A Slow Day and a Busy Mind

We got off to a slow start today. It was raining hard and there was no need to hurry.

It was 11:00 before we finally went off to the grocery store. Tom never goes with me to shop for groceries, except the last two times. He went so he could buy Powerball tickets. I guess we'll have something to listen for this evening. Last time we got one number match out of three tickets. Dream on.

Last evening we listened to, and watched the President give his SOTU speech. I was inspired and uplifted by his words and his presentation. I know many don't agree with his politics, but how he can be so despised and hated confounds me. He is truly a GOOD man. 

I loved some of his lines. These are not exact quotes, because I don't feel like taking the time to look them up again:
     Food stamp recipients didn't cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.
     When there's trouble anywhere else in the world, they don't call China or Russia, they call US. 

He talked about wanting everyone to vote, not suppressing voting, and drawing district lines that reflected the people living there, not manipulated for political party outcomes. 

I thought he was especially strong in appealing to our better natures. The current political climate is so toxic, so riddled with hate speech and fear mongering.

And yet, I fear this is the case far too often. 

How did I spend the rest of my day? Well, I worked for a while on my photo sorting project. That can be a subject for another day. And I did a lot of reading.

I like to follow politics and current affairs. We get a daily newspaper and I skim read the headlines throughout, and select some articles to read more thoroughly. I usually find one or two editorials to read. 

I also read a lot on line. Facebook links lead me to more than I have time to puruse. One link I have subscribed to now comes to me via email, the Opinion section of the New York Times. There I read today an interesting editorial about how we need to stop evaluating teachers based on testing, and instead consider teachers as learners, look at how we teach them in college, how lacking the on-the-job training and mentoring are, and begin to institute year long paid internships for teachers. Yes!

I got into a debate on Facebook over an editorial written by David Brooks called "The Brutality of Ted Cruz" that I shared on Facebook.  It's very good.

Thomas Friedman wrote today about "The Age of Protest" and the concern that when you raise your voice in protest, you need to settle more quietly into a discussion of the issues before calling for reactive action. 

Paul Krugman writes to assure us that the economy is not tanking and under President Obama things are a whole lot better than they were, even if we have a lot to do to level out the income inequality.

That's some of what's rolling around in my brain today. I did manage to do 11 miles on the stationary bike out in the garage, while reading a novel just for entertainment.

Now it's dark and time to cook dinner. I'll see if I can get my mind going in a different direction.