Second chances and bad decisions

I've been thinking about second chances and drugs a bit lately. This has been mostly spurred by the HONY series on inmates. I find a lot of their stories to be fascinating, and in many cases I feel sorry for them, even empathetic. Some of those people were dealt a bad hand in life. Others got caught up in a lifestyle. One guy justified his actions (dealing drugs) by his giving neighborhood kids money for the movies and helping someone pay a bill. Robin Hood of the hood!

I also watch the show Pit Bulls and Parolees. I find myself rooting for the guys there too. I want them to do the right thing. And I think most of them will.

But it is so easy, I imagine, to fall back into the fast lifestyle. When you can make hundreds or thousand of dollars a day working just a few hours, slinging burgers for $7.25/hour for 6 to 8 hours a day seems a lot less appealing. And the addiction. I know how difficult it is for me to not eat sweets or to stop biting my lips and my nails. I can only imagine what addicts must face on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Honestly, after seeing a couple of relatives go through it, for the most part I believe it is when, not if, they will go back to it.

When I see some parolee on that show saying he wants to turn his life around, I often say out loud, "Do the right thing. Make good decisions." I always watch the show with my kid, who is a sensitive soul, with a huge place in her heart for animals. I typically remind her of the poor decisions these guys have made, but that they are trying to turn their lives around. Seeing Joe in yesterday's episode provided a good cautionary tale; during his drug-dealing days, he was shot at in a car dozens of times and lost an eye. But we have relatives who have done things and have allowed me to give my child some excellent examples of how drugs can ruin your life. I can only hope and pray the lessons take.

These are things that I think about, particularly as my child is hurtling towards the teenage years and my not having a clue as to where she will go to high school or who her friends will be. I think about drugs because they are in the news so much. Part of me wants marijuana to be legal because it does not seem to warrant prison, most of which are already overcrowded. And I don't think it is particularly dangerous; most people I know who smoke do it to relax. You just don't read about people who have died from smoking a joint.

Yet people who do or did hardcore drugs did not start by sticking a needle in their arms. My one relative started with weed. Unfortunately it did not end there.

So as with most everything in my life, I have mixed feelings about this and no answers. I don't know how to get people not to buy, use, sell, or get off drugs. I just have to hope it lessens, and hope even more it does not hit home. And I am still going to forgive and give people second (and sometimes third) chances. Especially people I care about. But I know people fall back to their old ways and/or may not deserve the chance to begin with. But that is life. At least the one I am living in.

Let's build something together!

That is one of my favorite slogan's (Or is that a tagline? Over a year removed from a design firm, and I can no longer remember). It belongs to Lowe's, although I am more of a Home Depot gal. But suffice it to say if someone handed me a $5,000 gift card to Home Depot (or Lowe's), I would be ecstatic. If I had $10,000 to spend, you could hear my shouts of joy from miles away. The things I could do with that money. Well, the things I could have Brian do with that money anyway. I love walking around Home Depot and admiring the fancy bathroom sinks and tubs. I look at the lighting and think about where I would put each fixture. I touch textured and colorful tiles and wistfully look at the fancy kitchen cabinets. I admire the various carpet styles and blinds. I look at the fancy front-loading washer and wonder what it must be like to have a steam dryer. I even look longingly at the vacuum cleaners because I can no longer buy a replacement filter for my eight year old mo...

If only I had taken pictures of my detoured drive

When I moved to the Burgh just over 14 years ago, I had a lot of anxiety about getting from "here" to "there." I found the city, which is triangular, and even some of the suburbs quite confusing. On top of that, a lot of the signs were of little help. Clearly they were put up by either natives who had no need for directions or people with a sick sense of humor who thought it would be funny to put signs in random places, leaving off important roads. At some point, I got over that fear of driving to a new building downtown. I don't recall when it happened, but eventually I just figured most of the city out; and when I had to head to a new place, I just drove around, no longer with a feeling of dread, knowing I would eventually get there. But on Sunday morning, that awful, long-ago feeling returned, thanks to the closure of the outbound Fort Pitt Tunnels. I had to pick my mother up from the airport, so there was no avoiding it. (For some reason, my family think...

Summer in review

This summer I made it a point to try to take at least one pic of Jordan whenever we went somewhere, which most often was a park. I wanted to capture all the great, fun things we did this summer, knowing that it was probably going to be my last summer not working for quite some time. So here goes. I have expressed my love of Frick Park, particularly Blue Slide Park, in other posts ; it really is one of our favorites. And this summer marked the first one I did not feel the need to follow J around like a little puppy dog. I actually let her run around and explore, though, admittedly, I would panic if more than three minutes went by and I had not seen her. In the pics above, J is at the end of the blue slide, and then hanging several feet above concrete (which scared the crap out of me). We also visited another section of Frick Park, the area on the corner of Braddock and Forbes, a few times. There is not as much to do as Blue Slide, but we go there to mix things up a bit. In the p...

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