Arrggghhh!

Guess who’s in Binghamton tomorrow night?

Dropkick Murphys!!!

And guess who’s NOT going to the show?

Yep.

Dammit!!

We finally get a great band playing somewhere within realistic driving distance … and good ol’ Jenn can’t go!

[insert WILHELM SCREAM here]

Now, sadly, my mom has no idea who the DMs are. Poor thing.

Here’s a video just for her: [Turn the speakers up real loud, Momma. Heehee...]

I’ll be over here in the corner, curled in the fetal position and sucking my thumb, whinin’ about how freakin’ unfair life is…

A Prayer for Forgiveness

RevDeb posted this in the comments at Firedoglake yesterday today.

There’s a responsive reading taken from the Reform High Holiday prayer book Gates of Repentance written over 30 years ago. It pains me that it was so prescient:

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.

For our failures of truth, Divine Spirit, we ask forgiveness.

For passing judgment without knowledge of the facts,
and for distorting facts to fit our theories.

For deceiving ourselves and others with half-truths,
and for pretending to emotions we don’t feel.

For using the sins of others to excuse our own,
and for denying responsibility for our own misfortunes.

For condemning in our children the faults we tolerate in ourselves,
and for condemning in our parents the faults we tolerate in ourselves.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.

For our failures of justice, Divine Spirit, we ask forgiveness.

For keeping the poor in chains of poverty,
and turning a deaf ear to the cry of the oppressed.

For using violence to maintain our power,
and for using violence to bring about change.

For waging aggressive war,
and for the sin of appeasing aggressors.

For obeying criminal orders,
and for the sin of silence and indifference.

For poisoning the air, and polluting land and sea,
and for all the evil means we employ to accomplish good ends.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.

For our failures of love, Divine Spirit, we ask forgiveness.

For confusing love with lust,
and for pursuing fleeting pleasure at the cost of lasting hurt.

For using others as a means to gratify our desires,
and as stepping-stones to further our ambitions.

For withholding love to control those we claim to love,
and shunting aside those whose youth or age disturbs us.

For hiding from others behind an armor of mistrust,
and for the cynicism which leads us to mistrust the reality of unselfish love.

Teach us to forgive ourselves for all these sins, Divine Spirit of forgiveness, and help us to overcome them.

(RevDeb’s emphasis)

Saturday Potluck

I found some really cool blogs while dipping and diving around the tubes this week:

New York Hack — A female cabbie in NYC who’s written a book: Hack: How I Learned To Stop Worrying About What To Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab

The Best Night Ever:

I had an amazing night on Tuesday. So many people came out and the store sold out of my book! The whole thing was pretty damn special. A few cabbies came out, one regular passenger was in attendance, lots of friends and family, and even a bunch of people I didn’t know showed up. The room was packed, all the chairs were filled, and there were crowds of people standing in the aisles! It was probably one of the best nights of my life so far.

Blue Kitchen — A fantastic food blog that even the folks who can’t boil water will enjoy.

A Few Simple Ingredients Take Center Stage:

This particular soup came out of a failed attempt at a promising sounding recipe that just didn’t deliver. I’ve talked in the past about my overflowing, unkempt binders of recipes. As often happens, I was flipping through them looking for one recipe when I found another, for Tomato Bean Soup with Pasta. I love cannellini beans and I thought they would have more of a starring role in this soup. But the recipe turned out to be too busy, with too many ingredients all vying for attention—the white beans that caught my interest originally and tomatoes and pasta and either swiss chard or kale. In the end, the results were only okay, with no one flavor asserting itself.

Emergency Nursing Notes — Nursing from a male perspective.

Empowering Nurses:

Regardless of how good we may feel about the work we do, hospital nurses work in bureaucratic organizations which sometimes make our work and how we feel about it difficult.

Recently, I have been involved in a process at our hospital to improve the quality of nursing services. Oddly enough, however, no interest is expressed in improving the autonomy of nurses.

Although the nursing staff constitutes the largest group of employees at the hospital and generates the overwhelming majority of direct patient care hours (approximately 95%), we are not empowered by administration or the board of directors to conceive of ourselves as a organizational entity that may have interests and concerns that do not mirror the organization’s as a whole. Hence, we are permitted minimal self-determination.

Secret Scotland — Cyber-tour of “secret, hidden, or otherwise notable Points of Interest in Scotland” with it’s own Wiki. Mostly former military installations, but still interesting.

Corrugated Iron Buildings:

Following the recent offer for sale of a Corrugated Iron house, it was interesting to learn more about these old structures.

They come in many forms, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that the Portable Buildings, as they were known at the time, were available in a wide range of configurations, ranging from simple houses, all the way to dance halls and churches.

Dating back to their beginnings in the 1820s, their name/description is possibly a little confusing, and even unfair, as the Corrugated Iron referred to in their build is not the flimsy, general purpose steel sheeting we recognise today, but was then actually Wrought Iron, galvanised to resist the weather, relatively cheap, and able to produce a quickly assembled structure.

the (okay, not quite) daily word — Learn something (almost) every day!

curium:

cu·ri·um: A silvery metallic synthetic radioactive transuranic element. Its longest lived isotope is Cm 247 with a half-life of 16.4 million years. Atomic number 96; melting point (estimated) 1,350°C; valence 3. According to information found on the Wiki site, “Curium was first synthesized at the University of California, Berkeley by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso in 1944.”