Rights. Equality. Empowerment.

It was nearly a hundred years ago that my grandmother got a job as an assistant to the sheriff in the city where she lived. No doubt--besides her brain--the tool she relied on the most was a typewriter, not unlike the one above which remains in a place of honour in my office. 

Not a lot of women worked outside the home back then, but she was a single parent--and heck, with four kids to feed, she needed an income. 

Oddly, for that era when women mostly stayed at home, my other gramma had a paying job as well. She worked in a bakery which, lucky for me, meant I was privileged to get fancily decorated cakes for birthdays and other special occasions. She also had four kids, along with a husband who was unable to work. 

On this day, International Women's Day, when we celebrate women and our many accomplishments, it seemed important for me to remember these two brave women from my family who preceded me, with a legacy I am proud to claim. As for those words in the subject header, they constitute the theme of this year's IWD, and I can only hope that soon they will actually be true for all of us who identify as women. 

Private. Keep out.

As if. Still, that idea is probably the reason any kid builds a treefort, or finds a hole in a shrubbery somewhere she thinks she can call her own. Just a space for thinking, a spot for some privacy.

The hero of the day (the week, month, year?) has to be whistle-blower Edward Snowden. The Guardian ran an interview with him today (worth clicking on and reading).

Weird the way he has the same name as such an important character in Catch-22. Snowden was the bombardier who'd been shot and kept saying he was cold. He serves as the transformative force in the novel which shifts Yossarian's thinking.

Today's Snowden seems to be serving a similar purpose: shifting our thinking so we'll look harder at the matter of our privacy -- where it's gone, how can we retrieve any shreds of it.

They're watching. We know they are. Sifting among the raccoons and elks and bunnies or whatever we might choose to write about, hoping for weasel words to light up their scorecards.

I suppose I should throw in some weasel words tonight. 

How many might fit into one sentence? Hmmm... How about this. 

Stephen Harper’s speech bombed at the G8 Summit.  

That should get a whole raft of buzzer-bots zinging.