Cooking the NYTimes and Other Assorted Retirement Activities

I wasn't going to blog about the (most) recent school shooting.  Full disclosure: when the news broke, the Olympics were on and I switched channels to the cable station that continued with Olympic coverage.  I just couldn't watch yet another one, partially because I think I was steeling myself against the rhetoric I anticipated would follow. It did.  The rhetoric.  And that's what threw me over the edge this morning and why I'm writing.   First, allow me to offer the highest praise and admiration to the students who have taken it to the streets.  RIGHT ON!!  They are truth tellers, peace seekers, voices of wisdom in a sad society that appears to have become inured to and accepting of gun violence.  Thank you. Second, as a member of The Clubs and a former school teacher and administrator, my personal opinion is that arming adept teachers would not provide any additional measure of safety against an armed intruder carrying one or more we...

We've been ripping our basement apart, a retirement activity if I ever saw one.  We demolished a powder room that we stopped using a couple decades ago--fortunately, when we opened the toilet, we didn't find any dead critters in there.  We pulled down sheetrock from waist-high down, which means ripping out the insulation as well.  There was a unused bar in the basement and it's now in the dumpster.  Finally we pulled up the carpet from the basement stairs.  That night, we sank into our matching recliners in the family room.  Dan looked wearily at me and said, "We're never doing that again." Damn right. Anyhow, while demolishing, I've had a lot of time to think, too much time perhaps.  Pulling down the powder room walls, I composed the following letter to my Congressman, Erik Paulsen (R-MN).  I originally intended to send it to all members of Congress and the President.  However, as I researched doing that, it became clear that members of ...

I'm going to begin with a disclosure that at least some of you are familiar with. Almost 25 years ago, our family and our framily, the Smiths, were in the Drake Diner in Des Moines when it was robbed and two people brutally murdered.  One of the bullet casings bounced off Voldemort's foot (see previous blog regarding Voldemort).  The oldest children were called to testify in court.  The memories can still cause my blood to run cold and my heart to beat faster than it should.  Every mass shooting invokes the memory of being under the table at the Diner, holding our youngests close.  The oldest children were seated at a booth directly across from the register where the murders took place.  I remember the first shot sounded something like a wait staff had dropped a platter of glasses.  Or maybe a light bulb had exploded.  The restaurant went silent.  My eyes locked with Jeanie's, sitting across the booth from me.  Slowly we sank to the fl...