Friday, March 30

Up at 6:30, but had to skip water aerobics, so I could attend a home medical services advisory board meeting at 8 a.m. I arrived at the meeting, held in a conference room of the hospital, exactly on time.

As usual, pastries and coffee were offered, which is why I had breakfast before I went to the meeting. I did snag a couple of the huge pre-packaged blueberry muffins, however, to bring home to Hubbie. Each muffin has 340 calories, plus a load of fat and sodium. But Hubbie is unconcerned about these things.

It was a very informative meeting, with much of the talk revolving around the current Supreme Court hearings related to Obamacare. The home medical services director didn't overtly fall on either side of the issue, but he did hint that if the entire plan is scrapped, the medical service and its clients will suffer.

Back home around 9 a.m., I went to Mother's house to help her shower, and then throw a load of laundry in the washer. Mother came back home with me afterward, where I washed strawberries for her to slice and bag for the freezer.

After I washed the strawberries, I sauteed a leftover baked potato with onions and bell pepper, which I put in a baking dish with egg substitute, Monterey Jack cheese, and cooked turkey bacon. Hubbie put the dish in the oven later for our supper, while I was at the Film Festival at the college down the road.

The afternoon session began at 1:30, and included a documentary about a young man who returns to his childhood home of Juneau, Alaska, and struggles to make a living mass producing and importing Tlingit artwork from china and then wholesaling it to the tourism industry. The man is half native and half Caucasian. The film dealt quite a bit about catching and processing salmon, which is the man's favorite food.

His grandmother imparts the information that when the Russians arrived in Alaska, they brought along diseases that decimated the native population of the area, reducing it from 10,000 to 700. She also contended that the Russians had been given a small island upon which to build a fort, and that when the Russian government sold Alaska to the U.S., it had no claim on any land aside from that island.

One of the films was, besides being really weird, not well done. It featured a half beast/half man character that wore an obviously bad pair of vampire teeth, and loped along the ground on all fours, visiting park campsites and kicking over full trash cans. I'm not sure what the message of the film was.

Another feature involved a young woman picking up a hitchhiker, who, once she dropped him off, gets in a truck, follows her home, forces his way into the house, backs her into a wall, and hands her a burlap-wrapped package. It's a Bible.

The last short film was a documentary about the impact of cultural changes on churches. When one church interviewed local college students regarding the reasons for the decline in church attendance, the theme kept being repeated that church leaders are hypocritical.

I returned home after this to do whatever was needed to get ready for supper. Since the egg dish had not yet been put in the oven, I did that, and heated the biscuits. Afterward, I accompanied Mother to her house.

At 6 p.m., Hubbie and I went to the Film Festival. Tonight's films included a variety showcase of films-in-progress. One was about four sisters whose lives were changed after the murder of their father, and how the incident was buried and not spoken about until recently. The murdered man was the grandfather of the filmmaker.

There were also three short films by a hometown filmmaker that were very creative. One was inspired by a Tennyson poem...a woman's lover or husband is killed in a plane crash, and then he visits her to bring solace. This clip was only one and a half minutes long, but it had real impact.

Another one documented how important a teacher is in a student's life by profiling an elementary teacher.

The last film, about an hour long, was my favorite. It was a music video featuring a folk duo who interview Ozark legends, and create songs about them. A woman from our town, known as "The Mug Lady," was one of the legends. This lady lost her son to AIDS many years ago, and since then has been collecting and attaching mugs to a tree in her front yard, as her way of promoting AIDs awareness.

This duo is absolutely enchanting, so Hubbie and I were inspired to buy their CD and DVD, which were very inexpensive. The proceeds from these are used to buy instruments for children, as the couple's way of keeping Ozark music going.

The last film, at 8 p.m. was a subtitled French offering. It revolved around a group of children determined to help keep their Chechen playmate from being deported. They go to great lengths to hide her in the cellar of a store, but of course they are eventually caught. But the girl is not deported.