Browsing Archive: November, 2011

A Happy Family?

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, November 27, 2011, In : Personal

A family member emails that my writing is "crap" and that she will refuse to read my WTE feeds from now on. Since all along she has had the option of deleting my stuff unread, I stop to wonder over the urge to insult me. Name-calling is really a short-cut version of blaming. The speaker refuses to look at her own thoughts, feelings, and motivations and focuses instead on the "faults" of the other.

Relationships are a lot of work. We have to get ourselves to overcome--to forgive--not onl...

From the Heart

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, November 20, 2011, In : Personal

Today I write in pity and sorrow, for I decided to expand an earlier blog on my brother’s dying, which includes my D-Q experience. I'm determined to shape the piece into a newspaper essay but emotions overwhelm me as a write: pity for Karl, sorrow for the students I was unable to help. There’s also anger, the gut-wrenching fury at an industry that systematically manipulates millions of uninformed consumers. Last not least there’s anger at being powerless to enumerate the injustices th...
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Wyoming Wind--and Coal

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, November 14, 2011, In : Reading Life

It’s windy in Wyoming, particularly this time of year as autumn morphs into winter. Wyoming is my home now, for better or worse. I watch with interest its wind-development. Legislators debate back and forth on wind taxes, but it looks like wind energy is on the march, now that Wyoming transmission likes have become part of a federal program that has put electric transmission projects on the fast track.

All the more surprising that coal is still king in this part of the country. One of th...

Learning Something New

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, November 6, 2011, In : Reading Life

I rarely permit myself to wax nostalgic or to indulge in a glance backward. Life is what it is, no sense bemoaning what's lost; besides, come to think of it, the "good old days" weren't all that good to begin with. Today, however, I'll go back to the time when I owned the horse Star Jasmine, pictured above, when my family celebrated gift-giving, as in the snapshot below, when a continuum of life with Darold seemed yet a possibility.