My grand dad was a ranger for the forest service in the late 1800s in eastern Oregon. That is dry sagebrush area. Every penny he made he put towards land. He ended up with a ranch so large that even as an adult there is no way I would have gone off anywhere by myself as I would have gotten hopelessly lost; and possibly for a number of hours before anybody could find me! My mother and her two brothers inherited the ranch. As a child it was like going to visit a tv show western. There were hired hands and bunkhouses. Eventually the land was sold for what would be many millions of dollars today.

My cousin, Greg, who grew up on the ranch, is now a sculptor. A few years ago he decided to go into sculpting and I visited his site http://www.gregcongleton.com/. But today I visited for the first time in several years  and my Lord he has commissioned pieces for cities now. And many of the pieces are straight out of my past on the ranch. They have our history as a family in them.

I hope that you visit his site. He is truly remarkable. And you will have a small glimpse into my past as the child of a cattle ranching family.

http://www.gregcongleton.com/

So the gop has gone crazy at the idea of a stimulus package suddenly. With their collective eyes bugging out they seem to be following that good old anti-American Rush Limbaugh: “I hope he fails” in regards to Obama.There is something so appalling about this. It is just more of the same from these republicans. They would rather run up the deficit than actually change things and turn them around. There bulging eyes are disengenuos. They simply would rather be right than have the country recover from what Bush has done to it for the last 8 years.

And to those who say democrats are the party of spending just look at who ran up the deficit in the last 3 presidencies. It wasn’t the democrats. It was the republicans who got us here.

Take heed GOP. Your time is over. The people are behind this president and understand the need for big moves right now; including a stimulus package. So, if you want to keep your jobs, you best get out of Obama’s way and keep your partisan hatefulness to yourself. We will not stand for it because we cannot afford it anymore.

I don’t know if you know who Emerson Fittipaldi is, but he is one of the world’s greatest car racers.

A number of years ago I was in Jake’s bar in downtown Portland and there were a bunch of race car drivers in there as there had been a race in our area. One older guy kept hanging around me and even asked me to go to dinner with him. 

He was from Brazil. Anyway, he wasn’t coming on strong, more just curious about me. He was telling me all about who the other drivers there were and how good or not so good they were as drivers.

He became the famous Emerson Fittapaldi  in a few more years!

You know what he said to me? He asked me if I had ever been married. I said no. He said YOU ARE TOO SMART TO GET MARRIED.

But, a lot of smart women do get married. But, they marry the right men if they are smart enough, I guess.

But, imagine…Emerson Fittipaldi. If anyone asks me why I never married I will simply quote him….and if they know anything about the sport of car racing their jaws will drop! What a way to shut someone up on this topic! I love it!

The headline reads ‘Standoff at factory is drawing support’. ……The nation’s grim economy now has a rallying point: Employees at a window and door factory that went out of business have taken over the building in a siege that has come to symbolize the problems of the ordinary worker. The factory closed abruptly last week after Bank of America

canceled the company’s financing. Since then, about 200 of the 240 laid-off workers have taken turns occupying the factory, declaring that they will not leave until getting assurances that they will receive severance and accrued vacation pay.

This standoff also symbolizes peoples’ growing anger at the bail outs being offered to large corporations while paying little to no heed of the middle class. The middle class is the backbone of this country. And this is why we are in this mess, to begin with. We forgot that without a strong middle class this country is simply not your grandfather’s or even father’s country.

Rallying behind these workers are such illuminaries as ….Barack
Obama.., ..Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, civil rights activists and others.

Unions still matter and they are about to have a come back. Big time!
This is just the beginning.

Now about the long slow slide of America’s middle class. Creating a strong middle class has been the goal of organized labor since labor first became organized. And it is this goal that was abandoned outright by American political and business leaders as they did all they could
over the past three decades to encourage a relentless race to the bottom in wages and benefits.

Ah, the worship of capitalism. The worship of companies at the expense of what this country is all about. Trickle up. What happened to this country isthat the middle class could not afford to live a middle class life without borrowing. BECAUSE corporations and businesses kept squeezing more and more outf workers for as little monetary benefit as possible. A company is financially strong when its people can afford to purchase products. Money moves when workers have money to spend.That has not been the case for decades. Borrowing has been the case. A necessity for many. ….

We need to start paying workers enough to sustain themselves. We need to get the money into the hands of those who are striving to stayat or attain a middle class existence. That is the backbone. That is how which companies live and die should be decided; by what  people choose to spend their money on.

The labor movement has started. And it promises to be a doozy. Hang on to your hats folks. People are pissed off!….

Finally……………………….

Whenever I hear someone say they don’t like “drama” in some dissing manner, I find myself recoiling. As I think about why this is, I realize that mainly this comes from men. And when they say drama I suspect that what they really mean is emotion. ” Please don’t expect us to be emotional or respect your emotions”, is the underlying subtext I hear in this.

In other words it is a diss at women and our tendency to be more in touch with our emotions and to want to express them. Whenever I hear anyone talk about this drama thing I hear someone talking who is uncomfortable with emotion. They need to get a parakeet or something.

AND, the next time I hear the phrase”too much drama” coming out of some man’s face directed at a woman,  I am going to tell the bastard he should date a hyena if feelings are too damn much for him!

Q: What military unit was the most decorated in World War 2?

A: The Japanese American “Go for Broke” Nisei 100th.

As a military unit, their record in North Africa and Europe was extraordinary. After almost two years of fighting, the 100th/442nd emerged from the war the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history.

Oh the irony,

and the beauty of this. I am moved every time I hear about these fellows. They looked discrimination and Japanese camps in America in the eye and said WE WILL SHOW THEM. They risked their lives for this country more than any other military unit in all of American history. They had something to prove, and they proved it! They were every inch Americans first. Even to the point of being THE BEST Americans of all  in this one area. In all of American history they defended this country with the most intensity and valor of all. God, you gotta love these men. They showed us. They showed us up….and mainly they helped us win this war! Time for a movie to be made about this. And a great movie it would be!

As a military unit, their record in North Africa and Europe was extraordinary. After almost two years of fighting, the 100th/442nd emerged from the war the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history.

They fought in seven major campaigns in Europe, made two beachhead assaults and captured a submarine. In France, they liberated Bruyeres, and rescued the “Lost Battalion” — 275 Texas infantrymen who had been trapped inside German territory for almost a week.

In late spring of 1945, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion — part of the 442nd — was among the first Allied units to liberate prisoners from Dachau. Days later, heading farther south through Germany, the 522nd helped save more than 5,000 Jewish prisoners from the Dachau sub-camps who had been on a forced march toward the Bavarian Alps.

The unit’s valor earned more than 18,000 individual citations and eight Presidential Unit Citations. Known also as the “Purple Heart Battalion,” with more than 700 men killed and 9,500 Purple Hearts, they suffered the highest casualty rate in U.S. Army history.

But while the Nisei veterans are eager to talk about the past, they are not inclined to boast about their wartime accomplishments. Instead, they talk about the war in simple, unexaggerated language, without the flourishes or tales of mythical feats that war stories often engender. Theirs is a quiet pride — one rooted in historical fact.

“We weren’t going around bragging about what we did, because we didn’t think we did anything special,” said 522nd veteran George Oiye, 73. “It was just part of the war, as far as I’m concerned.” Classified as 4-C Enemy Aliens whose loyalty to the U.S. government was deemed “questionable” after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were ineligible to serve in the armed forces. But in February 1943, the government created a special all-Japanese unit, with Japanese enlisted men and Caucasian officers.

Most of the volunteers came from Hawaii, but roughly a third came from the mainland camps, where more than 110,000 Japanese Americans — including 70,000 native-born American citizens — had been put into internment camps.  At first, the two groups appeared to have nothing in common but their Japanese ancestry. Where they came from, how they behaved, how they talked — everything was different.

At a 1945 White House ceremony honoring the 100th/442nd, President Truman commended the Nisei soldiers on their wartime accomplishments. “You fought not only the enemy, you fought prejudice, and you have won.”

In the late 1980s, Nisei veterans led the campaign for redress that resulted in a formal apology and compensation from the U.S. government to Japanese Americans who were interned.

I don’t know what got me thinking about these guys today. But it has always been a story I believe every American should know about. It is a story of heroism of gigantic proportions.

We owe them a debt. A huge debt. Remember this the next time you have that subtle ringing prejudice ringing in  your mind. These guys helped beat japan and Hitler. While their families on the mainland were in camps they were out their defeating our enemies with a valor unsurpassed. Without them we might not have won this war. This was a very very close war.

Today is the date “that will live in infamy” when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Take a moment today to express gratitude to these average men who went on to make a mockery of the prejudice against them.  Who became, simply, the greatest military unit in the history of this country!

Puts a smile on my face just thinking about this.

Do most people have one of these? The friend from years ago that is still there, but so many times you really really, if the truth be told, don’t want them to be?

I have one of those. I met her when we were 16. It was a boring summer and I had no one to hang around with when “Ellen” came along. We took tennis lessons together. She was always on the obnoxious side, talked too much and too loudly. Always saying the wrong thing…etc. Years go  by and we are still friends. But, my deep animosity is building as her extreme passive aggressive behavior makes me never want to be around her.

When I was depressed and moved to live with her in California, she would continually block my ability to park on the side of the street we were on. There was enough room for both cars, but she just kept taking up both spaces. No amount of talking changed this. Can we say angry at me? Absolutely crazy-making behavior. A way to thumb her nose at me and not have to take responsibility for doing so.

Over the years I have heard that she talks negatively about me behind my back, tells me I am “too something” (don’t even remember what) to get married, ranked on my new friends right to their faces, kicked me out, disapproved of the few friends I made, told funny stories that showed me in a bad light and, frequently, she did this to my face while others were around.

Over the years she has only gotten worse. She tries to guilt-trip me into remaining friends. This only backfired because I just want to get further away from her.

She loves to tell me what  great friend she has been to me and all but says she is the only real friend I could possibly have. Nice, huh?

I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that she was poison to me and really did not like me at all. I finally told her so. I asked that she not contact me again. Yeah for me. Said “NO” to constantly being brought down by her in every interaction. Then she contacted me again because she saw some writing I had done.

I put down the rules about how she needed to treat me better or I would not consider resuming the friendship with her again. What does she do? Goes the victim on me. After all, she is such a wonderful friend, how could I accuse her of mistreating me and being insensitive to me, much less truly hating me underneath?

I had forgotten that she was the only person I have ever met who could not issue a sincere apology. Something missing here. The inability to admit any wrong about herself. This stems from some huge issues from her past, I suspect. And while I feel sorry for her in this regard, it doesn’t make me want to be friends.

I wonder how many others have, or have had, “friends” like this and what the experiences are like. I suspect most of us do. Sad for the “friend” but true.

She continually checks my myspace page. Just cannot let go but cannot get a clue. My God, it is so sad, but enough is enough.

I have an unusual memory for experiences. I used to think that others simply didn’t value the past like I did; how else to explain why I remembered “important” things and they did not”? It was not until very recently that I came to realize that I simply have a phenomenal memory in this regard.

At my HS reunion people were coming up to me asking what the names of various people were. I remember who sat across from me on my first day of first grade. It was Brenda Cunningham. And I remember who sat in the front row in first grade; Janelle Wilson. I remember that very first day and that I was in Mrs. Alderman’s classroom and it was actually an introductory (a few hours) day to acclimate us to school. I remember the film we were shown that day about the need to wash our hands. I went around washing my hands for days.

I remember the first time that I finished a book! I had read a whole book! I told my parents and they just did not get the significance of this for me. It was a Dick and Jane book. (no, I don’t remember the title LOL)

I remember being 4 and realizing that the neighbor girl would never catch up to me in age. It was quite a moment. I remember asking my grandmother how women had babies only if they are married? My poor grandmother. I saved her by coming to the conclusion that “God, just knows, right”?

I tend to remember moments of AHAs when I was young.

I remember being about age 3 and sitting in Dick Jackson’s lap while he and his wife were visiting our home. And the chair broke! I didn’t like men. I was afraid of men as a child. I was terrified by this chair incident. I remember being afraid of the scary looking man across the street from my grandmother’s house. He had a Finnish name, like most in the neighborhood; Mr Lumpa. Oh my, with his big bald head.

I remember being 3 years old and standing at the window in my house, in my little white fur jacket, saying to myself “I am 3-years-old today and I will remember this day for the rest of my life”. I suspect that this was the first time I realized that I had THE POWER to remember.

I remember the day my 4th grade teacher came in saying we could have pen pals from Waldorf, Germany as it was our sister city. I had 2 pen pals; Horst and Waltraud. Oh how I loved receiving those letters. It took 3 days for us to receive or send a letter. Technology has moved so fast we don’t really have time to grasp the significance of it and how , for example, it has created miracles in communication speed. We just absorb the intricacies of one thing and another pops up.

I remember when Astoria Oregon, my hometown, was a blue collar town. It had the smell of fish in the air if you were close to the canneries. And you could smell the lumber mill.

Now It has gone artsy and is a tourist attraction AND was named the number one place to retire by, I believe, Good Morning America.

I remember walking with Yvonne Takko, my best friend at the time, up Irving Avenue for her first date with Willis Van Dusen. We were 13! I remember her first meeting him, which SHE probably does not. This was a walking date. I was partnered with our State Representative’s son, Mark Bugas.

Willis Van Dusen is now Mayor of Astoria. He was the driving force behind the transition from the old Astoria to the new Astoria.

Most of my friends were cheerleaders. But, they were “the peoples choice” type of cheerleaders. They never themselves ran with the “popular crowd”. They kept their best friends; myself and others. One year there were 3 cheerleaders. I was the best friend of 2! But, I myself was never in the popular crowd at all. Liked, but without that zing that makes the boys follow you around. But, the fact that these 2 people chose me as their best friend, and that this in itself said volumes, never dawned on me until years later.  It wasn’t until HS when I played Lola (I played her straight, not silly) in Damn Yankees that the boys really went for me.

I remember so much. Each life, in this day and age, seems to have many different chapters that at times truly seem like separate lifetimes.

I remember…….

Now I know that this is going to be very politically incorrect. But, I suspect I am not alone in my reactions. I saw a woman dressed in a burka at Winco’s Grocery today. I have just started doing street photography which is where you simply take pics of people on the street, in the store, where ever. She had a little child with her, maybe between2 and 3. Now I know it was a girl because she was dressed just like her mother. The burka covering all of her but her face. Even her forehead was covered. She was sitting in the cart facing her mother. The child was looking at me and I was thinking MY GOD I CAN NEVER LEAVE MY CAMERA IN THE CAR AGAIN! Because this was a priceless shot, in my mind. A child having to be covered up. WHY?
My understanding is that the burka is to keep females from being ogled by strange males. This was a child. But, this went beyond just the child and the mother. It got me looking at how I recoil whenever I see a woman dressed like this. Especially a woman who is native born. It is for “religious reasons” I hear over and over. But religion is for man, when it comes to codes of dress. And I believe I have finally figured out why seeing women dressed like this bothers me so much.

Yes, I understand that in the USA you have a choice and that adult women should dress as they please. And they should. But, this is a country of freedom. Not codes. Laws but not oppression. At least these are our ideals.
Most women who dress like this probably like doing it; at least in this country. But, there are some things to consider. My mother, rest her soul, was a college graduate in 1935, a time when few women graduated from college. I remember her telling me, admiringly, that some woman had given up being a physician because she was getting married. This woman, who had had enough ambition to become an MD was now to live through others. She felt she had to choose. She probably thought she was happy living her ambition vicariously or competing to have the perfect house, perfect meals, perfect children etc. What a waste.

My point in the above paragraph, is that we believe what our society tells us to believe. Or at least we do to an extent, though not to the extend that we did in the 1950s. This was oppression we now realize. And that is what bothers me about these women wearing the symbol of their own oppression. Did you know that in Saudi Arabia, our ally, women get the death penalty for driving a car? Yes, driving a car. Oh yes, and they wear the burka. The death penalty……….
Also, notice that conservative, religious regimes, all want to cover up women’s bodies. They just do. Look at Iran…and how they have the special police just to give a bad time to a woman who has a head hair straying out of her UNIFORM. Or look at those polygamist religions so in the news today. One of the things they are most known for is their oppressive treatment of women. What they wear, who they marry etc.

So, this is why I don’t like seeing this. I know what it represents. It represents a woman oppressed. She may not be conscious of it, but she is oppressed none the less. Doesn’t change that fact, just because she accepts or likes it.

Oppression this overt has no place in this country.
There I have said it. I don’t approve of the burka anywhere. But in this country?  Absolutely no. And now that I have thought it out, I will not longer feel an uneasy guilt about my recoil. I am recoiling at a very blatant visible oppression of a woman. And I DON’T approve!

I don’t know what happened exactly…but I lost something again. This time it was my user manual for my Canon camera. So, since I need that I called Canon to purchase another manual. Wow.They made me pretty danged hot under the collar. They don’t give manuals out after the first one, I was told. For 2 reasons. Number 1: just because and number 2: For environmental reasons. You can, however, see the manual online and download it.

I spoke to 2 different reps. One was a supervisor. Yup, I was pretty steamed and asked for a supe to express my unhappiness (Nah, anger!) to. I began by saying “you mean that I have to go buy another camera in order to get the manual?!” He goes “What?” He was fast alright! Then I said that this environmental reason is nonsense. I need all the details of how to work this camera I told him. I am not working an old kodak from when I was ten! I need to have a manual with me and I can’t be lugging around a huge notebook. If you download the manual? You download 195 pages. Yes, One-hundred-ninety-five pages. That would kill a tree right there.

If they hadn’t flat out try to make themselves virtuous in the face of what is clearly just plain old cheapness, I would not be writing this.

Canon is too cheap to hire people to deal with sending out manuals. CHEAP.  This is why I say Canon kills trees. Tree killer! LOL

Yes, I have a wicked streak. This is just my way of saying thank you to Canon.