It’s not bad enough that I unaccountably was forced to turn 65 this month. Now, adding insult to injury, I keep getting spam about seniors meeting seniors for something other than bridge. Unless your name is Leroy Jethro Gibbs, don’t bother calling.

With the birthday just passed, I have reached the age where no matter what age a company sets for its senior discount, I qualify.
How the hell did this happen to me....

Get into your loosest, oldest, rattiest bathrobe, get under a blanket on your couch, spread a kitchen towel across your chest and eat nachos with homemade guacamole while watching the SAG Awards followed by the US Figure Skating Championships. Yep, a few hours of watching people whose total body weight is significantly less than what you carry around your belly is not the way to feel good about yourself. Especially when the women use less material in their whole dress than you use for your skivvies.
And yes, I am well aware of the irony of this self awareness achieved while eating nachos. 

Since some segments of our community are already sure I’m from the dark side, or heading there soon after my demise, I might as well explain my take on the Alaska Airlines’ prayer card issue.

The first time I got a prayer card I was slightly bemused. It was back when everyone was fed on a flight. I wondered if the card was their way of suggesting I might need divine intervention if I ate what they were euphemistically calling a chicken sandwich. My second thought was that they knew something I didn’t about the flight and wanted us all to pray that the plane made it OK.
Eventually though, I found them just annoying. Why would some airline be giving prayer cards to its’ passengers? Unless the plane was plunging towards earth and some travelers needed help in verbalizing their plea to god to save them, what was the point? People who profess to being practicing Christians probably didn’t need the prayer card to guide their spiritual life. And the rest of us were simply more interested in Sky Mall magazine’s latest geegaws.
Muslims, Jews, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Wiccans and others from the infinitely rich and varied belief systems that cover this earth may have wondered when their religions would rate a prayer card.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that some Christians are going to claim this is another sign of the moral and religious decay of America. They will swear that in some strange and twisted way not giving out prayer cards on a flight from Anchorage to Seattle is going to destroy the last hope for Christianity in our country. Those of us who think that an airline is one of the more inappropriate places for proselytizing for any religion will be accused of hating god, religion, peace, law and order and our mothers. It will be viewed as yet another assault on “traditional” values.
Aside from the magical belief in some bygone world in which everyone understood and lived by “traditional values”, that reasoning also shows a distinct lack of respect for the validity of the many belief systems that have been in this country since its beginnings.
We are, continue to be, and always have been, a nation if immigrants. Alaska Natives and Native Americans are the only ones who can claim to have traditional American values since they are the original inhabitants. From the moment immigrants starting arriving on these shores, both voluntarily and involuntarily, the fabric of our society has been a rich mosaic of cultures, a blending of old and new worlds, eastern, western and African traditions, song, food, dance and religions.
Christianity itself is not monolithic. Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans – all are part of the whole that is Christianity. And while the multiple Christian religions might argue over who has the last word on the truth, in the end they are all part of what we understand Christianity to be. Here in America, we have as many ethnic streams feeding into what we ultimately call America as there are religions feeding into Christianity.  Traditional values for someone whose ancestors came from Asia will be significantly different from those of someone who came from the mid-East or Africa.
So Alaska Airlines made the right call in ending their prayer card program. Aside from the fact that it is simply not very reassuring to a traveler to have the airlines currently operating their flight distributing a card that suggests they should start praying, it is just wrong to pretend that America was ever a monolithic nation of Caucasian Christians. That time never existed. Not then and not now.
Alaska Airlines deserves credit for acknowledging the diversity of its flyers despite what will probably be denunciations of their move by some who feel that if they aren’t allowed to push their religion at all times and in all places, they are somehow being denied their religious freedom. If the continuity of your faith is dependent on prayer cards slid under an airline’s meal entree, then you have much greater problems than the demise of those cards.
Stopping the prayer cards wasn’t an insult to Christians. It was an acknowledgement of the diversity of beliefs that exist in America and a sign of respect for all of them.

When I was in college I spent a lot of time at my Aunt Toni’s house. One time I transcribed the words of the song The Sounds of Silence for my cousin Robert who needed it for a school assignment. To this day, I only have to hear the opening notes of that song and I am instantly transported back to Glenside Pennsylvania and the living room of my aunt’s home. The sun is shinning, it feels like autumn, and I’m sitting next to a hi fi playing the song over and over and grabbing a few lyrics with each replay. Life wasn’t necessarily easier or nicer for me back then. But going back to that one moment in time is magical for me because it brings back a world long gone but never forgotten of a youth that was spent more happily than not despite the insecurities and neuroses I was so good at creating.
I miss all those people now. 

Because then my columns would write themselves for the next nine months.

Why can’t he get anyone to like him well enough to look happy about voting for him.

Poor Blondie. She was finally getting over her surgery when her system decided it didn’t like the antibiotics she was on and thought to expel them forcefully from both ends of her body.
As a wise man once said, getting old is not for the faint hearted.
Of course, the alternative is not for the faint hearted either.

Listening to the Republican response to the State of the Union address left me wanting to crawl under my blanket, suck my thumb and whimper for my mommy. 

This was my e-mail to friends on Tuesday. Happily, it turns out to all have been worthwhile because Blondie is better!  Yea!

OK, I’ve had the day from hell with my dog and it isn’t over yet. I am just now sitting down to answer my morning e-mail and Blondie is on her bed behind my desk howling at… well, nothing.
Got up at 6 AM, never my favorite time of day, and a friend came over who could drive in the dark to get her to the vet’s first thing for her anesthesia so they could x-ray her nose because, let’s face it, what else do I have to spend my money on. Got to the vet’s only to find out I’d written down 7 AM when I meant 7:30 AM. They weren’t even open yet. So we got coffee, brought her back at 7:30 and then I came home, cleaned and fed my seven birds and ran out to Bird TLC for my Tuesday shift. We ended up very busy, had to put an eagle down, convince a very recalcitrant tundra swan to not stand on the wood and exercise a raven whose right wing is frozen due to surgery. The raven was, like the swan, distinctly unamused. Then just as I was leaving we got a mallard in with a broken pelvis that had to be settled in. Got home, vet called to say they were going to have to take out two teeth which may be causing her sinus problem AND do a cell biopsy on some swelling at the tip of her nose where the bone and cartilage meet… kaching, kaching!… and that I needed soft food for her. Ran out and tried to get everything I needed to make her comfortable… and got me a Costco sized bottle of tequila… and by the time I got home, they called for me to go get her. Drove through rush hour traffic to pick her up and was halfway to the clinic when I realized it was getting really dark, so I rushed the vet through his explanation of her meds and bolted. I was waiting at the light a block from the clinic when I see this crazy man in shirt sleeves leaping snow drifts and waving frantically at me. It was my vet. I had forgotten her antibiotics. Meanwhile, Blondie peed in the car on the way home so I’m now washing the blankets and sheets that make up her bed in the car. And she’s totally goofy the way old people can get when they’ve had strong drugs. She alternates between howling on her bed and getting up and going into the hallway to look for me while I scream her name from behind her so she can see I’m still sitting at my desk.
And on that note, I’m going to go upstairs and start drinking.
Tomorrow will be a better day. And if it isn’t, I have lots of tequila.

Whether or not Jerry Prevo broke the law with his church’s property tax exemptions is perhaps not as important as the fact that it all just feels sleazy. Churches shouldn’t feel sleazy. Given what most churches preach, they should be so far from the line separating legal from illegal that there is no doubt whatsoever that they are upright and honorable. Trying to get as close to that line as possible without going over it, while shifting a financial burden to those who perhaps can least afford it, is simply not something churches should do.

It’s like the New Gingrich conundrum. Here’s a man vying for the Republican presidential nomination who is spraining his entire body with his attempts to turn as far right as possible. Here is a man expounding on the virtues of “traditional” marriage while married to his former mistress for whom he left his other former mistress.
Gingrich has not broken any laws. He got divorced from his first wife before he married his second one. He allegedly offered his second wife the option of an open marriage before divorcing her to marry his current wife. All very legal. And all very sleazy given his stance that traditional marriages are the bedrock of our society. One wonders which of his three marriages is the traditional one.
Conservative voters have apparently found a way to hold their noses at the smells emanating from Gingrich’s private life and vote for him anyway. As long as you always marry someone of the opposite sex, you can seemingly have as many marriages as you want without ever denigrating the tradition you supposedly hold dear.
So the issue I have with Newt and Prevo is not that they broke any laws.  (Actually, Prevo may have but we don’t know for sure yet.) No, the issue I have with them is the stench emanating from the less than honorable way they seem to conduct themselves.
If the standard is “What Would Jesus Do?”, then I have to think that Jesus would have at least waited until wife number one was out of the hospital from her cancer surgery and wife number two had time to absorb the news about the chronic disease with which she’d just be diagnosed before announcing he was leaving them. I’m going to go out on a limb and further suggest that Jesus would have remembered his statement about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Whenever there was even the smallest doubt about the legality of an exemption, I think he would have chosen to pay.
If you hold yourself out to be a moral arbiter in your community, then it just makes sense that you should live you life as much as possible above reproach. You should not skirt the edges of the law but should make every effort to stay totally clear of those edges. And if you purport to uphold the sanctity of what you view as a traditional marriage, you should probably make some effort to not discard your wives the way you discard an old sock that you no longer find functional.
We live in a world full of moral ambiguities. Those who would represent moral constants to us have some responsibility to live up to those morals. “Do what I say and not what I do” didn’t work when we were children and doesn’t work now.
If Jerry Prevo can manipulate the law and his connections to avoid paying taxes on properties that seemingly only qualify as exempt based on a very interesting interpretation of the law, then the example he gives of being a good steward and moral man becomes murky. You see the line in the sand and then watch him inch as close to it as possible without, hopefully, putting his toe over it. Pride in being a moral person is replaced by pride in how well he can scam the system.
And if you claim to uphold the Christian interpretation of traditional marriage by trying to have as many of them as possible in your lifetime, you have to expect that some people are going to look at the partner they have lived with and loved for the past 40 years but couldn’t marry and wonder how you get to define what marriage really is.

The good… the sun is returning and shinning brightly.
The bad… the sun is returning and shinning brightly on all the dust I couldn’t see during the winter when it was dark.

I understand about cheating in a relationship. It happens. But how the hell did those women look at Newt Gingrich and think, “I gotta have me some of that!”

Went to Target and walked the entire width and breath of the store twice before finding someone to help me. They eventually led me to what was left of the As Seen On TV section. No pajama jeans. But…
While having my hair done my hairdresser said she’d seen them in Fred Meyers. So I went over there and once again did about two miles of searching up and down every aisle until some kind store person rescued me and brought me to the tiny section of what was left of their As Seen On TV section. They had some pajama jeans left but none in my size. Only small sizes were left because, quite frankly, small size people don’t need to wear pajama jeans.
But now I’m a woman on a mission and will be searching online for my very own pajama jeans.
BTW.... I don’t watch TV commercials since, for the most part, I only watch TV that I’ve taped so I can fast forward through the commercials. Looking at some of the items in the As Seen On TV section gave me a whole new sense of wonder and fear at America’s capacity to be entranced by anything anyone tells them is new and shiny and great. I can’t believe some of that crap actually sells. Not that pajama jeans are crap. Oh no. They are the exception to the rule.

Write in Steven Colbert. He’s is at least as intelligent as any current candidate from any party and probably smarter than most. Lisa won a senate seat on a write in vote. I say we elect Steven Colbert the same way.