I is for ingredients

Pre-emergent Pad Thai.

Much of my life revolves around ingredients.

Cooking, one of my favorite hobbies, is all about ingredients. Even if you're making cupcakes from a box mix, you still need the mix, the eggs, and the oil - ingredients.

Knitting is all about ingredients as well. The yarn, the pattern, the needles - all ingredients needed to produce wooly works of art.

I is also for Immigrants

I wish I had thought to take a picture yesterday, but I was honestly rather dumbfounded at an occurance in my neighborhood. A branch of a local Mexican place is very near my house. There was a handwritten closed sign on the door. The owner is Hispanic and the employees are predominantly Hispanic as well. Only three of the restaurants have non-Hispanics anywhere - front of house or back of house. The man owns 24 restaurants in the Dallas area. He was not able to open 21 of his restaurants yesterday. I would be very surprised if he hired illegals. This raises an interesting quandry. Here is a man who is Hispanic. He is a civic leader. He is a businessman who has a large effect on the Hispanic community and also in the Anglo community. He had no idea his legal immigrant employees wouldn't show up. What kind of action should he take against the employees who don't think enough of their jobs to show up? Or should he?

At some point, all Americans were immigrants. My paternal ancestors emmigrated from France to Holland to America because of religious persecution.

I'm in an area that is very strongly affected by the walkout. We've had roads shut down over the past few weeks. I don't know how I feel about all of it. But I'm not sure that walking out on a job and closing down businesses run by people who have completed the immigration process is the answer. And I know that much of the Anglo community here just ate somewhere else so our dollars were still spent, just not at a Hispanic business. There were Hispanics at SuperTarget yesterday. Would they have spent their dollars at a Hispanic business instead, had it been open?

(I realize that Hispanics are not the only immigrant community, however in Texas they are the largest illegal immigrant community and the one I come in the most contact with.)