Last Night's Preparations

I grew up afraid of thunderstorms,  but especially afraid of the possibility of tornadoes.  It got so bad that eventually I ended up in therapy for it.  It was a true phobia, changing the way I lived my life.  Actually I didn't do much living during those fearful years, but that's another story for another time.

One thing I never was, even at my most fearful, was unprepared for severe weather.  Maybe it was because Dad was a firefighter, but I honestly don't remember a time when I didn't know exactly what to do in a tornado or severe weather situation.  I gave my first oral report on tornado preparedness in 4th grade.

Last night dangerous severe weather was headed into our area and for the first time in a long time we had reason to believe we might need to go to the basement.  We were under a tornado watch, had a  TOR:CON of 5 for this area, and could watch the super cells and large line of thunderstorms approach on the radar.

When Mom moved into this house she picked out a spot in the basement where she and my sister could shelter.  One of the first things she told me when we moved in was where the "safe spot" was.  She always has a gallon of water down there but yesterday evening we made some extra preparations.

Here are the simple things we did to make sure that if we had to head to the basement we'd be set:

1. Mom put an extra gallon of water in the safe spot.
2. We figured out which cats would need a carrier and who would just follow us into the basement.
3. Next to the stairs to the basement we each put a pair of good walking shoes to grab on our way down the stairs.
4. We charged cell phones so that we could keep abreast of radar without power and/or contact help if needed.
5. A wind-up radio/flashlight, battery-powered flashlight, extra batteries and a couple boxes of snack bars rounded out our "Grab If" collection.  The only change I'd make for next time is putting those "extras" in a bag to make it a faster grab.

This is NOT preparation for a strong tornado.  We were hedging our bets that if the worst happened we would have to climb over relatively minimal debris and that we wouldn't be stuck in the basement for longer than six hours or so.

These are, however, simple preparations anyone can make when you're under a TORNADO WATCH, so long as you already know where you're going to take shelter.

One last note: I was designated "weather watcher" last night.  Since a lot of the nasty weather wasn't supposed to get to us until the middle of the night, I offered to stay up and keep an eye on weather.  It was my job to rouse the house if we needed to take shelter from a tornado or strong straight-line winds.  Why did I stay up?  Because nighttime tornadoes kill more people than daytime ones.  You can't rely on  thunder or the winds to wake you up in time.  You can get alerts on your phone or weather radio but what we have isn't selective enough with the alerts and will wake us up for a flood warning six counties east of here.  So since I didn't have to be anywhere today, I stayed up until 3 AM.

Second Thanksgiving

Growing up, I had the most 50s sit-com family that could possibly exist in the 1980s.  Dad was a firefighter, Mom stayed home with me and my sister until she got a part-time job (just for the hours we were in school) when I was about 8.  I didn't have a bad holiday experience until I was in my mid-twenties.

My mom and her two sisters used to rotate who had what holiday at who's house.  We also used to switch back and forth between celebrating with Mom's side and celebrating with Dad's side.  It was the only holiday we needed to split.  All this continued even after my parents got divorced in 1995.

Then at some point, probably when Mom was moving houses, she and her sisters stopped rotating holidays and one aunt always has Thanksgiving, one has Christmas and Mom has Easter.  In 2001 we had our last Thanksgiving with Dad's side because his step-mother (the only Grandma I'd known on that side) passed away the following April.  Grandpa went to live with my Uncle in Cincinnati, and that was the end of big Thanksgiving get-togethers on my dad's side.

Somewhere along the way, Mom, who hates turkey the rest of the year, reached the point where she was tired of never having Thanksgiving leftovers to munch on for days on end - turkey, cranberry jello, stuffing, Mom's mind-blowing pumpkin pie...  So she started cooking a Thanksgiving dinner the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving and we'd stuff ourselves again that night and nibble on leftovers for days, the way things should be.

We have a Canadian friend who we often invite down for Thanksgiving since Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving at an appropriate time for a harvest festival.  So she usually brings a bottle of wine for Mom, a bottle of wine for dinner, and some Canadian smokes for my sister.  We head to my aunt's to gorge ourselves, come back to Mom's on the verge of a food coma and moan with happy discomfort.  We also have a friend from Michigan who we met the same day as our Canadian friend.  When Canada is visiting, Michigan usually comes down to kill two visits with one road trip, but not until after Thanksgiving.

So the second dinner Mom cooks every year started being our Thanksgiving with friends.  Our local friends got to know Canada and Michigan over the years and we started inviting some of them to the dinner Mom cooks.

And thus, slowly but surely, what has come to be known in our family as Second Thanksgiving (thanks, Tolkien!) was created.  It's now truly a second Thanksgiving dinner.  We could have as many as 17 people at Mom's this year - bigger than our normal family dinner!  My sister has called Second Thanksgiving "Like Thanksgiving, but with people you like!"

Since I actually like most of our relatives, I prefer to think of Second Thanksgiving as "Thanksgiving with the family we chose."

Whatever you're up to this weekend, whether you're celebrating or avoiding the holiday like the plague, I hope you're with people you love.

What a Depressing Hallowversary

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

I'm not sure when it started winning over Christmas, but I do know I was fairly young. I have many many memories of very happy Halloweens as a kid. Hell, my mom announced to me and my sister on October 27th 1994 that she and dad were getting divorced and I still managed to have a happy Halloween that year. It would have ruined Christmas.

Halloween 1997

We grew up with ALL the animated Halloween specials. The radio stations play Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Linus and Lucy" at Christmas time but that's how It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown starts. It will always be Halloween music to my ears. I learned the origin of the word "Halloween" from the 1970s special The Halloween that Almost Wasn't. And who wouldn't want a night rollicking with a slightly crazed witch like in Witch's Night Out? Plus good luck hearing "Werewolves of London" outside of October.

Then, in my mid-twenties when I became a pagan, Halloween took on the spiritual significance that had always been the only thing missing from the day. My favorite holiday becomes a double holiday? Sign me up! Samhain is, for many pagans, our spiritual New Year. It's a good time for me to make a resolution or two considering National Novel Writing Month starts the next day.

In 2006 I was still working but my health problems were becoming a work problem. I went home early from work at the candy store that Halloween. For the first time I was really, truly depressed on my favorite holiday. I didn't even dress up for Halloween. My poor, terrified,  ex-Jehovah's Witness husband got stuck with handing out candy that evening. I sat down in front of the TV and worked on a little decorative box on which I was trying to recreate the sky from Great Pumpkin (impossible, by the way, unless you're an actual artist).

We had started watching MSNBC earlier in the year because CNN was driving me nuts and MSNBC seemed to have a little bit of sanity on it. And that night we flipped over to MSNBC during the 8pm hour. In 2006 at 8pm on MSNBC was Countdown with Keith Olbermann. 

There are several reasons why this moment of first finding Countdown is stuck in my head forever. If we tuned in very long before the Worst Persons in the World segment, I wasn't paying much attention. But it was Halloween and when Toccata in D, which had always been Dracula's Theme in my head, started I paid attention. What stuck even more was what the guy on my TV was saying. He was calling out hypocrisy, and general douchieness. No one on TV did that except Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and they were comedians! This was on an actual news channel!

The next night I wanted to see more of this show and see if the Worst Persons bit had just been for Halloween. Of course, it hadn't been. I was hooked, my husband was hooked and we have been ever since.

This year we're losing the house we bought with a predatory loan in late 2005. The house is barely decorated because I couldn't see the point of unpacking stuff that would just need repacked when I was already packing the rest of the house. I'm not dressing up, though I do have a witchy outfit planned for handing out candy. And this year I won't close out trick-or-treat by watching the election and hurricane recovery coverage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Tonight I will be lighting a number of candles for friends and for all those affected by the storm, and we will be donating to storm relief efforts.

Werewolves of DC

For the purposes of this blog entry, I'm going to refer to my husband as The Werewolf or variations thereof.  It's a nickname that's come from twitter and we kind kinda like it. :)

I had never been to DC, but The Werewolf had been several times.  Why were we there?  For a job interview.

Happy Birthday to my Mom

 Mom holding me when I was 4 months old.

My mom, Peggy, was born August 10th in the year none-of-your-damn-business.  She was the third of four children born to my grandparents, Hedwig and Benjamin.  She grew up in Akron, Ohio and went to the same schools as my dad, had many of the same friends, and yet the two of them didn't meet until they were 28 years old!  They got married after dating only six months, probably not the smartest thing either of them ever did.

Mom wanted to go to college but there was no money, so she took high school classes to help land herself a good secretary job.  She was so good that when her boss from one job was opening a new office he pretty much begged her to come work for him, which she did because he was a good boss (plus yay, a raise).  She left work when it was time to have me.

My mom is an awesome mom.  My dad was a firefighter which meant he worked a 24/48 shift - he was at work for 24 hours and off for 48 (unless he got overtime or there was a big emergency).

Mom and I were just discussing the fact that all the "adventures" happened when my dad was at the fire station.  I don't even remember the earliest instance of this.  Mom says there was a day when my sister and I were really little and Mom smelled gas in the house.  So she called the fire department (the local one, not the one my dad worked for) and took my sister and me out to the very back of our yard for safety.

The trend would continue when my sister and the two younger neighbor kids (who I and one of the older neighbor kids were supposed to be watching for a minute while Mom ran inside) decided to wander off into the wooded back yards of our neighborhood and get lost for half an hour.  Then a few years later during a thunder storm, a tulip tree right behind the house split in the wind and fell on the back of the house. Thankfully the damage was minimal but it started my dad's quest to eliminate all tulip trees in our yard.

The most memorable emergency while dad was at work, for both me and Mom, was in fifth grade when I fell and broke my ankle.  I was down the street at a schoolmate's house where a bunch of us were having a water fight.  The hose got involved and a big muddy patch developed.  I ran through it, slipped and fell on my ankle with my leg out to the side.  My friends encouraged me to walk it off like you do with most injuries as a kid.  Thankfully the pain told me not to listen to them.  My friend, Laurie, ran down to her house where she called my mom to come pick me up.  It's a good thing she did because my ankle was bro-ken. Snapped clean in half.  And my bone doctor said it was a good thing I didn't walk on it because I'd have needed surgery if I had.  But that was after Mom drove my soaking, muddy butt home, helped me change into clean dry clothes the only way I could - laying on the kitchen floor (while she also talked to my dad on the phone), and took me to the ER.

I have many more fabulous memories of Mom than ones where she's yelling (though she doesn't believe this).  Like picnicking under the big "witch tree" in our back yard, and all the summers she took us to Fell Lake pool (the best pool in the history of pools), and laughing so hard it hurt while playing board games at her house.  It was Mom who took me to my 2nd - 7th Moody Blues concerts; drove with me out to South Bend, IN to see "Weird Al" Yankovic; and was in Burlington, Ontario with me for a Scottish film festival to see actor Billy Boyd when the Iraq War started.  In short, she's fed my fandoms happily!  Probably because she usually gets sucked into them.  She was just as excited to see the Moody Blues as I was every year and she ended up a fan of Keith Olbermann even though she rarely got to see Countdown.  My calling her and recapping the show probably didn't hurt that...

Mom loves to sing and loves music.  When we were growing up it was lighter rock (which I still adore) like ABBA and Lionel Richie, though I did find out in my teens that she's always been a Bad Company fan.  Then as my sister and I got older we introduced Mom to "new" music like Pink Floyd (she loves "Comfortably Numb") Boston, Van Halen, and Fountains of Wayne.

My parents got divorced after 21 years of marriage, when I was a young teen.  No divorce is really easy but I think theirs was the easiest. Mom and Dad are still friends and as anyone who knows my family or reads my tweets knows, we all still have dinners together, celebrate holidays together, and do birthdays together.  My parents are great friends.  They just didn't work as a married couple.  Mom made a lot of sacrifices after the divorce to try to make things easier my sister and me. It worked, and I'll always be so thankful for all she gave up and wish I could repay her somehow.

I think it's obvious I could go on and on and on. I love my mom dearly and am so glad she's having her *mumble* birthday today and I hope she has at least a hundred more!!!!!!!!!

Good Bye, Donna Summer

I found out a little while ago that Donna Summer, Queen of Disco, has died at age 63.  Aside from the fact that that is just too young (younger than my parents!) in a year that's already been full of iconic deaths, this one really hits me.

I was born in 1981 and meaning no disrespect at all to MCA, while my friends were listening to The Beastie Boys, I was listening to music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  And unlike my angsty male counterparts, I wasn't listening to most older prog rock, either.  If it was uncool to listen to at the time, I was probably unintentionally into it, so of course that meant I love disco.

My parents are a bit older than most of my sister and my friends' parents.  So while friends grew up listening to more contemporary music and followed that line, my sister and I loved listening to Dad's "little records" - 45rm.  He had everything from Buddy Holly to Cyndi Lauper in that collection, though most of it was the older stuff.  And our parents have wide ranging musical tastes, so we listened to The Ventures one weekend and had a family sing along with the Peter, Paul, and Mary albums the next.  Dad wasn't the disco fan, though.  That's mom.  And since Dad was a firefighter working a 24 on/ 48 off schedule, that meant that she had evenings when she would play the albums Dad wasn't as crazy about. 

That was how I was first introduced to Donna Summer through Mom's Best of Barbara Streisand album.  I quite literally can't remember a time in my life before I knew the song "No More Tears (Enough is Enough)" - a duet between Summer and Streisand.  For one it's a great song for belting out, Mom has a great voice and so my sister grew up belting it out along with her.  Who could hold the super long notes the longest?  Eventually I caught up and surpassed Mom, though to be fair she's a smoker.  When we were getting on Mom's nerves and she would tell us, "That's it.  Enough is enough!" my sister or I would diffuse the situation by continuing to sing "enough is enough is enough is enough...!" and laugh.

Skip ahead 9 or so years to when my parents are divorced and Mom is living in a clean but depressing apartment.  There was a movie rental place not far from the apartment so often when Mom would pick us up to come visit her we'd rent a movie on the way.  One time we rented the movie "The Full Monty".
Aside from it being a really funny and really heartfelt movie, it has some great music in it and one particular scene that for Mom, Sis, and I - all we have to say is the name of the movie and we know this is the scene we're talking about!

We love that scene (and the song "Hot Stuff") so much that at my rather unconventional wedding my sister, the Maid of Honor, and our Best Person danced their way out onto the floor when they were announced at the reception.  And they did do that twirl.

Of course there are so many other great songs Donna Summer did that I love.  But these are the moments where her music was a memorable part of my life.  Am I a Donna Summer fan? Who isn't?  Even Dad likes her stuff!

Rest in Peace, Donna Summer.  The angel choir is so jealous right now.

I Don't Like Pink Anyway

It's all over the internet news right now.  Susan G. Komen foundation has pulled their funding from Planned Parenthood, bowing to right wing pressure.  What horrible things were the Komen foundation funding?  Breast cancer screenings for women who are low income or uninsured.  But some Planned Parenthood offices perform abortions, and if the "pro-lifers" can save just one unwanted or unhealthy fetus at the cost of the health of an unknown number of women, then they've done their job.  But the war on women is another whole series of blog posts. (Actually Daily Kos has a great running series titled "This Week in The War on Women" everyone should check out.)

This blog is about why I never cared much for the Komen foundation their pink ribbons to begin with.

Did you know that September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month?  How about that March is National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month?  Do you know what color ribbon signifies Pancreatic Cancer Awareness?  It's purple.

Chances are, unless someone close to you has had one of these cancers, you had no idea.  Actually September covers a plethora of cancers, but good luck finding a single awareness ad during that month.  I mean, unless you're looking for breast cancer awareness ads.  Those start in September now.  Usually in August the pink ribbon items start hitting the shelves - water bottles, jewelry, pens, t-shirt, bras, books, hats, shoes, food...  It's like breast cancer Christmas.

And just like Christmas, all this commercialism has taken every last drop of meaning out of breast cancer awareness and awareness in general.  When you see a pink ribbon item, pick it up and look carefully at the packaging.  What percentage of the profit actually goes to fund research or education?  If you're lucky it'll be 10%.  If you're looking at your average item, it won't be anything.

That's right.  The people who make pink ribbon items don't have to donate a dime to anyone or anything.  And to be fair, it's the same way with what little other cancer awareness paraphernalia you can find.  This wouldn't be a sin in my book if everyone knew that their money isn't going to find a cure.  Someone asking me what my teal ribbon pin stands for is a good thing, whether it funded something or not - I get to tell them I wear it because a friend of mine is surviving with ovarian cancer.  It starts a conversation.  I could be wrong, but I doubt a pink ribbon has started a conversation about awareness in a long time.  The world is so full of them they're almost like visual background noise.

So why am I hating on the Komen foundation about pink ribbons when their obviously political move dropping funding from Planned Parenthood is vile enough?  Because not only did they help start this pink ribbon crap, but they've turned it into a cult that has completely eclipsed cancer awareness and research funding.

I don't want people to stop taking part in walks, runs, bake sales, or any other event aimed at raising awareness or money for cancer research.  They're uplifting, especially for those who have had cancer or know someone who has.  Some of them raise real money.  Actual breast cancer research is why my aunt and my sister-in-law are still here for me to hug at family events.  But I say if you want to give money to a cause, just give it directly to the cause.  See if you can find a research hospital working on what you're interested in and find out their donations policy.  The more channels your cash has to go through to get where it's going, the more people take a bite of it.

And next time you see a pink ribbon, raise awareness in yourself.  Do a little research on a cancer, illness or issue you don't know anything about and then share that information with friends and family.  That is raising awareness.