Birthday

I can't write about Quilt National with pictures because I have jammed my printer/scanner and haven't the patience to find the manual and see how to get in it to unjam it. Anyway, it is a birthday -- this lovely young lady ... so she's not as young as, say her daughter who just graduated from high school -- to a mother's eyes, she IS certainly young. And lovely, of cousre. I will not get sentimental but being inclined to note calendric reoccurences, birthday always are noticed.

To change the subject: it is sixteen months until the next presidential election but the newspapers are full of stories about how the announced candidates are raising money -- there's not much about what anyone stands for it's all about who can raise the biggest "war chest." I find this "news" repulsive -- not as repulsive as the daily tolls of deaths in Iraq, Americans, other soldiers and most of all Iraqi citizens of whatever persuasion. But the emphasis on money is so disgustingly American I really cannot read those articles and try to skip over the headlines.

A few minutes ago I had a phone call -- another of those sales around dinner time calls, I assumed ... yes and no. It WAS a recorded message. It was Hilary Clinton -- a well scripted and delivered message, especially for females and I totally agreed with everything she said, but I never took the invitation to "press one now". There will be many more such calls I'm sure. I am not going to contribute my few bucks to her "war chest" nor to anyone else's.

On the subject of money -- a friend recently forwarded a piece about a super deluxe RV -- so deluxe it had echos of an Onasis yacht. My reaction was horror -- could anyone be so selfish as to buy such a thing when every city and most towns have homeless people living in cardboard boxes? Why have we become a society in which such a vehicle could be constructed? Why have we become a society that seems to judge our political candidates by their fund raising power? Maybe we don't want to read about it, maybe journalists are forcing us to read the crap so they don't ever have to ask real questions -- certainly they've got out of the habit of really questioning those in power and the extent to which our Constitution is being disregarded or even walked on with boots -- Texas style boots in many cases,