I have a Job for You All


I am now a contributing blogger at Moms Speak Up which is a collaborative blog of writers from various backgrounds. We write about the environment, dangerous imports, health care issues, food safety, media and marketing as it affects us and our children, education, politics and any other hot topics of concern. We are more than writer/bloggers. We are women, parents, consumers, and most importantly – voters. The “business as usual” attitude of our politicians and the business world is not serving us or the generations who will follow us. We believe it is time for us to speak up and be heard!

My first piece is up today. It talks about the difficulty of being a recycler. My inspiration was Rob, who else? He wrote a piece on his own blog about the frustrations involved when trying to be a conscientious consumer in a world full of stupid people. Of perhaps just confused and worn out consumers like himself. Very hard to know the difference sometimes between the dim-witted and the merely defeated.

If you have a moment, click over and give my piece a read and then share you own thoughts on recycling. Good, bad and ugly, I would love to hear what you have to say.

all about me


Sometimes I remember that the point of this blog is me. 

Spring has finally arrived in my little acre of Canada and with it the urge to purge. In the spirit of that quaint custom known as spring cleaning, I will be engaging in a sweep of the corners of my mind and a trip or two into the depths of my soul. Things have been stirred up in the last few days. Issues that are old and no longer fit the newer, but certainly not completely improved, me.

I find my inspiration in the oddest of places. The newspaper. Upcoming anniversaries and holidays. My sadistic yoga instructor. The act of writing. Employment opportunites. Things that other people blog about. Regardless of where the impetus comes from, in the end this is about me. Try to remember that and keep up because I don’t want to have to pull over and repeat myself.

 

Sylvia Browne is Coming to Bilk Our Grieving Mothers


For those Edmontonian’s still searching for the perfect Mother’s Day gift, there are still great seats available for the Sylvia Browne show. I first heard that she would be further traumatizing the bereaved from a widow whose son attends the children’s group at Pilgrim’s Hospice with our daughter. She really wanted to go and had registered herself in a contest to win a free ticket. Ms. Browne generally doesn’t sweep the audience à la  John Edwards in search of the perfect cold reading victim. She has people picked out in advance and spends more time spewing her version of the afterlife than purposefully making contact. Although if there were an afterlife in the Christian sense of the word, it probably would recoil from her tentacles, hissing. 

I have seen Ms.Browne on the Montel Williams show. A repellent personality, brusque and quite unsympathetic, I didn’t know whether to be horrified or amused by her dismissive replies to the queries of obliviously distressed loved ones. She told one person that the dead don’t care about what happens to those that they left behind in anything but the most abstract terms. They “forget about us” because they are “in heaven and too happy”. Wow, there’s Christianity and all its virtues at its finest. Tough luck to those left behind ’cause I made it in. See ya. She has thrown some of the more fragile a bone of assurance that the deceased didn’t suffer, but that’s about the extent of the milk of human kindness that runs through her shriveled soul.

She and John Edwards both make me sick with horror for the most part. Playing people’s deepest pain for profit. Believing what I do about our souls and their journeys makes me particularly contemptuous, but hopeful that both of these truly evil people get a good dressing down and a century or more of remedial training before they are set loose down on earth among human beings again.

I understand the need to know that a deceased loved one is safe and happy and to have the chance to exchange unspoken words, but most people could do that as easily for themselves rather than waste their money and expose themselves to charlatans like Browne. I tried to ask the young widow at hospice group if she had tried talking to her husband herself and she assured me that she did all the time, but I think she is still too raw and traumatized to listen and look for his reassurance. I was about as far out as she when I finally was able to see and feel my late husband’s little incursions into our life. Perhaps it will be the same for her. I hope so.