This lovely wall I found at Marko’s Bull Terrier site is what’s currently gracing my home office computer. (The Sony Vaio RB43G desktop upstairs in my office.)

Most of you who know me know that I switched to working nights at Mega Law Firm so that I could be free during the day to take Robert to his various medical appointments and to develop the web design business that I have with my friend. It’s worked out beautifully. Of course, as my supervisor correctly predicted, gone now are the first few days when it seemed like the day stretched out forever and wouldn’t end. Lately, I look at the clock and it’s 8AM and then I look again and, yikes! it’s already 3:30PM and time to get ready for work. Here’s my schedule, in a nutshell. There are four of us, split into two teams of two each. One week, Team A works 3:30PM-11PM Monday through Friday and has Saturday and Sunday off. Team B works from 4:30PM-11PM Monday through Friday AND works from 11AM-4PM on Saturday. Then we flip, so that we all work every other Saturday. I HATE the early weeks when I have to be at the office at 3:30PM. The only upside to that is the 2-day weekend. But seriously, I’d rather work every single Saturday of my life and come in at 4:30PM during the week. Why that hour makes such a difference is a mystery, but it does!

I’m pretty well known around the Big Law office for remaining calm under pressure. Just this past week, I was handed a project taken over from someone else where the lawyer involved seemed nervous and not confident that person could get the job done on time to meet the Fedex deadline. After the lawyer explained the task to me (and it was quite similar to other things I’d done for him in the past) and after I shooed him away from my desk, telling him only to come out of his office when and if he heard me scream, I was able to take care of the remaining task items (five Fedex packages with three Fedex slips each, for a total of 15 Fedex slips) within half an hour, well within the 8PM deadline. I took the slips and Fedex envelopes in to the legal assistant who was standing in the middle of the room, perplexed about how to assemble and stuff the packages. I took that over, and handed the stack of five packages to him to take to our waiting Fedex representative.

I learned a long time ago that TWO overwrought, nervous people is not a good thing where a deadline is involved. One of us has to remain calm. That’s generally me, so I go ahead and let the lawyers run up and down the hall tearing their hair out. Once I’ve gotten the project done, they calm down pretty quickly. (Then it’s my turn to do the Daffy Duck routine up and down the hall.)

• Congrats to Serbian water polo team on bronze medal in Euro Championship! #

• RT @Burek "In their DNA, there is only the word win, something very typical of the Serbs" ~ Marca after the game #

The horrific sight of burning buildings might have been a new vista for Americans on September 11, 2001, but it was certainly nothing new to the rest of the world. In fact the list of countries who have experienced that magnitude of violence at the hands of the U.S. is quite long.

But there’s nothing that I could say that Robert Jensen, UT-Austin Professor of Journalism, hasn’t said better. This text, republished at CommonDreams.org, is from a speech he gave at an anti-war rally on September 11, 2005, in Austin, Texas. I agree wholeheartedly.

There was nothing special about the pain of Americans on September 11, 2001. And there is no hope for this world until we in the United States — the most powerful and affluent country in the history of the world — understand that.

The deaths of 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania mattered, but no more and no less than the thousands of other deaths in the world that day, and the day before, and the day before that. Or the deaths since, as the United States has used the grief of Americans to justify two illegal wars of aggression, wars to consolidate the power and control of the few, wars accepted by the many out of moral laziness and fear.

All over the country today, people will be speaking about the nobility of the United States, the barbarism of the attacks on us, the deep suffering of Americans. I will do none of that.

I will not mark September 11 as a day of special grief until all of us mark every day as a day of special grief for those killed by the callous and cruel exercise of power. I am through indulging the grief of Americans. I will not be part of it. I will not contribute to it any longer.

Indeed. The fact of the matter is that we got a small taste of the kind of senseless violence that we routinely visit upon other nations. And this has been going on for decades; it’s nothing new. Just ask the children of Nicaragua, Chile, Viet Nam, the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia, Zaire, etc., etc., etc.

So pardon me if I refuse to raise a flag in memory of a terrorist act committed against this country. While I mourn the deaths of the innocent American citizens who perished that day, not because they were fighting a war they believed in, but because they were victims of circumstance, I will not mourn the acts of THIS country which now uses that event as justification for further violence. Patriot Day? It’s just another way to celebrate war and violence.

This article was based on another article authored by Joni Mueller and published on September 10, 2006 at My.Opera.com.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times… In life after life, in age after age, forever. My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs, That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms, In life after life, in age after age, forever. Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it’s age old pain, It’s ancient tale of being apart or together. As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge, Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time. You become an image of what is remembered forever. You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount. At the heart of time, love of one for another. We have played along side millions of lovers, Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting, the distressful tears of farewell, Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever. Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you The love of all man’s days both past and forever: Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life. The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours - And the songs of every poet past and forever. ~~ Rabindranath Tagore ~~

• Geeks, rejoice! Houston's Jim Parsons wins Emmy for Big Bang Theory http://t.co/1M5iPrk via @culturemap #

How can so many silly, sophomoric, asinine, hateful, bigoted groups and pages exist unmolested, yet Facebook can shut down someone’s account for a week for a less offensive sin? Hmm? How? How does this shit slip past their radar? It really has to make one wonder.