Friday's Bread

Photo Source: Children's Ministry

It was my turn to write the Bread, a Christian devotional, this past week. Yesterday's was inspired by Sunday's sermon at church, and the pastor had this photo up while he spoke. Here's Friday's Bread:

Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

This past Sunday our pastor, who had been a missionary in Swaziland for four years, told the congregation about impalas. They’re beautiful animals with gracefully curving horns, and they can leap amazing heights and distances. Impalas can jump up to ten feet high, and they go up to thirty feet in distance.

You might think it would take tall fences to keep them penned in at zoos, but that’s not the case. Most zoos can keep impalas from escaping with a surrounding wall only three feet high, because impalas will only jump to where they can see where their feet will land. The solid wall is enough to block their view of what lies ahead, and they won’t take any chances.

How many of us live our lives like impalas, afraid to step out in faith when we can’t see where our steps will take us? How many times have we hesitated when we’ve received direction from the Lord, waiting for Him to give us more explanation than just His simple, “Go”? True faith means leaping anyway, because we have the reassurance that what we do not see is nevertheless certain when it is God’s will for us. No matter what lies ahead, He will see us through.

What leap of faith is the Lord asking you to make? What guidance is He giving you that makes you feel insecure in your own strength? Let us separate ourselves from the instincts of animals—particularly prey animals—and instead move boldly forward in certainty of what we do not see.

May we leap in faith in the will of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Brain Teaser

I have a Page-A-Day calendar at work, besides the French one, that my boss gave me for Christmas. It has comics called, "Brevity," which I'd never heard of before, and some of them are funny. On the back of each page is "The Daily Extra."

Today's Daily Extra is this brain teaser. I figured it out without having to peek at the answer.

I am a 6-letter word.
Letters 6-5-2 spell out a drink.
Letters 4-5-2-3 spell out a fruit.
Letters 1-2-6 spell out a pet.
Letters 3-2-6 spell out a pest, which often gets eaten by 1-2-6.
What am I?

You can post your answer in the comments. If nobody gets it, I'll put the answer in the comments in a few days.

Happy Easter!

He is risen!

Michelle Obama Speaks

Here's a newly posted YouTube video of Michelle Obama speaking before an LGBT group during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.



One of the commenters at Michelle Malkin's blog posted this as a link in the Saturday Open Thread. The comments that followed focused on Michelle Obama's comment, "[Barack's] home country of Kenya," as proof that our president was born there. But that could have been more along the lines of what my grandfather might have said about Hungary--he was born in America but his parents and a couple older siblings came over from the Old Country.

For me, the more telling comment in this video was the last. She said, "Barack is running for president because he believes that if we can work together and come together, that we can build that world as it should be. We can do it. And he says that in the world as it should be, what does that look like? In the world as it should be, we can repeal laws like DOMA and Don't Ask and Don't Tell, and he's opposed to (unintelligible) and constitutional amendments that would strip civil rights and benefits away from LGBT Americans, because discrimination has no place in a nation founded on the promise of equality."

Michelle Obama attended Princeton and Harvard Law School. I guess they don't teach the documents of the Founding Fathers to Princeton Sociology majors and future attorneys, because our nation was definitely NOT founded on the promise of equality.

Our Founding Fathers fought for liberty, for freedom from the tyranny of the ruling class forcing onerous burdens on the people and confiscating the people's hard-earned income against their will and without any say. Equality wasn't part of our rallying cry at all.

She must have been thinking of France.

Update:

Oops! In the comments, Anonymous pointed out a minor little clause in a minor little founding document, which reads, "all men are created equal." How did I miss that one?

I would argue, however, that Michelle Obama and her husband have taken "created equal" and morphed it into "equal outcomes for all," and that is not what our Founding Fathers fought for. They did not fight for redistribution of wealth to make all people equally poor. In fact, redistribution of wealth (from the Colonies to the British Crown) was what they were fighting against. They fought for liberty, for the right of all citizens to pursue happiness in they way they saw fit without interference from a very limited government. This is not the equality that Michelle Obama believes was promised.

Again, she must have been thinking of France.

I Read This Wrong

I was checking the news this morning and out the corner of my eye, I saw a headline at the bottom of a list. Here's what I thought it said:

Geitner: Disparity in weather 'deeply unfair'

Which really is funny. I was prepared to agree with him (shocking, I know, that I might agree with a member of the Obama administration). After all, it's completely unfair that California has no autumn weather. I call for an immediate... no, make that in October... redistribution of autumn to those of us unfortunate souls who are forced to live weather-deprived for most of the year in California. Indiana can have our October weather this year.

But that's not what it said. This is the real headline:

Geitner: Disparity in recovery 'deeply unfair'

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Thursday it's "deeply unfair" that some financial institutions that got taxpayer-paid bailouts are emerging in better shape from the recession than millions of ordinary Americans.

He acknowledged public outrage over that and said people watched with disdain as Washington protected the banks and investment houses whose risky bets caused the crisis, even as the national unemployment rate was soaring to double-digit levels for the first time in a generation.

But in a nationally broadcast interview, Geithner also argued that President Barack Obama had no choice when facing a financial crisis but to support then-President George W. Bush's "unpopular" bailout plan.

Oh, that's right. I forgot. All the unfairness in our country, even the weather, is President Bush's fault. And Obama is a panty-waist wussy who can't even stand up to an out-of-office former president and do what he believes is right. My mistake.

Macaroni

I was at work and I caught a whiff of what smelled like macaroni and cheese. Or maybe it was buttered noodles without the cheese, but in either case it made me think of my mother-in-law.

She passed away 28 years ago this month from pancreatic cancer, when my then-husband and I had been married about five and a half years. She was only 54. For her, the first symptom she had of the disease was itchy shins, an itch that drove her crazy and wouldn't stop. She spent the better part of a year going to the doctor and getting tests that didn't tell them anything, and finally they decided to do exploratory surgery. When they opened her up, they saw the cancer, and it had metastasized.

My husband and I moved back to California from Spokane shortly after she was diagnosed, and less than a year later, after battling through chemotherapy, she breathed her last.

But this isn't about cancer. It's about macaroni.

When I was a kid, my dad was in the Navy, and my mom stayed at home and raised the three of us. We lived in such nautical places as Bainbridge, Maryland, Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego, California (with a brief stint in San Francisco while my dad's submarine was in drydocks).

As a Navy wife, my mom served us budget meals. Some of my favorites were:

• Nalley's chili heated and poured over king-size Fritos in a baking dish, with a little cheese melted on top
• Mexican cornbread
• Macaroni & Cheese and hot dogs, especially when my mom sliced the hot dogs and mixed the slices into the M&C like little copper coins
• Galumkas
• Shrimp Creole

One time when I was in my twenties, I called up my mom and asked her for the Shrimp Creole recipe, because I had a sudden craving for it (no, I wasn't pregnant at the time). She told me it was just a can of Campbell's Shrimp Creole soup heated up and poured over Minute Rice, and they stopped making that soup a long time before. Oh, the heartbreak!

Some of my least favorite budget meals were:

• Tuna casserole, though I didn't hate it
• Anything with lima beans or beets
• Navy bean soup

I hated navy bean soup so much that I started to dread it when we had ham (which I loved), because I knew that meant the navy bean soup would be next.

But when I met and married my husband and got to know his family better, I learned that my mom had been a budget-meal piker. She was a lightweight compared to my mother-in-law, who had five little mouths to feed, rather than just three.

I don't remember all the other meals my husband and his sisters talked about having to eat when they were little, just the Mother of All Budget Meals: Beans and Noodles. That would be a large can of Pork N Beans (possibly the bargain brand) served next to (not over) noodles. Plain noodles. No sauce. No butter. Just the cooked and drained noodles.

They hated it. As much as I hated navy bean soup. Almost as much as I hated (and still do) beets (ptooey!). And they had to eat it often, because their mom was on a budget.

So when I smelled the macaroni at work, it brought all this to mind and a whole lot more. I wouldn't want your impression of my mother-in-law to be nothing more than beans and noodles, because she was a wonderful woman.

She won me over when we first met, because she championed me over the wishes of her only beloved son, when she chewed him out something fierce for wanting to make a dishonest woman out of me by living in sin. I hadn't said a word to her about it, and certainly not to him (too afraid I'd lose him), even though shacking up was not what I had in mind. But she tore right into him, and that gave me the courage to speak up a little.

He caved, and we decided to get married, and while we were making plans, my then-future mother-in-law started grilling me on religion. She was Catholic, and she wanted to know what my religious beliefs were about baptism. Did we baptize babies?

No, we let children decide for themselves when they're old enough to know what they're doing. Of course, at this time I wasn't going to church and didn't really care about God, and neither did my fiance, but I pulled the answers from my childhood spent attending church every Sunday.

Then my mother-in-law informed me that when we had kids, there was that whole Original Sin thing to worry about, and she was going to see that our babies got baptized, even if she had to do it herself in the bathroom sink.

I told her that was fine with me, if she really needed to do it. But we didn't have our first child until three years after she died, so they remained unbaptized until they were 10 or 11 or something.

After we had been married a year, I invited my in-laws over for Thanksgiving dinner. We had gone to their house the year before, about a month after the wedding. My mother-in-law surprised me by saying it was the first time in over 25 years of marriage that she hadn't cooked on Thanksgiving. I was thrilled, and I still treasure that meal, because it let me give back a little something to a woman who had given of herself for so long.

I'm not going to tell everything I might, but I'll end with the Andy Capp comic strip she kept on her refrigerator the whole time I knew her.

It was Andy's wife, Flo, sneaking into a Bingo game in the first frame, sneaking out of Bingo in the next, then she's in some business-type office at a desk where the man asks, "Name?" and "Flo" is crossed out and "Big Al," my father-in-law's nickname for his wife, is hand-written in. In the last frame the man asks, "Occupation?" and she answers, "Adventuress." That was my mother-in-law to a T.

I'm glad I smelled macaroni today at work.

Tipping Over

Oh my goodness! How did this guy ever get elected? (via Michelle Malkin)



The key statement by Congressman Johnson: "My fear is that, uh, the whole island will, uh, become so overly populated that it will tip over and, uh, and capsize."

And Adm. Robert Willard, commander of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, manages to not even break a smile before he answers, "We don't anticipate that."

Man! Our military is trained to be tough.

I've Been Robbed!

I got my notification today from the City, and the nice lady who's officially a neutral examiner has upheld my citation.

Et tu, Bruté?

That means the City keeps my $55, and I can fight it in court if I so choose.

The only reason I can think of (well, two reasons) is that the examiner thinks I failed to present a "preponderance of evidence" in support of my position. The other possibility is that the City's official records have been tampered with (or filed falsely from the start) to show an installation date for the sign that pre-dated my parking ticket.

If I go to court, it's a $25 filing fee, and I have no idea how it all works and whether I'll need an attorney and all the rest. I haven't exactly been living my life in and out of court.

But I did stop at the neighbors' house on the corner where the sign is. They speak Spanish, but we managed to communicate well enough for them to tell me that they went on vacation in January. When they left, there was no sign. When they got back, the sign was there. Enero. No doubt about it.

Next, I'll try to find out what the City has on record as their sign-installation date, and then I'll go from there.

Crap!

Random Act of Kindness

Tonight I went to Target to find some Triscuits. I had tried at Wal-Mart, but they only had the little bitty boxes for too much money, and I was hoping for a big box of flavored Triscuits for cheaper than the grocery store.

I got a shopping cart and headed for Target's food section, and on the way there, a woman was approaching me, her arms loaded down with about a dozen items. So I asked her if she needed a cart. She looked at me as though she wasn't quite sure what I was asking.

"I'm just here for Triscuits. You look like you could use a cart more than I can."

She hesitated, and then she started putting her stuff in the cart and thanked me, and I kept on going toward the food. Smiling. Because it felt good.

The Triscuits were regular flavor, but they had the big box for the little box price, so I grabbed one and went to the checkout, where the lady with my cart was. I got in line behind her and put my one box on the belt.

"Looks like you really did need that cart more than I did," I said.

She thanked me some more. And then she grabbed my box of Triscuits and put it with her items and said, "I'm buying this because you were so nice."

"You don't have to do that," I told her, and she said she wanted to.

I thanked her while the cashier scanned the box and put it in a separate bag and handed it to the lady, who gave it to me.

"Oh, wow!" I said.

And there was nothing left to do but leave the store. Smiling. Because it felt good.

Health Care Timetable

The Health Care Monstrosity has passed, and President Obama is expected to sign it Tuesday. Even this survey reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, showing that a third to half of all physicians will leave the medical profession if health care "reform" passed, wasn't enough to prevent passage.

The Wall Street Journal has a list today of when the main parts of the bill take effect. Here are the first few years:

2010

Coverage

■Subsidies begin for small businesses to provide coverage to employees.
■Insurance companies barred from denying coverage to children with pre-existing illness.
■Children permitted to stay on their parents' insurance policies until their 26th birthday.

2011

Coverage

■Set up long-term care program under which people pay premiums into system for at least five years and become eligible for support payments if they need assistance in daily living.

Taxes and fees

■Drug makers face annual fee of $2.5 billion (rises in subsequent years).

2013

Taxes and fees

■New Medicare taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples filing jointly earning more than $250,000 a year.
■Tax on wages rises to 2.35% from 1.45%.
■New 3.8% tax on unearned income such as dividends and interest.
■Excise tax of 2.3% imposed on sale of medical devices.

Cost control

■Medicare pilot program begins to test bundled payments for care, in a bid to pay for quality rather than quantity of services.

There's more that follows. It is not a pretty picture. Hold onto your wallets, especially next year, and buy the drugs you'll need NOW, before that $2.5 billion fee on the drug makers kicks in. You know who's going to end up paying it, don't you? The customer will, and that would be you.

In response to the passage of this abomination, it's time to start working for a repeal. There's no way around it but to hand control of at least the House back to the GOP, as distasteful as that may be to some of us. But party matters, as evidenced by the way the Republicans--yes, even the hard-core lefty RINOs--hung together to try to stop this bill. At the very least, a Republican-controlled House can starve this thing of funding and prevent it from taking effect.

Hugh Hewitt has a list of questions for those of you with incumbent Democrats running for re-election:

1. Did the incumbent vote for Nancy Pelosi for House speaker?

2. Did the incumbent vote for the "stimulus" package?

3. Did the incumbent vote for "cap-and-tax"?

4. Did the incumbent vote for Obamacare?

5. Did the incumbent vote to protect the assault on the Constitution known as the "deem scheme" or "Slaughter Solution" when it was first challenged March 18 by Rep. Parker Griffith?

Let these questions help you decide if your incumbent is worth returning to office.

And Hugh's producer Duane Patterson has this three-year pledge that you might want to consider, if you're incensed about the jam-down of health care reform.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Congress isn't stopping for a minute to bask in the glory of their legislative victory. The Los Angeles Times reported today that the Senate has moved on to a major overhaul of America's banking system. The "fun" never ends...

Fighting City Hall

While the rest of the country was watching such inconsequential things as health care reform, I was preparing for my Major Legal Battle, which occurred this morning.

Last October, on the 1st to be exact, shortly after I moved in with my friend the cardiac nurse, I heard a strange sound as I was getting ready for work. When I peeked out the front window, I saw a City pickup truck that trailed the street sweeper, and the guy was writing a ticket and putting it under the windshield wiper of my car, which just happened to be the only one parked on the street at the time.

After I got dressed, I went outside and grabbed the ticket to see what it said.

"Desc: NO PARKING ZONE, STREET SWEEPING"

Under "Remarks," it said: "SIGN POSTED AT BEGINNING OF BLOCK."

So I looked. To be honest, I hadn't noticed any street signs, but that didn't mean they weren't there. After all, I've been known to not see what was plainly in front of my face on other occasions.

There wasn't a sign at the beginning of the block. Or on any part of the block leading up to where I was parked.


In fact, the only sign on the entire block on either side was a dual-posting on a lamppost on the other side of the cul-de-sac, with the Neighborhood Watch sign on top.


I walked closer until I could read the sign, and it said, "No Parking Both Sides 6A.M. - 10A.M. 1st & 3rd Thursday, Street Sweeping."

That's just underhanded and wrong!

Mid-October I sent in a statement disputing the veracity of the ticket, since there was most definitely NOT a sign at the beginning of the street. I embedded the two photos above in my statement at the appropriate parts of my narrative, pointing out that no reasonable person could be expected to know about Street Sweeping Day with the way the signs were posted. And then I waited.

Three months later I received the decision from the city:

"Subject: Review Status- Review Outcome Liable... The appeal received for [your citation] was upheld for the following reason: STREET SWEEPING DATES AND TIMES POSTED ON STREET."

Not good! Apparently the City was saying that the posting of a sign across the street and at an unreadable distance is adequate notification that you can't park somewhere. The next step after that is Parking Tyranny: "You can't park here because I say you can't park here, so I'm writing you a ticket, and too bad for you!"

Not long after that, as I was heading for church, I saw that the City had put up a sign at the beginning of the block.


I felt cheated. If the signs were adequate on the day I got my ticket, to the point that they said I was liable for the fine, then why did the City feel the need to spend taxpayer money to put up a second but unnecessary sign? And if the sign on the cul-de-sac was not adequate, then why did they say I still owed the money? It just wasn't right.

I wasn't ready to give up the fight, so I filled out the form enclosed with my Review Status which was a "Request for Neutral Examination of Parking Citation," and I selected Personal Conference rather than a Written Declaration, since my previous written declaration didn't do me any good at all. About a month ago they sent me a notification that my Neutral Examination of Citation would be this morning at 10:00.

When I arrived as instructed, I was given a form that explained the process. It said I would have to make a plea, either (A) Admit with explanation or (B) Deny. But I wasn't sure what I was admitting or denying. Yes, my car was parked there, but no, I didn't think I should have to pay because the ticket had a falsehood on it about where the sign was.

I was taken into a conference room, and the reviewer said she was a neutral third party, not working for the City. She had a better explanation of what Admit and Deny meant, but I still couldn't decide which one applied to my case. While she was explaining how it would all work (it would be audio-recorded, parking is not a criminal offense, any evidence I presented would be considered as to how it supports my plea, and I would not be able to present more evidence once our conference ended), she showed me the City's evidence in support of their position against me.

The first was a photo of the new sign, like mine just above, only landscape mode and with some of the street showing to the left. The second was a hand-drawn layout of the street showing our house as being on the cul-de-sac directly facing the old sign.

One look at the City's photo told me what my plea would be. When the reviewer started recording and got to the part where I enter my plea, I said, "Deny liability."

She finished the preliminaries and then asked me to present my evidence. My opening statement was a passionate one. I pointed my finger at the City's photo and said, "THAT sign was not there when I got my ticket." And then I redrew the City's street layout to more accurately reflect where the house is situated relative to the old sign.

I had brought my original dispute statement with me, but she already had the one I mailed in, so I didn't need to show her those pictures. I also brought a couple others, including this cropped portion of the first picture. It shows a little better how there was no sign at the beginning of the street.


She seemed interested in this direction the evidence was taking, and it made me wish I had brought this picture with me as well (a better view of no sign when I got the ticket), but I didn't.


Then I showed her the photo I took this past Saturday, so she could see how the new sign is visible from roughly the same angle.


She marked the pictures as evidence item #1 and #2, while explaining to the cassette recorder which number represented which date. Then she said she'd look into the date when the City erected the new sign, and she should have a decision reached within a couple days. So by the end of the week, I ought to know if I get my $55 back (you have to pay the fine before they let you have a conference).

The minute she said she'd look into the timing of the new sign, I was filled with hope. Justice may yet prevail in this case.

Just Saying...

Ants make bad housepets.

Question

The brain is an amazing thing, especially the way it learns. Pavlov discovered the hard way that creatures can learn through conditioning, when his test subjects threw his dog-drool experiments awry by slobbering before the food was even presented to them. Their brains associated the sound of the lab technicians' approach with the food, and the drooling would begin early.

Human brains often work the same way. When my kids were teenagers, they learned to associate the sound of a slamming door with a fate worse than a slasher movie. A co-worker had told me that when one of his kids slammed the door, he took the door off the hinges for 24 hours. No yelling or threats were necessary, just swift, silent action and much consternation on the part of the door slammer. I brought that idea home, explained to the kids what would happen if they slammed, and watched as their eyes glazed over from tuned-out-edness.

I expected my daughter, the Primary Slammer, to be the first to feel the pain, but it was my son who flung a door shut first. I went over to his door and pulled the pins out of the hinges while he stood there saying, "What are you doing?!?"

"I told you both that if you slam a door, you lose yours for a day. You'll get it back tomorrow night."

"You never said that!"

"Yes, I did."

He hung a blanket over the open doorway and got his door back the next night.

Each of my kids slammed doors twice before they learned the lesson. After that, conditioning kicked in. If I had the windows open to let the breeze blow through the house and a door slammed itself shut, one of the kids would shout from another room, "That wasn't me!"

As a mom, this was one of the most beautifully satisfying things. As a psychology major, this was an excellent case of classical conditioning.

(Warning: Questionable taste follows.)

A very early example of conditioning occurs with potty training. Our brains learn to associate the bathroom, specifically the toilet, with getting to go. We see the toilet and our brains say, "Oh good! We can go now."

So here's my question: If our brain can condition itself to the sight of the toilet as the signal to "let go," why can't it ever learn to wait until our pants are down (or unzipped, if that's the case) and we're actually ready?

The Potty Dance is never going to end, is it?

True Confessions

Friday night my daughter came over to get my help finishing a knitted Gryffindor scarf which would be her friend's birthday present. While she was here, she showed me a new-to-me computer game where you shoot bubbles, and I started playing it after she left.

Normally I play games on msn.com, and those games make you watch a commercial every several minutes between levels. My latest favorite is Majongg Dimensions, which gives you 6 minutes to match and remove tiles from a 3-D cube in ever-increasing difficulty levels.

I can handle a finite 6 minutes of play time, with the requisite commercial between games. What I wasn't ready for was the new bubble game. It has no ads, and it has no time limit. It just goes on until you lose or win (mostly you lose), and either way it can take a long time. And then it's really easy to start another game.

I noticed the time at 4:30 am. Holy cow!

I went to bed and slept until 11:30. I don't like sleeping that late, but I needed it.

Saturday night I played it again, because it really is fun. And addicting.

At 4:30 in the morning (Daylight Savings Time, which is only 3:30 am Real Time), I again noticed the time. I decided to skip Sunday School class and just go to the 10:00 service, so I set my alarm for 8:30 and made it to church on time.

But before I left for church, I admitted I was powerless over my addiction to this game, and I closed the browser and deleted its memory from my pull-down internet history list. I cannot be trusted with the bubble game. Ever.

Baby Step Two

I've been attending Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University on Monday nights for the past six weeks. I figured it was a good time to start learning how to live within my means, now that I have some means to live within.

Dave's approach is based on seven Baby Steps. Baby Step 1 is to have $1000 in an emergency fund, so when unexpected expenses happen, you don't have to run to the credit card to bail you out and load you down with more debt at the same time.

Baby Step 2, which is where I am, is the Debt Snowball. That's where you pay off your credit cards one at a time, starting with the smallest balance and working your way up to the biggest balance. You keep adding what you were paying on the smaller ones to the bigger ones, so you're paying them off faster and faster until they're all gone.

Last week a guy who has been attending for about 18 months (they keep repeating the class, and once you've paid you get to keep coming back without having to pay again), just announced that he's debt-free except for his house. Pretty cool!

This week, after I paid off my Home Depot card, which I got when I moved here so I could get a discount on the shed I bought, I called up Home Depot and closed that account. They told me I could reopen the account anytime I wanted to, but I won't be doing that. Debt is a Bad Thing.

One of the things they do in class is keep a really big pair of scissors for when people bring in their credit cards to be cut up. It's a great thing to watch as someone's now-closed account is chopped in two. I had planned to bring my Home Depot card to class so it could have a contest with the scissors to see who would win. But when I found the card in the old checkbook box, lo and behold, there were other now-expired or closed cards in there with it. I put all the cards I found (except for the two I'm still paying) into a sandwich bag and brought them to class.

At card-cutting time, I went up front, and they had me count all the cards. There were 13. Lucky for me to be rid of them all. I started with the Home Depot card, and the scissors won. Two pieces of orange plastic flew sideways a little, then fell to the floor. After that, they had me announce what the card was that I was sacrificing. Discover Platinum. Visa Gold. Macy's. Robinsons-May, which doesn't exist anymore. One of the cards expired back in 1997.

When I had finished, the scissors-wielding leader said he'd leave them on the floor for symbolic purposes, and after class, he cleaned up all the pieces and added them to his bucket of chopped-up cards.

All in all, it was a beautiful evening. One card down, two to go...

Known Laws of the Physical Universe

When I was a little girl, there were certain rules my mother drummed into me that have transformed themselves and are still with me in their new form in my adult life.

One of these is that you must finish the open box of cereal before you are allowed to even touch the new box. I don't care how much you want that new cereal, you can't have it until the old box is gone.

I still do that. Not with cereal, because I don't eat it very much, but with everything else that's made to not be finished at one time. My mom was very effective with this rule, and it's become a source of wonder for me now that I have a roommate who (shocker!) is not exactly like me.

My roommate and I attended a Women of Faith conference a few years ago at which Nicole Johnson was talking about women and their purses. She said that when it comes to purses, there are two kinds of women: sorters and stuffers. Then she pointed her finger at the audience and said, "And you know which one you are." My friend and I looked at each other and smiled. She is definitely a stuffer, and I am definitely a sorter.

I've noticed that in the long run, it doesn't seem to matter which one you are. When she and I go to the movies and the guy tells me, "That'll be a billion dollars" (Okay, I'm exaggerating. We go to the matinee, so it's only half a billion dollars...), I reach into the zippered pocket inside my purse, pull out my wallet, grab a billion-dollar bill from the cash slot, and hand it over. The guy hands me my change and movie ticket, and then I stand there while I put the money in the right order, slide it in between the right bills so the ones are in the front and the bigger denominations are behind in ascending order. Then I stick my wallet back in the zippered pocket and leave.

My roommate, as a stuffer, gets told, "That'll be half a billion dollars," and she starts digging through her purse, because she just saw a bill down there somewhere this morning when her phone was ringing and she was trying to find it so she could answer it. She looks at her wallet, which has receipts sticking out of it but no cash, and she checks a couple pockets on the outside of her purse, and then she comes across a billion-dollar bill and hands it over. When the guy gives her the change, she sticks everything in her purse and leaves.

So from the moment we're told the ticket price to the time we leave the counter, it's about the same amount of time. I know I've digressed, but I'm getting back to the point.

Last September, when I was moving in where I live now, my new roommate left for a long-planned cruise, and she called after a couple days to see how I was doing. I told her, "I've learned that you treat your kitchen the same way you treat your purse." She laughed for a really long time, and I did too.

It's all a source of great amusement for us, the way we're trying to blend a sorter with a stuffer under the same roof. I can't speak for the way my friend sees my three bottles and one tube of personal care products lined up in the shower the same way all the time: shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and my tube of face cleanser. I need for them to stay in the same order, because I shower in the morning before the vast majority of brain activity has begun for the day. One time the cleaning lady mixed them up and I didn't notice, so I washed my hair with body wash and when I put what I thought was the conditioner (2nd bottle, so it must be) in my hair and it sudsed up, I figured out that something was wrong. I rearranged the bottles and started over and finally got everything washed with the right product.

Back to my mom. When one of my shower items gets emptied, I bring in a replacement, just like I was raised to do. My roommate, on the other hand, has all kinds of products in there, and I can't imagine what they're all for because, silly me, I don't shower with my reading glasses on. There's a matching set of lavendar bottles that I figure must be shampoo and conditioner. And there's a matching set of skinny golden containers that might have something to do with hair color, but I really haven't got a clue. And there are bottles that look like children's shampoo, and there are black tubes that fall down the back of the shower-head-hanging toiletries rack when I'm not looking and startle the heck out of me. And then just this week, two more containers showed up in the shower, but none of the other bottles got thrown away, and I just don't understand how that's even possible.

Oh man, this is going to be a long post, because that's only the first rule.

My mom's second rule was: Don't you even think of riding anyone else's bike, and don't let them ride yours. As an adult I understand about how, when your kid breaks the neighbor's bike, you have to buy them a new one, which is tough on a Navy enlisted salary. As a kid, though, I understood about the Wrath of Mom. I did not ride anyone's bike.

To this day, I don't drive other people's cars unless it's nearly an emergency. It's not an insurance issue, because you're covered when you've got the owner's permission to drive her car. I just... can't... do... it.

Rule number three is the earliest one I remember. It was burned into my very being by the time I was five years old. We lived in Norfolk, Virginia, on a huge corner lot across the street from the nice old lady who drove a school bus and had a parrot that said, "Polly want a cookie." On the next block to the right, if you're facing the school bus, lived a girl that we played with. She's the same one who scared the bejeebers out of me one time when it was getting dark outside and she came running down the side street toward me screaming in fear, "The moon mans are coming! The moon mans are coming!" I ran home crying, and my daddy put me on his lap and explained that there's no such thing as moon mans, and he talked soothingly to me until I was calmed down again.

It was that girl that my brother and I saw when we went outside to play one Saturday morning. She was playing in the street in front of her house IN HER PAJAMAS!!! I didn't know that was possible. It was a Known Law of the Physical Universe that a person had to be completely dressed before they could go outside. There were No Exceptions, and yet there she was defying all that was real in life.

My brother and I were scandalized, and we went back inside to tell our parents about the girl's sordid, shocking attire. It shook my world, but it didn't change the rule one bit.

Finally (and this isn't a Law as much as it is advice), my mom told me something when I was an older teenager. I don't remember the context, but she and I were standing near the kitchen table with the bright afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows. She told me that if I'm ever drinking beer, I should NOT have ice cream with it.

I didn't press her for details, and she didn't offer any, but I always remembered what she said and have never done such a thing. And, yes, there were a few times when the opportunity presented itself.

It was probably about ten years later that I mentioned to her that I had indeed followed her advice on this. She gave me a puzzled look and said she had no idea why she might have told me such an odd thing.

No matter. It is one of the Known Laws of the Physical Universe that beer and ice cream don't go together.

So how about it? What are some of the Laws that you grew up with that you still obey today?

French Phrases

I bought a Page-A-Day calendar for this year. It has a French phrase every day.

Some days, the calendar seems to be made for the rank beginner who has never had a lesson in his or her life. For instance, I've "learned" to say things like:

Bonne Année! (Happy New Year!)
Moi aussi. (Me too.)
Êtes-vous marié? (Are you married?) I've used this one in real life before.

That's not what I bought the calendar for, though. I bought it so I can learn some idioms and ways of saying things that will move me closer to that Someday goal of fluency. Most of the time, my calendar comes through for me. Along with the married question, I also learned to ask this gem:

Êtes-vous célibataire? (Are you single?) Notice the way it assumes celibacy on the part of single people. How very Old School. Or very Christian.

There are other phrases that are very important to my life:

C'est le premier pas qui coute. (It's the first step that counts.)
On voit le bout du tunnel. (You can see the light at the end of the tunnel.)
J'ai besoin d'une sieste. (I need a nap.)

Sometimes I'm compelled to correct the pronunciation help on the page. It's printed in between the French phrase and the English translation, and the "single" question above would look like this: "Eht voo say-lee-bah-tehr?" Which is fine, but on occasion they spell words that I pronounce as "ay" with "eh" instead. Like they'd say Tais-tois is pronounced "Teh twah," when I know it's "Tay twah." So I cross out their pronunciation and write mine above it.

Yesterday, however, was a particular challenge. It said, "Tu me manques trop," and they said that in English it means, "I miss you so much," which just plain looks wrong. Literally, it says, "You miss me too much."

I spotted the lady who lived for 20 years in Burkina Faso, which was a French colony (formerly Upper Volta), so I asked her if the translation on my calendar page was right, and she said it was. I was confused. How can the subject of a sentence be "you" in one language and "I" in another? But she said it sort of means, "You make me miss you so much."

OK, I can go along with that.

So then I asked her how you would say, "You miss me." Would it be, "Je te manque"? But she surprised me when she said no. If I wanted to tell someone, "You're gonna miss me," it still comes out with "you" as the subject: "Tu vas me manquer."

I don't get it! Don't "I" ever get to be the subject of a sentence about missing someone in French??? It's patently unfair. Completely you-focused. And the lady at work couldn't tell me how it all made any sense. It just is.

I don't like it at all. It makes me want the page I had on Friday:

J'ai un mal de tête terrible.

They're Going After Your 401k and IRA

Holy stinkin' crap! (Pardon my language, but it would be even worse if I hadn't emptied my 401k in 2008 to keep a roof over my head and food on the table while I was unemployed.)

Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara's column Wednesday analyzed the latest to come out of the Treasury and Labor Departments.

You did the responsible thing. You saved in your IRA or 401(k) to support your retirement, when you could have spent that money on another vacation, or an upscale car, or fancier clothes and jewelry. But now Washington is developing plans for your retirement savings.

BusinessWeek reports that the Treasury and Labor departments are asking for public comment on "the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams."

In plain English, the idea is for the government to take your retirement savings in return for a promise to pay you some monthly benefit in your retirement years.

They will tell you that you are "investing" your money in U.S. Treasury bonds. But they will use your money immediately to pay for their unprecedented trillion-dollar budget deficits, leaving nothing to back up their political promises, just as they have raided the Social Security trust funds.

This "conversion" may start out as an optional choice, though you are already free to buy Treasury bonds whenever you want. But as Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker Web site reports: "'Choices' have a funny way of turning into mandates, and this looks to me like a raw admission that Treasury knows it will not be able to sell its debt in the open market — so they will effectively tax you by forcing your 'retirement' money to buy them."

Moreover, benefits based on Treasury bond interest rates may be woefully inadequate compensation for your years of savings. As Denninger adds, "What's even worse is that the government has intentionally suppressed Treasury yields during this crisis (and will keep doing so by various means, including manipulating the CPI inflation index) so as to guarantee that you lose over time compared to actual purchasing power."

Congressional Democrats held hearings on the subject this past fall, and now the proposal is being run up the flagpole to see if it draws any fire. It darn-well better draw plenty.

This is just the latest chapter in what is developing into a war by the left on America's seniors. All that class-war rhetoric about "the rich" ends up targeting seniors, who tend to have accumulated the most in savings and investment on average because they have been around the longest.

All of this reflects a fundamental problem underlying socialist economic policies. If the government keeps punishing responsibility and rewarding failure, society ends up with a lot less responsibility and a lot more failure, destroying prosperity in the process.

As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, "The trouble with socialism is you run out of other people's money to spend." And now they want to spend our retirement savings.

I left out quite a bit, so read the column to get the full effect. In the meantime, contact your (preferrably Republican) Congressman and ask him or her to introduce and/or co-sponsor legislation that would ban the raiding of your retirement savings.

Dish Network is Vile

And they will screw you over if they get the chance.

This is my roommate's story, not mine. Her father passed away in September, and she was the executor of his estate. That gave her the unpleasant task of canceling all of the services he received, one of which was Dish Network.

The phone company did remarkably well, considering other people's experience, but Dish Network was another story altogether.

My friend's dad had paid $700 in June, to cover a year's service, plus he paid a monthly fee for local channels. In early October, my friend called Dish Network to cancel his service and have them refund the remainder of the annual service fee, since he certainly wasn't watching TV anymore.

They refused to do anything unless she could tell them his account number. They weren't about to look up his account for her. Privacy, you know. And when she asked to speak to a supervisor, they put her on hold for a half hour, until she got tired of waiting and hung up. They did the half-hour-hold-for-a-supervisor trick twice before she quit asking for one of those.

They told her they wouldn't accept his death certificate without his account number, which she was unable to find among his papers. So my friend decided to wait until they sent him a bill for his monthly fee, and then she'd have the account number and could get the refund.

They didn't send him a bill until January. When it arrived, my friend sent a copy of the death certificate, along with a letter that contained his account number and asked for them to cancel his service and send the refund.

They didn't. This month they sent him a notification that they were canceling his service due to non-payment. No refund. No statement of his account and where the money went.

Naturally, a company can't be expected to simply take the word of some random person calling and claiming she's the daughter of one of their customers, who she says is deceased, while she is requesting money from them. Identity theft and fraud are real issues that businesses face. But every other business she contacted eventually accepted the death certificate as actual proof that their customer was indeed dead and no longer in need of their services, and they took the appropriate action.

Not so Dish Network. Apparently they waited until they had churned through the remainder of Dear Old Dad's $700, and then they were happy to cancel.


I've advised my friend to contact the Better Business Bureau and make a complaint, as well as contacting the state Public Utilities Commission about how she was treated. Unfortunately, she doesn't have written proof of any of this, since most of her contacts with Dish Network were made by phone, except for the letter, which she didn't keep a copy of. They could deny any contact with her.


If you're considering signing up with Dish Network, think again. And if you already have them, don't lose your account number, and by all means, make all of your contacts with them in writing, retaining documentation for yourself.


This is a vile company who treated my roommate shabbily during a time of grief, and I don't wish them on anyone.

Losing Myself

I stopped at Albertson's on my way home from work to pick up a few things, and after I finished, I walked over to my car. When I started to put my key in the lock, I noticed somebody else's sweater around the parking brake handle.

Oh. That's when I saw the spoiler on the trunk, something I don't have on my car.

So I looked around and spotted my car, but then I saw some guy sitting behind the wheel.

Oh.

I looked around some more and spotted my car again. This time I recognized the tree I had parked in front of. Before I put the key in the lock, though, I made sure it was my stuff by the parking brake. It was.

Who knew there were that many people who have the same incredibly good taste in cars that I do? And who knew they'd all be at the grocery store at the same time?

Back Again - Sort Of

The repair guy came over yesterday after work. His job was to replace the laptop cover, screen and all, and poke around under the keyboard, and then get the re-installation of the operating system going up to a certain point. Then he would leave me with a piece of paper that had a phone number for Dell, and they would walk me through the rest of the process.

He was a really great guy who enjoys fixing computers so much, he does more of it for a side job. He grew up in New Orleans, so I asked if he was rooting for the Saints in the Super Bowl. He is.

I told him I have blogger buddies in Indiana, so I'd probably be for the Colts, and then he said Manning is the greatest quarterback he's ever seen. I asked him who Manning plays for, because that's how closely I follow football. And when he said Manning plays for the Colts, he said he still has to be for the Saints, or else his family would never let him come to New Orleans to visit again.

The last task he had to do on my computer before he left was to install the video driver. That didn't work, though. What I have is a screen that looks fat and like it belongs in the dark ages, and YouTube videos don't show up at all. The repair guy said my computer looks bad because of the lack of video driver, and he left me on my own to call Dell when I get the chance.

I haven't had the chance yet, though, because my roommate is back from vacation, so we're watching Season Four of 24 now. I do have my priorities...

Incommunicado

I'm at my friend's house using her computer for a little while.

Yesterday morning, when I left for work, I put my computer on stand-by. When I got home from work and tried to bring it back up, it hung up for so long that I held down the power button until it shut down. Then when I powered it back on, it gave me the Blue Screen of Death on the way up.

Last night I got on the phone with Dell's support line. I was expecting an Indian accent, but the guy's accent was different enough that I finally asked him where he was from. He said the Philippines, and I had that "Oh yeah!" moment when the accent and the location fit each other.

We spent almost 90 minutes on the phone and finally came to the conclusion that my hardware is fine but my operating system files are corrupted and I need to reinstall the system software, which will wipe out all my files. So I'm going to have to take my laptop and my external hard drive somewhere and have them back up all my files before the system disks arrive for reinstallation Monday or Tuesday (since I moved, I have no idea where my system CDs might be).

Which is all the long way of saying I don't have a functional computer, so I won't be blogging for a while.

Withdrawal symptoms are not pretty...

Not Watching the State of the Union

I didn't get to watch Obama's State of the Union speech last night, because that was my Bible study night. But when I got to Bible study, the speech was on for a few minutes, just long enough for me to see Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden popping up and down behind the President.

It's just as well that I didn't see him speak. I wouldn't have been able to keep a civil tongue and might even have verbally abused the TV every time he said something incorrect. Which would have been often.

Michelle Malkin noted the drinking game that some people play, where you take a drink every time the speaker says his favorite thing. I don't remember the favorite word that prompted a drink when President Bush gave speeches, but I think you had to drain the glass if he said, "nuke-yoo-lar."

For President Obama, the drinking word is, "I." Fortunately for Michelle Malkin, she's a smart cookie and realized that she'd be blottoed in no time if she imbibed in strong spirits, so she said, "Instead of drinking, I’m going to do a push-up every time O says 'I,' 'change,' 'jobs,' 'investment,' or 'clear.'" No doubt she got a good workout. Almost as good as Biden and Pelosi got.

What the Dems Learned from Scott Brown Win

Hugh Hewitt summed it up perfectly today: Democrats Contemplate Going Thelma and Louise.

Congressional Democrats are still grasping for a way forward on the Obamacare plan that the country well and truly hates. To press on via legislative tricks and intemperate tantrums is pure political insanity, the sort of contemptuous high-handedness that could indeed risk every senate seat the Democrats must defend in nine months and scores of House seats as well.

Congressional leaders are trying to figure out how to clean up the House and Senate health care bills just enough to make one or the other palatable to the American people. To quote a comment I read somewhere about this: "How do you clean up a turd?"

Good luck to the Democrats on that.

Haunted by the Past

As of the first of the year, I have medical insurance through my employer. I had a choice of three plans, all of which are with Kaiser Permanente.

Through the years, I've managed to avoid ever having Kaiser as my insurance provider. I know, I know, everybody who has it LOVES Kaiser. Except for those people who have been royally misdiagnosed. So previously I just went with a PPO plan or whatever my employer offered that wasn't Kaiser. But now I have Kaiser, and I was prepared to love it, because of all the people I know who think it's the greatest thing.

My roommate has Kaiser, and she absolutely adores her primary care provider, so I checked with her to find out her doctor's name, and tonight I went onto Kaiser's website to sign up with that doctor.

Kaiser's registration process, they said, would walk me through a series of 5 questions that would verify my identity before they'd give me my temporary password and let me register. It's understandable that they'd want to be sure, since anybody could (and of course would want to) pretend to be me. The rules were that I'd have 75 seconds to answer each question, and I had to get all five answers right on the first try, or no dice. If I missed, they'd send me my temporary password via snail mail.

First, they asked for the last four digits of my social security number. That wasn't the first of the five questions, though. The first question asked me what month my ex-husband (they named him) was born. Ummm... very odd, but OK. I answered it. Then they asked me if I recognized any of the names in a list of five. The fourth name in the list was my ex-husband's second ex-wife.

The next question was harder, because they asked what year I lived in one of the run-together cities in our area. My choices were 1985, 1988, 1991, 1995, and 1997. Well, I lived there from mid-December of 1985 until I think about mid-1987, and then I moved back in 1995 when my ex- and I split up, and I was there until 2003. But I wasn't thinking that clearly, and I was focused on when we first moved there, so I picked 1988, and it went on to the next question.

The fourth question was another list of names, and they wanted to know which one I knew. I picked, "I don't know any of these people." Game. Set. Match.

My temporary password will be arriving via snail mail in 5 to 7 days.

I hunted around the website until I found an 800 number, and I called, but they said they're experiencing a high volume of calls (at 8:20 pm???) and I should call back another time, like Saturday or Sunday.

I'm really ticked off. My ex-husband and I have been divorced since October of 1996, and at no time was I ever a member of Kaiser, especially not when my SSN and his were joined at the hip. So what on earth are they doing asking me questions about him to verify my identity?

This really stinks, and I plan on letting them know! (Politely, of course...)

Change We Can Believe In

Photo credit: AP

The Scott heard 'round the world...

Kudos to CNN's Sanjay Gupta

CNN reported yesterday on the situation at a field hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on Friday night.

Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security.

The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night.

Belgian Chief Coordinator Geert Gijs, a doctor who was at the hospital with 60 Belgian medical personnel, said it was his decision to pull the team out for the night. Gijs said he requested U.N. security personnel to staff the hospital overnight, but was told that peacekeepers would only be able to evacuate the team.

He said it was a "tough decision" but that he accepted the U.N. offer to evacuate after a Canadian medical team, also at the hospital with Canadian security officers, left the site Friday afternoon. The Belgian team returned Saturday morning.

I really don't understand how medical personnel who choose to go to a dangerous place to help injured victims can just bug out when they find out it might be dangerous there, leaving the injured behind to fend for themselves. Why even bother?

Gupta -- assisted by other CNN staffers, security personnel and at least one Haitian nurse who refused to leave -- assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little they could do without supplies.

More people, some in critical condition, were trickling in late Friday.

"I've never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous," Gupta said.

With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti's capital, ambulances had nowhere else to take patients, some of whom had suffered severe trauma -- amputations and head injuries -- under the rubble. Others had suffered a great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the clinic.

Gupta feared that some would not survive the night.

He and the others stayed with the injured all night, after the medical team had left and after the generators gave out and the tents turned pitch black.

Gupta monitored patients' vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition.

At 3:45 a.m., he posted a message on Twitter: "pulling all nighter at haiti field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable. turned my crew into a crack med team tonight."

The dedication of CNN reporter Dr. Gupta makes me proud to be an American. And his dedication didn't end with his Friday all-nighter. Agence-France Presse reported today that he went on board the US Navy ship Carl Vinson to perform neurosurgery on a 12-year-old girl to remove concrete that was embedded in her brain. She's expected to recover fully.

Great job, Dr. Sanjay Gupta! You make us proud.

Daddy-Long-Legs and Hedges

Shortly after I started first grade, the boys decided on a fun game for them. They would pick a Daddy-Long-Legs off the school's stucco walls, hold it by a leg, and shake it at a girl's face. They did it to me, but I was a stubborn, prideful little thing (some things don't change much), and I wasn't about to let them see how petrified I was, so I just stood there willing myself into stillness.
The other little girls screamed and ran away.

I discovered, not long after that, a surprising advantage to stubborn pride: The boys never shook another spider in my face again. They did, however, do it as often as they could to the screaming, running girls.

I tell this story because after Bible study tonight, I told it to the woman who came to the study in tears over being suddenly separated from her husband, who is delighting in emotionally tormenting her. Another woman's suggestion that the wife should thank her husband for helping her out reminded me of my long-forgotten trauma and its lesson.

Her husband wants to shake up the foundations of her life like the earthquake in Haiti, but if she doesn't let him see any rubble, he loses his satisfaction.

Tonight our Bible study group was at its finest. We didn't get through any of the lesson book (Max Lucado's Fearless), but we shared our fears and helped each other, especially this wife whose life feels shattered. She found a safe outlet for her tears, and she received comfort and encouragement and laughter. Most of all, she and the rest of us got a glimpse of God, because He worked through us to wrap His arms around her and lift her up.

A little after I told her the first-grade spider story, I let her know that I'd gone through an unwanted divorce and that initially, every time I had to go to court, I lost something more of my time with my kids. It seemed to help her to know that someone else had been down a similar road before.

When I was married, the last house we lived in together was surrounded by hedges, and when we separated I felt alone and unprotected in my new place. I would pray that God would put a hedge of protection around the house to keep any bad guys away. And in addition to that, I remembered stories told by missionaries from the deepest, darkest, primitive places, places that had little knowledge of God. The stories would go that the pagan villagers got angry and tried to attack the missionaries at night, but then they'd leave. And later on, maybe months or years later, the villagers would ask who were the strong men that guarded the missionaries' home that night. But there were no strong men, only the mighty angels of God. So I would ask God to post His angels around the hedges around my house, just to make sure my children and I would be safe. My prayers eased my fears enough that I could sleep.

A couple of the people in our Bible study told the wife, when she was still in tears, that God would later use her situation for a purpose. It can be hard to see how that's possible when you're standing in the middle of trauma. But the spider boys and the hedges visibly helped her, and by doing so, they showed me a renewed purpose outside of myself for what I went through in the past.

Tonight was a vivid reminder for me that we are the hands and feet and hugging arms of God, and He chooses to work His will through us and not just around us--if we let Him and are willing to open ourselves up to His leading.

America Rising

I found this over at Power Line.

I didn't vote for Obama. I voted for a stinkin' loser, just to try to keep Obama from getting elected. Alas, it wasn't enough. But there were plenty of true believers in The One and the message he brought to our nation: Hope. Change. Transparency. Bi-partisan amiability.

And how do some of those true believers feel now?

(Update: Power Line says it looks like liberals are trying to drive this video off the web. This link works for now)

Invictus

I saw Invictus with some friends yesterday, and I loved it. My roommate was bored and took a nap. If I didn't have any background on South Africa and its apartheid policies, beyond what most Americans know, I might not have been as enthralled as I was.

When the movie was over, I asked the friends (there were five of us), to wait for a few minutes afterward, so I could tell them about South Africa before we went home. This is what I told them:

In 1983, when my then-husband and I were on a four-month bicycle trip through Europe, we stayed a few nights at a youth hostel in Interlaken, Switzerland. One morning I sat in on a conversation in the women's dorm, with a Coloured woman from South Africa who had left that country and was traveling the world in search of a place she'd be able to call home. I mentioned a story she told, here.

She said the South African government had just begun relaxing some of the apartheid rules, and it was now legal for whites and non-whites to attend the same parties together, at the same time. Interracial marriages were still illegal, and I can't remember whether she said it was legal or illegal for interracial dancing. But it was a change, however small.

She explained the pecking order of the races in South Africa. Imagine a measuring stick as high as you can lift your arm. At the top were the Whites--those people who had all white blood and nothing else. At about waist height was where the Coloureds were--those non-White people who had some white blood, as though any measure of Whiteness was enough to elevate a person to a noticeable level of status.

About an inch from the ground was where the Asians were--primarily those people from the Indian subcontinent. And on the ground were the Blacks.

The educational system reflected this four-tiered status of the races. Whites had good education, with all of their tuition, books, uniforms, and transportation provided free of charge. Coloureds had to pay for their books, but the rest was provided. Asians had to pay for all but one thing (I don't remember which thing she said), and Blacks had to pay for all of it, including transportation from the townships to the schools. With Blacks making very little income per day, and the cost of trains to school taking up a huge portion of that income, very few Blacks were able to send their children to school. So Black poverty was reinforced generation after generation.

In addition to the educational disadvantage, non-Whites were segregated from Whites. Separate "homelands" were established for the Blacks to live in, or for those who had work where White were, there were townships, like Soweto, where they could live. Non-Whites, no matter how wealthy they were, could not live in White areas.

Considering the anger and resentment seething among Blacks, who bore the biggest brunt of apartheid policies and wanted revenge after decades of oppression, this Coloured woman could not see how apartheid could possibly end without violence. Whites feared for their lives if they were to ever overturn apartheid.

(This part I told to my roommate when we were driving home:)

When I was a sophomore in high school, we had to read Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country in English class. It's not a fast-paced book, so most of the students hated it. As far as I know, I was the only one who loved it. The book had a slower pace that I adjusted to, the way a New Yorker who loves the high energy of the city has to adjust to the tropical pace of the Caribbean when he goes on vacation. Paton's book is the story of a Black father's search for his son during the apartheid era of the 1950s, and one or two passages especially stirred my soul.

Later, probably in the winter of 1974, I used the soul-stirring parts of this book as the the main text of the speech I gave (over and over) when I was on the Speech Team in high school. I wish the written word could convey the passion I feel when I recite what I still remember of that speech.

Here is what I remember. I'm not going to look it up, and I apologize to Alan Paton and to lovers of this book if I've left out a line or two or mixed up some of the words, but this sums up the emotional world of South Africa during that time when Blacks were separated and oppressed:

... We shall knock this off our lives and that off our lives and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they will be the lives of superior beings. And we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown.

Cry, the Beloved Country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire.

Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all, if he gives too much.

Which brings me to Invictus.

I was reluctant to see the movie, because Nelson Mandela's political party, the African National Congress (ANC) is a socialist party, aligned with an African communist party. I was afraid I'd be spending my movie money on a propaganda piece. But all these friends were going, and so I went as well.

The only propaganda Invictus spread was in favor of forgiveness and reconciliation. If the film is even halfway accurate, then Nelson Mandela was used by God to work a miracle in 40 million hearts. Mandela started with his own staff, whose desire for revenge was a palpable force in the film. By adding Whites in among his longtime staff members, he sought to lead by example.

Throughout the movie, I was impressed by Mandela, about whom I'd been skeptical before this weekend. By the force of his personality and by his popularity among the Blacks, Mandela single-handedly prevented the violence that the Coloured woman I spoke to had foreseen. And through the course of his presidency, he helped to alleviate the fears of the Whites. The story is told in the context of the country's predominantly White rugby team.

For me the film filled in the post-1983 gap in my understanding of South Africa's race relations, and it left me so much more impressed by Nelson Mandela than I have ever been. I recommend this movie, and I hope that I've given enough background so that you can appreciate more fully just what a victory Mandela won for his beloved country.

Fitness

Picture source: GamingUnion.net

My roommate got the Wii FitPlus for us for Christmas, and this is one of my favorite fitness games to do on it. It's the Obstacle Course.

My Mii isn't blonde like this lady's is. Mine has short, dark brown hair and wears a purple dress. My roommate's Mii wears blue and has glasses. When we're not actually working out, the Wii FitPlus tracks our weight and BMI. So far, our trends are downward.

The boxing game needs you to hold the controler with the nunchuck plugged into it, but for some reason, it doesn't record my left jabs very well, so I've given up playing that game/workout for now.

The hula hoop game, in the aerobics section, gives a good workout for the midsection, and I like to do it twice: once circling to the left and once to the right (which feels wrong, but I make myself do it anyway). When I was a kid, I was the best hula hooper in the family, but after puberty struck and changed the geometry of my body, I couldn't keep a hula hoop spinning to save my life. Now, using the Wii, I'm back in business and kicking virtual butt with it.

The ski jumping game is fun, but it's not much of a workout, because it's designed to help you improve your balance. You crouch down and lean forward as your Mii slides down the ski run, and then at just the right time, you straighten your knees and try to keep from falling over while you soar through the air and then come down for a landing. Of course, if you miscalculate and lose your balance, your Mii takes a tumble, becoming a rolling snowball and you don't get a score for that jump. I benefited from beginner's luck the first couple days, but now I can't seem to get the long jumps anymore.

They warn you, before the ski jumping game and the tightrope walking game and the obstacle course (and probably some others) that you are NOT, under ANY circumstance, to jump up off the board. You must keep your feet down and just straighten your legs in a simulation of a jump, and the game will have your Mii do the jumping for you. That's good in theory, and I can manage it pretty well on most of the games. But the obstacle course has proven to be a challenge.

You run in place on the board, and your Mii runs down the course. Pause when you get to the swinging demolition balls, or they'll knock you into the ocean and you'll have to start at the beginning of that level again. On level 3 of the beginner course, they not only have gaps to jump over (or risk falling into the ocean) like on level 2, but there are rolling logs that have to be jumped as well. Those logs have become my nemesis.

I can handle the logs that roll toward Mii just fine (most of the time, but sometimes I get flattened). It's the ones that roll from the left or right that have caused me to lose control. I wait for the current log to roll by, then pitty-pat my way as fast as I can before the next log drops and starts rolling. The adrenaline starts to flow, and then the next thing I know, the game stops, a warning message pops up telling me that I am definitely NOT to jump on the board, and it makes me start over AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LOWEST LEVEL OF THE COURSE. Stupid logs!

But tonight, after getting sent back to the beginning in shame one time, I managed to clear all the logs with my feet firmly on the board, and I made it to the end of the course with about 5 seconds to spare. Score!

For the first time in eons, I actually WANT to come home and do my workout. The Wii FitPlus is the best game I (n)ever bought.

Year End

I've been thinking about how I ought to start thinking about maybe doing a year end recap. But at this rate, it looks like the year is just going to end before I'm even ready.

The nerve!

Merry Christmas

I found this video at Hugh Hewitt's blog. It's a different rendition of one of my favorite Christmas songs.



May the Lord God made flesh be your Light and your Salvation now and forever.

Obama Approval

It's time for a thousand words. Or, rather for two thousand.

Rasmussen Reports has today's Obama Approval Index, now at an all-time low of -21. That's the percent of likely voters who strongly approve minus the percent who strongly disapprove.

Why is this man smiling?


President Obama's overall approval ratings are falling farther than the temperatures in Washington DC.


Maybe if he stopped trying to take over health care (and GM and the banks and the climate...), his approval might start improving.

Maybe.

Surprises

I went to Costco tonight after work, because I needed to pick up just one item that I always buy there. After I walked in, I thought, "What are you doing??? It's not going to be worth waiting in Costco-at-Christmas lines just to buy some cheese!" But this thought came at exactly the time when I could see past all the entryway promotional stuff over to the cash registers. The lines were SHORT, so I stayed.

I said hi to the high school friend of my daughter's who works at Costco and who I haven't seen there in months, but I didn't linger for fear that all the other shoppers would beat me to the registers. Instead, I made a bee-line for that room in the back where they keep the fruit and lettuce, the room that's about a hundred thousand degrees below zero and even a parka isn't enough to keep you warm while you look at the grapes.

Before I got there, though, when I was near the high-density food sample area, I saw a familiar face. It was HIM, the guy who broke my heart a couple years after my divorce. But before he did that, he helped me remember what romance feels like. All that stuff I said in my Romance post about what you miss if you take things too fast, that's what I went through when I dated this guy. It was wonderful.

And then it hurt like hell, even though I didn't love him. But I got over him a long time ago, and I haven't seen him at all for a couple years.

Tonight at Costco when I saw him, there were no stomach flips or any sudden pounding of my heart. I simply recognized him and realized that, yeah, he's still around. He's still as tall and good-looking as ever, but I glanced at his hand and saw that he's married now. After all the other women with broken hearts after mine, he finally picked someone and settled down. Naturally, I kept my eyes open to see who she was.

I didn't know her, assuming his wife is the woman whose back he touched. She's unattractive and looks older than he does, with mousey brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, and frumpy clothes that Stacy and Clinton would definitely not approve of.

He could have had a beauty, with his looks, and his third broken heart (counting mine) belonged to an adorable woman with an incredible personality and joie de vivre. But he didn't want her either. Instead, he seems to have settled, and that's a little sad.

There was one night when we were dating when he took me to a dance at somebody's house, and I could tell he was head-over-heels about me (I was the same way about him), but the next time we went out, he started backing off. I always had the impression after that that he was afraid to let himself feel too much about a woman, for fear that she'd leave him devastated the way his first wife had. And he seemed to repeat that closeness followed by break-up over and over. Now it looks like he found someone who he doesn't have to worry that she'll be stolen away from him.

Life is too short to make all your decisions based on fear. That's not living, that's just existing, and if that's the case for him, it's his loss.

I walked tall and pushed my cart toward the ice-box room without saying anything to him, and he didn't say anything to me either.

The grapes looked lousy, so I went over and got my cheese and headed for the checkout stands, where there was NO LINE AT ALL!

Some days give you a big surprise. Today gave me two.

Changing Back Again

There are times in life that you don't realize things have changed, until they change back again.

One of those times for me was when I found a glucosamine product that tasted good. Officially, I have arthritis, but it wasn't until a couple years ago that it started bothering me any. After I started taking this glucosamine, I didn't really notice a difference in the ache of my hip - until I ran out of it and the product was back-ordered for two weeks. That's when I realized that my left hip joint was hurting again. I had been taking the glucosamine out of habit and because I liked the flavor. Now I make sure to always keep enough on hand in case of any more back-orders.

A similar changed happened recently, only it wasn't about a product.

I've had my job at the health clinic for almost 3 months now. I like my boss, I enjoy my work, and I'm getting the notion that they just might keep me after my probation is up next month.

What changed is that I've started singing to myself again. Nothing loudly enough for other people at work to have said anything to me about it. I do most of my singing in the car, or I'll catch myself doing it softly while I carry my tea back to my desk from the breakroom.

I don't know when I stopped singing. I used to do it at my last job, before the trip with my mom, and I continued through the trip and after I got home. I think it must have stopped when I started getting seriously low on money and had my house for sale and nothing was happening with the house sale or the job hunt. The stress must have crowded out the music.

Now that I'm working and my house has sold and there's money in the bank, I'm finally able to breathe again. And breathing allows for singing.

I first caught myself singing the chorus of Toby Mac's City on Our Knees, my latest favorite song on the Christian radio station. But with all the Spanish speaking going on at work, I'm back to ¿Con Que Pagaremos?, which I mentioned before, and even with the last remains of the cold I've had, I can hit the notes, and it sounds pretty darn good even if God and I are the only ones who hear it in my car.

And after church today, after singing Christmas carols, I'm thinking it's time for me to refresh my memory again for the traditional carols in French. I wouldn't want all that effort back in junior high school to go to waste at this point in my life.

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it yet again: Life is good. It's even better with a song.

Toothpaste

I was getting ready for work this morning, and as I always do, I brushed my teeth. And then I remembered that I should take some cough syrup before I left, except it was already time to leave.

There are certain things that really should not be consumed when the taste of toothpaste is still in your mouth. Cough syrup is near the top of the list.

Did I do it? Yes. I have a cold, and I need to do what I can to prevent bronchitis from settling in (I'm also keeping up with my 12-hour Sudafed to protect the sinuses). But of course, the distaste of the toothpaste/cough syrup combination got me to thinking about lists, namely the What Goes Bad With Toothpaste list. Unfortunately, my list is pitifully short right now:

What Goes Bad With Toothpaste

Cough syrup.

Milk.

Orange juice.

Grapes.

Umm... That's all I can think of. Did you notice how I spaced them out so the list looks bigger?

So, help me out. PLEASE! What do I need to add?

December Calendar Photos

At long last we come to the end of the calendar photo year.

The family photos for December are from Yellowstone National Park (here and here), during my trip with my mom. The blue one is a thermal spring near the Fountain Paint Pots. The bison are near Yellowstone Lake, and the third one is one of the many mineral springs at Mammoth Hot Springs.


My patterns calendar has a picture I took at a shop in Amish Country in Lancaster, Pennsylvania while we were on our trip. I love taking pictures of stuff for sale.


And that wraps up the SkyePuppy Calendar Year.

Dr. Senator Coburn Discusses Health Care Bill

I found this video over at Hugh Hewitt's blog, where his producer, "Generalissimo" Duane Patterson posted it today. At almost 19 minutes long, it's a sobering look at what's coming if the Democrats can get their monstrosity of a health care bill passed.