November 24

 Happy Thanksgiving

Hope you all have a good holiday. For some years I have seen articles about achieving a "Work/life balance" or "work/family balance." Usually, I have read (some) and had a very familiar feeling: they didn't seem to know anything about the lives of people at my level of the economy--not quite the bottom. I just finished Robert Reich's Thanksgiving post and it is worth a read. I am glad he was able to make a choice in balancing his family and work he loved. He writes about people who love their work more than their family, love their family more than their work, or those who love both intensely. That's nice but most people I know don't love their but can't leave it or cut back on it because they have to provide for the family they do love. Worse all too often the work they do don't love doesn't even provide an adequate living for the family. 

Gizmodo provides the current "Oh, S$#t" moment. Add the Rio Verde Foothills community to the list of communities facing water crises.

I am not as ungrateful and curmudgeonly as you might think. We do have a lot to be grateful for. We are in reasonably good health. We live in an area that has pretty much escaped the weather disasters so many other places have experienced. The heat wasn't much more or longer than usual though we are grateful for the air-conditioning that made it bearable. We have been able to afford all of the food we need (and some treats we didn't but at our age who cares?) We could afford the gas to get us to and from where ever we had to go and our rent is still affordable for us. Hope we can say the same next Thanksgiving.