carnival treats

house of wigs

downtown wigs

BINGO!

my family is thrilled to hear that my youngest niece liesl is a bone marrow match to my nephew andrew. we were ready for good news! see my pic of the donor, draped in my sister margie's curly hair, in my posting from june.

lanterns

Obon festival at Buddhist Temple

Obon - Festival of Joy. Oakland, CA

tick tock

sometimes the days seem endless but the months fly by. i have one sister in dallas battling a cancer that has invaded her child and another sister in niger, battling the hunger and famine that has invaded an entire region. struggles so near and so far and so devastating. and here i sit, working day after day on things that seem so petty.

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there is something i am doing that is making a difference. there has to be. please! i chip away and chip away and try to do good - volunteer, be kind, be fair, and smile. please let me leave the world a better place.

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Yes, my nephew has leukemia and requires a bone marrow transplant. my sister and her family are so strong. but the fact is, leukemia patients and their families need all the help they can get. research has brought cancer therapy a long way, but our government should not prevent lines of stem cell research because of ideology. I just don’t understand the administration’s “culture of life” reasoning.

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Actually, several of the current public debates remind me an awful lot of The Inquisition. scientific reason and advances squashed by the church, by ideology and it’s invasion into government. yesterday's insistence that earth was the center of the universe seems remarkably similar to today's intelligent design movement. and where will it stop? our schools and centers of research suffer at the hands of such ignorance.

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I find some solace in the fact that the inquisition ended. It’s ignorance (or advocacy of ignorance) defeated, no match for scientific progress. but in the mean time thousands of innocent people died. why would we let that happen again? deaths at the hands of disease are more passive than the inquisition’s murders, but needless and tragic all the same.

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Today many travel overseas or across the border for inexpensive medical care. But do you know when we have lost the battle? When US citizens make that trip because the medical care is better. That day will come if we allow our government to take us down such an unenlightened path.