Say What?

I read a book a couple of years ago titled Waking Up White by Debbie Irving where she writes about her life of privilege that allowed her to ignore the hardships of others different than herself. Once realizing that she was indeed privileged, she set out to try and more clearly understand the ways in which her privilege manifested itself in her life while at the same time helping her to gain a better understanding of the struggles of others who don't share a similar privilege because of their skin color. It was eye-opening for me and dovetailed well with what has been an ongoing effort in my own life over the past dozen years or more to try and see the world through eyes other than my own. A practice that has revealed in me my own tendency to be ignorant of others' struggles. I'm a work in progress. Before reading Waking Up White , I already understood that my life was one of privilege but I had never taken the time to try and put myself in the shoes of someone who was...

I was up early last Saturday to participate in a ride out of Northfield (25 miles south of me), trying to get a jump on the day with hopes of completing the ride before forecast rains arrived in the afternoon. I tuned to the '70s music station on Sirius XM for the drive, curious to see if I could guess the month and year of Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown rebroadcast that was playing ('70's music will always have a special place in my heart). The first song I heard was "Wildfire" by Michael Murphy, number 29 of the countdown. I guessed the rebroadcast to be from either April or May of 1975 because that song (as songs sometimes do) always takes me back to a memory of sitting on the bus for the ride to school from my apartment in the spring of that year, my senior year. It's also a favorite song of mine. Sure enough, the show was from May 17th, 1975. The number 22 song on the countdown was "The Immigrant" by Neil Sedaka—a song I hadn't heard i...

Our home has become a no-kill place for mice. We'll occasionally catch a mouse in one of our traps down in the utility room or in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I always feel bad that the only solution seemed to be to kill them to rid our home of them. I found a no-kill trap online a month ago and it appears to work really well. I've caught two mice so far. The only improvement I'd like to see with it is an ability for the trap to send a notification to my phone when a mouse has been caught. I doubt there's much of a demand for a feature such as that but I'd pay extra for it. I try and check our traps twice each day. Our spring season seems slow to get off the ground this year. We've had a smattering of warm days but nothing sustained. It looks like our warmer temps will arrive on Thursday for an extended stay. I made two trips to Gertens this morning to buy some hanging baskets and a few flats of flowers. I had to bring them inside due to one last night...