saraewood.com

My dad sent a consumer recall notice today. Thomas the Train is bad news apparently.

Name of Products: Various Thomas & Friends™ Wooden Railway Toys
Hazard: Surface paints on the recalled products contain lead. Lead is toxic if ingested by young children and can cause adverse health effects.

Most of the message was him blaming Bush for Thomas the Train having lead paint. Something about we Americans get what we pay for - we got what we wanted when we twice elected the crooks who run our country now - the Bush mob stripped the operating budgets and gutted the authority of our various consumer protection agencies, in favor of letting their capitalist cronies make more money. Something like that.

“there were a couple of kids, back when i was in grade school, who ate paint peeling off the woodwork. when i told my mother, she said it was because of a deficiency in their diet; she said the paint had lead in it and it would make them sick, and could even kill them. but they kept doing it. their family were white-trash tenant farmers. for as long as i knew them, those kids were skinny and hungry-looking, and they never did well on tests. they both ate boogers, too.”

Pictured above, my home grown version of white trash.

I had the good fortune to be invited to my fabulous and glamorous friend Silvia’s twenty-fifth (plus or minus) birthday which took place in Wapiti, Wyoming on the uXu Ranch. The ranch, run by a friendly cowboy named Tuff, his father Curly, daughter Tara and a couple of nice cowboys Matthew and Jon, is on the eastern entrance of Yellowstone National Park.

Ten of us went for a weekend of horseback riding, shooting guns, fly fishing - but mostly sitting around in a gorgeous place drinking and gossiping and talking about how fabulous and glamorous our friend Silvia is. Oh, and there was that one night of drunken charades by the bonfire - which I think scared our cowhands a bit.

And despite my cabin - the Moonlight - having two mice smushed dead in traps, the place was exceptionally nice for a rustic dude ranch on the eastern entrance to Yellowstone.

My horse, Kilowatt, lugged me around those mountains for three days without a wimper. And every few minutes we’d hear our city-slicker birthday girl refer to her stirrups as pedals or foot rests and her horse alternately as a cat, dog, friend or airplane (as in “when I got off the plane today”).

For the record - for those naysayers - people there really DO wear cowboy hats, belts and boots. And now, so do my kids… (but THIS is what Caleb and Tobias were up to while I was gone).

See the photographic evidence of our attempts to ride a horse here or here (gisela’s flickr) (or slideshow here).

• Sara’s photos: Wyoming
• Gisela’s photos: Wild Wild West

So, last night Tobias needed a new diaper. We were in West Oakland. The only thing that appeared to be a Safeway had been converted into a Baptist Church, so our remaining option was a corner liquor store - you know the kind, metal gates surrounding the building, cardboard advertisements for Miller High Life in the windows, one lone bulb lighting the place.

Thing is, to pay for the diapers - “Fitti” brand, I am not kidding - we needed to use a card, and to use a card there was a $2 surcharge. You’re stuck in West Oakland, don’t have any cash, you need a diaper so your baby’s mama doesn’t freak on you for not thinking to pick them up earlier in the day, you think you could also use a six-pack while you are at it, you have one of those credit cards that keep showing up in the mail. What would you do? You pay with the card. You need diapers now and that $2 is not real anyway is it? Not yet. Not til it fucks up your credit and you can never buy your own car or house or even think of paying off your credit card debt - which by now is chock full of surcharges, service fees, late payment charges, you name it.

Yet another way we have institutionalized keeping poor people poor.