Sunday Socializing

When I was a child, I spoke like a child.  No, wait.  Drinking liberally report included!

A.  My parents had distinct routines for Sundays that differed from the other days of the week.  

B.  I have been in a social rut of late, and I am starting to cure it.

C.  How is your local Drinking Liberally chapter?

I grew up in rural Iowa in the 1970's.  On Sundays, we went to church and then had a big Sunday dinner.  Sunday afternoons were for socializing.  We drove around the county visiting older people, frequently the homebound.  During the warmer weather, we hunted mushrooms (morels) and asparagus.  Also rhubarb, I think.  Sunday evenings were a light supper and a couple treasured TV shows.  Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and the World of Disney were the regulars for many years.  This is all before cableTV, of course.  And the favorite winter supper was sugar-cinnamon toast with hot chocolate.  

These Sundays drifted away as my parents' marriage fell apart and we three girls grew older.  I still have the fondest memories of these times and I try to recreate them for my children.  

Since I became a mom (7 years ago) my social life has totally fallen apart.  Our married dating life has been a big rough on and off, and is right now because we do not have a babysitter.  For awhile I went out once every couple months with some gals I met through Flylady.  I also had a gal-gang at church - for Lutheran women, it's called a Circle.  Even if there aren't enough data points to make it round.  Then Circle changed to Saturday mornings, and my husband insists on working on Saturday mornings.  I drifted away from my Flylady friends - I really didn't have a lot in common with most of them.  Oh, after the kids too, I stopped going to monthly Quilt Guild, and I never  went back to knitting meetings either.  It was just so hard to get away in the evenings, especially after the second child.  

When I turned 40 (almost two years ago), I realized how much my social life sucked.  I found a regular babysitter for us, and we had date nights once a week.  If husband was out of town, I used the date night for mommy sanity time.  :-)  Then our beloved babysitter had the gall to graduate from college and move away!  

I first heard about Drinking Liberally when I attended DFA Night School.  I found my local group and signed up for their emails.  I stopped by a meeting once, but I had my daughter, and the pub rules were no kids.  I left my daughter in the care of the bouncer for about 90 seconds and ran in to say "hi".  

Husband worked late every night this week.  Friday morning I told him to come home by 6 because I wanted to go out.  It was a special DL meeting - Earth Day with 4 speakers!  Friday afternoon was full of hassles of one kind or another, but I persevered.  I didn't get a shower until husband came home, and I was a few minutes late, but, I WENT!

This is my local chapter.  The first post is our agenda from Friday night.  And you can also see our totally cool logo, which pokes a bit of fun at a local symbol.  

The socialization was fun, and I met two of the three chairpersons, Heather and Jeremiah.  I chatted with the folks at my table.  Then the speakers!

Ted Wilson was Salt Lake City mayor long before Rocky, probably in the early 80's.  He is a local Dem hero (we have so few here).  He recently married a popular local columnist, Holly Mullen.  And his daughter Jenny ran for mayor, but lost in the primaries.  He said retirement was not sitting too well, and he decided to look for another job.  He opened a newsletter of some kind and said the Utah Rivers Council was looking for a director.  

He updated us on the status of a couple stupid schemes using water in our state.  He also said that in 2050, the Great Basin Desert will be one of the driest places on earth.  

The next speaker was Vanessa Pierce and she talked about nuclear issues in Utah.  The two big ones are the import of Italian nuclear waste to the west desert, and the loony republican lawmaker plan to put 4 nuclear reactors in the middle of the central Utah desert.  

Vanessa received some very happy news yesterday evening though.  The loon who wanted to put the nuclear reactors in Green River - his name is Aaron Tilton, and he didn't make it out of his party's county convention.  Darn.  

Ashley Peterson spoke next - she runs a green building center.  She talked about the "low hanging fruit" of conservation - that we should do the easy things first, like CF lightbulbs.  She acknowledge she was preaching to the choir.  

Trent Lenz was the final speaker (or maybe he was 3rd) and he encouraged us to plant trees.  He talked about carbon offsets.  He mentioned that Japanese businesses were buying up tracts of land in Australia and planting zillions of trees.  Now sometimes Australia makes Utah look lush, so I am skeptical of this working.  

There was some talk between the panelists about how inter-related all of these things were.  Then they took questions.  The outstanding question of the night went like this:  A man asked about the elephant sitting in the chair at the end of the table.  He was referring to population control.  He thinks that none of the work we do on any of these other issues will matter unless we get population under control - both for our valley and our world.  

Now, as you may know, Utah is 70% LDS, and the LDS folks tend to have larger than average families.  The part that really sucks, IMHO, is that people with large family pay little to no state taxes, because of all of their exemptions.  So there is not a lot of gov't incentive to have smaller families.  

All the panelists said that population was too toxic in Utah and they were not willing to mess up their individual causes.  I was pleasantly surprised to see AAF's diary on that same topic Saturday.

I encourage all of you to improve your social lives and to set aside part of one day of the week for some change of pace.