When You;re Not a Mommy Blogger, Political Wonk or a Geek...

What do you blog about?

Some of us fit nicely into a lable. They concentrate on their subjects and do them well.

Then, there are the rest of some of us. What are we, anyway?

Some of us keep and write several independent blogs, (I've tried..not so much for me...others have more to say).

Are you diluting your message, or just fully expressing oneself?

Personally, I have a couple of blogs I try to keep up with, but this one is my baby. I don't focus on just one thing. As Maria Niles said, "Interesting people have lots of interests..."

What do advertisers go after? Who do they pursue?

The give money to Mommybloggers, and to Technology bloggers and even to Political bloggers. They seem to think the rest of us....don't spend money.

I've got news for you. We do.

I was glad to know, here at Blogher, there are a group of women who have the same frustrations about that. We're out there. We have interests that go beyond our front doors, and lives that range far beyond any narrow category.

I read Mommybloggers (tho, I HATE that term, btw), I read political blogs, technology blogs, blogs about diverse lifestyles, military blogs. My question is: Why the hell would anyone WANT to be known as only one thing?

Women have been marginalized that way for... well....forever. We are ONLY (fill in the blank).

NO. Time for us all to step back and start telling companies that, DAMN IT!... we're out here too.

March Growin' and Moanin'

Just a jumble of thoughts tonight, with a couple of stories.



Saturday was a good day in the garden, I got a lot of the pond cleaned out and some hornwort and a taro moved over to the new half barrel water garden. When I'm finished, I'll have 3 half barrels and a pond, a DIY disappearing fountain and a disappearing fountain we installed from a kit. I seem to have a theme going here, huh? I haven't shown or mentioned them, but I also have 4 or 5 table top water gardens. A couple of them need to be replanted and redone. That's a topic for another....WARMER... week.

We paid a nice visit to Nelson's Water gardens, where I got some more fish food, a set of new filters, and some plants. It seems I can NOT go to that place without a plant jumping on me demanding to be taken home. In this case, it was some herbs, another plant for the water gardens and a couple of large tomato plants that promise good disease resistance. I'll post the names another day. I also got a small bay tree sapling. I'll be growing it in a large pot and keeping it bushy and compact. Right now, it's long and somewhat spindly. Not so spindly that I can't be taking one or two leaves to use with a pot of beans I'll be cooking in a couple of days...I'm looking forward to using the fresh leaves.

We headed out to do several other errands, but got only the most important ones, a trip to PetSmart for some dog food (oh, and a finch feeder jumped in the cart from the clearance table..), and then to the grocery store to buy groceries for us. We'd planned on getting back in time to do a little work outside, but even with both of us riding in carts at the grocery store, the windy, damp weather was getting to us and bringing in our purchases pretty much used up what stamina we had.

Yah, it's a bit chilly here for the nonce...and the wind is blowing hard. Damp, chilly, windy weather is not good for people who suffer from chronic pain. 'Pup is struggling with rheumatoid arthritis bad enough that, when the latest bone scan came back with the pictures of the damaged joints, the doctor doubled his pain med prescription. He's also got a problem with some early osteoporosis because he's not absorbing or using the calcium he's taking in with his food and supplements. This week, we'll be starting on some calcium shots to try to combat this. Unfortunately, its one of the possible complications of the gastric by-pass surgery he had to lose weight. He's gone from about 490 lbs to about 190 to 200 lbs. If he hadn't he'd probably be in even more pain than he is in now...it wasn't for vanity he did this, it was to save his life.

Me? Well, I'm pretty much as I have been for the last few years. The damage to the nerves running to my legs is annoying on the best of days, limiting how far I can walk comfortably. On damp, chilly windy days like today and yesterday, it goes from annoying to actively and acutely painful. There are just some places I have to walk and somethings I have to do, and if walking from my car into the house is enough to make me feel bad...it's not a good day. One of the really frustrating things about this is that I know that the pain isn't from something WRONG with my back or legs. The nerves just don't work right. If I try to push past the pain, as I did tonight (because I had two trips to get things from my car to the house), the nerves stop sending reliable messages to the muscle groups that are used to walk. They stop working easily and I have to compensate (the alternative is to fall down and just lay there--not acceptable) by forcing things along. It feels as if I'm using other muscle groups/nerve pathways to get the message to my legs. The cascading effect of this is that the muscles in my lower back start cramping, jumping, tightening and misfiring. This is the painful part. And narcotics don't help. 'Bout the only thing I can do is sit down, quickly. Sometimes a muscle relaxer can help, along with some heat. I don't like using the heavy duty pain killers, they tend to make me nauseous. But I have to, sometimes.

Okay, 'nuff whining.



Have a pretty picture:




Hopefully, my herb bed will look more like this in a couple of weeks....well......maybe by April.

Barry's Bungle-oh

'Pup and I went to the Cy-Fair Home and Garden show today at Cy-Fair ISD's Berry Center. It is a huge, monstrous building, and is, in my opinion...Ugly. It's design would have looked pretty good in a smaller size, but this is just...out of scale.

Anyway. The Home and Garden show was disappointing. There were lots of companies addressing HOME things, from Tupperware to Realtors ready to sell you a house....or sell your house. There were window vendors, stone vendors, landscaping Lights vendors...but nothing particularly GARDEN, except for one pitiful display of some fountains, an outdoor kitchen tucked away in a dark corner, two mosquito control misting systems ( I ain't spraying poison in the air when I have to be around--not to mention any herbs or tomatoes I'd be growing) and a misting system that claims to cool the air. Y'all. Houston has 90 to 100% humidity levels in the summer, even in a drought. Misting systems do. not. work. here.

I was looking forward to seeing some real gardening supplies, tools, seeds, plants, designs or just pretty things. Sigh. There were lots of nice people, there were even some products that would be nice for the house, but I didn't see anything that captured my gardening eye.

Ah well, this was the first year of the show, so perhaps next year will be better.


*This place cost ALL of a multi-million dollar bond issue, that we were told was going to be used for SCHOOLS. Instead, they built a HUGE monstrosity of a multi-use building. The first month's electricity bill was over $50,000 dollars. And that was for a partial month. The argument for the center was that other groups would pay to use the buildings. That was 2 years ago. Not that many programs have been set there, and as for conventions?... the nearest hotel is about 15 miles away from the center. It's not exactly in the center of ...well, anything. The district functions they've held there have one major drawback in that the road the building is on isn't really ready to handle the kind of traffic that 7,000 teachers or families of graduating seniors can generate. grumble mumble...

Some Thoughts

September Sky

It was a beautiful day to fly
through azure skies as deep as a tropical sea.
It must have drawn the eye
up to see and admire
the sight of sharp edged tower
against that infinite sky.

The air was so clear and filled with light
that you had to envy those
able to travel in buoyant flight,
‘til the comfort of the familiar wing
became unease, an incomprehensible thing
unfolding within our unwilling sight.

And when it hit and when it burned
a nation cried
a city yearned
for the safety of innocence lost
as every bad dream was tossed
within a lesson in terror too well learned.

Nancy France September 11, 2007


Good people the world over grieved for those lost, so incomprehensibly, in an unthinkable event. And it was both of those things, as most of us are never so filled with hate that we’d want to destroy strangers, a whole country of strangers, who’d only recently been your host. These terrorists lived with us. They lived and learned to fly here in the United States. They rented from and had Americans as neighbors. Undoubtedly they had strangers who would smile and wish them a good day, as they planned that stranger’s death. Most of us can only say; how could this have happened?

Americans, as a whole, are not used to hating a whole group of people. Oh, we’ve done it , in the past. But our culture dictates that once the argument or fight is over, we are supposed to forgive and forget. Yah, most of us work on that, pretty hard, especially in our personal lives. But consider: Japan and Germany are now our trading partners. Even Russia is no longer seen as the great enemy. China, who used to refer to us as a paper tiger, now seems to think we can be given trash to give to our children or pets, but we trade with them too. We invest money and time with them. We may remember why we fought these countries, but we give them those two things, money and time. And those are things we value, highly.

But now, we’re faced with an enemy who hates us for who we are and vows to kill, not conquer us. They want us dead.

And still, we can’t understand it. We don’t want to be enemies with anyone in particular. We want prosperity. We even want others to prosper as well. Hate has no profit for most of us. It isn’t cost effective.

So, how do we deal with an enemy who wants nothing from us except our deaths? They are an enemy who shares a face with those who profess to be our friends, and is an enemy who lives among us as neighbors.

We all know people who are followers of Islam, and are good neighbors. They are part of our society, and make a real contribution. How can we hate our neighbor? We are instructed by our God to love our neighbor.

That is not to say we have no bigotry involved. It is, of course it is. It is a natural response to mistrust those who are not like us, especially if the “not like us” involves a wish for our deaths. It’s hard for most of us to love a neighbor who hates that we even exist.

We are in a war in a country we went into as liberators. We’d like to leave now, but we’ve not finished what we came to do. We want these people to live prosperously. We’d much rather sell them something than shoot them. We’d rather go as friends, than leave as enemies. We are there to help peace happen. We are blamed for deaths of people killed by their fellow citizens. The same people we’d like to help become a people able to live with one another in peace are wasting our best young men and women. They are wasting their own best as well.

Perhaps the lesson we will take from this is that you cannot give peace. You can only help it come into being by helping those who do not want to hate any more.

I don’t want to hate anymore. I don’t want to be angry anymore. I don’t want to see my nephew hurt or worse. I don’t want anyone’s son, husband, father, mother, sister, niece, nephew, grandchild damaged by a bullet…whether it is a bullet that hits them in anger, or a bullet that they have to fire in anger.

But, given the choice of who dies, between “them” and “us”, I’d rather it be “them”. Then, the rest of “us” can get on with our lives.
If they want to go to heaven as a martyr, please, let us help them get there.

Update: I want to include a link to last years post that honored one of those lost in the Towers.

Aegis

The recent news about Aegis laying off people here in Houston has hit home with us. Aegis is a company 'Pup applied to, several times. We even know someone who had worked there in the past (and we weren't sure if he still was!) and we worried about him. Turns out, he'd been there to hear a message from Aegis management that, while things were tight just then, Houston wouldn't be affected and everything would be just fine and please keep working. Sound familiar?

cough--ENRON--cough

So now, there are a lot of people out of work, and their insurance dies at the end of this week. No Cobra. No severance. Just...nothing.

Imagine going to work in the morning, and suddenly being told that now, you don't really exist...