A Milestone in Iraq

Today is another milestone in the Iraq war. The 2000th soldier has been counted among the dead.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks is dead at age 92.

She has always been a testament to what one person can do.

I remember her being asked why she didn't get up on the bus and her answer was simple and yet so powerful, "I was tired."

I've always loved that statement because it says so much about the state of things. I never took it to mean it was only a physical tiredness, but much more a tiredness of the way things were.

Some of us are still tired.

May she rest in peace.

Beautiful Morning

I've been up since 4. I went to bed about 9 - decided I should try to sleep before all the drugs wore off from the dental work. It was 10 before I really got to sleep - so, naturally, I was awake at 4.

I have a built in alarm clock it seems - four hours after I go to sleep, and then 6 hours if I don't get up. On the rare occasions I sleep longer than that I also wake up at 8 hours.

I had a sleep study done years ago - before they were something you ever heard about. It was at a research facility. Anyway, they discovered I have some oddities in my sleep pattern, which overall I find rather convenient.

One is that I go into REM sleep very quickly. Supposedly this just can't happen, but I can start dreaming within moments of being asleep and that only happens in REM sleep.

Maybe my whole sleep is just speeded up, although I suspect it has more to do with the training my mom gave me early in life. Regardless, I'm glad to get that little bit extra out of life that isn't devoted to sleeping.

I'm working on house stuff before the work day starts. I need to be on the phone a lot today and you just can't call people at 6:33 in the morning, regardless of when you got up.

It's nippy here - 32 now. I didn't bother to cover up the plants last night. I did the night before, figuring all the extra time I could give them to go to seed would be good but it seems that fall is really here now so there's no point in continuing to do it. I hope Monday is nice for the kiddos for Halloween.

I mailed off some photos yesterday that I took at the governor's reception last week - of various people with the governor. I like thinking that people will get a little surprise in the mail today. How fun.

Well, I need to do some more house things. I'm having company this weekend and there are some things I'd like to finish before then.

I'm reaching the point where I'm going to be glad when I'm through having work people in and things are organized the way I want them and I don't have things sitting around here and there. Things get bumped around and misplaced because although I might be careful to walk around something, work people aren't the same way about it.

I'm also starting to want to booby trap bits of my house to keep people from being snoopy. I've had three instances in the last couple of months of people just wandering in to rooms in my home where they were not invited and looking to see what it looks like - once even opening a closet. The closet was empty, but I just didn't like the gesture.

I'm pretty generous with my home - at least I like to think so - but if I'm inviting you into the living room and everything is set up for us to sit in the living room, and the rest of the lights are off, that is NOT your invitation to wander in to my kitchen just to see what it looks like at the moment. It's a mess. I'm in transition. I'm trying to get a break from it by having you over and enjoying some tea. Now you're making me deal with it and explain to you what my plan is and feel like I'm not moving fast enough to suit you. Please, can you not just sit down and enjoy some tea with me. I've made a path to the bathroom, but I haven't done anything else because it never occurred to me that you'd take off to the kitchen uninvited and flip on the light just to see what it looked like.

Along the same lines, please keep your overwhelmed looks, comments about how you couldn't live in this transition, and discussions about my choices (unless asked) to yourself. I don't need any extra pressure. I have enough, thank you.

I guess I'm just in a pissy mood about that because it's happened multiple times lately. But, it's the sort of thing that irks me. Part of me is thinking geez no wonder people here don't entertain if this is the way guests act.