Day 7: Athens. So I’ll start off with a couple planning mistakes: First, we had looked at maps and said, “we don’t need no stinkin’ tourist hop-on hop-off bus; we can walk to the metro stop at the port and exit at the Acropolis.” But it turned out that this particular hop-on hop-off bus would have been a good idea because it would have come out as far as where our ship was docked and it was a longer walk... Read more
Continuing with my vacation narrative: Day 4: the start of the cruise. We took our time in the morning, with breakfast and general lazing around until it was checkout time, because the earliest arrival on the cruise ship was 12:30. We then hauled our suitcases back to the train station, took a train to the port, and cast about for a way to get from the port train station to the cruise ship terminal itself; we had figured we could... Read more
So I promised, upon getting back from our vacation, that I would write about it. And, yes, you, dear readers, may not be particularly interested in it in any event, but I wanted to pull together some of my favorite pictures and my observations. As a side note, yes, we did take pictures with some combination of my husband, my son, and/or myself in them, but I’m choosing not to post these on the blog. Day 1: Montreal. Here’s the... Read more
That’s the gist of an argument among fellow Patheos writers that seems to have transpired while I was on vacation. And I’m not going to dig into the specific comments any of the authors made, not least because that requires acquainting myself with the full back-and-forth rather than the single article I’ve seen, but also because I don’t like the business of taking apart a single author without knowing how influential the article is (and, yes, Patheos discontinued “share” counts... Read more
Remember the dust-up about whether Obama believed in “American exceptionalism” — that is, as shorthand for whether he believed there was something uniquely special about the United States? It came about after a series of comments culminating in an interview in which he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Now, he goes on to affirm that which is special about the United... Read more
You’ve no doubt read about the latest nonsense in claimed “offensive” symbols: that Nike was going to have released, in time for Independence Day, a shoe with the Betsy Ross flag, that is, with thirteen stars in a circle, but was instructed by Colin Kaepernick not to do so because that flag was both oppressive in its own right because slavery existed at the time of its creation and because it had been “appropriated” by White Supremacist groups. Writing at... Read more
So, other than a pre-scheduled post last week, the blogging has been quiet as of late, because I’ve been on vacation, namely, a cruise vacation, for the first time, in Italy and Greece. (I’m still jet lagged as I write this.) And I want to write a bit about this, even if in the form of journaling so that when I get old and my memory goes to pot, I can reread it, and I’ll share the photos that I... Read more
So regular readers will know I’ve been engaged in the process of working with my siblings to clean out my parents’ house. In the basement, among all manner of boxes, were shelves full of fabric, half-finished craft projects, undone needlepoint and crewel kits, and a banker’s box full of unmade patterns. There was even a box with the afghan on this magazine cover, half-made from the kit Mom had ordered. And there were a selection of women’s magazines from the... Read more
SMDH, as they say. Let me start by telling you about the “family bill of rights” as declared by senator and presidential candidate Kristin Gillibrand, which dates to late May but only came to my attention last week as a result of an Institute for Family Studies blogpost. She proposes the following five items in a Medium blogpost: “1. The right to a safe and healthy pregnancy”, which sounds unobjectionable enough. “2. The right to give birth or adopt a... Read more
Ever since Tom Brokaw coined the term the “Greatest Generation” to refer to the men who fought World War II and the men and women who supported them on the home front, we’ve developed this mythology that these young men (because, let’s face it, the Rosie the Riveter stories don’t have that same element of heroism, and are just as likely to celebrate the employment of women in factory jobs as a step towards greater women’s rights and economic independence... Read more
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