We stopped by Holly’s office at the land development company today. I watched Mother try to soak in the fact that her granddaughter (which is her ONLY identity to her grandmother) identifies land, builds whole subdivisions, lays out sewer lines, etc. It was fun to watch her as her eyes darted around all the charts and stacks of papers, permits, drawings that fill the shelves and tables in Holly’s office, unable to take it all in.

After the tour, we took Holly to a belated birthday lunch. On her actual birthday, Holly was out of town helping put together Cruefest 2007…interviewing bands to open for Motley Crue. If you know Holly, you know that she has lived and breathed Motley Crue and Tommy Lee since she saw them in concert when she was 13 years old. It was her first concert; I can still remember it and she’s never gotten over it. She’s gotten close to several of them and their wives over the years. After lunch, Mother and I went shopping at Target where we usually can (and did!) find exactly what we needed and a little of what we wanted.

This evening Bill and I went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Now I’m a Gore fan but the thought of listening to a 2 hour talk about global warming….narrated by Al….talking about carbon emissions….in a slide show….with charts. Well, it’s taken weeks for us to get around to it but we did and are glad we did. Most educated people know this stuff already so it was a little like preaching to the choir. Point: Politicians and big business have politicized science. Duh. He managed to liven it up with cute cartoons like Mr. Sunbeam being beaten up by Greenhouse Gases. Amazingly it opened at Sundance and received a standing ovation from an enthusiastic audience. This was Al’s slide show and he traveled around the country putting in on for free to small invited audiences in people’s homes until approached by a team of folks who wanted to make it into a movie. A team that included Lawrence Bender (producer of Quentin Tarantino films, including "Pulp Fiction") and Jeffrey Skoll, the billionaire eBay founder and movie mogul. They met with Gore and talked him into letting them make the movie. It had been his baby and he had strong proprietary feelings about it so it did take him a while to succumb. The pragmatic suggestions for what individuals can do to help change our course are at film’s end.

William Booth, a Washington Post Staff Writer basically summed it up when he said, “among the film’s lessons….Earth’s glaciers are melting and the polar bears are screwed.” Director David Guggenheim said, “This isn't about box office. None of us are going to make a dime." What is at stake, he says, "is, you know, the planet."