Blanca

Blanca has come to the library almost every morning this week asking for me to give her tag board from the supply room. She is in 3rd grade. Her teacher is new and she must not realize we aren't supposed to give a child tag board every day, but I don't care. Blanca is a girl who always knows what she is doing. One day she needed it for picture she wanted to draw. The second day it was Saul's birthday and she wanted to make a birthday card. On the third day, she asked me if I had heard about the woman at Winco who got arrested because she didn't have her papers. Blanca needed tag board to make a sign. I asked what she was going to write on her sign, and she said, Stop discrimination, or something like that.

pick your battles

Today I got an email petition from a relative. Sign this if you want to save our Social Security system from illegal aliens. I try to stay away from these things. I don't want to argue over whether it should be called a Christmas tree or a holiday tree (my cousin from Texas) or whether Hugo Chavez is a totalitarian dictator (a friend of my Uncle Joe's) or whether Saddam Hussein is al-Qaeda (my hairdresser in Philomath.) But today I couldn't hold myself back. I replied-all to point out that the petition was
1. inaccurate (they do pay taxes)
2. meanspirited
3. whoever wrote the petition didn't even use correct punctuation. You do not use an apostrophe to make a plural, for crying out loud