When I was young I didn’t grasp great aunt or great uncle and I was fortunate enough to know a lot of great aunts and uncles, I even knew some great-great aunts & uncles. So, how my young brain processed these family members was to group them as grandparents. It only made sense, they were my grandparents age and seemed to be very “grandparent-like”. I knew it wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close enough. Especially with my grandma’s sister Mary and her husband Kenny.

They were always over to my grandparents house when I was young. I have very distinct memories of trying very hard to avoid Kenny’s slobbery kisses. He also was the first one to do “got-your-nose” to me. After Kenny passed Mary would still come over and there was a time that every Saturday Nick and I would go to church with Grandma, Grandpa, Mary and Rick on Saturdays and eat dinner afterwards. Other than the church part, it was one of the best times of the week. I knew how truly special it was. Mary would also join other family occasions including celebrating hers and JD’s birthday. She was just like another grandmother.

My great aunt Mary passed away yesterday. I was so fortunate to have known such a special, sweet and kind woman. And under strange circumstances she died within 24 hours of her brother Wayne, who I did not know very well.

Amazing yoga illustrations of my favs by Rob Osborne:

From Sad and Useless,

Last night at book club we got to talking about our favorite love movie and it got me thinking. My first response off the top of my head was Chocolat. That is a sexy and lovely movie, however, my real fav would have to be Pride & Prejudice, steal my heart. Here is a list of my 10 favorites in no order:

I wrote down a couple of the things that I think are the elephants in the room that people haven’t talked about this week, let me list them first:

One was the single-payor thing, if we had a single-payor system we wouldn’t be relying on our employer, that is so creepy, that your boss is the one handing you want you need to fuck your husband.

Population control, hello, we do need to control births, there are too many people in the world. This idea of you know, conservative, “well, the bible says be fruitful and multiply”. Yes, that was written by a desert dweller 3,000 years ago when the population was 5,000 people. Its preposterous.

Now this is corny, but, if men could get pregnant, I mean, they’ve said of years or altar boys, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. That catholic hospitals would go broke without federal funding. Try to fund a catholic hospital with the 12 people who are at 8am mass.

And finally, contraception prevents abortion. This is something pro-life people should be for. And if the democrats were smart they would remind them of that.