Sunday Morning
Was just watching 'CBS Sunday Morning', a show I love and have always enjoyed. Sounds like there are a lot of good movies coming out this Fall.
I traveled last week on business! It was very interesting, very educational. I returned home at 1:30 am on Friday morning and didn't get to sleep until after 3. My mind was spinning, the only thing that helped me shut down was to visualize writing emails with all the different ideas I'd come up with, and then sending them, then shutting down the computer, etc. Modern day sheep counting, right?! Very effective, however! I was sort of a zombie the next day. Even bloggers need their sleep!
What else is going on. Seems like we have something going every night this week if we hit all our marks. And one thing to reschedule from Saturday morning to some other time, the better to clear the decks for a potential girls night in Portland this Friday with my two BFFs Lanie and Christine! I am dying to lay my eyes on my dear sister in law, positively dying!
I will try to do more of the guest blogger posts with Maggie and Henry, they are super easy to do with Photo Booth on Jeff's MacBook. As I write to you from this perfectly adequate Powerbook G4 of my very own, I can unabashedly admit that I have serious MacBook envy. It's all about that Photobooth and the iSight camera and the speed. My friend Bob has a new MacBook like what I want.
In other news of durable goods envy, we went out last night to look at new dishwashers! It is entirely possible that we will be dropping the hammer on that new purchase very soon!
My momma is coming out, I am really excited about that! She'll be here thru Halloween and also for the election! And she'll get to meet Jim, which will be great. I am interested in seeing if my sister Marcia will be available to come along for the fun, too!
I am still living la vida low carb and that is going well. I fell off the wagon while traveling for work last week, but who cares. We are talking about high quality danish, delicious baked ziti, and the best steak fries I have had in a very long time. Sue me. :-)
I am sitting out on the porch and it is raining. Maggie is explaining her new game with the ladder that I bought from IKEA that hangs from the rafters. Now she's hungry. Now she's silent. Now she's humming. I bought her a pair of high heel platform sandals yesterday, 85% off or something on summer clearance. Anyway. Came with a toe ring that's she's obsessed with...
Okay, over and out.
Oh! In the September 15 issue of the New Yorker, there is a very interesting article about Cindy McCain. Did you know that she says she's an only child, but that she actually has two half sisters? Apparently Cindy McCain's father left his first marriage, with children, to marry Cindy McCain's mother, which, as this excerpt illustrates, is about what happened when John and Cindy got together!
In his memoir “Worth the Fighting For,” John McCain said that when he started dating Cindy Hensley he “was separated from Carol, but our divorce would not become final until February of 1980.” However, in his court petition for divorce, obtained by the Los Angeles Times, McCain stated that he and Carol had “cohabited as husband and wife” until January 7th of that year—nine months into his romance with Cindy Hensley. His divorce from Carol was finalized on April 2, 1980; he married Cindy five weeks later.
McCain has attributed the divorce to his own “selfishness and immaturity.” Carol McCain told Robert Timberg that “the breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things. I don’t know that it might not have happened if John had never been gone. I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else.”
This pattern must have seemed unremarkable to Cindy Hensley, whose own father had left his first family in much the same way. Jim Hensley met Marguerite Smith at a military facility in West Virginia in 1945, after he was injured while flying a B-17 over Europe with the Army Air Forces. He was married to his high-school sweetheart, Mary Jeanne, and they had a daughter, Kathleen. Within months, Hensley had divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite.
Cindy McCain regularly calls herself an only child. In fact, she has two half sisters: Kathleen Portalski and Dixie Burd, Marguerite’s daughter from a previous marriage. “I feel bad about having a father that wasn’t there, and then having my face rubbed in this—having her stand up and say she’s an only child—makes it even worse,” Kathleen Portalski told me. The video played before Cindy’s speech at the Republican Convention declared that Cindy Lou Hensley “got all the attention of her father. . . . They were truly best friends.”
Jim Hensley visited Kathleen on her birthday and on Christmas throughout her childhood, and took her shopping for school clothes. He escorted her down the aisle when she married Stanley Portalski, a wedding at which both Cindy and Marguerite were guests. He paid for the education of her son, Nicholas, and her daughter, Stephanie, who named one of her sons James Hensley, after her grandfather.
Kathleen Portalski visited her father almost every day in the months before his death. When he died, Cindy McCain inherited the Hensley empire; Kathleen Portalski and her family received ten thousand dollars. Stephanie Portalski found that a credit card her grandfather had given her had been cut off days after his death. “It makes absolutely no sense,” Kathleen Portalski said. “It makes me wonder what happened.”
When I asked Portalski if she had ever contacted her half sister, to discuss the situation, she began to cry and spoke angrily: “You think she’d give a flying fuck?” Portalski said that she has not spoken to Cindy McCain since their father’s funeral, at North Phoenix Baptist. Portalski sat in the front row as McCain gave a eulogy from the lectern, where she spoke of her father’s generosity and kindness and referred to herself as his only child.
OMG! How rude!
I’m out.
