Blackberries, International Loans, and a Bit of Writing

I have blackberry thorns embedded in the bottoms of both of my flip-flops. I looked up from the computer screen about 7:00 and decided to indulge Brendan's begging with a trip to the berry bushes. What is it about berry picking that is so addictive? It's like playing Pacman. I am SO not into video games, but Pacman is a different story. I start gobbling those dots, and I just can't stop! I thought of that feeling as I reached for "just one more patch" of berries. We came back with a good sized bowl, some of which I'm now eating with Cheerios. (Why can't we always eat that way? If I lived on my own, it would be cereal and soup and ice cream. Oh, and the occasional salad. Anyway! I'm getting off track.)

I really wasn't staring at the computer screen constantly today. We were in the hospital last night, so I slept in until 9:00 this morning. Then I spent a half hour reading an article in Sojourners about how some Christians are calling for a return to the principles of the year of Jubilee, in which all debts were forgiven. (This year is, actually, a year of Jubilee in the Jewish calendar.) This article was discussing the fact that some of the countries which most need help--Haiti, Kenya--are struggling to pay back just the interest on loans that wealthier nations (the U.S. included) made to them while they were under the control of corrupt dictators who took the vast majority of the money for themselves. They can't even start paying back the principal, and the vast amounts of money that are going out to pay back the interest alone could be far better used under the new governments to pay for health care and education and other services. But instead the poor people are paying for the sins of their former "dictators."

But again, I digress. After I woke up enough, I got to work on my new assignment. Of course, I had to get up once or twice (or twenty times) to tend to kids, etc., but most of the day I did spend working on the first ten groups of my current (okay, so it's my only!) assignment. I formatted and edited and battled with those #$%% grids. Sorry, Rod, if you're reading this! I didn't mean to swear at your lovely grids, but those things are freaking ORNERY! Well, when I got to dinner time and went to look back over my beautifully finished groups, I found ... only eight. One, thank goodness, had relocated to my email folder and was easily persuaded to join his brothers on the desktop. But the other--the one with most of the grids?--yeah, well ... they had turned into gibberish. Nothing I did could make it speak English again. So I started over. I got a headache from staring at the screen and still ... you know what I thought? I thought, "This is great! I love doing this! I love working for myself, feeling like I'm putting one foot in front of the other and doing something for myself, for my family, something that (with a lot of work and some divine blessing) could, eventually, help pull us out of this hole." It feels so good to be doing something concrete to improve our lives.