THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the end of today, people will head out of the office and into a long weekend of BBQs and maybe even a little get-away. They will celebrate the beginning of summer which is marked by Memorial Day. Everything summer opens up Memorial Day weekend. School’s out for summer. Except here. We had too many snow days this year. Michael’s last day of school is the 29th. The Cabbage’s last day of middle school is a half day on a Monday, June 2. They are so mad and have spent weeks complaining about having to go in for half a day on a Monday on the first day of summer. They’ve been petitioning an out, but their mom thinks they shouldn’t miss their last day of middle school. I am Switzerland on the subject, but honestly, the Cabbage has been over middle school since December. They’re ready to move on.

We have plans for attending a BBQ on Sunday with Jenn and Wade and some other friends. We’ll do the typical Memorial Day stuff even though Memorial Day has not been typical for me or my family in a really long time. This August will mark twenty years without my nephew, J. For those of you knew to my blog, we lost J to a car bomb in Iraq, August 1st 2005. My family is a small one and J was more little brother then nephew thanks to our four year age gap. Despite having a wife and two little boys (who are now grown adults), he did what a number of young people did after the attacks of Sept 11. He joined the Marine reserves as a way to serve and honor his country. We were all a bit delusional in thinking that because he was part of the reserves and had a young family, the government wouldn’t send him to Afghanistan. And they didn’t. They sent him to Iraq and two weeks before he was supposed to come home, his unit was hit with a car bomb. J came home to us in pieces and this broke my tiny family.

My tiny broken family has changed quite a bit in the last twenty years. J’s young boys are now grown men with wives. His young wife remarried and has two more boys, who I guess are not so much boys anymore as they are young teenage men. My tiny family grew a little bit with the addition of these people but then shrunk a bit with the loss of Chris and Dad. We’ve all moved forward. I no longer visibly cringe when someone thanks me for my sacrifice. It has taken me twenty years to understand that what I really sacrificed was naivety and innocence. I did not willing offer up my nephew to be a sacrificial lamb for this country. Instead, I sacrificed the idea that such tragedy could ever happen to my family. I sacrificed a belief that my country would ever allow such tragedy to happen to any family.

Twenty years later and I still don’t understand how J’s presence in Iraq helped this country.

My so called sacrifice shapes my vote, as I meticulously research candidates and their stance on veteran affairs and support of military families. It is one of the many reasons I did not vote for Josh Hawley (MO. Rep). He voted against supporting expanded health care for our veterans. The DOGE, set up by Trump, cut thousands of jobs for the Department of Veteran Affairs, a department that was already understaffed and implemented a hiring freeze. Veterans will now have longer wait times for health care, disability claims, burial and funeral expenses and the Veteran’s Crisis Line. As a citizen, it’s not like I didn’t care about these issues before this country wrongfully sent J to Iraq. It just made me care more and because of that, Memorial Day is more than BBQs and sales events. It’s about remembering those who died in service for this country, one that doesn’t truly support them.

I am grateful to those who support our military with more than words and accolades. I am grateful for those who still choose to serve in spite of the lack of support they will receive from this administration. I am grateful J turned out to be the kind of person who believed in doing good deeds and a man of integrity. I am grateful to the young ROTC group who decorated J’s grave site this morning by raising the American flag, something the group does every year. I am grateful to spend some time with friends this weekend and I’m grateful for the start of summer.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Tuesday after work, I headed to my polling place to vote. The polling place in my neighborhood is never really busy. It is plagued with by with the usual problems of a polling place in a low income neighborhood where people struggle to get to the polls because of jobs and transportation. Early mornings are busier than afternoons, but I’ve only ever had to wait in any kind of line during presidential elections. I want to see the polling place full. I want to stand in a line. It gives me hope to stand in the line at the polling place. This week, I walked right up to the election worker and got my ballot. When I got up to put my ballot in the voting machine, I was behind a young woman with three young children. I watched as the three little ones helped to place the ballot in the machine and then they all took stickers. As I stepped up for my turn, I heard the young woman say “Now, hold onto those and we will take a selfie when we get to the car.” When I got to my car, I looked over just in time to see the four of them proudly holding up their sticker while the young mom took the picture.

Then I cried all the way home.

I know I’ve told this hundreds of times. Change happens in increments and the biggest impacts happen locally. There were five things on the ballot this week: two education board members, a bond to improve KCMO schools, keeping 3.5 acres of park land, and a tax to build a new jail. Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but things that will have a big impact on my community. I know I’ve talked about my parents taking me with them to the polls every time the polls were open many times here and how this imbedded the importance of voting every time. They both taught me this was a way to show up for my community even if it there is only one thing on the ballot. I can still remember how frustrated my parents would get whenever a school bond would come up on the ballot and it would fail to pass because not enough parents would even show up to vote. We lived in a town where the elderly outnumbered us and the elderly vote. I mean they vote. Even though I do not have children and the one that sometimes lives at my house does not attend KCMO schools, I’m always going to vote for something to improve the schools.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. -Benjamin Franklin

I don’t know that young woman’s story. Her children ranged in age between maybe six and three. Maybe she has a partner to help or maybe she’s a single mom. I do know, just by seeing her car, that she probably lives paycheck to paycheck and barely so. Making time to vote is hard and she made a commitment to do so while wrangling three small children. Seeing her cast her ballot filled me with hope, something I’ve been pretty low on these days. I’m not only grateful for her sense of civic duty, but for the enthusiastic way she involved her children. Her lesson to them on voting is not just about civic duty but it also teaches community. Voting on small ballot issues has a great impact on our communities. Every time I get overwhelmed by the latest atrocity, I remind myself to put my head down and focus on my community where I can do the most good. I have one regret from my voting experience on Tuesday and that was not saying Thank you to this young woman’s face.

Where ever you are right now lady, Thank you.

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES

I was having a conversation with a coworker friend and he was telling me about playing Trivial Pursuit recently and discovering that lightning can heat the air around it as it strikes to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s five times hotter than the surface of the sun. First I wondered how close you can get to the sun before you evaporate into nothing. Like, how close did Icarus get before his wings caught fire? Then I wondered about all the stories I’d heard of people surviving lightning strikes, some of them multiple times.

The Weather Channel website keeps a list of lightning strike survivors along with a link to Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors, International (LSESSI), a support group for survivors. The list on the Weather Channel is a spreadsheet of names, location of strike and medical impacts. I scrolled through the list, reading the various medical impacts of lightning strikes. Burns and fractures seem to be a common medical impact. Someone on the list had to relearn how to read and write. Heart problems, ringing ears, memory loss. A couple of people experienced no side effects at all, which I feel is a bit remarkable. A few people claim to have “psychic abilities”, which did not surprise me. Let’s face it. If you survive being hit with something five times hotter than the sun, you are going to be left believing that there is something freaky special about you in some way.

The CDC has a whole wonderful section devoted to facts around lightning strikes. The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year is less than one in a million, which is crazy since there are about forty million lightning strikes a year in the U.S. Males are four times more likely to be struck by lightning than women. This does not surprise me. Every time the tornado sirens went off, Chris would be outside with cup of coffee while I would be finding a way for all of us to fit into the ‘safest’ closet. The ‘safest’ closet was always the smallest one. Statistical data for lightning strikes finds that most often people are stuck doing outside leisure activities like fishing, golfing, boating, and beach lounging, activities most available to white men of a specific age with a certain income.

So yeah, it makes sense that they are four times more likely to be struck by lightning. What doesn’t make sense is how we’re still allowing this kind of man (or any man) to make decisions on women’s reproduction rights, LGBQT rights, or racial equity. It’s pretty safe to say that waiting around for lightning to remove these guys is a waste of time.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

Because we are not lucky enough for a lightning strike.

CLOSED FOR REMODEL

Not really, but I feel like it.

As I am pondering some current feelings on remodels, I just realized that it is almost July. I generally lean towards feelings of deconstruction and rebuilding in the summer months. I don’t know what it is about the middle of summer and my need to tear down everything and start over. Right now, my feelings of ‘burn it all to the ground’ are exacerbated by my feelings on the current state of a country where I feel like me and my friends are no longer safe and/or welcome. Some have talked to me about seriously moving to Canada. Some of us are just too tired for the fight. I’m leaning towards being too tired. In middle school, I became an activist for the planet, denouncing pollution and handing out free seedlings. In high school, my activism turned to the AIDS crisis and sex education. In college and beyond, my activism turned to voter representation and getting people to the polls.

Today, my activism is in throwing money at Planned Parenthood and AbortionFunds.org.

One of the most valuable and most difficult lessons I learned when Chris got sick was that eventually, I must accept that there comes a time when there is nothing that I can do to fix things.

Do what you can, with what you got, where you are. -Squire Bill Widener

The consequences of accepting that there is nothing I can do to fix this current problem is to turn the fixing to the self. Saturday, I rewarded myself for no reason with a trip to the Container Store where I purchased things to reorganize the linen closet. The linen/medicine closet is now perfectly organized and I can tell you exactly how many COVID home testing kits we have. It’s six. We have six COVID at home tests. I also installed LED lights so we can now see all of the COVID home testing kits. When I felt like I’d done enough with that closet, I moved to the food closet (yes I know it’s normally called a pantry, but a brain fart years ago changed the naming the system). I threw out old snacks and cake mixes and reorganized all of the pasta. I’m not stopping there. I purchased a Bagster dumpster not too long ago that’s begging to be filled up with garage trash. I will most likely tear down this blog and rebuild it with new pictures and ways to purchase pictures and I might start walking around the house punching hand weights into the air (it’s exercise).

This is what I do.

When I can’t fix the big thing, I find other things to ‘fix’. Once, I almost rented a drain snake to cart down to my basement until someone convinced me that I could not physically lift a 200lb drain snake down the basement steps alone. That’s not true. I know how gravity works and still believe I could have gotten that 200lb drain snake down the basement stairs.

It’s the up that’s the problem.