I get ’em by the dozens. Every day. Home furnishings. Clothes. Kids stuff. Chocolates. Cheeses. It happens every year about this time, a month before the winter holidays.
What a waste of paper. But I remind myself that — even though I don’t buy anything — every catalog I get helps to keep mail carriers employed. E-mail has really cut down on the amount of personal mail that gets sent out. So it’s those bulk mailings that keep them carrying.
Actually, I did get one catalog that I enjoyed looking at: Femail Creations.
I mean, this one got a chuckle and nod from me.
Heh.
This is my favorite, although I wouldn’t mind having one of these either.
And, boy do I know someone I’d like to buy this for, but I don’t think he’d appreciate it.
And then there’s this one that caught my eye, because it’s my mother’s philosophy and I wish it were mine:

On top of all the conniving and confusion and compartmentalization going on in America today, on top of all of that, according to an Op Ed piece in today’s NY Times,
….Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.
The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. ….
So there we are, doing unto others what we once condemned because they were doing it to us.
Now that I am an “older” person, I’m beginning to understand why old people long for the “good ol’ days” — the innocent fifties, the patriotic forties. At least then we were the good guys. The rest of the world looked up to us in various degrees of respect. Our American regime has turned into what we most despised in other regimes.
Maybe all those Cole Porter tunes made me feel nostalgic. And now I’m listening to CD of wacky songs from the forties, like Mairzy Doats and Manana by Peggy Lee, and I’m my Own Grandpa by Guy Lombardo, and the Woody Woodpecker song by Mel Blanc and the Sportsmen.
Silly songs for a world of children now beyond disillusionment.
Rag Mop
Ames Brothers
M
I say M-O
M-O-P
M-O-P-P
Mop
M-O-P-P
Mop Mop Mop Mop
R
I say R-A
R-A-G
R-A-G-G
Rag
R-A-G-G M-O-P-P
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
R-A-G-G M-O-P-P
Rag Mop!
A
I say A-B
A-B-C
A-B-C-D
A-B-C-D-E
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H
I
I say M-O
M-O-P
M-O-P-P
Mop
M-O-P-P
Mop Mop Mop Mop
R
I say R-A
R-A-G
R-A-G-G
Rag
R-A-G-G M-O-P-P
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Rag Mop
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
R-A-G-G M-O-P-P
Rag Mop

catching the repeat of Nip/Tuck with the steamy milonga scene with Joely Richardson and Bruno Campos and remembering being able to do some of those steps but not having anyone like Campos to do them with, which was sad because the tango is not just a dance, it’s a seduction, and if the chemistry’s not there you might as well be doing a square dance.
Night and Day on pay-per-view, watched with mom, who is entranced by Cole Porter’s music, while I think about kissing Cary Grant good night ’cause he was a much nicer (altho’ much more fictitious) Cole Porter than Kevin Kline was in DeLovely.
Fact and fiction aside, “Night and Day” is a movie with fantastic dance numbers interpreting Porter’s songs through modern dance, ballet, tap, Latin, and just about any other kind of dancing there is. Imagine Eve Arden with a French accent, Monty Woolley playing himself. I didn’t even recognize the very young Dorothy Malone and Jane Wyman, but I had no trouble recognizing the young Mary Martin, who played herself. No mistaking that smile, those eyes.
Whether it’s 1936 or 1946 or 2006 (well, almost), it’s all about passion, isn’t it?

I think I remember when this happened. At least I remember reading about it before. There’s a great video on the site as whale blubber flies as much as a quarter of a mile, one big chunk even smashing a car.

I used to one of them, those signed up on the blogroll over here. Or at least I used to try to one of them — that core of early-on bloggers who know how to mix up a batch of blogs that always mean more than what they first seem. They’re still mixing, but I’m not in it any more, not even on the fringes.
It’s all moving on without me. They’re all moving on without me. My grandson, my friends. Heh. I move away and now four of my five women friends from where I used to live are in relationships with really cool guys.
I’m stuck in time. Stuck in space. Marking time. Marking time with days filled with chores that get me no where but where I was the day before.
today she wants her keys. the keys with the little flashlight. you know that she hasn’t had that key ring for years, and she doesn’t need keys where she is now. she’s totally distraught over keys that wouldn’t open any doors in her life now anyway. where is her home she wants to know. where are her keys. you give her a key ring with a key, but she knows it’s not what she’s looking for. she is looking for a life that has moved on and left her behind. each day, she falls a little more behind. each day you try to help her hold onto that day. each of your days is given over to her, as everything else moves on without you.
One of the good things about having a public blog that gets picked up by Google is that all kinds of interesting people find me. So, even though my very first batch of blogger friends are moving on without me, there are other bloggers who are traveling closer to my circle.
One of these is Dalene, who also lives out in the middle of the woods, somewhere. Except for her being a cancer survivor and me, luckily, never having to have dealt with that horrible disease, we have a lot in common, including looking for natural remedies for various conditions. She maintains a separate weblog, Rutabaga Stew, where she shares the information she’s discovered.
She has a great recipe for Sweet Potato Pie, which I’m just going to have to try, since I love sweet potatoes and pecans.
She also has some interesting information about the health benefits of cabbage and saurkraut.
As an individual of full-blooded Polish heritage, I come from a family that ate lots of cabbage and saurkraut. Not too long ago, I improvised a really good recipe for cabbage/saurkraut soup that’s easy to throw together. And the longer you cook it, the better it tastes. It tastes even better than that when you reheat it the next day. It also freezes well, so I make a giant pot of it.
So, Darlene, here’s my recipe that needs a large stock pot to hold all of the ingredients:
1 pound of saurkraut (from a can or bag)
1 bag of cole slaw (the kind you find in the packaged salad section that’s just shredded cabbages and carrots)
a pound can of low-salt tomatoes (I use diced)
a couple of cloves of smashed garlic
— empty the saurkraut into a colander and let the juice drain out
— put the saurkraut and shedded cabbage from the bag in the biggest pot you have
— add the tomatoes
— add two cans of low salt chicken broth or vegetable broth (each will give a different under-flavor; I prefer the chicken, but if you’re a vegetarian you’ll have to go with the other)
— pour in enough water to reach a half- inch above the the top of what’s already in the pot
Bring to a boil and let simmer for as long as you can, but at least two hours. Stir occasionally. During the first hour, chop up three onions and saute in oil or butter or margarine or any combination thereof. (If you like onions, you can even use more.) When the onions are transluscent, add the onions to the soup and continue to cook. You can add water if it looks like the soup is getting too thick.
options: You can peel and cut up potatoes and throw them in with the soup at the outset OR you can mash potatoes (with or without sour cream) and add these to the soup during the last few minutes. You can also provide sour cream to add to each bowl just before you serve.
Another option is to add some pork and cook it along with the soup. Or cook some kielbasa separately, cut it up in bite sized pieces and add it to the soup during the last half-hour of cooking.
Great with Russian Horseradish Bread, which you make like garlic bread, only you use slices of rye bread that you spread with a little butter or margarine and then with white horseradish (from a jar) and then warm in the oven just as you would garlic bread.
Make lots and freeze.
So, Dalene, there’s my favorite saurkraut recipe.

So, teach kids to never question authority and to stand in awe of anyone in uniform or who claims he/she wears a uniform; train employees to follow the rules and always obey their managers or be fired; encourage girls not to be assertive or trust their own judgement but to follow what their elders tell them.
And then this is what you get, as reported on ABC’s Primetime. —

That’s a quote from my non-blogger friend myrln.
Then there’s:
“All we are is dust in the wind.”
– Kansas
“Gravity isn’t real and dinosaurs are dragons from Hell.”
– The Other Kansas
The above are from Randi Rhodes of Air America.
So, the Kansas Board of Education is revising their Science education standards and improperly injecting religion into biology classrooms. But supporters of the new standards said they were simply trying to open the curriculum, and students’ minds, to alternative viewpoints.
To quote Rhodes, again:
“Kansas, preparing young minds for the high tech jobs of 1652.”
What is going on in this country?
And then there’s the IRS harassing a church for the sin of insinuating that Jesus was a man of peace. According to an article in the L.A. Times,
In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991’s Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that “good people of profound faith” could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support.
But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, “Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster.”
On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that “a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … ” The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.
And just to get a little more Bush-bashing in, according to The Nation:
President Bush and the current administration have borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 presidents combined, a group of conservative to moderate Democrats said Friday….. According to the Treasury Department, from 1776-2000, the first 224 years of U.S. history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions, but in the past four years alone, the Bush administration borrowed $1.05 trillion.
I still maintain (I’ve blogged about it before) that Bush, with his evil minions, is the Anti-Christ, misleading his followers to believe that his is doing good, while he is actually leading the world into a disaster of major proportions.
Among those who understand that the Antichrists of whom John was writing are instead a single individual and expect this one to arise in the future, there is a general consensus that sometime prior to the expected return of Jesus, there will be a period of “trials and tribulations” during which the Antichrist, inspired by Satan, will attempt to win supporters, and will silence anyone or make enemies of any country that refuses to approve of him. This metaphor is written as “receive his mark”.
[snip]
The most common interpretations continue to be that the Antichrist will be some sort of high-ranking political leader, who will initially do very good, popular things, which will win him many followers. In the end, however he is supposed to get increasingly totalitarian and elicit more and more sacrifices from his followers until eventually his evil ways become known, and the era of “trials and tribulations” begins.
OK. I don’t really believe in the Bible-belchers literal interpretations of either the creation or the anti-christ. But I do think that those concepts are powerful metaphors, and as often as not, metaphors are where the truth lies.
I live in the middle of a forest of trees that turn golden in autumn. Until yesterday, when a hard wind and rain ripped the last of the leaves from the old trees, the very air shimmered in the sun. Now, with all of that yellow gone, I can notice a few small struggling maples that have somehow managed to put down roots. And even some scraggly pines that keep trying to compete with those determined oaks.
How often it happens we can’t see the forest for the trees. Sometimes it takes a harsh and brutal wind to clear the air.

They flock to building walls that are warm in the autumn sun.
They ride indoors on my clothes, in my hair. They’re looking to settle in somewhere for winter. They’re already getting lethargic, like the houseflies caught between your windows.
Generally, I like ladybugs. They’re good for gardens. But this time of year, they’re a nuisance as they try to migrate indoors.
I try to catch them in cups and release them to back into the world where they belong. They say it’s bad luck to kill a ladybug, even when they’re taking over your farmhouse.
I don’t need any more bad luck.