Changing Places

You betcha!

Not thrilled….

Devil Dog!

Lame city had Halloween in the Park, so we had very few trick or treaters. Not like the old days, sigh…

Wow….

Over 80, It’s Anyone’s Race

Joy Johnson, 81, aims to break six hours in New York Marathon; ‘I want to die running’
By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

For Joy Johnson, winning her age group in last year’s ING New York City Marathon was bittersweet. First place was nice, but her time had slipped to seven hours.

“This year I cranked up the training,” says Ms. Johnson, a silver-haired, 81-year-old former Minnesota farm girl from San Jose, Calif., competing in her 21st consecutive New York City Marathon. “I want to die running. That’s my goal.”

Never mind the Kenyans who will battle through Central Park early Sunday afternoon and break the tape of the New York City Marathon in roughly two hours. The most intriguing competition among the 39,000-plus runners should come four hours later in the women’s 80-90-year-old division, the oldest group of women competing this year.

Ms. Johnson will try to hold off four others in the race, including Bertha McGruder, who is in the 80-90 division for the first time after completing last year’s race in six hours, 15 minutes, good for third place among 75-79-year-old women.

Ms. Johnson will face four other competitors over 80, including Bertha McGruder who finished the 2007 race in six hours, 15 minutes.

Bring it on, says Ms. Johnson. “I have my stronger leg muscles now,” she says, placing her hands just above her knees. “I can feel it in my thighs.”

More older Americans are exercising regularly than ever. By 2010, a quarter of the U.S. population will be older than 55, and officials with Running USA say seniors represent the fastest-growing segment of the sport’s participants. Since 2003, the number of finishers 80 and above for all road races has risen 23% compared with 16% for all age groups.

Still, Ms. Johnson headlines a tiny segment in road racing’s most grueling mass event. Just 26 runners over 80 registered for this year’s race, including just three women other than Ms. Johnson and Ms. McGruder, none of whom are expected to win the division.

If history is a guide, roughly six hours after she crosses the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Staten Island into Brooklyn, Ms. Johnson will trot across the finish line hoping to grab the piece of Tiffany’s crystal awarded to the male and female winner in each age group.

It’s a goal Ms. Johnson has been working towards for months. Throughout the summer she ran 50 to 55 miles each week instead of 30 to 35. She ran hills and bleachers at the local high-school football field, and she worked to build up her core strength at a running camp in Minnesota.

The hard work has paid off. Four weeks ago, Ms. Johnson finished the Twin Cities Marathon in six hours, six minutes and 48 seconds, nearly an hour faster than her time in New York last year. Since 1997, she has won her age group in New York five times, finished second on five other occasions and came in third once.

Winning her division once more won’t be easy, though. Ms. McGruder, who declined to be interviewed for this story, ran the race in five hours, 56 minutes in 2005 and has not finished below third in her age group since 2002….

Strangely, other than the occasional game of tag with her five brothers and sisters on the family farm in Waconia, Minn., Ms. Johnson never ran growing up. The only hint of the sport was the verse from the Book of Isaiah on the kitchen wall. “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

“It seems that to find the real path we have to go off the path we are on now, even for an instant, and earn the privilege of losing our way. As the path fades, we are forced to take a good look at the life in which we actually find ourselves. For many professionals in the corporate world, going off the path may simply mean approaching work in a more contemplative way, that is, to meditate on work’s problems as much with the heart as with the mind. This is not to give up our responsibilities and the need to get a job done on time, but to see things from a radical perspective. Imaginative decision-making means being able to step out of the process at hand and see it with fresh, leisurely eyes. Equally so for the life of the imagination.”

— David Whyte, The Heart Aroused

Another elder Obama voter!

Daughter of slave votes for Obama

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country’s first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Republican-leaning Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones’ 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

For at least a decade, Amanda Jones worked as a maid for $20 a month, Joyce Jones said. She was a housewife for 72 years and helped her now-deceased husband, C.L. Jones, manage a store.

Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year’s presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children — Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones — helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. “I feel good about voting for him,” Amanda Jones said.

Jones’ father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones’ father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn’t recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

One of Amanda Jones’ 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election’s significance to the matriarch.

“It’s awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us,” Baker said. “It’s awesome to see what she’s done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work” if Obama is elected, she said.

Jones lives in a small gray house with white trim just off Texas 21. These days, a curious white kitten and a sleepy old black dog guard the house. Inside are photographs and relics of a long, full life, including a letter from then-Gov. George Bush in 1998 commemorating her 100th birthday. A black-and-white picture of her in a long flapper-style dress was taken between 1912 and 1918 — no one can remember the exact year, Baker said with a chuckle.

Jones is part of a small percentage of active voters above the age of 100 in the state — and the country.

Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old nun born in New Hampshire but living in Rome, made recent national headlines as the nation’s oldest voter. But if Texas records are any indication, that’s hard to validate.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Ashley Burton said Texas can’t confirm whether Jones is the state’s oldest active voter because there is too much voter information to sort through. At the county level, there are other challenges. An election official in Hays County said its records are not searchable by age, and Bastrop County elections administrator Nora Cano said that some counties automatically list voters who were born before the turn of the 20th century with birth dates of January 1900.

The oldest active voter in Travis County is 105, officials said, and in Williamson County the oldest is 106 — making Jones the oldest-known active voter in Central Texas.

Making it to see the election results on Nov. 5 is important, but Jones is resting up for another milestone: her 110th birthday in December. “God has been good to me,” she said.

That game rocked!

From “The Heart Aroused”, by David Whyte:

“But what is soul, and what is meant by the preservation of the soul? By definition, soul evades the cage of definition. It is the indefinable essence of a person’s spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress. In a work situation, its lack can be sensed intuitively, though a person may, at the same moment, be powerless to know what has caused the loss. It may be the transfer of a well-loved colleague to another department, a change of rooms to a less appealing office, or, more seriously, the inner intuitions of a path not taken. Though the Oxford English Dictionary’s lofty attempt at soul is the principle of life in man or animals, depth-psychologist James Hillman describes it in far more eloquent terms in his provocative book of selected writings, A Blue Fire:

To understand soul we cannot turn to science for a description. Its meaning is best given by its context…words long associated with the soul amplify it further: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence, innermost purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God. A soul is said to be “troubled,” “old,” “disembodied,” “immortal,” “lost,” “innocent,” “inspired.” Eyes are said to be “soulless” by showing no mercy. The soul has been imaged as…given by God and thus divine, as conscience, as a multiplicity and as a unity in diversity, as a harmony, as a fluid, as fire, as dynamic energy, and so on…the search for the soul leads always into the “depths.”

Entering the “depths” and entering a corporate workplace are rarely seen in the same light. Looking over the vast amount of management literature, very few authors are willing to take the soul seriously in the workplace. The soul’s needs in the workplace have long been ignored, partly because the path the soul takes to fulfill its destiny seems troublesomely unique to each person and refuses to be quantified in a way that satisfies our need to plan everything in advance.

The Heart Aroused will look at the link between soul and creativity, success and failure, efficiency and malaise at work, but it sets as its benchmark not the fiscal success of the work or the corporation (though this certainly can be good for the soul), but the journey and experience of the human spirit and its repressed but unflagging desire to find a home in the world. It is written not only to meet the ancient human longing for meaning in work, but also in celebration of the natural human irreverence for work’s authoritarian, all-encompassing dominance of our present existence.

Preservation of the soul means the preservation at work of humanity and sanity (with all the well-loved insanities that human sanity requires). Preservation of the soul means the palpable presence of some sacred otherness in our labors, whatever language we may use for that otherness: God, the universe, destiny, life, or love. Preservation of the soul means allowing for fiery initiations that our surface personalities, calculating for a brilliant career, would rather do without.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko says:

Sorrow happens, hardship happens,
the hell with it, who never knew
the price of happiness, will not be happy
(Trans. Peter Levi)

Preservation of the soul means giving up our wish, in the scheduled workplace, for immunity from the unscheduled meeting with sorrow and hardship. It means learning the price of happiness. Preservation of the soul means refusing to relinquish the body and its sensual appreciation of texture, color, multiplicity, pain, and joy. Above all, preserving the soul means preserving a desire to live a life a man or woman can truly call their own.

For consultants and management gurus, the soul is a slippery customer. On the one hand it may be dismissed completely. Many trainers and consultants maintain that the soul belongs at home or in church. But with little understanding of the essential link between the soul life and the creative gifts of their employees, hardheaded businesses listening so carefully to their hardheaded consultants may go the way of the incredibly hardheaded dinosaurs. For all their emphasis on the bottom line, they are adrift from the very engine at the center of a person’s creative application to work, they cultivate a workforce unable to respond with personal artistry to the confusion of global market change.

On the other hand, many progressive management gurus ask that the person’s soul life be included fully in their work but imagine that the vast, hidden Dionysian underworld of the soul erupting into everyday work life can only be positive. The darker side of human energy is very often sanitized and explained away as the product of bad work environments. Change the environment, they say, and all good things will fall into place, but this displays an untested middle class faith in the innate goodness of humanity that is only partially true, one doomed to fail when faced with the terrifying necessity of the soul to break, if necessary, every taboo, and wend its vital way onward, irrespective of family, corporation, deadline, or career.

This book does not offer easy answers as to the way that home life and work life, career and creativity, soul life and seniority, can be brought together. What it does do is chart a veritable San Andreas Fault in the modern American psyche: the personality’s wish to have power over experience, to control all events and consequences, and the soul’s wish to have power through experience, no matter what that may be. It offers the poet’s perspective on the way men and women throughout history have lived triumphantly or tragically through both their daily work and their life’s work. For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster, for the soul it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.

I use poetry to chart this difficult fault line in the human psyche not because the fault line is vague and woolly, but because, like human nature, it is dramatic and multidimensional, yet strangely precise. No language matches good poetry in its precision about the human drama. “My heart rouses,” says William Carlos Williams (generously giving me, by way of Dana Gioia’s article, the title of this book) “thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men.”

I have a new favorite nom….

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Can’t even remember which friggin’ party she’s in and wants to be VP. Unbelievable….

150K and they couldn’t get THIS right?

Even here in the heart of ultra-Republican Poway!

When Darwin and I went for our pet therapy visit to the Casa yesterday, we saw Gertrude, the oldest resident of the Casa at 106. She was proud to tell me she had been busy reading over the election materials and casting her absentee ballot. “I voted in every election until now, and I wasn’t going to miss this one!” she said. At 106, Gertrude is still voting, still reading, still active and walking, with the help of a walker these days. I can only hope to live as well as she has….

Here’s another story on another 106 year old voter:

Ann Nixon Cooper, 106 years old, has seen presidents come and go in her lifetime and has outlived most of them. On a sunny fall morning, she left her weathered but well-kept Tudor home in Atlanta, Georgia, to vote early — this time for Barack Obama.

The African-American centenarian remembers a time not long ago when she was barred from voting because of her race. Now she hopes to see the day that Obama is elected as the nation’s first black president.

“I ain’t got time to die,” Cooper said with a smile.

“Even if he didn’t win, I was happy for him just to be nominated,” said the former socialite. “The first black president — isn’t that something, at 106 years old?”

At the Fulton County government center, Cooper was greeted by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

“I thought that I would accompany her today to support her, but also to say to all people that this is a choice we have,” Franklin said.

“As all Americans, we should cherish the right to vote and take every opportunity we have to vote our opinions. She is an inspiration to me personally, but she is also quite an inspiration to all Atlanta.”
Cooper, in a wheelchair and helped by two caretakers, bypassed the long lines of early voters and headed right to the voting machine. Her 106-year-old hands reached out to the 21st-century touch screen to cast her vote for Obama. iReport.com: How do you feel about the election and Colin Powell’s endorsement?

Back at her home, surrounded by the elegance of a bygone era, Cooper clutched the photo albums laid out on her dining room table. The longtime socialite and community leader has called Atlanta home since the 1920s.

She and her late husband, prominent dentist Dr. Albert Cooper, raised four children in this house.

“Our days and nights were just social affairs,” she said. The home was a center of Atlanta’s black society and the scene of many parties. Celebrities, including the late singer Nat King Cole, dropped in to visit.

“It’s been a house with a heap of living going on in it,” said Cooper.

She wears a charm bracelet that former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young gave her when she turned 99.

“He adds a charm every year,” said friend and caretaker Sally Warner. “Andy says he will have to apply for a loan soon to keep up with Mrs. Cooper.”

Cooper danced the electric slide up until the age of 103. She has recently slowed down after suffering several heart attacks and a fractured hip.

On a typical day, Cooper spends hours watching television in her wood-paneled sitting room.

“Her favorite show is ‘The Price is Right,’ although she is getting used to Drew Carey as the new host,” said Warner. Other favorite shows include “Oprah” and “Dancing with the Stars.”

When the weather is nice, Cooper spends afternoons on her screened porch, watching traffic go by and reminiscing about old times. Occasionally she leaves the house for an outing.

Cooper was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 1902. She grew up in Nashville with uncles and an aunt who worked as a domestic for wealthy whites.

She married Albert Cooper in Nashville in 1922, and the couple moved to Atlanta. Three of Cooper’s four children have died; her surviving daughter is 83. She has 14 grandchildren living and many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

When asked about the secret to her longevity, Cooper said, “I don’t know how it happened, but being cheerful had a lot to do with it. I’ve always been a happy person, a giggling person — a wide-mouthed person!”

To young people, Cooper offers this advice: “Keep smiling. No matter what, you get out and vote. Vote your choice.”

Calculate YOUR Obama tax savings!!

Barack Obama and Joe Biden: Change We Need | Tax Calculator

Obama-Biden Tax Calculator

Barack Obama and Joe Biden will cut taxes for 95% of working families, and provide at least three times as much tax relief for middle class families as John McCain and Sarah Palin. The Obama/Biden plan provides $1,000 of tax relief for workers and new tax benefits to help families pay for college, childcare and save for retirement.

Here’s my tax savings:

Obama tax savings
$1109
McCain tax savings
$224

Plus, under Obama, you may be eligible for

* $4000 tax credit to pay for college expenses
* 50% tax credit for up to $1000 for retirement savings

Please bend over….

lol…. via Mish….

Other Sinfest faves:

Barackstar

Samakin Skywalker

Good to be a Banksta

The Way of the Bodhisattva
By Shantideva

From Chapter Three:

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
A guide for those who journey on the road.
For those who wish to go across the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,
And a lamp for those who long for light;
For those who need a resting place, a bed;
For those who need a servant, may I be their slave.

May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
A word of power and the supreme healing;
May I be the tree of miracles,
And for every being the abundant cow.

Like the earth and the pervading elements,
Enduring as the sky itself endures,
For boundless multitudes of living beings,
May I be their ground and sustenance.

Just as all the Buddhas of the past
Embraced the awakened attitude of mind,
And in the precepts of the Bodhisattvas
Step by step abode and trained,

Just so, and for the benefit of beings,
I will also have this attitude of mind,
And in those precepts, step by step,
I will abide and train myself.

That this most pure and spotless state of mind.
Might be embraced and constantly increase,
the prudent who have cultivated it.
Should praise it highly in such words as these:

Today my life has given fruit.
This human state has now been well assumed.
Today I take my birth in Buddha’s line,
and have become the buddhas’ child and heir.

In every way, then, I will undertake.
Activities befitting such a rank.
And I will do no act to mar
Or compromise this high and faultless lineage.

For I am like a blind man who has found.
A precious gem within a mound of filth.
Exactly so, as if by some strange chance,
the enlightened mind has come to birth in me.

This is the draft of immortality,
that slays the Lord of Death,
the slaughterer of beings,
the rich unfailing treasure-mine.
To heal the poverty of wanderers.

It is the sovereign remedy,
that perfectly allays all maladies.
It is the wishing tree bestowing rest
On those who wander wearily the pathways of existence.

It is the universal vehicle that saves
All wandering beings from the states of loss—
The rising moon of the enlightened mind.
That soothes the sorrows born of the afflictions.

It is a mighty sun that utterly dispels.
The gloom and ignorance of wandering beings,
the creamy butter, rich and full,
all churned from milk of holy Teaching.

Living beings! Wayfarers upon life’s paths,
who wish to taste the riches of contentment,
here before you is the supreme bliss—
Here, O ceaseless wanderers, is your fulfillment!

And so, within the sight of all protectors,
I summon every being, calling them to buddhahood—
And till that state is reached, to every earthly joy!
May gods and demigods, and all the rest, rejoice!”

Small cute dog for President! Yay!

Got my absentee ballot and voted and mailed it in today — YAY!!!!!

Vote early if you can and avoid the lines! They’ll be LONG this year…..

POWAY: Diving community looks for answers after death : North County Times - Californian

By COLLEEN MENSCHING - Staff Writer

As word spread of the ill-fated dive of a Poway father and his son, the diving community began speculating about what happened in the waters off La Jolla Shores.

On Saturday morning, a lifeguard at La Jolla Shores spotted a scuba diver in distress, officials said. It turned out to be 19-year-old Josh Sonsteng, whose father, John, had run out of air more than 100 feet below.

The pair, whom officials have said were newly certified divers, tried to share the younger Sonsteng’s air during a 150-foot ascent, but John Sonsteng, 45, never made it to the surface. He was found hours later by a search crew.

“This could very well be a case of two divers exceeding their capabilities and paying a terrible price —- or there could have been equipment failure or even medical conditions contributing to this,” said Tom Perrine, a diver whose son was a childhood friend of Josh Sonsteng.

On Monday, San Diego Lifeguard Service officials were unable to provide details about the condition of the Sonstengs’ scuba equipment, the contents of their diving log books or what their dive plan was on Saturday.

“We all want to know what happened,” Perrine said Monday. “We will eventually know much more.”

John Sonsteng, a father of three, ran a hobby shop. His wife, Deb, runs a day care.

Perrine and his wife, Donna Woodka, remember John Sonsteng as a good man who, along with his wife, was protective of his children.

Perrine and Woodka praised the teen who played at Midland Elementary School with their son.

Because he surfaced so quickly Saturday, Josh Sonsteng was taken to UCSD Medical Center in San Diego as a precaution. He was not in the hospital Monday, according to officials.

“Josh is a great kid,” Woodka said. “I know he did the right things and really tried his best to save his father.”

She said that even though her husband and son dive in larger groups, she still waits for the call that lets her know they surfaced safely.

Woodka, who has taken a break from diving because of health concerns, said she remembers the 40-foot, “out of air” ascent she had to complete to become certified.

“It is terrifying, even with a good instructor with you,” she said.

The situation is more dire 150 feet down, she said.

“At 150 feet, nitrogen (in the blood stream) acts like a drug,” she said. “You can run out of air in five minutes at that depth.”

The “buddy breathing” technique used by the Sonstengs is one of the first things taught in scuba diving classes, said Randy Shaw, training manager for the Florida-based nonprofit National Association of Underwater Instructors.

Shaw said new divers are discouraged from descending deeper than 60 feet. And all divers are expected to resurface with 15 percent to 20 percent of their air supply left, he said.

At that point, they either can refill their tanks or call it a day, but they should never run out of air, Shaw said.

If John and Josh Sonsteng were as deep as officials say, and had as little diving experience as has been reported, a trip 150 feet down would be highly unusual, according to other divers.

“For whatever reason, they got into a situation they never should have been in,” Shaw said.

Perrine said local divers have been speculating privately about what went wrong for the Sonstengs.

“That is one way the diving community tries to both prevent accidents and … get closure after these terrible events,” he said.

But, Perrine said, the focus should be on the Sonsteng family —- “on just how good Josh is, and his dad was, and how strong they all need to be.”

Contact staff writer Colleen Mensching at (760) 739-6675 or cmensching@nctimes.com.

Sadly, this young boy is a friend of our sons….

We are heartbroken for John’s wife Deb and their family today…. there are no words….

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Metro — Man dies on first certified dive

The body of a 45-year-old diver was found yesterday afternoon after a five-hour search off La Jolla Shores.

John Sonsteng, of Poway, and his 19-year-old son were diving for the first time after receiving their certification at a depth of about 150 feet at 9 a.m. when Sonsteng ran out of air, San Diego lifeguard Lt. John Greenhalgh said.

Search teams from the U.S. Coast Guard and lifeguard agencies around the county scoured the sea for hours before finding Sonsteng using a remote-controlled underwater vehicle about 2:30 p.m.

When Sonsteng ran out of air, the two began “buddy breathing,” sharing the air supply from the son’s tank as they tried to ascend to the surface, but they became separated.

The son told authorities that he continued to ascend, but he too ran out of air at about 40 feet below the surface, Greenhalgh said.

When he surfaced in front of the La Jolla Shores lifeguard station, about a quarter of a mile out to sea, he began waving his arms and caught the attention of a lifeguard.

The teen was taken to UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest as a precautionary measure because of his rapid ascent. He was listed in “stable but guarded condition” yesterday, a nursing supervisor said. It was unclear whether he was suffering from decompression sickness, in which gas bubbles form in the bloodstream.

Rescuers launched an immediate search with dive teams, a helicopter and boats, but by 10 a.m. the mission was reclassified as a recovery effort, Greenhalgh said. Divers from the Coast Guard and other agencies later responded to aid in the search.

Dive instructor Todd Young, with Aqua Tech Dive Center, said his group of student divers had just completed their first dive when lifeguards ordered all divers in the area out of the water.

Young said novice recreational divers are taught not to exceed a depth of 60 feet unless they have more advanced training. Divers who breathe high-pressure gas at extreme depths can begin to feel as though they are drunk and judgment can be seriously impaired.

“We preach that you should always be watching your gauges and compass,” Young said.

How Many of Me (via Five Acres With a View)

* There are 890,014 people in the U.S. with the first name Donna.
* Statistically the 47th most popular first name.
* More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Donna are female.

* There are 397 people in the U.S. with the last name Woodka.
* Statistically the 66181st most popular last name.

Donna Woodka

* There is 1 person in the U.S. named Donna Woodka.