From the moment that we are born until we breath our last, our lives are filled with losses. Baby teeth, childhood dreams, pets buried in the back yard, Idols with feet of clay and other things and people that touch our lives with thier passing. I have lost some people and things that have knocked my world off it's axis. A friend named Tom, a dog named Princess, grandparents that taught me my heritage and loved me unconditionally. A man whose name was Gary that was part of my life for 12 years. Gary who lost his life to driving drunk. A husband that I didn't love as much as I should have and a man named Kevin that was the love of my life. Sometimes when I am alone with my thoughts, I think of the people and pets that I have lost to death. Often the memories of them make me smile, but mostly...they break my heart. There are times that we aren't given another chance to say, " I love you" or I'm sorry" or "you mean the world to me". Life can go by so fast and one day we wake up to find that we have lived over half of our lives. So much wasted time... Time that we can never get back. People that we will never see again. So, before it's too late... tell them.. Tell them that you love them, while you still have a chance.

There is this site that I visit that has bizarre newspaper headlines from around the world. A few days ago, the headline was " One Million Dollars offered For The Capture Of Bigfoot." Some poor sucker saw the fuzzy picture ( you know, the one of Bigfoot running, that we have ALL seen) and decided that Bigfoot is real and needs to be captured. I wish that I had a million dollars to throw away like that. Can you imagine the chaos that could come from this? The woods of the Northwest will be full of idiots with cameras and guns. Poor Bigfoot.... Leave him alone. If he is real and hasn't been caught by now, I don't think that he will be captured. He may already know all about humans. He may have come out of the woods on a Saturday night and decided to get a "cold one". He may have walked into "THE ALL NIGHT TAVERN, had a Budweiser and just watched. He probably saw Betty Lou cheating on her husband in a dark corner and Kevin passed out drunk on the floor. He may have seen the football game on the TV set and men screaming and cursing at it. He may have had some of Bubba's famous hotwings and a bowl of peanuts. Chances are he saw the Anderson brothers throwing punches at each other. Then he probably left. Bigfoot knows that life is better in the woods. No one fighting, cussing or crying. He may have gone back and shared his peanuts with a Bluejay. I hope that Bigfoot sets out traps and snares for the Humans that are trying to capture him. The ones that think they know more than he knows. I hope that he can capture one of two and take them to HIS village. Maybe he will put them in a cage and let the other Big, Hairy familes gawk at THEM. Sounds like a plan to me. RUN BIGFOOT... !!!

Admit it... We all have those days when we feel 'stir crazy', when we want to change our lives. Do things that we have never done. Go somewhere that we have never been. A few days ago, I started a list of things that I want to do before I die. Here it is;
1. Swim with a Dolphin.
2. Go to Walden Pond and read Thoreau while in a canoe.
3. Get passionate about a cause and spend time helping it, instead of just thinking about it.
3.Grow a vegetable garden.
4. Make love on a forest floor.
5. Send a message in a bottle.
6. Drive the Autobaun.
7. Go deep sea fishing and eat what I catch.
8.Reflect on my deepest weakness and realize that it may be my greatest strength.
9. Buy a round the world ticket and a backpack and run away.
10. Take a shower in a waterfall.
11. Learn to juggle
12. Make love on my kitchen table.
13. Run a marathon.
14. Learn a foreign language and use it fluently.
15. Drink beer at Oktoberfest in Munich.
16. Sleep under the stars.
17. Let someone feed me grapes while we are both naked.
18. Create my Family Tree.
19. Make love on a train as it rumbles down the track.
20. Write the novel that I KNOW I have inside me.
21. Drive across America coast to coast in an RV.
22. Build a cabin and spend time making it what I want.
23. Run to the top of The Statue of Liberty.
24. Go skinny dipping at midnight in the South of France.
25. Fall deeply and hopelessly in love again.
26. Spend New Years Eve in Ireland.
27. Scuba Dive off the Great Barrier Reef.
28. Spend a day at a Concentration Camp and never, ever forget.
29. Go to at least ONE major sporting event. The Super Bowl, Olympics etc.
30. Plant a tree.
31. Teach someone to read.
32. Raft down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon ( # 1 wish)
33. Visit the Holy Land
34. Accept myself for who I am.

There.. That's not so bad and it's doable.. how about you? What do you really, really want to do?

Websters 2 defines Miscarriage as: Premature expulsion of a non viable fetus from the uterus... What a horribly cold way to define something that absolutely breaks ones heart. It should read like this;" Miscarriage; The end of the dreams that you planned, An already named,loved and wanted child or children that you are unable to hold in your arms, feed at your breast or watch grow up." I suppose that it's not always the end of your dreams but for some women it is. If you are very lucky, then you will have a man that will love you even if you feel like a failure as a woman. And you DO feel like a failure. Even if you are smart and educated and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that NOTHING that you did caused it. You asked the doctor questions over and over." is it because I used to smoke?" Is it because I ate fried foods? because I drank a glass of wine? because I had sex?" NO, he says. "Don't torture yourself. We don't know why these things happen. it's nothing that you did." You come home from the hospital and fold the things that you bought and put them away . Some place where you won't see them for a long, long time. The little blue blankets, the tiny booties and the tee shirts that say I LOVE MY DADDY. You fold them all and put them in a box, the whole while as tears stream down your face. You look in the mirror at your belly that already looks so much flatter and feels so empty. You remember him moving. At first little flutters that feel like a butterfly moving it's wings, then as the weeks passed, harder kicks as if he could not wait to get out and see the world. You wonder why you were denied that miracle and you cry. You cry and cry. You cry so much and so hard that you get sick. You realize as the years pass that you will ALWAYS count him in your mind when someone asks you how many children that you have. And you hope and you pray that he knew how very much that he was loved...and wanted... Someone should have told Mr.Webster when he was defining miscarriage that he should have made the definition softer and kinder, so that the world would know exactly what you lost.

The headline reads "Babysitter to be Executed" in the news this morning. It seems that several years ago, 50 year old Cathy Lynne Henderson was babysitting a couples two children. She stated that "the baby was cranky and she was swinging it around, tripped and it flew out of her arms and hit the concrete floor". She then took the baby"s sister and her own child somewhere, paid someone to watch them and fled the state. She buried the body of the baby in an Igloo cooler. When she was captured, she said that she panicked. The story was graphic and the average person would think, " I would never do that". But she did. That brings me to my point. The Death penalty. Like religion and politics, conversation about The Death Penalty can get heated. Sometimes I ride the fence about it. I have lost someone that I loved to murder. I could rip that murderer apart with my bare hands but mostly, I do not believe in it. I worked as a prison nurse for many years. I got to know people on Death Row. They became faces to me. What they did was terrible and changed lives forever. Sometimes they committed the murders in "a crime of passion", sometimes under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Sometimes they are retarded. I always felt safer working around murderers than gang bangers and punks. There are monsters though. People that WILL kill again and you know it. The prison that I worked at was Maximum Security. Inmates were held there for other states at times. Once, I denied a serial killer a Tylenol. It just wasn't time for him to have any more, and that's the only reason. He went insane. Started jumping up and down and screaming. He screamed, "I'll kill you and stuff your dick ( yes, I'm female) in your mouth like I did that little boy In New Orleans". Bang... A confession... I had to go to the warden and then had to testify in court. It was a murder that they had not solved. People like that can NOT be helped. Can Not be let out, EVER. Mostly though, I don't believe in the Death Penalty because MANY,many innocent people have been killed. You can't bring back those lives. Also, there are very FEW wealthy people on death Rows, if any. Remember OJ? The sad truth is that while people talk about "the inmates watching TV and lifting weights", it isn't a good life. I wouldn't trade my freedom for thier life. NEVER. It is a question that people will always debate. Death Penalty or life? What do you think and why?