Many years ago, John decided that he and I should buy a Bed & Breakfast somewhere in picturesque New England and leave the Washington DC area behind us.
“No,” I said immediately, the first time he procured an ad for one.
My husband didn’t understand why I wasn’t jumping at the chance.
“Why not? It’s perfect for us!”
“What would your role be at “our” B&B?”
“Well, I’d …”
I stared him down, believe me. Because you see, John doesn’t cook. He doesn’t clean. And he’s an introvert. If you are an old friend or family, John will welcome you graciously. Otherwise, he will say hello, and quickly make his way to another room and go back to his book.
And his lack of handy-man skills is legendary.
I would have to do the cooking, the cleaning, the welcoming, the chatting everybody up. I’d have to work the toilet plunger.
“No,” I repeated. “I do not want to run a B&B.”
But YOU might want to. YOU — You know — the person reading this, scratching his/her/its head.
This morning I learned about a wonderful opportunity. The owner of the Deerfield Valley Inn is retiring, and holding a contest for her replacement B&B-er. Check out the link on the Huffington Post. And do listen to the video in that link and hear all the particulars.
The Deerfield Valley Inn
For $150 and the winning essay, the Deerfield Valley Inn can be yours. The essay? Here’s your prompt; in 250 words or less tell the current owner your story:
“This is my dream: To own and operate a Vermont country inn.”
I’m having trouble getting the link about the contest to load, so here is a Hotels.com video of the Deerfield Inn so you can see it.
Sometimes, I feel my gag reflex going into hyper-drive.
And sometimes, I just need to get out of the way and let some folks speak for themselves.
So I’m gonna do just that tonight.
Here is GOP Presidential Candidate neurosurgeon Ben Carson, MD
And since I know you, and I KNOW you didn’t click on that video, I will have to step back up to the plate and tell you that the good doctor explained that we Democrats are all wrong.
It’s true, apparently.
Dr. Carson let all of us know that the GOP, well, they aren’t so bad. Women should like them, even.
So says the No. 2 (in some polls) Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. It’s true. He said on Thursday that Democrats were wrong to allege Republicans were waging a “war on women.”
“They tell you that there’s a war on women,” he said. “There is no war on women.There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”
This guy should be headlining in the Poconos. What an eff’in commedian.
You probably can’t tell from my blog posts, but I love words. I love the sound of them, the feel of them in my mouth and at my fingertips. How changing just one word can transform a sentence from shit to shinola.
So I love it when somebody proves me right-ish. Or like I’m in the right pew.
For decades one term has bothered me. “Pro-Choice.”
Abortion ain’t a “whole wheat or rye” sort of “choice.”
So I’ve had my thinking cap on for all that time, trying to think of a better way to say it. What else could it be called? What word can express the magnitude of that decision for any woman.
And am I the person to come up with it anyway? You see, I never had an abortion. I never was able to get pregnant. So perhaps it isn’t my role.
But I do know women who’ve had abortions. I’ve sat with them, talked with them, consoled them. They have been friends and near-strangers who somehow tell me their deepest trouble. They are not women who are making a “choice.” Rather they are women slicing a piece of their own heart out, most often because they have no“choice.”
That includes two women who were forced to have late-term terminations. You know, the kind that is being outlawed in state after state, mostly by men, with no exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother. No basis in the real world of what women face.
These two women had nearly identical stories. Their prenatal testing showed that their fetuses had trisomy 18 (From WebMD):
A “trisomy” means that the baby has an extra chromosome in some or all of the body’s cells. In the case of trisomy 18, the baby has three copies of chromosome 18. This causes many of the baby’s organs to develop in an abnormal way.
There are three types of trisomy 18:
Full trisomy 18. The extra chromosome is in every cell in the baby’s body. This is by far the most common type of trisomy 18.
Partial trisomy 18.The child has only part of an extra chromosome 18. That extra part may be attached to another chromosome in the egg or sperm (called a translocation). This type of trisomy 18 is very rare.
Mosaic trisomy 18. The extra chromosome 18 is only in some of the baby’s cells. This form of trisomy 18 is also rare.
***
What Is the Outlook for Babies With Trisomy 18?
Because trisomy 18 causes such serious physical defects, many babies with the condition don’t survive to birth. About half of babies who are carried full-term are stillborn. Boys with trisomy 18 are more likely to be stillborn than girls.
Of those babies who do survive, less than 10% live to reach their first birthday. Children who do live past that milestone often have severe health problems that require a large amount of care. Only a very small number of people with this condition live into their 20s or 30s.
Both women were happily married. They and their husbands wanted their babies; they were devastated by the news. These women had to choose when, not if the baby they wanted so much would die. One of them said that because their fetus had a condition called Intra-uterine growth restriction, the baby would essentially starve to death inside of her. And then she’d go through labor.
See what I mean about “choice”? It’s way more like being between a rock and a hard place. Or just being in a hard place.
In all my years, and with the numerous women I’ve known who’ve terminated a pregnancy, there was only one who did it casually. She’s a staunch Republican.
So I was delighted when I read about Sister Joan Chittister recently. Because she’s the one who made me realize it’s not us, it’s them.
We’re not necessarily the ones with the wrong term. They are. Because they are DECIDEDLY NOT PRO-LIFE:
I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
Thanks Google.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
Periodically, I take some heat here at FiftyFourAndAHalf for being one sided in my political commentary. For not saying nice things about the GOP. There is some validity to those charges. My bad.
But, frankly, there are loads of folks who write up the other side. I have said that if the Republican Party hadn’t taken Ronald Reagan’s “The Government IS the Problem” quite so much to heart, well, things might be different. I might be different.
But as things turned out, you see, well, I’m a liberal. An unapologetic liberal.
When I look at today’s GOP (which is very different from the pre-Reagan GOP) I am astonished that there are folks who go along with the things these folks are advocating. They’re cra-cray!
Only today, Governor and GOP Presidential hopeful Scott Walker announced that he might just have to bomb Iran his first day in office. You know, before he knows were the bathrooms are in the White House. The minute he gets near the button, well, he might just push it.
Some newly elected prezes watch a parade and dance at the Inaugural balls. But not Scott! Nope! Nope, he will inaugurate his own balls by starting a fucking war.
Where the hell do you think I got this one?
Even ¿Jeb!, the brother of the last GOP guy to bring us a stupid war, thought that Scotty was going a wee bit too far:
One thing that I won’t do is just say, as a candidate, ‘I’m going to tear up the agreement on the first day.’ That’s great, that sounds great but maybe you ought to check in with your allies first, maybe you ought to appoint a secretary of state, maybe secretary of defense, you might want to have your team in place, before you take an act like that.
Scotty, however, disagreed:
At a press conference after his appearance at the Family Leader Summit here Saturday, Walker was asked if he thinks Bush is wrong. “He may have his opinion. I believe that a president shouldn’t wait to act until they put a cabinet together or an extended period of time,” Walker said.
“I believe they should be prepared to act on the very first day they take office. It’s very possible – God forbid, but it’s very possible – that the next president could be called to take aggressive actions, including military action, on the first day in office. And I don’t want a president who is not prepared to act on day one.
This is not a man who thinks he might have to react to a 9/11-like attack. This is a man with no military experience except the fucking Boy Scouts, And he is planning to go to war on January 20, 2017.
Does this make you feel safe? Secure? Like your children and your children’s children will be hunky dory?
Personally, it gives me a feeling of déjà vu:
Photo Credit; My memory and Google Image’s
Contrast that with the Democrats. They just negotiated an historic agreement to avoid war. To see what we can do to not destroy the planet. Well done, Blue Team!
Wendy Sherman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who was involved in the negotiations, described what happened after the deal was concluded. After the cameras and the reporters were gone.
[E]ach of the foreign ministers of the P5+1 group – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – and Iran “made a statement about what this meant to them.”
“All of the remarks, by all of the ministers, including [Iranian Foreign] Minister [Javad] Zarif, were very moving, because it was private, and it was about what this deal meant to them.”
But the last spot was reserved for John Kerry.*
“When I was 22, I went to war” – [Kerry said] before choking up.
“He couldn’t get the words out,” [Sherman] recalled. “And everybody was completely spellbound.”
Kerry composed himself and continued, “I went to war and it became clear to me that I never wanted to go to war again.”
Do you have kids? Grand kids? Siblings who might be called upon to fight? Which side should you be supporting?
So I am unapologetic about supporting the folks who believe that before going to war, they should work for peace.
I had the poster. I had the necklace. Google has the image.
You know, I’m getting pretty cynical. Folks all across the world are going all Ayn Rand, feeling like folks shouldn’t work together to solve problems. That every body should fend for themselves. Or, as my Dad used to say when folks just didn’t give a damn about each other (or didn’t save him the last cookie): “I’ve got mine, how are you?”
And really, I’m getting kind of discouraged. Civilization was built because humans figured out that working together gets more done than working individually. And of course, the “cradle of Civilization” is Greece.
I am not an economist. I am not a European. Hell, I don’t really know what’s going on over there, what led to the economic collapse that Greece is experiencing. I don’t know why the Germans and the French are standing idly by watching it happen with their hands on their hips. But even I’m smart enough to know that the impact of a collapse of Greece, in both actual and symbolic terms, is not a good idea.
But I just read the coolest article. Thom Feeney, 29, of London, is a shoe salesman. And he has set up a GoFundMe site to collect donations to enable Greece to pay its loans. He said:
All this dithering over Greece is getting boring. European ministers flexing their muscles and posturing over whether they can help the Greek people or not. Why don’t we the people just sort it instead?”
He has raised more than €500,000 in two days. The Greeks need €1.6 billion.
It’s amazing what one person can do sometimes. (I believe this photo is from Al Jazeera, which reported this story)
Crowdfunding is not the solution to Greece’s problems. In fact, I don’t think that crowdfunding is the solution to big country-wide or international problems.
But even I, with my belief in strong government, think this is pretty damn cool.
And maybe, just maybe, it is what we need to do more often.
FiftyFourandAHalf 