You Know It's Trouble When...

I’ve messed up my knees. There’s no other way of putting it. I wish I have some fantastic story to tell how I did it like base jumping into the Grand Canyon, but it’s really quite sad how it all happened. The first time, it involved New Years Eve, me, a trampoline, a skilled surgeon and many hours (I can’t say countless because my insurance company has kept track of all of them) of physical therapy. I had so many questions and I was never sure exactly what to expect or how far I could push myself. I am now so amazed at the limits to which the human body can be pushed and still recover.

That was the first time. This time, it’s a little less complex, but a whole lot more embarrassing. I didn’t realize how much until this weekend.

I was involved in a community play with people at church, many of whom I did not know and was meeting for the first time. As we would go on stage people of course would say, “Break a leg,” and I would laugh about how I really shouldn’t try that as I recently did that. Once gentleman asked how I had broken my leg. I replied that I had done the other leg a couple years ago and went for the matching set and it was a bit of an embarrassing story. He then proceeded to talk about how a friend of his daughter had told them about a girl who had broken her leg doing the limbo and that my story couldn’t any worse than that. "Besides," he told me, "no one could really break their leg doing the limbo."

I was standing there listening aghast as a total stranger told me the story of how I had broken my leg. I had to confirm to him that someone could indeed break their leg doing the limbo as I was the girl in the story. And now I’ll get to do a second knee surgery.

The Power of the Visual

I was on my way into work this morning when I noticed something that I had seen hundreds of times before, but I had not realized. Every day I pass by the offices of a major energy (mostly electricity) corporation that has it's logo on the building as most companies do, but what got me thinking is that the logo for this company has almost the exact same elements as a blog that has the exact opposite aim as the corporation.

First, here's the corporation's logo:

The style is modern in the font. It's sans serif, so it's designed to be seen in large typeface. It's made of of blue and green colors so it indicates a harmony with the enviorment and the "o" is designed to look like the on switch of most consumer electronics so that would indicate it has to do with power.

Now here's the logo of the blog:

Again, it has the modern font as it has a modern mode of communication. The colors, while not an exact match, are simularly themed. Even the design schemes are simular with the on switch. Only this time, it's not the name of the company that's turning on the message, but rather the enviorment.

I'm always amazed at what groups come up with when they have the same message (in this case to tell the consumer that they each only want what's best for the enviorment) but and exact opposite way of viewing it. Isn't spin wonderful?

Where am I exactly?

When I went and visted my sister in Salt Lake a couple of weeks ago, she told me that we were going to a fund raiser in Peru. Now, I lived in Utah and I had never heard of Peru, UT but I was just going to go with what she said. When we got out there and actually got in the car to go to the dinner, imagine my suprise when we only drove a few blocks to East High. It was a dinner and silent auction for http://eagle-condor.org/ and we also got to enjoy the talents of some authentic Peruvian dancers. I even got some pictures.

When I got home I showed my pictures to some of my co-workers who asked where I was over the weekend as I said that I was in Salt Lake City. You see they all thought that because the pictures were taken at East High from High School Musical that I had gone to Peru, via New Mexico, via Salt Lake. All in all, it was a very busy weekend.

Have Terror, Will Travel...

Every time I fly on a plane, I reflect on how exactly my life has been affected by all of the changes that have come into the world since September 11, 2001. It can be just the little things like being dehydrated after a flight or knowing that the government is more interested in reading my emails.

Sometimes though, the terrorism threats feel very real and they hit close to home. What follows is a story as I related it to friends and family in an email in July 2004.

"I just wanted to notify you all of a very dangerous situation that occurred to me last week while doing my daily commute home from work. Because of security risks that have been happening, all commuter trains have been on a heightened state of alert and so many of the passengers and railroad personnel have done an excellent job of making sure of our safety. Before you go on, I just want to ensure you of it's truthfulness and that it really did happen to me.
"Last Friday evening, a bomb scare shut down the commuter rail line that runs from Chicago to the western suburbs because of a suspicious package that was on the 4:44 train. We were stuck on our train in the train yard for 30 minutes and then were forced to walk the last half mile to our cars. Others had to wait more than an hour for buses to get to their train station during rush hour and then sit on a bus to get home. The fire department sent out the bomb squad, the immediate area of the station was evacuated, and all emergency personnel were put on alert. "The immediate area around the package was quarantined and stabilized, but the package itself began to move. After and exhaustive attempt to defuse the situation without putting any of the brave personnel in uniform in any undue rink, the suspect package was found to contain a hamster.
"Just so you know, I was neither hurt nor terrorized during this incident. I was actually rather amused.
"P.S. The hamster found a very happy home with one of the fire fighters."

Despite the lightness of that incident, I know that in many ways the order of things post 9/11 is very different than it was before that day. Like so many social changes that happen, most of them didn’t occur right after the terror attacks happened in 2001 but it was a more gradual shift so that we could become more used to the idea.

I didn’t fly after 9/11 for six weeks, but at that time we still had National Guard personnel manning the security checkpoints at airports with automatic weapon. That was uncomfortable. That has since changed. When I went to the Louvre in 2006, the military presence at the entrance there was also heavily armed and I imagine they could use their weapons just as easily as those who were at the US airports in 2001. But there it didn’t feel as out of place because as an American, the threat of terrorism has always felt like a faraway or foreign problem. Every once in a while we have moments like the great hamster episode that remind us that even here we are vulnerable, but I’m not ready yet to allow the automatic weapons to patrol the grounds around the Museum Campus just yet.