Monday's, Politics, and Melancholy

I am not feeling very peppy this morning, but then, it is Monday morning, which is my personal Hell. You know, everyone comes home for the weekend and destroys the house. On Monday morning they all grab the lunch I make them and run out of the house to leave me with the aftermath of a chaotic weekend. Not to mention I worked part of the day on Saturday at the library so that just makes it worse.

I really think that sometimes I leave the house and the 4 other people in my family have a pow-wow about how to completely send me over the edge...

"OK So girls, you leave the markers out and let Henry draw on the carpet with them, and oh, don't forget to leave little Lego's all over the house, so she can step on them with her bare feet...she loves that. I will make lunch and leave an entire years worth of crumbs on the counter, and get the mail and separate the Newspaper into as many sections as possible to leave it, then I will take all the shoes from the mud room and leave one from each pair in every room in the house....Henry? You make sure that you poop in your underwear at least twice as soon as she gets home... OK ...BREAK!"

While I am sure it really isn't as sinister as that...I still have days where I have my doubts.

But it isn't just the chaos in the house that has me a little down. We noticed that two houses near us were looking a little, well, abandoned lately. You know the unkempt yard etc... I am not all that particular about that kind of stuff; it just made me wonder a little because one of the houses had a dad that just returned from Iraq. We found out that they had been foreclosed on, both of those houses. This is becoming common place around here. I cannot tell you how many houses I have seen under foreclosure lately.

While I understand that it isn't even someone I know really well or anything... they have three kids like I do, they have 2 that are coming up on college age, and I remember them being so excited to move into that house a couple years ago. It just sort of was a sign of the times in this country. That economic squeeze that seems to be squeezing even the middle class... (What is left of it.) And it made me sad.

The news on TV makes all of this so sterile, it all is about charted graphs, and trends. But there are people loosing everything they have. People, who have worked hard their entire lives, have lived fairly conservatively, and they are not making it anymore. It isn't a bar graph when a family goes under, it is children and parents, and their lives that will now be different, and will have an effect on the direction their lives will now travel. It just makes me angry and disheartened.

So, while I am cleaning up today, I am thankful that I have a house to clean up. And I will think about those who are loosing theirs...there just has to be a better way out there...Here's hoping for a better day in November!