Three Beautiful Things 01/24/17: Blood Draw, Rubbery and Tired, Podcast on Poverty in the U.S.A.

1. I take my little kit -- it's a box that serves as a mailer -- with an empty red capped blood sample tube, a label that must be initialed, dated, and affixed to the tube, and a couple of pieces of paperwork down to Labcorp once a month for a blood draw that is sent to the U. of Maryland Transplantation Center in Baltimore so they have a fresh sample of my blood every month. Today, as is often the case, Angela drew my blood and we exchanged barely a word, but we have a drill and I can feel respect between us. All I do to keep her respect is visit regularly, have my kit and paperwork ready to go, and always thank her very much for her work. I respect Angela because she works so efficiently, quietly, and kindly, and, in her unassuming way, adds warmth and goodness to my day.

2. I worked out for an hour in the pool today using the dumbbells again and, when I got into bed tonight, my chest and arms and legs were rubbery, tired, and that felt right.

3. The Sube doesn't have any Bluetooth capability nor is there anything in the factory radio/cd player that I can plug my phone into and listen to podcasts over the car's speakers. So, when I listen to podcasts in the Sube, because I don't want to listen through earbuds while driving, I put my smartphone on the passenger seat and listen through the crappy smartphone speaker. Today, I listened to the latest episode of Radiolab, here.  This episode featured Brooke Gladstone, one of the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts, On the Media. Gladstone has just completed a five part examination of poverty in the U.S.A. for On the Media entitled, "Busted: America's Poverty Myths", found here.  In the episode of Radiolab, Gladstone talked about putting this series together and she played and discussed different segments from the series. Once again, as I often do when I'm listening to such podcasts, I thought about how much this series would have enhanced the work Margaret and I did when team teaching our course that combined American Working Class Literature with English composition.