A former reporter for the now-defunct print edition of the Tucson Citizen has filed a civil lawsuit against Gannett Co., Inc. and Citizen Publishing, Co. for breach of contract.

The lawsuit for A.J. Flick, who worked for the Citizen for 15 years before its closure this spring, was filed in Pima County Superior Court late Monday night by Adam Watters, a local attorney specializing in employment law.

The specific dollar amount of damages sought by Flick isn’t specified in the complaint, but she said, “It’s less than what some Gannett executives pay for a round of golf,” referring to Robert Dickey, president of Gannett U.S. Community Publishing, paying somewhere between $12,500 and $25,000 in green fees at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic the day after delivering the news of the Citizen’s sale/closure to stunned reporters and editors.

Dickey told Citizen employees Jan. 15 that the paper was for sale and if it wasn’t sold by March 21, it would be closed. Employees were also given a written statement to that effect, which noted that employees would get one-week severance pay for each year they’d worked at the Citizen if they stayed employed through March 20.

Flick, who covered the courts beat during her final six years at the Citizen, claims Gannett broke its contract when, on March 17, it told Citizen employees that the paper would be open “day to day” because a buyer had surfaced and negotiations were “ongoing.”

“I had a vacation I had already planned and paid for at that time, so I went on that, and then when I got back, I met with my lawyer and our stance was, whatever Gannett asks people to do after the 20^th is a new agreement,” Flick said. “We basically said to them I will come back to work for you indefinitely if you give me my severance now and pay me for the work I do until the paper closes. I had plans to move on after March 20. If they wanted me to work, we’d needed to strike a new agreement. They should have offered me a new contract, but no, they were forcing my hand, asking me to do something extra for them and then they would give me severance. But how would I know they would honor that contract?”

Flick and Watters engaged in a month-long letter exchange with Gannett officials while Flick was on unpaid leave, continuing to argue breach of contract. In mid-April, Flick was warned by interim editor Jennifer Boice that if she didn’t return to work she would be fired. Then, on April 27^th, Flick received notice via certified mail that she was being fired.

“Mark (Evans) had called and said he needed to get my (Citizen) equipment from me and we were having lunch when the certified letter came from Jennifer,” Flick said. Evans was Flick’s direct editor at the time and is the current editor of TucsonCitizen.com, one of only two full-time employees on Gannett’s Tucson payroll.

In her lawsuit, Flick asks for the 15 weeks of severance she feels is due to her because of her 15 years at the Citizen, as well as the value of health benefits she would have received during that severance period, triple that amount in damages, and attorney and legal fees.

“Gannett told me on Jan. 15 of this year that it was putting the Tucson Citizen up for sale and if I were still employed on March 20 and the paper not sold by March 21, I would get one week of severance for every year of employment with all of my health benefits,” Flick said. “I was employed by the Citizen on March 20 and the paper was not sold. However, Gannett tacked on a 12th-hour requirement that employees needed to stay past March 20th, indefinitely, in order to collect severance, contrary to what we were told previously in person and in writing.

“I filed the lawsuit because I held up my end of the bargain and Gannett did not. The lawsuit basically says I relied on Gannett’s promises, to my detriment, and suffered financially.”

Representatives from Gannett were not immediately available to speak about the lawsuit this morning and Boice declined to comment, referring comment to Gannett corporate offices.

Flick, 48, is now pursuing freelance writing and legal research. During her Citizen tenure, she covered a number of sensational trials, including the James Allen Selby serial rapist trial (for which she appeared on an episode of A&E’s “Cold Case Files”) and the Bradley Schwartz and Ronald Bruce Bigger trials for the murder of Tucson eye doctor Brian Stidham.

Flick has won numerous awards, including two for the coverage of the Stidham murder and a second place in the Arizona Associated Press’s public safety reporting category for her story “Prison without bars,” which reported on the Tucson state prison’s Catalina Unit. In 2004, she was part of a team that won first place in Arizona AP’s deadline news reporting for covering a fatal hostage crisis that left three people, including the shooter, dead.

The Tucson Citizen printed its final edition May 16 and TucsonCitizen.com launched May 18.

1. The post I did last week on noise in public libraries was a hot discussion topic both on this blog and out in my neighborhood, so I called Nancy Ledeboer, Pima County Library Director, today to get some information about how local libraries are dealing with concerns over noise. As per normal when one speaks with a librarian, I learned something: Libraries are actually serving a broader range of the public than they did in the past, thus being more “public” than ever.

“We say we’re a public library here to serve everyone in the community,” Ledeboer said. “But the truth is what we were servicing in the past were people from middle class backgrounds who grew up in a culture of using the library.”

But now, she explained, libraries are drawing from all strata of the community because libraries offer more than books. The Internet changed the game in the ’90s, and people who could not afford access to a private computer – or lacked Internet access at home – came to the one free place where they knew they could find both computers and Internet access.

“A whole new group of people began coming to the library library looking for information,” Ledeboer said. “That’s a good thing – we’ve got more and more people acquainted with the library and what a library offers. But it did create a clash of sorts because so many people are using it.”

That clash is often about noise. Ledeboer said it has been an issue at many of the 27 branches in the library system, and each of the libraries is dealing with it in different ways.

“We’ve charged each of our libraries to create a quiet zone, and if they don’t have enough space for a quiet zone, then they are working to create a quiet time. “But frankly, some of our libraries are just too small. In that case, people need to approach a librarian if they feel they are being disturbed. Some people are hypersensitive to noise, and some people don’t know they’re being noisy so it is a matter of finding a find balance where people can all coexist in the libraries. We do have a code of conduct policy posted on our Website that says you’re not allowed to create a disruption that interferes with other people’s use of the libraries, but we don’t have specific ‘no cellphone’ policies.”

Ledeboer also said that the belief that fewer people are reading books because they only use the library for the computers or to hang out after school is a fallacy. She said books circulation is actually way up in the past few years when contrasted to before the time when libraries were community centers, and part of that is because when people come into a library branch to do research on a computer or participate in one of the job clubs or book clubs or get tutoring, they often leave with a book as well.

So, yes, libraries may be more noisy than in the past, but that is because libraries are, thanks to computers, Internet access and the myriad programs offers, actually living up to the “public” in their names in a manner that didn’t happen in the past. And that’s a great thing. See how much you can learn if you talk to a librarian?

2. Yet again, there was a study saying we’re killing ourselves with food. Actually, the report was about how more 60-somethings are disabled now than ever before and that disability is directly attributed to obesity. This is something that really gets on my last nerve because – surprise – we all have the ability to control what we eat. (Well, except for those people who have the syndrome where they eat in their sleep and all that.) We have the ability to get off our tail and go for a walk or something more strenuous. We have the ability to say no or go to food-addiction meetings to get help saying no. But we don’t. How many times do we have to hear that we are killing ourselves by eating this and drinking this and then eating this? With talk of health care all the rage, is anyone besides me wondering if we should put a limit on what a government plan would cover in regards to illnesses caused by obesity? Should healthy taxpayers have to pay for people to get insulin when their diabetes could be controlled with diet but those people refuse to control their food intake? Should we fine parents who let their children get obese? If you want help eating right and exercising, here’s an article you could read. And here is a clue: The sooner you start getting in shape, the better it is for you. It is harder to lose weight with every passing year and the damage is cumulative.

3. And speaking of eating …Thanksgiving is just around the corner and fellow religion blogger Karen Edmisten is asking, “Have you started your Thanksgiving tree?” If you don’t know what one is, check out her blog here. We used to make these when my kids were small and I’m thinking the idea needs to be revisited, especially in this year of loss. Too often we focus on what we don’t have … a Thanksgiving Tree is the cure for that.

4.  John Allen, reporter on all things Catholic and Vatican has come out with a new book, The Future Church: How 10 Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. In this blog post, he says that if he had to pick a motto for his book it would be “Designed to start arguments, not settle them.” Sounds like my kind of read. Anyway, he is inviting people to read the book and then meet in cyberspace for discussions — should be fun. (And maybe interesting to see who actually shows up.

5. And finally, if you want to do good while you’re searching the Web, add GoodSearch to your browser. You can pick any charity you want and they get funds from your searches. Share, and share alike is what I say.

National Public Radio this morning had a report that included interviews with doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s Fort Hood massacre. That report came before employees at WR were put on lock down as far as talking to anyone, including the press, and, according to NPR, the FBI.

I can’t find the report on their Web site, although this story mentions briefly how Hasan was reprimanded for proselytizing about Islam when he was in training at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Even though I’m lacking evidence that what I heard in the car this morning wasn’t a product of my imagination, I’m sticking my neck out with a big question: Why didn’t the folks at Walter Reed report this guy as crazy if what they recall happening indeed did happen?

I think it is because there is a fine line between racial/ethnic/religious profiling and pointing out the obvious and people are really afraid of crossing over to the wrong side. Since 9/11 people have been afraid of appearing racist where Muslims are concerned. There’s good reason for that, such as the case of the flying imams.

So, instead of appearing intolerant, people stay quiet, even – sometimes especially – other Muslims. They don’t want to be judged by their religion so they are reluctant to judge others by that rubric, even when they know that the person they are dealing with is dangerous.

A few months after 9/11, I was working on an analysis piece for the Texas Catholic, and I interviewed a Dallas imam about this very thing. I asked him why imams would keep quiet if they knew someone nefarious was in their congregations. He said that if a dangerous Muslim was at a mosque, the best thing was to hope that he – in hearing the moderate, educated teaching preached at the majority of American mosques – would either change his stripes or, “in most cases, we just hope he leaves.” The community wants the crazy guy out of their religious space because, the imam said, lunatics are just as likely to kill other Muslims as anyone else.

In other words, moderate Muslims are trying to protect themselves as much as the rest of us, but in so doing – in not directly going after the crazies among them – they are putting others at risk. Ditto for your average citizen, or the doctors who knew Hasan. Who wants to be called intolerant or a racist? According to the NPR story, Hasan was cold, horrible with patients and fanatical about his religion. Doctors would talk about him in the hallway, the report said, asking themselves if he could be a terrorist or if he was just a really bad doctor.

Who knows if that is what drew him to kill people at Fort Hood? We won’t know until the investigation is complete, or until he talks. (And once he gets a lawyer, fat chance of him talking). But what we do know is that he was not a very warm, caring doctor – even by military standards – and people noticed that early on. They noticed that he seemed more concerned with his religion than his schooling and treatment of soldiers. They noticed that he used  medical lecture slot to preach the Quran. And yet he continued at the medical school, worked at the hospital, moved on like low-achieving students who are socially promoted because the grade they are leaving just wants them out of their hair.

What happened at Fort Hood shows that common sense really needs a shot in the arm. We don’t necessarily have to go all Hannity on folks, but we need to stop being so afraid of speaking up when craziness is staring us in the face.

I didn’t realize my post about loud libraries would elicit such fervent comments. Ergo, I think I need to offer a clarification or two, the first of which is I LOVE LIBRARIES! OK, and the rest:

#1. I’m normally not so cranky when I write a post and so my tone was, well, cranky. When you write about libraries, you shouldn’t be cranky because they are great institutions run by great people who have a love of the printed word. (Let us all give homage to words on paper even if the whole world is headed toward reading on iPhones.)

#2. I wasn’t picking on the Oro Valley library, I just happened to be there that day. I regularly visit the Nanini Library and the Joel Valdez Main Library as well, with an occasional jaunt to the Woods Memorial Branch Library and the cell phone chatting is present in all of them. I’ve mentioned noise to librarians before at those various branches, which is how I learned about the libraries as community center model. And most days, it doesn’t bother me, really. Yesterday was just one too many cell phone chatters.

#3. I am not an ogre who thinks there should be absolute silence in libraries, or stern librarians getting angry with library patrons, although it would be easy to think I believe those things from yesterday’s (cranky) post. I recognize that libraries have to be more welcoming than some might have found them in the past. Just the fact that every city library I visit is JAM-PACKED most days is evidence that libraries are doing things the right way.

#4. I do, however, mourn the loss of manners on the part of library patrons, especially, like I said, the people who should know better. You might expect teens to chat away oblivious to those around them; I was surprised to see it happening with more mature folks. I have no problem with small children running squealing through the library in joy; I love seeing that. And tutoring is wonderful (and have done it myself), even if it is in a louder voice; anything to help kids is to be praised and I was a dweeb to criticize (I was cranky!)  But talking on cell phones at length in full voice or not turning your phone ringer to silent? That seems impossibly rude and that’s really what pushed my cranky button yesterday.

All that said, perhaps the people talking on the cell phones yesterday do not have access to computers in their home. Perhaps they have to come to the library to conduct business by phone because they need both an Internet connection and a phone. Perhaps they lost their jobs and are trying to remake their lives and have to use the library as their office (this is reportedly happening across the nation) and they can’t whisper on the phone because whomever is on the line would then know that they aren’t in an office.

In other words, there might be plenty of reasons besides rudeness that people talk on their cell phones in what used to be a semi-silent space. I should have considered that before posting — instead of letting my cranky-self rule the day.

Two interesting pieces on Google News this morning to share. No comment from yours truly, as I’m up to my eyeballs in homework, but feel free to read and discuss amongst yourselves. (But remember to play nice in the God Blogging sandbox, please.) Here’s one on interfaith dialogue and here’s another out of the New Statesman that discusses how faith in science (think global warming) is now officially protected in the same category as religious belief. Hmmm. I guess that means that atheists really are, in spite of their fervent denials,  “believers.”

Interesting side note, the New Statesman (”created in 1913 with the aim of permeating the educated and influential classes with socialist ideas,” according to their Web site) being a United Kingdom publication, sticks w/ the King’s English usage so there are no periods after honorifics such as Mr. and Ms. and that completely makes me want to pick up a red pen. It also has a religion blog called The God Blog, which makes me feel like a copycat having God Blogging.

I wish I saw this sign in my local library (sigh). Image courtesy of CityofSound blog

So, I’m in the Oro Valley Public Library, a satellite of the Pima County Library System, and it is crowded and, more often than not, noisy. It appears all the laid-off people in OV now spend their days in the library – or maybe OV has always had this many self-employed folks. Whatever, they are noisy. Their cell phones ring and they answer them (!!!) right where they are sitting, frequently carrying on a detailed, fully voiced conversation.

There are also kind adults tutoring kids and, OK, that is a good thing overall, but I don’t really understand why the instruction has to be loud. And, a few minutes ago, a dog-trainer came in with a handi-dog doing what is necessary to train the dog (expose dog to people and places) but the chatter she carried on was not necessary.

This is all part of the movement of library as entertainment center to make libraries more accessible to the public. It has its positive points; one does want the public to use libraries, even if few of them read something actually printed on paper and head instead to the bank of computers. But there is something to be said about silence, as well as for basic manners.

Everyone knows the young imitate the old, so I would hope the 40 to 60 year olds could maintain some decorum and set an example for the younsters, but alas, it isn’t so. In fact, the Baby Boomer set, overall is louder than the younger library-goers. I just listened to a 60-something man at the computer station conduct a 15-minute conversation on his cell with someone about a Web page he was viewing. This guy sitting at a table behind me? His cell phone ring is turned up to “loud and annoying.” What is up with that? Turn the dang thing to vibrate, buddy!

You can’t stop progress, or so they say, so this new silent-never-more library-with-a-bookstore-feel train can’t be derailed. But perhaps the librarians could consider allocating space on the basis of noise level. You know, a tutoring section, a chit-chat section and then a research and study session where the old golden rule of silence – and no cell phones – applied. Just sayin’.

Trying to clean off my desk this afternoon and came across two curiosities. The first is this article in Wired Magazine  about Thorkil Sonne, an IT worker in Denmark who decided a few years ago that people with autism and related conditions like Asperger’s would be great for jobs requiring total concentration and near-total recall —- jobs like software engineers.

In most countries, a diagnosis of autism means a lifetime of struggling with social and people skills. I know two young adults with high-functioning autism, both at the University of Arizona. In social situations, they stand out like clothed people at a nudist colony. They are kind and intelligent, but their obsessive focus on minute details in a conversation makes relating to them difficult.

No surprise to that, says Sonne, which is why most folks with an autism-spectrum disorder don’t fit in at many jobs – they don’t “do” social interaction. However, they do do persistence and structure and routine in a way that would drive many workers batty, which makes them perfect as software engineers. In 2004, Sonne founded Specialisterne (Danish for “specialists”), an IT consultancy firm that hires people with autism-spectrum disorders. These consultants work for places like Microsoft and Cisco, finding software errors missed by those companies’ designers, according to the Wired article.

The consultants do well, staying focused long after most of us with our 7-minute attention spans have switched gears and gotten distracted talking about last night’s episode of The Office. “This is not cheap labor, and its’ not occupational therapy,” Sonne is quoted as saying. “We simply do a better job.”

Item 2: Parents of students at the UA received a plea letter this week that looks like it is from the Alumni Association. It is actually from a “Final Exams Service Program” in Trenton, NJ, that partners with heave knows how many Alumni Associations to provide heavy-fat, high-sugar “care packages” for students during finals week. So, first point is, don’t they know we have an obesity epidemic among young people? And the second point is the tone of the letter. Take a peak inside the one I received:

Two students showed up to get their Care Packages. One beamed when she received her package. The other, whose family had not reserved a package, immediately used her cell phone and called Mom with a plaintive, “You didn’t send me a care package?”

First of all, why would the kid have shown up at the UA Alumni Association building to get a care package if her parents had not sent one? She wouldn’t have been notified. Secondly, I’ve received these letters before and they just been an offer (”You too can spend even more money on college!!!”), not a guilt trip. It seems odd, especially during this economic downturn, that any university would pair up with this business and allow pleas such as the following:

Because so many students receive Care Packages during exam time, it can hurt if a student is left out. This year, we have a solution to make sure every student feels supported at this critical time. The enclosed free gift card is our way to help. Please send it even if you don’t plan to reserve a Care Package. Of course, it will be more appreciated if it comes with food.

Of course! Good gravy. Parents have enough guilt as it is and they are paying through the nose to get their kid a degree and, in their minds (c’mon, admit it), that kid needs to buckle down during finals with or without the Pop-Tarts and Andy Capp Cheddar Fries.

I happen to send my kids my own version of a care package around exam time. There are homemade chocolate chip cookies, but then its fresh fruit or veggies and nuts and maybe a coffee card. I’ve done this for too many years to remember, since I tend to believe a good salad cures all ills and all greens should be washed down by chocolate. But I don’t like being guilted into thinking that if I don’t cough up $25 to $60 for an “Exam Survival Pack” or a “Wildcat Spirit Care Package” I’ll somehow be causing my offspring to feel excluded. We’re not talking 5-year-olds here, people, but young adults who (one would hope) have a sense of perspective. But maybe I don’t know as much about this age group as the Final Exams Service Program does. After all:

If you’ve sent (a care package) before, you already know how much it helped. If you haven’ts, you can be sure your student will appreciate receiving the same kind of support other classmates receive.

UA Provost Meredity Hay

It is hard to believe it has been a month since a University of Arizona faculty poll revealed that at least 31 percent, and possibly nearly 50 percent, of the voting faculty wanted Provost Meredith Hay fired. Time flies when you’re buried under textbooks.

During the past four weeks, while I’ve been building lessons for rascally high school freshmen and learning new terms like “constructive assertiveness” and “summative evaluation,” UA’s upper administration has been following up on President Robert N. Shelton’s promise to meet with faculty and improve communication. My e-mail inbox, once a veritable clearinghouse of faculty and department head concern over Hay, grew silent, leading me to wonder if Hay’s apology in a faculty senate meeting had made things hunky-dory in Wildcat Town. Apparently not, according to inquiries made yesterday and today.

“She dug herself a deep hole and she’s now trying to dig her way out of it,” said Lynn Nadel, UA Regents Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee. “The general feeling I’ve gotten from speaking with the faculty who have attended the meetings is one of guarded – well, I wouldn’t even say optimism – it’s just guarded. I think she is sincere, but I’m not surprised people are skeptical. But to her credit, she’s been brave and gotten out there. She hasn’t run away.”

Not that some don’t want her to, still. This, from a department head who admits to being more than a little skeptical:

Robert’s gotten the word–from faculty, from administration, from faculty leadership–that the provost is arbitrary, incompetent, and personally impossible. “Never been a dean, never been a department head” is how she gets regularly characterized around here, by way of explanation for why she understands leadership, budgets, curriculum, and the management of a university so poorly.

UA President Robert N. Shelton

Indeed, Shelton held a meeting with various department heads on Sept. 15 – before the faculty poll – and was told (according to minutes obtained through a public records request for Shelton’s emails) that, of the four meetings Shelton had held prior to Sept. 15 with these department heads, “the meetings that were held with Dr. Shelton alone had a different tenor than those in which Dr. Hay was present as well. … in the perception of the Heads Representatives, there was little in the way of give and take dialog…”

Nadel said the big change since the faculty poll is the creation of a SPBAC subcommittee that is charged with making sure Hay’s my-way-or-the-highway method of faculty consultation is changed. The committee, called SPBAC 2012 in reference to the funding “cliff” anticipated in 2012 when the federal stimulus dollars go dry, is meant to increase communication both up and down the chain of command. It is a 15-member committee appointed by Nadel, with representation from staff, the student body and every major UA college, including the College of Humanities and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, both of whic have felt put upon since receiving 7 percent cuts to their budgets this year. Here’s Nadel:

Everyone still agrees (Shelton and Hay) will have to make decisions, but in the recent cuts it is like they got input too late in the process from the faculty to take advantage of the collective wisdom of the campus. This committee will ensure input early so that it isn’t us just getting the decisions they would recommend but rather we help them come up with options, help decide what are the priorities of the institution. Decision-making is not shared, no one argues with that, but the point of this committee is to institutionalize a mechanism that they have to have proactive discussions with faculty early in the process.

Also, it is to make sure this change in behavior on (Shelton’s and Hay’s) part is real. We worked hard to create some space for them to change because the alternative – trying to get rid of them – is too horrific. I think they know we’re serious. They’d have to be stupid not to understand they came very close to the edge. This was a real public thrashing. I hope they don’t get lulled into a sense of false security about what is happening here. This committee is meant to hold their feel to the fire.

Holding Shelton and Hay’s feet to the fire, however, doesn’t mean looking to the past, but focusing on future cuts, Nadel said. While there’s no doubt that the money that is being poured into translational medicine and environmental sciences is coming out of the hides of other colleges, he said, but it isn’t as bad as some people have made it out to be.

“The $12 million is misleading,” he said. “That is over a number of years, not at once. But yes, they made a $2.6 million cut in permanent funding over and above what they had to do to meet the $19 million in reduced state funding. We know that’s a flash point. They will defend it as necessary for the success of the whole university. It added to the total amount that had to be cut campus wide. In principal, they could have given smaller cuts and that differential investment couldn’t have been made.”

But, Nadel said, while a 7 percent cut equates to cutting 1 out of every 14 faculty members, that cut doesn’t equate to Shelton and Hay saying they want to get rid of a college.

“If you want to get rid of a college, you close it, you don’t just cut its budget,” he said. “Look, we lost six out of 36 faculty in psychology and we’re not getting them back. That’s one-sixth of our faculty, not one-fourteenth, and we teach more students than any unit on campus. And 1/14th is the worst-case scenario, because the cuts can come in other positions. They aren’t trivial cuts, they are forcing some hard decisions, but it isn’t like they are the only hard decisions.”

Arizona Board of Regents President Ernest Calderón

Arizona Board of Regents President Ernest Calderón is keeping a close eye on all these changes. He’s been down to the UA at least four times in the past four weeks for meetings with Shelton, Hay, faculty leaders and just about anyone who calls and says they want to meet, he said this morning.

The Provost apologized and she’s going around meeting with colleges – kind of a road show – and I’m told she’s taking responsibility for being rude and being brusque. I’m hearing some good things, but the question is, will she walk the walk? It’s one thing to say, I should not have talked to you that way, or I should have asked for your input before I made these decisions, but it’s another thing to see if there’s real change. When this comes up the next time, how will she do? That’s what I’m interested in. She’s told me in a very heartfelt way that she is sorry for this. And I said, ‘Great, do better.’

Ultimately this falls into Robert’s lap. If she goofs up again, it will be his responsibility. But this isn’t over. I’m going back down there next week. I’m still trying to sift the fact from the fiction, hear all the sides. People need to know that Earnie is going to keep coming back, and keep coming back, and keep coming back to see if things are working. I don’t care if people disagree with each other – it’s a university, of course they’re going to disagree – but they need to get to where they can work together down there and treat each other with respect.

The advertisement for Elvis' Friday appearance at Desert Rain Coffee

It isn’t every day one gets her coffee served by the King, but folks up Oro Valley way can have that experience today by stopping by Desert Rain Coffee inside the lobby of the Oro Valley Hospital. And, if you bring a non-perishable food item, Elvis will give you $1 off your favorite beverage.

This is the second year Desert Rain owner/operator John Hall has been able to convince Elvis to run a food drive for Catalina Community Services. Last year, according to the King, the event raised $100 in cash and about 100 pounds in canned goods.

Elvis doing his thing at Desert Rain Coffee

So, if you want a cup of the most consistently good Java north of River Road, and you want to do some good while you’re at it, stop by John’s shop with some food or a little extra cash before 3 p.m. today. If you’re really nice, maybe Elvis will sing the song he’s been working on for the past 30 years: A Whole Latte Love.

For folks who think the problem is just in Arizona, the New York Times has this piece on how all universities are trying to do “less for more.” Granted, the unhappiness on the University of Arizona campus isn’t about budget cuts, but rather, how President Robert N. Shelton and Provost Meredith Hay are going about those cuts. More on all that tomorrow, when I’m not under the gun in my pursuit of further education and the job opportunities that will bring. For now, read the times piece, especially if you have college-age (or nearing) kids. Forewarned is forearmed.

UPDATE: The ASU State Press has an update on the suicide incident this  morning here.

This sad, breaking news from the ASU student newspaper: A graduate student committed suicide at 11:40 a.m. in the College of Design South building. The State Press is reporting via Twitter and their Website that the building is on lockdown after the student shot himself inside a professors office. Heartbreaking. Keep tuned to the State Press for further developments, but, in the meantime, think about this:

National Public Radio has been running a series of broadcasts on the increase in mental distress among today’s college students. You can view today’s broadcast here. You’ll hear how more and more of our college students are depressed, stressed and not dealing with life very well. Part of it is they seem to think they have to be perfect – not really surprising considering they are products of the most-involved (some say overinvolved) parental generation of all times.

So, if you know a college student, talk to them – and listen. These kids need to feel like they are not alone. Case in point: Yesterday, at church, I met a new kid, freshman from out of town. I talked to her about her classes, etc., and at some point I said if she got lonely, she could come over to our house for a meal. I was surprised to see her face light up so instantly (my cooking isn’t that good!) and even more surprised when she said, “They just think we can do this on our own, you know? Everyone thinks we’re ok, but sometimes we just need advice on how to handle all these changes.”

The words just blurted out of her mouth, it was like she’d just been waiting for someone – anyone – to notice that she was 18, in a new city, adjusting to hard classes and major demands and more freedom than she knew what to do with and peer pressure and professor pressure and God knows what else. It hurt to watch.

They aren’t as OK as we think they are, these young people crowding our supermarkets and our roads. We need to pay attention to that.

Cute pigs who CANNOT give you the Swine Flu

They aren’t really broadcasting this at UA, but according to my UA-student daughter, a number of people are out sick with the flu in Wildcat town, some of them with H1NI.

Clare, who began running a high fever last night and started feeling sick “all over,” called UA Campus Health Services this a.m. to get an appointment so she could get a doctors note that would allow her to miss classes (some professors require this). She was told she couldn’t come in because Health Services is trying to reduce the number of people exposed to the flu. This is probably part of UA’s pandemic plan some of which is based on the CDC’s recommendations for universities in dealing with H1N1.

A nurse administered a health survey to Clare over the phone and pronounced her sick with the flu, then gave her a lecture about how “contagious and viscous this strain is” without saying it was swine flu. She prescribed some medicine to reduce the symptoms, especially the massive headache, then explained how Campus Health Services sent off samples (of body fluids, I’m guessing) from people early in the semester who came in sick and “they tested positive for H1N1.”

Students are supposed to stay away from classes until they are free of fever for 24 hours without the use of Tylenol, which, Clare said the nurse said, could be anywhere from three to seven days from the onset of symptoms. I’m wondering if the overall GPA of the UA will be down considerably this semester from students not being able to keep up with work when they are missing so many days of school. Clare says she’ll be able to keep up with things by viewing class lectures online – once her head stops pounding.

Backtracking to try to figure out where Clare may have picked up the germ is difficult: it could have been anywhere in town. But she said someone in her French class was coughing last week, as was someone in the choir she sings with. Upwards of 30 people were exposed by those two people when Clare was exposed – not counting all the other people they exposed in their other classes at UA. Clare started feeling sick yesterday, in the Dallas airport, so she exposed everyone on the plane as she flew back to Tucson, although she said she tried to hold her breath as much as possible for the whole flight. Of course, she has two roommates who will be exposed, and they will continue to go to classes until they feel sick, by which time they may have exposed more people. And thus the flu virus – H1N1 or the “regular” – travels on.

St. Peters Basilica, Vatican City; image courtesy scrapetv

The religion world was all atwitter yesterday when the Vatican announced that members of the Anglican Communion who want to become Catholic will be able to do so while still being, basically, Anglican. People have wondered, what does God Blogging think about this interesting development? Well, here goes. You might want to grab a cup of coffee.

According to Cardinal William J. Levada, the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Anglicans (Episcopalians in the U.S.) will soon be able to join fully with Rome while “preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.” He said the move to create “personal ordinariates” was to “regularize” something that was happening anyway.

In regular English, that means that what has heretofore been done on a case-by-case basis and required the shedding of all things Anglican to happen, will now be done en masse, with the possibility of whole congregations being absorbed into Catholic dioceses while they retain their style of worship and spirituality.

It also means that all the Anglicans who’ve felt marginalized, irritated, betrayed or furious at the Anglican Communion’s ordination of women and openly homosexual bishops now have a place to go. And according to Levada, they’ve asked to come to Rome.

Converts will have to make professions of faith to the truth of the Catholic Church’s teaching and the primacy of the pope (nits that split them from Rome years ago in the first place), but they can keep the Book of Common Prayer and their really cool choirs, all without having to deal with those pesky women priests or openly gay clergy. (They’ll still deal with plenty of closeted gay clergy, of course, because although Catholics operate under a don’t-ask, don’t-tell motto in Holy Mother Church, everyone in the pews can tell, even when the priest himself is unaware.)

Do not misunderstand the gravity of this move. We’re not talking an Episcopalian here or an Anglican there and we most especially need to understand that this exception wasn’t done primarily with lay people in mind. This is a clergy-driven process, with Levada saying between 30 and 40 Anglican bishops have “been in dialogue” with Rome about unifying while keeping their traditions. Most importantly, the Anglicans want to keep their own clergy who, diligent readers of God Blogging will recall, are frequently married. Married clergy are a no-no for Catholics – at least normally.

That is Problem No. One: The inconsistency in the Catholic Church’s teaching on life-long celibacy for its all-male clergy. I’ll let super-productive Catholic writer Woodeene Koenig-Bricker explain, as she did so clearly on Face Book yesterday (who said social networking ain’t got religion?):

I find the “mixed message” to be upsetting. It’s okay to be a married priest if you don’t start out Catholic, but it’s not okay to be a married priest if you begin as Catholic. … Either priests can be married or they can’t. Saying that some priests can be married and some can’t is sending a dreadfully inconsistent message. … This decision is going to have some major fallout in the future. If someone feels called to both marriage and priesthood, why wouldn’t they first become an Episcopal priest and then come to the Catholic rite? They can have both vocations if they take that route, but if they choose Catholic priesthood first, they have to deny their calling to marriage. .

Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact, I said as much more than 10 years ago when I was covering the conversion of an Episcopalian priest to Catholicism after he was assigned to a parish in the Fort Worth Diocese. He, along with a smattering of other Episcopalian priests across the country who converted following an uptick in the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion, was pushed to Rome’s side of the aisle not because he (ta-da!) saw the virtue in the papacy but because he believed scripture forbid the ordination of women.

I interviewed a number of Catholic priests who complained then that they viewed this acceptance of married clergy converts to be an affront to the more than 25,000 Catholic priests who’ve left priesthood in the past four decades because they felt called to both marriage and priesthood (History buffs and fellow God geeks will recall that married clergy was allowed for centuries in the Catholic Church and indeed, the man we claim was our first pope, Peter, was married.) Additionally, they said the inconsistency was difficult to explain to the average kid who came inquiring with questions about the Church’s entrenched stance on celibate clergy when he’d just sat in Mass celebrated by an married Episcopalian-cum-Catholic priest.

So, the whole married priest thing is Problem No. 1, but Problem No. 2 is more concerning to me. That centers on the concept of conversion and my belief that rarely (if ever) does true conversion come as a result of being pissed off. If it did, I would have crossed over to the Anglicans years ago. But, in spite of my belief that some women are called to priesthood and that celibacy should be optional and that artificial birth control inside of marriage can be a moral choice, God keeps me Catholic and, perhaps shockingly to some, keeps calling me to deeper relationship inside a Church that makes me crazy sometimes.

Of course, that’s just anecdotal, personal evidence of how conversion doesn’t come from a place of anger. But think about these “disaffected” Anglicans. They feel betrayed by their church, and/or they disagree/doubt the movement of the Spirit in their church. If they think they’ll find it all peaches and cream in Rome, they are wrong. There’s more to becoming Catholic than just thinking, “Well, at least they don’t ordain women and consent to homosexual unions.” And if you’re coming over because you’re mad, well, chances are, you’ll still be mad.

Reading between the lines of Levada’s announcement yesterday, it sounds as if the personal ordinariate (with rules about implementation coming in a month or so) will create an Anglicized liturgy within the Latin, or Western, rite of the Catholic Church. It won’t, in other words, create an entirely new rite, like the 17 Eastern rites currently in union with Rome. Those churches follow ancient liturgical traditions of the East based in their culture (Greek, Marionite, Melkite, etc.), while being in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church and placing themselves under the pope’s authority. The disaffected Anglicans will do much of the same – follow their liturgical and spiritual traditions while assenting to Rome, so the “there is no new rite” might be more semantics than anything else.

Levada said this is about “unity in diversity,” which plays well as a sound bite but not so well to the other folks who’ve wanted unity in diversity, like, say, nuns who are currently being investigated by the Vatican for not being “traditional” enough or those priests who left to marry. As religion writer and NY Times commentator David Gibson says, “For a church whose leadership has earned a reputation for reprimanding liberal Catholics who color outside the lines, these developments could be more than a bit frustrating.” Ya think?

You can tell that those supporting this move bend right and, sadly, they aren’t being very polite about their support. Rather, they’re showing their rude colors in comments about the Archbishop of Canterbury and the entire Anglican Communion. Example here and here and, shockingly because it comes from someone in the normally polite and sane Order of Preachers, here.

Interestingly enough, a lot of these folks are the ones who want to drag the Catholic Church back to the “smells and bells” times of pre-Vatican II, and yet the only reason these “personal ordinariates” work is because of Vatican II and its subsequent production of the new Code of Canon Law (Canon 372 to be specific).

Best case scenario for this new event: Everyone sees this as a step toward unification of the splintered Christian churches and plays nice. Worst case scenario: People are confused, particularly about married priests, nasty battles over church land and property ensue, and those remaining in the full Anglican Communion (including most U.S. Episcopal churches) feel slapped in the face in spite of years of ecumenical efforts. Time will tell.

If you want more info, here’s a great video analyzing the change, here’s a response from the Episcopalians in the U.S. and here’s some thoughts from a Dominican priest in Tucson.

An armed robber in Indianapolis shopping center ended up hugging the woman he was trying to rob and then praying with her before leaving with only $20 and the woman’s cell phone. A brief story on the event can be found here, and it is all over the news this a.m. All I wanted to add was that people frequently question the power of prayer because their understanding of God is so limited. They view God as a magician and prayer as the way you can get God to do your bidding.

But what anyone who has spent any length of time on their knees will tell you is that prayer doesn’t necessarily change events; it changes the person praying. And in that personal change, events can – as happened during the robbery – take a turn for the better. If you watch this video, it is obvious that prayer has some power. It just isn’t the power televangelists proclaim.

Zachary Christie is now a free boy – sort of. The 6-year-old won’t have to spend 45 days in an alternative school for troublemakers, but he’ll still be suspended from first grade for 3 to 5 days for his “crime” of bringing his Cub Scout camping utensil to school.

One of the Boy Scouts all-purpose camping utensils

Zachary – who you can see here in a film he did last year titled “What is my job??” – is obviously a hardened criminal who wanted to stab someone with the knife from his combo fork-knife-spoon Cub Scout tool. Or, maybe he was just a 6-year-old boy excited about showing the coolest thing since video games to his friends.  But due to zero tolerance policies at his schools (and oh so many other schools), the administrators believed they had no choice but to suspend the kiddo because the district policy for the Christina School District in Delaware bans all knives “regardless of possessor’s intent.”

And here’s where critical thinking comes in. I’m currently in a teacher education program, preparing for life after journalism as a state-certified high school teacher. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve come across the term “critical thinking” in my reams of reading for my classes. The texts emphasize that teachers must help students develop critical thinking skills and that teachers must be “reflective” critical thinkers. We aren’t supposed to make knee-jerk decisions because, well, those kinds of decisions rarely take into consideration all the facts.

Instead, we’re supposed to carefully observe a situation, give our observations some critical thought, then arrive at the best answer to a problem. We’re encouraged to think not only of the short-term consequences of our actions (little boy learns to never bring sporkife to school), but also the long-term effects (little boy spends 45 days in alternative schools for hooligans learning all sorts of negative skills from the experts of the mean streets).

This critical thinking helps teachers and other school officials arrive at the most prudent decision for any particular situation, and (bonus!!) the modeling of such critical thinking helps students learn to think critically, examining not only short-term gains (popularity) but also long-term consequences (detention).

So tell me, how do zero tolerance policies reflect critical thinking? Those of you who answered, “They don’t” can move to the front of the class. These policies came about in part because of school shootings and in part to deal with drugs on campus. But the problem with them is they ignore everything educators know about child development – especially early child development – and they leave no wiggle room for thinking critically about a particular situation.

Sure, we don’t want weapons or drugs at school, but we have to use our brains to tell the difference between a Cub Scout “weapon” and a machete and we have to moderate our “punishments” in the proper manner. How about just telling Zachary, “Hey, buddy, that is a very cool thing, but the knife is sharp and someone could get hurt, so we can’t have that at school. I’ll keep it here and we can call your mom and she can pick it up.” Then, if he brought the verboten item to school again, officials would know there’s a problem, bring in the parents and school counselor and try to figure out an appropriate discipline.

That course takes a lot more time (and thought) than just saying, “Page two of the handbook says ….” but any critically thinking human being can see it is the right thing to do.

Ironically, the Delaware Legislature tried unsuccessfully last year to make disciplinary rules more flexible so local boards could modify the “terms of expulsion” on a case-by-case basis, according to reporting by the New York Times. That attempt came after a third grader was expelled for a year (!!!) because her grandmother sent a birthday cake to school with a knife to cut it.

Folks who enforce zero tolerance rules are folks who’ve skipped right over the critical-thinking advice in the teacher education classes. They are like lemmings running off a cliff in a misguided attempt to “keep schools safe.” But in that attempt, they’re making those safe schools look awfully stupid.

From the comments on yesterday’s post about the staged reading The Laramie Project; 10 Years Later, a thank you to those who attended:

On behalf of the rest of the cast and crew of Laramie Project 10 Years Later, thanks to all who came to see the performance last night. As an actor, I have to say, this was by far the most powerful theatrical experience I have had in a long time, particularly because of the warm reception we received from the audience.

Matthew Shepard via wikipedia

Eleven years ago, early October found me crying as I sat in my home office writing my weekly column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The subject was Matthew Shepard and how he had been picked up in a gay bar by two young men who then drove him to the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming, tied him to a fence in the freezing weather, stripped him of some of his clothing, and beat him to within an inch of his life. Then, they left.

The 21-year-old Shepard was discovered 18 hours later by a passerby, still alive, but in a coma. He would die six days later, but when I was writing the column, he was still hanging on in a hospital, suffering massive brain damage from being pistol whipped by his attackers. I normally don’t cry when I write, but I was so angry that I could do nothing except cry and pound my outrage onto my keyboard. Shepard was attacked simply because he was gay. Why? I kept thinking. Why?

My then 10-year-old daughter arrived home from school that day, saw my red eyes and asked what was wrong. I explained what had happened to Shepard.

“They left him all alone?” she asked, seeming to have skipped right over the fact that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson had beat Shepard so severely.

“Yes,” I said.

Her next words have stayed with me, and return every October when I remember Shepard’s parents and their indescribable loss. She asked: “Didn’t they know he would want his Mommy?”

An innocent question from someone who couldn’t imagine what it was like to be 21, what it would be like to be living where you wouldn’t be seeing your mom every day. But she could imagine was that any child in pain would want help. And in her 10-year-old world, help meant Mommy.

What Shepard wanted was the last thing McKinney and Henderson cared about. At least that’s how it appeared to me. My knowledge of their mind set was limited, but tonight, everyone in Tucson has the chance to find out what Shepard’s murderers were thinking by going to the free presentation of The Laramie Project – Ten Years Later; An Epilogue.

The staged reading is the final chapter of the original The Laramie Project. Right after Shepard’s murder, a theater company descended upon the town to conduct interviews with the townspeople. The play that came out of those interviews a year after Shepard’s death was The Laramie Project, which has become one of the most performed plays in the past decade. Lacking in that play, however, were the voices of Shepard’s parents or killers, which the epilogue adds.

The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, will be performed in UA’s Centennial Hall as it is simultaneously performed in more than 100 other theaters in all fifty states, Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Hong Kong and Australia (see the links above for all the details of how the project is managing all this). It revisits what has happened in Laramie since the original play and how Shepard’s death still affects the community. There will be an interactive web cast connecting the various sites during the performance, which starts at Centennial Hall at 7 p.m. It is free and open to the public, but Centennial Hall only seats about 1,000 people, so folks interested in attending might want to get there early.

Anyone who cares about a civilized society should go. Anyone who wonders how hate thrives in ignorance should go. And anyone who has ever thought that a person’s differences deserve a violent response, or wondered how anyone can forgive such violence, should go.

I couldn’t believe it when I read that Penelope Trunk, 42 going on 16, had tweeted her miscarriage. Surely, I thought, the columnist had it wrong. No one, least of all someone who claims to be a “career expert” and long past the age of what most would consider grown-up, would be so banal, so shallow, so unprofessional as to broadcast her miscarriage over Twitter.

But, no, a little research did indeed reveal that Ms. Trunk, author of the blog “Brazen Careerist” and a Twitterer with more than 19,000 followers, wrote at 7:34 a.m. on Sept. 21 “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a f*****-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

Who does that? Who makes light of death of a child? (Yes, class, quick review: The thing growing inside pregnant women is not a frog or a dog or a fish, but a human.) Who does the equivalent of yelling in a crowded bookstore something that is so very private? Someone, I dare say, who needs to be sterilized.

I think even Planned Parenthood, never a paragon of virtue, would have a problem with Trunk so lightly broadcasting her plans to get an abortion. Especially since the argument for legalized abortion has centered around privacy, as noted in the column about Trunk by Kathleen Parker. I can’t imagine what her parents think, what her “friends” must say about her in private, or what rabbis do when she tweets things like “New way to torture myself for being a bad Jew: Write a post about how I shouldn’t post on Yom Kippur and then twitter it.”

I can imagine quite clearly, however, why her husband left her. This is a woman who suffers from a lack of filter – moral and otherwise – and can’t stop her own verbal vomit about the most personal of issues, including her marital problems. I’d leave her too. (A glance at her blog about her then-husband demonstrates Trunk’s total cluelessness about parenting, since she can’t say anything nice about the father of her children. She must not know that kids need to be able to idolize both parents – at least until they reach middle school.)

Trunk is an old-enough-to-know-better, self-aggrandizing “author, blogger, entrepreneur” who serves as today’s Exhibit A of what is wrong with the world: Self-centered, immature people wandering around in the land of Let’s Not Judge challenging someone – anyone – to slap them and say, “Grow up!” Of course, few people ever do confront these nattering nabobs of narcissism and when they do, they get labeled “judgmental,” as though having basic standards of decency is a sin.

Well, go ahead and throw the J label at me because I think Trunk is a danger to civilized society. Not just because she violates the sanctity of every relationship she has with her tweets, but because she has two children who are learning from her how to be a grown-up. They need a better example. They’re also learning how to be scared of Mom. The fact that Trunk doesn’t “get” this shows she is an unfit parent.

Let me explain: Most women, if they have a miscarriage, go through loss and grief; they don’t throw a virtual high-five party. Most women seeking an abortion don’t go around wearing it like a badge of honor even if they are the type who believes the surgical removal of a 6-week-old human fetus is simply corrective birth control. And none of them usually broadcast their abortive plans or action in a manner that their living children can discover. Why? Because to do so is emotional child abuse.

Children are notoriously curious and if they know about an abortion will eventually ask: Why did you get an abortion? And then Mom has to explain and most explanations, once unpacked, come down to “I didn’t want a child at that time,” which leads the living child to wonder if Mom might decide one day that she doesn’t want him/her. Can anyone say “childhood insecurity”?

Parker reports about Trunk being interviewed about her miscarriage tweet by CNN’s Rick Sanchez, who asked her, “Have you no shame?” Trunk’s reply? “Why are you asking?”

Why are you asking? Why are you asking? Who IS this woman? Answer: A woman who writes on her blog about the CNN interview that she had “a good hair day.” A woman who desperately needs parenting classes, reality-check therapy and sterilization.

Are you interested in learning how investigative reporters get the goods on public officials and figure out who is

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

doing what with your tax dollars? If so, get ye over to the University of Arizona tomorrow night and hear from two of the best.

Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin, who together won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in April, will be speaking about investigative journalism at 7 p.m. Thursday in room 211 of UA’s Education Building. They won the Pulitzer for a five-part series investigating the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Their work demonstrated how Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s near single-minded focus on detaining and arresting illegal immigrants in his county had resulted in a lack of enforcement of other crimes. The public, in other words, was paying taxes for slower response times to any number of 911 calls while Arpaio directed those funds to hunting down illegal immigrants.

Timing is everything, and today the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the Obama administration is now limiting Arpaio and his deputies’ ability to use federal immigration law to arrest suspected illegal immigrants.

Gilbin is a UA grad and Gabrielson attended the school before beginning his award-winning journalism career. You can read all about the men here, but don’t pass up the chance to hear them speak in person, especially if you want to learn how reporters keep an eye on government for the rest of us.

The economic meltdown has launched any number of new small businesses as people get laid off from their jobs, take salary cuts or find out that they have to support family members who have lost their jobs.

Such is the case with Tucsonan Christiana Staller, owner and operator of Little Flower House Cleaners. I’m writing about Christiana today because she’s one of the happiest women I know, in spite of a background that would have crushed lesser women. She just believes in believing in yourself, learning from your mistakes, and starting over again – although it took her a number of years to get to that happy space after years as a domestic violence victim.

So when her housecleaning business started to lose customers as people who hired her lost their jobs and had to clean their homes themselves, Christiana – a single mother with three of her five children still living at home – didn’t sit down and feel sorry for herself. She just got busy with Passion Parties. (Motto: “The ultimate Girls Night In.”)

You’ve heard of Tupperware parties and Pampered Chef, no doubt. A  Woman invites over some friends, opens a bottle of wine, passes around some snacks and they all watch a consultant demonstrate items that can later be purchased. Passion Parties is along the same lines except there isn’t any burping of plastic or cooking lessons involved.

“The way I explain it to the ladies is that Passion Parties accessories bring passion and romance back to their lives,” Christiana said. “There are lots of creams, lotions, body washes, perfumes, things that will make you feel beautiful and sexy and then, of course, there are toys to play with because, after all, sex is supposed to be fun!”

Christiana’s New York cousin convinced her to give the job a go two months ago, and so now Christiana can clean a woman’s bedroom in the morning and then offer to sell her, ahem, “items” to spice up the marital bed at a party that night.

“You can just get a catalogue from me and order from there but it is more fun to have a party and the hostess gets discounts based on what people at her party might buy,” Christiana says. “The girls just have some wine, talk girl talk about love and live and buy some stuff. It’s fun!”

The items for purchase range from $10 to $175 and if you’d like to host a party and put a little passion into your life (because, after all, it IS Happiness Wednesday), contact Christiana at petitefluer@live.com