What is your definition of cheating?

Whenever you feel, in your heart, that it's wrong, then it's wrong.  This is going to vary from person to person.  That's why there is no clear cut definition.  Sure, sometimes for school and work there has to be standards for everyone to follow, but that doesn't mean you might not have even stronger standards set for yourself.  Sometimes you know that sometime is wrong, that it would be wrong to "cheat" the system in a certain way, but you could get away with it and no one would know.  But it would weigh on your conscience.  Then it's a true cheat. 

Share a story of a time you acted foolishly.

Tongue out

Show us a great April Fools' Day joke.

The End of an Era on Vox
yesterday

As you've noticed, we've been making a lot of changes to Vox during the past couple of months. These changes were all implemented to make sure you're getting the most out of your Vox experience... to ensure that Vox is truly a place where you can come to share your passions and your creativity. Two...

April Fool's - unfortunately, they really are going to stop the Question of the Day and the Vox Hunt.  Boo Hoo!

     Right now I feel like that comic, Ron White, when he says "They call me, Tater Salad."  A couple of minutes ago I posted the picture of my eyes in response to the Vox Hunt "Show us You" or something like that.  Well, I didn't realize that when I posted it the name given to the picture would also be shown.  Okay, it's a fact.  My husband called me Disco Bunny in that picture.  You'd have to see the rest of the picture to get it, and even then you'd maybe disagree, but that's it.  I do not claim and have never claimed to be a disco bunny.  To be perfectly honest, I can't dance.  There.  It's out.  Not that my foot doesn't tap when I hear Gloria Gaynor or Diana Ross.  But mea disco bunny?  HA!  What a joke. 

     But John, my husband, calls this picture my Disco Bunny look, so the pic was titled that when it was saved.  I suppose he might have thought of me as a disco bunny because I had pink hair weaves.  Not that chicks did that then, but hey, he was never one to get fashion trends right.

     In any event, I am not a disco bunny, make no representations of being a disco bunny, nor do I want to be a disco bunny.  It was just the way the picture was saved.  I tend to save pictures by emotions, not just numbers (although numbers do get involved when pictures get revised) because that way I immediately know what picture I'm looking for or thinking about.  Say my Disco Bunny picture and wham!  I'll know which one you're referring to.  But I'm not a Disco Bunny.  Sorry to disappoint you. 

Show us a photograph that best represents you.

Disco bunny.1

I wasn't feeling very Christmasy this year.  Then I decided to do something.  I decided to write a thank you to someone who helped me long, long ago.  Here it is:

Letters, 12/16: Overdue thanks to the kindest of strangers

For many years I have vowed to write your paper and tell you my story. I didn’t mean to neglect my duty, for it is my duty to share what I know with your community, but I, like most people, would each year get caught up in the hustle and bustle of Christmas. But I am determined to be silent no longer.

In December 1980, my 2-year-old daughter and I were traveling from southern California to Iowa. I was 20 years old. Since we had been living in California, we did not have any warm clothing to speak of.

I had very little money and was trying to make it to my mother’s home for Christmas. I planned to live with her until I could decide what I was going to do with my life.

ust west of Lincoln I had a flat tire. I stood out on the highway, shivering in below-zero wind, not knowing what to do, when suddenly a pickup truck pulled up.

The driver hustled me and my daughter into his warm truck before I could object and began changing my tire even though he had to remove all my worldly goods from the trunk before he could find the donut spare. Once completed, he came back and declared that, “You’re coming home with me.”

By this time it was late afternoon on Christmas Eve. I had just enough money left for gas to get to Cedar Rapids, so I couldn’t get a hotel. The heater in my car was broken. It was so very cold, and I knew I couldn’t let my baby freeze, so even though I knew better than going home with a stranger, I took a deep breath and followed the man home.

When we arrived, his wife treated me as if my child and I were expected guests. I was not allowed to help with the dinner dishes. I was given the spare bedroom while their children, home from college, slept on the basement couch and sofa bed. Her husband took my car to a garage and bought me a new tire.

A bit later in the evening they asked me whether I was Catholic. When I told them I wasn’t, they apologized for having to leave me alone in the house, but that they needed to go to Mass. How trusting!

The next morning a lovely hot breakfast awaited me along with some warm clothes, a sack lunch, and some money for “just in case.”

I don’t know when I’ve received more genuine kindness. Certainly if Joseph and Mary had knocked on this door when they sought shelter, Jesus would not have been born in a stable.

Those kind people in Lincoln gave me their address and it was lost. I’ve always regretted that I was unable to thank them properly. I don’t remember their names, and they may not even still be alive. But even if they aren’t, I feel certain that their spirit of giving lives on in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Thank you, kind people. May your entire city be blessed. And Merry Christmas.

Leslie Muzingo, Mobile, Ala.

And this is what became of it:

Belated thanks helps women reconnect

By LAURA CHAPMAN / Lincoln Journal Star

Shivering on the side of a road near Lincoln in below-freezing wind chills  with a flat tire and her 2-year-old daughter, Leslie Muzingo didn’t know what to do.

She had left the heat of Los Angeles, disillusioned with big city life, to go home to her mother’s place near Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Without money for repairs or a motel, without even warm clothing, the 20-year-old felt desperate.

“I knew my daughter and I would’ve frozen to death out there,” Muzingo said.

It was Dec. 24, 1980.

Paul Grosserode of Lincoln pulled over to help. He changed her tire and took Muzingo and her daughter home with him.

The man fixed her car and his wife, Dorothy Grosserode, made them a spaghetti dinner and set up the spare bedroom. The couple’s children — home for the holidays — slept on a basement couch and sofa bed.

“We just didn’t think anything about it,” Dorothy Grosserode said recently, thinking back across the 27 years separating that Christmas Eve from today.

“We just did it.”

Before Muzingo and her daughter left the next morning, Dorothy Grosserode handed her a sack lunch and some money, “just in case.”

This year, after wanting to do so for a long time, Muzingo sat down in her Mobile, Ala., home to write a letter to the editor.

She wanted to thank the people who took her in, but she’d lost their contact information.

Halfway through her letter, she heard about the shootings at Westroads Mall in Omaha and felt compelled to finish.

“I know it’s just a small little thing,” she said, “but people need to be reminded that there’s good things out there, too.”

Dorothy Grosserode, drawn to a Dec. 16 letter by its headline — Overdue thanks to the kindest of strangers — read what Grosserode wrote.

She remembered the young woman and child, and she wanted to talk to her.

Muzingo and Dorothy Grosserode spoke by phone Tuesday for about 30 minutes.

Muzingo wanted to say thanks.

Dorothy Grosserode, who still lives in Lincoln, wanted to know how Muzingo’s life turned out.

“That just shows what kind of person she is,” said Muzingo, who went on to earn a law degree.

Dorothy Grosserode and her husband had always wondered if the young woman made it to Iowa.

Paul Grosserode died in 1991, but his wife said he would have liked to have seen what became of the woman he’d helped.

“I wish he could have been here to read that,” she said of the letter.

Muzingo wished she could have thanked the man who found her.

She hoped her letter would commemorate the man she credits with saving her own and her child’s life.

“You can’t tell a lot about people when you just look at a picture of someone,” she said after looking at an old photo of the couple who helped her.

“This is the picture of what the man looked like by the person he was inside

What's on your holiday wishlist?

A happy ending to the Iraq war.  The beginning of the return of our soldiers.  The resignation of President Bush and Vice President Chaney.   A miracle for New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast.  Better understanding and willingness to work together between conservatives and liberals.  Good health for me.  A job for my husband.  Safety for my dog. 

Or an ipod.  That would be totally cool. 

Show us a sign that Christmas is a month away.

100b0300.1

I'm not going to post a picture of my favorite meerkat because the last picture I posted for some reason is gone.  Do pictures "stolen" from Animal Planet just disappear over time?  Or is it because the real Mozart died that the picture had to disappear?

I couldn't go to the chat rooms and cry with the other mourners when Mozart died, but I did go to my bathroom and break down into a bawling fit.  When that didn't suffice for grieving, my dog and I just went to bed.  For the entire next week I thought about it.  It just didn't seem fair.  Here was this little meerkat who at every turn was getting the rug pulled out from under her, so to speak.  Yet she kept coming back, never being aggressive (like Kinkachoo, who murdered Mozart's newborn babies), never giving up.  She lost three litters of pups, two of which were brutally murdered.  She was the underdog of all underdogs (or kats) and naturally there was this expectation of a happy ending.

Especially when she met Wilson.  Here we have Mozart, all alone in the desert, really desperate, and a knight in shining fur appears.  Rescued!  Everything seems rosy for a while.  They have a little tumble which makes the viewer think - ahhh - Mozart will finally be the matriarch of a group - but what should happen but they run into two warring groups, one of them Wilson's.  Wilson apparently feels the need to help in the battle (isn't that just like a man, going off and leaving us women after they've gotten what they wanted from us!) and he takes off to help.  Mozart stands there, unsure what to do.  If it hadn't been for the battle she probablay could have gone home with Wilson since she absolutely stunk of Wilson by that time, but the battle made that impossible - she would've been killed.  The other group was her former family, but she smelled so strongly of Wilson that they wouldn't have recognized her.  She did the only thing she could do - she ran.

Wilson, to his credit, did go looking for Mozart the next day.  And he found her, or what was left of her.  Meerkats must travel in groups so that they can watch each other's backs to protect each other from predators.  It had been a miracle that Mozart had survived as long as she had.  But we, as humans who expect happy endings, expected that miracle to continue.  We had watched as Mozart shivered alone in the rain after her mother banned her from the group.   Later Flower allowed Mozart to return, but when Mozart again had pups Flower simply moved the group and left Mozart behind and we the viewer watched Mozart's confusion when she came above ground and realized they weren't coming back.  We saw her angst in deciding whether to leave the pups to find something to eat - which was necessary in order to produce milk for them - or to stay with them and protect them, and we saw the fear that gripped her heart when she came back from eating and found her babies gone, murdered by the Commandos.  It was much of the same in her final pregnancy.  And we, the voyeur viewer, watched Mozart as she cried out to her fellow meerkats for help when it came time for her to deliver and saw her dismay when she saw they weren't coming to her aid.  Her sister, Kinkachoo, was in charge this time, and she wanted to make sure Mozart didn't take control.  So again Mozart was left to fend for herself, and when she was finally forced to leave so that she could get something to eat, her sister Kinkachoo came back and murdered her babies.  This time we didn't see Mozart's reaction to the murder.  Instead, we saw all that remained from the deed - one tiny bloody paw. 

Throughout all of this we, the viewer, mourned with Mozart.  We tsk tsked sometimes when Carlos, the roving male, came around because every time Mozart ran into him, she would end up pregnant.  Girl frined, we'd think, can't you leave that guy alone?   Don't you know he's bad news?   We loved her gentleness.  Even after all of this cruelty it never changed her personality.  We were amazed at how she could bounce back and how she could survive.  She was almost like the Ever Ready Bunny - she just kept on going! 

Which made her death all the more shocking.  We didn't expect it.  We expected a happy ending.  She had experienced only bad times even though she had been a "good girl."  It wasn't fair.  It simply wasn't fair.

Which brings me to probably the greatest truism that I can offer.  Life isn't fair. 

Thank you Mozart.   You've brought something into my life that I'll never forget.