So it's Saturday morning, early Saturday morning. Tired but about to end my 'broadcast day.' That's really what it feels like some nights. If you're too young, you may not know what I'm talking about. But used to, and I know one in my area still does, before a TV station stopped broadcating and went to the blank screen, they'd say: "This ends our broadcast day." Usually, they'd show mountain tops or flags while they played the national anthem. Then the screen would go to white fuzz.
I should say "Betty here." I'll get down before Rebecca gets back from vacation.
So it was a long day at work and the morning wasn't the calmest. (As a parent, it's one of those moments where you ask, "And how did you break your lunch box and why did you never tell me?" I go to open my oldest son's lunch box to put his snacks in -- he was actually hanging with my uncle, his great uncle today, they were going to go fishing. I open his lunch box and I'm holding one piece of it.) Traffic was crazy for a Friday morning. I spent my lunch hour trying to rearrange the kid's appointments with the doctor and, for the oldest two, the dentist so we could get that all out of the way in one day. I told myself that I'd grab something on the afternoon break. Instead, I snagged my panthose so bad. This wasn't your normal tear. I thought, "Okay, there's an hour and a half left of the work day. Am I going to use my break to try to rush to the drug store and get a new pair or go the ladies' room and just get through the day without any?" I decided on the latter. Though I will deny that if someone runs back to my grandmother who said it once if she said it a million times, "A lady always wears hose in public."
The deal we had was that since they were staying with their cousins tomorrow night (ha ha, I'll get to that) they and their cousins could all go to the movies tonight. I get all the kids, apologize to my uncle for rushing off with just a "Hi and bye" but we were trying to make the seven o'clock showing (actually 7:05), and I knew my sister's kids would be as much of a round up crisis as my own. So, we get there. Her youngest is saying he doesn't like cars. He does. That's all he will play with. But it's one of those, "I want to stay with my mommy moments." So we've finally got him on board and excited. I've got thirty minutes for the drive and buying the tickets and the theater is only twenty minutes from my sisters. We're headed to go and my daughter, my youngest, has no shoes and no socks.
"Where are your shoes? Go find your shoes."
She took them off to take off her socks because Mommy wasn't wearing hose. We're all on the floor looking for them and I'm saying, "Just the shoes. Just find the shoes and she can't go without socks."
We finally find them in a toy box. It's five minutes until seven. So it became, "Okay, we're going to go have pizza instead." My sister offered to tag along, but the whole point when we take each other's kids is to give the other the night off.
Pizza goes very well. The kids have a blast. But they all want the movie, including my sister's youngest. I call her and tell her I know they're going to fall asleep in the movie but that's fine and, if it's okay with her, they'll just all go back to the house with me and spend the night. (Which was fine with her.) (The second showing started at ten p.m.)
Sure enough three out of the seven are asleep within five minutes of the movie. That was fine except my youngest nephew woke up and needed to go to the bathroom. At the seven o'clock showing, I wouldn't have been as worried. Instead, I told my oldest to hold my cell phone, to start screaming holy murder and dialing 911 if anyone bothered them, and hurried to the bathroom with him. And of course, he didn't want to go into the 'girls' bathroom with me. There was no male around that I knew, so I wasn't sending him into a men's room this late at night by himself (he's five-years-old). I pick him up, and he's fussing (I don't blame him) and griping about the 'girls' room. He was so mad at me.
He was also fully awake so he ended up watching the last hour of the movie and loving it. Is it Cars? It's the thing with Paul Newman and everybody else doing the voices. (I was a lot more together earlier this evening.) So the movie's over and we're leaving.
By the time we're home, everyone's wide awake and ready to stay up all night. I made two bags of microwave popcorn, tossed it in a big plastic bowl, parked them on a big blanket in front of the TV with Finding Nemo which is a wonderful movie but I'm so sick of it, I can remember wanting to watch a favorite movie over and over when I was a kid but they really do watch their favorite movies over and over. Cars, when it comes out on DVD, is one they'll watch. Because they know it. That's how it works. Now. When I was a kid, a movie I hadn't seen? Sure, let's go.
Oh, here's my "ha ha" from way earlier. My youngest will not stay overnight with anyone except my mother. I don't know if my mother bribes her with candy or what, but any of my sisters, they have to call me. Around eight p.m. she will say she wants me. By 8:30 if she's not told I'm on the way, she will begin this piercing scream. So what I do is show up a little after eight, talk to whichever sister she is with. Have a cup of coffee. Then when I kiss her goodbye, the hope is that she'll say, "Bye-bye." But she never does. She grabs me and won't let go. So it's just easy to take her with me. She'll usually fall asleep in the car and be completely out of it by the time we get home. The first time she stayed with a sister, I'd gone to a movie and didn't have a cell phone then. I'd called before the movie to check and was planning to call after. This was my oldest sister and she wasn't going to call the theater (my younger sister would) and have them go get me. She finally mentioned our mother. That hushed my daughter and they all got in my sister's car and drove over there, dropped her off and went back home. When the movie was over, I called and, after hearing what had happened, went straight to my mother's. She was having the time of her life. She didn't want to go home with me. But that's really it, she'll stay with me or Granny and no one else. Not for a sleep over.
You know, there is someone else she'd probably stay over with, Kat. When we were all in California, she'd fall out in Kat's lap. And she won't do with anyone but me and my mother. She gets too wound up. But in California, like when we were in DC, she was just fascinated with Kat and with Kat's hair. (Kat really does have amazing hair.) She's very girly-girl, my daughter. (She doesn't get that from me.) She loves to play with hair and loves to have her hair put in plats or pulled off back and pinned up. And she loves powder. After having a little powder put on her face or her hair 'fixed,' her favorite thing is to watch you do the same. (My mother's hair is very long and when she takes it down at the end of the night, if we're there, my daughter has to see Granny's hair.) She really does love Kat. If I'm on the phone, she always wants to know if it's Granny or "Kitty Kitty" (her name for Kat). Kat's got a family vacation (she has a huge family) this month and, on the way back into the country, is going to try to swing by. My daughter fusses over her bedroom now because Kitty Kitty's coming by.
I have no idea why she turned out to be such a girly-girl. It's probably me, I probably had fun dressing her from the second she was born. My mother thinks she gets it from her mother (the one who always tells me, to this day, "A lady always wears hose in public"). I was a tough little girl. I can remember this older boy, in second grade, on the playground, pinching my butt. He did that to some other girls and they ran screaming to the teacher. I spun around, hauled off and punched him in the eye. He was in fourth grade. I didn't even think twice. (This is probably where I should say, "Two wrongs don't make a right." But if some older kid pinched my daughter on the butt and she slugged him, I wouldn't make a big deal out of it.) Recess and gym were always fun classes with me. When I got older, I played basketball and ran track. On Cosby, I always thought Denise was so pretty but I knew I was more like Vanessa.
So that was my day and aren't you all bored?
There were two things I wanted to talk about. Wait. Three. First, Kat has a wonderful post that she talked about writing Thursday and did write tonight. "My thoughts" is the title and I hope you'll check it out. Second, I never get to talk about Wally. It's late and I'm tired but I do get some e-mails asking what I think of Wally's site? Sometimes there seems to be some suggestion that I might not like it. I think people worry that since Wally and I both do humor sites, there might be some conflict? There's not. Wally's really funny. (Also a really sweet man. Honestly, I did write "kid" but that's because of my age, not Wally's. He's a mature young man.)
Wally's pretty even keeled (is that the word?) and dependable. That's great but for the longest I really wasn't too sure about him. (I'm talking before he did his site, because I knew him from a community committee we were both on where we'd all be on the phone once a week for three weeks and a number of us, including Wally, would speak during the week and I also knew him from a roundtable we did for the round-robin before his site started, and no one but C.I. knew at that point that Wally was about to start a site.) I think of him, like Robert Redford in any movie. You know how Redford's usually playing some man who's reserved? (The Way We Were makes me cry buckets. That's probably my favorite Redford film.) That's Wally.
I think if he would have been in DC in September with all of us, I would've gotten to know him then. (My fear, because I can babble, can you tell? My fear was that he thought, "Who is this woman who never shuts up?" If we'd been face to face, I would've just realized that he's more reserved. He's a watcher! I just thought of Barefoot in the Park and how Jane Fonda tells Redford that there are watchers and doers and that Redford is a watcher.) When everything was going on with his grandfather -- they live in Florida, it was after the hurricane last fall and his grandfather had no power, no power in the entire neighborhood in fact, and Wally was down there trying to convince him that his home would be safe and that he really needed to be somewhere with power so to go to his mother's -- Wally's mother, Wally's grandfather's daughter -- I saw that action mode and also saw the caring that's there but not upfront the way it is in me or in a lot of people. And when I'd hear about that while we were all working on The Third Estate Sunday Review, I finally figured out, "Okay, that's Wally. He's the strong, silent type. He's a good guy."
It was so weird to meet him face to face because he really looked exactly like I'd expected. I could've drawn you a picture of Wally before I ever saw him. So, the long road to a simple answer, I like Wally a great deal and he does a wonderful job at his site. Mike can get him to be silly and goofy. (They became friends right when Mike was starting his own site.) And the two of them do love their dick jokes. But outside of having fun with Mike, he's really serious. If I hadn't heard him with Mike, I'd be reading the site and thinking, "Who is this guy?"
I think that's because, and I'm not talking out of school here, he's talked about this in an interview with Mike, he lost his father at such a young age. I know he and Cedric are really tight and they share that so I'm sure it's a bond between them. (Cedric also lost his father when he was really young.)
But I really do like (I want to say "love" but I think that would embarrass him, he really is much more silent and reserved unless he's goofing off with Mike) him -- and his site is really funny. I moan about how hard I have it because I've got to stick to my outline for Betinna and carry the storyline along each time. But he's got it pretty hard too. The way The Daily Jot works, he's grabbing some thing breaking in the news, five days a week, and trying to find a humorous slant on it. Mike was recently depressed about Democracy Now!, the whole thing really did depress him. And I'm sure Wally could relate to that because when Alito got confirmed, and we saw Democrats weren't going to fight any nomination, Wally really did take that hard. He and Mike are both very action oriented. In a, "here's a problem, here's what we'll do" figure it out kind of way. And he really did think Alito could be stopped.
And being a man of his word and a man of principle (and there I don't hesitate to use the word "man"), it really shocked him that men and women in the Senate wouldn't be the same. It was an eye opener for him and I think those can be sad to go through but we end up stronger. So, again long road to a short answer, I have a lot of respect for him. Age wise, sorry, I do see him as a kid. But he conducts himself like an adult and then some. His mother (who is very sweet and who I felt like I knew and was friends with the first time we spoke) said even as a little boy, after his father died, he was very much acting like the man of the house. The first guy she dated, two years after his father died, was a fix up from a friend and she wasn't crazy about him. They had one date and he dropped her off but wouldn't leave. Wally came into the living room, I hope it's okay to tell this story, his mother tells it, and said, "Sir, I don't like the way you're talking to my mother. It's time for you to leave." I can picture that and I can picture a grown man high tailing it out of there.
So the third thing? C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot." Before I get to that, thank you for the kind words I what I wrote about Iraq this week. I intend to write some more about it. And promise to be far less chatty. Probably not the best time to blog when you've spent the evening with children. (Not because it wasn't wonderful, it was, but because I probably had all of that in me all day just waiting to sit down and talk about with a grown up.) (My sister and I really didn't have time to talk this evening. We were trying to get the kids rounded up so I could take them to the movies.)
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
The Operation Happy Talk goes on.
Sean McFarland becomes the biggest doofus outside the administration by delcaring, "I think we have turned a corner her in Ramadi." MacFarland is both an Army Col. and a Happy Talker.
In news that's a little harder to Happy Talk, Antonio Castaneda (AP) reports that of the 1000 Sunni soldiers who made up the May 2006 graduating class "only about 300 of them have reported for duty".
In other news from the real world, Reuters reports that the US Congressional Budget Office predicts: "The Iraq war could cost U.S. taxpayers between $202 billion and $406 billion more over the next 10 years".
These projections come at a time when, as Martha Burk has pointed out (Ms.), the US government has cut "[d]omestic-violence prevention by $35 million, Medicaid by $17 billion over five years and child care programs by 1.03 billion over five years."
In other costs paid, Reuters reports 12 corpses were discovered in Tal Afar. CBS and the AP note a corpse ("shot in the chest . . . signs of torture") discovered in Azizyah".
Bombings?
As noted earlier this morning, seven people were killed ("after Friday prayers") when a Sunni mosque in Baghdad was bombed. Meanwhile Reuters reports that a mosque in Balad Ruz was hit by mortar rounds leaving at least two dead and four wounded while a car bomber in Mosul who killed himself and five others. The AFP covers a mortar attack in Baghdad that left one person dead and nine wounded.
Shooting deaths?
Reuters notes that two policeman were killed by a sniper in Tal Afar while a minibus near Kut was attacked "with machine gun fire" resulting in five dead ("including a wwoman and a child"). Meanwhile, the AFP reports attacks in two cities: a car was "ambushed" in Tikrit by assailants who shot the father dead and wounded the son; and, in Mosul, two different attacks left a police officer dead as well as the bodyguard of a judge. And the Associated Press reports a drive-by in Baghdad that killed a taxi driver.
The BBC noted the death of several Iraqi soldiers (12 at that point) in Kirkuk when they were attacked with "rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns". AFX raised the number dead to 13 (citing "colonel Mahmud Abdulla").
Meanwhile, following yesterday's kidnapping attempt that left wrestling coach Mohammed Karim Abid Sahib dead, the AP reports that: "Iraq's national wrestling team [has] pulled out of a tournament in the United Arab Emirates".
In the United States, Saturday July 15th is a day of action calling for Suzanne Swift to receive an honorable discharge including a protest, "at the gates of Ft. Lewis (exit 119) beginning at 12 pm with a press converence at 3 pm" in Washington state -- while in Eugen, Oregon there will be a demonstration outside the Federal Building at noon.
In DC (and across the globe -- over 22 countries), the fast led by CODEPINK and others continues. As Thursday's The KPFA Evening News reported some Congressional members, including Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney and Lynne Woolsey took part in a one-day fast on Thursday. Ann Wright, who ressigned from the State Department on May 19, 2003 and is taking part in the actions stated: "The only reason we fast is to force us to remember what's going on here. That innocent Iraqis are dying every day, Americans are dying every day. We need to get this war ended. So, yeah, we're going to up the ante".
Lastly, Wednesday July 19th, San Antonio, TX will be the location for a "public hearing held by the the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves" -- "in the Iberia Ballroom of the La Mansion Del Rio Hotel, 112 College Street, San Antonio."
There will be two panels with the first lasting from 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. and focused on "roles and missions to funding requirements" and the second, lasting from 2:00 pm to 4 pm, focusing on how reserves were "involuntarily mobilized after September 11, 2001".
