After reading the following 2 stories:

A Georgia judge ordered a Muslim woman jailed for 10 days after she refused to remove her scarf for court.

and

A federal judge in Los Angeles has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Muslim woman who asserted her right to wear a traditional Islamic head scarf while being detained in a courthouse holding facility.

U.S. District Court Judge David Carter ruled March 26 that unlike jail or prison, a courthouse holding facility isn’t a protected institution under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, the National Law Journal reports.

It occurs to me that I have never heard of a judge jailing a nun for refusing to remove her veil for court. I’ve never even heard of one being asked to remove it. And, if a nun was somehow to find herself in a holding facility, I really doubt she’d be asked to remove her veil.

Observant Jewish men are not required to remove their yarmulkes. Orthodox Jewish men are not required to remove their hats.

So why is the hajib (which is NOT the face veil) different?

It’s cooling off some now that it’s almost 6pm but it’s been 82 here today. Yes, I know it’s the south but this is just a bit much.

Growing up, December always meant snow. If it didn’t actually snow on the 25th there was at least left over white stuff on the ground from the day or 2 before. Ice on the sidewalks, sometimes the creek would be frozen hard enough to skate on. In other words, December…and especially the christmas season…meant COLD. I could never wrap my mind around the fact that in the southern hemisphere it was actually -summer-. I couldn’t understand how anybody could be in the holiday spirit if it was actually warm. Or even hot.

There was only one christmas dinner menu. Turkey (my grandmother was horrified by the idea of a ham…that was for easter), not a frozen one, either. We’d get a fresh turkey from the farm across from the cemetery (the one where they filmed Night of the Living Dead…the original). For a lot of years, it would come to us just dead. My grandmother would pluck it and scald it and spend 2 days just getting it ready to start cooking. As the family got bigger she finally gave up on doing that and got the turkey dressed out but she still wouldn’t have a frozen one. She said they had no taste, that all the flavor had been frozen out of them.

Pounds of mashed potatoes. At the height of the family size, sometimes as much as 20 lbs of potatoes mashed up. A gallon or so of gravy; carrots and peas, a cold veggie tray of carrot and celery sticks and olives. The green ones with the pimento stuffing. Sweet potatoes; lots of brown sugar but no marshmallows. Cranberry sauce. Cole slaw. And stuffing. Lots and lots of my grandmother’s stuffing, which is still the best ever in my eyes. I can get it close. Maybe someday I’ll be able to make it like she did.

After all that there were the pies. Pumpkin and mince meat. Cookies for us kids.

All of this with lots of family there. My grandmother in the kitchen bitching whenever anyone offered to help because they didn’t do things right and they’d mess up her meal. And bitching afterward because nobody helped her.
That part I don’t miss.

So now I sit where it’s 6pm, and still close to 80 degrees, the air conditioner is running, and christmas dinner will consist of a feta cheese fondue with crab meat and shrimp in it and crusty bread, fresh asparagus and mushrooms for dipping.

It’s been a long road from there to here. I like here better. Expectations are lower and stress levels are less. Better, much better.

I never was much good at math. At the time I was growing up, girls weren’t supposed to do well in math…we just didn’t have the balls for it. So, like the good little girl I was (ok, so that’s a snort and a half) I let it go through one ear and not remain in the brain.

But no matter how much I don’t do math, this just doesn’t seem right.

Leo got a raise. Hooray! Right? Sort of. He got a 3% raise. At the same time his insurance went up 11%. So, Leo got a raise and we end up with LESS money in the take home.

I sure am glad he didn’t get a bigger raise.