Going Down

 I see Issue 1 went down, as expected... it was 60/40 before I went for a walk, and now it is 57/43... which is about what I expected it to be.  To be sure, I voted for it -- abortion is wrong, and, as I often said, the PD has been wrong about everything else, so why trust them on this?  But I didn't exactly feel warm about; it was certainly a bit of a stretch -- changing the rules of the game in the middle of it is not exactly kosher...

I continued (or completed) my tour of our food pantries by visiting the Southwest Ozanam Center.  It's at Broadview and Searsdale, and like our food pantry, it is run by a consortium of parishes -- mainly those on the Broadview Road axis and in the West Side overall.  It is not a large site; they have a store, basically (they pay rent, in contrast to us, and we are truly blessed).  It is open three mornings a week, and like us, they get food from the GCFB and pick up food from other stores/locations.  The layout is a bit tight -- half is their clothing area.  Everyone gets one bag of canned goods (unlike us), a bag of produce/mixed items (less than us), and a bag of meat.  I would say that for smaller families, you get less food than we provide, but for larger families, more canned goods, bread, and meat are provided, so you get a comparable amount, if not more, than we do.  Their crowds are smaller, sort of; they average about 120 families a week (like us), but across three days... well, the pace is a bit more leisured.  My job was "pusher;" every person's order is put in a cart, you take it to their car (or outside if they walk), unload it, and bring it back.  This was...fine.  They were glad to have me, I was glad to take notes and record, and... well, I will report the observations to the Board.

I am glad I am unemployed, as I have plenty of stuff to do -- morning meetings the rest of the week, and of course I am now helping out with the Thursday pickup/deliveries at the OC.  I am fascinated by this -- I think it is more of a quirk of the calendar than anything else -- but it would be nice to have fewer outside commitments, so I can do stuff I want to do, like work, look for jobs, and do some more reading... yes, I am ahead, but if I can chop a few more books off the list, so much the better...