it's gonna be a long weekend, heh

Wow, it has been an interesting morning-of-the-first-day-of-a-four-day-weekend. ;) We popped out of bed at 7am, variously raring to go and groaning in protest -- I give you one guess which of us was which. ;)

Three hours, several feeding attempts, many toys, and ten million book-readings later, Isaac fell asleep nursing ("muh boo peez?"). Falling asleep at 10am is pretty much unprecedented for him these days, but what the hey, I put him down in the crib and took to my bed. I have a zillion books to read, but I wasn't in the mood for any of them, so instead I picked up The Story of the Stone to reread.

After a 45-minute catnap, Isaac was up and once again raring to go. Fortunately it wasn't long after that when my mom showed up to cart him off. Whew. Now I just have to catch my breath *g* and then I'm gonna get started any minute now on all that stuff I gotta do. Yeah.

Whew, it's going to be a long long weekend. Any locals want to come hang out with a cute toddler while I sit staring blankly at the walls? ;)

on disasters and charity donations

rainbow_goddess makes a good point about people who donate money to disaster relief, e.g. for the Asian tsunami, but ignore the problems of people in their immediate areas, e.g. the homeless and impoverished and starving in your very own hometown.

Given that a lot of the people donating now to tsunami relief probably ARE people who also regularly give money to other charities, nevertheless, there are also a lot of people who will click on Amazon to donate to the Red Cross* because it's easy, but who wouldn't bother to give money to local charities the rest of the time.

I think we all kind of understand, probably in a cynical sort of way, how a huge disaster like the tsunami makes people more inclined to give to charity than an ongoing, not-seen-in-the-news, not-a-good-soundbyte tragedy like people being homeless and unemployed in our own backyards. Seeing people on TV wailing over the bodies of their drowned children packs more of an emotional wallop for most of us, and we learn to live with the liberal guilt of knowing that there are homeless/poor people in our own towns, whereas the shock of 100,000 people swept to their deaths by the uncaring ocean in one horrible instant is harder to ignore.

I'm not trying to make excuses or say that it's right; I'm just saying that's why it happens.

I'm also not criticizing anyone for donating to tsunami relief, or for not donating to other charities, etc. -- we all make our own choices. It's just that people like rainbow_goddess are understandably bitter when the unavoidable implication is that we care more about anonymous strangers half a world away than about the actual faces we see on the streets before we avert our eyes.

* By the way, IMO the whole Amazon/Red Cross thing is a scam and you're better off donating to the International Red Cross directly, or to Doctors Without Borders or similar. Amazon says that 100% of your donation goes to the American Red Cross, and that's true, but that doesn't mean that 100% of it then goes on to tsunami victims. The ARC takes a cut first, which the international one doesn't.

To Do

To Do today while kid-free:

* Shower
* Deal with disgusting cat-box situation
* Mop kitchen and living room floors
* Vacuum hall carpet
* Make shopping list for party
* Shop (if time)
* Post Office (if time)
* Change sheets on bed
* Figure out how we're going to entertain ourselves next 2 days
* Call deadbeat friends who haven't RSVP'd for party

Ten bucks says fewer than half of those actually get done today.

I guess it might help if I got off my ass and stopped surfing the web.