Dancing In The Aisles...

... as I was shopping in Earth Fare yesterday when they played the song below; I couldn't help myself. Well it is Mardi Gras, right?

War, What Is It Good For?

Good God ya'll... I love this song.

Colorfully Off-Color

Pardon me if you've seen this joke before, but it really tickles my funny bone.

I took my dad to the mall the other day to buy some new shoes. We decided to grab a bite at the food court. I noticed he was watching a teenager sitting next to him. The teenager had spiked hair in all different colors: green, red, orange, and blue. My dad kept staring at him.

The teenager would look and find him staring every time. When the teenager had enough, he sarcastically asked, 'What's the matter old man, never done anything wild in your life?'

Knowing my Dad, I quickly swallowed my food so that I would not choke on his response; knowing he would have a good one. And in classic style he did not bat an eye in his response. 'Got drunk once and had sex with a peacock. I was just wondering if you were my son.' 

Three Lucky Ones

Awww, what sweet little guys. They wouldn't have needed rescue if people didn't support the beef and milk industries. They're like puppies, happily jumping around and nuzzling her for petting and kissing. Most of us wouldn't eat a puppy... why these guys? Sigh.

I'm Grateful... I Think

I am grateful, really, I am. But this fitness thing really takes up a lot of my precious time.

My company does a great job of providing incentives to be healthy. They have their own reasons for keeping us healthy (so we keep coming to work instead of calling in and running up bills for our chronic diseases) but there's no doubt that they are giving us a gift. They have hooked us up with WebMD for purposes of record keeping and learning about healthy lifestyle choices, and they have given us a set of criteria to meet and for which we earn points that go towards lowering our insurance premiums. Short of packing our sports bags and chauffering us to our work outs they've done all they could towards making this happen.

The current "1st Quarter Challenge" is to log our steps (goal is > 10,000 steps per day using a pedometer) and at least 150 minutes of heart-raising exercise per week. It's actually pretty easy to get 150 minutes -- that's 30 minutes 5 days per week. What's hard for me is not putting it off to another day! So I make myself exercise daily in the hope that if I don't do it, I won't feel good. HA! I would feel like a million bucks if I could just sit on my couch drinking diet Coke and nibbling on snacks while I read or watch a movie. No such luck.

So that's why my blog entries have slowed down. I'm now running around in the neighborhood trying not to get bitten by the local canine riff-raff, and unless you want to know how many steps I did today I have less to blog about because I'm not doing anything but stepping and counting.

But you know what? I'm starting to feel pretty good. I'm sore every day, but I think my body is starting to get used to the pounding and getting stronger. What happens when the 1st Quarter Challenge is over? I'll surely sign up for whatever the next one is, but I'd better pretend this one's ongoing because in reality, it is. This needs to be a way of life, the way it was for my Dad. Sometimes I talk to him while I'm exercising. I say, "See Dad? I'm exercising." It's a pain in the ass so he better be happy about it.

Protesting The Circus

Well, we did it, and didn't even get spit on. We met up with about 50 protesters who were polite and kind, not putting the circus-goers on the defensive. Aside from the circus issue itself we found that the other participants were very much on the same page as we are in regards to the role human domination plays in the destruction of our planet generally and to animals specifically. It was so refreshing to hang out with like-minded people!

I wore my "I am not amused when elephants are abused" T-shirt but it was so cold and windy I never opened my jacket. :-(

The venue was the Timer Warner Cable Arena (whatever happened to non-commercial names for buildings?) which is located on Trade Street in downtown Charlotte.

Across the street was the Charlotte City Transit Station and it was kind of fun for me, as I stood there with my sign, to watch the buses come and go. Charlotte has some Green Hybrid buses and the regular buses are somehow rigged up with 'clean exhaust'. I'm not sure what that means but we drove behind one and it's true; there was no stinky diesel fume cloud bellowing out the back. Charlotte may not be San Francisco but it's quite progressive.

On one side was Charlotte's Light Rail, I guess the modern version of Chicago's "L" - elevated trains. They run very smoothly and quietly.

Above us the Bank of America building towered; it has cool architecture on top.

Down on the ground, however, there was some work to do!

Some of the signs were from PeTA. The signs with photos of baby elephants being abused during training were definitely the ones most people looked at the longest. It's true that one picture is worth a thousand words. If I say 'baby elephants are beaten with bull hooks' it doesn't have the same horror factor as actually seeing that being done to a cute baby elephant with it's little tufts of baby hair sticking straight up just like a human baby. That's why I think people who eat meat, wear leather/fur, or use animals in some way should actually have to SEE what happens. It's not fair to hide behind ignorance.

Some people made their own signs, like the girl on the right. The guy with the sign on a stick made a sign that said, "Beat the clowns, not the animals!" I'm not sure that would be my message but it made Saeed and me laugh more than once. Saeed actually spoke to him later and told him that sounded like something you'd hear on Seinfeld; the guy laughed but I'm not sure if he was just being polite.

I'll have to check the local news to see if the guy with the camera put the protest in the newspaper or on TV.

Initially Saeed felt less than enthusiastic about participating in this protest. We had a lengthy discussion about whether protests have any effect on issues on our way up in the car. We protested against the war in Iraq before Bush did it anyway, so I think he felt discouraged. He admitted that he had a defeatist attitude as I reminded him that causes take a LONG time to bear fruit, bringing up the struggle for civil rights and women's rights as examples. As the day progressed he saw that it was the children, in particular the girls, who were very interested in the plight of the circus animals. He admitted that it was important to keep whittling way at the message. The guy in camo who says it's his God-given right to shoot any animal he wants is not our target audience; that kind of person will probably never be convinced. His daughter, however, maybe one day... Afterall, I too once ate meat and went to the circus.

In the transit station was a Burger King. After the morning session was over we went in for a veggie burger and some warm R & R. Saeed is never happier than when he's in an eatery reading the paper! We recharged our batteries and went back out later for the afternoon session. It was a bit warmer by then but still windy, so when we got home we were both tired and ready to rest our hoofies. We're glad we went and would do it again.

Our Retirement Plans

Most people talk about traveling when they retire, but Saeed and I want to buy some property so we can create an animal sanctuary of some sort, small scale of course. It may turn out to be just a dream, but sometimes people actually make their dreams some true. Imagine if we had our personal vet nearby...

So when I bumped into this video I thought... that could be us! The lady lives in a nice warm area of the country that never gets these 20 degree days we keep getting, so I don't think we could exactly replicate what she's doing, but it shows that it's possible to make a life according to your heart's desire. Add a few goats, a donkey, a few egg-laying hens (separate from the kitties!), and you have Sanctuary Modaresi. :-)

Protesting The Circus

Saeed and I just signed up to protest the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus that's coming to Charlotte on January 29th. Contrary to what they say and what they'd like you to think, they have been caught on tape many, many times abusing animals (badly) in the process of managing and training them. Elephants are smart, emotional creatures with family units very similar to ours, but they are beaten and abused as a means of coercion. It's disgusting.

So we're going to do it; we've signed up with the Charlotte Animal Welfare Meetup Group to hang out on a street corner with signs, and probably hand out literature. Although I feel so strongly about protecting animals it's kind of scary to 'put yourself out there'. I know people will be ugly. But my girls did it in college and other people do it all the time. I just need to put my big girl pants on and do it.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was quoted as saying, "Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way."

All Before Noon

I look forward to Saturday mornings more than anything because I don't have to set my alarm for 5 AM. Yet, when we get up early to go to the Farmer's Market I love it once I actually pull myself out of my cozy, warm, flannel-sheeted bed that's full of kitties and another warm human. The day before me is full of possibility and I feel like I have a head start. I believe this qualifies me as a morning person.

The sun was just coming up as we left for the market.

This man was one of the few vendors at the market yesterday. Normally in the winter months the market opens every other weekend, but this year there were several vendors who were willing to come the imbetween Saturdays for a "mini-market". We talked with him about his chickens and learned that he is one of the original farmers (he and another guy) that began the Matthews Farmers Market 20 years ago. It was cold, in the twenties yesterday, so he didn't even have to keep his eggs in the cooler.

Despite the temperature (I love cold weather even still) I went for a walk. Our neighborhood is full of hawks and owls. I had a stare down on Friday with an owl in our backyard and saw this hawk on my walk. They are so beautiful and majestic and I love them, but I try not to think about who they're eating.

The rest of the day was grocery shopping and laundry. Today I'm doing some cooking for the week and finishing the laundry but everything stops at 2 pm for the Bears game. Saeed has a bet with Gabriel (who took the Packers, that traitor) and M & K are certainly going to be watching it too.

I'll be wearing my Bears shirt which I purchased a couple of years ago.

Book Club Indian Style

Last night we finally had our meeting to discuss For Ganesh, Remover Of Obstacles that had been iced out last week. After a flurry of emails we decided to eat at an Indian restaurant to have our discussion which is good and bad - good for my taste buds but a bit more challenging to stay on task. Due to its location we chose Copper, an Indian fusion restaurant in the Dillworth (older, affluent) section of Charlotte. It was very nice and our waiter, when he kept hearing us discuss things Indian, began to linger near our table and eventually joined in the conversation from time to time.

I was the host of this book and did my research well on the issues, locations, and historical facts surrounding the story and its characters. I was able to contact the author via FaceBook (gotta love the internet) and Sujoya gave me so much personal information that made the discussion that much more meaningful since this story is semi-autobiographical.

Her mother, Krishna, which is a traditionally male name, was 'accidently' accepted into Princeton in the 1950's which was closed to females at that time. She came from a strict Brahmin family in Mangalore who really just wanted her to get married to continue and preserve their particular sect of the Brahmin line. She, instead, learned Bharatanayam, a classical Indian dance, and was so good she received scholarships to go to university first in India, next the The London School of Economics, and then the fateful accidental term at Princeton (they did let her stay but wouldn't let her graduate - they transferred her credits to another university and let her graduate from there!)

What a great story, and I liked the way Sujoya interspersed Krishna's early life with her modern life, both of which were told by her daughter Sushila. Sujoya wrote me that her mother only had two regrets about the book: 1) that she used Krishna's real name, but Sujoya explained that she had to use it as it was so crucial to the explanation for how she got into Princeton, and 2) that the character that was Krishna's father back home in India was written as a bit of a tyrant, when actually was a pretty nice guy. I guess that's where the semi in semi-autobiographical comes; Sujoya admitted that she had to exaggerate some things to make the novel work.

I loved it. Five stars.