I had the pleasure of seeing Ray Bracy, Senior VP of Wal-Mart, speak last night at Colorado College. I hardly know where to begin, so convinced am I that Wal-Mart truly is making people’s lives better by saving them money.

I’ll focus on Wal-Mart’s contribution to the eco-sustainability movement. Recently, the company vowed to make the new high-efficiency fluorescent light bulbs available to their customer base at an affordable price (they are usually about six times the cost of incandescent bulbs). They succeeded wildly in their endeavor, selling 150 million of them in the past year.

If you've met me, even for five minutes, you know that I hate the US food industry with great gusto. Every single day, though I try very hard not to, I read something about the obesity epidemic and the alarming rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. The list of woes goes on ad fricking infinitum.

Before I rip on the government, who should be watching over the food industry to ensure that our food supply is safe and nutritious, but most assuredly isn't, not only because they are fascist bastards who love corporate goodies, but also because they are f#@king idiots who know absolutely nothing about health or nutrition....breathe.....before I rip on them, let me say that the joke known as the food pyramid has actually, finally, been revised a tiny bit in the right direction. Still, the pyramid only addresses the quantities of food that should be consumed and doesn't speak a word about nutrition, so it's still pretty worthless.

Warning: Very cute picture embedded! Thanks for writing about this ongoing important issue, half dozen! -Elisa

This year I've resolved to be a better Earth citizen.  Last night I watched The Story of Stuff.  It's a digital video making its way around the internet and it  elucidates clearly the materials economy, from natural resource inputs to consumer consumption and, finally, to waste landfills and garbage incinerators.  It is truly disheartening to see what we are doing to the planet.  There is no question that things better change, and soon.  The earth can't sustain our never-ending demands much longer.

Today I read that 13% of home energy bills go toward heating water.  To make some headway on our resolution to be eco-conscientious, I presented a couple of options to my kids.  We could commit to taking shorter and cooler showers.  Or we could economize in the way my mother did while my dad was in Viet Nam and she was left home alone to care for 5 young children.

Did you ever carry pepper spray, or Mace as it was known when I was in college?  It was pitched to women as a sure-fire way to stop a predator in his tracks.  Just spray it in an assailant's eyes and he'll stumble around yelling "Ah, my eyes! my eyes!" long enough for his prey to flee.

There is a new protection device available from an Arizona company called Shieldher.  It is, I kid you not, a personal taser, the TASER® C2.  To soften the outright horror at the thought of our already over-armed streets filling with more weaponry, the Shieldher taser comes in innocuous and feminine colors like metallic pink.  I imagine this is meant to discourage macho would-be criminals, who might otherwise be inclined to carry one of these weapons to subdue recalcitrant victims.

I felt more than a bit empty around Christmas this year.  For the first time it seemed completely devoid of meaning.  No one believes in God.  No one believes in Santa.  There's nothing particularly thrilling to give or get.   There's just an obligation to pour money into the pockets of corporate jerks and fill our houses with crap none of us needs, or even really wants.

I remember Christmas as magical.  But, as I reflect on my childhood, the magic of the holiday was closely tied to religious ritual.  Coming into church on a Sunday soon after Thanksgiving, back when Christmas lights didn't begin showing up by Halloween and could still be cause for celebration, we'd find the Advent wreath suspended from the rafters.  Oh, yes!  Christmas is coming! The three purple candles, a pink one for the third Sunday of Advent, a white candle for Christmas Eve.  Each candle with its own story and symbolic meaning.

The beautiful haunting Christmas carols.  O Come O Come, Emmanuel was my favorite.  It still gives me goosebumps.  The nativity display.  The Christmas story with its shepherds and wise men and camels and bright stars and inns and stables and mangers and gold, frankincense and myrrh.  Oh my!  I just loved it all.

Over the weekend I saw Lars and the Real Girl, a strange but funny movie about a mentally-ill introvert who, much to his concerned family's delight, finds a "girlfriend" on the internet .  The girlfriend, Bianca, it turns out, is actually a Real Doll, a life-sized anatomically correct silicone woman, created by Abyss Creations in California and sold for upwards of $10,000.  The entire community sweetly honors the "relationship" while Lars works through deep psychological issues resulting from his mother's death at his birth.

Last summer, catching up on the goings-on after a week in blazing hot and muggy Mexico, I read on CNN.com that Al Gore III was arrested recently for possession of -- in addition to marijuana -- Vicodin, Xanax, Valium and Adderall.  Oh my! The article pointed out that prescription drug use is becoming more prevalent among the young than even good ol' pot.

Prescription drug abuse is particularly common among upper middle class students, according to Lisa Jack, a clinical psychologist at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  "It just goes to show that where you're from doesn't matter," Jack said.  (I hope she isn't speaking geographically).

The article goes on to admonish parents to lock our medicine chests so that vulnerable offspring will be adequately protected from evil.

November 30, 1997

The Denver Broncos beat the San Diego Chargers 38-28 on the way to Elway's first
Superbowl victory.

I looked like this, packing 11 pounds of baby, and gamely waited until victory was in hand to utter, with a crampy grimace, "I think we should go."

At 12:25 and 12:27 a.m. on December 1st, the twins arrived--weeks before their December 25th due date--making the family Christmas card with only days to spare.

Happy Birthday, Sweet Devon!

Happy Birthday, Sweet Ryan!

Once when I was twelve or so, my sisters and I bought my mother a birthday present.  We found it at Spencer's, a store full of black lights and glow-in-the-dark posters, lava lamps, hanging beads.  To our young minds Spencer's held every groovy thing the 70s had to offer and we could not wait to present our gift to Mom.  

I remember with crystal clarity the look on her face when she opened the box.  The sidelong glance that she gave my father, who turned away at that moment, the apparent victim of a coughing fit.  I knew there was something that I didn't understand and I thought about it for a long time after.

Much of what I've read lately has been negative.  Politics, war, civil liberties under fire.  My Daily List of All Things Depressing has become a scroll, a la Jack Kerouac.  But, fear not, love and compassion are alive and well.

A few days ago I posted Activism Home Grown, about living with a Vietnamese family when I was a teen. The comments indicated that many of us would like to do more to engender an outward focus in our children, but the complexity of daily life does not lend itself easily to this pursuit.  

Cross-posted at Not My Tribe.

My siblings and I frequently talk about our "activist" upbringing. We grew up with parents who walked their talk. Our mom hung out with the radical nuns protesting around Rocky Flats. And I can’t remember a single Thanksgiving where we didn’t have a couple of homeless men sitting at our dinner table. Our parents introduced them by name and we were expected to be gracious and make interesting conversation.

Then there was Robin, a retarded young man who was obsessed with a pair of moccasins that we had in our front closet. My mom made a rule that the front door be always open so that Robin could come in for his moccasins whenever he wanted to. As a mother, I question the wisdom of this now but, at the time, we just accepted that at any time Robin might walk in and open our front closet. It wasn’t anything we worried about. Just another one of mom's people.

Video game playing in my household has never been a sedentary activity.  I think that my boys, all three of them, came hard-wired with a gene that had lain dormant in human DNA for millions of years, waiting for the Japanese to self actualize.  They are video game phenoms.

When my David was barely two, we got an English au pair who had apparently spent plenty of time in Cornwall video arcades.  She taught him to play The Lion King.  He was an amazing player from the start. He couldn't speak yet, but he developed a whole video game language....a series of barks and whoops and shrieks reminiscent of Tourette's Syndrome.  He stood and leaned and squatted and ran back and forth.  We once filmed him for America's Funniest Home Videos.  I really believe we would've won had we followed through, so hilarious were his antics.

We've had every Nintendo system invented.  Last year my boys reminded me every day for a month that the Wii came out November 19th.  "Yes, yes, I know.  You're not getting one.  I know what it will take and I'm not doin' it.  Deal with it."