It’s a little after midnight, it’s quiet here on the second floor, and my children just called me to tell me goodnight.  I sit here listening to the clock tick, and somewhere I hear an IV pump beeping.  My coworkers are discussing their favorite country music stars, and what their children did for Halloween.  It’s a typical night, I suppose, which is a bit weird to me because today is going to go down in history.

Almost fifty-three years ago, Rosa Parks started the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.  And forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC.   Today, we are likely going to elect the first African-American President of the United States.  I am cautiously optimistic.  I want so much to believe that our country has come that far in stamping out intolerance and bigotry. I want so much for the reign of the “good ole boys’ club” in America to be over.  I want to have the hope for our future that will come with knowing that over half of our citizens were able to stand up and say “enough”, while putting their trust in the biracial son of a single mother. 

I have already voted, but today, my boys and I will walk up to the nearest polling place (which is a block from our house), and we will stand outside for a while and watch the voters come and go.  I want them to remember this day when they’re grown.  I want them to remember when they watched history in the making.  I want them to feel the wave of hope and relief that is likely going to wash over our family and many of our friends tomorrow night when the new president is announced.  I want them to remember the end of the Bush era.

Today, Americans everywhere are holding their breath…

(Stolen from a Wikipedia article).

Occasionally, individuals have sought to excel in subjects outside the mainstream of conventional education:

• Socrates, Avicenna, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Feodor Chaliapin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Alva Edison and many others were autodidacts. Karl Popper never took courses in philosophy and he did his initial work in the philosophy of science during the late 1920s and early 1930s while he was teaching science and math in high school. He then turned to the social sciences and attempted to transform them as well, again without any formal training or official mentoring. The best source for this story is Malachi Hacohen’s book “Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945″.

• The cognitive scientist Walter Pitts from the MIT was an autodidact. He taught himself mathematical logic, psychology and neuroscience. He was one of the scientists who laid the foundations of cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and cybernetics.

• Forensic facial reconstruction artist Frank Bender is self-taught. His well-known forensic career started off with a day trip to a morgue, asked to try to put a face on the deceased, brought measurements home, created a successful facial reconstruction that led to his first (of many) IDs. He only took one semester of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

• Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and Newton’s contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were largely self-taught in mathematics, as was Oliver Heaviside. Ramanujan is notable as an autodidact for having developed thousands of new mathematical theorems despite having no formal education in mathematics.

• A number of famous British scientists in the nineteenth century taught themselves. The chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, the natural historians Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) and Henry Walter Bates, “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer.

• Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea depicts an autodidact who is a self-deluding dilettante.

• Physicist and Judo expert Moshe Feldenkrais developed an autodidactic method of self-improvement based on his own experience with self-directed learning in physiology and neurology. He was motivated by his own crippling knee injury.

• Gerda Alexander, Heinrich Jacoby, and a number of other 20th century European innovators worked out methods of self-development which stressed intelligent sensitivity and awareness.

• John Boyd, fighter pilot and military strategist, was an accomplished autodidact who not only revolutionized fighter aircraft design, but also developed new theories on learning and creativity.

• Mythologist Joseph Campbell exemplified the autodidactic method. Following completion of his masters degree, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate, and he went into the woods in upstate New York, reading deeply for five years. According to poet and author Robert Bly, a friend of Campbell’s, Campbell developed a systematic program of reading nine hours a day.

• The musician Frank Zappa is noted for his exhortation, “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.”

• Mark Twain is known to have said: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

• Playwright August Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade but continued to educate himself by spending long hours reading at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library.

• Arnold Schoenberg called himself an ‘autodidact’ in an interview.^[1] Other largely self-taught composers include notably Joachim Raff, Georg Philipp Telemann and Edward Elgar.

• Several notable people considered to have an inspirational religious message have been autodidacts: for instance John Bunyan, George Fox and Rodney “Gypsy” Smith.

• Many successful filmmakers did not attend college or dropped out. These include Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston and Steven Soderbergh.

• Penn Jillette, a member of the comedy and magic duo Penn & Teller, declared both he and his partner Teller to be autodidacts in an episode of their television series, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.^[2]

• Comedian Drew Carey claims that he learned comedy through reading books on the subject.

• Modern Pashto poet Ameer Hamza Shinwari though not educated in the regular manner, was able to establish his career through self-education.

• Robert Lewis Shayon, early radio producer, author, television critic for Christian Science Monitor and The Saturday Review, and Ivy League professor, never had a college education.

• David Bowie, Singer, Musician, Multi-instrumentalist, Actor and Painter. Has never trained in any of these fields and only received a few singing lessons in the 60’s (as reported by his ex manager Ken Pitt) and as a teenager he took some lessons on Saxophone by Ronnie Ross. All other instruments (including Piano, Keyboards/Synths, Rhythm/Electric/Acoustic Guitar, Harmonica, Koto, limited Bass and Percussion), he taught himself. His paintings and sculptures were created (and exhibited) without any formal artschool training. He took a few lessons in Movement and Dance with Lindsey Kemps Dance company but trained himself in Mime.

I just watched an inspiring video that shows some of the faces and voices of people who are building Barack Obama’s movement for change from the bottom up.

I also made a donation to send a message to John McCain that his attacks won’t stop everyday Americans from transforming this country.

Watch the video:
 

http://my.barackobama.com/facesofchange

Having lived in North Carolina all my life, and being the peace-loving, open-minded, humanitarian liberal that I am, I was relieved to hear of the death of Senator Jesse Helms. 

“No American publication would print an obituary such as the one that the Guardian (UK) ran. Read it and remember. His passing marks yet another of the calcified Old Guard gone.” –Anonymous
Obituary: Jesse Helms
Guardian, UK

Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper’s memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity. From his earliest years, Helms’s attitudes recalled those of an earlier southern bigot, Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who so
outraged his Senate colleagues, that they eventually refused even to let him take his seat.

There was never a comparable risk for Helms, who maintained an old-world courtesy in his personal contacts. But that was only on the surface. He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on
American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as “pouring money down foreign rat holes”, and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.

In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”, voted against a supreme court justice because she was “likely to uphold the homosexual agenda”, acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord.

The irony was that he was often seen as a relative moderate in his home state of North Carolina. His views sprang directly from his background as the son of the police chief in the small town of Monroe. Even before the Depression, life there was a constant struggle. It produced generations of deeply conservative poor whites, steeped in jingoistic patriotism and fundamentalist religion, who regarded the surrounding
black population as barely part of the human race.

Helms was educated at local schools and had just enrolled for a college course when America entered the second world war. In 1942, he joined the navy, to be given a role which inadvertently established his
postwar career. As a recruiting officer, he had to make regular patriotic appeals on local radio. They brought him sufficient recognition after the war to abandon his college studies for journalism, initially as news editor of the Raleigh Times and later as director of news and programmes for the principal local radio network.

In 1960, he was given an extraordinary boost when the owner of the main local television station appointed him one of the new medium’s first editorial commentators. For 12 years, Helms appeared nightly at peak viewing time to denounce the civil rights struggle, trade unions, the UN, Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, hippies, and any other social or political development rejected by the extreme right. His commentaries were repeated by 70 southern radio stations and, as they became increasingly popular, reprinted in 200 newspapers across America.

In a climate well to the right of mainstream politics in Europe, Helms became extraordinarily influential among those Americans Richard Nixon dubbed the silent majority. At the same time he built up a solid
political network in North Carolina, working for several conservative senators, serving on Raleigh town council, running the state’s bankers’ association, and joining the Masons, their associates the Shriners, and the Rotarians.

By the time the Republican Richard Nixon moved into the White House in 1969, Helms’s political ambitions had been focused. In 1972, in a state that had voted solidly Democratic since the civil war, he stood for the Senate as a Republican. In a bitter campaign against a middle-of-the- road opponent, Helms won by 8%. It was a signal of the South’s seismic political shift after years of Democratic desegregation. It also made Helms the first North Carolina Republican to sit in the US senate for nearly 80 years.

His initial ambition was to secure his place on the agriculture committee, where he could push the interests of the powerful tobacco lobby for which he had worked for years. But, in a move which proved a stroke of near-genius at a time when direct-mail was in its infancy, he and two close associates organised a postal campaign for a body they named “the National Congressional Club”. The repeated arrival of impressive-looking letters signed by Helms and denouncing school busing, funding for the arts, compensation for Japanese-Americans, the Red menace, and umpteen other liberal causes, sparked a stunning national response.

His allegations were often mind-numbingly bizarre. “Your tax dollars are being used,” he claimed in one letter, “to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and
the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behaviour.” But his rhetoric convinced millions of Americans and, invited to save the nation by donating a dollar, they did just that. A river of cash poured
into the club.

What happened to it all remained a constant mystery and, as the rules on election finances were slowly tightened, the club’s accounts grew ever fuzzier. Some cash certainly went to the Coalition of Freedom,
which had Helms as its honorary chairman until federal tax authorities began investigating its illegal campaign activities.

More than $800,000 went to a firm called Jefferson Marketing. Then the election commission established that this company was inseparable from the club, making its electoral operations unlawful. Less traceable were donations to other conservative groups and to fundamentalist religious figures like Jerry Falwell.

What is beyond question is the malign impact of Helms’s innovation on all subsequent American politics. He inaugurated the age of massive back-door political donations, now euphemistically known as “soft
money”. In his own 1984 re-election battle, he spent $16.5m, then the most expensive Senate campaign in American history (and the federal election commission twice penalised him for using illegal contributions) . Sixteen years later, a New Jersey candidate would lavish $60m on gaining a Senate seat, making it evident how effectively Helms’s initiative had opened political office to the highest bidder.

It had also bankrolled the rise of the religious right and its effective takeover of the Republican party. That in turn polarised the entire American electorate, as the results in 2000 so dramatically demonstrated.

With Helms’s agenda moving into the political mainstream’s opposition to abortion, gun control, foreign entanglements, multicultralism, social welfare, educational reform and a host of other liberal policies, millions of voters dropped out and the rest divided evenly into mutually hostile camps.

For all his political posturing, however, Helms repeatedly showed himself inept at the tedious business of shepherding legislation through Congress.

The Senate’s tradition of choosing committee chairmen by seniority eventually brought him to head the agriculture committee (1981-87). It should have been an enviable chance to promote North Carolina’s farming and tobacco interests, which employ half its people. Yet the state, ranked eleventh by population, had one of the nation’s highest poverty rates and lowest levels of federal funding.

Helms contributed his share to this misery with his ownership of rented houses in poor black districts of Raleigh. Some tenants reported that his properties had been without adequate heating for 30 years. The
city’s building inspectors repeatedly issued summonses against Helms to remedy a wide range of dilapidations, from rotting floors to leaking pipes.

Helms’s principal skill, in fact, was obstruction, which he employed ruthlessly once he assumed chairmanship of the foreign relations committee in 1995, having been a member since 1981. The Senate’s arcane rule book offers virtually uncontrollable power to committee chairmen to determine their own agenda. In a private war with the state department, Helms refused to hold confirmation hearings for 18 new ambassadors, or to debate such key issues for the Clinton administration as the chemical weapons or strategic arms treaties.

He cut the state department’s funds by $1,700m until the administration finally agreed to his reorganization proposals, abolishing the arms control and information services and placing new restrictions on the US aid agency. In 1996, he caused an international furore by joining forces with Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana to push through the Helms-Burton Act, extending American jurisdiction to international companies trading with Cuba.

But continued Republican control of the Senate meant that Helms could not be ignored. He established a Jesse Helms Centre in his home town of Wingate, at which American and foreign dignitaries could pay homage. Those unable to attend in person could demonstrate their goodwill in cash: Taiwan donated $225,000, Kuwait $100,000, and various tobacco companies more than $1m.  Former president Jimmy Carter, secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Dr Henry Kissinger, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and other key public figures all turned up. Eventually even the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, heeded the call: in the aftermath of his visit, the foreign relations committee suddenly released America’s
long-outstanding payments to the UN.

In later years, Helms suffered from increasingly poor health. He contracted prostate cancer and a bone disorder, Paget’s disease, which obliged him to travel round the Senate building on a scooter. He also
underwent a quadruple heart bypass.

Helms finally lost his chairmanship of the foreign relations committee when the moderate Vermont Republican Senator James Jeffords, lost patience with the Bush administration in May 2001. His defection to the Democrats secured their control of the Senate and of all its legislative committees.

This sudden loss of power, allied to his failing health, at last convinced Helms that it was time to give up. In August that year, he announced he would not run again when his term expired in 2002.

Though there was dismay in North Carolina, his decision was greeted with relief by most of the country. The New York Times observed: “Few senators in the modern era have done more to resist the tide of
progress,” and Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, “nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America’s national security more than his retirement.”

He is survived by his wife Dorothy, two daughters and a son.

Jesse Helms, politician, born October 18 1921; died July 4 2008

Today, Seth won Little Canteloupe King 2008 at the Canteloupe Festival. It was 200 degrees outside.   (Ok, so it was only 102).

You see how tall this kid is?  He is up to my shoulder and he is only 6!   Well, almost 7.

And I got a new piece of metal in my face.

Tomorrow, I am workin 12 hours in Pediatrics and I hope it is slow enough that I can write a long entry about how wonderful my life is.

Gah, I am SO tired.  We’ve been getting up at 5 am all week.  

Tired, but happy.   People love us!  No complaints, lots of compliments on the food and coffee.  And our place is already getting “regulars” who come by every morning for coffee, and sit and chat with us and each other.  I’ve got some art on the wall from a local teenager who is an aspiring painter, AND my own black and white photos of a local historic cemetary have gotten a couple of “Are these for sale?”s.    The guy who runs the local theater group asked me today if he could have month poetry readings at the shop.  (Of course he can!)   We are passing the break-even point in sales every day, and I only foresee it getting better.   The locals are super supportive, and I’ve heard “I’m SO glad you’re open!” so many times I stopped counting.

My good friend, Sam, came on our opening day. I hadn’t seen her since Halloween.  She found me next door at a wine tasting.  Heh.  I was tired AND tipsy.  I was so glad to see her, I just wanted to squeeze her.

You know how sometimes you find yourself in a situation, in a moment, where you stop and ask “how the hell did I get here?”

Today, I was in MY coffee shop, pulling a double shot of espresso for a local attorney (he comes in twice a day for the same)…Ani Difranco was playing in the background.   My friend and employee (who is also an unschooling mom) was there with me, and the three of us were laughing about something.

All of a sudden, the last twenty years flashed before me, and I thought, “This is really freakin’ cool.”

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/work-connect/tune-in-to-planet-green.html

The show that John is going to be on is Renovation Nation, hosted by Steve Thomas.

by Kathleen Knapp

I was spanked.  I was sent upstairs, my parents would calmly explain why I was being spanked, they would hit me until it was clear I had been sufficiently punished, and then they would comfort me and tell me they love me. I fully believe that my parents acted in love and did what they believed to be the right thing. They were wrong.

I have no memory of feeling loved or cared for during these episodes. What I remember is terror, pain and humiliation. I remember struggling against my mother’s grip, pleading and weeping while she hit me repeatedly with her hand, a wooden spoon, a ping-pong paddle.

I have little memory of why I was spanked, save for a handful of incidents. One time I lied to my Sunday school teacher that I was older than I was, because I wanted to be in the big kid’s group. My mom took me to the parking lot and spanked me with my dress up in the car. On one memorable day, I was spanked several times as my mom attempted to establish a house of discipline. I remember that one of the offenses that day was forgetting to make my bed.

I remember sitting alone and trying to puzzle out why my parents would hit me, how that it’s possible that these people that I know loved me could do it to me. I had these thoughts as a child, before I was exposed to even the suggestion that spanking could be wrong, let alone attachment parenting ideals. I instinctively knew it was wrong long before anyone spoke the words to me.

At some point, my parents stopped spanking me. I have trouble pinning down what age this was, but their stopping had nothing to do with age. At some point, they simply could no longer stomach it. They, to this day, cannot tell me that they were wrong to do it, or that the practice itself is wrong, but there came a day for them that they realized that this was not the parents they wanted to be.

Some people say that only certain children need to be spanked, so-called “strong willed” children. I was, and am, strong willed.

Why is that a bad thing? Why on earth would any parent want to spank that out of their child?

My strong will enabled me to withstand years of emotional abuse at my high school. It allowed me to continue to believe there was good in me when I was being told every day that I was wrong, defective.

My strong will gave me the power to birth two children with little intervention, and then stand up for them when doctors and teachers and relatives would have harmed them because they believed they better knew how to raise my children.

My strong will has given me the faith to believe in the beating heart of my marriage, the amazing spirit of my husband.

My strong will has given me the courage to discover faith for myself.

My strong will has let me stand up for myself countless times that it would have been easier to lay down and be bullied.

I can live with myself because my strong will has stood against those who would rob me of my dignity.

Believe me when I say that I know how difficult children can be. They do the same wrong things over and over again, and it seems that nothing short of taking off your belt is going to stop them. I would ask you to first stop yourself.

Stop, and try to understand why they are doing what they do. Are they dumping pastry flour on the floor because they hate you and enjoy seeing you work, or are they making it the North Pole in your foyer? Are you going to punish your child something as beautiful as this imagination? I’m not suggesting that you take out the sugar and help him out, but keep your understanding of him in mind as you explain why flour doesn’t make such good snow, then go find a white sheet and give him some lessons in cross-country skiing.

I am not trying to make this sound easy. Today I had to go to the office supply store to send a fax, and my children ran away, up and down the aisles, unable to contain themselves despite my pleas. Did I chuckle and feel wonderment at their innocence? No, I was frustrated and embarrassed, angry. But, putting myself in their shoes for a moment, I had to imagine what a warehouse full of shiny things would do to me if I spent the majority of time at home, unable to choose to drive off to adventure on a whim. There is such a thing as too much temptation for children, and that needs to be recognized. In this situation, my choices would be to either put them in a shopping cart so they couldn’t escape, or take them for a supervised walk through the store so they could safely take in the stimulation. Either action would have solved our problem without violence.

Stop, and try to understand your child’s problem. Your child is not being incorrugible because his most recent spanking has expired. Children do not “need” spankings to be happy and behave properly. They are real, functioning people, and have needs and feelings just like the rest of us. My children are very difficult to control when they are tired, and spanking won’t make them well-rested and content. If one of my boys is a monster for a couple of days in a row, I suspect that he’s getting sick. Young children don’t have the communication skills to tell you they have a sore throat or swollen glands. I have had my kids at the doctor for a check-up and been told that it looks as though they’d had an ear infection recently, but it had cleared up on its own. How would I feel if I have spanked that child for being miserable with an ear infection?

I think that the main reason that children act out negatively is that their needs are simply not being met. This can cover a huge range of things, from time spent with their parents to getting enough sleep to being lactose intolerant. When you are a new mom, they tell you that crying is how babies “talk.” Well, being difficult is often how toddlers and young children “talk.” They have the words, but not always the ability to communicate what they need to.

Choosing not to spank has forced me to think more deeply about my kids’ state of mind, their intentions and their needs. It has encouraged me to find my way into their world, and think creatively about the solutions to our household difficulties. I find one of the best ways of dealing with an ornery child is to hold him close, and talk close to his ear about what is happening. The physical contact immediately relaxes him, and sometimes is all he ever really needed. The first thing I usually ask is what is wrong, why did he do that. We talk about other things he could have done instead. I engage him in the problem-solving part of the conversation, rather than just
lecturing him. If someone was wronged, apologies are in order. If something was messed up or broken, then he must help clean it up.

I do resort to time-outs sometimes, when I feel the need to re-assert my authority. For example, Josiah knows that he’s not allowed, knows it’s dangerous and destrucive, but he really wants the star off the Christmas tree, and it’s the third time that he’s balanced on the back of the couch trying to reach it. Every time I correct him, he waits for me to start doing something else, then goes back to work. I silently admire his strong will, then send him to his room for a few minutes, as much to remove him mentally from the temptation as to provide a consequence for the action. I explain that my job is keeping him safe, and I can’t do my job if I let him go after the
Christmas tree anymore. If I am having a really good day, this is where I suggest something less taboo for him to do. Boredom is the root of a great many difficulties, in my experience.

And you know what, some days just suck. They cry and fight and whine, and as soon as you put one fire out another is started across the room. You feel miserable and helpless. But, you know what? This is simply part of parenting. You cannot erase all the hard days, or even the stretches of hard days every child goes through, by hitting your child.

I recently read about a problem that modern horticulturists are having. Trees aren’t living very long. Modern plants are being bred to grow up fast and pretty, without thought to what it will be fifty or a hundred years from now, and the product are fast-growing trees that do not have the fortitude to resist disease. Realize that children are the same way. It is not your duty to produce perfectly polished, perfectly behaved children, little miniature adults. Children will be immature and rowdy; they aren’t done growing. Your job is to create a happy, healthy adult, one that has been given the freedom to be a child and make messes and mistakes. Remember that when others act as though you should have perfect control over your children at all times, that they should never run or raise their voices. Shoot for the mighty oak, not the pretty little sapling.

I am not mom of the year by any stretch. I lose my temper and get impatient and make mistakes. I am not speaking to you as someone who considers themselves to be a great example of parenting, but as a first-hand witness to the results of the practice of ritual spanking.

If you choose to spank, take responsibility for that choice. Accept that spanking will cause your child terror, extreme pain (just because there are no bruises doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell), humiliation and fear. Accept that your child will have to keep this a careful secret from their friends, who won’t understand this kind of “love.”  Accept that your child will learn to hide his forbidden activities skillfully, and will become a fluent liar, because the punishment is so horrific. Imagine yourself a little child. Imagine, start to finish, what spanking feels like to them.  Imagine how confusing it is to have those loving arms pin him down and hit him.

If you choose not to spank, be bold about your choice. Defend your faith in your child’s good spirit, and your duty to defend that spirit from violence and degradation. If your peers talk negatively about parents who don’t spank, speak up and let them know that you are a member of that “permissive” population. You may just give another mother the courage to choose gentle parenting.

(Printed with exclusive permission from the author).

I was thinking while riding in the car today that I would start posting an occasional photo.  Then again, maybe it will just be this one, and I’ll forget it.  Anyway, I got a new camera last week, to replace my old Canon SD550.  I got a Canon SD870IS.  Still a point-and-shoot, but takes darn good pictures. 

 I was inspired to stop and take a picture of this tree today.  I love oak trees, and I particularly love this one.  I’ve passed by and admired it hundreds of times.  In a few weeks, when it is full of new leaves, the profile won’t be the same.  I like this one bare, against the sky like this, out in the middle of nowhere.  I like the way the conifer to the right seems to be admiring it’s naked beauty.  I caught this between rain showers, so the road is wet. 

Cutting Corners: NC Applebee’s Can’t Afford Breadsticks Or Candles Anymore

The author of the above article offered some advice “to Applebee’s customers” at the end:  “if you have a kid, bring a couple of phone books with you next time. You know, just in case they’ve sold off the booster seats.”

My own advice would be this.  Don’t be an Applebee’s customer anymore.  Just don’t go.  Stay home, make your own huge, glorious birthday cake that your 5-year-old will LOVE, and let him have as many damn candles as he wants. 

Customer service and product quality is getting worse and worse all the time, and I’m getting fed up with it.  Hello?   Don’t these businesses need us more than we need them?  I’m done with spending my money on mediocre service and products.  No longer will I pay a business to treat me like my satisfaction isn’t important!