3167 Flat

Saturday, November 20, 2010

"They do not love that do not show their love."
-- William Shakespeare --

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I woke up this morning to find a flat tire on Fred. Not just low - it was resting on the rim. Naturally, I have no friendly garages or other contacts here, and my tire-blower-upper-machine is still at the old house.

Because of his lowered floor I can't use his own jack on Fred when the tire is that low. It won't squeeze under. And even if I could get it jacked up, I'd hesitate to change the tire myself anyway because the driveway slopes and I have nothing with which to chock the tires.

I called Daughter to ask if she had a local friendly garage to recommend, one that makes house calls, and she said no, but she has AAA. Unfortunately, she was about to leave for work. So I called #ROAD, an emergency service I have through my cell phone ($3 a month, but they don't service you at your home, only on the road, dead in your driveway is not considered an emergency).

A friendly guy arrived within a half hour, and put the spare on for me. I thought it was #ROAD, but he turned out to be the AAA guy. Daughter had called them anyway. Before the AAA guy left, the #ROAD guy showed up. I hadn't canceled him because I thought the AAA guy was him.

Service sure is a lot faster here than at the old house!

I had looked at AAA a few years ago, but it wasn't very useful in the mid-Hudson valley. The nearest AAA-authorized service folks were in Albany, so it would take at least an hour and a half to get any help if I needed it anywhere near home. I guess it might be worth looking into down here.

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I'd mentioned that I'd bought a small office refrigerator to use until I could either find a regular bottom-freezer refrigerator on sale or bring my old one down to the new house. Well, it's working just fine with just me to feed, except that I really wish it had more freezer space. There's just a flapped space in the top of the compartment, big enough for four Lean Cuisine dinners and a tiny ice cube tray, but no room for ice cream.

I need ice cream.

Yesterday I was in Home Depot arranging installation of a garage door opener, and lo, they had taller 2 -door mini refrigerators on sale, with a much larger freezer compartment behind a separate freezer compartment door.

I had been surprised at how cheap the first mini was. This one was even cheaper.

So now I have TWO mini refrigerators in the kitchen, side by side in the space meant for a big one. The two together cost less than a quarter of what I'd expect to pay for a standard one, even on sale, and I think it'll work out just fine.

Daughter is going to roll her eyes at me. Piper thinks I'm nuts. I'm perfectly happy. (Except that the smaller one is all black, and the new one is black with stainless steel doors. I wish they matched better.)

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The Man has been traveling all over the country most of the month. I asked him if he had to go through the new TSA scans yet, and he said that none of the airports he'd used had them yet. He didn't mention having endured the new pat downs. I was curious because if they patted him down, they'd think he was packing artillery.
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3166 We are living in 1984

Friday, November 19, 2010

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

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I've been reading a lot about the new TSA "scan or pat" controversy. Of course it's security theater, not real security at all, having much to do with past failed attempts and doing nothing to thwart future attempts, and a whole lot to do with someone profiting from sale of the machines.

It's also unconstitutional under the fourth amendment. To quote a comment from 'Mela' on an interview of TSA agents here:

"This policy allows TSOs to “pat down” (which is an absurd bastardization of the term in this case) American citizens, assumed under the law to be innocent of any crime, in ways that a police officer is not allowed to touch a suspect in the face of probable cause of evidence of a crime. That is blatantly unconstitutional and every citizen should protest if they believe in the tenets of rights this country was founded upon."

But then, we've been giving up rights over the past ten years. What's one more (shrug).

Many non-Americans have said that they will no longer enter the US, for business or pleasure, because the American "security" measures insult them.

I have flown El Al. Their security measures make sense and are supremely successful, especially considering that they are target #1. Please do read this: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother. They take the problem seriously, and attack it intelligently with training and psychology. No fuss, no feathers flying, nobody profiting, no insulting intrusion or harassment.

Then ask yourself why Americans are generally considered lacking in intelligence (and yeah, that's a sort of a sad pun).
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3165 Off with their heads!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

"What is life? It's a way of keeping meat fresh."
-- Doctor Who --

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Let me see if I've got this right. They tried a Guantanamo terrorism suspect in civilian court, and although he was found guilty of conspiracy charges that will keep him in jail for life, he was not found guilty of the most serious murder charges.

So people are saying that this therefore proves trying terrorists in civilian court won't work - they should be tried in military court?

I don't get it. Are they saying that prosecutors should shop around for a court guaranteed to convict? What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? What happened to "fair trial"? What happened to having a trial at all? It sounds to me that a lot of people want to simply punish whether there's evidence of guilt or not. Mock trial. Off with their heads.

Why not just execute them all and stop hypocritically trying to make it look fair and legal?

Those people scare me. They are terrorists, too. They just pretend to be civilized and take a longer time getting around to killing people they don't like, which is scary because it's coldly crafted, not an act of passion.
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3164 Duh?

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves to be free.”

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The FDA has banned alcoholic "energy drinks" - those with both caffeine and alcohol.

Everybody talking about it seems to home in on the combination. One of the companies intends to keep selling the stuff, without the caffeine.

I don't think it's the combination that's bad - it's the concentration. One can of that stuff is equal to four beers, one can of Red Bull, and a cup of espresso.

If it's the combination, then what about rum and coke?

Duh.
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3163 Almost a Honey

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.

-- Will Rogers --

True, and all the more reason to elect intelligent people willing to change direction based on new information, rather than robots blinded by ideology.

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Beautiful day today, except for the wind. It was 60 degrees by 9 am, clear blue sky, warm sun --- but wind! Gusts hitting 50 mph.

One of my bathroom vents thumps when the wind blows. Outside it's just ting ting ting, but inside it sounds like someone pounding on the front door, or hammering on a wall. I went to the door several times before I figured it out.

My front yard is filling with oak leaves. It seems like everyone around here has a leaf blower. The neighborhood has been filled with the sound of them for days. I guess I can expect more tomorrow or whenever the wind stops.

Me, I just run the mulching mower over leaves. It's faster, and the leaves "disappear" into future topsoil. Problem eliminated.

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Someone recommended this video to me. It's dance sequences from many movies melded into one, to "Footloose". Very enjoyable.


The above video brought Gregory Hines back to mind. I have always adored him, and I do miss him. It's Wednesday, and time for the Honey of the Week, but he doesn't really qualify. My admiration for him didn't have a lustful component; I simply adored him, a talented and thoroughly nice person, as close as one gets these days to a Renaissance man.

Don't give me "I don't watch videos in blogs". Watch this. It will make you smile, and energize your day. (Not at work, though. Tap dancing requires full sound.)

[From the Movie: "Tap". Outstanding tap performances by Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr., and legendary tap dance veterans Harold Nicholas, Jimmy Slyde, Howard 'Sandman' Sims, Bunny Briggs, Steve Condos, Arhur Duncan and Pat Rico.]
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3162 Do Jeeps get hung up?

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.
Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."
-- Katherine Hepburn --

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Oh, green Katherine, I so agree!

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I just watched a commercial for Jeep where they say that putting the wheels very close to the front and rear allows the Jeep to climb over bigger obstacles. Then they show it clambering over some huge rocks.

I noticed that the front wheel went over the big rock, but then it bounced off to the side.

Yuh. Uh huh. Because if you really climb up over a big rock like that and keep going straight on over it, especially if there's a dip after it, you'll get hung up on it in the middle.

If you want to really clamber over big rocks, with wheels spread way apart like that, you'll need a third pair of wheels in the middle. Otherwise you just make a very expensive teeter-totter.
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3161 Oddities

Monday, November 15, 2010

"A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by
association with smarter people."
-- Will Rogers --

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I don't agree with Will up there in the green if he meant that those are the only ways to learn. Another way to learn is by doing. But maybe it's a tongue-in-cheek play on one of my biggest peeves - the misplacement of the modifier "only". The "only" here modifies the "learns", not the "two ways" as most people would interpret it. In that case, he's correct. In reading and in associating with smarter people, a man "only learns".

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A weirdness about the house - just before the heat goes on, before the actual burner fires, not just the fan, there's a section of outside wall between the window and the bathtub in the master bath that ticks. It sounds like water dripping. The wall will start ticking, and within three minutes I'll hear the whoosh of the furnace firing. Weird.

A weirdness about me - I normally go to bed around 11 pm or later. But lately, I'm looking at my watch thinking of bed at 7 or 8 pm. Last night I went to bed at 9. Weird.

A weirdness about outside - I hear more birds, of greater variety, here than I did in the mid-Hudson valley, weird enough in itself, and there are more squirrels close to the houses. So this morning I threw some bits of (whole wheat, slightly mold-spotted) bread out on the back patio, hoping to attract some birds or squirrels for Jasper's viewing pleasure. The bread is still there, untouched, at 10 pm. Weird.

A weirdness about the neighborhood - there are some very small houses, like 15 feet wide, and the smaller the house, the larger the TV set visible through the living room windows. The set across the street has to be at least 6 feet by 8 feet. I've noticed that before in other areas. I think it's weird. (Maybe I'm just more attuned to investment considerations....)
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3160 Brief Encounter

Monday, November 15, 2010

"My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure."
-- Abraham Lincoln --

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Wow. I haven't been here for a while. Busy. Lots of stuff to do. I've been marking posts on other folks' blogs as "unread" because I wanted to comment when I had a moment to think about it, and now there's a big backlog of unexpressed comments and thoughts. Sorry. It's certainly not that I didn't think about you.

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I had a visitor a few days ago who came in through hidemyass.com. The location said UK (ISP RapidSwitch Ltd, which is a server in UK, probably where hidemyass lives). Whoever it was knew the URL of this blog, and came directly, not through a search. Oddly enough, the timezone of the visitor was the same as mine, not that of England. Interesting. I wonder who was anxious that I not know that he/she/it visited.

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There's a young woman who drives up and down my (new) street a few times a day, in a minivan. She sits hunched forward, away from the back of her seat, with her chest perhaps four inches from the steering wheel, elbows down and sharply bent, both hands gripping tightly high on the wheel, head thrust up and out, chin raised as if she feels she must see the front of the vehicle (not easy, as the van's nose slopes down). She scares me a little. I'd rather not be on the same road as someone who is so obviously uncomfortable driving.

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I went to a BNL concert last Friday evening. I don't have much to say about the performance. I do have major complaints about people in the audience who are so self-absorbed, arrogant, and insensitive that they don't realize that standing has a negative effect on people behind them.

That part thoroughly pissed me off. And is a major part of why I have no further comment. I could have saved a hell of a lot of money by just buying another CD.

BTW - Why do they charge different prices for different sections of seating if nobody sits in the seats they paid for? Why is it ok that they go and stand in front of higher priced seats?

My old fogey opinion is that you go to a concert to see and hear. You don't go to a concert to dance. You go to a club or a party to dance. If everyone stays in their seats, everyone can see. Why is that a bad thing? If you want to stand and dance, BUY THE FREAKIN' CD AND DANCE TO IT IN YOUR OWN SPACE!

I'd love to hear some performer say that, on the stage.

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I forget what I did Saturday, but I must have done something, because I had signed up for a Meetup party and canceled because I was too busy.

Yesterday, Sunday, I shopped for chairs or stools to use with the marble table, with no success. Then in the evening, Daughter rounded up some friends to help get the marble table top out of the van and into the house, and then we had a takeout food party. I think I've found the best ribs ever.

Today I watched last night's The Amazing Race online, I've been catching up on internet stuff, and I plan to finish cleaning the insides of the kitchen cabinets and then tape up the bedroom for painting.
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3159 The rich get richer and the poor, well, what do they matter?

Friday, November 12, 2010

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Aristotle --

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Piper and I have some social and political differences. He is Republican to the point of thinking Sarah Palin makes sense. When you get him started he rails against lazy people who don't work, don't save, and who are experts at "working the system". Yeah, I saw a lot of that when I was doing court and family mediation, and I don't like it either. Where we differ is that he wants to eliminate all government social programs. He doesn't seem to realize that there are people who are in honest need of assistance. He seems to think that it is always their own stupidity that puts them in that position, and he shouldn't have to pay for their lack of planning.

Here's where that kind of thinking leads:

The real 'death panels' are coming from the GOP

Read the article. It's frightening, and I believe it to be absolutely true. Giving tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and giving tax dollars to the military industry, creates deficits that some people, mainly the beneficiaries of those programs, want to use as an excuse to reduce or cut out social programs.

My tin hat is buzzing so hard it's giving me a headache.
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3158 Ocular/Ophthalmic Migraine

Thursday, November 11, 2010

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."

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Just a note, for future reference. I'm having one. An optical/ocular/ophthalmic migraine. The third, I think, since the first one that scared me in 1996ish. A bright flashing circle of jagged lines, slowly expanding. No pain, but a heavy "solid" feeling in my right eye.

Very strange.
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3157 Attention Civil War Buffs!

Thursday, November 11, 2010

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
-- Thomas Edison --

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The NY Times is doing a series on the civil war, started October 30, 2010, with the news of October 31, 1860. I got the impression from the introduction that there would be a weekly roundup of news articles from the New York Times and other papers from that week 150 years ago, with occasional essays, so I signed up for the RSS feeds through Google Reader - but it seems like some days I'm getting one, two, or three updates per day. Well, they're short, and so far fascinating. I am not a Civil War buff, but I'm enjoying the analysis.

If you are interested, the series starts just before the election, here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/will-lincoln-prevail/.

To get to the next post in the series, don't go to "Next Post" at the bottom. Instead, you can step through using the "Related Posts" at the center bottom. They are listed sequentially.
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3156 Such a pretty table, but....

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

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Please, World, learn the difference between "peek" and "peak". They are NOT the same word!

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Monday afternoon I headed north, and Monday night and Tuesday morning I loaded the van with more stuff to bring to the new house.

The first thing loaded Monday evening was the marble table. Other than the houses and vehicles, it's probably the heaviest thing I own. The top is somewhere around 42 inches in diameter, and 1.5 inches thick, and solid marble, colored marble inlay over a solid marble slab. It sits (rather frighteningly loosely) on a ceramic base. I want to use it as a breakfast table.
I suspect the base was once a plant stand, and the table once had wrought iron legs or something, and somewhere along the line they got married, as they say in the antiques game, and in the interests of liability reduction I may have to divorce them, but ... anyway ... back to the story, The Hairless Hunk wrestled it from my basement, around the corner of the house, up the hill, and to the van. Amazing.

So far, I've had three men help me move it. The first move was from the auction house to the Suzuki, where the top leaned on edge in the back seat for several weeks because I couldn't get it out of the car myself. The second move was from the car to the basement, through the basement SGD, when the auction house guy delivered a chest after the next auction, and I asked him to help me get it out of the car. It lived in my basement for a year or so. The third move was from the basement to the minivan Monday evening. The Hairless Hunk was working in his yard when I went past on my way to the old house, and I asked him if he would help me.

The flippin' thing must weigh almost 200 lbs. I can support almost 100 lbs if I can rest it on the top of my thighs, so with another person I can help to move it, and in every case I've asked these guys to help me - and in every case they've insisted on doing it themselves. Testosterone overload, I guess.

So, anyway, we laid it flat on the open center floor of the van, and then I packed everything else on top of it, and drove back to the new house last night. This afternoon Daughter helped me unload the van, but the table top is still out there.

I suggested that maybe when Hercules got home from work, the three of us could bring it into the house, but she said no way. Without having heard my experience with men "helping", she, being smarter than I, said that if we involved Hercules, he'd insist on doing it himself, and she's not too happy with that idea. He's strong and healthy, but he's a marathoner-type athlete, not a weightlifter. He sits at a desk when he's not running up and down stairs. But being idiot male, he'll try anyway.

Yeah, that's the way it seems to work.

I need to find several people, all at once, either all females or a group with a minimum of two males. At the moment, I don't have the faintest idea who or how. I think I'm going to be hauling it around in the van for a while.

Sigh.
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3155 Wrecking wrapping

Sunday, November 7, 2010

"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month."

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Sometimes some small thing will get stuck in my head, and I can't get rid of it. Like an earworm song, but different in that it's something I want to do or say, but I know I can't, and it just gets stuck.

And that's one of the reasons I have this journal. I can say stuff here that I can't say out loud or to whomever I want. That's also why very few people who know me know where this blog is, especially not people who might know the person I want to complain about or to. (There's exactly one of those - and I trust him to not spread what I'm about to complain about now.)

There's a woman in Mensa that I find very difficult to take. She's actually an innocent soul, not a bad person, but she's a drama queen. Fakes an asthma attack at the sight of an electronic cigarette, or real cigarettes across the street and downwind. (Fake because it stops when she wants to say something, then starts up again.) Believes that no one should have children, and wanted to deny financial assistance to another member because he had children. When another woman and I were in menopause and having hot flashes, she decided she was in menopause, too, even though it was about 15 or more years too soon for her. She just didn't like sharing the spotlight (or heat lamp, as it were).

She sets up one of the group annual scholarship fund money makers - gift wrapping at Barnes & Nobel, sometime in early December. There have to be two people at the table at all times. I had volunteered for the full day for many years, most other people would put in a 4-hour shift, and then one day I decided I wasn't going to do it any more.

My reasons were many, but I never really expressed any because I'd get the reaction, "Well, then, why don't you just do it yourself?"

One complaint is that we wrap purchases for free (materials, table, etc. provided by B&N) but there's a donation box, so people know they are expected to donate a dollar or so. Now, people who will pay to have a gift wrapped with store wrapping are usually getting a last-minute gift. So scheduling the gift wrapping three weeks before the holiday doesn't work as well as doing it three days before. This woman also schedules the same wrapping gig for Sierra Club, and I noticed that Sierra Club always gets better dates.

Second, she always comes for a four to six hour shift herself, but she's NEVER on time. She is consistently one or two hours late, and I have occasionally had to cover that time alone, skipping lunch. Usually the previous person stays over, and once they see how she wraps, they stay the full time.

Third, she is the sloppiest wrapper I have ever seen. We're wrapping books and boxes, for Pete's sake! There's no excuse for not having sharp neat corners. But she just pokes and bunches and scrunches the paper at the ends, she tears the paper unevenly, the "wrong side" of the paper sticks out from the scrunch at the ends, she covers the gifts in so much tape it's like she plans to mail them --- they are messy! I've seen six-year-old children do a better job. I am embarrassed for Mensa that we're handing that mess to a customer. I and others at the table, many of us, have offered to show her how to measure and cut to fit, how to center the seam, how to trim the ends and crease folds, how to use at most three tiny strips of tape, but she simply says "Oh, I can't do that" and flatly refuses to learn.

She sees nothing wrong.

We've tried edging her out, getting the packages before she can destroy them. But she's enthusiastic and leaps, elbows flying. She wraps very quickly, and grabs the next. She never notices the dismayed look on the face of the customer when she hands them their gift. You know that the customer rewraps the book after they get it home.

That embarrassment and her refusal to learn was the reason I quit. I no longer wanted to have anything to do with it. I was tired of cringing. Of not being able to look customers in the eye. Others who have refused to go back have said the same thing.

So, a few days ago she sent out a call for volunteers for this year's wrapping. In the email, she says, "And believe me, you don't need to be an expert at wrapping; heaven knows I'm not."

You have no idea how much that pisses me off. She complains that she can't get volunteers, and I want so very very badly to tell her why!
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3154 Change of season

Saturday, November 6, 2010

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."
-- Plato --

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It's kind of funny. Coincidence. I ran out of green quotes and had to start over from the beginning of the collection at just about the same time I ran out of Honeys of the Week.**

Also within the past week, I finally realized that I have actually moved. Yeah, I've been saying it, but it hadn't really sunk in that THIS house in NJ is my new home. This is home.

I had been bringing things down, but I had been bringing things like for camping. Like for an extended but temporary stay. Future thinking was like "this is where I'll store some stuff while I clean out the old house." The really important things, like the financial and insurance records, online passwords, photographs, the stuff you'd grab if the house was on fire, are still at the old house, and I hadn't really considered moving it all down here.

It was like on the top of my head I was moving in, but deep inside I hadn't accepted it yet.

There's a lot of things I'll miss about the old place, like the huge yard (1.3 rolling acres dotted with trees), the hawks nesting in the back, the doe parking her fawn under my bathroom window, snacking all summer on the blackberries along the edges of the yard and the mulberries in the back, the view all the way to Woodstock, the groundhogs and the foxes in the front yard, fighting wild turkeys to get down the driveway in the winter, the scent of the wild roses and locusts blooming in the spring, the thousands of daffodils along the driveway and around the house, the coyote packs having a loud party just below the hill, watching the shirtless Hairless Hunk mowing my lawn, the 2.5 car garage, the walkout basement.

On the other hand, driving to the movie yesterday, I saw at least one of every store I'd ever heard of along route 35. The shopping opportunities here are incredible! No more being satisfied with whatever one can find at the few local stores. No more driving 20 miles round trip just to find a decent pair of shoes or a selection of books, or 60 miles to find curtains of a certain color. One can actually comparison shop here, almost by bicycle!

I could get used to this.

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**Actually, The Man would qualify for HOTW status, but it would annoy him greatly if he ever discovered the post, so I won't. A friend, having met him, asked me if I thought he was handsome. I answered no, he's not particularly handsome, but he's definitely striking. She nodded, agreed, seemed satisfied with that description.

I haven't come across any other men who qualify. We'll have to be satisfied for now with the thirteen listed. I guess I'm very selective.
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3153 Workin' it.

Friday, November 5, 2010

The consumption of alcohol may lead you to think people are laughing WITH you.

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I painted some walls yesterday. I figure I need to do the rooms that will be getting bookcases and heavy furniture first, so that means the living room, master bedroom, and dining room first. The rest can be done later.

I found the "local" (25 minutes away) arts theater in Red Bank, and today I saw the third in the Lisbeth Salander trilogy, Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest". I figured I'd avoid crowds by going to the 12:40 pm showing.

This one wasn't as bloody and cringe-worthy as the first two in the series, but, again, you must see them in order, and the closer together, the better. I'd seen the first two, but I still got lost a few times.

The theater is really nice, multiplex, soft, semi-reclining seats, electric fireplace in the hall, etc. There were only six people watching the movie, but a real live usher with a discrete flashlight walked down the aisle at least three times, and at the end he stood at the door with a basket of mints.

A movie at the Upstate in Rhinebeck, where I had seen the first two Lisbeth segments, costs about $6 with the senior discount ($7 for you young'uns), and parking is free. Today I was shocked to find that parking in the town lot across the street from the theater was going to cost me about $2 in change (of course I had only two dimes - had to beg change for a $5 from a very nice woman in the lot) and the movie was $11, no senior discount. Wow. That's more than twice what it would cost me for a movie in Rhinebeck. That's expensive for an afternoon's diversion!

I've been buying things for the house - freestanding toilet paper holders, shower curtain and rod and hanger-uppery things, spring tension rods to hang temporary sheers, sheer curtains, cotton cafe curtains, mops, waste paper baskets, cookie sheets, on and on. I have been utterly amazed at the packaging. The cheap spring tension rods came in a long skinny plastic bag, which is expected, but the bag was denser and stronger than many shower curtains I have known, and the top, where the hanger/label closed the bag, was fastened with metal studs, not the staples one would expect. Everything fabric came in a dense plastic bag with a zipper!, and then was in a second plastic bag inside the outer one.

I'm making a pile of packing materials twice the mass of the items I bought. Of course, being me, I've saved the zippered bags. They've got to be good for something. I can't just throw them out.

Besides the landfill question, plastic is made from oil. Am I the only person who sees over-packaging as a complete waste?
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3152 Annoyed again

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

"The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few, in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea-maybe! But the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are inclined to find very few good fish in the sea."
-- DH Lawrence --

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I am annoyed that the same people who are busily getting anti-Sharia laws onto the state election ballots see no contradiction in getting Christian-based initiatives onto the same ballots.

At least Sharia law applies only to Muslims.
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3151 Wedding entrance clip

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

An adventure without a dragon is not worth telling.

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This is cool. Simple, and celebratory.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GaP5kCObo&feature=player_embedded]
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3150 Short Memories

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you
give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give
you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give
her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is
given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of
shit.

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Well, it seems like a lot of people with very short memories were upset because Obama wasn't able to undo in two years the mess that Bush created in eight.

Some good might come of this - maybe a few fear-mongers on TV and the radio will find nothing they want to talk about.
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3149 Sharing the water

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

"Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease
left a name worth remembering."
-- Theodore Roosevelt --

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I've been worried about Jasper not drinking water. I haven't seen him drink water since he arrived at the new house. He did drink some tuna can water, but that supply is rather limited.

On the other hand, I haven't seen him eat anything, either, but the food is disappearing from his dish. I have so many bowls of water scattered around, I wouldn't notice a drop in level.

I even closed the stopper in the tub in the master bath and put an inch of water in the deep end. He likes to play in water, and I hoped that would attract him to drink some. I heard him lapping water from the tub during the night last night --- which explains his confused expression when I took my bath this morning.

It was absolutely "Why is Mommy sitting in my water dish?"
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3148 Bad Night

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”
-- Ghandi --

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Last night was a very bad night. I had a lot of pain on my left side, just below and under my lowest ribs, front wrapping around to the back. I think it's probably a pulled muscle, but I really got worried because I couldn't find a comfortable position. I was afraid the pain was more serious than a pulled muscle. I hope it's a pulled muscle. And that stupid tempur-pedic-style/memory foam mattress wasn't helping at all. I positively HATE it. I need a firm flat mattress. I may have to buy a futon tomorrow.

I felt a little better after I got up, and lots better after a late-morning soak in a hot bath.

The pain in my side was only part of it. Jasper was going through something, I don't know what, but he called all night long, starting at about 1:30 am. I could hear him wandering the house, "Mau? Marrrr? Mao?" I'd yell to him (and finally yelled AT him) and he'd be quiet for a while, and just as I fell asleep he'd start up again. It wasn't that he couldn't find the litter box - I heard him use it once. I was ready to throw him out the front door! I wouldn't - he's strictly an indoor cat, but I was getting desperate. With hard floors and no curtains and so much undecorated wall and no furniture, sound echos. It sounded like he was maoing into my ear.

He stopped when the sun came up. Between the pain and the maoing, the only sleep I got was between 6 and 9 am.

I don't know what I'll do if he starts that crap again tonight.
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