My mother has had just about enough of Bush taking it on the chin because of the war in Iraq. She asks me what these people who criticize want . . . for more people to blow up more things and hurt more people on our soil? The Twin Towers, the Pentagon . . . and the targeted White House.  She remembers the attack on Pearl Harbor; she remembers the speech on December 8, that announced “A state of war exists . . .”

And this morning I found myself murmuring the lines of a 1914 Kipling poem:

FOR all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!

UPDATE: I see that a lot of people have come to this post today, and my first thought was “Why?” Now I see that it has a bit about Whitney and Laura in it. I’m sorry but that’s about all there is – a bit. I had special interest in the case because I live in here in Northern Indiana and went to high school in Michigan where Laura was from and where she went after the time at Parkview in Fort Wayne. In addition, my daughter-in-law also worked there on the neuro floor as an RN for a couple of years before coming to Parkview Noble.

I started following Laura’s blog and so I was very familiar with the background when the mis-identification was discovered and announced in national news. We talked a lot as to how traumatic this was for both families. So when my daughter-in-law brought the book out to me, I couldn’t not read it immediately.

It gives an honest insight in to what both families went through; I would say it puts you there with them. The writing is not contrived nor strained; it is pretty much as if they were sharing it with you personally or as if you are hearing it from a person who was right there with them.

And you hear Whitey’s voice, telling how she is now, how she was when she first re-entered the world of school and being away from home . . . and how she is adapting to her new personality.

What bothered me most in the account was not the candid memories of tough moments, but society is such that the Cerak’s  had to seriously consider if the first call to say Whitney might be alive was really a “prank” phone call, a cruel middle of the night trick by some jerk.

When you sit down to read it, you have to realize you are going to experience the families’ honest feelings and you almost feel guilty knowing you can close the book. I have deep respect for the way both families handled the situation. I don’t think I could have done it.

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I have four things to do in the next few days, four things to write . . . and I really, really don’t feel like doing them. I always feel like this and then when I have finished, it feels so very good – yes the old hit yourself over the head with a rock for a while and then stop syndrome.

Augghh, I am pushing the save button and going to go work on them.

Continuing on . . . I did start working and was going along pretty well when my daughter-in-law came out and handed me Mistaken Identity, the story about the two girls – Whitney Cerak and Laura VanRyn – who were mixed up after an accident here in Indiana. Laura died at the scene and Whitney survived, but for a long time, everyone thought it was the other way around. So . . . I read a good part of it.

Then I snacked and now I don’t feel like pushing paragraphs around at all. I feel like watching some TV and then going to bed, even if it is only 7:25 pm. I just took off my shoes – mmmmm, comfy stretching feet in pink socks. Pink socks? Yes, I couldn’t find my dark socks to go with my navy slacks and so I grabbed a pair of Lands End pink to coordinate with my burgundy silk blouse . . . which I need to go change out of before I get some horrendous stain on it.

Today someone talking about my mother today and made the comment, “She is never going to be a little old lady.” She’s got that right. Mother is one sharp dresser, unless she is working at home, and then she wears old ragged clothing. Not as bad as my dad though; the man wouldn’t go out in public without being immaculately dressed, but would work in the yard in duct-taped shoes. Can’t say too much, though, since I’m the one that preached duct tape as a cure-all for years. Did I duct tape the dog once? Wouldn’t doubt it.

Feeling restless tonight – maybe it’s the pink socks.

Yesterday was Tuesday and Tuesdays are the “new movies at Redbox” day. I rented Kite Runner and Love in the time of Cholera – the first will demand that I find the book so I can re-read some parts and the second will leave me with . . . well, I don’t know what. I wasn’t particularly interested in renting the movie or seeing it, but felt it was an investment in my reference knowledge base. The book was a bestseller, but I didn’t read it; the movie is a convenient “Cliff’s Notes”. I have to confess that I just don’t care much for South American subjects and, quite frankly, I am not a fan of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, even though he won the 1982 Nobel Prize. So we shall see.

I think last year at this time I was in San Diego, totally soaking all the things I have come to totally love about the place: breakfast at Kono’s and sipping a soda on the balcony of of the little coffee house. The staircase is through a non-descript doorway and lots of times – given the right time of day and year – you may have it to yourself or have to share with only a couple of folks. Last year, one day the wind was strong off the ocean and sand was blowing right at us, but there was a sheltered corner and we stayed quite a while.

The beach was deserted and the little booths that sell sweatshirts and sun umbrellas and tee-shirts to take home for relatives were shuttered. Sand drifted like snow. I think I would have been happy there to stay all day, just watching the occasional person pass beneath us. I was lured away by the mall and the Apple Store.

The wind wasn’t particularly cold for a northerner, but it was strong – gusts around 40 mph. and it brought to mind the famous line: dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly. I was glad for it; we need something to dry out everything so we can start getting things in order. We’ve had a long time of frozen ground, thawing ground, re-freezing and heaving ground. It’s a mess, but as they say on so many TLC shows, it’s our mess.

Oh, I think someone ran over one of the rakes.

I uploaded a practice blog today, so I could fiddle with a template and see what things could happen. I managed to shut it down . . . but I got it up and going again thanks to what I learned last night. Being a member of that generation which did not grow up with computers and the Internet, I find it tricky delving in to all this stuff. That’s okay. And at least there isn’t a test on it in the morning. There is just so much to be learned, however.  Having a live-in tutor wouldn’t be bad.

In 2000, my grandson Cameron was playing Nintendo and he would come to Quentin, his uncle, for help when he got stuck.  We would be sitting in the big room over the garage with the six windows – Mother, Quentin, myself – and my father, who was ill. Quentin spent a lot of time working a jigsaw puzzle; Mother read and did whatever she could to help my dad be more comfortable. I don’t know what I did.

Ever so often, we would hear, “Uncle, Uncle . . . ” spoken all so softly outside the door.  The pleas for help were closer than “ever so often” now that I remember it more clearly. Quentin would always help, although sometimes I would see his shoulders sag at the first soft syllable.

He would get Cameron over the hump and on the way to getting whatever the goal was accomplished; he once mentioned that he didn’t want to do it all for him and not leave any of the fun. That reminded me of when he was quite young and he said, “Barbara (Egan) is really nice.” When I asked him why he thought so, he told me that a lot of times when you asked someone to “start” the tab on a cola can, they would just go ahead and open it, but Barbara would pry it a little from the can lid and allow the younger kid to get the fun of the fizz.

Learning and teaching :  it’s pretty much a satisfying thing.

Yes, I got an internal server error because I decided to 1) just fool around with the .htaccess file and 2) to push a little square with a red “x” in it in the Apache handler section of my host. It was ugly . . . but Christina came to my rescue and things are running again.

I am just so tempted to go fool with that file again . . . Must control typing fingers of death.

To determine what animal you most resemble in the quiz featured in the post below, they ask you a bunch of questions, answers to which range from a wide scope of diverse choices to those which ask you to narrow in on one facet of a topic.

But, as I sit here, pondering my baby pandahood, it occurs to me that I probably qualify for my own personalized set of questions for kooks.

Do you prefer to nap on a bed or curled up on a sofa with an afghan pulled over all of you, including your head?

Which do you crave more – peanut butter or candy?

Would your home look like a real estate model or a second hand shop with narrow paths between odd objects?

Do you feel a loyalty to inanimate stuffed animals that have become threadbare? Y/N

If your spouse woke you from a deep sleep and said, “The Assyrian,” would you respond “What?” or say, “came down like a wolf on the fold and his cohorts . . . “?

Are there certain common English words that are the default punchline to joking questions? Example: trucks.

Would you sit in the rain on a Pacific beach and watch the gray water or go do something in a dry place?

If you saw a new gadget, would you think, “I can make that with my grandmother’s old potato masher and duct tape”? Y/N

Have you been torn between the old school punctuation outside a quoted word or phrase and the new school’s idea to stick in inside the closing quote? Y/N

If you are reading a mystery and think you have figured out the killer, do you go to the back of the book, find out and then go back to reading slowly and enjoying the writing OR do you race through the rest of the book to see what happens, totally missing clues and well-phrased sentences?

Do you ever feel like punching someone in the nose? Y/N

Here’s a little quote from a Wikipedia article; it does not surprise me. In fact, when I saw I was a baby panda, I thought, “Gee, they’re kind of mean, aren’t they?”

Though giant pandas are often assumed docile, they have been known to attack humans, presumably out of irritation rather than predatory behavior.

My mother said to me around Christmas that she had noticed women wearing colorful versions of “that hat you got your dad” – the mad bomber hat. I don’t know where I got it. It was a long time ago. Now Quentin’s WWI aviator’s suede helmet I bought at the original Banana Republic, I didn’t buy it for him. He was little then, but later he found it. He likes it and wears it for the same reason: he tells people, “It’s warm.” Yes, it is. It is also a little odd looking, but then Quentin has the most marvelous smile and the hat takes on a renewed flair.

But I was talking about the Mad Bomber hat, the one I gave my dad. It was sort of a joking Christmas present because when I was in high school, he used to drive me crazy by sticking the zipped-off hood of a parka coat on his head to putter around outside or walk the dog. The sideflaps poked out down around chin level like beagle ears. Overall, it gave him the look of a homeless man. It was some shade of green; I can’t really call it forth clearly in my mind’s eye because I always rolled my eyes when I looked out the window and saw him wearing it.

When I saw the Mad Bomber hat years later, I knew I had to get it for him. That Christmas morning, I remember my mother telling my aunt about the infamous hood and remarking, “She hated it, just hated it.” He wore the Mad Bomber and I think it kept him warm, and that I had learned, was the important thing.

Then these stylish versions turned up at Eddie Bauer and Mother took a fancy to them, so I got her one for a late Christmas present – although she insisted on paying for it. I got her, though, I told her it was half as much as it was. Hers is blue with the fur in the usual places – on the forehead flap that folds down, on the ear flaps and around the edges of the neck. Mother is 81; she has panache.

She wore it down to the bookmobile and into a couple of her thrift shop haunts. She doesn’t wear it to chop kindling; she says she doesn’t want to get it dirty.