worth working ?

Today the local news is filled with a long wrap-around line of people hoping to work at the new Jungle Jim's that is opening in September. People are so hungry for jobs that they are waiting in summer heat -- and this summer's heat is especially brutal-- for hours. Jungle Jim's is looking for 300 to 400 people, from inexperienced to specialist. They've probably had about 3000 people turn out. That is my estimate from looking at photos and news coverage.

I've been looking for work, too, but that's a more troublesome proposition. If I start work, even just five or ten hours a week, my husband's spenddown for MedicAid will go up, by whatever amount of money I make. Probably the gross amount, not net, but I'm unsure about that. We'll also lose out food assistance, but that's not a deal breaker for just the two of us. But what if we still had children to nourish so they'll grow, and pay attention in school.

And I won't be at home to care for him. He doesn't need nursing or tending, but he can't stand at a stove -- or even a microwave -- long enough to cook for himself. So would he have to go without any time that I work at or through meal time? What if something were to go wrong? What if the electric goes out and he can't use his nebulizer or his oxygen? How will anyone know to help him? How would they help him? What if a water line breaks? He doesn't have the strength or the agility to shut off the water under the sink behind the jars and brushes.

But I still look for work -- I'm pretty sure it's better than not working. Better for us both in terms of community and personal sanity. I know this isolated life makes me edgy, cross, crabby, and mean-as-hell. So, if there's a local job I hear about, I try for it. In a year and a half, I've had two interviews. For the others (about a dozen) I don't make the cut. I'm not sure if it's the beauty check I fail or the background check. Not that it matters.

But I wonder, as I fill in yet another application, if I should get beyond the interview stage, will the job eventually won be worth it. Or will it cost me more -- in more ways -- than staying at home does?

I don't know, but I would like to have the chance to find out.

Police shut down concert at Burke Park | CommunityPress.com | cincinnati.com

If you read the article, please read the comments also. That's what I really want to share.


Police shut down concert at Burke Park | CommunityPress.com | cincinnati.com

Who's Hungry Now?

I am getting sick and tired -- and mad -- over the defamatory snide comments and patches and things about food stamps. That includes, big time, the media slanders.


First, some facts.
There are more people than ever needing help,.

These are people who have been working for 25, 30, 50 years and they have never -- NEVER -- had to ask or look for any help whatsoever for daily living. They have been paying into the system for years, even decades, and taking nothing out of it.

They have been living on savings and retirement funds and are 'just now' running out of money.

Or they are just now entering the work force and the unemployment line -- returning soldiers come to mind.


The 'advertisements' for food assistance is NOT advertising. They are Public Service Announcements, meant to inform those who don't know where to begin of a place to start. If it's your son returning to his wife and children from overseas, should they go hungry out of ignorance? If it's your grandparent forced into early unrecompensed retirement, must they starve because they bought things when they were working? Your gramma should stand on the street corner selling her Ipod you gave her for Christmas last year because you don't think a person getting assistance should have 'things'?

I thought not.


These newly broke bought and paid for their stuff when they were working, just like the SuperSnobs have done. When you lose your job or get sick for a year, will you be selling your car? Your house? Your electronics that depreciate faster than an automobile?
I think not.

So quit dumping on people for having things. You don't know where or how they got them, or why. Could have been gifts, for all you know.Things could even not work properly but it's all they have.
You may see they have something. It may be something that you don't. You probably have something that they don't.


Big effing deal. That's life.

Too many people are going hungry, are letting their children go hungry, because of ignorance.
The ignorance of the self-important self-approving.

Chaos in Colorado & the Right to Know

Last week, there was a shooting in Colorado. No doubt everyone has heard of it by now, and they've heard misleading quotes, incomplete assessments, rumors, outright lies, and everywhere the young man's name all over the news. We've seen it and him and he knows he's going down in the history books, so now he's going to act or claim crazy. (As if a sane person would shoot up a theater and booby trap his own home.)

I'm not naming him. There are enough people and mechanisms doing that, and that is what this young man is eating up. He's FAMOUS! He's INFAMOUS! He's on the Front Page, he's the LEAD Story, he's on YouTube, he's shared and reshared on Facebook and other social media.

Everyone knows his name. He can sit back and wallow now. And that's exactly what he's going to do.

To most of the public, especially the politically attuned, the Horrible Happening is a new reason to scream and open debates about gun control. It is somehow the fault of the guns that they were amassed and misused in this fashion.
To me, the issue should be about the media. The Fourth Estate.
We have freedom of the press. That's a good and wonderful thing.
Until something like this happens.

The  media is helpful when there is a question of locating a perpetrator or suspect. The media is at its best when reporting events as they unfold. The media is a force to be reckoned with when someone in the public eye is trying to hide secrets. The media tells us we have a right to know, and they will inform us. They can keep us informed of all rumors and speculations as long as they say they are rumors and speculation. Reporting of the booby traps may have saved lives.

But what, exactly, do we have a right to know about? What is needful and/or entertaining and informative? Do we need to know, on a national level, speculation and gossip?
 Is it right to be shoving their microphones into the faces of families waiting for someone to come outside from the scene of a massacre? Is it our right to know when they finally accept the unbelievable unacceptable fact that their loved one is not coming away from the scene?
Is it our right to know what a mother thinks when her son has admitted to this type of horror? Has she no right to the privacy of thought?
Do we have a right to know about every clipped toenail or late bedwetting incident ever in the guilty person's history?
Do we have the right to decide -- believe -- he's guilty before there is any sort of due process?
Does the media have the right to claim our right to know gives them the right to lionize punks and publicity hogs?

There are no easy answers, which is why the problems have been unresolved for so many years. There is a right to know, but who can or should decide what anyone else has the right to know?  Is there, or should there be, a time that it's right to know.

Difficult questions that need to be looked at and discussed and worked on as intently as gun control or defining insanity. It's no wonder that policing authorities try to conceal identities and evidence from the press. Irresponsible reporting compromises deaf, dumb, and blind justice.

And then, there  are young men like this "joker" who do the deed, then, when the media is fully present, walks up to the police and says "Yeah, I did it," then spends the next three days -- or three months, three years, three decades -- smirking and preening and posing for the cameras.


He has the right to know how important he is

Innovative Tree Treatments Save U.S. Economy Over $252 in 2011

Innovative Tree Treatments Save U.S. Economy Over $252 in 2011

Summer Family Fun.

Today, my sisters are going to a family reunion. It will be the first Schmidt family reunion since my dad died. (I think. I could be wrong about that.) It will be odd  to have his family there and he is gone, but life is a winnowing out process, and the sad truth is he wasn't the first to go.

We have lovely weather for the event today. The heat has backed off, the storms that reduced it to cowardice have moved on to vanquish elsewhere. The sun is shining, skies are blue with puffy white clouds. There will be trees and a lake and restrooms and paths and picnic tables and a playground.

A perfect day for a family to reconnect, however briefly.

It grieves me that I won't be there. I love some of my father's sisters, even though I haven't been around them for years. I love them although I know little of their lives and they know less of mine.

Saturday we will be having another family party. This one I'll be able to attend. This one I will attend. Good lord willing and the creek don't rise -- an apt qualification in this case, since the party is being held near Red Oak Creek in Ripley.

I'll see people there that I know, know of, and maybe a couple that I don't know. New victims to observe, new cadences to hear. All within the safety of a family network, and of course an easy exit in case of overwhelming anxiety.

First week of August is busy with birthdays in this family -- thank goodness they aren't all celebrated individually with parties. A person would be constantly on the run (although birthday parties would be more pleasant running than doctor's visits, hospital tests and trying to get prescriptions filled.)

There are fairs, too, and church festivals. It's my firm belief that the only reason it rained three days this week is because Adams County Fair was in progress. It will rain three days the last week of September, when Brown County Fair is in progress. That's just how it works in this part of the country.

Summer is a good time to catch up with everyone. The hard part is catching up with yourself and your own.
Having family is important, having fun is important too.

Having you is important to me.

Have fun and take care. 

At Long Last, RAIN!

Today, stars danced in the streets and diamonds lined up on the back of my glider and dropped pure crystal beads into the dry grass.
In other words, it rained. Lovely rain.

Not a drought buster, to be sure. Not even good rain in places near to me. When the flash floods warnings go up before the storm warnings come down, you know it isn't a good rain.

But it's still a wet rain, even if the relief is short. It's nice thick dark clouds that keep the sunlight from burning down and baking the ground, from reflecting and refracting and getting hotter from every surface it's bounced off.

When I was little, I used to drape myself over the back of the couch, stare out the window, and watch the raindrops hitting the road. They'd hit and bounce and splatter. I thought it looked like stars dancing in the street.

It still looks like stars dancing in the street.

And why wouldn't the stars dance when some of us are finally getting some rain and some relief? Aren't the heavens supposed to rejoice with us, and isn't that where the stars come from?

Don't they ride the raindrops down, to dance together on the blacktop?

Dark Shadows. (No, not mine.)

Spent the weekend browsing the old show. YouTube has quite a bit, if you have the patience to weed out the Johnny Depp- Tim Burton overwhelming publicity. YouTube has quite a few clips from the old show, including one with the very beginning. Fan club events and interviews, from then and a few from now.

I saw a few clips that might have been from the short run evening version with Ben Cross as Barnabas. I didn't look at those.

What I did not see anything of, is the two movies they made from the show: Dark Shadows and House of Dark Shadows. Not surprising. The movies were pretty bad. By the time the movies were made, the show had lost focus and was campy. Blood and guts and 'boos' and very little story. An adventure into variations of time travel and ghosts and vampires and werewolfs and anything else 'not normal'.  It created a lifelong interest in these things for me, led me to some good reading that led to better research that led to more reading that leads to more research.

Interesting the bizarre storylines were, and even educational. Entertaining they often were not.

Over time, everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that Dark Shadows didn't start out as a vampire-and-werewolf chiller and thriller.

It started out as a Gothic Romance.

"My name is Victoria Winters.My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me.and link my past to my future."

Victoria Winters, you see, is an orphan. She has been pulled out of her orphanage to be a governess in a big old house by the sea. The residents of the house consist of an angry young boy, an angsty teenaged girl (and could anyone be more angsty than a teen in the late 60s?), the boy's drunken irresponsible father and the girl's mother who hasn't left the house for nearly twenty years.

Pure Gothic as far as genre goes. Nowadays cliched, but back then the genre was undergoing a revival. (Maybe as an outlet for all that built-up angst?)

It took Barnabas almost a year to appear. The first few months were dedicated to straight out mysterious events that had logical explanations. Then the supernatural began creeping in -- ghosts and premonitions and dreams.

Oh my lord, the Dream! I don't remember the details of the dream, but the storyline was that each person would have the dream, but each person added something to it. And when the next person had the dream, the last person who'd had it died. It was one of the most intricate and well developed plot arcs I have ever watched grow daily. Just seeing bits of it, and sometimes the actors, can give me thrill-chills because it was such a creepy story. (It was also a good way to kill off a bunch of characters that no longer fit, which as an author, I appreciate today and didn't realize then.)

The Barnabas-Josette- Jeremiah- Angelique story was well done as well. The ghost stepping out of her picture and opening her music box and waltzing through the big empty room. WOW! This story would be reworked over and over again throughout the show, but the first incarnation was damned good storytelling. So were a few of the others as Barnabas keeps going back to try and change the past, and Angelique or/and her cohorts follow to prevent him from doing so.

This is pretty much where the evening television remake started, and they didn't do a bad job with it. I would have continued watching. But too many people turned it off or turned away from it when it wasn't played for thrills or laughs. A common complaint was that there was too much sex.

Really? It was a soap opera. Or a Gothic Romance. Romance IS usually about sex, is it not? And exactly why was Angelique so obsessed with Barnabas? If it had just been for his money or his standing, his brother would have fit the bill just as well. No, she wanted Barnabas, and it wasn't so she'd have someone to talk to during meals.

So much good drama in there. Good plotlines, good story arcs.

It's a shame that it is being remembered as camp and memorialized for new generations as a comedy. although I don't mind the laughs. From what I've seen, they are mostly clever, if campy, laughs.

But I sure do wish they'd revive the "it was a dark and stormy night" genre of serials. The endings are so much more satisfactory than the endings to the current reality spooky shows.

Badly made by today's standards (and even their own) but entertaining and mysterious and fun.
I guess that's what most people remember -- the fun. 

Little Girl Gone (Home)

Last night was difficult for me. I took my granddaughter to the library with me, then took her back home to her mommy.

This is not the usual order of things.  Usually, if I pick her up at her house to go to the library, I take her home with me. It's not anything we talk about, it's just how it works. It will only work that way for another year, at best. Next August she will turn five and have to start school.

"I want to go home with you," she said. She said it when she first got in the car. She said it when she got back in the car after her sojourn at the library. She said it when I pulled up in front of her house.

I hugged her and kissed her and hugged her again and just kept saying "Not this time. Not today."


When I got home the first thing my husband did was look for her. Then he asked why she wasn't there. Then he proceeded, throughout the evening, to tell me how much he had been looking forward to her.

I feel like I let them both down, badly. I hate to do that. Like I said, too soon I won't be able to bring her along as often. (Although I do hope we will someday move closer so it won't be as much a problem.)

Too soon, I'm afraid, her pappaw won't be able to enjoy her company.

I already know it will be too soon that he probably won't be able to be there foir her.

Have I cheated them both out of a memory-making moment?

Well, every moment should be made for memory, although we'd all have our heads so stuffed full of the past that we'd have no room for thoughts of the future, if we all lived that way.

Maybe, just maybe, the next visit will be more cherished because of the visit that wasn't.

Or perhaps we'll sneak off from our ordinary life and pay a surprise visit to her.

TV judges and Social Security

I think they all need a crash course on Social Security laws. Of course, I also think anyone with a Social Security payout problem needs to take their case to Social Security, but there is probably a backlog, for one thing. For another, one wouldn't get to be on TV (or get paid for suing) if they handled their problems that way. I'm not real sure what the appeal is in displaying one's ignorance and stupidity (two different things) all over the world, but it seems important to many people.

And, yes, I will watch you air your dirty laundry. It helps me know how to keep mine unexposed. Judge shows are pretty good for quick character studies, and sometimes name finding.

The judges have different personalities and different agendas for their shows. The People's Court bends over backwards, usually, to apply the law of the state where the litigants live. That's a lot of work, and the result makes for educational entertainment most of the time. Judge Judy doesn't really seem to care what the law may be. Her 'courtroom' is her kingdom, and she makes all the rules -- even if they aren't the law of Anywhere Else. The other programs fall somewhere in between.

Recently there have been quite a few cases dealing with Social Security (and its affiliate programs) issues. Usually someone squabbling over who should get payee money for children, but not always.

One case was a man whose girlfriend 'stole' his payments while he was incarcerated. She used his money to maintain his apartment, buy his bills and other horrible misspending.

Prisoners are not allowed to receive Social Security payments, according to the documents my husband received. When you 'become incarcerated' your benefits are supposed to be suspended, until such time as you are no longer incarcerated. No exceptions, although there is an appeal process of some sort.

So why is the judge not educating people that this is an illegal act, if s/he must hear the case on TV?

Other cases involve payees of SS or SSI for the disabled . Now, any monies accumulated before payment is made should go to whoever is taking care of the child or person. Roof over the head, food in the mouth, entertainment, education, clothes on the back.
It is NOT for whoever takes custody later.
It is NOT to be saved up for college. In many cases, especially with SSI, if there is any 'extra' income, there will be no payments. The payments are to help support the recipient with basic payments.

Social Security can, and does, ask for an accounting. Every year there's a paper to fill out. Every now and then, the payee for the recipient has to haul off a year's worth of receipts and canceled checks and bank statements to the local office and show that the money has been used to pay the person's fair share of expenses. (In a four person family, each person can be responsible for no more than one-fourth of regular living expenses. Specific expenses for the individual for personal needs and medical expenses are handled differently.)

Whoever paid for these things during the waiting time is who should get this money. Period. The end. That, too, is spelled out in letters and forms the government sends out when there is a new judgement on receiving benefits. It doesn't belong to the recipient, unless there is leftover. It doesn't belong to the next person to take over -- except for that leftover.

Why do I know this, and so-called experts -- even ones who do detailed research -- don't?

Who educates the educators?

Hi now, Kai-lan, and Exploring with Dora

It's been a long time since I paid much attention to children's programming. Now that my granddaughter is watching it with attention, I'm paying more attention, too. (Because she's never watched anything in my care that I haven't also watched.)

Nick Jr is her channel. Not too much wrong with that, as this child also has a healthy interest in going outside and reading, writing, and 'darwing'. A lot of kids don't, but that's another story.

 Most of the shows are okay. A (very) few are brilliant. Some of it I don't get, but since I'm not its target audience, I'm not too worried about that. Should probably be more worried if I 'got' all of it.

Nick Jr tells parents (or whomever) what the show teaches. Interesting, but not as interesting as what the children -- or at least this child -- learns from it.

Dora the Explorer is supposed to teach all kinds of stuff: counting and Spanish and logic and colors and following instructions. Never mind the Spanish. What Dora teaches, apparently, is that there are different words for the same things. At 18 months, my little one watched Dora, and when Dora had to go across the river and through the forest, Hailey told her she had to boat the water and go in the trees. All English, but completely different words.

This week, Hailey applied the lessons from Ni Hao, Kai-lan, a show that also teaches bits of Chinese. When Mammaw got mad, she observed that Mammaw was mad, thought about what Mammaw was mad about, and decided Mammaw needed to CALM DOWN.

It was a little much, though, when she instructed me to sway back and forth, back and forth in order to do so.

The question I have is how will this work once she goes to school (months away if she can do preschool; only a year away for kindergarten) That swaying back and forth thing sounds like an invitation to mockery to me. Maybe not, if the children are all of an age and all watch the same programming -- or if they are programmed by teachers to do this. (Can't you just see a roomful of four-year-olds swaying back and forth, back and forth every time one of them has a tantrum. When would any teaching get done?)

But it troubles me, and I don't know how to address the problems. On the one hand, observation and application are good things. It's really great that a preschooler can understand you can be mad without it being their fault, or that a river is made of water and a forest is trees. On the other hand, the coping strategies should be private and somewhat internal, or they are invitations to misunderstanding and mockery.

The underlying message is the same as it has always been. The shows are a tool. The real learning comes from the family and from daily living. Know what your children are watching and let them talk to you about it. They are learning and they want you to tell them what's right for your family. And even that it's okay if it's different for others.
'
It's all good, as long as we're ALL involved.

To the Motorcyclist

To the motorcyclist on Tri-County today: You were a joy to drive behind. You maintained a steady speed,  with no swerves and no sudden stops. You stayed in your lane. Not only did you stay in your lane, you stayed straightly in your lane, no riding from side to center and back again.

I have seen motorcyclists do all these 'fun' things. I understand the urge, but when I am the following driver, it worries me. When I am the approaching driver, it scares me.

There's been a lot of news stories about motorcycle accidents, and how to avoid them. There are Facebook and e-mail pleas to watch out for the motorcycles. It's good for drivers to be aware, but the cyclists themselves often take risks that don't have road safety in mind. Weaving from edge to centerline, making sudden turns or stops, speeding up and slowing down. Part of the freedom of riding, but unsettling to other drivers.

So you were a joy to follow today, from Mt. Orab to Sardinia, to Macon, where we parted ways.

And, after having followed you, when the road opened before you, and you met the challenge, your shirt billowed like a sail -- ah, then, I wished that I were you.