There are about a zillion posts flying around the blogosphere about BlogHer08, and I’m no exception. However, I’m still processing some of it and want to wait and do a more thoughtful post. What I don’t want to wait on, however, is sharing my thoughts about driving the Chevy Hybrid Tahoe up and back with Suebob.

I’ve posted a full review of the Tahoe over on the BlogHer site. If you don’t want details, then here’s the bottom line: It’s a great vehicle with the potential to get great fuel economy and reduce our carbon footprint and fuel consumption in a conspicuous way. We averaged 24 mpg there and back. We did drive it easily, staying between 60-65 mph, and easing into starts and stops.

I’ve also left a post over on BlogHer about GM and how impressed I was with the way they approached the carpool idea, which was, basically, to let us have the vehicle, the keys and free reign. They get it. They have a product they believe in, and are willing to risk handing it over to a Prius owner with no strings, an extra day on either side of the scheduled drive, and hot damn, they also paid the $50/day parking charges.

I took them at their word. We put that vehicle through its paces on the drive up and back, and I spent some time with it on the extra days taking it to and from my daughter’s school out in the strawberry fields, as well as the beach. (Yes, I have more to say about the beach trip in a separate post soon where I offer to kiss every RIM employee involved in the design of the BlackBerry Curve).

It is a lot of car built for small women. Big ones too, but I say small because I am a smallish person who drives a small car that she loves. I was fully prepared to be completely unimpressed and somewhat skittish about driving a full-blown SUV, but oh, about a mile into it I was over it. Completely.

Finally, I just have to say that I could not have had anyone who was more fun to drive with than SueBob. She’s a native of the San Luis Obispo/Central Coast area, so I was treated to a terrific tour of all her old haunts, funky restaurants, introduction to some of her really nice and creative friends, and stories, stories everywhere. Go read her blog — you’ll enjoy it.

Even though we’ve been Twitter buddies for awhile, the morning I picked her up was the first time we’d ever met face-to-face, and it was like meeting an old friend you knew forever. I don’t know many people who have the ability to set me at ease at the first second we met, but she did it, and it was a really fun drive with her. Thanks, Suebob for a great road trip and a great time.

And thank you, GM, for getting it, and trusting me with your very big, very cool, new hybrid. Even if strange men did follow me home when I drove it.

Observation: Evidently a woman with a camera walking through Union Square is a pickup target. It was work to shoot these photos around the drunk guys trying to put on the pickup lines.

I’ll bet you thought this was yet another BlogHer ‘08 report post. Fooled ya. It’s just a long shot with a short lens.

I love this picture. It so perfectly depicts the differences between my Mom and me. She’s looking straight at the camera, smiling, confident (I have yet to see a camera that didn’t love her on sight), and I’m looking aside, sort of engaged and sort of distracted, all at once. Yep, that was me, flighty, flitty girl, wandering off either in my mind or body to whatever looked interesting at the time.

Were it not for the things my mom taught me, I wouldn’t have had the skills to fry an egg much less manage a life. Mom had a job from the time I was born, so to me, it was a given that women worked. It wasn’t until I was old enough to notice that my friends’ moms stayed home that I began to understand how different she was from the rest, and what a trailblazer HER mother was for not only working, but having a successful career and retiring at just about the time women were starting to push for equality in the workplace. Grandma was years ahead of her time, and she passed that same ethic to my mom, who passed it to me.

Being the drifty child that I was, I remember Mom getting in my face and telling me to use my common sense about things. If I was supposed to be home at five, I’d darn well better have a watch or a way to know what time it is, because I’m expected to be home at five. If she was working, I should be able to feed myself, and she taught me to cook the basic things early on. My mom knows how to gets stuff done. And she taught me how to get stuff done, even if it meant doing it myself and in unconventional ways. If it needed to be done, it got done. It still gets done. My mom is the best when it comes to that — she’s a go-to person.

My passion for politics came straight from Mom. She has always been involved and engaged in the political process, right in the center of it, where possible. In 1960, she worked at the Democratic convention here in LA when JFK was nominated. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, she was also working the night RFK was assassinated in LA, phoning in primary election returns to CBS so they could report in as near to real time as they could get.

I’m sure it made her mad as hell when I rebelled in 1972 and joined my Republican friends to get out the vote for Nixon, and yet she never once drilled me with I-told-you-so digs when I spent the entire summer of 1974 watching the Watergate hearings and realizing I’d been duped, big time. She had more class than that, and welcomed me back into the fold of friendly Democrats with a wink and a nod, unlike other family members who STILL needle me about it.

For all of her practical leanings, my Mom is an artist at heart and in her soul. Whether it was drawing, or painting murals on the bedroom wall, or making those sequined calendars every single year for the relatives (yes, I think she sewed sequins on about 15 years worth of calendars altogether), or making me dresses that really were cool to wear to school, or painting my bedroom in all the shades of lavender that any respectable purple-loving girl could want, my mom is truly an artist. It’s her creativity that I love the most. I’m wearing earrings that she made out of antique buttons for me, and I still have the shawl she crocheted for me back in the 70’s when crocheted shawls were all the rage. Mom showed me how to be creative, to be artistic, but still keep both feet on the ground.

Mom lives the “don’t be afraid to try” motto, which is why she ordered up a Dell laptop for herself about 8 years ago or so and went from wondering what a mouse was to being a power seller on EBay in short order. She’s not afraid to try, she’s not afraid to learn, and she’s not afraid to ask when she doesn’t understand how something works.

Above all, though, my mom is a giver. With her time, her attention, her money, and her encouragement. There was a time where we were driving somewhere and came upon an accident in an intersection ahead. Without even thinking, Mom was out of the car, helping with first aid to the victims. One of them was a hemophiliac, and no ambulances had arrived on the scene. We were about a half-mile from the hospital, so without so much as a skipped beat, Mom bundled the lady into the front seat of the car and said she’d just drive her up to the emergency room.

I can remember being a little bit scared, but mostly surprised that my mom didn’t care that this person was bleeding all over her car, that she didn’t even know her, and that she was taking over like she’d done it all her life. (My dad, on the other hand, would never have let someone bleed in HIS car…perish the thought). As it happened, the ambulance arrived just as she was going to go, so she handed the lady back to the paramedics (or whatever they were at that time) since they had on-the-spot resources to help with her condition.

Later I asked why she had done that. She explained what a ‘bleeder’ was, and asked me this: “If you had a choice between helping or not, and you knew time was of the essence, and you knew this person could bleed to death waiting, what would YOU have done?”

I have never forgotten that lesson. That was driven home clearly. If you have a way to help someone from dying, being hurt, being hungry, being sick, DO IT. Don’t let people suffer when you can help. Don’t wait for someone else. DO IT.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. In your honor, and because you taught me to, I am making a donation in your name to the BlogHer Global Giving initiative to help the Myanmar/Burma cyclone victims. Global Giving has people on the ground there, helping already, so this is a situation where giving really can make a horrible, tragic situation better. Despite confirmation of over 61,000 victims, I can still help the ones who are still alive.

Of everything you taught me, Mom, that lesson matters most. Make a difference where you can.

The donations being made to Global Giving on behalf of Myanmar are reaching people. Here is an update, posted today:

IDE Myanmar has operations in practically all of the cyclone-affected areas in the Irrawaddy Delta, and is hence positioned well to provide aid where most needed. IDE has targeted 20 township areas containing an estimated 8,000 -9,000 villages. About 125 staff have been mobilized to work in these areas - approximately six per township. The initial focus will be on providing immediate relief but rebuilding the agricultural and food security systems will receive equal priority and attention.

Project activities include manufacturing and distributing water storage containers and water treatment supplies, providing plastic sheeting for shelter, and directing cash donations to village-managed relief centers, so that they can purchase food for the vulnerable.

I would ordinarily apologize for asking repeatedly for the same thing, but I hate the idea of an oppressive government causing innocent men, women and children to die. Please give what you can.

Excerpt from the extended reports sent to Global Giving:

The immediate problem in affected areas is now survival, with water and electricity cut off, roads blocked by fallen trees, roofs torn off homes and prices for transportation and food rising fast.

“People are starving,” an unidentified resident was quoted as saying by the Democratic Voice of Burma, a dissident radio station based in Norway.

“Fuel is becoming scarce,” the resident was quoted as saying. “People are likely to die of starvation. If international help doesn’t come within a week, it will be impossible to survive. There will be nothing left to eat.”

Mr. Horsey, of the United Nations, said teams representing various aid groups were trying to assess the damage in the disaster areas, where half the country’s population of 53 million lives.
Despite concerns from human rights groups that the junta would not allow outside aid groups into hard-hit areas, Mr. Horsey said, “There are discussions ongoing. My impression is that they are receptive to international assistance.”

Some aid had already been stockpiled in anticipation of natural disasters, he said.

“It will take a few days until a complete and accurate picture of the impact and of the numbers of people affected comes out,” he said. “The road network has taken a significant hit and moving around is difficult, and the communications network is essentially down.”

Even without the destruction from the cyclone, travel and communications can be difficult in the country because of its weak infrastructure, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch.

In Yangon, he said, people usually get only five or six hours of electricity a day, and some remote areas have no access to electricity. “So the fact that electricity is down is not really that important,” he said.
Jens Orback, a former minister for integration and democracy in Sweden, was in Yangon when the cyclone hit.

“Trees that were standing there hundreds of years fell easily,” he said, “and things from roofs fell down and the electricity went down and there were only flashlights. In the first days you couldn’t go anywhere by car. No telephones worked. The Internet was out, and there was a lack of information.

“What struck us also was that in the first daylight, nobody from the police, military or firemen was out working with the devastation, but people privately were there with knives and machetes and hand saws.”

Aung Zaw of Irrawaddy Magazine said that groups of monks joined residents in clearing the streets but that in one case they had been prevented from leaving their monastery by armed police officers. As centers of the September uprising, some monasteries remain under police or military guard, he said.
In advance of the referendum, the riot police had been reported patrolling the streets in a show of force said to have been more visible than the current military relief efforts.

Technorati Tags: blogher, burma, charity, cyclone, disaster, global giving, myanmar

I should go to bed but I just got my second wind, and there have been all sorts of little random things this week that made me stop and say to myself, “You should be blogging this!”…but something else got in the way. Let’s see how many I can remember…

• James Spader really DOES look like one of the Lennon Sisters when he’s in full drag. It’s why he wins the Emmy — he’s just unafraid to do anything, no matter how bizarre or believable, which he was…in spades.
• Our house is not big enough for 2 drumsets, 2 kids, 3 adults and 1 pug. We’re a bit cramped with the eldest moving home…hopefully his situation will improve soon.
• Too much work and absolutely no play makes Karoli a dull, tired girl. Every October it goes the same way, no matter how hard I try to prevent it.
• I love our Prius more now than I did when we got it. It’s just a fun, quirky, cool car.
• I really need a Nikon D300. Well, don’t I????
• There are some absolutely terrific bloggers out there. I’ve found some really fun and interesting blogs by clicking on the links underneath the Blogher ad over on the right. It’s humbling to read the funny, touching, gripping and beautiful blogs I’ve seen this week. Try it — click any of those links right under the ad over there, and enjoy.
• Speaking of Blogher, I’m stoked about the 2008 conference in San Francisco, and think their tour will be very, very cool.
• I wish I could write funny posts instead of bitchy, critical ones.
• I’ve come to really, really like the Foo Fighters. Sticks’ influence, I’m sure.
• The new Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell albums are awesome. Vinnie Colliauta is especially cool on Herbie’s album. Both mellow, jazzy, and full of nuance.
• Teachers really have a tough job. More on this later, but should a graphic novel that’s a bit on the adult side be grounds for ending a career that by all accounts, was successful up to that point? Teaching in Connecticut seems to be fraught with peril.

G’night.