Conversion Decisions Part 2

The first step in getting my slides converted into digital format was to find the darned things. I went to the shed and looked at every one of the boxes in there. At times like this, I'm thrilled that I'm organized just enough to use a Magic Marker on the side and end of every box to record the box's contents. My slides were not in there.

In the garage, where all my boxes of books that I can't fit in my house are stacked in three six-high stacks and all the other boxes that didn't fit in the shed are piled, I hunted some more and finally found the box marked, "Photos/Slides Japanese Plates.' Inside the box was all of this:

Perfect!

Out of respect for my back (that's a different story), I waited for my daughter to come home and bring the box in the house.

Back when we were taking our pictures as slides, we had a Bell & Howell slide cube projector, not a Carousel projector like everyone else, and the brown fake-wood-looking box had the cubes with all the slides from our big bicycle trip through Europe in 1983, plus a few cubes with slides from other trips.

I was able to make a good light box by using my computer and opening my Nook application to a book with two nearly blank pages together. By holding the slides up to the monitor, it was easy to see what they were.

After looking through all those cubed-up slides (which I had labeled with the date, location, and subject), I pulled out the photo album to the left of the fake-wood box. I opened it up, and it looked like this inside:

Ick! I'm SO glad there were no photos inside the "magnetic" pages. There was just one loose black-and-white photo, complete with photo-album-induced discoloration:

I remember making this little guy but not where or when it happened, though I have this vague sense that it might have been at Mt. Palomar and that it was before we had kids. It was a week when it had snowed in the mountains, with a pretty low-elevation snow line, so that weekend we drove up to the mountains to play in the snow. Of course, by then almost all of the snow had melted. We found one turnout on the north side of the mountain where there was still a patch of slushy snow, so that's where we stopped. We were barely able to form three regular-sized snowballs, and we stacked them on top of each other, set them on the asphalt curb, and found some acorn tops and twigs to give him personality. He's a charmer, isn't he?

After throwing the photo album in the trash, I turned to the blue binder full of slide sleeves. There were more slides from the Europe trip (all properly labeled), plus the Grand Canyon trip with the youngest sister-in-law before she got married, several shots of my nephew (who just turned 34) when he was 22 months old and I visited my sister and her then-small family in the Panhandle of Texas, and photos from the hot-air and helium balloon festival of 1981. I even have pictures of when the Greenpeace balloon got away from its handlers before it was completely filled with hot air, and it ascended (but not enough) and the basket hit the roof of some grandstands, tipping out the guy inside the basket, who was injured. The story made the local TV news that night, but I wasn't able to find a link to it for this post. Apparently 1981 was a very long time before the internet came on the scene. Anyway, I really love a lot of the balloon pictures.

The problem with most of the slides in the sleeves is that, other than the bicycle trip photos, the slides aren't labeled. I had put stick-on labels on the sleeves themselves for the first picture in a series, for example, "Grand Canyon 1st Day 11/81." I'm afraid to choose 500 of my favorites, send them in, and then get them back and not know what they are from. So my decision-making process has just become a bigger production than it already was. I found some clear return-address labels (1/2" x 1-3/4") in my supplies, and I'm printing two slide labels on each, at 6.5 pt. font, and cutting them in half lengthwise.

It's going to be a while before I get this done.

Barrycades and Iron Fists

Photo source: Ricochet.com

Dang! If Dave Carter at Ricochet writes this well all the time, it could become a really tough tie to break for my intellectual affections between him and Mark Steyn. I saw Carter's piece when Pat Sajak (@patsajak) retweeted it today. Both men have columns this weekend raking the Obama administration over the coals for its over-enthusiasm for inflicting pain on the American public during the government "shutdown."

First, Mark Steyn, who borrows the term, "punitive liberalism:"

Nevertheless, just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall – that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site – which, oddly enough, requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.

So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow “Police Line – Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest “We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest – or presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multibullet ventilation that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy, it, too, had not been officially open....

The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations – plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.

This kind of spitefulness has been making my blood boil: Barrycading the WWI memorial, the Vietnam War memorial, the Lincoln memorial, in addition to the WWII memorial; blocking scenic roads and turnouts that might give people a view of Mt. Rushmore; and closing the ocean. Their purpose is to make us suffer as much as possible, as visibly as possible, so they can blame Republicans for the pain.

Here's how Dave Carter opens his column:

Whatever the perceived shortcomings of Ted Cruz and his hardy band of stalwarts, they've performed a remarkable public service by highlighting the fate that awaits all who rub wrongly the translucently thin skin of King Barack the Petulant. The Spartans may have had their shields, Native Americans their tomahawks and arrows, the Samurai may have wielded his sword with all the deadly grace of a tiger in mid-attack, but pound for pound, nothing comes close to the audacious stupidity of "Barrycades" and people in pointy little Smokey the Bear hats, poised to protect America's monuments from law-abiding citizens.

Welcome to liberal utopia, where barriers are not erected against terrorists or illegal aliens on our nation's borders, but rather against citizens, and where wheelchair-bound veterans enroute to honor their comrades face tighter security than terrorists enroute to murder a US Ambassador.  This is where up is down, wrong is right, illegality is celebrated as progress, and where Constitutionalism is derided as racist.  No longer relegated to the fever swamps of academic fancy, utopia has acquired real estate and made known its demands.

"Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual…" the First Lady warned us, and she wasn't just whistling Alinsky either.  Under King Barack's Reign of Error, your life is no longer your own, for you are now commanded to enter into private contracts by virtue of your simple existence on the planet.  Why?  Because our Sovereign and his fellow travelers are compassionate, of course. Their hearts bleed for you,…almost as much as your pocketbook will bleed for them.

We expect to be blindsided by the unforeseen effects of the shutdown's furlough of non-essential personnel. One case was a man at my work who needed to put air in his tire. The gas station he went to was having trouble with the customer air machine, and there's a number for the station to call to try to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, that number is for a federal government bureau, and the recording said they're shutdown and unavailable to help. So the guy drove to work, slowly, with 28 psi in that tire. We expect that sort of thing.

It's the vindictive nature of the shutdown that costs taxpayers extra when there's theoretically no money available that really sticks in the craw. May the real perpetrators feel the wrath of the American people, and may all of them in Washington get this shutdown shut down soon.

Conversion Decisions Part 1

A few weeks ago I went to the Home and Garden Show in Del Mar. I went there because several months ago my bed broke.

One of the supporting pieces of wood along the side rail cracked along the grain, and the corner of the mattress fell to the floor at bedtime. With help from my daughter and her friends, we disassembled the bed frame and moved it into the garage. Now the mattress and box spring are on the floor. Where spiders can get on them more easily than before.

My hope in going to the home show was to find a cabinet maker or woodworker who was willing to take on teeny-tiny projects like bed repair. I found that, or rather a referral to a handyman who repaired the bed of the lady at one of the cabinetry booths. My hopes for reduced spider opportunity increased.

But I found even more than hope.

I'm not a homeowner right now, so it was very freeing to wander around the home show and  just to say, "I'm renting," when the various artisans and home-equipment salespeople tried to part me from my money. Most of them shut up after that, though a few suggested that I speak to my landlady about their windows or solar systems or pavers. Ummm.... No.

One of the booths sucked me in, because it had very little to do with homes and gardens. They convert slides and photos into high-quality digital images at an affordable price.

I cannot adequately convey how much this is a dream from the depths of my heart.

Eight years ago I went to a travel photography workshop in Washington DC. They had two main instructors, one whose focus was more on the art side and one whose focus was on newspaper and magazine publication. I connected more with the art guy, but the other one said something about having to convert his slides to digital. When I asked him how much that costs, he said it was $2 per slide, and my heart sank. I have slides from so many trips:

• New England in the autumn of 1982
• The four-month bicycle trip through Europe in 1983
• Grand Canyon with the youngest sister-in-law in 1987
• The long-weekend trip to Paris with my airline-job office mate in 1988 (she said she wanted to go to Paris to find the name of this one Impressionist painting, and I said, "I'll go too!")

And of course, there are family pictures from way back when as well. At $2 a slide, I'd have to be a millionaire to convert even half of them to digital.

But at the home show, the guy at the photo booth told me that $2 is still the going rate for professional slide conversions out in the world (which fits with the last time I asked at the good-quality photo store in town). The photo-booth company, ScanDiego, normally charges $.39 a slide (the same price as Costco) to produce 4100 dpi digital images, whereas Costco produces 1800 dpi images. And if you buy the package at the Home and Garden Show, they'll do it for $.29 a slide. I bought the package. They'll convert 500 slides (if they don't require special processing, which some of mine will) for $149.

I got a box in a bag to take home.

When I've selected my 500 slides, I put them in the box and call them to arrange pick-up, or I take them down to Mira Mesa and drop them off.

Adventures at Wal-Mart

I was out of Sudafed, and the last few nights I've had some sinus congestion that was making it a bit challenging to breathe at bedtime. So I decided I'd better head over to Wal-Mart before the pharmacy closed at 9:00 and get some more.

Everything went smoothly inside the store. I got my drugs, picked up a couple bananas, had no wait in line, and then walked out the door toward my car. I had a really great parking spot very close to the door, and on the way I saw a couple cars, one of which was a police car, coming down the next lane where a tall man was waving his hand up above his head, trying to get someone's attention. It quickly became clear that the man wanted the cop.

He walked around to my lane with the police cruiser following him, and by that time I was at my car. The man pointed to another car two spots over, and the cop got out of his car while I got into mine and settled my stuff on the passenger seat. I wasn't overly filled with curiosity as I started up the car, but when I looked in the rearview mirror, the cop car was blocking me.

Okaaaaay. I stayed put.

After a little bit, I got out of the car to see if the policeman was nearly finished, just in time to see him shining a small flashlight in the car with his left hand while he held his cocked gun in his right. He said, "All of you in the car, put your hands up and keep them there."

I was stunned into motionlessness. Then the cop straightened further, pointed his gun more menacingly at the windshield and said, "If you put your hands down one more time, I will shoot you."

I got back in my car.

The police officer stayed there with his flashlight and gun pointed at the car until another officer, also with flashlight and drawn weapon, arrived at the front of the car and then moved out of my view, which was partially blocked by the car next to me and by the reflection of one of the parking lot trees in all the side windows of the suspects' car. But not long after that I saw in my mirror that the second cop was cuffing and frisking someone, who he led away to one of the (now) two police vehicles.

When the second cop came back, the first one had the driver get out of his car, which he did by sliding out the window. Police #1 proceeded to search and cuff the driver and then lead him away, presumably to police car #1. The second cop was talking to someone who was still in the suspect car, and I rolled down my window a bit and heard him saying there had been a report of one of the people in that vehicle having a weapon, so they were being arrested and he really appreciated the suspect's cooperation. This conversation happened with the gun still trained on the car.

After cop #1 came back, a third suspect was taken out of the car, cuffed, searched, and made to sit on the curb next to the rear of my car. Finally, the fourth person was arrested, and as he was led away, the other two officers (a third had arrived by then) searched the interior of the empty car with their flashlights as best they could through the windows.

Then one of them saw me watching, and I gave him a smile that I hoped conveyed appreciation without any exasperation. He walked away from the car and said to the first cop, "I'm going to move this vehicle (police car #1) so she can get out." Before he did, he apologized to me, and I said, "No, no. I'm fine."

As soon as it was clear, I backed out of my really great parking spot very close to the door and stopped when I was alongside where the police car had been moved. I told the officer, "Thank you. And thank you for what you do."

I drove home with my Sudafed and my bananas and a shifting sense of the world I live in.

Good News Indeed

I was checking the news before bed tonight, and I saw that Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, is dead. It was a little strange for me to learn this, because it comes on the heels of a conversation I had with my son just a few weeks ago. Before that I hadn't thought of Ramirez for years.

My son had come over to hang out, and he asked me about Ramirez and what it was like then. The question came up because my son had posted about the killer on his tumblr blog, Today in Depressing History, back in April.

We lived in the city of Orange in the year of 1985, with our brand new baby boy, when Ramirez was doing his serial killing. CNN's Greg Botelho describes that time this way:

A serial murderer, a serial rapist, a Satan worshiper, a man who inflicted physical and emotional pain on his victims in myriad ways. Richard Ramirez was all those things, but to Californians terrorized during his violent spree in the spring and summer of 1985, he was simply the "Night Stalker."

Botelho didn't come close to capturing the feeling. Yes, we were terrorized, but it was a terror that went on, night after night, week after week, seemingly without end. At first they called him the "Walk-In Killer," because he simply walked into the homes of so many of his victims, through slider doors or windows left open to the cooling night air. Even after checking that every one of our windows and doors was firmly locked before we went to bed, we didn't sleep well. The word was out that his victims all lived close to freeways, and our house was just a few blocks away from three different freeways (just below the "O" of "Orange" on the interactive map (move the map up a bit), two towns south of Fullerton and Yorba Linda).

We lived on a short cul de sac and knew our neighbors pretty well. Every morning we checked the paper for news, dreading there being another victim and hoping for word of the killer's capture. Every evening the neighbors would all talk about the latest that we'd learned, trying to glean some bit of information that might make us safer.

The men on our block, especially, felt the burden of trying to safeguard their families. Finally, three or four of the men, all of whom owned guns, decided to mount an all-night, armed patrol. Each one took a two-hour shift on the roof of his own house and watched over the street. The neighbor a couple doors down told us one morning that during his shift that night, a van had cruised into the cul de sac as though casing the place. When the neighbor made his and his shotgun's presence known, the van turned and rushed away.

We slept well, in peace, through the nights of those two weeks of patrol, but the men were getting tired. They started talking about reducing the patrols. And then the news came that Ramirez, who had only a day or two before been identified as the suspect, was caught and had the crap beaten out of him by some people in Los Angeles. It was satisfying to hear that, but I was disappointed that the police stopped them before they finished him off, because the relentless fear he put us through--millions of us in the greater Los Angeles area--deserved so much worse than the beating they gave him.

The death of Richard Ramirez today doesn't make us safer, since he was securely behind bars, but it does remove the possibility of his escape. He was an unrepentant, savage murderer, and I for one am glad he no longer draws breath but is enduring the torment he chose for himself while he lived. May God have mercy on me for my hard heart.

The Amazing Mark Steyn is Amazing

Mark Steyn weighs in on the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut without giving his own theories about the root causes, theories he says are "no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else's."

What he does give is some historical perspective relating to the ignorant theories being bandied about by both the Left and the Right, as well as a reminder about the realities of human nature. In this column, Steyn resists his usual tendency to be irreverent and is sensitive toward the families who lost their children last week.

"Lullay, Thou little tiny Child
By by, lully, lullay..."

The 16th-century Coventry Carol, a mother's lament for her lost son, is the only song of the season about the other children of Christmas – the first-born of Bethlehem, slaughtered on Herod's orders after the Magi brought him the not-so-glad tidings that an infant of that city would grow up to be King of the Jews. As Matthew tells it, even in a story of miraculous birth, in the midst of life is death.... Then a century ago the Catholic Encyclopedia started digging into the numbers. The estimated population of Bethlehem at that time was around a thousand, which would put the toll of first-born sons under the age of 2 murdered by King Herod at approximately 20 – or about the same number of dead children as one school shooting on a December morning in Connecticut.

At the same time, Steyn is pointed in his criticism of the politicians and pundits rushing to push their favorite agendas.

The Left now seizes on every atrocity as a cudgel to beat whatever happens to be the Right's current hottest brand: Tucson, Arizona, was something to do with Sarah Palin's use of metaphor and other common literary devices – or "toxic rhetoric," as Paul Krugman put it; Aurora, Colorado, was something to do with the Tea Party, according to Brian Ross of ABC News. Since the humiliations of November, the Right no longer has any hot brands, so this time round the biens pensants have fallen back on "gun culture." Dimwit hacks bandy terms like "assault weapon," "assault rifle," "semi-automatic" and "automatic weapon" in endlessly interchangeable but ever more terrifying accumulations of high-tech state-of-the-art killing power....

Nor am I persuaded by the Right's emphasis on pre-emptive mental-health care. It's true that, if your first reaction on hearing breaking news of this kind is to assume the perpetrator is a male dweeb in his early twenties with poor socialization skills, you're unlikely to be wrong. But, in a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who's to say what's odd?

Be sure to read the whole thing, because I've left out so much of the best of what he writes. He wraps up the column this way:

Meanwhile, the atheists have put up a new poster in Times Square: Underneath a picture of Santa, "Keep the Merry"; underneath a picture of Christ, "Dump the Myth." But in our time even Christians have dumped a lot of the myth while keeping the merry: Jesus, lambs, shepherds, yes; the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, kind of a downer. If the Christmas story is a myth, it's a perfectly constructed one, rooting the Savior's divinity in the miracle of His birth but unblinkered, in Matthew's account of Herod's response, about man's darker impulses:

"Then woe is me
Poor Child, for Thee
And ever mourn and may
For Thy parting
Nor say nor sing
By by, lully, lullay."

The World is Still Here

I woke up this morning with a headache. That means that at no time during December 21, 2012, did the world come to an end. Not when midnight first came to Kiribati or Tonga or New Zealand, and not when 11:59 pm faded away on Attu Island.

It also means that, in my half-asleep, pained condition this morning as I lay in bed, I sort of wished it had come to an end, because then I'd be in heaven without a headache. But a nice dose of Excedrin and trying to work the kinks out of my stiff neck - which is the source of almost all of my headaches - have left me in a much better disposition about still breathing the air of the earth that's still spinning around the sun.

Here's what I don't understand about the true believers (and even the half-believers) in the Mayan Apocalypse: they hoarded bottled water and toilet paper and other survivalist supplies. I heard about it from people who heard about it on the news or from people who knew people who were doing the hoarding.

Why would you hoard??? The. World. Is. Ending.

That's what they thought, anyway. And when the world ends, it ceases to exist, so there's no need to drink water or use toilet paper or hide out in a protected part of your house, shooting at looters who have come to take your stash.

I had a dream one time, when I had been married about a year, back in the late 1970's, and in my dream I heard on the radio or the TV news broadcast that the world was in the process of ending. So I went to the front door of my house, opened it, and stood in the doorway and watched. Off in the distance of my neighborhood, a fog denser and higher than any I'd seen was very slowly moving toward me. As it engulfed each house, each yard, each fence, I knew that those things were gone - swallowed up and erased from existence.

There was no panic, no neighbors screaming and running for their lives. It was a peaceful end in a silent fog that eventually moved to my doorstep, and I felt a sense of awe that just inside the fog an arm's reach from where I stood was nothing, because everything had disappeared. And now it was my turn, and then I woke up, not frightened at all.

I'm sure that when the world does end, it won't be like that. It won't be some slowly moving fog that saves me for last. But at the same time, I'm pretty sure it will be like that. When God sends the new heaven and the new earth, it will be filled with peace - the peace that passes understanding.

Until then, my head is feeling better, and I have some decisions to make about what to do for Christmas dinner. I'll probably head back to Costco to pick up a ham, and I'm hoping it won't be as busy as it would have been without the Mayan thing, because after all, there are quite a few people out there who won't be needing to buy toilet paper for a long time.

New Year's Resolutions

My daughter has a great post on her new Tumblr blog, where she talks about (among other things) New Year's resolutions. This is the point she made that got me thinking:

So, I have a challenge. For me, but you can definitely jump on this bandwagon:

Use December as a head-start and decide on one or two resolutions that you can begin today.

This is brilliant! Especially for that one category of resolution resolvers: the January Gym-Goers.

Every year, vast numbers of people make that same resolution. "This year," they say, "I'm REALLY going to get into shape." So they join a gym, or they rediscover that auto-pay gym membership that they never could bring themselves to cancel because they might actually go there again, and they head out on New Year's Day (or maybe the day after) and start working out.

The problem is that it clogs up the gym for themselves and all the year-round regulars, and everybody grumbles about not being able to get to the desirable machines, and nobody likes going there when it's crowded, and so the weak-willed stop going. And by February everything is back to the way it was before New Year's.

So I say to you January people, why not change it up this year and start in December? According to Cassey Ho of Blogilates fame, who used to work at a gym, December is the month with the lowest gym attendance. Since you're only going to work out for a month anyway, why not enjoy it by going now when you can get to all the good machines? Then, when you get tired of exercise (because, really, who even likes it?), you'll be quitting right when it becomes super-ultra crowded. It's the best of both worlds!

Besides, by the end of December you might decide that you like it so much you want to keep on going. You might even be willing to put up with all those other January-only people, since now you know how good it will be again in February. And THEN... you might actually get into shape the way you want to.

Obama Wins

"[Mitt Romney] and his team --and especially his remarkable and wonderful family-- sacrificed so much and worked so hard that is very difficult not to feel disillusioned with a country so unwilling to confront its deep problems and trust a virtuous man to lead it."

-- Hugh Hewitt

Normally I'm an optimist. I have a positive attitude, but on occasion that can get stripped away. This is one of those occasions.

In 2008, right after the election, I posted this. I just went back and reviewed it, and most of my predictions about the results of an Obama presidency have proven correct. And they're still trying to get the others accomplished.

The thing I don't appear to have mentioned, either in that post or any other one, was the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy for the end times. Do I think Obama is the Antichrist? No. But there was a moment during the campaign of 2008 when Obama said something in a speech that triggered an image in my mind. He indicated a desire to abandon America's support of Israel and to side with Israel's enemies, and I could see the forces of the world amassed around Israel to destroy her.

Until the election of Obama, America had always been a steadfast ally of Israel. According to End Times prophecy, there will come a time when Israel stands alone, without any allies, and that's when the world will come to attack and destroy her. As long as America is her ally, that time cannot come. But Obama is working on clearing a pathway to that time.

I'm not saying it will come during the next four years, or even the next forty, but the re-election of Barack Obama has made the path a wider, smoother one.

And his re-election has made the economy, energy independence, and all the rest a whole lot suckier.

Quote of the Day

"There hasn't been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office."

-- Edward Lazear, Economist

Tooling Up

Back in 2003, before the real estate bubble burst, I sold my house and moved to the other end of town. I paid a moving company to do the move, and the movers ended up packing up the garage into boxes, because I had barely finished getting the inside of the house packed up in time.

Quite some time after we got settled in the new place, I needed to use my tools for something or other, but when I looked through all the garage boxes, my tool kit was gone. It was a set of Craftsman tools - sockets, wrenches, screwdrivers and some miscellaneous stuff in a nice, compact case. All of it gone.

It was much too late by then to file a complaint with the moving company, but I was able to get by with the few screwdrivers that had made their way into the house before I moved. I think I bought a cheap hammer at Home Depot, and between that and the screwdrivers, I was set.

Six years later, I sold that house and moved in with my now-former roomie, and she had a cute little pink tool kit in her garage. I had to give my hammer to our next-door neighbor, because I had borrowed hers before I finished moving in (my hammer was still at the old house), and I broke it. Apparently hers was even cheaper than mine.

Since my roomie got married and took her cute little pink took kit with her, that left me with the one phillips screwdriver and my roomie's hammer that she left behind with a few other things. I used these two tools to assemble a cheap coffee table, but I kept the matching end tables in their boxes until I could get the moving boxes out of the living room (almost done!).

Last week I decided that it was time for the end tables to get put together, but by then I had misplaced the screwdriver, an essential item for table assembly. So I concluded that it was probably time to get a new tool set. I went online to Sears (gotta have Craftsman) and saw that they had their tools on sale, so I ordered an 8-piece set of screwdrivers (four phillips, four slotted), a 12-piece set of combination wrenches (they were the same price as the 9-piece set, so what the heck), and a hammer. Then I went down to Sears and picked up my order and was a happy camper.

Of course, now Sears has joined the parade of companies who send me emails telling me about their specials. Best Buy, Albertsons, Souplantation, and some others really love me and long for me to come and visit and spend more money. Normally, I just check the box by these emails and send them over to a folder where I don't have to look at them in my inbox anymore. But Sears has managed to make their subject lines enough of a teaser ("Look what we've picked out for you!") that I actually look at them first before I send them to join their compadres in the "Ordered Stuff" folder.

A couple days ago, I looked at one of their emails, and it was full of expensive tool sets that I couldn't possibly imagine ever needing. And I noticed, down at the bottom of the email, where they asked me for my opinion on whether their choices for me were good ones. They had five stars, ranging from "Not At All" to some enthusiastic version of "Yes" that I don't remember because it wasn't my answer. I clicked on the star that was slightly better than Not At All, and it took me to a survey asking for more information.

The survey asked me to choose the selection that matched the type of disappointment I felt, and below that was a text box for more information. Did I have an opinion for them? You bet I did! Here's the box I checked:

"Included products I was not interested in."

In the text box I wrote:

"I bought tools that I needed. Now I don't need them, but you're showing me more tools. This is not helpful, because I am a woman and the need to buy lots of tools is not in my DNA."

I think it worked, because today they sent me another email ("Think you've seen it all? Here are more great deals from Sears!"). Inside, they showed me a bunch of non-iPad tablets. We're making progress...
 

Obamacare Upheld

REPEAL!

Here's the Supreme Court's decision.

Here's the only hope we have left of getting rid of this socialist, enslaving monstrosity.

Spammed

I get spam email a couple times a day, which isn't bad considering the volume I got on my old email address many years ago. The spam I get now is easy to detect, because they use a bunch of Danish-looking characters and kooky accent marks in the titles. They think things like "viågra" or "hot støck tips" will get them past the spam detectors more easily. And I suppose those things do.

But today I got spammed in Norwegian. Not just Norwegian characters, but the whole thing was written in that language.

How do I know that's the language? Because it's signed by someone at "norwegianseo.com."

What's really cool is that I kind of understand what they're trying to get from me.

She starts off with, "Hei," which must mean, "Hi." Am I good, or what?

In the first sentence, there's this: "introdusere meg selv," and then she gives her name. It's a girl name.

The curious part is this sentence: "Jeg jobber som en SEO manager for Norwegian SEO." Did she forget halfway through that she's writing in Norwegian? That's quite a "jobber" to be a manager.

"Jeg gjennomfører en undersøkelse for en av mine partnere..." I'm pretty sure "Jeg" means "I," and OK maybe "for" is a Norwegian word too. And that at the end must mean, "my partner," and a little later she says, "interessante forslag." I don't know what a "forslag" is, but it's interesting, all right, because that comes right after she spells out my blog's web address.

And then later on she says, "Som en SEO ekspert driver jeg kvalitetssider som kan matche og hjelpe siden din til å få høyere rangering og trafikk." Well, that explains a lot. Their expert driver something, something, can match or help something, something rangering or traffic.

Yeah, I'm all over that mutual assist with generating more traffic for each others' websites, because we're practically sisters now. If I'm "interessert," I'll be sure to have her "sende deg mer informasjon."

Right after I delete her spam.

America's Constitution

Yesterday's weekly column by Clark S. Judge, at Hugh Hewitt's blog, is a sobering look at where our nation's constitution is headed. Here it is in its entirety:

The Constitutional Convention and The 2012 Election by Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

Today is Monday, May 14. In 1787, also on Monday, May 14th, in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention held its opening session.

Now, two hundred and twenty five years later, we are engaged in a great presidential campaign that, at its most essential level, is about the future of the governmental system the delegates to that convention wrought. For in the last four years we have seen challenges to the long accepted meaning of many of the features and guarantees of the Philadelphia constitution.

In no particular order, here are examples:

The manner of recent presidential appointments including to the National Labor Relations Board challenged widely shared understandings about the constitutionally mandated advice and consent role of the Senate.

The expansive and aggressive use of regulation – for example, EPA’s moves to reclassify CO2 as a pollutant because of its supposed impact on climate after Congress had repeatedly rejected similar proposals – has challenged the line between legislative and executive powers.

By overriding bondholders, this administration’s federal auto bailout arguably challenged long understood constitutional limits to taking property without due process and upset the constitutionally mandated uniform rules of bankruptcy.

By requiring Catholic and other religiously affiliated institutions to provide health coverage that violated basic denominational beliefs, federal Obamacare challenged the widely understood standards of religious liberty.

In this year’s state of the union address, the president suggested that during a second term he would compel states to accept his spending priorities as their own, anticipating a challenge to the constitutional concept of federalism, as long understood.

As former White House counsel Boyden Gray has pointed out, the framing of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that the administration championed so vigorously challenges fundamental constitutional rules regarding judicial review.

As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested in the recent high court hearings on the administration’s signature health care legislation, the central feature of Obamacare challenges the long-established relationship between the government and the citizen, in other words, basic constitutional understandings of liberty.

Reading the record of the Philadelphia deliberations, you can’t help but be struck at how seriously the Framers took the purposes detailed in the Constitution’s preamble: “form a more perfect union… establish justice… insure domestic tranquility… provide for the common defense… promote the general welfare… secure the blessings of liberty.” These terms come up repeatedly in their debates as failures of government under the Articles of Confederation and as the goals for their project.

Would they have said that the Fast and Furious program is an example of establishing justice?

Would they have agreed that radically downsizing the Navy provides for the common defense?

Is a reelection campaign designed to stoke animosity between economic and social groups consistent with insuring domestic tranquility?

Most of all, perhaps, when our senior military officer names the national debt our biggest national security challenge… when bond rating agencies downgrade the country’s credit standing… when major federal trust funds are careening toward bankruptcy… when general fund deficits and debt are projected permanently to top levels previously seen only in the single most expensive year of World War II, thanks to spending beyond levels we have ever seen, at least in peacetime… is utterly refusing to address any element of this spending crisis an example of providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare or securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity?

These are not just my questions. In calls around the country over the last few weeks, I have repeatedly heard anxiety expressed about the future of America’s fundamental institutions: the open economy, the family, religious liberty, as well as the Constitution.

Yes, anemic economic growth and the lack of job creation are major worries, too. Many ask, how could the administration have spent so much money for, we were told, stimulating the economy and got so little for it?

Granting all that, still I wonder, is it too much to say that this election is shaping up into a new Constitutional Convention, in which we the people will decide the character of our country for generations to come?

Governor Holds Citizens Hostage

The AP reported Saturday that California's deficit is unexpectedly larger than the state government anticipated.

California's budget deficit has swelled to a projected $16 billion — much larger than had been predicted just months ago — and will force severe cuts to schools and public safety if voters fail to approve tax increases in November, Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday.

The Democratic governor said the shortfall grew from $9.2 billion in January in part because tax collections have not come in as high as expected and the economy isn't growing as fast as hoped for. The deficit has also risen because lawsuits and federal requirements have blocked billions of dollars in state cuts.

Naturally, when there's a deficit, elected officials' first inclination is to threaten the children of the state and the public safety. They say, "Give us more of your money in the form of increased taxes, or people will die."

Their first thought is never in the area of cutting out the deadwood from the mindless bureaucracies that flood the state with surliness in DMV and unemployment offices. They never think of cutting the legislature's staff by, say, one clerk per State Assemblyman or State Senator. Maybe it's more accurate to simply say they never think.

It hasn't occurred to our government that the reason for much of the shortfall is that people and businesses are leaving the state because the taxes are already too high. Enough businesses have already either left or folded that people can't find work. Without work, those people have no taxes to pay. And the businesses that aren't here anymore aren't paying taxes either.

In my Bible study group of about 18 - 20 people, two have already left the state. One went to Tennessee and the other to Texas because they weren't able find enough work here to keep a roof over their heads. A third is returning home to Wisconsin this month after finishing cooking school. She hasn't been able to find a job as the pastry chef she was trained to be (and she's good!), and Wal-Mart doesn't pay enough to keep her here.

That's three people whose tax money won't be available to make up California's deficit, and if the state raises tax rates, even more people will be taking their money elsewhere.

But Governor Moonbeam and the Democrat-controlled legislature haven't got a clue. Lord, help those of us who have to stay!

Happy Mothers Day!

This is for all the mothers, ESPECIALLY for mine. Have a wonderful Mothers Day!

Unfortunately, some on the political left are tarnishing the meaning of the day with their disgusting request that people support women's right to destroy their children in the womb.

But I'm not going to leave you with that thought. On a much happier note, today is Bella Santorum's birthday. Here is what her older sister, Elizabeth, wrote about the occasion. It's beautiful:

Happy Birthday, Bella.

What the Heck?

I left work Wednesday, running a little late for my chiropractor appointment, and went to my car. It was parked in the gravel-and-dirt parking lot behind the building, where employees are supposed to park so that patients can have the good parking spots in front. This parking lot does not have trees. It also is not near the building. This is what I found when I got to my car:

Here's a closer look:

I said, "What the heck???"

It's as though an entire flock of birds stopped mid-air to hover over the back of my car and bird-bomb it. And neither of the cars next to me was hit, except a few tiny drops of excess splatter on the one to my right.

How does this happen? Was it one bird on a horrible rampage? Was there a loud noise that scared the... you know... out of a flock of birds? What the heck was going on over my car???

I didn't have much time for contemplation or mystery solving, because I had to get to Dr. Magic Hands.

When I got home, I grabbed my camera and got pictures.

Thankfully, overnight we had some rain, so it washed away the worst of the white and left all those little yellow dots that don't want to come off, even with the gas station squeegee. Still, it's better than it was at first sight.

But that's not the end of the story, because Thursday the Corporate Communications department communicated with all the employees that we could get a FREE CAR WASH!

I called the lady on the email and told her my shocking story, and she said that God must be apologizing to me. She might be right. I went to her office and picked up my car wash card (valid Monday to Thursday):

I don't know what an Average Joe Express Car Wash is, exactly, but I'll be finding out soon. Probably Monday.

Pain in the Butt

I have one.

You know how some famous people only have one name? Like Cher or Madonna? My pain has one name too: Sciatica, and she's doing me wrong.

The pain started over a week ago, on the Friday that's my first date of the month with my chiropractor, Dr. Magic Hands. (I allow myself two visits a month whether I need them or not, which I always do, but they're usually for my stiff neck - kind of an Old Testament thing.)

I told Dr. Hands (not his real name) where it hurt, a couple inches below my waist on the right side, and he said that was my sacroiliac joint. Having taken Medical Terminology and Anatomy & Physiology, I actually knew what he was saying and how to spell it. He adjusted me, and I felt much better.

But I didn't stay fixed. The pain was back by morning and, over the course of the next week, it moved downward where it lodged in my gluteus muscle and the back of my thigh and knee, with the occasional shooting pain along the sole of my foot (the WORST!).

This past Friday (no date with Dr. H.) I googled sciatica treatment and found a link to WebMD, where they said to go see a doctor if it hadn't gone away in a week. So I called Kaiser, and they sent me to their urgent clinic to see one of the doctors who used to work at one of my work's clinics, so that was pretty cool seeing someone I knew.

She gave me a prescription for Vicodin and a muscle relaxer. I'm only supposed to take the muscle relaxer at bedtime, and I think that's a good idea. I remember a guy I used to work with a really long time ago, after he hurt his back doing judo, he came to work after taking muscle relaxers. He called them his "happy pills" and decided he'd better go back home after a couple hours of doing nothing at work besides floating around a couple feet off the ground (or so it seemed to him).

The Vicodin, though, is another story. Everybody keeps warning me about this medication's addictive nature, but I'm not sure I get it. They take quite a while to start cutting down on the pain, maybe an hour or more when I really want it NOW. Over the weekend, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday sleeping on the couch. On Sunday, since the sciatica hurts the most when I'm sitting, I decided to skip Sunday School and just go for the 10:00 service. I got up at my regular time, did the normal morning routine of shower and breakfast, took my meds, curled up on the loveseat for a little nap, and when I woke up momentarily, church had already started. Darn! Missed it. The next time I woke up, it was 3:30pm, and the day was mostly gone.

Other people get La-La Land on Vicodin. I get knock-out drops. Where's the fun in that? Just as well, I suppose, because I won't be tempted to abuse them.

I'm hoping this pain in the butt disappears just as quickly as it arrived. Permanence would be an extremely bad thing.

Departing Words

Not mine. In spite of my lack of recent blogging, I'm not going anywhere.

These departing words are from Michael "Flathead" Blanchard, from the obituary he appears to have written for himself, which appeared in the Denver Post on April 12, 2012.

Blanchard, Michael "Flathead"
1944 ~ 2012

A Celebration of the life of Michael "Flathead" Blanchard will be held on April 14th, 3 pm 8160 Rosemary St, Commerce City. Weary of reading obituaries noting someone's courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors' orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.

There's more.

I love the defiance this describes. I can't quite relate (except for the stubbornness), but there's something compelling about someone who lives life on his own terms instead of meekly showing up to do what "they" tell him to do.

Life coaches, success instructors, and motivational speakers often encourage their audiences to write the eulogy they would like to have delivered at their own funeral. Then they're told to live in such a way as to make that true.

It looks like Mike did just that. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as though I'll get a chance to meet him after I'm gone. Such a shame...

Clark Judge on the State of the Union

Clark Judge's Monday post at Hugh Hewitt's site hits a home run. Here it is in full:

SOTU: Did I hear that right?
By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute.

It sounded like such a soft, even conservative speech.

But let me get this straight:

1) banks will be punished (do I understand this right, by a committee headed by Eric Holder?) if their lending is too risky,

2) and they will be required (by the same committee) to give more home loans (meaning, it must be, to people who would otherwise not qualify for the loans, or else the government would not have to be involved) at lower rates (which means rates that do not compensate them as much as the market says they need to be compensated for the risks they are taking, all of which sounds like a new edition of the policies that brought on the financial collapse),

3) which must mean that they will have to pull back on risky lending someplace other than homes,

4) the only place that most banks would be able to pull back on riskier customers would be loans to small and new businesses,

5) but these are the businesses that have created just about all the jobs over the last 20 years and he said early in the speech he wants to encourage them,

6) so maybe their growth capital will come from selling stock to the kinds of people who invest in new and small businesses,

7) but through the Buffet Rule he’s going to double the tax rate on investment income for those people, meaning that, like the banks, they can’t be fully compensated for the risk of backing small and new businesses,

8) so they will not invest more in small and new companies but in big established firms,

9) so more of those small and new firms will have to turn to the government for capital,

10) which luckily he said would up its investing in early stage businesses with “the best” ideas,

11) “the best” ideas meaning, I guess, as with Solyndra, ideas that advance his agenda through companies whose owners support his candidacy),

11) (sic) or maybe it would be companies that agree to invite unionization (since the unions have failed to organize the new and dynamic sectors of the economy, which is why they have been shrinking),

12) but then with the big businesses, he wants to punish American companies if they invest overseas,

13) and he wants to increase exports,

14) but being competitive in the global markets often means having part of your production near your markets, which is why many companies have opened production facilities abroad and many foreign companies (BMW and Honda, for example) have opened their facilities here,

15) so he’ll make these companies less competitive, meaning less able to export anything that might be paired with some other product the company makes abroad in order to attract buyers,

16) and it also means he’ll have the U.S. ignoring many of the international trading rules of which we have been the principal sponsor since the end of WWII, rules that have led to an incredible growth in widely shared wealth all over the planet,

17) which means that, if he follows through, he’ll blow up the post-WWII global economic system,

18) which in the very short run may help the uncompetitive American labor unions but in the not-so-long run would devastate every economy on earth,

19) but it would also mean he would be in a position to decide where big companies could invest, and when, just as he’ll be in control of all new and small businesses, too,

20) meanwhile he is going to tell states and localities what their budget priorities should be,

21) and make them adopt his policies for running their schools, leaving me to wonder, when he’s through, what won’t he control?

I believe that’s what I heard the president advocate last night. But one term I didn’t hear, maybe I missed it: “The Constitution.” Then again, wasn’t he suggesting that, in brave times like these, we need to put aside those old rules. Do I have this straight?

Yes, I think he does.