"Black Friday" Horror Story

Heavy foot traffic tramples a dozen at local Wal-Marts

Trampled Shoppers Released from Hospital

I have been hearing the term "Black Friday" used a lot this year to describe the post-Thanksgiving shopping rush, so I'm going do my part to keep that meme in circulation. Black Friday used to be the day that the stock market crashed, first in 1929, then more recently in 1987 (which happened while I was in the middle of my epic solo cross-country drive to rejoin my family - then it was Julie, Alyssa and the just-over-two-month-old twins who had moved back to Michigan from California. I was so eager to get back with them that I drove from the state of Wyoming to Grand Rapids non-stop except for gas and food and one short rest break I took just after I crossed the border into Michigan.)

Anyway, the story above mentions customers getting injured in the stampede at Wal-Mart here in Grand Rapids. It has to be read to be believed - wounded consumer handing his VISA card to the store manager to pay for his laptop computer that he's physically unable to retrieve so a newly-befriended fellow shopper grabs the item for him before the victim has to evacuate the battlefield and get medical attention for his injuries.

You can see the video for yourself here, though I don't know how long it will remain on the website: http://video.woodtv.com/

What a disgrace.

Sleepy Snowy Saturday Morning.

I take considerable comfort in knowing that as of now, we are just a little over halfway into the long weekend that Thanksgiving has become for many of us. I'm conscious of a fair number of people who are working it so I don't want to sound too smug, but I really enjoy this time away from the job.

So today is a pleasantly open day - not much of a strong agenda to be concerned about, though there are a few things I gotta get done. Thing is, it's so cold and grey out right now that the natural requirements of the situation are to just bundle up and stay comfortable. A hot beverage will soon be sitting at my side, I'm in my loose warm flannely clothes, two days stubble on my chin, music going on the iTunes (Country Yard by the Vines just finished, now it's Your Loving Flame by Paul McCartney - excellent tunes and tempo for this laid back moment!) - life continues to be good!

On Wednesday morning as I reported to work, the snow had been already begun falling as the meteorologists told us it would throughout the rest of the weekend. Within 15 minutes of my arrival I was involved in a restraint with an angry client who, for reasons I won't attempt to explain here, didn't want to allow us to have our team meeting while she was back on the unit and not in school. She's a strong and violent girl, and she really got worked up, to the point where she was throwing desks and making explicit verbal threats to us. All very irrational and unprovoked, let me assure you - we don't abuse or harrass our kids at Wedgwood - they have explosive tempers prior to coming our way and we work very diligently and specifically to verbally de-escalate them, it's just that sometimes they don't want to engage with us on that level. In fact, she was saying "What do I have to do to get restrained? I want to be restrained!" prior to our second physical intervention with her. She's a big girl and it usually takes three people to safely manage her. Anyway, I've gone into way more detail than I like on that, but I won't delete it... Just let it flow and go from here.

So after that, work settled down quite a bit - the girl we'd restrained turned it around and did much better as the day went on, and we got about our business of sending about half of our group on to visits they had planned with family members or others. Busy but routine for what we do. Then it came time to leave and I was pleased at the prospect of four days off!

We had a pretty ordinary and according-to-script Thanksgiving Day around my home. Julie and Alyssa did most of the food prep, and Julie's mom came over for dinner at mid-day. We had about as traditional a menu as I could imagine and it was all very tasty and satisfying.



I glanced in a few times to see that the Lions were getting pounded in their Thanksgiving Day game, glad that Roy Williams, a wide receiver on my fantasy football team, caught a touchdown and irked at myself for choosing to not play the Falcons defense since they did a great job with sacks, turnovers and points allowed - I would have gotten 14 points from them and I need all the help I can get in this weekend's matchup with the Redondo Roughriders (my team is the Wyoming Tumbleweeds) - I'm 7-4 with a good shot at the playoffs but I'd like to finish in the top 4, not just qualify, so it's important that I win these next two weeks or at least one of them. Hmmm, I suspect that I may be losing your attention here...

Later our family went over to my mom's and we had another big spread of food laid out before us, including five different quiches, salads, hor d'ouevres, desserts, pies, wine... even though I only sampled here and there I left feeling stuffed.

Yesterday I spent the morning catching up on emails and ripping CDs into my computer. I'm still working on rebuilding my library from the computer crash of October, and even with my 48X CD-R drive I still have not gotten everything in my own collection back on to the harddrive. But I'm pretty close. I'm also trying to be more selective in what I slap on there compared to my last collection. I'd like to make each song worth listening to if I put the whole list on Random Shuffle, so I'm deleting stuff that bores me and not getting too concerned with having to archive the entire history of Western Pop Music since 1955 on my computer.

I took Alyssa out around noon in a feeble attempt to cash in on some of the Incredible Bargains advertised in the papers on Thursday but the ones that caught our eye were all sold out. That's OK, I had no interest in sacrificing the pleasantness of a slow and gradual entry into the outside world for the sake of saving fifty bucks or so. The sales clerks I talked to at CompUSA and even Office Depot could only shake their heads in resignation at the evidence of Total Depravity that they witnessed that morning. But we did do a little shopping. I got a CD that my brother-in-law had asked for the night before, and just in time too, because we had plans to join him for dinner that night in celebration of his birthday!

So that's what we did last night - dinner at the Grand Rapids Brewing Company, which is a good restaurant but was very slow last night - strange for a Friday night, but this is not your usual Friday night, I suppose. Here's a picture of him and his gifts - we got him the "Sorcerer" DVD (suspense thriller from 1977, William Friedkin's first post-"Exorcist" film, excellent soundtrack by Tangerine Dream) and the "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs" CD by Marty Robbins that Ed had mentioned just the night before.



My youngest son Derek's birthday is Monday, so we have some shopping to do today. He's asking for accessories and games for his Nintendo DS system, so that's probably gonna be what he gets! He's a great son - getting all A's or A+'s in school, making life pretty hassle free for his mom and dad, just finishing up his drivers training classes, which will make for some interesting decisions as we try to determine just how much snow and icy conditions he's ready to deal with in the months ahead as he gets his hours in...

OK, time to send this off and go get that cup of coffee.

New Toy.

Sandisk - 256MB Digital Audio MP3 Player (Red) - SDMX1-256-A18 - Home Electronics - MP3 Players

I just got one of these today in the mail, so I've been enjoying myself, at last truly joining the portable mp3 trend. It's a nice little unit, small, utilizing flash memory so there's no hard drive to crash. Only takes one AAA battery, holds somewhere between 60 - 120 songs, and it only takes seconds to delete all the old stuff and upload new stuff. I am very happy to have music that I can take with me, bounce around and not have to worry about it skipping. This is all very common and familiar to anyone who's owned an iPod or some similar device, and I've listened to my son Curt's iPod too, but now I have mine, with my music (I loaded Chemical Brothers "Push the Button" and Spiritualized "Let it Come Down" for starters, no particular reason why except that they are both sonically rich albums in their own distinct ways.)

So not much time for emailing and blogging tonight, 'til now. Curt is back in town (from college), I helped make apple sauce tonight, Julie baked a couple of pies, the holiday is almost here and I'm genuinely feeling thankful for life in all it's thorny complexity, anxiety and on-going lack of clear resolution. Life is good.

Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning - Los Angeles Times

Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning - Los Angeles Times

It may well be the case that the IRS is looking into some of the conservative, pro-Republican activity going on in countless churches across the country, but this investigation looks to me like a form of political harrassment aimed at a church that took a provocative anti-war stance and is now feeling the heat from aggravated government officials.

WMJPC mentioned in the local paper.

Buddhist communities lend strength to lost nation

The West Michigan Justice and Peace Coalition, with which I'm affiliated through IGE and numerous friendships, got a mention in yesterday's Religion section of the Grand Rapids Press. So I'm trying another "Blog This" link to see if I can connect readers directly to that article without copying it and pasting it here.

Snow claims young lives

Snow claims young lives

A sad story...

This report is especially poignant to me because my youngest son Derek is currently going through drivers training, he's 15, he's in 10th grade... I'm empathizing pretty heavily with what the mom must be going through... Though I have to wonder what in the world made it so important for a kid that new to driving to go out on the road on the first snowy day of the year and a heavy storm at that. The conditions were terrible for everyone and I saw several accidents in my travels around town on Wednesday. I know for a fact that Derek is simply not going to be driving in such circumstances until probably next winter at the earliest!

Shaking the Foundation of Faith

Shaking the Foundation of Faith - New York Times

This column gave me some amusement so I thought I'd pass it along. It deals with the spiritual interpretation of an earthquake that occurred in New England back in the 18th century. Draws some parallels to the on-going creation/evolution debate that's taking place in various school districts as religious activists try to get "intelligent design" concepts into the curriculum.

I don't intend to post it as a mockery of religious believers though - I'm not pointing at the people who see divine portents in natural phenomenon as objects of derision. I just find it remarkable how differently people interpret the same phenomena and I think it's always important for us to hold our own conclusions somewhat tentatively because in the process of deciding "what is really going on" it's likely that we are excluding perspectives and interpretations that could shed light on the significance of ordinary events.

Weather Hazards for Grand Rapids, MI

Weather Hazards for Grand Rapids, MI

IT'S BAA-AACK!

Just seems like it was a short while ago that I was complaining on this very blog about the misery inflicted by a big dump of snow we had here this past March. I guess it wasn't that long ago, now that I think of it. But just a couple days ago I was saying how pleasant this year's autumn had been, that we were into double digit dates in November and still wearing short sleeves, enjoying more sunshine than we might ordinarily expect, and so on.

That all changed today.

Snow fell, it's accumulating and it won't be melting away anytime all that soon. Probably not through the weekend at least. Wow, what a transition to get used to again, bundling up, wind whipping freezy blasts upon exposed skin, pulling out the thicker shirts and maybe even sweaters?!?! I'm not ready for that yet - kind of like holding out from having to turn on the furnace for as long as you can. You just don't want to go there until it can no longer be avoided.

In other news, I'm done with trainings for a little while now, feeling relieved and happy to have gotten through them all. I can go focus more of my attention on my beloved Delta home and see what I can do to help lighten the load that our needy and mixed up girls put on themselves and the people around them. So that's what I'll be doing for the rest of this work week!

Still running the gauntlet.

I am in the midst of another busy stretch. It just doesn't seem to stop, but that's the way I set it up for myself I guess. Yesterday was full of meetings and interviews at work, then I spoke and facilitated at the 26th annual meeting of IGE in the evening. That was a very nice event - positively energizing for me and I imagine many others who were there. We have a good group doing worthwhile and important things even if our message and priorities don't often seem to prevail in the political sphere. But I feel motivated to step up my efforts on behalf of IGE.

Today I have to lead our last Trauma Sensitive Treatment training (in the morning) and another Handle-With-Care session at night. How is it that so many events get scheduled for such a compact period of time? I'm paying more attention to this stuff as we set up the schedule for the next year. No more than one training per day please!

OK, that's pretty much it for now. I gotta get going but I'm trying to stay more on top of my blogging in this new "drive by" style, so wish me well and leave comments if you please!

Busyness is Winding Down... Sorta.

A couple posts ago I spelled out the heavy load of tasks that I'm currently working through and I'm pleased to note that not only have I gotten several of them done, they've turned out pretty well. Particularly the long day of training that I had to co-lead yesterday. The comments we got from the audience indicated a high level of satisfaction and that leaves me feeling satisfied too.

Last night I actually got a chance to unwind a bit and just enjoy a night out. Julie and I went to see Calvin College's production of "As You Like It" which was nice and light and entertaining. Nothing too profound to say about it, merely that it was an enjoyable diversion and it is both good and necessary to take one's mind off of responsibilities and things to be accomplished every so often. I've had a bit of a difficult time doing that as of late.

I'm testing a new extension to Firefox that is supposed to make it easier for me to add to my blog so without any further ado I'm gonna hit the Publish button and see what happens. If it works, maybe I'll update this thing more consistently!

Audioslave in Grand Rapids

I had a great day today - took it off of work since I have to do a long training session on Saturday, spent some time at home this morning refining the material that I'll be presenting. Took care of a few tasks that I mentioned in my Too too busy post the other day, that felt good. Like I'm getting a bit more on top of the load rather than having it roll over me.

But the best part came tonight when I had the privilege of working a literature table at an Audioslave concert here in town tonight. It wasn't a Van Andel Arena event - it was held at the DeltaPlex, the same place I saw Pearl Jam in October 2004 in their Rock for Change tour aimed at unseating George Bush as president. (It didn't work entirely, but Kerry did take Michigan at least... and we all know about how the vote was rigged in Ohio, but that's a different subject, innit?)

The West Michigan Justice and Peace Coalition was contacted late last week to see if we would have any interest in setting up a table at the show. If you don't know who Audioslave are, they're comprised of 3/4ths of Rage Against the Machine plus the vocalist Chris Cornell who used to be with Soundgarden. Among fans of heavy rock, Audioslave is something of a "supergroup" similar to old bands like Blind Faith that featured musicians who had earned a lot of fame joining together after their original groups broke up.

So of course I jumped at the chance. It worked out perfectly because I had already arranged to have today off so it presented no conflict for me to go down to the IGE office and collect several stacks of brochures, newsletters, posters and other handouts that we could distribute to the politically enlightened crowd of twenty-somethings (and others) that Audioslave was sure to attract.

Well, maybe "politically enlightened" is not the most accurate way of putting it. Oh, we had enough interest in our stuff to make the effort worthwhile (I would have been happy to be there even if not a single person came to our table, but thankfully that was not the case.) But if we had been selling $30 T-shirts and $55 hoodies, we would have attracted a lot more attention than we did for having stacks of free socially-conscious reading material for the taking. I'm not complaining, just observing how eager so many people are to spend big bucks on alt-rock fashionable body covering but how hesitant they are to peruse ideas that might cut slightly against the grain of what they are accustomed to thinking.

But enough about that - the fact is, we had many fine, satisfying, intriguing conversations with people who were willing to engage us on the issues we represented. Our table covered the following topics: Locally-grown food collectives, environmental preservation, the imminent vote on drilling in ANWR, dealing with military recruiters, the war in Iraq, Chinese oppression of Tibet, fair trade (as opposed to "free trade"), and a number of organizations affiliated with the Coalition that just wanted to publicize their existence, including the Institute for Global Education (IGE.) I talked with people who were mostly sympathetic to my stance on the issues (opposition to war is my big one) but there were a couple of conflictual encounters which could wind up turning into more extended debates if my offer of an email contact is taken up on their end. I'll let you know. One that I'm hoping for is from a veteran of the Iraq war, a young man who took some offense at the slogan we put up on the wall, "War Threatens Democracy." I didn't coin the phrase, but it makes sense to me. He challenged me to convince him of the validity of that statement.

OK, I'm getting sleepy now so I'm going to wrap it up here. I'll say that, musically, Audioslave were excellent. While I will always regret the fact that I never got to see Rage Against the Machine live, I think that Audioslave is a worthy project for the RATM players to be involved with. Chris Cornell is a different type of singer than Zak de la Rocha, but he did a credible job covering Rage's "Sleep Now in the Fire." He's got a powerful, soulful voice that is better for swelling up to strike strong on the long hollers, not so suited to machine-gun paced rapping which is what a lot of the best RATM material demands. Apparently he's known as a somewhat inconsistent live performer whose voice can slip off key or sound shreddy from time to time, but I suppose that's the risk one takes putting the vocal chords to the test night after night as Cornell does. His songs are not all that easy on the throat, I imagine!

As for the instrumental accompaniment, the three players are sheer wizards. Tom Morello is a brilliant pyrotechnic guitarist and the bass/drum combination is funky, tight and flawless. I'm not as familiar with Audioslave's album material as I could have been but I dug their performance and had a fantastic time with my son Brandon, who became interested in activism all of a sudden when I told him it could get us into the concert for free! We were joined by Diane from the Coalition and her daughter Annaflora, who like Brandon is also 18 and a student at Grand Rapids Community College. Brandon took this picture so he's not in it...



But here's one of him feeling kind of geeked to be backstage before the show!

Too too busy.

I'm only writing this because I said I would earlier this morning. I ought to be in bed right now, and shortly will be. Here's what I have going on.

1. Leading a training in LSCI for one of our teams at Wedgwood at 8 am Tuesday morning.
2. Working a peace and social justice literature table at the Audioslave concert in Grand Rapids on Wednesday night, plus gathering all the materials tomorrow and Wednesday for the dozen or so groups that I and a few others will be representing.
3. Preparing for five hours of training that my boss and I will be leading this coming Saturday, including two hours of material that I've developed but haven't yet fully refined to the point I'd like it.
4. Juggling my long-standing duties as a home supervisor for the other half of my job at Wedgwood - a very complex set of responsibilities that I don't have the time to describe now, but trust me, it's a LOAD!
5. Among the tasks of #4, I turned in three resignation letters to Human Resources today from our staff! One full-time and two part-time positions. This is not a sign of people bailing out - they all had valid reasons for changing their roles - two at least will still work on-call - but it's still a big turnover.
6. Financial stuff involving my son who's away at Spring Arbor University.
7. Financial stuff involving another son's car which needs an estimated $1700 in repairs, supposedly.
8. Financial stuff involving my youngest son getting into drivers ed (which he started tonight) and some other significant bills which my weary brain can't even remember at this moment except that it's going to cost a few hundred... oh yeah, a passport for his trip to China next summer.
9. Decision making about taking on the treasurer responsibilities for the high school band boosters group next fall.
10. Decision making about whether this is a good time to go back and get my MSW or not.
11. I have to make a speech at next Monday's IGE meeting (a local peace activist group of which I'm a board member.)
12. Any number of household tasks that should be done before the snow starts falling.
13. Finishing up Wedgwood's Diversity Digest newsletter (which I edit and write for.)

That's 13, a nice crooked number to stop with. I could add a few but that gives a sense of my mental work load. But I will accept it gladly as the fruit of a busy and involved life, thankful for the abilities that I have to do a fairly good job at the many tasks entrusted to me.

And now, a picture of my four children who were all together at our house for about less than an hour of waking time this past weekend, but it did afford me this one chance to get a pick of the four of them together just before Curt (in the cap, eating a tuna roll) and Alyssa headed back to their college dorms...

A pointless post.

Well, for being "back" I haven't done all that much here lately. I am still doing some little tweakings here and there on my computer, and I've been prioritizing other things, but there's something holding me back from blogging. I can feel it, though I'm not sure exactly what it is. Even now, I'm just dropping a few lines without having any particular point or objective or story to tell. Obligatory blogging is what it is. OK, so I've named it. Set that aside.

Really I should just be getting ready for work! I will add more to this later today, I PROMISE! But not now...