Sunday Quick Takes

Seven quick takes this Sunday:

1.  I took a nap yesterday for the first time in forever.  It felt really good to spend part of an afternoon just sleeping. I don't know why I was so tired; it just kind of happened.  I think M watching the Food Network beside me had something to do with it -- she says it's calming.

2.  I've been eating well for the past couple of weeks.  M watching the Food Network has offered some good ideas for meals -- home-made old-fashioned pancakes and frittatas for breakfast, pasta for lunch, salmon with orange dressing and fennel salad for dinner.  Yummy, healthy food made from fresh ingredients is hard to beat!

3.  M goes back to work on Monday, but she's not quite sure how it will go.  She's still in some pain, with physical therapy prescribed and continuing for a few more weeks.  She has worked it out to have a little more flexible schedule to allow for the PT, but it may mean some long days with school and everything else.  I have a couple evening meetings next week, so we both will be working longer than a typical 40-hour work week this coming week.

4.  I'm reading a good book, which has really given me a fuller picture of the civil rights movement -- it's the third of a series of very detailed books by Taylor Branch, all of which have Biblical references in the title.  This one is called At Canaan's Edge, and it's about the last three years of Martin Luther King, Jr's life.  The word that keeps coming to mind as I'm reading is "struggle" -- it really was a struggle to earn the rights that we more or less take for granted now, and the movement is full of complex internal struggles, as well as the external opposition that continually surprises me with its level of animosity and violence.  The fact that the US elected a black President less than 50 years after the civil rights movement shows that we've come a long way.  We still have a long way to go when it comes to race, but it's interesting to see how difficult the first steps have been.

5.  The book I'm reading reveals that J. Edgar Hoover was a horrible figure in the history of the civil rights movement.  As director of the FBI, he not only opposed any federal protection for the people involved in the struggle, leading at times to those people's deaths, he also actively interfered with the movement, wiretapped many hours of phone calls among King and his advisers, and thought of King as someone who was deeply influenced by Communists, based on very flimsy evidence.  He ran the FBI almost like a secret police agency, and conducted domestic spying outside his legal authority on a routine basis.

6.  Congrats to Green Bay for winning this afternoon's football game.

7.  I'm not really excited about Pittsburgh vs. the Jets, but if I had to pick a team, I guess I'll go with Pittsburgh.