turning it inside out. The zipper on the enemy dress caught in Laura’s hair. Now Laura’s arms were pinioned against her head, imprisoned in the inside-out fabric bag. She remembered the little service bell to the right of the door and got to her knees so that her up-stretched arms could find it, and that’s when she recalled that she was wearing her husband’s underwear.
That morning, in the darkness of their room, she’d rummaged in the clean laundry basket (which she should have folded and put away earlier, but didn’t) and pulled out what she thought was a comfy old pair of granny underwear—perfect for pre-dawn shopping. By the time she discovered her mistake, she was just too tired to rectify it, so she had slipped the briefs on under her sweatpants.
Now, kneeling in the three- foot -square dressing room with her arms up over her head, her top half encased in inside-out fraying fabric and her bottom half sporting Hanes-For-Him, she couldn’t bring herself to press the “help” button.
It was at that point a tentative knock came at the door.
“Is someone in there?”
Laura bit her lip.
“Is this room in use?”
Laura took a deep breath and the seam finished its deathrip. “Could you help me, please?”
The door opened and a part-time saleswoman entered. She assisted Laura in pulling the dress down but no amount of effort would allow them to remove it. When the dress was off her head, Laura came face-to-face with the salesclerk: a woman in her nineties, barely over four feet tall, who was face-to-face with Laura’s husband’s tidy whities. Her expression said it all.
The clerk cut off the price tags from the ruined dress, and Laura pulled her sweatshirt over it. She meekly followed the elderly woman. Not wanting to meet anyone’s gaze, Laura kept her eyes down as they walked, matching her stride to the lights which flashed with each step of the old lady’s sneakers. They reached the checkout, and Laura scanned her credit card through the machine before the clerk escorted her to the door.
At that point, an alarm sounded and a mechanical voice told her she had activated the security system and she should step back into the store.
The greeter, another senior citizen in tan pants and a blue shirt, reached up and removed something from her hair. “I’ll take this,” he said.
The necklace.
The perfect accessory for the teeny-bopper dress had slipped itself under her thick matted curls (maybe she should have brushed her hair out at home, but it was Black Friday and four am, for Pete’s sake) and it had been fitted with one of those smart tags which screams out as it is abducted.
The four-foot black-belt karate clerk from the women’s section took her arm. The other senior spoke into his phone, and the manager arrived at a sprint.
Laura didn’t buy the necklace. ( Who knew Wal-Mart sold hundred-dollar jewelry) and the understanding manager allowed her to leave without calling the police. They banned her from the store for a year.
Still meek, Laura asked if they needed her ID so they would have a photo reference.
Not necessary, the manager assured her. They could pull up any number of still photos to identify Laura. You see, he told Laura, each dressing room was fitted with a surveillance camera.

Just a Thought

The other day one of my granddaughters posted a comment on Facebook about not changing a thing about her life. I don't know if it was just a status shuffle or her true thoughts, but it is a question I have thought a lot about too.

If by changing things, you mean things like walking out of the bathroom at church with my skirt tucked into my pantyhose...(as I recall, my friend tackled me and shoved me into a Sunday school classroom so I could make the required repairs) then, yeah.

Or if you mean the time Charlie and I came to the end of a beautiful duet in the morning service and I tripped in front of God and everybody, and rolled down the steps landing with my dress up over my head, then probably.

And the time I left the farm auction in the 1949 camper bus we had just bought, turned the wrong way and drove nearly to Yuma before Charlie caught up with me? Most definitely.

Charlie would probably change the time he saw one of our children (who didn't have a driver's license) in his grandmother's car and chased him into someone's country driveway. The person who got out of that car ( and who wasn't our child) was mildly curious at who the fool was who had tailgated him to his own front door.

But if you mean the pivotal moment in our history...the murder of our boy, then I'm not so sure. At first blush, I would jump up and down at the chance. But then I would think about all the ripples that boulder caused when it was thrown into our lifestream.

Would Sarah still end up with Greg? Or Shawna, Doug? Would we have still adopted our boys and Michelle? Would there still be Hunter and Tyler and Annabelle and Aaron? Would we have gone into fostercare and touched the lives of so many children?

So many other people and events have been affected by Chad's murder. Would I have the right to change those parts of their lives, too?

And then there's my little boy, himself. I think about the families disrupted by the Vietnam War...those who were able to get their children out of the country before it was overrun by the enemy did so. I know they were torn apart by the hole their child's absence left. But their kids had gone to better lives, and to safety. They would not have wished them back from their security and peace to a place where their very lives were at risk.

I miss my son more than words could ever tell. The wound in my heart will never heal. I still cry over him. But would I tear him out of the arms of God to have him in this world with me again?

No. I wouldn't.

I wouldn't change the past. I would bear the dark parts of it, and be thankful for the parts which were ( and are) rich and sweet.

Electric thoughts

I needed some electrical work done, so I called an electrician. Not a hard choice; there were only three listed for our area. He said he'd try to work us in. The work didn't need to be finished for three weeks, so that was fine.
He came and looked the job over. He even did a couple of things. He said he'd be back, but he didn't say when. That should have tipped me off. But I am naive and I still believe people who tell me things face-to-face and business-like.
I called him three weeks later. He said they were really busy. They had some outside work to get out of the way before the weather changed. He said they would come the first day it rained. In this country, that could mean next spring, but I trusted him. After all, he is a businessman. The rain came...they didn't.
I called him the other day...almost two months after I first contacted his company. He said ( and this is hard to believe) that he had intended to call me that very day! He would come by the end of the week. The trouble is, he didn't say what month.
I'm getting put out.
I know when he'll show up. He'll drive his pickup truck up behind the tanker that's pumping water on the last of the flames that lick at what's left of our house. He'll get out and walk up to where we stand shivering in the cold, and he'll say ( with a straight face) " Well, we can get started on this next week."

Are you on Facebook?

And if you are, what color is your soul? What city do you belong in, and do you have enough points to unlock the answer to a question someone answered about you?
How many friends do you have? Facebook friends, that is.
Facebook friends are different than real friends, although a real friend could be a Facebook friend too.

A lady I know lives alone, and her Facebook account has become her life. At precisely 10 each night, she posts, "Good night, dear Facebook Friends."
In the morning, she posts, "I ghussw i shuoldn't tyr to type befor e I've had coffoe."
Why would your Facebook account be your first thought in the morning?
And now she has access to family squabbles...her own and other families. You see, people now hang out all that dirty laundry on VERY public Facebook. People who don't know you from Adam now know that you wear Victoria's secret underwear and so does your wife.

Susan posts that her husband made her mad this morning by criticizing her hair.
The lady I mentioned posts that people who love you should accept you for who you are.
Which is what Linda, who isn't our lady's friend, but who IS friends with Susan and so has access to HER comments on the lady's post, reposts on her status, adding her comment: Everyone who has an ungrateful husband or wife, copy this to your status.
Which fifty people who are ticked off at their mates do.
But that includes ten husbands and a wife who were the object of the original posts.
At one time, families waited until Christmas and Thanksgiving to solve disagreements. And they did it privately. Uncle Joe and Aunt Gerry would go off into a corner, share some hard words, and come out hugging. Then they would go home and not speak to one another until the next holiday...when it would all have been forgotten.
Now, they post on Facebook. And "friends" take sides. Before you know it, a simple "baditude" has become a family feud.
And the lady I mentioned?
She is incensed that people who don't even know what's going on would get involved. She gets so angry, she forgets to harvest her cranberry crop in Farmville. That little incident bums her out for the rest of the day. And she is all ready on antidepressants.

See, if she wasn't on her computer all this time, she'd be outside. In the sun, or the rain. She'd be talking to her real friends ( who would care if she got rained on) and getting some exercise ( which is good for depressed people.) She'd be getting into real arguments with real people and solving them with real hugs. ( Not little hearts posted next to her comments.) She's know her soul wasn't ANY color. She'd be satisfied with the city where she lived, and if she wanted to know what someone else had said about her, she'd go ask them, whether or not she had the points.

I'm not against Facebook. I have an account. I have 130 plus Facebook friends...most of whom I haven't seen or talked to in years. Maybe, after all, I'm just bitter.
I wanted to post this to Facebook, but I was over the allowed number of characters.