Memorial Day 2006

What is Memorial Day all about anyway??
Many people think of this day in many different ways.

When I was a kid, it was a time to visit our grandparent's and my brother's resting place in the cemetarys where they were laying in eternal peace.
It was also a day to travel out to our little county lake to have a picnic. My parents would pack up the car and we would head out to Lake Wazeecha just outisde of town or sometimes we would take a trip out to the family farm in Plover, Wisconsin to visit my other set of grandparents and sometimes some of our other relatives who might be out there visiting also.

For many, this day probably holds some of the same memories, for many others it is a much more somber day as there have been so many souls lost in the many years of war that we have been going through over the course of the last few years.
And for others it was a day of death and fear, as relayed in the next few stories:

Closer to home, the Metro Milwaukee area witnessed numerous (28+) deaths in various shootings throughout the weekend. The most in a 3 day weekend in a long time. The article below from the Milwaukee Journal Online tells of a "massacre" at a lakeside park that I have visited many times in the past. How aweful that must have been....
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=429290

......and scores of other shootings around the Metro area as well.
What is going on in the world? You would think that Milwaukee is a "Little Bagdahd" or something from reading the above story.


Speaking of Bagdahd.....Over in Iraq, which is where most of our troops are now located, there seems to have been a horrible accident that has claimed the lives of some veteran journalists and seriously wounded one reporter:

A CBS News corrospondant is in critical condition and her camera man and sound man were killed after a run in with a bomb in Iraq while they were covering Memorial Day stuff in Iraq:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/J/JOURNALISTS_KILLED?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

I remember seeing the woman who was killed (pictured here in this post) on a few news episodes on tv. Kimberly Dozier is in critical condition after stepping out of her vehicle and being too close to a car that had a bomb in it that then went off. The blast killed her traveling mates, who were both veteran news people.
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I spent my Memorial Day working and remembering my mother who passed away back in the beginning of 1999.
I hope that the scores of my friends and family had a nice weekend.