Daily Observations

The thing I like about blogging is having a place to record random thoughts.

Today I took a different bus route home from work in order to stop by "the grocery" (as my friend Maggie would say). On the #8 bus going down 15th I passed an area of town near the last apartment I lived in before buying my house. Instantly I was filled with nostalgia of walks through the neighborhood with my old Lab, Abbey.

By that time Abbey was fairly old (she died when she was 15, a few years later) and didn't do a whole lot of things that surprised me. I got her when she was just weeks old and thought I had seen her do all that I would ever see. Well, one morning while we were goofing around in a school yard I hid behind a giant container (the type used to haul stuff behind a semi or on a train or tanker in the ocean) and when she had lost sight of me I would jump out and surprise her. After a few mornings of doing this, Abbey not only caught on but actually fooled me by turning around the opposite way and surprising me from behind. It was so adorable and clever and unsuspected it made me laugh out loud. Turns out that not only can you teach an old dog a new trick...perhaps your old dog can teach you one.

On 15th and Fremont I got off the bus to go into Wild Oats which is located right next to a branch of Planned Parenthood. On the sidewalk there were a handful of people standing with huge signs stating that "Planned Parenthood kills babies"
as well as huge pictures of tiny fetuses. I had a multitude of emotions with this. It was the second protest I had walked by today (the first was downtown on my lunch break at the University Club regarding Tibet). Unlike the protest downtown, these activists didn't say a word. They had video cameras but I was fairly certain they weren't filming at the time. I didn't say anything to them but thought to myself a few things.

First was that I have a neighbor who works for Planned Parenthood. Her and her partner have two children whom they love and spend a great deal of time with. Therefore, the idea that Planned Parenthood somehow was harming children didn't fit for me. Additionally I was reminded that Planned Parenthood does not offer tubal ligations for women. Men can get sterilized there but women can't because the procedure actually involves general anesthesia (although I can personally vouch for the fact that it is a super simple surgery). Therefore I thought, well, that whole thought got me going on a lot of issues. For instance, many (well, most I think) hospitals are owned and operated by churches which do not allow for sterilizations. In fact when I got my tubes tied (by Kaiser for a $5 co-pay ten years ago) the doctor had difficulty scheduling it as they were leasing space from hospitals that did not allow them to perform tubal ligations there...which triggered me to thinking about the lack of accessibility to birth control, blah blah blah. I just don't think focusing on abortion is the best approach to helping babies. Preventing unwanted babies strikes me as the more useful approach. Of course I also thought that war kills a lot more babies than abortion and that unless the protesters were vegans they were responsible for a lot of death. Of course I didn't say anything to them...I have stood on a street corner with a protest sign way too much to ridicule anyone for standing up for what they believe in. Mostly I just wanted to document how one activity triggers thoughts.

My third observation is still cracking me up and perhaps is a good way to end this post on a less serious note. As I was looking out the window of the bus riding down Fremont street I noticed that there is a bus stop in the middle of a block right in front of a very large cemetery. No houses on either side of the stop for at least a block (on one side it is more than two blocks). Um, who is gonna catch the bus there?