The moving van comes tomorrow for our furniture and all they can fit of my mom’s boxes. I’ll have to figure out how to get the rest of my stuff to the new digs, but I have two weeks in which to do that.
The good news is that I lost five pounds, what with all the non-stop bending and lifting and walking to the trash room and back. The bad news is that my back is killing me.
I’m definitely going to get a massage as soon as I can get an appointment.
There is so much bad news breaking lives apart every day. The Big Picture is so very much out of control. So I’m hanging on to the Little One as best I can.
Mom is not taking the packing very well. She keeps forgetting what it’s all about. Worries that I’m abandoning her, wants to know who’s taking her stuff away. That’s been the most exhausting part of packing — dealing with my mom’s delusions.

There’s the cutest little skink lving under a layer of bricks right outside the door to where I will be moving. I’ll bet she’s laid her eggs under there and soon we’ll be surrounded by a hoard of little skinks. Better skinks than skunks.
as you go through the nooks and crannies in her apartment, you realize why she never seems to have plastic storage baggies for leftovers and little paper cups in the bathroom. it’s because she takes the plastic baggies, rolls them up, puts a rubber band around them, and sticks the batches in various drawers and boxes. in those boxes, tucked into corners of closets, also are larger storage baggies full of little paper cups. and more lids to jars long discarded. because, you know, you never know…
I am considering having a nervous breakdown so that I can spend a couple of weeks somewhere in heavenly solitary confinement. And then, after someone else winds up clearing out our apartments and moving all of our stuff, I’ll have a miraculous recovery.
“Crone, Interrupted,” my daughter quips when I tell her my fantasy.
The moving van comes for all of our furniture and boxes on Monday. I know there will be a lot of small things left as yet unpacked that I will have to deal with.
I will make it through this. I will make it through this. I will make it through this.
Two carloads of stuff went down to the new place with me and my friend yesterday. When we were all done, we went into the nearby town and had a very late lunch. I had brie and blueberries on grilled sourdough bread. And blueberry lemonade.
Such diversions will help me make it through this.

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned. — Judith Viorst
Viorst also said
the many challenges of marriage and the family sometimes made me feel as if my only two choices were homicide – or humour. I chose humour.
Good choice, Judith — although, at the moment, I’m feelig more homicidal.
Mom and our furniture get moved on Monday.
Tomorrow I and a good friend of mine (who is on vacation but offered to give me a day of her time to help with the move) are loading up both of our cars and driving down to the new digs to unload some stuff and finish painting my piece of the place.
I must have done something right to have a friend like her.
The same goes for my children, my health, and my face.
I can live with that, although I do wish I had a better hold on that humour!

The Brits (the citizens, that is, not the rulers) have come a long way in these more than 225years. Well, so have we. And now we’re more alike than not.
Thanks to Stu Savory over in Germany for cluing me in to this Flash animation that’s a reminder of how much we have in common with those fellow tea drinkers — especially our distaste of Big Brother.
Here’s to global interdependence.

Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O’Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name–and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.
Read the rest of the above at mediainfo.com
Now, if that is true and Rove goes to jail — which he should if it is — and then Bush gets impeached, we might be able to dig America out of this hole they helped to put us in.

she looks for faces in clouds — over there, a lady sleeping — see the old man with a beard. look, she says, they follow us. who makes them do that.
I am drawn to the land that’s owned by stones. Chunks of granite that once belonged to the mountain so high that it muffles the thunder that rumbles along its other side.
It’s a warm rain — the kind I always liked during childhood summers, when it meant that I wasn’t expected to be out jumping in the lake (with a tube, of course, since I’ve never learned to swim). Instead, I could curl up on a screened in porch with Nancy Drew, follow the sound of the rain into a sleepy dream.
It’s a warm rain. She naps. I go out and gather stones to put around my mullein patch. Yes, mullein’s a weed. It grows in any kind of soil, even this stone-bound clay. I plant bee balm next to the three leafy mulleins. I set my old chipped cement child-Pan in a corner. He’s missing some toes. I think of ee cummings’ “goat footed ballonMan” and Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume” Pan. I think I would like to build a cairn of stones. Maybe plant mullein in a circle all around it.

She sees her god in the clouds.
I think of stones and feel the magic of the earth.
I wonder how that fits in with the new book Chris Locke is working on, which, really, just doesn’t seem to jibe with my way of creating an awe-full and mythic frame for the very practical and pragmatic world I live in.
Although, when and if his book gets published, I will probably read it — if only to be able to point out to him the error of his logic.

The New York Times’ Frank Rich warns that Sesame Street’s Big Bird is the “ornithological equivalent of a red herring.” The right’s latest assault on public broadcasting is “far more insidious and ingenious” than that seen under Newt Gingrich a decade ago.
The above notice, along with more details and relevant links related to this and other stories of current PR underhanded spinnings are from here — where it’s worth checking daily to make sure you’re not suckered.
Me? I’m still packing and hauling things to the new place, where I’m helping to paint the walls. Going for the day tomorrow.
No rest for the wicked.

Two heads are supposed to be better than one, right.
Not if one is your 89 year old mom (and you’re trying to get her to pack in an organized way).
Unless she’s playing with your toddler grandson.

(I took a ride yesterday with my mom out to my daughter’s to bring some stuff she can use and I didn’t want to move. Found an auger pile driver in the dollar store for the little boy who loves construction trucks. He also likes explaining how it works to anyone who’ll listen. My mom was a good listener.)
……………
When we got home, I found two heads (below) attached to my windowpane. They’re still there. I assume they’re in that position for a very good reason, but it sure does seem like it’s taking an awful long time for a couple of little bugs!

…………..

I don’t know what was in my own head when, a decade ago I rescued this old seen-better-days cactus from the deck of an at-the-time-significant-other who was moving. I think he said it was about 30 years old at the time, having been his mother’s before that. It’s ugly, unwieldy, prickly, and top-heavy. I’ve moved it myself four times now. Yet, I can’t bring myself to toss it. Now it’s part of my family.
So, move it I will, along with all the other stuff I can’t bear to throw out. Heh. Am I my mother’s daughter, or what?

All politics are performances, right? Give ’em a good show, tell ’em what they want to hear, and they go away happy. Nevermind the truth of what goes on behind the curtain. Or so our government leaders seem to think.
Take, for example, the recent news that the Department of Defense has contracted with a private company, BeNow, to gather data on high school students, even though school districts already are required to gather student stats so that they can get federal funding.
Over at Uncomment Thought Journal, Rowan takes a peek behind the curtain:
…..So why the contract with BeNow? After all, under SEC. 9528. Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information of the “No Child Left Behind” Act, schools receiving federal funds must turn over the Names, addresses, and phone numbers of students on demand by the military. Isn’t that enough information? According to Chu [David S. C. Chu (U.S. undersecretary for personnel and readiness]. , it is not. The data collected under the No Child Left Behind provisions is “decentralized” and of use only to “local recruiters” and is not a centralized list of all possible recruits.
However, the data being collected for the BeNow contract goes well beyond the data collected through No Child. It includes “The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying” according to the Washington Post article. Why the additional information just for “recruiting?” Grade point averages and classes being taken? Are the planning on focusing their recruiting on the highest G.P.A. or the lowest? Are they looking for those who are failing? This seems entirely possible, as earlier reports have note that the military is lowering their standards in an effort to meet recruiting targets.
Get a better glimpse of the hidden agenda here.
Then there’s the bit in my local Saturday newspaper by Andy Rooney (not available online)on how lobbying fattens wallets.
….Big Business is in business with Big Government, Rooney says — meaning this Republican administration.
The popular concept is that Democrats favor more government and Republicans want less. But there are no fewer government employees now than there were under President Clinton.
Government spending in Washington increased by a whopping 30 percent between 2000 and 2004 to a record $2.9 trillion…..
….Last year, Hewlet-Packard paid lobbyists $734,000 trying to get Republicans to pass legislation that would allow the company to pay a lot less tax on the $14 billion they made in profits from foreign companies they own. I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to a class of eighth-graders, but if a company pays Chinese workers 35 cents an hour and sells what they make in the United States as if they has paid the workers $25 an hour, the company makes a lot of money.
And then such outsourcing companies can pay even more lobbyists even more money to get out of paying more taxes.
And Americans are treated to a lot of circuses, but not nearly enough bread.
Speaking of circuses, I’m sure someone is going to make a movie out of the just-breaking story of the CIA Operatives who were living the good life in Italy, until they finally got caught:
They ran up tabs of thousands of dollars at some of Milan’s best hotels and restaurants. They chatted easily on their cell phones and gave out passport, frequent-flier and driver’s license numbers when booking flights or renting cars.
And now they are fugitives.
If Italian authorities are right, a CIA operation has been exposed in Milan that on some levels was brazen and perhaps reckless, even as it successfully spirited away a reputedly notorious Egyptian imam.
And, most touchingly, over at (Pro)Claiming Age. blogger Mary Godwin, with a daughter recently deployed to Iraq, begins to wish she didn’t know what keeps slipping out from behind the curtain.
In the months that have passed since Tommi’s deployment to Iraq, I have learned how to read the news faster and better than I did before. I have learned to read electronically, to read RSS feeds through online aggregators like bloglines, and to appreciate the various watchers who collect, synthesize, and engage difficult issues circling around the topics of war and the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Months of learning are bringing me to a new place now: each next story seems to raise in me a recurrent response. “Enough now,” I think to myself. “I don’t want to know.”
But we need to keep knowing, no matter how painful and upsetting. We need to keep knowing what the war is costing all of us, and especially what it’s costing those expected to fight, as well as their families waiting for them to come home — and not just American fighters and families.
We Americans have not yet felt the ultimate results of this war and the profiteering that this administration is allowing — even encouraging. There is a big mess being hidden behind Bush’s curtain of deceit.
If the next presidential election doesn’t pull down the curtain and show us how to clean up what’s been swept behind it, we weary travelers are going to be eaten alive by those insatiable lions and tigers and bulls and bears. No, we’re definitely not in Kansas any more.

i had it right there, she says. i made a green..you know….green, not velvet, you know…
felt, you prompt her.
yes, felt. i put it right there by the…. you know….the music thing.
what is it, you ask.
it’s for the music thing. i kept it there all this while and now it disappeared. you took it. why did you take it.
you take a deep breath. i didn’t take it, you say. it’s around here somewhere.
she starts crying. sits and the table and cries that people are coming in and taking things from her.
you take a deep breath, look at all the stuff yet to be packed. you pat her back, give her a tissue, tell her that it will turn up somewhere. she thinks you’re lying.
you have a headache because you haven’t had a chance to eat breakfast yet and it’s almost lunchtime.
you leave her at the table with her tissues and her fantasies and you go to your place and eat. lunch.
a knock on the door. she comes in with a green felt pouch in her hand, secured with a large gold pin.
i’m sorry, she says and kisses you on the forehead. i found it on the dresser. do you want to see what’s in here, she asks.
sure.
she carefully opens the pouch and pulls out a slim SONY remote.
you don’t tell her that it’s for a tv that she doesn’t even have anymore.
put it in the drawer with the other remotes, you say, and we’ll pack them all together.
oh, no, she says. it’s my first one, she says, smiling, returning to her apartment to, no doubt, misplace it again.
you sit down to finish your glass of homemade orangeade and read a little more delightfully escapist nonsense
the phone rings.
you’re not sleeping, are you?
no, i’m packing, you lie, because she doesn’t seem to like you wasting time reading.
i went to the bathroom, she says, and now i can’t find it.
it’s there somewhere, you say. taking a deep breath. we’ll find it later.
ok, she says. i’m going to lie down for a while.