Alien Tea Shoppe

This article came across my news feed today; Mississippi, Burned , which talks about the dismal healthcare in my home state.  It is quite a lengthy article, but worth a read. To surmise, our former Governor, Haley Barbour, wanted to jump onboard with a healthcare market place similar to Mitt Romney's.  Things were started, the ball was rolling; entire groups of people here who had no access to healthcare would be covered, including myself.  But then Phil Bryant got into office and he's dug his heels in.  I'm not really sure how we'll vote him out. Bryant basically put a ridiculous political agenda before his own people.  All the work that Barbour and Chaney (not VP Chaney) initiated, that hundreds of people worked on for several years, Bryant flushed it all down the toilet at the last minute.  He refused to accept the Affordable Care Act (ACA), so we were denied.  If things had gone down the way they should have, we would have been an independent h...

So, in an earlier blog post I talked about my father being a jeweler; and more specifically that he implemented the system of bartering to obtain things we needed like dental visits.  But his bartering also extended to my sister and I having a trousseau, or dowry.  A trousseau is something every bride brought to the marriage in numerous countries.  The wealthier you were, the wealtheir your trousseau.  It contained your wedding dress, as well as things for setting up your new home; blankets, crystal stemware, china, sterling silver pieces, jewelry.  It might also contain various types of livestock, money, servants, art works. While technically it was in order for the bride to have her own things, trousseau's were ultimately incorporated into the man's wealth and more times than not, never belonging to the bride to begin with. It is an odd thing to think about.  Today a trousseau is generally not something a bride has, nor ...