Along with the rest of the country, my husband and I have watched our stocks (in a local bank), our 403b and 401k tank. I keep trying to be positive and think that they will recover and as all things cyclical, they will. But, our country has never been through this bad of an economic downturn before, and I keep wondering if my financial assets really will come back to their previous levels and if they will go beyond that. Both my husband and myself had parents that grew up during the depression. When I was a child, my maternal grandmother had a basement full of home canned goods, and was almost fanatical about growing a very large garden every year and making sure she had food for the upcoming year. A child of the 1970's and a teenager of the 1980's, I really did not understand my grandmother at all. Even though my parents didn't have much money, I never went without food (hamburger gravy...YUCK!), shelter, or clothing (even if it was second-hand). For my grandmother, however, it was a different story and being poor at the begining of the depression, and then surviving the depression with two small children and a husband to take care of is unfathomable for me. My mother would often mention stories of living in a chicken coop while they tried to build the farmhouse that I was familiar with, but like all kids just assumed their parents were exaggerating a little. Now, I'm not so sure.

My grandmother passed away April 1, 1986 at the age of 78, and up until her death, she continued to raise that garden every year. She started seeds in the basement even before all the snow was gone in the yard. She had a huge fenced in area that was once the part of the horse pasture, and had a permit from the DNR to shoot the woodchucks that tried to consume the efforts of her hard work. As one of her four grandchildren, I was put to work weeding and tending that garden when I would stay with her for a few weeks in the summer. I hated it. To this day, I can remember whining about it, doing a half-hearted job, and consuming all the ripe strawberries when she wasn't looking. I'm sure she knew, but never said anything. She grew everything from fruits to nuts. And then, the canning would begin. If I thought the weeding was bad, canning was worse. Hours and hours of prepping the food, the jars, the lids, the mashers, sieves, and spices. Hot, sweaty, weary, and sick of smelling vinegar and cooked food. Still, it never once sunk in to my self-centered kid brain that for grandma, this wasn't a hobby. This was her survival. This was how she survived the roughest economic time in America's history.

Now, close to 23 years after her death, our country is facing far worse economically than what my grandmother went through, but I still don't feel the need to start growing a garden. But, that isn't because the lesson of my grandmother's struggle was completely lost to me. At some point, her tendencies to, oh, let's say, stock-up and grow her own food, was replaced with I'll buy extra when on sale and stock up that way. She understood that the only person she should really rely on was herself. There was no need in her eyes for the government or the taxpayers to solve her financial woes. I am always amazed at folks who do not take advantage of sales or are not willing to buy an off brand to save money. Or even worse, just walk into a store and buy items higgly-piggly with no regard to price, name-brand, sale, or quantity. I'm continually floored when I see other people's shopping carts in stores filled with very expensive items that are really nothing but packaging and no substance. Or have non-essential items like alcohol or cigarettes. Yet, these are the same people who cry that they cannot feed a family on $100 a week, and that's true when you buy nothing but non-sale brand-name items that are more convenience than substance.

I also can't help but compare my grandmother's take-care-of-herself-spirit with all the folks clamoring for hand-outs, buy-outs, help-outs, bail-outs, and the flat-out gimmes. Many of whom got themselves into these predicaments of needing taxpayer money because they were selfish, greedy, and self-centered. Not all are, and to help the folks who TRULY need it I'm glad to do it. But, they are such a small minority that it wouldn't even register on the evening news in any other time but the gimme, gimme, gimme time we are in now.

I'm angry because my husband and I did everything right. We kept full-time jobs and steadily built our lives up the way we were taught you should do it. Rent until you can afford the house, buy a house within your means, eventually you'll sell that house and buy a bigger one, pay off that mortgage, and save for your retirement with a 401k and a 403b. We did EVERYTHING we were supposed to, paid our mortgage off four years early because we put extra money to the principal every month and still put money away for retirement. We don't carry credit card debt and bought our last two cars with cash. Oh, and those two cars? Normal cars that get good gas mileage and not the giant honking SUV's that cost more than both of them together. So why, then, are we now watching all of our hard work evaporate AND not only have our savings gone but have to bail-out dead-beats who just spent, and spent, and spent and never ONCE thought that this would come back to bite them in the ass?

Yeah, I'm angry. And, if I have to start growing a garden so I can have food in the coming year, I will be cursing every dead-beat to eating hamburger gravy forever for every seed I have to put in the ground. But, it will be my ground, paid for with my money, not taxpayer money, and unlike most of the dead-beats I'll be bailing out who won't even think twice about where that money is coming from, I will still be thankful that I did things the right way and know that my grandmother and parents would be very proud of me.

Migraines

I suffer from migraine headaches. I've had them since I was a young girl, my sister suffers from them and my mother also had them. This past weekend, (Feb. 28th) I woke up at 3am with a pain so intense on the right side of my head it felt like someone was shoving a flaming hot saber through my eye and up and out the back of my head. I would have confessed to anything to stop that pain. I even denied it when I first woke, telling my husband, "My head is killing me, but I don't think it is a migraine." I hate migraines and usually try to deny they are happening when they do strike. They are a whole body experience for me, the pain, nausea, sound and light aversion, tactile over-stimulation, and the pain. Yes, I know I mentioned that twice. I always laugh at the migraine commericals that show a person up and at whatever activity they were doing an hour before they took the medicine that eliminates their symptoms.

It doesn't really work that way.

I have both over-the-counter and prescription medicines to try to prevent them and to treat them when they do strike. For some reason my daily Rx meds are not doing too well as I'm two for two in 2009. I had one January 1st (that's a good way to start off a new year) and then this one yesterday. The Rx med I took to actively treat one did work for me, but not until I slept for several hours and took an OTC med with it that has aspirin, caffeine, and acetaminophen in it. I had to take several more doses of that yesterday too. So, no, after an hour I wasn't "up and at 'em" like the TV commercials.

My point in divulging all my migraine history is that in the past, I have heard mention (from non-migraine sufferers) that these headaches are just exaggerated from the people claiming to suffer from them. That we are somehow trying to get attention, or that we want a day off of work, or that they really aren't that bad, and if you watch the TV commercials, they aren't. The active mom just pops her OTC or Rx meds and the next thing you know she's running around in the yard with the kids! Nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe I don't have the right meds, but just trying not to throw the pills up is a major milestone in the course of a migraine for me. Running? Cognitive thinking? No, that's not going to happen for many hours yet.

Sometimes I get a visual aura before the major symptoms hit. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope of broken crystal that shimmers like sunlight on water. I know that most people who suffer from aura have different types of it, but mine starts on one side of my visual field and progresses toward the other side, blocking my vision for as long as an hour. Whether I close my eyes or not, it's the same sight. I've come to think that it's my brain trying to figure out why it's being assaulted by its own blood vessels and trying to fight back. Yeah, yeah, corny, I know. What it is anyway, is an early warning for me to take something RIGHT NOW, because what's coming is going to be hell if I don't. However, if the aura occurs in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping, I can't do anything about it until I wake up feeling like I'm being stabbed in the head.

So, if you are reading this and happen to be one of the people who thinks that migraine sufferers are just exaggerating their headaches, you are wrong. Just plain wrong and despite what the TV would have you believe, we won't be up and running a few minutes after taking whatever product is being hawked on the screen. Unless we are running for the bathroom and hoping the pain of throwing up won't send us into a seizure.

Saving the environment

Can anybody tell me why our new President feels the need to fly everywhere to give speeches he doesn't really need to give? Or why in all of Washington D.C. and the top chefs in our country (who are working at the White House) cannot provide a romantic meal for the first couple for Valentine's day that they have to fly to Chicago for a meal? What happened to his promise of saving the environment? Or was that just for us peons? A "do as I say, not as I do" kind of thing. So far I have seen nothing of his gallivanting around the country at the drop of hat that shows me he is serious about saving money, saving fuel, not wasting resources, or taking advantage of his office. Just because you can fly to the Windy City for meal doesn't mean you should. A little more restraint and common sense would go a long way to convince skeptics that maybe he is putting his money where his mouth is. So far, the only money I've seen him save is... oh wait, he isn't. And, with this joke of a stimulus package going into effect, no one will be saving money. What a complete sham.

Viva Las Vegas!

During winter break from school, my husband, Scott and I went to Las Vegas for a week. We planned this kind of at the last minute and chose the perfect week to go. It was bitterly cold at home and perfect 50 to 60 degree days in Vegas. We had talked about going there a few times in the past, but never really made an effort to go. With air and hotel prices at bargain basement levels, we jumped at the chance to go. We are not gamblers, nor did we go there just to gamble. Sight-seeing and buffets were our primary goals, and we excelled at both.

We didn't anticipate, however, the amount of walking that entails a visit to Vegas. The "strip" isn't that long, only about 7 miles or so, but the hotels and casinos are so BIG that walking from one end to the other can take as long as a half hour. We also chose not to rent a car, so we took the bus, a double-decker known as The Deuce. When getting on The Deuce, a recorded message was broadcast at an ear splitting level that informed you to HAVE FUN! RIDE THE DEUCE! By the end of the week, we were mimicking it perfectly. It was more frugal that the taxis, which are really expensive.

We saw two shows, Louie Anderson and Mac King. Both were very good and we recommend going to them if you find yourself out that way. We wanted to see Penn & Teller, and had planned to go on Thursday night, but the guide book we had was incorrect in its listing and they are off on Thursdays and Fridays. So much for making a plan. We also used the half-price ticket booths, and that turned out well for us.

I got to go horseback riding in the Red Rock Canyon, which was something that I had wanted to do for years. Not necessarily the Red Rock Mountains, but originally the Grand Canyon. Red Rock was closer, less expensive, and a much smaller group. There were only five of us and it was a really "personal" tour. We didn't ride in the canyon, but followed the mountain up and down and rode along the canyon rim. I've never been nervous riding a horse before, but had a brief glimmer of it when I realized that if she wanted to, my horse, September, could have flipped me into the abyss without a second thought we were so close to the edge. One slip on a stone and that would have been the end of happy trails for me.

We went to five buffets while there. The Belliagio, Harrah's, Tropicana, and two others that were not so good and I can't remember their names. The buffet at the Belliagio was by far the best, and although pricey at $35 each, was well worth it. Go hungry and be prepared to eat. It is a huge buffet and has delicacies from around the world on it. Heavily influenced with seafood, my favorite was the lobster ravioli and Scott's was the African Blue Nose fish. Outstanding.

While we didn't do a lot of gambling, it was surprising how fast the week went. We had a beautiful hotel room at The Signature at MGM. It was on the penthouse floor, 30 stories up. A balcony and a great view to boot. There is a considerable amount of construction going on, and it seems like each casino keeps trying to out-do the one before it.

All in all, a fun trip and a great break from the dreary Wisconsin winter.

And the secret is.....

Spoiler warning: I'm discussing the book "The Secret" and giving away the secret. If you want to find out for yourself, read no further. You have been warned.







I just finished, or well almost finished, the book "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. I had heard a few people here and there talking about it, and finally decided to read this book and discover how I could make everything I want happen, happen. The secret is the law of attraction. And in her book, Ms. Byrne has interviewed several experts on the secret. They all state the same thing. If you truly believe what you want to happen, you will transmit that to the Universe and the Universe will give you what you want. The book states that we are all transmission towers and that the Universe "hears" us and then gives us what we want. So, if you are in a bad mood, bad things will happen. If you are in a good mood, good things will happen. As I was reading, I began to wonder if at the end of the book, there was a gotcha! line coming along. So, I did something I NEVER do. I skipped ahead to the end of the book. Nope, the interviewees believe that if you feel good, are a positive thinker, and can really convince yourself that what you really want IS what you really want, you will get it.

I'm a skeptical person, and I freely admit that. Life experience and years of practical jokes and not so practical jokes have taught me that you can't take everything you experience with your senses for real. Especially when the husband tells you stories about earwigs. To have someone then tell you that you just need to think positive and feel happy and you will be positive and happy leaves me with the feeling that someone has been heavily medicated. Same with wanting money or wealth. If you imagine yourself living in wealth, you will get your wish. If you want to be fabulously beautiful, you just have to think and believe that you are. I guess somehow, faeries or gremlins will somehow transform you while you sleep and you will wake up with whatever vision you want yourself to be. While this is all good and wonderful, I began to wonder what would happen if someone REALLY wanted an enemy dead, or disgraced, or ruined in some way. Would it happen? The book only addresses how negative feelings impact you, not if you can transmit negative thoughts to that annoying neighbor's dog barking at 2am.

I read all the summaries and skipped the last 1/3 of the book because I could no longer stand the exclamation points, the Stuart Smiley like text and the trite way of how we should deal with life. If this utopia described in the book is possible just by the power of positive thinking, does that mean that there is also a doppelganger version that accounts for all the bad things that happen in the world? Good and Evil are as old as time itself and are found everywhere. But wouldn't the majority of the human race want good? Shouldn't we have a very small percentage of people that can't help themselves and want bad? The question then becomes do we really have so many people in the world that want bad? Crime, disease, corruption, war, poverty, slavery, apathy, deceit, disgrace, hate, rage, could all be eliminated just by thinking happy thoughts. The book states that love is the most powerful feeling you can experience or transmit. If you could live in a perpetual state of feeling love, you would never know unhappiness. It was at this point I stopped reading the book, because while I don't disagree that love is a very powerful emotion, it is impossible to live in a perpetual state of that blissful, flower-child sentiment from the 60's. Just watching the evening news will put a dent in anyone's love-o-meter.

The idea of the book is wonderful. If you could really pull this off, there would be no mental illness. I would say it is a safe bet that if you ask most people who suffer from say, depression, that they could cure their depression just by feeling happy, they would. In fact, there are probably many of them that have tried to help themselves just by doing that very same thing. "Maybe if I just put on a happy face....." Maybe they should be thinking that they should fix the chemical imbalance in their brains? Do you have to be that specific for the secret to work? "Oh, I know my serotonin levels are normal today!" And *POOF* depression cured? Could we really put the medical business out of business? Do we bring on our cancers ourselves by our negative thinking that we are going to get cancer?

So, I guess the only real thing I believe from this book is the money part. I got the book from the library, but I know there are many people who bought this book and went to see the movie that was based on it. I guess the author must really have wanted wealth because she found a way to make that happy thought come true.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Behavior vs. Fans

Thanks for the picture Scott!


In earlier posts, I've used sports as a comparison to other subjects and not always in the best light. I'm not anti-sports, or think we should pursue more loftier, intellectual goals in life and I'd like to prove it here. Growing up, my immediate family consisted of myself, my sister, and my mom and dad. Typical family, but poor dad usually ended up watching the Sunday football game by himself or with his family who quickly grew bored and heckled the TV with cliches about stupid football players and then left the room before the first quarter was over. Dad tried many times to explain the game to us, and without us having an interest in football, it just wasn't doing any good and he'd usually give up. His favorite teams were the Packers and the Cowboys, and I could never understand how he could have two favorite teams when there was always so much rivalry going on and it was pretty clear that you couldn't have two favorite teams. When the two played each other, we always teased him about which team he was going to cheer for. He never got mad about our teasing him, probably because we'd only be in the room for 10 minutes before leaving to pursue more loftier goals.

As the years passed and when I was a teenager, it just never entered my world. I was busy with school, friends, homework, band, reading, and other teenager stuff that usually didn't include football. I should note, however, that when I was a teenager, there was no cable TV and only one TV in my house. In fact, cable TV was only a few years old and we didn't even have the cable in the ground in our area. So, it was pretty much JUST the Sunday games that were allowed in our area. And, there were no 24 hour channels devoted to football, let alone sports in general. We watched the ABC Wide World of Sports (THE AGONY OF DEFEAT!) and if there wasn't anything good on that, it was usually a Sunday afternoon movie or wrestling on channel 18 (out of Milwaukee).

When I met, and eventually married my husband Scott, I inherited by marriage the subject of football once again. He is a life-long Cowboys fan, and so I too, became a Cowboys fan. It wasn't that hard, really, because I had already been exposed to the team in a favorable light through my dad. But, this was the Cowboys of the 90's, with Troy, Michael, and Emmitt. Not a hard team to dislike, and I quickly became a fan of Emmitt Smith. I also realized that I liked watching football, and as an adult could understand the game and realize what all the fuss was about. Over several years, I've gained a pretty good understanding of the game, can recognize the hand signals the refs use (before they tell us), and have even gone to two Packers games (against the Cowboys, of course). Something, when I was a kid I thought I'd never do as I couldn't stand the amount of time devoted to a football game. I wish I could report that the Packers game going experience was fun, but each time was a complete disillusionment of my interaction with the Packers fans.

The first game was the match-up at Lambeau on 10/24/2004, with a Cowboys loss. This was my first professional game and my first game at the legendary Lambeau. (From my years in high school pep band, I'd been to four years of high school football and basketball games and a few UW-Madison college games.) For years I had been told by local media that the Green Bay fans are the BEST! fans in the world, even if you are cheering for the opposing team. Both my husband and I expected a fair amount of teasing, but nothing like the treatment we actually did get. We didn't realize that everyone is crammed into that stadium like sardines. It looks much bigger on TV. When one person stood up in our row, we all had to stand up because we couldn't move independently. The Packers fans behind us took great delight in ramming their knees into our backs and being so obnoxious to us that I was more than ready to go WAY before the game ended. With it being a Packers win, this game (even though I thought differently at the time) ended up being the "good" experience of the two games I've been to. Our second game was this year, on 9/21/2008 and was a Cowboys win.

It's important to note that the amount of alcohol consumed was a bit shocking to me. I don't know if everyone who was drinking at that game wasn't driving, but if they were, Brown county could easily be so wealthy off of the DUI tickets that they would never need to get Federal money again. I also understand that we are a drinking state, and I don't care if they do drink, but the driving afterwards and the complete lack of common sense and courtesy was appalling. Again, we expected a fair amount of good-natured teasing, but we didn't expect to be assaulted and called derogatory names that I won't print here. It was flag day at Lambeau, so you can guess at what became the instrument of assault. As the Packers began their descent into loss, the mood of the drunken crowd around us also spiraled into loss. I won't go into every detail of what happened to us, but here's a list of the bigger things:

Scott was poked in the head with several flags shoved together
The old guy next to me tried on several occasions to break my ribs by ramming his elbow into my side
Vile and obscene names and language hurled at us and at BOTH teams
Under the pretense of flag waving, hit in the head with flags
Given the "bird" by exiting sore loser fans

I could go on, but I'm not going to. I was most shocked by the parents of a tween girl who were using such language as to make a sailor blush. Words that are not even used in R rated movies. The mother was the person who was using several flags together to poke at Scott. How do you explain to your bully child what they did was wrong when the parents are setting the example? The behavior was appalling especially since their child was with them, and there were other children in attendance too. The vile language of several people around us I consider abusive to use around children but seemed to have no affect on the "adults" who were hurling such words around. I have heard on countless occasions that the Packers are a family organization, and how the fans are part of that family and have been coming to games for generations. Well, I guess I know where the children get that education on being sore losers and bad hosts and grow up to uphold the family tradition.

While I don't think I'll be going to another Lambeau game again, I still enjoy watching football at home. I set out at the beginning of this blog to prove that I'm not "anti-sports" and I think that if I can still enjoy the Sunday game even after the bad Lambeau experiences that's a pretty good indication. I know there were many reasons why we received the treatment we did, and none of them are good reasons. But it wasn't the players fault. It had nothing to do with the actual game of football. As with anything else in life, it breaks down to individuals behaving in either a good way or a bad way. And that is my point. It doesn't matter what activity you might engage in. If you are the type of person prone to closed-mindedness and bad manners, the addition of alcohol will accentuate those traits. And that, is what I guess I really don't like about sports. Healthy competition and team pride taken to such levels that like anything else once taken too far and in such extremes becomes distasteful. I guess I would say that I'm not anti-sports, but anti badly-behaved fan.