What a day. Today I woke up and saw that Alberto Gonzalez resigned. Instead of being happy, I was just sad that the Daily Show and Colbert are in reruns this week. They are missing out on some prime jokes. Do you think Alberto did that on purpose? No, you're right, I don't think he has that kind of foresight either.
Today at work we had a presentation by Red Cross about disaster preparedness. The lady was very nice even though her job was essentially to scare us silly with statistics about earthquakes and tsunamis and volcano eruptions and flooding, and how everyone needs to have a disaster kit to get through all these disasters which are just around the corner. But she had a good sense of humor, and in telling us about how to personalize our disaster kits, she said, "I know I'm going to need a glass of wine if I'm in an earthquake, so I have some in my disaster kit!" And she made a good point, that if you are going to do something like that, then you should use boxed wine, and not a bottle of wine, because that might break in the earthquake. That is very good advice.
She said that in this area, the number one thing that the Red Cross responds to is house fires. Then she gave some advice about candles in the household, complete with an anecdote about a woman who had a candle going but then her cat's tail caught on fire, and she tried to throw water on the cat, but cats don't like water, so it set off running through the house, with its tail ablaze. I didn't quite catch how the fire went out, but it's a good story all the same.
But listening to the fire conversation did take me a back a little bit to when I was 5 years old. In kindegarten, we did stations, and one of the stations was watching 20 minutes or so of Sesame Street. Except when my group got to the station, it was a PBS documentary about families who lose everything in fires. I sat there for 20 minutes and got terrified. I think the point of the show was that kids were supposed to go home and draw escape maps with their parents, and talk about what to do in a fire. But what I took from that was that I was going to lose everything in a fire.
The results of this horrible show on my sensitive psyche were that I slept with a bag of belongings by my bed every night, so I could grab it and run if the fire started at night (although I was likely more convinced that I would just burn to death). But if we were leaving the house for any period of time, I wanted to take several bags of belongings, including a big bag of books so that I would have enough to read until all my things could be replaced.
The bag o'books made my dad mad. I guess there was no room in the car for my brothers with the bag or something. So sometimes, my mom would go out and hide it in the car, so I could have it. The habit of taking so many books with me pretty much ended when my dad put some on the top of the car while he was getting kids settled, and then he drove off without getting the books. I never saw those books again. I learned a horrible lesson that sometimes you don't even have to live through a fire to lose your books.
I forget where I was going with this. I'm too depressed to continue.
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