will being a star go to his head???

take a gander at this. dennis was asked to be in a commercial for the hospital to attract new nurses. scripted, of course. unpaid, of course. no royalties, of course.

just the honor of being asked. he said yes because he's a nice guy and cares about the people who go there for care. which is as it should be.

a sweet scene

i love to people-watch. and i love bookstores. so when i was away in the big city at the training i just posted about, i spent a large part of one evening at a huge bookstore.

i love the smell of paper. one of my high school friends had a garage loaded with paper products--her dad sold paper bags to grocery stores, etc. i always wanted to hang out in her garage because it smelled so...papery...a digression. sorry.

so i am at the bookstore sniffing lots of books.

go upstairs to the kid's section and am nasally lovin the kids books. i turn the corner and see a man with his little one. just the two of them. no female in sight. and i hear him reading to his little boy. they are curled up on the floor in a quiet corner, totally absorbed in the story. it brought tears to my eyes to see the tenderness of that man as he quietly read to the little boy.

later on i was in the bookstore coffeeshop and i saw them again. this time the man was giving the little boy spoonfuls of the whipped creme and honey drizzle from the top of his cup of latte.

and once again, quietly and tenderly.

it was such a gift to be a witness to these acts of love. done quietly, not for show, not to impress bystanders.

by day i was learning how to react to all the nasty things that man can do in our world, but this nite i had my faith restored in the goodness that man can do for the most important beings in our world.

daylight savings time

atta girl.......looks like she's getting ready for st. pat's....i just love her dog. he reminds me of brodie.

now i know how to exorcise! i mean exercise! the homeland security way!

greetings, my fellow americans. for the last couple days i was out of town at an "hseep exercise training".

yes, i realize you're jealous and want to know how you, too, can enjoy this type of spa-sounding experience. but hold on, don't start lining up just yet.

of course we all remember sept. 11 and the nation-wide emergency response system that was born out of it. (interestingly enough, based on the methods of fighting wildfires out west--involving the use of an incident command structure, etc etc)

hseep is actuallly u.s. govt. acronym-speak for "homeland security exercise evaluation planning."

now do you get it? no? i didn't either, and i had to go spend 2 9-hour days trying to do it!

by friday afternoon my brain had turned to alphabet soup.

the trainig centered around a massive 3 ring binder filled with modules, and power points with slides so small i couldn't read the print, even with my cheater glasses, and an a to z list of acronyms that was 5 pages long! and the instructor used them constantly, talking about nims, and eoc's, and pheps, sop's, eeg's, aar's, ics, and about being sure to share your mesls (pronounced measles) with all the prime players. hearing that made me smile--but only the first few times of the hundred or so times i heard it!

the gist of the training was learning to plan disaster exercises in order to practice emergency response and evaluate and improve emergency preparedness--for any type of disaster--be it terrorism, natural disaster, pandemic influenza, blah, blah, blah.

i know this doesn't sound like something a public health dept. would be involved in, but depending on the type of emergency we might be right in the thick of things.....oh joy.....i even have to carry a cell phone for emergency call-in these days. nine-eleven changed so many things for so many of us, didn't it? and i don't mean for the better.....

blogging is hard work

i've spent a good hour redesigning this silly blog layout--just fiddling around, clicking and dragging and swearing.

i guess it's better mental exercise than watching some lame tv show but why can't i be like my kids, all high tech savvy, keyboarding at the speed of light and oh so very computer literate?

it just isn't fair!

"if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

shelley had it right.


to fully appreciate
a scene like this,
a white carpet of trilliums
filling our little woods...
we must first have our winter.

an afternoon at the orchid show

emilie and i went to an orchid show in neenah today. wow!! i am in love! brought home 2 new babies...one for home and one for the office. some of the orchids were almost otherworldly and a few were absolutely twilite zone/outer limits looking. i think i have found a new interest......long ago lost interest in house plants, but this orchid thing may be a great replacement. there are countless varieties of orchids with varying degrees of propagation difficulty. i brought home 2 phaelanopsis orchids, which is a good variety for beginners. they only bloom twice a year but the blossoms last 5-6 weeks. their common name is moth orchid. the mottled burgundy photo above is a moth orchid.