Pledge Week!

It's that time again. The local NPR stations are conducting their winter pledge drives. We've been shamefully lax with our donations since moving to California; shameful because of how much we rely on our local stations. The difficulty is figuring out how much to pledge to each station. Yes, there are two of them in our listening area. And, due to the idiosyncratic nature of radio waves, we get KXJZ in the bedroom, KQED in the kitchen and both in the living room. It's also been our habit for years to listen to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me on on Saturday mornings (KQED), but now if we miss it, we can catch it on KXJZ on Sunday morning. Confusing the issue even more, who gets credit for Ed's listening these past six months? No, there aren't NPR stations in Iraq, and he is not allowed to stream audio at work. However, thanks to NPR's embrace of the digital age, Kathy is able to download and send him about a half a gigabyte of podcasts each week.

We can't stress the importance of having this resource. The NPR podcasts keep Ed much more informed about current events than he would otherwise be, given that Fox News is the default "news programming" on army bases. And the podcasts are a great incentive to go to the gym. An hour of Fresh Air or Wait, Wait apparently makes the miles on the elliptical machine just fly by. That benefit alone should warrant membership. We'll figure something out before the pledge drive is up. Promise.

Now, I know a lot of people complain about the pledge drives, especially the pledge breaks. But every once in a while, they contain something informative. Or, funny. Such as this morning, when KXJZ played an excerpt from an interview (?) with Corey Flintoff when he was in their studio last fall. He was talking about how difficult it is to come back from Iraq. You come home, and there is all this stuff to do. Mow the lawn, do your laundry; when you're in the Green Zone, everything is taken care of for you.

Kathy's heart sank when she heard this. 'Oh, no. Not him too!' For as Ed approaches the last 100 days of his deployment, he is talking about how difficult it's going to be when he comes home to not just hand Kathy a yellow mesh bag of dirty laundry and expect to get it back, clean, in three days. Or how he will miss having all of his meals prepared and dishes taken care of - even though he is looking forward to fresh fruits, vegetables that aren't cooked to mush, and knowing that his (plastic) utensils aren't being incinerated releasing dioxins into the air.

Hopefully though, he is able to readjust smoothly to civilian life. Otherwise, he'll just have to get used to wearing dirty clothes.