I'm a Blood Donor

Ok, I’m officially a blood donor. I don’t know why it took me so long to do it, but now I have. I guess the opportunity never presented itself before. I wanted to write this, not to brag about myself, but to vent about my office-mates who also had the opportunity to give blood but declined because they were not given a free 4 hours off of work for their donation.

Let me explain. In the past OR at other ports OR at other government agencies, employees were given 4 hours of time-off when they donated blood. The 4 hours is NOT a reward for doing a nice thing; it is actually supposed to be used to allow an employee time to give blood during working hours without having to use personal leave. It’s time allowed to the employee for the actual time it takes to give blood…that’s it. You CAN be granted UP TO 4 hours for giving blood, IF NECESSARY.

Over time, it has evolved into employees being “paid” 4 hours of time-off for their donation, so that is what people have come to expect. This year the blood drive was during the middle of the day. You were allowed to go give and come back to work. That did not sit well with many employees. Consequently, NO ONE in my work area gave except for me. I was appalled!

Would 4 hours off work be nice? Heck yeah! Would it be a nice incentive to encourage people to give? Yep. But is that what giving blood is all about? NO! The point of giving blood is to do something SELFLESS for a complete stranger. So, now, I have learned a lot about the people I work with. I am very disappointed to say the least.

In the end, I was able to gain a lot from the entire experience---guilt-free cookies, juice, and a t-shirt, two hours away from my desk, but most importantly, I’m thankful I have wonderful parents that taught me great values so I can feel good about myself for doing the right thing.

Memories...

I was just looking through some old pictures and found one that I can laugh about NOW. We came home one day to find our living room looking like this:





What you can't see is half the carpet was in the same condition as the sofa.


Now does this look like a face that could do all that?


GUILTY!!!

I'm trying my hand at this blog thing. We'll see how it goes. I think I need some formal training. I took a digital photography class recently. Little did I know we were the 1st "trial" class so things didn't go all that well. For one thing, it needed to be twice as long. Anyway, I want to have a place to share pictures and what's going on with us. I'll attempt to post one of the pictures I took for my photography class. I think it turned out nice.