A Speckled Trout

I work Monday through Thursday, and though it’s only a part-time gig, my brain is pretty spent when I get home.  Any intentions I have of getting much done other than making dinner go by the wayside.

Ahhhhh……..but Friday.  I always have a three day weekend and I live for Fridays.

If I don’t have a frequent dentist or hair appointment, a car repair or lunch date I am in heaven.  The whole day to get caught up on everything.  Everything!

That’s where I found myself this past week.  I talked myself out of getting routine blood work first thing in the morning from a physical that was done in April, and ignored a change oil and low tire pressure light on the dash of the car.  This Friday was going to be about me doing what I wanted to do.  Me!

Oh the thoughts swirling all week on the possibilities.  No grand projects this time.  No sirree.  I would clean the house, get some bills paid and enjoy not being committed to anything all day.  While the laundry was going maybe I’d maybe make some zucchini bread with all those veggies coming from the garden and finish a sewing project.  Or make some calls for estimates on painting the house that we’ve been talking about.

Maybe I would write.  Ack!  Not that! 

I started with the sewing project – valances for Maggie’s kindergarten classroom.  I’d already cut the fabric.  I just needed to pin it and sew it up.  First, though, I needed to read the paper and check out Facebook, Pinterest and Huffington Post.  And eat.  Yes, I needed food to keep me energized for the tasks at hand.  This took longer than expected.  Finally, I sat on the floor with the box of pins and turned on the Young and the Restless while I worked.  Who are these people?  Jack has a fiance?  But Jack’s married to Phyllis In The Coma For The Last Year.  The deceased daughter of Sharon and Nick has come back as a barmaid who seems to be in love with Nick?  What a tramp that one is!  Paul has a son that looks to be five years younger than him?

When was the last time I watched this show?

I put my project down.  This required my full attention.

And a snack.

When that was over I plugged in the sewing machine and got busy.  Piece-o-cake.  I’d be done with this project in no time.  I finished the first two and then took a little break.  I checked out Facebook, Pinterest, Huffington Post and Craigslist.

I had a snack.

The seam ripper I needed to open up where the rod needed to be inserted was nowhere to be found and so I used teeny scissors that were bent at the tip from being smashed in the drawer.  This was making the job much more time consuming.  How frustrating!

I needed a break and a snack.

By this time it was early afternoon.  Had I even brushed my teeth?  I couldn’t remember.  Maybe some personal hygiene and makeup would help this Friday Attention Deficit I seemed to have.  I got out my makeup bag, sat on the bed and turned the t.v. on while I beautified myself.

It was The Talk.  Sherry explained that she had bladder leakage and that one in four people have this.  One in four!!!  What’s the answer to chronic bladder leakage?  Why, Depends, silly girl.  After an explanation on the leakage holding ability of Depends there was a fashion show.  Four men would walk the Depend Fashion Runway and the women of The Talk had to guess which one was wearing the man diaper.

After the second guy I turned the t.v. off.  Bored out of my Friday gourd, even I couldn’t watch this humiliation and call it entertainment.

So I checked out Facebook, Pinterest, Huffington Post and a few blogs.

Maybe I needed to get out of the house?  Of course I did.  I decided to go to the shopping center.  After all, I needed navy pants for work.  Yes.  That’s what I need.  I already felt more energized just driving there.  I had a plan.

The store I often find pants that fit my shortyness was having 50% off the entire store.  50%?  The whole store???

I bought two pair of colored jeans that I cannot wear to work and a black cardigan because I only have twenty of those and I needed twenty-one.  I went into another store and after they promotion-assaulted me with a dozen deals that I couldn’t keep track of they called me “sweetheart” more times than I have cardigans.  I had to leave.  I cannot be the sweetheart of a high schooler.  There are laws against that.

The last store I went into was having 40% off the entire store.  40% off?  Even sale stuff?  I took some things into the dressing room and tried them on.  I would get completely dressed and undressed three more times.  I was getting confused on what I didn’t need but had to get anyway because it was on sale.

I had a talking to myself on the way home about my behavior so far that day.  There was still time to finish something I started and to make some healthy choices when it came to my Friday Frequent Eating.

“Okie dokie”, I said back to me.  “When I get home I’ll have an apple with my cup of tea and kick it into gear.”  I walked in the door, dropped my bags down and went into the kitchen to make my healthy snack.

Mal had made cookies.

I ate four and checked out Facebook, Pinterest, Huffington Post and Ann Taylor Loft (where, in fact, I had just come from).

Then I put a fork in my productive Friday.

It might not have been done but I was.

I was not raised in a military family.  My dad was in the Navy, but with the exception of a few uncles nobody else followed suit.  Dad kept detailed photo albums of those years with every buddy named in each picture.  They are in a box in Mom’s basement along with his uniform and Navy manual.  I like to sneak down there when we’re home, sit on a plastic tub and look at the remnants of an era gone by and the only evidence of a part of my dad’s life that I know little about.

I’m not sure if what I know about combat and the military has come from movies or the nostalgia that sweeps over me when I open those boxes and pull out the brown photo albums with each snapshot secured by a black triangle in every corner.  Newly made friends at basic training smiling in front of tents with their arms wrapped around each other.  A stray dog adopted by men who were just boys a few months earlier.  Living at home with a mama who woke them up for school with the smell of bacon and eggs and now learning how to use a scope and rifle.

This is what I know about getting ready for duty.  Young men in black and white photos.

Is it that nostalgia that makes me think children were off limits in the rules of war?  Does the musty smell of another time make me believe that honorable men did everything they could to leave the future out of the carnage of the present?  Was just the opposite true and I didn’t know?

Today’s conflicts and wars show no signs of rules.  Bombs hitting elementary schools in Gaza, shelling and poisonous gas in Syria, a passenger plane scattered in pieces in the Ukraine, thousands of people forced into the mountains with no way out in Iraq. 

The eyes of traumatized children staring into the camera.   

A reporter asked some six year old boys in Syria what they wanted most.  “Peace,” they said and collectively wept for none of them had a father still alive.  A little girl in Gaza picked through the remnants of her home, crouched down and clutched a rock.  “All my grandparents died today,” she cried with her head in her tiny hands.  “All of them.”

In the newest conflict in Iraq we are air lifting water and food to a mountaintop where thousands are stranded.  Are we the good guys?  Weren’t we the bad guys for a decade?  Bombing a country day in and day out where civilians surely bore the brunt of the modern weapons of war in the name of democracy.

In our own country where thousands of immigrant children made a harrowing journey to escape the violence of a drug culture fueled by Americans, we scream at the desperate with their backpacks of worldly belongings to get the hell out of here.

A daily onslaught of despair fills the news and my stomach twists in knots at the brutality of these times.   

PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod.  My constant prayer over and over and over…….

…..because if I stop for one minute I think my soul will be crushed by the burden of bearing witness to what we are doing to the most innocent among us.

The Big Daddy and I are working on controlling our moods.  Angery moods like yelling at the newspaper when we read the letters to the editor.  Or hissy fits when a screw falls out of the bathtub faucet for no apparent reason and the replacement doesn’t fit.

“Look, Kath,” The Big Daddy said, “it’s too big even though it’s exactly the size the original paperwork says will fit.”

And I lean over his shoulder and look at the faucet while in my head I’m saying, “Well, isn’t that just the greatest?  What are we supposed to do?  Buy a new $300 faucet because the seventeen cent screw won’t work?  Well why the heck not?”

Out loud, though, I say, “Perhaps we got the wrong size screw from the hardware store.”  Because getting mad is counter-productive to a happy life.

Or so they say.

All of this would be so much easier if there weren’t faucet conspiracies, we didn’t have to work with, you know, people, or there weren’t so many Republicans in Kansas.

Since exercise is a good mood stabilizer we try to go after dinner for our twoish mile walk.  On this day it was hot and humid.  So humid it felt like we were doing laps in a swamp.  Mark chatted with some bike buddies and we ran into an old classmate of Will’s and her mom.  We saw an owl on the ground near the golf course and tippy-toed closer for a look.  Near the end we saw our friends and told them where to look for the owl.

All in all a good way to end the day.

We walked our drenched selves home and just spitting distance from our own yard a pickup truck drove by.  The kid hung out the window and screamed WOOT.  It scared The Big Daddy and I so that we jumped a foot.  The kid laughed and slapped his steering wheel as he drove off.

And I yelled back “F*** YOU.”

The Big Daddy turned around.  “I can’t believe you said that.  No, wait, let me take that back.  I can’t believe you screamed that.  In broad daylight.”

Technically it was pre-dusk and not broad daylight, and upon reflection it did seem to be one of those things that might fit into an angerish column.

But why did that little hooligan have to go and ruin my zen mood?  Why take the call of the mighty owl we had just seen and use it to scare us?

Our long-time Republican senator who hasn’t even lived in this state in years is beating the tea partier in the Kansas primary tonight and I’m sorta okay with that.  It’s like having a deadbeat boyfriend.  You know he’ll never do a single thing to make your life easier but at least he won’t burn the house down while you’re off working to pay the bills.

Lookie there.

I just managed some anger.

Woot.  Woot.

The Big Daddy and I logged 3000 miles on the car and more gas station and rest area stops than we could count.  All that time in a car watching the scenery gives one more than enough time to observe some things.

Hay
This must be hay bailing season from here to Montana.  We saw all shapes and sizes of hay bales.  Stacked, rolled and pancake size.

Cowboys
I only saw a few (one especially handsome one on an ATV repairing a fence) and have but one word to describe them.  Hubba hubba.  So cute I had to use the same word twice.

Fences
They are essential to the farm/ranching life and are like hay bales……unique to each place and daily being mended.

Sagebrush
Believe me, this seems to be the only form of vegetation in the entire state of Wyoming.

Highways
We did little interstate driving and more highway roads.  Some were so desolate that I prayed for me and the few people we passed that they have no car problems.  There isn’t a mile marker, a water tower, a town or business for miles and miles to even guess where a tow truck would find you.  That is if you could even get a two truck to help you out.

Little Towns
We passed so many of these.  One had a sign with a population of 35.  How in the world???  I couldn’t imagine where you grocery shop, get your hair colored or send your kids to school.  Remote, isolated, small.  Maybe the point in some cases is not to be found.

Gas Stations
Some looked liked they’d been around since The Flintstones.  Regardless, they are a welcome sight and despite sometimes having more than half a tank stopping and filling up is a given as God Only Knows when you will come across the next one.

Liquor Stores & Casino
They are one in the same.  What could go possibly wrong with that?

Littering
I cannot remember the last time I’ve seen someone throwing garbage out their car window but we followed two yahoos in Montana who decided to clean their car of Dorito bags and other snack trash.  It is a disheartening experience to see someone toss their garbage onto such a pristine place.

Hotel Pillows
I thought about bringing our own pillows but talked myself out of it.  Next time I will think better of it.  Regardless of the price, from a Motel 6 to the Hilton Garden Inn, hotel pillows are crappy, flat things that will make your neck do funny things for days.

Wild Animals
Mark wanted to see a bear.  I wanted to see moose.  His wish came true when twenty miles from Glacier a black bear crossed the road in front of us.  I never saw any moose but we did see lots of deer, prong-horned antelope and buffalo.

Farm Stands
The entire western half of Montana has roadside stands selling cherries.  Closer to Glacier they sell huckleberries.  We stopped at one that was selling three varieties of cherries, bought six pounds and ate every single one.

Climate Change
It is most undoubtedly here.  Once we left the midwest we saw evidence of forest fires EVERYWHERE.  Massive swaths of burnt trees as far as the eye could see.  And Glacier National Park?  We didn’t see any glaciers though a few still exist.  At one time there were 150 in the park.  Now there are 25 and they aren’t expected to be around much longer.

Fracking
We passed a water truck which we first assumed was headed to Washington State due to their forest fires.  In reality, though, these trucks are used for fracking.  While proponents of fracking say that it uses less water than the average household (and this is true), water used for fracking can never be reused.  The water we use in our homes is always being recycled.  Water that has been used for fracking then becomes toxic.  In a time when so many states are in dire drought conditions it is disturbing to see trucks of water tanks going to support such a controversial and environmentally harmful endeavor.  

Marriage
We not only survived eight days together in a car, we had a really, really good time.  That’s not to say we didn’t have our moments but they were small and insignificant…….which is fitting under the majesty of nature’s handwork.

Big Skies & Starry Nights
Without a doubt, Montana has the biggest sky, the brightest stars and freshest air. 

I am smitten.

The answer to fracking?

Almost to Idaho so no sagebrush.

My sherpa.

When Mark was in graduate school and I was working at a bank, my coworker in consumer loans was a Montana girl named Phyllis.  Like me, her husband was also in graduate school.

We made a good team.  Two women doing the heavy lifting of finances in our relationships while our spouses each pursued a doctorate.  Two women who sometimes weren’t so happy about how long that degree was taking and often homesick and out of sorts in the small town we found ourselves in.

Our work styles complimented each other and Phyllis was better at some things than I was.  When we got new calculators that involved a multi-step process inputting rates and terms to come up with a loan payment, Phyllis read the manual and taught herself how to use it.  I couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, but with Phyllis around to do it for me it didn’t seem like such a big deal.

While I longed for my days in Chicago working on Michigan Avenue, Phyllis longed for her home state out west.  When she booked her flight to return home for two weeks at Christmas she was giddy for months.  In four years in a little office at the back of the bank I listened to her talk about Montana every single day.

Enough with the Montana I used to think to myself some days.

When we took our first trip out west years ago I told Mark we had to stop in Bozeman to see Phyllis’ home town.  It was stunning.  Nestled in a valley with a mountain view in every direction, I finally understood how jarring the flat central Illinois landscape must have felt to her.  Because of her I have always had a sweet spot for that state.

Mark had the opportunity to go to a meeting at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, and so we took a road trip and spent this past week in my former coworker’s home state.  My sweet spot turned to a full blown romance.

When Mark finished his degree we moved out east for awhile.  Phyllis and Bill left after we did and eventually made their way back home.  Some years I hear from her at Christmas and some years I don’t.  I have looked for her on Facebook with no luck, but everywhere I went on this trip I thought of my partner in consumer loans.  I looked for her blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes at the gas station, grocery stores and every shop in town.

******

“Phyllis, I know you’re sick of me asking but can you show me one more time how to use this calculator?  I promise it’s my last time asking you.”

“I’ll show you again,” she said.  “And if you don’t get it this time I’m going to throw my calculator at your head.”

Those Montana cowgirls know how to saddle up.

Mark and I are headed out of town for a big road trip out West to search for our inner cowboy.  He’s going for legit reasons and trying to wrangle some attention and money.  I’m desperate to get out of Kansas and would go to the Quiktrip across the state line if we could make it last a couple of days.

I took the car in to make sure everything was in good driving condition for our long distance trek and mentioned that on occasion our car alarm goes off for no reason.  It’s usually around 7:00 a.m. but about a month ago woke the neighbors up blaring at 4:00 a.m.

Back at home a few hours later, I got a call from the service department.  “One of the back passenger locks is corroded which in turn is setting off the alarm.  I can get you out the door for $565.00 and a little bit of tax,” the service writer said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.  “Forget it.  It doesn’t happen that often and I’m not paying that much money to fix a lock.”

“Well, what are you willing to pay?”

“What?  This is negotiable?  We can do Let’s Make A Deal for car repairs?  Why didn’t you tell me this when the last one rang up at $1200.00?”

“I’m just trying to fix your problem to your satisfaction, m’am.  I’ll look for a used part and call you back.”  Magically the call back (even without the used part) came in at a reduced price of $395.00.

I didn’t bite.  “Put it back together.  I’ll be in shortly.”

“Well, m’am,” she said, “I sure would hate for your alarm to trigger and cause the dome light to come on and drain the battery.  Could leave you stuck in the middle of nowhere.  You did say your were going out west, right?  That would be awful to have that happen where it’s a bit more remote.”

“Sheesh,” I thought to myself.  “That one should have been an actress.”

A few days later a guy came around selling pest control.  “Spiders, mice, mosquitoes.  We spray the perimeter to secure the house and form a barrier that they can’t penetrate.  I guarantee you that your spider population will go down to practically nothing.”

I stood in the house while he went on and on and on and for the life of me I couldn’t think of the last time I even saw a spider.

“You know,” I said, “I just don’t have that problem and even if I did I’m not afraid of them.”

“Mice, m’am.  We’ll kill the mice.  You’ve gotta have plenty of those running around with the creek and all.”

“We do but I have two cats.  They rip their heads off and leave them at the back door.”

“Do you know two ants mating can produce 300,000 ants?  Think of that.  Hundreds of thousand of ants trying to get in the house.”

“You have to go,” I said.  “You’re wearing me out.”

“We only use organic chemicals,” he yelled as he walked away.

“Sheesh,” I thought to myself.  “That one thinks he’s the Rodent Whisperer.”

Two days later the alarm went off, a mouse ran right in front of me by the garage door and a big spider was on the trash can.

I didn’t blink.

Maybe I already am a cowgirl.
                                    .

                                                   

Mark had a colleague in town last month from London.  He said very British things like, “rubbish, lovely and loo.”  I was charmed.  A Londoner in Kansas?  In our house?  Look at my husband bringing home The Classy Brit.  Quite a different lot than back in his roofing days when those guys came with their GEDs and outstanding warrants.

Keith and Mark have known each other for years.  In January they ran into each other at a meeting and Keith said he was coming to the States in June.  He told Mark he’d love to spend part of his holiday seeing what Mark was doing research wise, and was especially interested in going to the Flint Hills to go bird watching.

“I’m an avid birder,” he told me the first night over dinner.  “My wife has no interest but I love it and couldn’t wait to see your prairies and all the species I don’t normally get to see in England.”

“Jolly ho, chap,” I said.  “You boys have at it.”

Jet lag hit him as soon as dinner was over and he went straight to bed.  The next morning I got up in the wee hours, put the coffee on and cooked some bangers and crumpets.  Our new housemate, The Brit, came down sleepy-eyed, poured himself a cup of brew and then went out onto the screened-in porch to watch the birds go about their morning chores.

Eventually Mark woke up and joined him on the porch.  I fell back asleep for awhile and when I woke Mark told me that our cat, Pip, killed a bird right in front of The Brit.

I was gobsmacked.

“Right in front of him?  Today?  Right now?  Pip killed a bird?”

“He did.  It was bad.”

“Oh geez, Mark, when did the cat start killing birds?  Mice?  Fine.  Baby rats?  Sure.  Chipmunks?  Okay.  But birds?  Not birds and not this weekend.”

“Yep.  A baby woodpecker right in front of us.”

“You know this makes us look like bloody a*******, don’t you?  Classless Americans with killing machine pets that’s what we are.  How did The Brit take it?”

“Well, it wasn’t good I’ll tell you that.”

I was in a kerfuffle.  I wanted to make a good impression on The Brit and at the first break of dawn we had a dead bird and a cat licking his chops.

That night when the blokes returned I expressed my condolences over the incident our guest had witnessed.  “It was a downy-headed woodpecker,” The Brit said.  “A baby.  Female.  Those things happen I suppose.”  Well, at least it wasn’t by gunshot I wanted to say.  Then Mark and The Brit opened the wine and got bladdered – probably to drown their sorrows over what they had seen at the start of their day.

The next morning they went off to the prairies and I puttered in my garden.  On one of my trips in I noticed something black at the bottom of the stairs.

It was a bird.

There was a dead bird in the house.  My knickers were suddenly in a wicked knot.

I chased that cheeky cat out of the house because I was so mad at him for killing another bird.  Then I chased him back in the house so he wouldn’t kill any more birds and told him to bugger off.  Then I scooped the dead bird up and put him in the trash.

What was happening?  Why was this cat killing birds all of a sudden?  And why did he have to do it when The Brit was here? 

The Birdwatchers returned home later that day.  Knackered from the prairie winds and their ornithological trek, we turned on the telly and watched England get kicked out of the World Cup in record time.

Keith left early the next morning to shop for a laptop for his son as they are much cheaper here in The Colony than over in England.  Mark offered to go with him but he declined.  “Cheerio, good man,”  I yelled after him as he appeared to be running to his rental car.

Later that day I told my next-door neighbor what happened and how I’d never seen either of our cats kill a bird.  “Oh I have,” she said.  “My cats flush them out and then your cats go in for the kill.  There’s all kinds of dead animal bodies around here.  Between your cats and mine it’s like we’re living with gangbangers.”

Well ain’t that a kick in the arse.

The Listen to Your Mother videos for 2014 made their way to youtube this morning.  My hair is wild.  My mouth got so dry I felt like Pinocchio.   My heart was pounding.   I was still making changes to my piece until the very day of the show. 

It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Whenever I get all hot and bothered by something (I’m talking to you Hobby Lobby) and then write about it I usually get a good response.  It seems the tendency these days is to frequently get hot and bothered over current events.  There’s refugees this week, Congress, Iraq, Israel and guns every week, and Joan Rivers attempt at humor a few days ago.

There’s a blog I read that I often think I should quit because she’s so, so deep.  Half the time I feel incredibly dumb and the other half I’m tempted to comment, “LIGHTEN UP FOR PETE’S SAKE!!!!”  This woman recently wrote about the 4th of July and how difficult it is to feel patriotism and pride when you think things in this country are so broken.

“My thoughts exactly” I might have yelled at the screen.

We know so many people in their late fifties or older who have been shoved out of the workforce due to downsizing and a lousy economy.  I could name a dozen off the top of my head.  Though much of the future I saw for our family hasn’t exactly been like my daydreams, losing a job at this age never entered the picture and yet it has happened to so many friends and acquaintances of ours.  That isn’t our reality, but the possibility of Mark not getting his grant renewed and taking a massive decrease in pay dangles over our heads every day like a swinging ax.

Because this is the nature of what he has always done we live with it.  When colleagues get funded we are elated.  Look!!!  The funding numbers are going up.  If their grant is rejected we are knocked flat.  It’s so bad this year.  Worse than it’s ever been.  The stress is always there and adding sleepless nights and anxiety to that cocktail makes for a recipe of dysfunction.

And so we are working on that.  Both of us are trying to figure out how to make our mark on the world with more peace and less anger.

In the blog I read about the 4th, the writer’s husband told her that Independence Day is meant to celebrate the “intent.”  The intent that our founding fathers had for freedom and liberty.  The intent that we can move in a new direction and that our unalienable rights will evolve with the times.  The intent that the braver among us will stand up for the weak.

Intent is so loaded with hope I may have squealed when I read it.

Out of nowhere last week the idea of the children’s book I’ve always dreamed of writing popped into my head.  I could see the main character as clear as day.  My niece will be my partner and illustrator.  I’ve written a rough outline.  When I told Maggie my idea she steered me in a different direction that makes more sense to the story.  While doing my accounting job by day, my nighttime thoughts are swimming with ideas. 

At the halfway point of this turbulent season, my midsummer dream is for us to move towards serenity while fanning the flames of our individual creativity.

This is no easy task for passionate, political people like ourselves, but each day is starting to feel more weary than the last, and resting in the waters of hope for awhile seems like the best of intentions.

We women are a competitive bunch and we compete for all the wrong reasons.  Decades after women returned to the workforce in greater numbers, we’re still hashing it out over who is the better mom.  The one who stays at home and raises her kids or the one who goes to work every day and raises her kids?

Or the idea that somehow just having children puts you on a pedestal higher to God than women who can’t or don’t want children.

Bottle or breast?  Public, private or homeschool?  Soccer or football?  Honors or regular? 

Sheesh.

I have never heard my husband or brothers ever compare themselves to another man.  Ever.  But me?  I have played that game with gusto.  I have patted myself on the back many a time at the expense of other woman.  We all have, but today it’s important that we stop.

Today. 

My preferred method of birth control was always the pill.   It was covered under my health insurance plan thirty five years ago when I worked in Chicago and it’s been covered under every insurance plan we’ve ever had.  Similar forms are also covered such as the IUD and implant or injectable contraceptives.

My daughters (for very different reasons) use birth control and it is covered by their insurance.

This is a reasonable expectation from an employer’s health plan and far cheaper to provide than the alternative.  Preventing pregnancy, regulating cycles and clearing up acne, are but a few of the reasons one would need birth control.  This makes for a healthier, more productive woman and thus, a better employee.

This Supreme Court, however, doesn’t see it that way.  Women (at least the ones at Hobby Lobby……..for now) are required to march lockstep with the religous beliefs of their employer.  Rather than a discussion between a woman and her partner about family planning and the method under which they choose to do that, the court believes the employer’s beliefs get a say in the decision.

Though I am long past the need for birth control, my daughters are not, and the fundamental decision to prevent pregnancy and manage their own health with their own doctors (by methods that are best for them) took a huge step backwards.  It is no surprise that the majority opinion consisted exclusively of men.

For conservatives and opponents of Obamacare this was considered a huge victory.

The Hobby Lobby customer, however, is predominantly women, and unless their sales strategy was to rely on men from here on out to buy the cheap crap they import from China, they picked the wrong battle with the wrong gender.

Suit up, ladies. 

Game. On.