We've got protesters.

Picketers, really. Teamsters, or so I'm told. See, the Red Cross chapter I work for was given a donation by a local Fscking Rich Guy. The rich guy said 'you can have this money so long as you use it to buy a new piece of property and build a new headquarters on it'; I believe he wants his name on a building, and since he's a good guy, we're happy to comply. We bought the land, and Fscking Rich Guy said 'great, now I'm going to build the building for y'all and donate it to you when I'm done - don't forget to put my name on it, 'k?' Problem is, apparently, that Fscking Rich Guy has had some bad experience with unions in the past. He hired the people working on our building. Only some of them are union men, or so I'm told (I dunno if it's some are or none are). So now we've got the Teamsters standing in our driveway waving banners and American flags and handing out papers about how we're using non-union labor and so on and so forth. . .

They're wasting their time, frankly. Most of our major donors already know about the arrangement. Most of the other people who come to the Chapter are either fire victims (who are unlikely to care about much beyond the immediate situation) or volunteers. Some of them are here to get books from our Braille department. I guess the protesters aiming at our CPR and First Aid classes or something. I was raised never to cross a picket line - my grandfather was a union bricklayer and a master mason - but I don't think it applies in this case. They're not picketing a worksite or refusing to work for some reason, they're just protesting.

I think this is a pretty good sign that my decision for my last elective is the right one. I'd decided to register for a course based on the fact that it did not interfere with my karate classes, since I had all my electives in my area of concentration already. The course I'd decided on was a management course rather than a computer related course... Management and Labor Relations.

Totally unrelated to the prior entry:

Just heard 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing' on the CD. The second verse - at least I think it's the second - contains the following lines:

Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark the herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn King!

I can never listen to that part of the song without wanting to laugh. See, when I was little - I dunno, maybe first or second grade - I was given the Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas. I read them all multiple times; I think my favourites were The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. In the books, Aslan was always careful to use the proper forms of address, whatever those might be for the species and gender of the addressee. Boys were sons of Adam, girls were daughters of Eve, mice were, yanno, noble mice or something, and dwarves... dwarves were sons of Earth.

This makes Hark The Herald Angels Sing is the only Christmas song I know of specifically addressing the concerns of dwarves, unless you can make a case for king #1 in We Three Kings of Orient Are being dwarvish by virtue of giving gold as his token of highest esteem. Moria was sort of in the East, wasn't it? 'course, that leaves the question of who the remaining kings were; is frankincense an Elvish sort of thing, or can we chalk that up to men and have the elves giving myrrh in recognition of the fact that, yanno, other races die? (None of the kings could be hobbits. Hobbits are in the west.)

Er. Anyway. you get the idea.

*boggle*

Got a package today from my penpal in Wuhan. A while back I'd mentioned something about holidays... I think I may have wished him a happy Moon Festival, and mentioned that it was on my calendar. He offered to get me a Chinese calendar if I wanted one, and I said sure. Told him I'd send him an American one with lots of photos in exchange. The calendar arrived today...

I was expecting one of those paper ones that you see in Chinese restaurants, with a nice painting and all the months on the lower half of the paper. That would've been fine; those are neat to look at. What I got instead was a four-section folding affair of sturdier construction than most chessboards I've ever owned, months neatly numbered though not named, and metallic reflective sections for each of the zodiac animals. Unfolded, the thing's almost as long as my ARM.

I have got to find him a suitable reply gift. I simply wasn't expecting anything of this caliber.