Maybe a post a day will keep frustration away. It seems to work for Jeneane, who certainly has more do deal with then most of us — recent surgery; a plethora of baby hamsters; a bright, curious, and energetic young daughter; a husband who travels for his music; and, on top of all that, work.
It’s worth a try.
Woke up this morning to a phone call from my mom saying she can’t find her watch, her money, and her curling iron for her hair. I had already put small beepers in her purse, on her keys, and in her wallet. I keep the fourth, and then I can beep my way to their unfamiliar locations. But putting beepers on her curling iron and watch just won’t work. So those are still missing.
I’ll distract her today by taking her out to get a battery for an old watch.
Meanwhile, I wish a had a fairy godmother who’d come in and clean my apartment.
Now, where the hell are my keys? My watch?
No beeps for me — not yet, anyway.

A friend called me yesterday to see if I was OK, since she noticed that I wasn’t blogging. Then Betsy Devine pinged me and that sent me over to Frank Paynter’s evocative Spring post, which made me really yearn for those kinds of connections again. Not just to nature or Nature, but to those feelings of honoring small, everyday details of a life lived with joy.
The real truth is that I have nothing to write about. And forget any joy. My days are filled with helping my mom find the half-dozen things that she misplaces each day and insists that someone came in and stole — with giving myself a headache shouting so that she can actually hear me and repeatintg everything I say at least three times before she actually understands.
So we took a ride today, she and I, to where we will be moving in a few months. These are my views of the area near where we will be living, where the Catskill cliffs rise awesomely in all seasons and against all colors of sky.

The sky today was a definite early Spring blue even though the trees in those mountains have barely begun to bud. By the time we move, they will be lush and green and I will bring in bags of topsoil for an herb garden in spite of the shale and scrub.
Meanwhile, I share here a chuckle I got the last time I checked Ken Camp’s blog. He stole the following from his son, and I’m herewith stealing it from him because it reminds me just how crazy so many other people are and so I feel a little saner.
TOP TEN THINGS AMERICA LEARNED FROM THE SCHIAVO CASE
1) Tom Delay is a qualified neurologist.
2) Two dozen court cases weren’t enough to really figure out what’s going on.
3) Michael Schiavo is after money, which is why he turned down millions of dollars to sign over guardianship.
4) Right to life applies only when it’s politically expedient.
5) Medical diagnoses are best performed by watching highly edited videotape rather than in person by trained physicians.
6) Minimum wage-making nursing assistants are more qualified to diagnose a persistent vegetative state than experienced neurologists.
7) Fifteen years in the same persistent state is not really enough time to make an accurate diagnosis.
8) Marriage is the most sacred of all unions, except when it isn’t.
9) Interfering in a family’s private tragedy is a great reason for President Bush to cut short a vacation, but getting a memo that warns of a terrorist attack isn’t.
10) Right-wing pro-lifers are the most compassionate people on Earth, which is why they are robbing gun stores or offering money online to make sure Michael Schiavo dies.

I wish I could be there, and I would hope that lots of Blog Sisters will spread the word. Anything that bills itself as “Tits, Twats, and the Politics of Blogging” is my kind of meet-up.
Blog Diva Liza Sabater and Nichelle of Nichelle’s Newsletter are doing the cleverly worded organizing.
There definitely are blog sheroes I’d like to meet who just might be there:
Lorraine of Stregonaria (I’m assuming she took her blog name from the Italian word for witch. My kind of woman!) Her latest post points to a NY Times article proving that “Homo Erectus was a Progressive.” Lorraine, who also posts on DailyKos, ends her post with:
Having just argued that compassionate politics do not have to be reliant on notions of God, that we do not have to cede ground to the Right on this, reading this article presents proof that caring for other human beings is a human impulse, a late impulse that contributed to our evolution, the thing that, gasp! makes us human.
So, long, long ago, our ancestors kept a toothless old man alive. For what reasons and at what cost to themselves? At some point, humans developed the notion of a common bond, of an empathy for their fellow travelers.
Do we have any doubt which party can claim that as our lineage?
And then there’s Elayne Riggs. (In the early Blog Sisters days, we had a thing going about Elayne with a “Y” and Elaine with an “I”…. we’re both pretty assertive about our identities.)
I noticed a couple of interesting recent links on Elayne’s blog. One is about the death of Dale Messick, creator of my other favorite comic book when I was a kid (the top one, of course, was Wonder Woman) — Brenda Starr. As the Times reports: Of her heroine’s profession, she once explained, “She was already a reporter when the strip started, but she was sick and tired of covering nothing but ice-cream socials. She wanted a job with action, like the men reporters had.”
Elayne also links to Tilde~‘s Cafe Press She-Blogger site. I just love the image on the shirts, which, of course, can’t be copied so I can’t put it here. But I sure wish I could. I’ll just have to buy one.
While the younger Blog Shero set is planning for its wild night at Madame X’s, I’m gettng ready to take my just-turned-93-year old neighbor grocery shopping tomorrow. Oh, to be young and a sassy Shero once more!!
As Tild~ says on her Cafe Press t-shirts:
SHE-BLOGGER:

She had the experience of an older woman,

the morals of a liberal —

and all of the internet for her wanton playground!
ADDENDUM: Heh. Over at Tild~’s, there a whole bunch of “Sweet, Savage She-Blogger 1940s-style images. Check ’em out!

Yeah, this is about the Pope. The Polish Pope being mourned by people of many religious persuasions, not just Catholic. We share the same heritage, he and I, with Polish blood running strong in our veins. Well, not his, any more, but you know what I mean — that tireless dedication to democracy and equality (except, on his part, where Catholicism was concerned), that hunger for Solidarność (except, on his part, where Catholicism was concerned).
For almost all Poles, Polish history began somewhere in the 9th century when Christianity did its thing with the “Polians”(dwellers of the field).
From here:
Polishness was traditionally identified with Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it was the “baptism of Poland” which put the country on the cultural map of Europe in 966. However, the Polish – Lithuanian Republic was a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational country (Catholicism, Orthodox, Judaism and even Islam). This tolerance attracted religious dissidents from all over Europe. The decline of the Polish Republic and the transformation of a multi-ethnic society into a modern ethnically homogenous nation, plus the struggles for independence with Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia, strengthened the stereotype of the Pole – the Catholic. Under the partitions the Catholic Church was a mainstay of the Polish identity.
An acceptance of hierachy is fundamental to Catholicism. There are people, then there are nuns, then there are priests — and then the clergy has its own hierachy, culminating in the Pope. As a red-blooded and full-blooded Pole, dedicated to democracy, equality, diversity — and, as importantly, the importance of dissidence — I could never understand how the Catholicism (as different from the more general concept of “Christianity”) practiced by the Polish Pope jibed with his Polish roots.
Now, I happen to know a lot about Catholicsm, having gone through 13 years of its schooling. I also know a lot about growing up Polish, having been part of a large extended family of first and second generation immigrants. In my early years, I was even bi-lingual.
Polish and Catholic. That’s how I grew up.
My family, of course, was ecstatic when the first non-Italian Pope in some 400 years wound up being Polish.
As a diplomat, as a performer for peace, as a negotiator, Karol Wojtyla … revolutionised the papacy with his formidable energy and intellectual abilities, but his most lasting memorial was achieved in politics – the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe…. He left one of his most momentous acts to the twilight of his papacy – an attempt to purify the soul of the Roman Catholic church with a sweeping apology for sins and errors committed during its 2000 years of existence, implicitly invoking the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust.
However, as the leader of a purportedly “Christ-ian” sect, Pope John Paul II set the causes of gender equality and personal rights back into the last century. Christ, as I learned about him wasn’t at all hierarchical. He left that behind with the Old Testament god.
Because of the Polish Pope’s personal charisma and his success in living up to the legacies of his national heritage, people all over the world stand ready to excuse him for his unfortunate success in further entrenching the reactionary and oppressive hierachy that Catholicsm has always been.
In his usual cut-through-the crap style, Andy Rooney, on tonight’s 60 Minutes pointed out how most people who say they are Catholic don’t really follow the leader of their religious hierarchy. They use birth control, have abortions, get divorced and remarried. They marry individuals of other religions. They do all of the things that Pope John Paul II said they’re not supposed to do.
As for me, the older I get, the more I enjoy being Polish (especially since now there are web sites that deal with Polish paganism — you know, all that Polish history that happened before the 9th century). And the older I get the more I can’t stand the hypocrisies of hierarchies.
May he rest in peace, even though, because of the influence of his narrow religious opinions, many of the rest of us won’t be able to.