Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

After a week-long hike through the charming English countryside with my brother and sister-in-law I had a charming 7 hour flight home. The movie options were somewhat limited, so I watched three movies, two of which were about brothers and sisters passionately loyal to their siblings (the third was Monsters Inc, but that's just good entertainment). In Conviction , Hilary Swank's character believes her lovable nogoodnik brother is innocent of the murder he's been accused of, so she decides to become a lawyer to overturn his conviction. Which means she has to go to law school. Which means she has to go to college. Which means she has to get her GED. (In other debates, I suspect Swank represents the kind of college student who perhaps doesn't need a lot of GE courses...) She never once entertains the idea that her sometimes violently angry brother might actually have committed the crime as she not only goes to school, but suffers economically, emotionally and even loses he...

Okay, so here's me getting bossy again, but I was thinking about how I return from a trip and how to do this best. Here's my free advice, and you get what you paid for. You don't want to be overwhelmed and depressed by coming home, but you want to return peaceful, refreshed and happy to be in your normal life again with such good memories. To ensure this, I think a successful reentry from a trip requires as much planning and care as heading out. That starts even before you've left. Before the Trip: Get someone to feed the pets, get the mail, etc. You don't want to return to disaster. Clean house, including making the bed & having some clean clothes. You want to come back and see your home at its best and you don't want to have to do dishes or pick up before you can rest after a hard day of travel. Clear out any perishables, but have some non-perishable food ready in the cupboard. With airlines being so stingy these days, you'll probably be hungry when...

Far be it from me to use this forum to prescribe ways of living (except when I do ), but sometimes I think we get the wrong idea about emergency preparedness. The point isn't that the world is about to end and we all need several 75 lb bags of wheat in our basements. The point is that we better be careful and prepared to be self-sufficient. My brother-in-law once gave a genius talk about how there are 3 kinds of emergencies: 1) the world is going to end and, honestly, your wheat probably isn't going to save you, so better focus on being spiritually prepared to meet your maker 2) you're in a tough economic place for a long time and really what you need is money and good credit (and probably also some food storage, clothes, gardening and handiman skills, etc.) 3) something unexpected happens and it takes 2-3 days for Red Cross to show up and in the meantime, you and your family needs food, water, diapers (depending on age) and depends (depending on age). This is pretty clever...