I just plugged in my new clock radio and turned on one of the local NPR stations to hear a familiar Minnesota voice broadcasting from the Kansas state fair!
I am sitting in my new home, listening to a radio host from my old home, which is airing from my first home.
Nothing involving politics, humanitarian aid or really anything of consequence.
I received my desk today, and I put it together. Slowly my room is coming together.
I now have a bed (with frame!!!) and a desk. Soon I should have my curtains.
Then I can focus on the most important component, but the ones I've had the hardest time deciding on:
The Bookshelves.
Soon I will be unpacked out of all of these boxes piled on my floor.
Soon.
I received my receipt for my Red Cross donation. It took them quite a while to send it - they must be very backlogged, which is sort of a good thing I guess. Not the backlogging, but the overwhelming response of donations.
Anyway, at the bottom of the email was this:
Please note that in accordance with IRS regulations, no goods or services were provided by the American Red Cross as part of this contribution.
I hope this isn't the reason aid was so slow in getting to the Gulf region.
I have a friend that made a challenge to her friends on Wednesday.
She would match any donation made to a FEMA approved charity up to a total of $1000. By the end of the day on Thursday, she had met that $1000 matching donation, had another person donate an additional matching $1000 and yet another person donate to match the next $500 above her original challenge. And her $1000 had turned into $4000.
I can't make the same challenge (having not even started my new job, yet), but she has agreed to publicize any personal matching donations.
Since I was out all day today and building my bed this evening, I didn't get a chance to look at the news until just now (after posting that last entry). And now my previous post seems callously cheerful.
What is wrong with the world? The hurricane wasn't as bad as it could have been. Then the flooding started. Now the violence.
This doesn't seem real. Too much like the plot to a bad sci-fi movie.
I can't come up with words right now, but I am feeling queasy thinking of the inhumanity to which the scarcity of food, fresh water and other resources has driven New Orleans.
(I get to use this category again after quite a while!)
Next week I will start my new job. Quite an appropriate way to end a dry spell of joblessness - by starting a new job on the day after Labor Day. I am glad that the U.S. doesn't celebrate Labor Day (or I guess that is "Labour Day") in May like the rest of the world. I don't think I could stand waiting another 8 months to get a job!
The past two days, I've been scouting out furniture for my room, now that I know I will have an income again. I even drew up an almost accurate pseudo-blueprint of the room and made copies so I could try out the spacing on different furniture arrangements. I bought my bed today - a simple, "natural" color platform bed. Paired with the "natural" color bookshelf that was left by the former inhabitant of the room and my "natural" color folding tray/table (and the light wood floor), I think I may have doomed myself to shopping for a desk and bookshelves at a certain Scandinavian allen-wrench assembled furniture warehouse... Fortunately bright yellow and blue would not match my current color scheme (of black and red), so I think I am safe from becoming too much of an Ikea showroom.