My husband received the 2009 Republican Party Census Document in the mail the other day.  I thought I might fill it out to let them know what we think.  Sadly, I quickly realized that all the questions were worded so as to elicit Yes answers, and all of them pertained to some imaginary form of the Republican Party that is nothing like the one that actually exists right now.  Such as this gem:

• Yes, I support the RNC and am enclosing my most generous contribution of $500, $250, $100, $50, $35, $25
• Yes, I support the RNC, but I am unable to participate at this time.  However, I have enclosed $12 to cover the cost of tabulating my survey.
• No, I favor electing liberal Democrats over the next ten years.

Posted by: Sarah at 01:35 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 So, I'm not really sure where you stand on this, Sarah... *snort*

I agree totally.  On the same wasting money tangent - Air Force Guy sends back all unsolicited credit card applications with trash in them.  As heavy as he can make them, since they're all pre-paid envelopes.  Someday they'll stop sending that crap out.

That stupid survey wasn't to actually GET opinions, it was a psychological ploy to make people think they're opinions are valued and matter and to make people have the feeling they are contributing to the national direction.  The Democrats do it, too - I got tons of obnoxious "surveys" soliciting money because of my party registration before we moved out of CA.

Did they send a prepaid envelope with it?  I would totally print out your blog post and send it back to them with the notation that they don't NEED false stupid survey money begging - they should actually ask for people's opinions. 

Probably won't do anything, but it might make you feel better.

Posted by: airforcewife at June 07, 2009 02:54 PM (NqbuI)

2 YOU should run for office.  If you were on a ticket, I'd vote for you and I'm NOT a Republican.    Seriously though, you understand what the Republican party is supposed to be and you fiercely protect that.  That's so much more than what I see from most Replublicans and the politicians that are supposed to be representing them. 

Posted by: Val at June 07, 2009 04:54 PM (5btL/)

3 It's amazing how reliant some organizations and businesses are on tiny response rates. How many Republicans fill out junk like this - and mail it back? How many people buy the junk being sold by spam?

Your key line is:

"If you design a survey with the intent of obtaining all Yes answers, you probably aren't very serious about really checking the pulse of your constituents."

They want you to tell them they're OK.  But they're not. And they'll keep doing whatever they want anyway. And call it "right-wing" and "conservative".

Notice the use of vague words like "left-wing" and "liberal". I doubt the survey allowed you to define them from context. From my perspective, the Republicans are becoming increasingly left-leaning liberals. By not defining these terms, they hope the respondent will assume that the Republicans are the 'good guys' fighting against a vague yet menacing enemy whose details are left to the imagination - it's as eeeevil as you want it to be.

I plead guilty to having used such vague terms myself, but I think you and I at least agree on what they mean for us. I don't think the RNC thinks of themselves as "left-wing" and "liberal". They define themselves as The Other. We're Not Them. I'm Not Obama. That is not an attractive message, as McCain should have learned (but probably didn't). It's a defeatist message. It lets the enemy define you. It reeks of weakness.

This whole letter is one long expensive confession of weakness. Help us! Reassure us!

But you won't.

I have never been a Republican and I certainly am not going to sign up now. Their opposition has been pathetic. The presidential election was embarrassing.

And I think the party will only become more self-destructive over time. I'm no insider - I barely can stand to glance at them at all - but I suspect they think they failed because they weren't cool enough. Not Obama enough. They want to be duh-lightfully D-lite and expect you to express your approval of this new duh-rection with your money. When the money - and the votes - stop coming in, when more people like us refuse to support their travesty, while the Original D take over, the Meghan McCains will think they need to move even more leftward and drive the party straight over the cliff.

I don't see any happy ending.

The American people don't want "to keep their own money, suck it up, and take care of their damn selves." The Omerican peOple want the gOvernment to take care of them. This includes the so-called Republicans, moderates, and even libertarians who cOnverted during the last election. Even non-cOnverts haven't thought out the issues the way you have. How many Republicans vote out of habit instead of - it's soooo hard! - thought?

This survey is crafted for the reflex Republicans, the mindless who will vote for anyone bearing the sacred letter, regardless of what it stands for, bailouts, amnesty, whatever.  They are only capable of instinctively reacting to icons. To them, the R is all that matters.

But it is ideas, not mere labels, that really matter. How do we sell our ideas to a complacent, poorly educated populace including reflex Republicans? Are they willing to listen? Can they even understand us?  When they get back Air Force Guy's stuffed envelopes, do they even know what that means?

The only language their superiors understand is money and power, and I'm not giving it to them. No payments, no votes, nada.  Just opening their envelopes makes me feel like I'm wasting my time.

I've seen bloggers like you, commenters, so-called ordinary people, blow away these alleged superiors in terms of both intellect and knowledge. Those in power are so often those who least deserve it.

We can't expect a McCain to become whatever we want him to be. What is he going to do, rely on printouts of TTG to keep him straight? No, he's just going to remain a D-lite-fool maverick.

Since those in power do not and will not stand for us, I see only two ways out. Either we take power ourselves or leave the system. Like Val, I would love to vote for you. Move over, Palin, this Sarah is the real deal. I have met you. You have the charisma to win people over. More importantly, you have the ideas, the ability to think, the desire to grok. Alas, all that is lost on our people. Some of them might even confuse you with Palin! I am ashamed of Omerica, this thing our nation has become. The gulch looks more attractive all the time. Yet it too is not realistic.

What are we going to do?

What if Un-Liberaled Woman is right? What if Mike Judge really is our generation's Nostradamus?

Will we just have to sit back and laugh like Judge's earlier creations Beavis and Butt-Head?

Will those who say "uh-uh" to both Republicans and Democrats today be saying "huh-huh" someday? 

Posted by: Amritas at June 07, 2009 10:20 PM (b3Ptv)

4 When I get one of these pieces of tripe, I fill it out in red pen, adding in my own answers, instead of the "toe the party line answers."

Any questions that piss me off get special consideration--like anything on immigration, gets the response of "your last candidate for president was a fucktard when it comes to immigration.  Borders exist for a reason, and if your candidate isn't willing to enforce them, I won't vote for him."

2nd amendment-- "If your candidate can show me one instance, just one, in all of human history, where limiting access to handheld weapons has made the population safer, I'll vote for him.  Otherwise, he should be running on a platform of repealing all gun "control" legislation."

Healthcare--"It's not a right to have healthcare provided by the government.  Show me where it says that in the constittution, or take the correct stand on it--all people have a right to emergency, lifesaving healthcare.  They also have a right to pay for it, and the free market has produced the greatest healthcare system in the world, and screwing with that is ridiculous.  If they want free healthcare, they can join the military."

Then, when the begging starts, I write, with big bold letters on the donation form--"Since I turned 18 and my opinion mattered, I've voted along republican party lines, for the most part.  However, I'll not give youany of the money I  earn  until you actually put forth candidates who are truly conservative and understand the role of government the framers intended.  Stop trying to be "democrate lite" and start acting like conservatives.  Clean house and drop those who are supposedly republican, but vote according to popularity polls.  (John McCain, for instance.)  Start taking a hard line on who you support for office, and clean house within the party, evicting those with questionable voting records and even more questionable morals.  Until then, you won't see a goddamn dime from my wallet."

Then I sign my name and give contact information if they want to discuss issues with me.

So far, /crickets/.

They apparently don't need my money that badly.

Posted by: Charles Ziegenfuss at June 08, 2009 10:39 AM (meX2d)

5 As a direct mail professional, let me assure you that this isn't a real survey, it is a fundraising piece. The survey is the hook to get people involved. It isn't about gathering data, it's about gathering donations. You took it seriously (as they hoped you would) but then it made you angry, understandably.
It was never intended to be any kind of serious survey.

Posted by: Amy at June 08, 2009 12:44 PM (9fDOS)

6

I get about 50 pieces of political direct mail a week, and most of it is just awful. Lots of sleazy fake surveys like the one you're writing about. Also lots of envelopes with 15-digit "official" sequence numbers on them, trying to make it look like it's some kind of big deal. (This was also a favorite of low-life mortgage brokers.) The message from direct mail like this, of course, is "we think you (our prospective customer/voter/contributor) are an easily-manipulated moron."

I think every industry forever bears the stamp of the era of its greatest success and growth, and in the eyes of most direct mail people (maybe Amy is an exception), it's always the 1950s, or rather some 1950s stereotype in which all the prospects are yokels, easily taken advantage of by the slick operators from the big city.

 

Posted by: david foster at June 08, 2009 03:53 PM (SpkYG)

7 I don't do THAT kind of direct mail, more like official correspondence from companies, statements, things like that, along with other types of print/marketing materials. Nothing political for me. But I am aware from industry publications and the like that this is a predictable way to get people to open the piece, read it, get drawn in to answering the 'questions' and then hopefully donate.
It's definitely hokey, as are the pieces where key sentences are underlined, like the sender actually took your letter and individually emphasized key parts. Or how about the ones that look like a page torn out of a newspaper with a post it attached?
All kinds of tricks exist. What I also find interesting is that this whole direct mail approach has now moved over into the online world and they are trying to use a whole bag of tricks to get you to open emails, click on banner ads, follow links, etc.

Posted by: Amy at June 08, 2009 07:15 PM (9fDOS)

8 Sarah!  You're my new best friend! errr. wait.  maybe that's old best friend.  Anyway, the Republican party has a total inability to produce a piece of mail or information without pissing off a giant bulk of the intended audience.  I'm not quiet about that fact, and I don't think that it's inherent to the GOP.  But, when you're freaking not in control of the presidency or congress, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, one would think you'd find some better marketers. 

You want my vote? my money? my time? quit freaking spending *any* time on these pointless pieces of crap.  Did someone have a deadline and had to get something in the mail and this was the best they could do?  Seriously? It's insulting. 

Run for office.  Or don't, really - why would you want that?  Be the man behind the man and let's change these idots who think they can keep pulling the same crud again and again.  I'm forwarding your post to my congressmen.  And to the people who've suddenly placed me on their rediculous email campaign.  I'll likely get a crap form-letter response, but hey, it's worth a shot. 

Posted by: Lane at June 08, 2009 10:34 PM (5Uhc4)

9 Groan!

Posted by: Lucy at June 11, 2009 12:07 AM (0nTD7)

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Need a belly laugh? Read the comments here: Heartbroken cereal litigant loses suit over non-existence of "Crunchberries."  (via CG)

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A bit more oversharing and more stuff that will make me look depressed.  And then I'll go back to working on my long Afghanistan post.

Yesterday morning, I remembered what deployment feels like.

My husband is again gone for training, his last week of it before he deploys.  And as I spent my fourth day without him, I remembered how bad it sucks.  I miss him too much this week, and it's a pain I had quickly forgotten after he returned in December.

I'm not really ready to let him leave again.

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Mary Katharine Ham wrote an article about oversharing online.  Guilty as charged.  The thoughts in my previous post were weeks in the making, but they prompted people to check on me and make sure I'm not depressed.  For the record, I'm fine.  I am so burnt out on the whole issue that it mostly doesn't register as sadness anymore.  The fact that I have a baby stroller, a dresser full of baby and maternity clothes, and a even most of a nursery set up, complete with crib filled with handmade stuffed animals, is no longer sad to me; it's just absurd.  It's so ludicrous I can't begin to be sad over it anymore.  It makes me laugh.  When we go to sell our house, that spare bedroom will be a nursery whether we have a baby or not.  I don't care who you are, that's funny.

So really, I'm not even thinking about this anymore.  The IVF is less concrete than the dentist visit I have scheduled for September.  I don't want to do it, so I have pushed it out of my mind.  I haven't even called the doctor back in over a week.  Don't care.  I'm done thinking about it.

But I still like laughing at the Johnny Jump Up in my garage.

Posted by: Sarah at 06:26 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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CaliValleyBoy's first birthday is this weekend, and it's a sad reminder of my own fate.  If our first baby had lived, that baby would also be celebrating a first birthday soon.  I imagine we would already be thinking about trying for Baby #2 in that alternate reality.

We would have a one-year-old child instead of a vial of frozen sperm and a prayer.

Yesterday I stumbled across the first post I wrote about preparing for baby:

Posted by: Sarah at 08:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Testing...
All my posts from today disappeared.
Plus a long draft.
Yuck.

UPDATE: Pixy fixed it.

Posted by: Sarah at 03:48 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Oh no!  I have a list of headings and little snippets from your posts in my reader, but it's sad to see them all gone!

Is mu.nu trying to tell you something?

Posted by: Deltasierra at June 03, 2009 04:12 PM (ofEjY)

2 Deltasierra,

Please save whatever you have of the lost posts and send it to Sarah.

I wanted to comment on them and by the time I was ready to do so, they were gone.

I'm hoping they'll be back.

At least this didn't happen on July 1st. A whole month ... gone ....

Posted by: Amritas at June 03, 2009 04:43 PM (+nV09)

3 Yay for Pixy fixes!

Posted by: Deltasierra at June 04, 2009 09:37 AM (ekWzF)

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(via CG) Jonah Goldberg:

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One of my great pleasures of blogging is knowing that there are a few of you out there who read Atlas Shrugged because of me.  For those of you who haven't gotten around to it yet (and there's one in particular, and you know who you are...ahem), may you find your motivation here: Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load

The hard-money monologue of Rand’s copper king, Francisco d’Anconia, used to sound weird. Who even thought about gold in the early 1990s? Now, D’Anconia’s lecture on the unreliable dollar sounds like it could have been scripted by Zhou Xiaochuan, or some other furious Chinese central banker:

“Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

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I can't believe you've been gone for four years.  I miss your presence and voice on the internet as much now as I did the first day.

Mike Reed, Bunker Mulligan, one of my first and favorite imaginary friends...

I miss you.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:19 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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(via CG)  Megan McArdle wrote A Really Long Post About Abortion and Reasoning By Historical Analogy That is Going to Make Virtually All of My Readers Very Angry At Me.  But she was wrong: not only did it not make me angry, I thought it was the most interesting thing I've read about abortion in a long time.

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I have a friend who voted for McCain and loved Palin...but who now is thrilled with Obama and would vote for him in 2012.  And this friend wants me to be open-minded about considering voting for him too.

I'd love to dismiss this as the passing fancy of a politically unserious person, but I just can't seem to stop thinking about it.  Every time I am confronted with the badness of Pres Obama, I have this urge to point it out to my friend as one more reason why things are far worse than I can stomach.  Such as this graph from Cass' post:



I can't seem to let it go that this friend doesn't see the badness of Obama.  CaliValleyGirl pointed out to me that now she understands how people felt about Pres Bush.  How it feels to think your president is a buffoon who has no idea what he's gotten himself into.

In contrast to the Bush haters though, I don't think Pres Obama is evil.  I just think he wants to live in a USA that looks nothing like the USA I want to live in.  But he has the power now to get his way and I don't.  I feel impotent as so many enormous changes are altering my country forever.  I am aghast, and I am even more aghast that there are people who are not aghast.

And as much as I feel like bombarding my friend with email after email of all the horrifying things Pres Obama is doing, I don't.  As Lawrence Auster said, "the badness of what Obama is doing, and the amount of it, and the complexity of it, is overwhelming and I frankly find it hard to take it in and form a view of it."

All I can do is politely tell my friend that, no, there is zero chance of me voting for Obama in 2012.

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I am very late in bringing this up, but I still wanted to say it.  During the last episode of 24, they finally catch the bad guy and realize that there is no evidence to charge him with and that he will probably get away with all of his bad deeds.  One FBI agent wants revenge and turns to Jack Bauer for advice.  He says the following, which I think the writers of 24 did a beautiful job with:

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Today's must-read on granting the premise from Cassandra:
Staying on Message: Conservatives Should Play Offense, not Defense

(via WifeUnit, who leaned over to me and said I should read this.  I love that I have an in-person hat tip!)

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Here are my short reviews for the next ten books I read for my George Bush 2009 Reading Challenge.  I got way behind on my reading when my mother visited, so I will really have to hustle later.  At this point, I am barely on track to beat Bush and clearly not able to beat Rove, but once my husband deploys, I think I can pick up the slack.  Previous books are included at the bottom.

MAY

20) How To Break a Terrorist  ("Matthew Alexander")
Meh.  That's really all I have to say about this book.

19) State of the Union  (Brad Thor)
AirForceWife introduced me to Brad Thor, and I mean that both figuratively and literally.  She and I went to his book signing, and since she already knew him from her SpouseBUZZ Radio interview, she and ol' Brad were like BFF.  I think he's in her five.  Anyway, my true desire is to read The Last Patriot, but I decided not to start at the end of the series, so I began at the beginning.  This was book three, which was as action-packed as the previous two, so now it's three more books until I can get to all the fatwa-goodness of The Last Patriot!

18) The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
This book had been on the card for a long time, but David Boxenhorn finally prompted me to read it.  I found many fascinating new ways of looking at success.  The more statistics-heavy parts of the book were a tad rougher for me to grasp: seeing as I don't measure anything in my own daily life against the Gaussian bell curve, I had a hard time truly grokking the superiority of the Mandelbrotian.  But the first half of the book was definitely worth reading.  Although the implication -- that success is quite often due to dumb luck -- is disquieting.

17) Bonk (Mary Roach)
I have read several books in the past two years about sex and fertility in the hopes of learning something new that would give me one more piece of the puzzle as to why things weren't working out for us.  I thought this was just another book like the others I'd read, but it completely wasn't.  I loved this book.  It reminded me of Assassination Vacation (without the Bush derangement) or a Bill Bryson book, only about the history of sex.  It was laugh-out-loud funny in places.  If you like Bill Bryson, you'd like this book.

APRIL

16) Hard Green (Peter Huber)
This book contained some good examples of why the "green" movement isn't actually that much greener.  I will have to use some of them on my eco-friend.

15) Is Your Body Baby Friendly? (Alan E. Beer)
I started this right after the third miscarriage; it was a gift from CVG.  It freaked me out pretty bad: it's a book about the theory that most miscarriages are caused by your immune system, and since my mother has Lupus, I was convinced that this was my problem.  Turns out it wasn't, but the book was informative and worthwhile nonetheless.

MARCH

14) Survivor (Chuck Palahniuk)
I had heard that this book wasn't as good as his others, but I still liked it just as well.  (But I like everything: the third Matrix movie, The Lady In The Water, etc.  I am pretty easy to please is something is sufficiently weird.)  And I always love how Palahniuk describes minutia so vividly in the middle of big action, like the porn titles while Tender fights his brother or the details of the mobile homes while they're on the run.  He's so good at that.

13) I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell (Tucker Max)
This book had some funny moments, but I seriously think I am too old for it.  I am sure I would've thought it was funnier ten years ago.  And for me, the best parts were the parts where Tucker got his comeuppance.

12) Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Arthur Herman)
I really knew very little about the details of what happened concerning Joseph McCarthy.  What I learned from this book was that "fake but accurate" didn't start with Bush's National Guard records.  The press lied and distorted everything he said and all the charges against him.  McCarthy was a blowhard and probably a very annoying man to be around.  But his accusations were never as sensational as they were made out to be, no one ever lost his job or went to jail based on McCarthy's investigations, and above all, he was mostly right.  The government was far too lax in its hiring and vetting processes.  There were Communists everywhere, hardcore and "soft."  McCarthy didn't deserve the bum rap he's been dealt by history.

11) The Reader (Bernhard Schlink)
For whatever reason, I thought this book was just kinda meh. I also have no idea how they turned it into a movie. And, despite the fact that I love the book Lolita, I found the story abhorrent and chilling. So, hmm.

Previous post: Books 1-10

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1 Better get a move on with Brad's books! His newest comes out June 30th. MacGyver's getting it for me for my birthday.

I'll have to update my list too. I"m reading...I'm just not updating. Whoops!

Posted by: HomefrontSix at May 30, 2009 03:57 AM (7Qxzl)

2 Well, Brad Thor is not in my five - but it's because he wasn't wearing socks at his book signing.  I mean, really.  For some reason that really got to me. 

I wouldn't even give How to Break a Terrorist a "meh", though.

Posted by: airforcewife at May 30, 2009 07:47 AM (KBeca)

3 True, true.  I probably ought to have said "gag" instead of "meh."

Posted by: Sarah at May 30, 2009 08:16 AM (KBeca)

4 Sarah,

What does "in one's five" mean? (AFW could also answer this one.)

"[F]atwa-goodness"? Two words that I wouldn't put together. Do you have an ... alternative value system I don't know about?

The Black Swan wasn't so much "disquieting" for me as eye-opening. For years I couldn't figure out why people succeeded in spite of their obvious faults. And I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I wanted the world to be a simple realm of obvious cause-and-effect chains, even though I always said the world was a complex place. The answer was so obvious. The world really is complex. I just didn't want to believe it. There are so many factors that outcomes only look random to us. And as the world becomes even more complicated, the apparent randomness is only going to skyrocket. Understanding that almost makes up for the sadness of knowing that you can do you everything right and still fail. Almost.

Posted by: Amritas at May 30, 2009 09:26 AM (b3Ptv)

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This week has been so busy, and I've barely been online at all.  I have no idea what's been going on in the world.  Did we pass the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog legislation yet?

I'm off again today to Hill Air Force Base in Utah for another SpouseBUZZ Live event.  It's another gulch convention, and I'm happy.

The lame part is that I return Sunday evening, while my husband leaves Sunday morning for another week of training.  We said goodbye today until the following Saturday.  It's his last week of pre-deployment training.  Shortly thereafter, we go on block leave, and pretty soon the next round of deployment starts.

I am slowly figuring out the whole IVF/PGD issue.  In a nutshell, my doctor told me too look into "probes."  He said to call the IVF clinic and they could explain it.  I called and they had no idea what he was talking about.  Typical, right?  The genetic counselor called and when I asked her what he meant, she just laughed.  She said, "Sure, I know what that means, but why on earth did your doctor to tell you to figure this out?  Isn't that his job?"  Sigh.  But I am finally figuring this out and trying to get our ducks in a row.

I know my problems don't amount to a hill of beans, but as Frank Drebin says, it's my hill and these are my beans.

And now AirForceWife is in my living room and I need to get moving to the airport!

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I asked Amritas to write a guest post about his weekend visit.  He came through in spades, but trust me, we aren't nearly as cool as he makes us sound!  In fact, I feel like a d-bag putting such gushing about me on the front page, so click after the jump to read about our most recent blogger meet-up...
more...

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I realized my dream job yesterday.  The yarn section at my work just got renovated, so I was hanging new signs, project sheets, and yarn swatches.  Hanging in front of the yarn is a sample of knitting so that customers can test what the yarn looks and feels like, something like this:



I had the thought that someone has to make all these little 4"x4" samples.  How fun would that be?  Dream job.

(I realize they're probably made by machine.  Humor me here.)

I also realized that my dream job is decidedly NOT to take all those little squares and sew them together into a big blanket.

Last November, our store collected rectangles for Warm-Up America.  It was then my job to single crochet all 56 rectangles together.  It took me forever to find the motivation, but the final product is pretty neat.



But definitely not my dream job.  I'll make the squares all day long, but someone else can do the finishing.

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1 I realize they're probably made by machine.

The machines have taken your jerrrrb! Skynet knits!

I'd love to see all 56 rectangles in a single picture. Unfortunately, their textures wouldn't be distinguishable from a distance.

Posted by: Amritas at May 27, 2009 02:54 PM (+nV09)

2 Heck, I never realized they were machine-made, LOL... I always thought that'd be a fun/boring job, depending on the day, LOL!!! :-)  

Posted by: kannie at May 27, 2009 03:45 PM (5XpA4)

3 I think I would actually have more fun arranging the swatches and crocheting them together.  I tried making a blanket out of squares once, and got bored after about 4-5 squares.  Which I think is usually why I end up doing stripes of some sort.

Posted by: Leofwende at May 27, 2009 11:30 PM (28CBm)

4 That's beautiful!!!

Posted by: Allison at May 28, 2009 08:14 PM (kKR3v)

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There's a junky strip mall I always pass on my way to work.  There used to be a shop in it called Church Suits, a name that always made me smile.  It was a tiny shop, one of the only ones still left in that strip, and I noticed recently that they too had closed down.  I chalked it up to the economy and was saddened to think that I would no longer get to smile over the idea of Church Suits.

As I drove to work today, I was embiggened to see that Church Suits had not in fact closed; instead, it had expanded!  They had apparently bought the bigger store next door to theirs and tripled in size.

And they changed their name: Sunday Best Suits.  Still smile-worthy.

I don't think this story is a metaphor for economic upturn or anything.  It just makes me happy to know that if one so desired, one could still fulfill all his church suit needs here in town.

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On Saturday, we went to the local military museum and listened to a presentation given by Chester Biggs, a WWII POW of the Japanese.  The talk was very interesting, but I was disappointed that only a handful of people were there.  And the majority of the people in the room were his comrades.

You know who does not need to hear the story of a POW?  Other POWs.

At the end of his speech, after he had described four years in a POW camp as a PFC, someone asked him what he did after the war.  He said he reenlisted and then subsequently fought in Korea.  Later that night, my husband remarked that he was sure -- after hearing this apologetic man explain that he wasn't actually in WWII and had to learn about it later in history books -- that this man, a war prisoner, felt he hadn't done his fair share.

Mr. Biggs was one of the lucky ones to make it home...and allowed to collect his per diem of "$1 per day of imprisonment for failure to receive sufficient quantity and quality of food" under the War Claims Act.

Many of his comrades didn't make it home...

Today is a day to remember them.  And to realize that we need to take advantage of any opportunity we are afforded to gain perspective from someone like Mr. Biggs.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I wish I had made that caption up, but it actually came with the article Sobbing Kindergarteners Snubbed for Steelers?.  I got a screenshot because I thought it was too funny to be true.

Keep it up, Obama.  Keep making the people who voted for you mad.

Posted by: Sarah at 07:25 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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