TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

Having a job outside the home requires several things.

One thing is a 'work' wardrobe.

When I was working at BYU, the dress code forbade blue jeans. I was working on a night custodial crew - so I wore overalls - every night. And nobody could complain because they weren't blue jeans.

And when I worked for a pharmaceutical company - as a reward for getting our first drug FDA approved, our CEO gave us the okay for casual dress for the entire summer. And everyone liked it so much, he kept it for the rest of the year.

And with working, you have MAJOR food issues.

Most places, you put your name on your lunch (or in my case I just kept buying funky lunchboxes on sale that no one else in their right mind would want to claim), and hope that most individuals keep their dirty fingers out of your chocolate pudding.

Sodas, however, are difficult, if not impossible, to label.

And they get taken.... a LOT. Unless you drink something like diet bourbon dosed with lemon... no, actually, that would probably be taken FIRST.

Thankfully, I went back to a regular job not that long after leaving Germany.

And Germans do not believe in refrigerating a lot of things. Beer is warm, milk is so ultra pasteurized that you keep it in the cupboard, not the cooler. So you get used to it - and room temperature sodas were the norm.

It only took a few times of my Diet Cokes disappearing for me to come up with the ultimate solution.

Keep them at my desk, not in the fridge.

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HOWEVER, I am no longer working out of the home AND my Diet Cokes are STILL disappearing - and I'm in Arizona and I am NOT going to settle for non-chilled sodas anymore, so keeping them out of the fridge isn't an option anymore.

Solution?

Keep those stupid plastic six-pack thingies ON. And the two males in my house somehow are stopped by the simple effort of having to take REMOVE them.

A to B to C becomes Z

It's funny how images change. To me, for years and years and years, Germany was a scary nation of Nazis, beer and sausages - then it was home & two of my kids' birthplace (Joy, I do apologize for the fact that you are forced to put "Monchengladbach" on any sort of form asking for your place of birth).

Jim Wilson was a nice quiet guy I graduated with - then he was a movie producer with Kevin Costner (and suddenly was also much taller and better looking than I remembered).

And growing up in Los Angeles, Mexico was a quiet, picturesque and colorful land of serapes, tacos, and extremely poor people.

Now. living on the Arizona border for the past ten years, Mexico is the view from my windows. The landscape has changed little, but the actual border has progressed from a simple barbed wire fence to the "wall", as we refer to it down here.

But suddenly, via national news, Mexico is

an eruption of drug-related violence, weapons trade, mass murders and kidnappings.

Military support, international government officials meeting and people suddenly finding other vacation spots.

Okay.

Now, somebody please explain to me how Jesus got translated into the Easter Bunny.