Sunday misc

It will be a short work week,  The kids have classes three days this week, but the Elementary kids and the Middle School kids don’t have school on Wednesday – only the High School is in seesion Wednesday.  Ha ha ha.  The big kids had a four day weekend last week and their younger siblings didn’t; they laughed long and hard, but this week, the joke’s on them.

Unfortunately, their bus driver has to work no matter who has to go to school.

I’ll be working Wednesday night, helping to deliver the Thursday papers.  We will be getting 1505 of them – lots more than usual, and fat with ads for Black Friday’s sales.  The retailers are desparate this year – Christmas sales season is the real money maker for a lot of retailers, and with the dollar falling in value and people being more conscious of their spending, sales are way down.

I’ll go get all the papers, like on the weekends, and split them with the dailies driver.  He’ll get 700 of them; I’ll keep the rest.  I’ll be driving the stepvan; he has a minivan and I think I’ll be meeting him later in his run to give him the rest of his papers.  I used my minivan to deliver the dailies before I started driving a school bus (and after too, but that was too much work for me…).  Anyway, I know that he won’t have enough room for all 700 papers.  It may be a long night.

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It’s been raining all damn day.  Mt. Hood and the ski areas up there are getting up to 14 inches of snow tonight, so there is confidence that the skiing will be open by Thanksgiving.  I’m waiting for the weather now, but this rain looks to be staying for a few days.  Thanksgiving is supposed to be dry, I heard earlier – good for deliveries.

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Some of the things I have written lately have been idealistic and less than one sided.  For example, writing about Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I called him "one of the greatest mass murderers in history".  This past month, PBS has been running the Ken Burns documentary "The War" about WW2, and it’s obvious to me that the situation was way more complex than one man deciding to drop a bomb.  The invasion of Okinawa was a prelude to what an invasion of Japan would have been like.  Most all of the Japanese garrison on Okinawa died fighting, 92,000 men, killing tens of thousands of Americans, and an invasion of the Home Islands would have been horrendous in it’s carnage.  I know personally that school kids in Japan (Like my ex father in law and his brothers) were being trained to defend the country, to fight for every yard of land.  Millions would have died, Americans and more so, many more Japanese. I lived and worked there; I know that the Japanese don’t do anything half way; it’s 110% all the time.

Tibbetts helped cause the deaths of thousands in a horrible way, one that was "wrong" ethically, but given the times, it would have been him or someone else; there was a ferocious war on.

It wasn’t as black and white as I put it in what I wrote about his death last week.

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I do take a black and white view, a yes or no view of a lot of things, but I KNOW that hardly anything is black and white, that the world is full of shades of grey.  Black and white is easier, in a way, but it is often wrong too.  The complexities of life make it necessary to see the grays more clearly than the black and white.

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Here though, is a kind of monotone look at us humans:

Yesss, we’re much better than animals.  Why, if left to themselves, you know that none of them would destroy the world.  Like we’re doing.

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Back to work tomorrow.  Well, I did work early this morning too, but I finished right at 5 am, so it’s almost like I had the day off.  I didn’t do all that much; talked on the phone to one of my favs here, did some of the laundry, went out and bought a take and bake pizza, napped, and played a little bit with Blacky Cat.

I did some remembering today too; the last entry was a favs only thing that took some thought.  Not the most pleasant of memories, but then again, not the worst.

I don’t have any Thanksgiving plans, sigh.  It’s pointless to make a turkey and all the trimmings for just myself, although I know Blacky loves turkey and would be happy to share the bird with me.  I have no idea what I’ll do that day, but last year, I went out and bought a small bottle of Wild Turkey, and what the hell, I might do that again.

One last thing.  I was watching what has become a regular show on TV for me, "Corner Gas" a Canadian TV program set in Saskatchewan, and on the wall of the gas station, there was a bunch of car license plates.  One of them was an Oregon PUC plate, off a commercial truck.  T’was kinda nice to see.

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