Oprah is an inspiration whether she is 100 lbs or 200 lbs. I don’t know why it’s an issue. She is wonderful, she will never be anything less than wonderful. If I could say one thing to Oprah, it would be, “Honey, you are beautiful inside and out, and YOU need to love yourself and accept the fact that people don’t care about your weight, they care about YOU”…

Julia - Thank you for your honesty - while most of us may have certain opinions towards Mr. Bush it is truly unfair to transfer those feelings to Mrs. Bush. She deserves to be treated with respect as we all do - and to disrespect her because of her husbands actions is just totally unfair and certainly uncalled for.

Have a wonderful birthday Marlo….Thank you for all that you do for St. Judes!

Whoopie, Happy Birthday Girl !!!! I love your posts love your “view” and wish more people were like you - if that were true the world would be a much better place. Have a wonderful birthday !!!!!!!

This about sums it all up I think: You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, ‘Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.’ My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. Oh yeah … and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front step, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

I happen to find heidi’s story very intriguing. She is no different than the rest of us….She wanted to earn a nice living, ran a fabulous business, and is held accountable and held back by men. She has been way up and way down - is there anyone one of us that hasn’t? We all have a crutch - cigarettes, wine, food, coffee and the list is endless……We are all addicted to something, only Heidi’s something is going to kill her at a young age if she doesnt get some help. She is brilliant and will find a way to get help and show the world she can “make it”.

I would definately say it was my mother. She was an incredible woman. She taught my sister and I that the most important thing in life is respect. As long as you are respectful to others, everything will fall into place. She was right. She passed away 16 years ago from Breast Cancer, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I dont think about her and miss her terribly. There are days when I have just had enough and don’t even want to get up in the morning, then I think about her, and her strength and it helps me to get moving.

What hasn’t gone up? Everything is raising at such an alarming rate. I never really pay attention to the cost of individual items at the grocery store, but I have certainly noticed that my bill keeps getting higher every week. My paycheck is not increasing but it is costing me more and more to get to work! This is a very frustrating time for everyone, rich or not, the economy is killing us all financially !!

Oh Edith Ann, thank you for giving us a delightful way to start the day! Your innocence and wit is what we need more of in this world. Ask for an increase in your allowance and then you wont have to worry about a shortage of marshmallows. Hang around - we need you around here :)

I happen to think that it should be legalized. I do agree there should be some safeguards in place like health screenings. If the person/establishment does not comply then we shut them down like any other business that doesnt comply with licensing standards. I do not want the government regulating what I can or cant do with my body - whether its abortion, prostitution, smoking, religion or whatever. The choice should be left with the individual.

I’m usually just getting up at 4:00 a.m.(after being up every 2 hours all night) I love the quiet time before I need to get everyone else up so we can be out of the house by 6:45 a.m.

I think Silda needs to make that decision herself. But I agree, she should not be forced to “stand by her man” at press conferences. That to me is just too humiliating !!!