Whatever happened to Sportsmanship?

Yesterday a high school football team coached by my husband's niece's husband (there must be an easier way to say that!) lost their CIF championship game... Apparently with only 2.9 seconds (that's seconds folks) the opposing team threw a hail Mary pass that connected and they won the game.... response from the adults...? The other team was privately funded and recruited heavily for their players! Not being at all interested in high school games of any type, I don't keep up with CIF regs, but it seems to me that their are rather stringent rules governing that type of thing. And, if they did put all types of efforts into buying players, I would want a refund! 2.9 seconds and a hail Mary pass...? Sounds like these teams were very well matched and it was a great game.... Leave it to adults to teach kids to whine about life not being fair...

Harry Ried is Slow....

Well, Harry Ried has finally decided to include a public option in his health care bill... wow! He really must be slow... or has commitment issues. All this time I was dead certain that a public option for health care was a must... Progressive Democrats of America were clamoring for single payer health care... Obama promised a public option long ago.... private health insurance companies would have carte blanch to continue to rape us if a requirement that everyone obtained health insurance was included without a public option.... and NOW he says his bill will include it!!? I am not impressed with Harry Ried.

Now we get to find out what kind of public option we will end up with... will it only be available to those who can't get insurance through an employer? Will it only be available where other plans are not available... will it be a real public option available to EVERYONE so that insurance companies will have real competition that will make them improve their product, reduce their prices (hint... no one, even the CEO of a health insurance company needs to make $57K a minute... cut there first!) and instead of existing solely for their shareholders, start thinking of their customers and saving lives... We will see... Now is not the time to stop calling... where's the phone!?

What I have learned from Precient walking

1. There are a lot of ignorant people out there. They far outnumber the folks who are not ignorant. They aren't stupid, they are ignorant. Stupid you can't fix. Ignorance is something that can be remedied.
2. Most ignorant people do not want to be fixed. They are comfortable in their ignorance and want to stay that way. Too much information takes them out of their comfort zone. That's why they like things like Fox News. It hands them information in short sound bites that are easy to digest and repeat. They don't know what the issues are or if they are affected by them. They don't want to know....They figure someone else will take care of it. They hang on to the belief that as long as they stay in their neighborhood, in their house, they will be ok which probably explains #3
3. So many people are afraid to even come out of their houses, much less talk to someone they don't know. If you live in South Central Los Angeles, I can understand it. I can't understand why you are afraid on a beautiful morning in Moreno Valley. I shouldn't have to ring your doorbell. You should already be outside!
4. There are a lot of nice people out there and walking around on a beautiful day to talk to some of them isn't a bad way to spend your time.

It's funny how a few degrees can change a day. It was a little cooler today so I could go outside and work on my yard a little bit.... Being confined to the house because it is too hot really makes retirement suck. I guess I could get some of my indoor activities going again but I think I would rather pout! It's the hot weather. It makes me crabby!

Lazy Day

After a whirlwind day of apartment hunting for my daughter in LA, today I am just lazy. I need to go to the grocery store and it is trash day, but I plan on being lazy the whole day!

Just returned from Argentina and things keep occurring to me... Like what a cool way they have their traffic signals work. There is a yellow light before a light turns red as we have, but they also have a yellow warning light before a red light turns green. They have hundreds of taxi's on the street and these yellow lights seem to keep the traffic moving a lot better than it does here. This occurred to me as I almost rear ended a person sitting in a green light. I don't know what she was doing... balancing her check book, putting on make up, but as I was approaching the light turned green and, silly me, I assumed that she would go. Maybe if she had a warning that the light was going to turn green she could have prepared. Argentina also has good wine and beer and lots of smog... all those taxis. I would never drive there. Most of the roads don't have lane lines painted on them and all the cars go wherever they can. The taxi drivers are masters at squeezing into any open spot. If the roads do have lanes the drivers ignore them. We took taxis everywhere and I never felt that I wasn't safe, but, again, I would never drive there. More later.

Why I hate the Blind Copy function

Due to some malfunctioning of my volunteer mechanism, I have the duty of writing not just one, but two newsletters. One for the Democratic Club and one for what I affectionately call the sissy girl horse club. It is the sissy girl horse club because basically, they/we are a bunch of sissy girls... Mostly them... They don't ride on anything other than flat trails, they don't lope their horses, they don't do a lot of things that are really fun... a bunch of sissies! This is my first month for both and, because I am leaving for vacation I was rushing to get the newsletter for the sissy girls out before I leave... It's 10:27 pm, I push the send button, and within seconds I get the request.... The request from a member to send out the news letter with everyone blind copied so no one can get any other person's address! What kind of club is this?? They don't want to be able to contact one another? That's weird, but no...That's not the reason. They are convinced that the tiny, insignificant Trailseekers newsletter is the reason they are getting Viagra and male enhancement email! Of course, that's not the reason. It's because they put their email address on classmates.com or bought something from a site and gave them an email address for shipment confirmation and that company sold their address. In the Democratic club, the mysterious list is kept by the treasurer... I forward the newsletter to her so she can send it out... I am not allowed access to the "list". So I send her the letter attached to an email. She attaches my email to her email and everyone has to open 3 things to read the news. This drives me crazy! Are they this protective of their telephone numbers? Their street addresses? Do they have trouble using the delete button? Setting up spam filters?

I have come to the conclusion that technologically speaking, I am miles ahead of my friend... I should be having just retired from an IT position, but shouldn't they all be able to figure out that they shouldn't give their primary email addresses to sketchy sites that don't promise to keep your information confidential... Then they blame it on their friends having their email addresses. Yikes!

But the big thing I have against blind copy list is that no one can tell who else received the email and so I am bombarded with duplicate copies of things I already received directly, just because that communication thing is so important and we want to keep everyone in the loop... we just don't want everyone to know who else is in the loop with us!