Stayin’ Alive

I’ve been posting. Really, I have. Just not here. See, check it out. I’m trying to find my pace there. I have another online project, just for fun though, that I’ve been thinking about for the past year or so, and started to do back in December only to put it on hold and I think that I’m finally moving beyond thinking and messing about to actually doing thanks due to Melissa and Ms.Velvet Hammer. I’ll tell you more soon. Honest. I know you’re just dying to know.

Talking of dying or not, I shared this at work today and can’t get it out of my head. Go on, play it. It is totally irreverent, but as a cardiac arrest survivor and as someone who lost a sibling to a heart attack I give you permission to laugh your arse off at this public service announcement. Well, as long as you take the message to heart. Get it? Take the message to heart. If Danny was still alive he would laugh too, but there wasn’t anyone nearby who knew CPR, so he can’t. So we have to laugh twice as hard for all those lost. Frak, only 32% of cardiac arrest victims receive CPR from a passerby. Only 8% of us make it from the site to the hospital. The number of us out in the public and functioning successfully is lower yet. The quicker we get CPR the higher the rate of survival, the greater the number of us that can continue to function and contribute in this society. Watch the bloody video will you and share. Thanks. I feel better now.

Check it out, then go to http://bit.ly/AHACrowdRise to find out about a little prize competition they’re having.

Staying alive, staying alive, staying alive….

Tucson – Our Big-Little Town

Our thoughts are with those families whose loved ones were taken too soon and so awfully, and that those who were wounded be healed swiftly.

Tucson is a beautiful place. Sunrises and sunsets that make you swoon. Mountains that rise majestically from a fabulous bizarre desert landscape. In summer, thunder and lightning roll in from the East and provide us with both relief from humidity and spectacular evening entertainment. For most of the year, the high altitude, dry air, clear and dark skies allow us sweet glimpses into the celestial heavens that this transplant, from a country known for its constant cloud, still gets goosebumps from.

There is something else too. Something that can’t always be seen. The city has a population of over a million now, more than twice what it was 22 years ago when I arrived. Yet, despite its size this is a small place. A place where typically it isn’t six degrees of separation but one, or maybe two, degrees of separation. And so here Green and I sit this evening talking of the lovely Ashleigh Burroughs who I only know through her writing, and Tom & Mary who we know IRL, hoping they’re okay and that their path to healing is swift. We know we’re not alone in that hope. Across this big-little town we’re all trying to process what has happened. These people are our friends, our colleagues, our family.

From Dream Within Reach - Rebecca

Others have talked more articulately than I ever could about the factors that have contributed to the state we now find ourselves. At some point, very soon I’m sure, I’ll return to this topic, but today it is still too raw. Instead, I want to share a little bit of the Tucson I love, a video of Calexico, one of Gabby Gifford’s fav bands playing at the Festival en el Barrio Viejo 2010. This is the song Gabby picked for the Shuttle Astronauts to wake to: Crystal Frontier.