baby's first furniture pieces

Here's a dresser, specially painted to lure in tiny clothings and sockies. The photo may not show it too well, but it's a funky light green with white swirls and the occasional redish swirl that turned out pink. Let that be a lesson to you about mixing white and red paint. If we get a boy, there's a chance those pink swirls will be replaced.

The best part is that this dresser came from Brother Dave's bedroom closet, just upstairs, where he had innocently left it before heading to college. Only days ago, it was a dark red color. Thanks, Wavey! You are already so generous with your forthcoming niece or nephew.

Also, my mother, without trying, somehow collects chairs that rock (she owns no less than five at the moment), so she was able to spare one for the baby's spot in our room.

P.S. David, Mom let me have this dresser from your closet while you were away at college.

salad dressing recommendation

This stuff is really good. If anybody's in the mood for a salad dressing changeup, I highly recommend Brianna's Homestyle Ginger Mandarin dressing, especially if eaten with darker lettuces and greenery. Feta cheese, pine nuts, and apple or grape chunks are helpful too.

But mainly, this dressing. Wow.

a story of freedom

You know how doom and gloom, those dark tornadoes, unceasingly swirl about these days? In our own land to a degree, with the financial and political debacles, but more severely, the world over? Technology provides us the ability to hear real-time reports of famine, flood, earthquake, and genocide, and I oft wonder if the human psyche is meant to know about this tremendous suffering. For those of us without personal ties to displaced or impoverished people, there is very little we can do to help. And inability to act is very stressful.

So, with that in mind, an email I got today from my friend Stacy made my heart change directions for a small moment, and I decided maybe somebody else out there in blog-reading land could use the same bit of encouragement. Stacy is in her second year of work in India with International Justice Mission, an organization made up of lawyers, social workers, and other folks interested in human rights. Their work is specific to freeing people from literal bondage - kids in the sex trades, families and individuals enslaved in labor debt, etc. - and of bringing the perpetrators to justice. Some of those trapped in labor debt are spending their entire lives working to pay off a $2 debt that their grandfather incurred. NO KIDDING. Handily enough for the slave owners, the interest compounds faster than the worker can pay it off.

Well, Stacy sent a link today to an article on the IJM website about a recent raid. I haven't talked to her to know if she got to take part in this particular one herself, like she has in the past. Can you imagine something so heart-wrenching yet so fulfilling?! I mean, literally freeing slaves. Holy crap. Here's the story:

http://www.ijm.org/newsfromthefield/successfuloperationsatfourricemillsbringfreedomto25slavesinoneday