I decided not to put up with days of logging into WordPress only see “Please Update staring at me. I have done that before; it gets annoying. So right away, I said, fine, just automatically upgrade me. And the little tiny, tiny elves in my computer ran around and did it – really quickly. Then I had to update my database and they did that too. I call them e-elves. I also have nano-elves, but I tend to think of them as the little guys who hope into my body with vitamins and medicine.

But they moved all the furniture around here on the Dashboard page, and other pages as well. It is cleaner looking too; I guess that means no more eating in the WordPress room.

Rats, I already tripped and wrote this first on  a page not a post.

I listened to an interview this morning where someone made the point about political correctness having the effect of putting the importance on what people feel they should say think as opposed as to what they really do think. My mind works in weird ways. As I was about to move away from the page, I looked at the banner of cows and into my mind popped:

My cow burns at both its ends,

It will not last the night. 

But, oh my foes and oh, my friends,

It gives a lovely light. 

Now, where the heck did that come from? But this isn’t anything to do with political correctness because  I don’t want to burn cows. Obviously, this must be symbolism, a Freudian thing. Or maybe it is just a silly attack – my mind wandering on to the remark: Emily’s first draft was not quite there, yet.

Weather.com is saying we should have sun today, at least mostly sun. Well, good, I hope so; I really do. I have seen this before, blue happy skies in the early morning and then clouds rolling in, first a few and then a lot. I want to believe there will be sun (mostly sun) all day. Of course, right now I am looking at the blue sky through snow on the evergreen branches on the north and west side of my little porch office.

I have, during these months of winter, been able to pick-up a 12 pack of Lipton’s Diet Green Tea, Peach flavor. Now, I haven’t done it often, but when I have, there has been a pack for me. Not now. Knowing I would be wanting a lot of iced tea soon, I checked out the stores and found, “Yes, we have no peachanas.” Well, rats. I really liked that peach. They had lots of the flavors I don’t care for, but no peach and my only hope was that the new berry flavor would do. Today I tried it, and it is okay. Different from peach, but better than the others – much better.

I love to drink iced tea in the summer. That I am drinking it poured over ice out of a bottle would be news to my grandmother. She always made hot tea and it was poured over ice that cracked. It had no flavors other than “tea” and back then I had no idea there were different kinds of tea, anyway, let alone flavors. The glasses were tall and thin and the spoons long and graceful; condensation formed on the outside. As I grew older, I learned by example to run the glass slowly over my forehead when we were sitting on the porch. Of course, you didn’t do that at the dinner table.

I was so fortunate as a little, little girl. The war was over and people were happy; people gave you the things they had wanted in the Depression. My father took graduate courses in the summer on the GI Bill and one year we were in Bloomington for the whole year. We lived downstairs from a Chinese gentleman who had a daughter my age  – only she was in China with her mother and couldn’t get permission to come. I’m told he used to come and see me and that I was afraid of him. I have no idea why and now I feel sorry. And somehow I have come back to tea – tea in china cups with a man from China during a Midwestern winter.

I feel sorry for the cute little pseudo-orphaned polar bear cub at the German zoo who was brought to – uh, let’s call it – “really bigness” by the people. Knut is the bear whose picture has been on the Internet news a lot lately – you know the one, the picture where it seems he is trying to bite, eat, whatever a kid and would have succeeded had it not been for the Plexiglas barrier his face rammed against.

As I understand it, the people who were with him all the time, the ones he thought were friends and family, decided it was time for him to live like a bear, alone in his cage. (I guess they call them enclosures now.) He has, in a very real sense, been abandoned. This time he is no longer the incredibly cute little polar bear cub and some people in the zoo community are calling him – forgive me – a psycho bear.

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.