Unpaid Product Endorsement: Bissel Lift Off

We found our rugs!

Happy Valentine's Day!

It is always great to hang out with Yoders. Simon also had a great time with Rio. Even when his nose exploded when she accidentally head-butted him. (Don't look unless you are brave!)

Update: Matt just emailed a photo he took of Simon going down the slide at the park. This dog will do anything to follow his beloved tennis ball. If you look carefully, you can see the smile on his face!

Prayer Requests

Please keep the following folks in your thoughts and prayers:

* Our neighbors, Erin and Randy; Erin's mother was in a fatal car accident.
* Our neighbor Dominque, whose father passed away this week.
* My favorite professor, Dr. Harris, whose mother passed away this week.

Procastination

While I accomplished a lot today, I also did a fair amount of procrastinating. We can safely blame most of that lost time on my childhood journals.

Over the weekend, while hanging out with my family to celebrate my father's birthday, my parents gave me yet another box of stuff they have been storing for me. The box contains journals from high school (the biggest time-suck) and lots of my notebooks from elementary school. This stuff is comic gold and I spent most of the day crying with laughter.

For example, at the end of every assignment in 2nd grade, we got to do a little free-style writing while using words or ideas from the main portion of the assignment.

This one reads,
GOOSE
Once I was giving bread to ducks and one goose, and the goose took the hole peas of bread out of my hand and I said. "Hay you." Thair is a tone called Duck. I love goose. Take a cap.
This one is the best:
Writing a Letter
Dear Linh Truong,
I miss you very much.
At recess I have no one to play
At school no one sits in your dest and no one dos think my freckles on my forhead look ugly.
Sign,
Laura
[Linh was my best friend in elementary school. Even though she was thinner than me, her nickname for me was "Chicken Bone" because I was skinny. I thought everything she said was the funniest thing ever. She is now a gorgeous weather forcaster in the Bay area.]

Other classics include:

Something to Share
If I had to share something I would shara the air.
[To which, Ms. Heckman wrote, "Really, Laura. Wouldn't there be anything else you could share?"]

The Goat French Toast
Ingredients: Book, shoelasis, radio, socks, pains and shirt. You need a bowl put the eggs in the bowl and do not! I repeat! do not! skrabil the eggs! and then tie and shoelasis arond the egg tirn the radio on then get a hammer and then smash the radio. Put sock in the bowl and pains in the bowl and shirt mix it up for a year. Do not! I repeat! do not! take the shell out of the goat french tost!

A Special Day
When I and my brother and dad went to the air show and I took pitchers at the air show.

And just for you, dear readers, here's a picture of my brother and I at the air show.

I know that all kids at this age are funny and make funny spelling errors. I think these notebooks delight me so much because I vaguely remember writing and thinking a lot of these things. It's joy to go back and re-visit these thoughts and ideas.

Update: Ended up (electronically) sending Linh the note that I wrote to her a long time ago. She responded with, "Oh Laura...you're sooo sweet. I love that letter!!! I honestly had the best childhood ever. I loved everything about Carlisle and all the great friends I made at Mooreland. I really miss those days. Thank you for sharing that with me. I will cherish that forever. Miss you..Chicken Bone!"

Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse

"Prison populations have grown mostly through society's locking up ever-increasing numbers of young men, especially black men, largerly from impoverished places. The concentration of imprisonment of young men from disadvantaged places has grown to such a point that it is now a bedrock experience, a force that affects families and children, institutions and businesses, social groups and interpersonal relations. With its isolation of people from poor places, incarceration does more damage than good, including increases in crime. In this way, incarceration has become part of its own dynamic. Imprisonment has grown to the point that it now produces the very social problems on which it feed. It is the perfect storm.

Uninformed public sentiments and practiced politial interests have created a malignant foundation for our crime-prevention policy. Legislative changes lean only in the direction of ever-growing punitiveness, drawing more and more young people – especially black men – into the system’s clutches. The system clutches them; indeed, people who get caught up in the penal system stay there longer, are subjected to more controls, and suffer a greater chance of failure than ever before in history. Faced with this situation, policy makers think only of becoming more strict and more punitive, more damaging, for an ever wider range of misbehaviors, drawing into the storm an ever larger group. As that group grows, the ripple effects of the damage also grow, crossing the social networds of those poorer communities and extending into future generations. Crime goes up, crime goes down; yet in a weirdly disconnected fashion, prison populations increase regardless.

The concentration of imprisonment among young black urban males is so extreme today that many of us simply assume that, when we encounter a young black man, he has a criminal record; and so we take what seems like appropriate precautions. As a matter of cold, hard facts, often these assumptions are correct.  ..."

--Todd R. Clear

 

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These types of topics are what I have been focusing on during my master's program at Temple.

Camden pastor to see bill signing in D.C.Camden pastor to see bill signing in D.C.

A pastor from Camden is expected to stand with President Obama today when he signs legislation expanding health coverage for children.

The Rev. Heyward D. Wiggins III of Camden Bible Tabernacle was invited by the White House yesterday to attend the signing of a bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program, commonly known as SCHIP, according to the group Camden Churches Organized for People.

In 2007, Wiggins testified before a congressional committee urging passage of a previous version of the bill. It was ultimately vetoed by President Bush.

- Matt Katz, Philadelphia Inquirer

Update: Here's video of CCOP's own Rev. Wiggins at the signing! He can be seen starting at the 18:54 mark. You should watch the whole thing to learn about the importance of this bill, which offers medical insurance to working families.

CCOP Stands with Congressman Pallone for Children's Health

By JOSEPH GIDJUNIS Courier-Post Staff • January 26, 2009

CAMDEN - Seventh and eighth graders at St. Joseph's Pro-Cathedral Elementary School stood in frigid temperatures Monday morning holding signs asking Congress to pass legislation reauthorizing and expanding health care for low-income children.

Members of the Camden Churches Organized for People, spoke about the need to reauthorize and expand SCHIP, or the State Children's Health Insurance Program. This federal program is funded jointly by Washington and each state, to cover children in low-income families - but these families make too much money to qualify under Medicaid. The additional aid money would come from a increase in the national tobacco tax.

Two years ago the expansion of the program was vetoed by former President George W. Bush, arguing that children and their families had reasonable alternatives such as community health centers and emergency rooms to meet their needs, said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., NJ-R. Now with President Barack Obama in office, the legislation is expected to pass. The House passed the bill Jan. 14, 244-178, according to the Congressional Record.

"The biggest group of uninsured Americans is children," Pallone said on the steps of the Camden school. "Children should be able to go to a doctor on a regular basis."

Pallone said it's not only important to pass the legislation, but make efforts to register more children because many aren't receiving the aid their entitled to receive.

New Jersey Senator Frank Pallone Jr., answering an 8th-grader's question
at the press conference

Beach Weekend

Since dogs cannot go on most of the beaches of the Jersey shore during the summer, we decided to take Simon this weekend so that we could all enjoy the ocean and get a blast of fresh air.