A few random thoughts -

*****I'm tired -It's 1:30 and I still have my blog to update!

*****Tonight was church choir night - I rush home as quickly as I can from work - generally get here between 6:15 & 6:30 - snarf something down (tonight it was popcorn!) and then we have to leave by 7:00 to get to Blaine by 7:30.

Our choir has been shrinking. 10 years ago we had about 16 or 17 members - it is the only choir I've ever been in where there were more basses than sopranos! But we are down to 9 members! We have lost all our basses except for The Shepherd (who is our director) - one of our tenorettes has a broken arm so she's out for the rest of the year - (two retired sisters are tenors so we call them the tenorettes) one of the altos had another meeting conflict and one of our two remaining sopranos is sick, AND our accompanist (92 year old Reah) is just back from being ill with the flu since Christmas! We have a good time though. Tonight we worked on some songs that we haven't sung for a while and we didn't sound half bad.

We are starting to do more things a capella to make it easier on Reah - We have a choir service in March and Easter and Mother's Day coming up too. It is going to be an interesting spring.

*****I get emails from Sunset magazine with recipes, ideas for garden plans, etc. Today it was recipes - 25 reasons to love Bacon. Like I need another reason to love bacon.....

*****On the whole, I am not a very politically "active" person - I AM a card carrying Demo - but all they got from me was $25 - so it wasn't a real big deal - they still sent me an inauguration photo of President Obama (doesn't that have a nice ring to it??) amd a nice letter from VP Biden - I think I may write back to him. It seems to me that the Stimulus money would go a lot farther if they suspend the Davis/Bacon/prevailing wage act. They could put two or three times as many people to work if they would do that, and still pay decent wages.

*****I decided when we got home at 9:30 that I needed to wash two more skeins of the "Regina" yarn that I spun last fall. I'm using it to make the Scarves for Soldiers Scarf (yes, I'll tell you more about that soon) but I ran out just before I got to the required length and didn't get the edging finished either, so one more skein to go. Might as well wash both the skeins that I have left, so I put them in a sink full of hot soapy water and came back to the computer to work on my NO NAIS WA letters to my state representatives and senator. A group of concerned people have gotten bills before BOTH our state House and Senate Agriculture committees to make NAIS VOLUNTARY in Washington state.

I don't think is is possible to stop NAIS - it is already part and parcel of the USDA - BUT they have given the states the option to make it a voluntary program - seems to me the best way to go. I hope that the efforts of these people come to fruition. Anyhow - copy & pasting all those (25) letters into emails took me over an hour or more - remember I had those two skeins of yarn in hot water? Well, it wasn't too hot after all that time - so I just finished rinsing it and hung it to dry. I think it will be OK.

*****During Joys & Concerns on Sunday, someone told of the death of a one year old baby in the community, from complications of croup - a virus that is characterized by a barking type of cough. It seems terribly sad to me that in a country as rich as ours that children can die of a simple childhood disease. Terribly sad.

So, I'm off to bed I guess. My eyelids are so heavy that just about every time I blink I fall asleep - yup, better get to bed.