Happy day after Halloween, otherwise known as November 1.
Have a cup of Joe and sit a spell as we wonder through the headlines from the mornings email updates. For those of you wondering where I get the time for these morning musings, let me say a few things about how my morning goes…Teenage daughter, school, and bathroom, enough said? That combination usually means I have about an hour in the morning for putting together these wanders through my slowly awakening brain cells as the coffee meanders into the veins.
After glancing at the mornings comments from the “Decider” I decided to forbear measuring for new drapes for another week. I wouldn’t want to give anyone new ammunition to chunk at the “loyal opposition party”. Not that anyone in this administration has really needed actual evidence to back up their statements about much of anything.
I also see the story from yesterday is still trying to float up into the national awareness. Another foodborne disease outbreak, and it seems that even though the E. coli outbreak has been contained we still don’t have a clue as to where it came from according to the following news story…
CDC Investigating Salmonella Outbreak – washingtonpost.com:
“Illness linked to produce is a growing concern among food safety experts as Americans consume more fresh fruits and vegetables, on the recommendation of the federal government. Consumers are now more likely to get sick from a produce-related outbreak than from any other food source, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the CSPI.Every year, about 76 million people contract foodborne illnesses in the United States. About 325,000 of those cases require hospitalization, and 5,000 people die.”
Folks, did you catch the significance of that figure? Over a quarter of the population each year is made ill from the food they eat. It all goes back to our corporate industrial food supply. With more and more of the food supply passing through fewer and fewer processing locations we are asking for disaster. To me this is a Homeland Security issue the government just wants to keep quite. I guarantee you I am just as bad as most of America when it comes to buying locally grown produce. I couldn’t even tell you how much of the produce sold at my local farm stand is local.
I just saw this from Garrison…
Early retirement | Salon.com:
“Nov. 1, 2006 | It took me an hour to turn the clocks back an hour, coordinating all the watches and digital alarm clocks and oven clock and kitchen clock and car clocks to Central Standard Time, during which a man starts to question the entire concept of promptitude, meetings, appointments, etc., which leads to thoughts of retirement, the End of the Trail, Old Paint, the part of your life when it doesn’t matter so much if it’s 9:30 or 10:05, or even if its Tuesday or Saturday, when you drift along as most mammals do, eating when hungry, sleeping when sleepy, and meeting whoever you meet whenever you meet them.”
Lord I know that feeling these days, you drag yourself in to do what you have always done…But, you are beginning to here the words from the song run through your head…”Is that all there is?”. This piece of Garrison’s leads to ruminations on retirement. This of course must lead to thoughts of the coming retirement of the “Leader of the Once (Sometime?) Free World”. His closing is classic:
“Washington is a city where a bill to relax air-pollution standards would be called the Clean Air Act and a bill to protect government officials from war-crimes prosecution would be called the Military Commissions Act, and so a man’s statement that he knows who he is and who his friends are needs to be taken as meaning the opposite, a cry for help. You come to office as a uniter and you wind up doing the opposite. You stand for American values and you wind up defending torture and the waste of resources. Knowing who you are is a minimal adult requirement, and you don’t get there by being an object of attention. Retirement is recommended. The sooner the better.”
Time to run on down the road…maybe later…