The Blaisdell Blog

Today was buried a lady of the Great Plains .   She died days short of her 93 rd birthday.               The first thing you need to know about Charlotte is that she grew up in a home touched by tragedy, but not subdued by it.   She was the first of five children, born to Ellis and Lucille, pioneers of the Great Plains of Eastern Colorado.   Her father was a day laborer and part time farmer in the middle of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.   That was a daunting duo of hardships, but they were nothing compared to what was to come.   Ellis took a job unloading car chassis from a railroad.   A hoist broke; the metal frames fell on Ellis, breaking his back.   He spent the rest of his life a paraplegic, confined to a wheel chair.               As he healed, the family went through a time of deprivation of which people today have no conception.   I remember hearing tales of days and days of fried mush.   There were no safety nets.   Ellis did qualify for medical care at th

It is estimated that there are about 26,000 homeless people in Los Angeles , up 12% in the last two years.   The city has now budgeted $100,000,000 to solve this problem.   That amounts to a little over $3800 per homeless person.   Los Angeles does get credit for trying to solve the problem, unlike San Francisco that treats its homeless like a protected class to show how well they live the liberal faith.   And LA’s   situation is not unique.   In New York City , Mayor Bill de Blasio has seen his city’s homeless population boom in the last two years, numbering between 57,000 and 60,000.   Generally, the warmer the climate or more liberal the policies, the worse the situation of homelessness is.   Hard nosed efforts don’t seem to work any better than warm and fuzzy ones.   So how do we solve the problem?   First of all, you can look at the decades of efforts tried thus far to see what doesn’t work.   For example, in New York hundreds of housing vouchers go unused because land

October is the American Humans Society’s National Adopt/Rescue a Dog Month.   This is my favorite memory of my first dog, a Norwegian elkhound named Torgy. Elkhounds are beautiful.   They look like small, square sled dogs.   Their thick silver-gray fur has a pure white undercoat.   Like all elkhounds Torgy’s face, ears and paws are trimmed in black, but the best part was his tail.   Elkhound’s tales are curved tightly over the back, the white under fur making a kind of flag that bobs along when they trot.   They trot everywhere.   In fact, they are given to roam, and Torgy was better at roaming than most of his breed. We had Torgy when we lived in the small town of Luverne , Minnesota —a good climate for elkhounds.   In August, when the heat wave started, Torgy started disappearing in the morning, and he wouldn’t show up until we were getting supper on the table.   Torgy was also coming home clean.   There was no water from the creek or mud from the fishing pond.   No dust fr

On September 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, met for the last time to sign the document they had created.   Many of these men had been part of the debate and life changing decisions to write the Declaration of Independence and failed Articles of Confederation.   Many of these names are familiar to us (George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin…) others are unknown (George Read, Jared Ingersoll…), but they all get the credit for this amazing document.   The Constitution, even more than the Declaration of Independence, makes us the finest country in the world.   If the Declaration of Independence is the heart of our nation, the Constitution of the United States is our brain.   The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God I wou

I haven’t paid much attention to Bernie Sanders.   I don’t have much sympathy for socialists.   They look way too much like tapeworms.   But Bernie was on the television the other day when I had my hands in the sink washing dishes, so I had to listen.   It seems that, unlike most socialists, Bernie actually does have a job.   He is a pimp for the snivelers of this nation. According to Bernie, rich people are bad and poor people are good.   [Someone I thought those qualities of personal rectitude would be evenly distributed throughout the population but, no, it seems once you earn enough money you turn into a running dog capitalist and aren’t worth spit.]   Bernie hates rich people, hates capitalism which creates rich people and he really hates Walmart which is an example of capitalism that employs 1.4 million people--about 1% of the American work force.   But there is a dose of reality that Bernie the Pimp never tells his johns. In 1986 the top 10% of income earners in t

I made a presentation to the Blaisdell Family National Association this summer about my book "That Blaisdell Blood: a Novel."  In it, I wrote about St. Paul's Episcopal Chapel and the attacks of September 11th.  Later a very kind person asked if I could repost this blog and I told her I would.  Here it is: I had slept in, taken my morning walk late and was just making my first cup of coffee when my daughter called me.   “Mom,” her urgent voice said, “I saw the plane fly into the tower.   I saw it, Mom!   I was watching the television in the break room and that plane just flew into the second tower.”   That is how I learned that our country was under attack.   America began its emotionally tumultuous day— Pearl Harbor laid out before our eyes.   My husband and I are in the habit of having a glass of wine with dinner and toasting to any small, significant or touching thing that happens during our day.   That night, as I raised my glass, we both quietly spoke the words

Today is Labor Day.   Women know all about that.   Labor day is our specialty.   Of course there are secrets associated with the birthing room that we share with almost no one.   But I am in a feisty mood today so this Labor Day I am going to offer up a peek behind the curtain. First of all, take your visions of the Madonna and Child moment and set them aside.   Birthing is an earthy, messy business involving blood, flesh and bone.   Labor requires moving an extraordinarily large child through the birth canal.   [A newborn ape weighs just 3% of its mother’s weight, but a newborn human will weight twice that, about 6% of its mother’s weight.]                         As a result of pushing a large child through a confined body space anything not involved in the birthing needs to get out of the way.   That means that the stomach, bladder and bowels get pushed aside and frequently empty themselves.   Nobody tells you that little piece of cheer at the ribbon and balloon festooned

Alaska gave President Obama an extraordinary chance to tap dance back and forth across the line of political correctness.   How do you keep Native Americans and the lathered left both happy at the same time?   The Inupiat Eskimo Corporation had sent Obama a letter saying “History has shown us that responsible energy development, which is the lifeblood of our economy, can exist in tandem with and significantly enhance our traditional way of life.” So, with dismissive dissimulation, he told the Inupiat that Alaskan oil was part of the future.   In a state where 90% of the economy centers on energy, Obama was singing the song of conciliation.   The Asterisk-in-Chief then oiled up the left by stopping for photos at carefully chosen venues designed to dramatically highlight global warming.   He waved a hand toward retreating glaciers and said “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now…We’re not acting fast enough.” His implication being