Running and droopy drawers

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postaday2012

I try to make a point of walking Rex and Jack three times a day, definitely twice but I strive for three. It’s great exercise for the dogs and for me as well. I have slacked off on my daily 4 mile walk because sometime during the fall last year, I felt beyond fatigued and I still feel off, but the daily walks with the dogs does me a lot of good. Today when it was time for walk number 2, Rex looked at me and stayed under the table. Jack was all goofy, wagging his little tail a mile a minute and Rex still just lying under the table. I jingled the leashes and that usually gets Rex up and about and Jack starts sort of hopping in place, it’s not quite jumping, it’s weird. This time Rex was serious, “Maman I’m not moving”. Fine, Jack “it’s just you and me” and off we went. The walking dynamic was quite different without Rex, Jack and I actually walked. I should say, I walked really fast while Jack was trotting to keep up. I might be fatigued but I still walk really quickly and Jack was not used to it, he looked sort of concerned because he couldn’t quite get his walking pace established. It was very amusing and then I decided to really put Jack through his paces and I broke out into a run. I never run, I run badly and I also have weak knees and ankles, either one of those joints could go at any moment. It’s weird, I can walk for miles very quickly but I cannot run more than a block without something going very badly.

Now before I write about what went very badly, I must talk about my dislike of tight jeans. I used to wear tight jeans back when I was 14 years old, the days of the designer jeans, until one day when I was wearing my Calvin’s and I bent down and I heard and felt the rip. That day was the last day that I wore tight jeans. My hubby affectionately calls me droopy drawers and my baby girl constantly tells me that I look horrible in my jeans and that they need to be skinny jeans. I don’t pay them any attention, my comfort comes first and I usually wear a belt. When I’m home and lounging around the house, I wear normal worn out jeans, no belt, since it’s only myself and the dogs.

So here I am walking with Jack without a thought in the world, except for the excitement that since Rex, the elder, isn’t with us, I can get Jack to move really fast. Goodness knows he needs the exercise, everyone calls him chubby, (he is not chubby, he’s still a baby and he has short legs). I started running, not planning to run that far, because my important joints might fail me during my running. Jack is running next to me with a strange look on his face, like “why are we doing this Maman, I like the walking, this is hard”. So while I am being amused by his look, I’m noticing a breeze coming in at my very low back and on my lower belly, great Gods my pants are falling and they are falling really low! I pull my pants up in mid run, yanking Jack’s leash and he starts jumping on me saying “okay Maman, stop, we are done running” My knees and ankles held up but not my pants. I guess it was the pumping of the legs and the up and down gravity thing that I hadn’t taken into account when I had started out.
The running felt good, I used my Yoga breathing to get my heart rate back to a human rate and I was Yoga breathing during the whole walking, cool down loop. We have a nice steep hill in our park, Watson Park, with a renovated gazebos near the pinnacle of the hill, so I took Jack up the hill and he was still looking at me “Maman what are you doing? We just ran why are we climbing?” When we got to the top and went down the other side, we took our usual path back home and when we got in Jack was really, really happy to see Rex. He licked his eyes clean and then started cleaning his teeth, laid down between Rex’s front paws. Jack was acting as if he hadn’t seen Rex in like forever. It was cute. After that Jack collapsed on the couch and I didn’t see him until 2:00 in the afternoon when it was time for another walk, walk number 3 for Jack and number 2 for Rex. I was happy to see that Rex was up for his walk and I think that Jack was as well because Jack hung back and walked in step with Rex which was comical. I still hadn’t put on a belt, I wasn’t going to run so I didn’t bother. As long as I don’t jump or run, my pants stay on.

What’s your favorite foreign film?

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postaday2012

What’s your favorite foreign film?

April 5, 2012

Favorite Foreign Film

La Bartavelle is the guinea fowl that the boy’s father and his uncle hunt in the hills of Provence

My favorite foreign film comes as a package of two. The films are based on the books written by Marcel Pagnol and the first is “La Gloire de Mon Pere” My Father’s Glory and the sequel “Le Chateau de Ma Mere” My Mother’s Castle. The two books/movies follow a young boy and his childhood in southern France in the early 1900’s I believe. You see the magnificence of Provence where they spend their vacation and the lovely city of Marseilles where they spend the school year since the father is a school teacher. I fell in love with the entire family and the countryside. It transports you to paradise.

Le Jour ni l’Heure 2771 : bartavelle dans la cuisine, maison natale de Marcel Pagnol, 1895-1974, Aubagne, Bouches -du-Rhône, dimanche 8 mai 2011, 17:28:32

Women Are Caterpillars: The Media Life Cycle Of A Dumb Political Analogy

As a woman, I don’t like the GOP’s paternalistic and patriarchal attitude towards women rights. I don’t like the GOP’s embrace of profit at the expense of health care and their belief that health care coverage is a privilege. I don’t like the GOP’s ideology that good education is also a privilege and that we are all on our own. I also don’t like their thinking that nothing is sacred, the environment, our food, our air, our civil liberties. I don’t like the winner takes it all mentality. A society is at its strongest when we are all in this together. If we look into our brief history, the society that the GOP is pushing for doesn’t last long, it explodes with the masses left picking up the pieces, just look at the 1890’s and then 1929 for example. Both times weren’t pretty and 2008 wasn’t pretty either, so who really wants to go back there. Romney sure does and I don’t want us to follow him down that path.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Orrin Hatch: Obama Might Attack Mitt Romney On Mormon Faith

I think that Orrin Hatch feels the need to say something, anything that can bring more “us” versus “him” to the table. Is he still fighting for his political life in the future re-election or did he surmount that hump of a primary? Harry Reid is a Mormon and you don’t hear him crying about being ostracized. I had forgotten that Hatch was a Mormon as well and until the tea party came to town he was safe in his seat. I think that he is desperate to be seen as fighting for the GOP in any which way because with everything that is lobbied against President Obama, he has never stooped to anyone’s base level by questioning their integrity or religious background. Hatch has made himself look the fool for even mentioning that.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

One of my comments on Huffington Post that oops didn’t get through.

My response to Robert Scheer’s article in the Huffington Post “Obama by Default” 04/05/2012

What exactly are the GOP voters looking for? I do not want private companies taking over public services because you cannot vote them out if you are dissatisfied with their level of service. There are far too many examples of municipalities who are experiencing buyer’s remorse once they give over to private companies such as parking meters and waste water management. I do not know of a single individual who would trade Medicare for private health coverage and I don’t know of any who would turn their backs on their social security. These aren’t free programs, every worker has paid into them. Our country has a long and productive history of public/private projects that employed millions of workers at any given time, we shouldn’t dismiss that history but rather embrace it. I am cognizant that perhaps when private and public entities go into business you don’t get the astronomical profits that private companies crave for their shareholders and therein lies the rub. The almost religious devotion to the shareholder, profit market and share price have skewed the private companies vision into short-term goals of quarterly profits and that is it. Yet historically when we saw big public/private partnerships like the space program, the highway projects, the dam projects we saw more than profits we saw growth for all. That is what this country needs, a vision that encompasses all of us, not them and then perhaps us, but all of us.

Obama JOBS Act Leaves Labor Fuming In Democratic Feud

I really dislike this bill, whenever I hear that financial deregulation is going to create jobs, such as unraveling the Oaxley act that was put in place as a response to the fraud on Wall Street that engendered Enron and the tech bubbles, I know that it’s code for monied interests to make a killing at the expense of us once again. I am all about President Obama 2012, but still WHY? I know that President Obama doesn’t just govern for us, he governs for all of us but still, this bill to be signed into law? NO!!! President Obama, think back to former President Clinton, when he signed the repeal of Glass-Steagal, I would bet a lot of money that millions of folk, if they could turn back the clock to that moment, would have torn that bill, broken that pen and tossed everything out the window to keep Glass-Steagal on the books. The same can be said for Oaxley, financial deregulation isn’t the key to jobs, financial regulation is the key to keeping finance people on the up and up and to keep our economy safe from their shenanigans.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

President Obama Locks Horns With Chief Justice Roberts Over Health Care Case

Since MA is the only state that has the individual mandate in place and being a resident myself, I can say that I hope that Obamacare remains the law of the land because I know that President Obama’s version is even better than Romneycare. First, being able to keep young adults on your plan until 26 is phenomenal, second, eliminating the preexisting condition specter is huge and third eliminating the caps on payouts is another benefit that all Americans would hate to see vanish. Here in MA, we didn’t have those benefits, we simply had to purchase coverage if we didn’t already have it. The recently terminated have access to COBRA and the uninsured/unemployed providing they don’t have any access to private insurance have the State’s coverage which honestly is far better than any private plan.The premiums aren’t more than $100 and the co-pay for prescriptions are between $1 and $3.98 and no copay for doctor’s plus dental and vision. What I also like about President Obama’s plan is the set-up of insurance exchanges to create more competition (hint: free market values) and the requirement that private health insurance companies spend at least 85% of premiums on actual medical costs and not administrative cost. The Obamacare legislation is a start and further on down the line it will probably be tweaked to make more sense and be better for us, who knows it might just morph into a Medicare for all sometime in the future.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Climbing Romney Ridge

Chris, your graph and article should be required viewing in any political science class debating the 2012 GOP nomination race/crawl.The only saving grace that the long process served us is that it underscored for months now, all the negative aspects that a Romney presidency would have in store for this country. This all happened thanks to the other candidates doing the progressives work for them, Gingrich calling out Bain Inc making profits at the expense of Main Street, Perry calling Bain Inc Vulture Capitalists, his own campaign manager calling him Etch a Sketch and calling out for military action against Iran as if the American public needs another war. I see Romney and I see any progress that President Obama made for the environment, financial regulation and student debt to name a few, all be pushed back. I wish that the President’s jobs bill had been passed and that the progressive caucus budget had been passed perhaps we would be seeing now the results of what a partnership between government and the private sector would be truly like. President Obama speaks about a vision of America that is inclusive and where government isn’t the enemy. The GOP has this warped view of government being evil even as they benefit exceedingly well from all the perks of public office such as health care coverage, pensions, paid vacations, paid sick days and access to highly lucrative lobbyist/consultant jobs after they leave office.Great job if you can get it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost