Black-eyed Peas for Good Luck in 2011

We started 2011 off right:

Lots of laughs with some great friends;

Lots of rest on January 1 and lots of black-eyed peas (frijoles de ojos) on January 2 with a steady stream of luck seekers coming throughout the afternoon.

 On a personal level things are pretty good; only 3 more tuition payments and we will have a graduate on our hands. She lined up a job during Christmas break-who could ask for more than that in this market? And she was looking for apartments just before she left.

Both of our fathers are in remarkably good health and our mothers are holding their own, for the moment anyway.  

We both have jobs we like and all the Christmas stuff is already put away.

My first art show is coming up in February.

We have a reasonable mortgage on a fabulous house and so far have dodged the declining real estate bullet as even now we have equity.

My 5 year- old car just turned over 48,000 miles and the pump on the right side was actually open at the gas station today.

Our social calendar is filling rapidly and we have more great friends than we can even count. We are truly blessed and it would seem either the black-eyed peas are really working or we are just plain lucky. Probably a bit of both.

If only things were looking as bright in the world of politics. Arizona is in a tragic state of underfunding which is going to cause lots of social unrest. Things at the federal level are not much better financially and with the influx of new party members to Congress it is going to be very interesting to watch. The financial future of our entire country is downright scary. And foreign affairs are not much better. I saw a list of 10 separate spots around the world in serious unrest. Yikes!

In addition we have the interaction between state and federal policies. So it is interesting that the federal government has completely failed to manage illegal immigration-a job that should be a priority if you read the Constitution. In contrast, state after state is legalizing the use of marijuana to varying degrees but it remains illegal at the federal level creating uncertainty about how that is going to play out if the feds decide to enforce against Doctors and their patients in the medical marijuana field. 

As if that is not enough, an unaccountable Commission just voted 4-3 to regulate the internet which is government once again going looking for a problem to solve as if they don’t already have their hands full. This points up the problem inherent in trying to spread yourself too thin-the things you are supposed to be doing get ignored while you concentrate on items that are questionably within your bailiwick. The result is the entire system suffers, none of the governments receive the respect they require to function properly and the erosion of order is exacerbated. It is even worse here in Maricopa County where scandal after scandal continues to break. These may seem like small issues now but taken in the aggregate with everything else that is going on, these are hardly good  developments.

How can it be that things are so great on a micro level and so miserable on a macro level? If the positives that were being mentioned on today’s radio reports hold true, maybe economically things are looking up. That would be a step in the right direction. We can only pray and eat more black-eyed peas.