Tag Holiday

Dare to Dream

Michael 8 Comments

Today is a special day and the people converging on Washington have nothing to do with it. But the people who converged on Washington on August 28, 1963, all 250,000of them, knew someday today would be special. Today, and every Third Monday of January, is officially the “Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.” in that quirky way that Congress has of celebrating birthdays not on the birthday of the honoree but on the convenient day to wrestle out a three-day weekend for government workers. Rev. King’s actual birthday is January 15. No matter, at least a true American hero will get honored sometime today, maybe even in Washington

I think that’s enough said about today.

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(Photo from Wikipedia)

Speaking of dreams, did you ever dream about how you connect with others? (Yes, I know that is stretching the bounds of segue-ism. Bear with me.) (Please.) We dream of a world where we all treat each other like members of the same club, players on the same team, kids from the same family. (I told you it was a stretch.) What kind of club would the Human Club look like. We talk about that and what the dues to belong might cost in this week’s Uplift! Check it out. While you’re there, consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

Memorial Day 2021

Michael Leave a comment
SoldiersCross

We set aside today to honor the lives of the members of our armed forces who lost their lives to let us live a life of freedom. Freedom of the innocence of what they had to give up so we can live without giving up.

Please spend the literally literal few seconds it takes to say a prayer for their eternal salvation and a toast to their forever memory.

Strength to Love

Michael 5 Comments
 
Boy I had a time coming up with today’s post. I started thinking I should do something lighthearted. It’s been a while since I’ve been particularly light about anything and the world certainly could use a break from its self-seriousness. Then I thought I should do something for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the second of many reasons each year for banks and post offices to close while the rest of the country celebrates by buying new washer/dryer combinations or king size mattresses for the price of a queen. Then there’s the whole inauguration protest combination thing going on this week. Personally I think Twitter was about 1400 days late in pulling that particular plug and it goes to show people will believe anything they read online. And how can we let a week go by without paying homage to the real ruler of the world, Orthocoronavirinae betacoronavirus-2. In the end I decided to do what I do best and just ramble.
 
Let’s start with the good reverend doctor. Although I have not yet today opened a paper, wood based or electronic, I’m certain somebody somewhere has managed include the word “dream” in a headline, photo caption, or lede. Dr. King said more than that one phrase we associate with him almost to the exclusion of all others. I particularly like “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy” from Strength to Love, a collection of his sermons published in 1963.
 
The whole idea of of needing strength to love is so appropriate for today. Nearly 50 years after it appeared in print we are still struggling with how we mark the measure of mankind and the concept of loving our neighbors (no exceptions). We are clearly in a time of challenge and controversy and if you want to rise above the pack of animals – or crazy people dressed in animal skins – that man has become, you must accept the challenge to rise above the controversy, set it aside, and move on.
 
So I’ll offer a challenge that I know many if you don’t even need to hear. Let’s get through this week without saying anything negative about somebody who you don’t agree with or who doesn’t agree with you, whenever discussing anything stick to the facts rather than “alternate facts” and think three times before committing anything to writing – particularly electronic writing, smile at a stranger even knowing they can’t see it under your mask, and love your neighbor.
 
Can you do that? Do you have the strength to love?
 
 
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Corn Sweet Corn

Michael 8 Comments
Darn that pumpkin spice craze. The real flavor darling of the season rightfully should be Candy Corn. You read that right – Candy Corn. Capitalized Candy Corn because it is something special.
 
Candy Corn is not only the perfect candy dish filler but it is also a perfect food and a superfood all in one. It’s a perfect food in that it contains the four basic food groups – water, sugar, corn syrup, and artificial colors and flavors. It’s a superfood because it is fat free, low calorie (compared to a bag of chocolate bars), and tastes better that kale. And Candy Corn has it’s own day that isn’t even Halloween orThanksgiving. Take that, kale!
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Candy Corn has been around for a long time, and contrary to some thinking, it isn’t the same corn every year you see in the stores. You would be confusing Candy Corn with fruit cake. Candy Corn first hit the confectioners’ shelves in the 1880s. It wasn’t until after World War II that it become really popular but like all things genius, Candy Corn took a while a catch on.
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As far as candy goes, Candy Corn is a healthy snack. Umm, healthier snack. Each serving, officially 15 pieces or one generous handful, is fat and cholesterol free, low sodium, and contains 22 grams of sugar and only 110 calories. Unlike real corn it is also fiber free so they’ll be no uncomfortable bloating if you should go wild and eat an entire bag in one sitting. Not unheard of, let me tell you!
 
Thirty-five millions pounds of Candy Corn are made each year. That’s nine billion (9,000,000,000) kernels. Give or take a few. Candy Corn sales will bring in $340 million this year! That’s not chicken feed, which incidentally was Candy Corn’s original name. Those numbers are just the commercial production. Candy Corn is easy to make at home with recipes abounding on the internet even from the likes of celebrity chef Alton Brown, no fancy molds required. 
 
You still have a couple days to get ready for the biggest fall holiday, October 30, National Candy Corn Day! Whether you make your own or buy a bag, celebrate responsibly this year with Candy Corn!
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The Fruits of Our Labor

Michael 2 Comments

Hello! I would say “Happy Labor Day” but to those who know the origins of the day that would be just as offensive as wishing those who understand the meaning of that spring holiday a “Happy Memorial Day.”

I wonder if even the organizers of big labor know why we have today. Last month a new group voted to be represented by a labor union in their quest for more equitable treatment in the workplace. Those were the local librarians. They are now represented by, and pay their dues to, the same union protecting the interests of that other maligned worker, the part time graduate assistant. No, I’m not making this up.

According to the U. S. Department of Labor, “Labor Day is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” Noble sounding. Actually Labor Day is a commemoration of when 10,000 workers took unpaid time off to march from City Hall to Union Square in New York on September 5, 1882. They weren’t looking for lower deductibles for their health insurance or a guarantee 5% raise every year without a corresponding 5% increase in productivity. They were protesting 12 hour workdays over 7 day work weeks with preteen co-workers. They were protesting violence in the workplace ending in deaths of employees and employers over working conditions that would have resulted in their deaths anyway. They were protesting not having a life while at the same time not making a living. They were truly under appreciated, maligned, and frankly endangered.

Please take a moment today to pray for those killed in the 1800s so 59% of the American workforce can have today off with pay. Just don’t try to return a book to the library.

(In case you’re wondering, the union representing graduate assistants and librarians – the United Steel Workers. I guess even union officers have to find creative ways to continue living the life to which they’ve become accustomed.)

 

Happy Independence Day

Michael Leave a comment

Happy Fourth of July. Interestingly nobody seems to call it Independence Day any longer. That’s because we are mostly a confused group of people. That’s we from the USA. you other we people (as opposed to wee people which would probably have somebody somewhere in the Good Ole U. S. of A. organizing a protest) might or might not but that’s not for me to question because even if you have your own freedom of speech, well that’s yours, not mine.

Anyway, what ever happened to Independence Day? I even conducted my own experiment and earlier this week asked 4 people “Do you have any plans for Independence Day?” I got 2 “What? Oh, do you mean the Fourth of July?” one “Wasn’t that last  month?” and one “What I do every weekend,” which was actually confusing since the holiday is not on a weekend day making me wonder if the respondent did not know what Independence Day is, did not know when Independence Day is, or is planning on a four day weekend because by gosh by golly if the holiday is on a Thursday then it is truly and justly our God given American right to make it a four f-ing day holiday! I will be the first to admit that is a small sample size (unless you already brought that up to yourself while you were reading those preceding sentences so then I’ll be the second to admit it) but it’s clear (to me at least) that 50% of the country is confused (see, I told you), 25% is clueless, and 25% is out for him or herself at all costs.

A quick check of the local paper confirms this. In the last couple weeks there have been 2 separate instances of people pressuring a charitable organization from presenting the fundraiser “Drag Queen Bingo” and a non profit, privately held library from holding a “Drag Queen Story Hour,” reading program in the children’s section. These are the confused people. They are confused because the same people who had been quoted in the articles as saying (I’m paraphrasing here) we can’t expose our children to such aberrations were expressing love and acceptance of all people at the opening of the “Pride Parade” four weeks earlier. Agree or disagree. It confuses people when you do both.

A suburban community Fourth of July parade is being protested by a group organized by a local man to “shed light on the District Attorney’s failure to represent certain victims of violent crimes.” The organizer of the protest has just been released from prison where he served a 4-10 year sentence for aggravated assault, a violent crime. I would say he and his followers are on the clueless end of the “what’s wrong with this picture” spectrum.

For this year’s example of one out for one’s self we must turn to the national news. I was unaware that the colonial flag was symbolic of slavery and racism but then I wasn’t around 243 years ago so I can’t say for sure what they were thinking when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. Oh wait, nobody alive today was there either, not even a badly coiffed ex-football player.

Happy Birthday America. I’d suggest a stiff drink with the cake and fireworks.

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It’s Beginning To…

Michael 4 Comments

I was out shopping yesterday. Shopping is probably overstating it. I went out to pick up a prescription so it wasn’t like I was planning a spree complete with breakfast out, a break somewhere around mid-day, and tea and scones before wrapping things up and heading home with my packages. My plan was to pour the rest of the morning coffee into a travel mug, shoot down the road to the pharmacy while sucking down the leftover sludge, run past the drive up window to retrieve aforementioned prescription, then head for home where fresh, follow up coffee should be ready for the next cup.

That was the plan. And it would have worked if there hadn’t been a 3 car line in the drive through. Blame it on the rain. So I pulled into one of the every spot open in the lot spots, reinforced myself with an extra glug of caffeinated dregs, and headed inside.

I could have still stayed close to my original plan and been home before the car heater had a chance to actually heat except for the aisle that I had to walk through to get to the prescription counter. The seasonal merchandise. And the season of the hour is …… Christmas.

I can’t help it but I am a Christmas Junk Junky. If it sparkles, I will stare at it. If it blinks and flashes, my eyes will follow it. And if it has a “Try Me!” button, I’ll try it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a multicolor LED light set, a winter scene in motion snow globe, or a plush flamingo singing “Santa Baby.”

SantaBabyI must have bought the last one of those 6 or 7 years ago because I haven’t seen one since. Yes, I’m the one who’s one aisle over pushing all the buttons and laughing like I’ve just seen A Charlie Brown Christmas for the first time. (That reminds me, It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown will be on ABC this Sunday at 8.) (In case you were wondering.)

I know, for the last 6 years I’ve harped on how stores rush every season, unveiling this Christmas’s hottest toy before last Easter’s leftover remote control hopping bunny can make it to the clearance bin, but all is forgiven (temporarily) while I read the cards’ inside inscriptions or check out the dancing Santa and elves. If Christmas brings out the kid in us, it does doubly so on me. In me?

Then I realized I hadn’t even bought Halloween candy and came to my senses. As long as I was inside the store I picked up a little supply of candy for next week’s treats. I rarely get trick or treaters where I am but just in case I wanted to have something on hand. Besides, the Halloween stuff is such a great size for when you want just a bite. But it will never beat red and green M&M candies in a motorized nutcracker dispenser. Um, yeah. I got one of those, too.

 

Give Me a Break

Michael 2 Comments

Everything starts to run slower every now and then and can be fixed if you unplug it then plug it back it. Even you. This sage advice is brought to you by the people who marketed the first home computers way back in the dark ages, like 1970something. That it’s still true today isn’t surprising. That you need to unplug even from unpluggedness isn’t something I would have before imagined.

When I was working I always looked forward to time off. Not a day or a weekend. Not a week around the holidays when you worked harder at cooking and cleaning and then celebrating and recovering than you did before taking the time off. Real time off. A week on a beach on an island that has spotty cell coverage and Wi-Fi is something you ask when questioning the use of the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. That kind of time off.

If you’re still of working age I strongly urge you to consider using some of your time for actual time off. Even if it is just a day or a weekend, make it a day or a weekend of unpluggedness. Maybe you can use it to come up with a better word than unpluggedness. Lexicologists excepted. And if you’re still working then by all means take a break from not working.

Here’s my logic. As I said, when I was working I looked forward to my time off. I also looked forward to going to work. Yes, I was one of those people who loved my work. I didn’t mind if I was in early, worked through break times, worked late, worked extra, or covered others. Preferably not all in the same day but if it happened I still made the best of it. But even though I was doing what I loved I wasn’t going to be fooled into believing that sampler waiting to happen “when you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life” resembles truth. Doing anything well, even something you like, takes work. That’s how you get good at it. And work, even at doing something you like, is tiring. Exhausting even.

You need that break from work to recharge so you can do it again. That’s why so many companies have a “use it or lose it” policy regarding vacation time. No, it’s not so they can work you to death and then not give you what (you think) you’re entitled to. They have it so you’ll be forced to take time because so many seem to think that by denying yourself time off you’ll make it look like you’re such a great worker they can’t do without and you’ll never get let go. Actually, not taking time off only means you get burned out, end up doing a half-assed job, and get let go. That’s why I insisted those who worked in my department took their time off even if I had to schedule it for them myself. That’s also why, having managed to work myself up to a position of getting rewarded with 5 weeks of available time off each year I took as many of them as I could, often within a day or two of all five weeks. It might be why I enjoyed what I did. Because I took the time to recharge. Even when I was just starting and got all of two weeks vacation, between taking time off for the holidays and family activities, I always tried to take a couple of days off to just be off.

Now that I’m not working every day should be a holiday, right? Well, not so. You know that not working was not originally my idea. Those guys called doctors as well as those body parts called mine got together and decided it was better for my health, wellbeing, and continued living to start taking time off on a more or less permanent basis. Not working has not been fun, and I was sure it was because I wanted to work.  Ah, but I was wrong.

Perhaps at the beginning of not working, not working was not fun. But I’ve been not working for 3 years now. I should be used to it. Used to it I am. Enjoying it I am not. That is until I “took time off” from being off and started doing new things out of the routine that I had established in lieu of working. It really doesn’t matter what the routine is; what matters is that it is a routine. It was going to work at not working. But in the last 2 months I took a break from that. I didn’t a adhere to the routine, and I feel more refreshed, more positive, and more anticipating of returning to, you guessed it, my new old routine.

If I can keep taking some time off from myself like that more often, I might get used to this not working thing.

 

Happy [fill in the blank] Independence Day

Michael 3 Comments

Boy: Grandpa, did they have the fourth of July in Italy when you were growing up?

Old Man: Yes. In fact, they did. They have the fourth of July everywhere!

Ok, it’s an old joke. But actually, they do have a fourth of July, or more accurately a Fourth of July, or most accurately an Independence Day everywhere. No matter where Flagyou are reading this, sometime in the past, sometimes a quite distant past where you are isn’t what it used to be. Every nation on Earth at some time wasn’t. And a surprising number of when they became what they are happened in July.

There is our American Independence Day tomorrow on that at least here famous Fourth of July, commemorating when we told the English Crown that we would rather suffer through a couple hundred years of taxation with poor representation than another day of it without any representation.  The actual independence came five years, three months, and 15 days later when the British forces officially surrendered. All those Americans reading this, you knew that, right?

A couple of days ago, July 1 actually, our neighbors to the north celebrated Canada Day.When I was going to school it was known as Dominion Day (and probably was to a lot of Canadians back then also) and we were told it was the Canadian IndependenceFlags Day. What did we know? We’re Americans. I later learned that it actually commemorated the combining of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario into the Dominion of Canada, presenting a stronger unified border against the United States just in case the politicos in Washington having just reunited the states after the American Civil War might have designs on taking those Canadian provinces for their own. Our own. Somebody’s own. I found that out when the British Parliament declared Canada to be an independent nation 115 years later.

Another thing I learned in my American schooling was that July 14 was France’s Independence Day on what we were told they call Bastille Day. And in fact July 14 does commemorate the storming of the Bastille and the uniting of the French people against the monarchy in 1789. The French Republic was actually established on September 22, 1792 which like our October 19, 1781 doesn’t seem to be celebrated. Now you could say that all that isn’t really independence as much as a changing of the guard. For the real French Independence you have to go back to 481, give or take a couple of years, when the Kingdom of the Franks was founded by Clovis I with land taken from the Roman Empire.

WorldWhatever misconceptions I had of these days they were still momentous days in the formation of what nations share our terrestrial home today. But there are a lot more nations celebrating freedom this month. Twenty-one other nations from Algeria to Venezuela. (I was hoping when I did my research that I find Zimbabwe gained their independence from Great Britain in July but alas, it was actually on April 18.  But it would have made such a great sentence!)

So wherever you are, chances are pretty good that you or a nearby neighbor is celebrating something this month that made somewhere literally somewhere.

Happy Blank of July!