GCKp

Mom, wife, avid fishing person, HR Director and life-long educator. 💐🦋🐠☀️

[GCKp @gcwynkoop]

Flying kites and enjoying this perfect day on South Padre Island Texas and listening to Classic Rewind with @kristine_stone ! 🩱⛱️ Happy place! ❤️

[GCKp @gcwynkoop]

@JTKoop32 So cool! 😎 Love it!!

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

This is a beautiful letter from Fiona Apple explaining to her fans why she must postpone a concert date.

I am impressed at the way she was instantly able to make the decision to choose love over her career. Indeed, the world needs more of this.

Enjoy the story...

“It's 6pm on Friday, and I'm writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I'm writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here's the thing.

I have a dog, Janet, and she's been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She's almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She's almost 14 and I've never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She's a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We've lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it's always really been just the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she's used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison's Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.

Despite all this, she's effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she's the one who taught me what love is.

I can't come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.

She doesn't even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she's not sad about aging or dying.

Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That's why they are so much more present than people.

But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She'll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can't leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I'm afraid she'll die and I won't have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.
Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable and comforted and safe and important.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I've ever known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I'm asking for your blessing.
I'll be seeing you.

Love,
Fiona”

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Photographer Axel Bocker took a glorious damselfly close-up in Germany and earned a spot as a finalist in the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

[source: https://t.co/aVv2qxHhRt]

[GCKp @gcwynkoop]

@tompettyradio Tom Petty’s version of Gloria! Be still my heart! Love it!! ❤️❤️

[Joey Palacios - Texas Public Radio @Joeycules]

Welcome to San Antonio where:

Blanco = Blank-oh
Huebner = Hee-Bner
Bexar = Bear
Seguin = Suh-geen
Gruene = Green
Boerne = Bernie
3009 = Three Double Oh Nine

Any others?

[News 4 San Antonio @News4SA]

Do you think horse-drawn carriages should be banned from the streets of downtown?

Members of San Antonio City Council are actively working to eliminate them: https://t.co/TDKItywLDf

[GCKp @gcwynkoop]

@JTKoop32 @UTSASOSA Congratulations! So proud of you!! 🧡💙🧡💙

[The SWU Network @TheSWU]

#QOTD:

“And what do you sacrifice?”

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote fifteen years ago from which there’s only one conclusion…”

[Shoresy @radiokaos666]

Last time I checked it’s still legal to dance while waiting to vote. Get off your duff and vote.

[Beto O'Rourke @BetoORourke]

Thanks, President Obama!

[Joe Biden @JoeBiden]

Take it from me and my friend @BarackObama: VOTE!

[Beto O'Rourke @BetoORourke]

Greg Abbott's extreme abortion ban is threatening the lives of Texas women as he allows our state to lead much of the developed world in the rate of maternal mortality.

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

What Mehmet Oz means when he says abortion should be between "a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders." #PASenateDebate

Thx @amyschumer

[Manu Ginobili @manuginobili]

🇺🇲Whaaaaaat? That's pretty cool!
🇦🇷Ah buenooooo! Tremendo!

[GCKp @gcwynkoop]

❤️ #Andor

[The Chicks @thechicks]

#Texas! The registration deadline for the Nov. 8th election is TOMORROW, Oct. 11th. Make sure you are registered! https://t.co/B1qdmghyYe

#BetoforGovernor2022

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

“Columbus initiated a new world genocide of Indigenous people. He murdered. He mutilated. He took slaves. And we honor him with Columbus Day? Are we that backwards?” — Coach Pop spitting 🔥

[GCKp @gcwynkoop]

#siriusxm #myperfect10 Wow! Loving all the music from guest DJs! Great music while at work!

[ABC7 Eyewitness News @ABC7]

NO WORDS 😩🤣 A toddler seemed to wonder what she had gotten herself into as she stood in a room full of screaming kids on her first day of day care in Syracuse, New York.