I love raking leaves

I mean it - and not in a sarcastic way. I do. And what's more I hate leaf blowers. Or as my buddy Aaron said this morning, "I abhor leaf blowers" which led him to this GEM of an article (click on Gem).

Some highlights from it:

What is becoming more and more clear to me is that our country, and even most of the developed world is ill. We have a disorder of some sort. We expect everything to be easy. We expect everything to be fast. We trade off money for services we could do ourselves … without thinking. We use resources wildly. All the time we “save” we use to sit in front of the TV or Internet and buy stuff that we think will make us happy. It does not make us happy.

Our illness has major, major costs. It doesn’t make us happy. It doesn’t make us healthy. It is destroying our planet in so many ways. And worst of all, our patterns are now deeply ingrained societal bad habits. These habits are very hard to break; we have built a huge infrastructure to support and foster these bad habits: urban sprawl, malls, credit cards, large vehicles, cheap food, and most importantly an expectation and pride in the rightness of it all.

BLOODY OATH. HALLELUJAH and AMEN.