SATURDAY

I went to my new bank this morning and am very impressed at the little rose garden area where customers can sit and watch the world go by - not I suspect, that many do, but it looks nice.

 The only thing missing inside the bank is the filtered coffee (am I spoiled or what) but maybe that's because it is too big a bank.  By the time the teller finished sorting me out (they are not yet used to me, or to foreigners transferring money from their home banks) the queue was ten deep behind me.  They would have needed two or three pots of coffee.

Pattisue was feeling surprisingly well after her chemo yesterday and we went to lunch at the Korean restaurant, which is fast becoming my favourite.  She wanted to go to lunch but wasn't sure how she was going to feel by lunchtime, nausea is a common side effect, so I told her to ring me when she knew, they were open until 3.  I had intended going to the track at the YMCA to put in a few miles walking (or maybe a couple) but apart from the bank I stayed in instead to wait her phone call.  I'll try and go tomorrow.  

I forgot to mention yesterday that I passed a pathetic little demonstration downtown, a handful of people protesting against the evil rich people.  I asked Fr Clark (whose politics are to the left of Karl Marx) why there was such lack of support; are all the residents of Shawnee members of the evil rich themselves.  But he said that most residents are fellow travellers who believe that God has decreed unbridled predatory capitalism, and the belief that if one is rich then that is because it is the will of God, and if poor then ipso facto it is because one is either not liked by God, insufficiently pious, or does not have enough faith that God will make him rich.


I didn't think God had anything to do with it, I thought myself - and I have yet to put this to Fr Clark - that Republicans believed that people were rich because they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, overcame their difficulties, worked hard, and didn't whine for handouts and entitlements like we do in Europe where socialism (according to them) doesn't work.  

He knows me well enough that I can voice my sardonic criticisms, that I'm just the foreign bystander here.

We have had some much needed rain this evening, and thunder and lightning.  Bubbles scuttled off to her tornado shelter in my closet, so I folded up the fleecy blanket she lies on so she'd have somewhere soft to sit on in the closet (isn't she the pampered pet) but when I looked in on her she'd wedged herself instead between a storage container and the wall.  Perhaps I'd better use the closet instead of the bathroom as a tornado shelter, she would obviously be happier there than in the bathroom.