February 01, 2009

BOOKS

I'm on track to beat Bush's 2008 and 2007 scores in my George Bush 2009 Reading Challenge: I've read four books in four weeks. I'm gonna make sure I keep up the pace, which I think will be easy once my husband starts leaving town all the time. Heck, maybe I could even beat Rove.

I have plenty of things on my bookshelves to keep me occupied, but I always enjoy asking people to recommend books. What are your favorites? Maybe I will add some of them to my list this year.

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January 31, 2009

BIPARTISAN

The first blogger my husband read was Matt Welch, waaay back in the day. Today Matt has a good post up that's kinda related to what irritated me yesterday. Money quote:

The other factor at play here, which Democratic ears seem unable to detect, is that Obama is skillfully turning the meaning of the word "bipartisan" into "the coalition that agrees with my magnanimous self."

Yep, disagree with Obama and you are destroying America and ruining democracy.

Hat tip to my husband, who runs in different blog circles than I do and always manages to find interesting stuff that I wouldn't happen upon. Also he is hot.

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UPDATE

Quick update...

I realized that I couldn't wait until Monday morning, because in order to be ready for the procedure on Tuesday, I have to give myself that trigger shot Sunday night. So I had to find out if the procedure was still a go-flight.

Luckily, my neighbor is friends with my fertility doctor's wife. She called their house and got me permission to call the doctor today. Otherwise I have no idea what I would've done.

He listened and said that it probably is just the hormone levels tricking my endometrium into doing goofy things. He said that as long as the bleeding is letting up, and it has, then we are still on track.

So whew.

Hindsight sucks. I wish I'd gotten a good night's sleep last night instead.

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THE TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD DAY

Some days just beg to be blogged about. They have Palahniuk's "paperback potential." But other days are just too much to even form a coherent story.

Yesterday was the perfect storm of awful. In bed last night, the husband and I rated it as one of our three all-time worst days of our marriage. And by "in bed last night," I mean this morning, because we didn't get into bed until after 5 AM.

We started our day Friday at 5 AM with a trip to the fertility clinic. Everything looked good for a procedure next week. And then all sorts of little things started going wrong during our day, things barely worth mentioning save the fact that they all happened in a row: had to buy a new printer, knocked over a can of coke on the sofa and my knitting project, the garbage disposal broke, etc. We kept describing our day like this: Life FAIL. We just wanted the day to be over.

But around dinnertime, I started bleeding...and there's no earthly reason why I should be bleeding today. It was enough to make me nervous, and since it was a Friday night and I wouldn't be able to reach my doctor or nurse until Monday, we decided we'd better head to the ER. Luckily we ate dinner first, because we had no idea what we were in for.

I expected to be there until midnight. I didn't expect to be there until 4:30 AM. During that time, I had less than ten minutes of actual medical care -- take blood pressure, ask about my symptoms, quick pelvic exam -- and was eventually told...drumroll..."Geez, I don't know anything about fertility stuff, so just call your doctor Monday morning."

When we walked in the house to finally go to sleep, my husband's watch alarm went off. It had woken us up at 5 AM that morning to start our day, and he wryly announced it was ending our day as well.

Thanks to everyone who noted my offhanded Facebook status and checked on me. I am fine, apparently, even though I am still bleeding and don't know why or what this means.

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January 30, 2009

GROSSLY MISSING THE POINT

This Michael Hirsh piece made me laugh out loud:

Is it possible history is repeating itself? As House Republicans defy President Obama over his stimulus package, the party seems to be reverting to form after decades of overreaching ambition and outsized growth; think of the GOP, perhaps, as the Citigroup of politics. Many Republicans seem resigned—even content—to go back to being the party of Barry Goldwater. In other words: We don't care if we're marginalized. In our hearts we know we're right. Never mind that the party suffered terrible defeats in 2008 and 2006, some thoughtful Republicans (mainly on the Senate side, like Lindsay Graham, as well as intellectuals such as David Frum) have been fretting for some time that the GOP base is getting too narrow. These days, you hear little talk of Karl Rove's bigger tent or reinventing conservatism. Quite the opposite: it seems as though the party has decided to go back to basics. The message they're sending: "We don't care if Obama won or that he's popular; let's just wait until the country sees the truth again, as old Barry did. Until then, we'll be happy to be the righteous minority again, proudly willing to go down in flames for our beliefs: government spending never works, and tax cuts always do. Keynesian stimulus is for liberal witch doctors."

I laughed because it just shows such a gross misunderstanding of what it means to be a conservative or Republican, while stating the obvious as if it were some kind of joke. He writes about my entire worldview as if it's something to mock. As if Republicans are the only ones who stick to their guns in the face of opposition. Didn't Democrats do that for the last eight years and get lauded for it? And now we're the ones who won't roll over and die because a Dem got 52% of the vote?

We're not "resigned" to going back to being the Goldwater party; that's where we want to be! And yes, we are willing to "go down in flames for our beliefs," because we do what we think is right, not what is popular.

Actually, I don't think "right" and "popular" are mutually exclusive, but I can't really test that theory because Republicans keep trying to out-Democrat Democrats by granting them too many premises.

The article continues in laughable fashion:

True, Wednesday's unanimous GOP vote against the $819 billion stimulus package was partly driven by the peculiar politics of the Hill. Some House Republicans wanted to send a "message" to Obama, and they may come around and vote for the final bill after the Senate approves its version. But for many Republicans the vote reaffirmed the old philosophical divide. Never mind that Obama reached out, lunched with GOP leaders on the Hill, and pressed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to drop family planning and National Mall renovation. Not a single House Republican could bring himself or herself to vote with the president on a measure to prevent what could become the most serious recession since the 1930s.

Good heavens, how could the Republicans not side with Obama after he took them to lunch? Value systems and deeply held beliefs be damned; Obama invited us out to lunch! And to the SuperBowl! Let's forget everything we stand for and do whatever he says.

But reaching a new consensus would require a reassessment of basic premises, and it appears, at least for the moment, that there will be very little of that. The emerging Republican consensus suggests that Bush grew so unpopular because he strayed from, rather than stood behind, the old GOP verities by creating a vast national-security state and giant deficits. Hence the Republicans are flocking to a proposal by the House Republican Study Committee calling for no new government spending at all, and nothing but tax cuts instead.

Those bastard Republicans. If they'd just become Democrats, the world would live in peace and life would be flowers and sausages for everyone. But nooooo. They have to go and ruin it for everyone by having principles and values and other such nonsense that keeps us from consensus!

Read that first sentence again: "But reaching a new consensus would require a reassessment of basic premises, and it appears, at least for the moment, that there will be very little of that."

Translation: The last eight years, we held our ground. But now you Republicans, you need to reassess your premises. Because they're wrong.

For eight years, dissent was patriotic. Now it's a big travesty.

The laughable piece ends with this:

A little over a week after Obama's inauguration, "stale" political arguments again rule the day. So much for the post-partisan era.

Obama tried to move beyond politics and make everyone on the planet live in harmony and agree. He's tried for a whole ten days! And you jerkwad Republicans won't put aside your differences and become Democrats. If you did, the world would be perfect. But you won't. Obama tried to be post-partisan, and you Republicans ruined it.

I mean, there are just too many things to fisk here. See something you'd like to pounce on? Feel free...

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January 29, 2009

USING SCIENCE

KDeRosa blogs about schoolwork that's not exactly brainwork:

The competition challenges middle school students to design a city of the future with a focus on water conservation, reuse, and renewable energy. The students use the game SimCity (Deluxe 4) to help them build their three-dimensional models to scale. They have a semester to dream up and then construct their miniature cities entirely out of recycled materials. Supposedly, this inspires them to consider engineering as a profession.

He belittles the project, saying:

This is not how engineer's turn an idea into reality. It doesn't seem to me that the students needed to know any actual engineering or any engineering constraints to construct their models. So, this is how a non-engineer turns ideas into reality. And, I'm not sure this exercise , in any way, generalizes to any real-world situation.

I suppose the kids did learn how to play SimCity. Videogames 101. That's what kids need -- more time playing videogames. I'm sure SimCity is a neat program, but it's not exactly a precursor to AutoCAD or other real-world construction/drafing programs.

And how does building a model out of recycled mterials generalize to building real stuff with recylced materials? Someone explain that to me.

Found via Amritas via Joanne Jacobs, where Joanne writes:

My husband, born to be an engineer, built a color TV set when he was in high school. It worked. His father, also an engineer, built model planes as a teenager. They flew.

My first husband, a math-physics guy, designed an atomic bomb in fifth grade for a school project. “It probably wouldn’t have worked,” he said. But he’d studied the science and the math. It wasn’t an art project.

My uncle built a working light show in his basement when he was a kid. He rigged up a Lite Brite to a Casio keyboard, so when he played certain notes, different lights lit up.

I wish I had developed more of an interest in these math and science projects when I was young.

To conclude with an awesome comment by hardlyb:

When I was in 3rd grade I made a sextant out of a protractor, a couple of pieces of wood, some string, nails, and thumbtacks. The trick, of course, was to calibrate it, and I can’t remember what I did, but when I tested it that night against the North Star, it was dead on. Anyway, I turned the thing in after doing a presentation to the class, and I got an A. Then Miss GrumpyFace, the teacher from the class next door, came in to judge our contest. She awarded first prize to a ‘diorama’ that had Native Americans and dinosaurs in it (the diorama was really a shoebox with plastic toys arranged in it), and she held up my entry as an example of something beneath contempt. She had absolutely no idea what it was, and hadn’t bothered to ask.

I didn’t really mind her reaction, because the realization that many of the teachers at my crappy rural East Texas public school were too ignorant and/or stupid to understand the work an 8-year-old was something that I, as an 8-year-old, found very interesting. It doesn’t appear that things have changed much, except now they give all the kids a shoebox and some plastic Native Americans and dinosaurs. So the teachers don’t ever have wonder “What the hell is that thing?”.

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THIS GUY IS SOMETHING ELSE

First, Obama was a hypocrite about bin Laden. Now he's a hypocrite about the environment.

Last year:

We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world's energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we'll be fine. Don't worry about us. That's not leadership.

Today:

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

While looking for the original quote, I realized Ed Morrisey has already blogged about this today, and rightly notes in Heat For Me But Not For Thee:

Many people in America, especially where I live, would like to heat their homes to a comfort level where sweaters and coats become unnecessary. However, Obama and the Democrats want to impose ruinous taxes and penalties on energy production and fuel that produces carbon dioxide — a naturally-occurring element — and make that choice economically unbearable for us.

I wish my house were warm enough to wear summer clothes, but I have to pay my own heating bill, so it's not. Shame on you again, President Obama.

And also, you're from Chicago, not Hawaii. You should be used to cold weather and wearing sweaters.


[Thanks to AirForceWife for angering up my blood this morning with this link.]

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ALMOST AS AWESOME AS THE CORNER

Last night my husband and I were talking about Rachel Lucas' post about the morons who are suing over that plane crash. And my husband goes, "That's not even the most ignorant thing I heard today. I read this somewhere, maybe on The Corner?, I can't remember, but apparently 49% of people think the government gets its money from a money tree."

And I just laughed and said that, yes, you read that...on mah blog.

My husband quoted me back to me. It was hilarious.

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January 28, 2009

THE END OF AN ERA

I case you were sitting on the edge of your chair in anticipation (snort), I did go ahead and resign from my job. I will not be staying on in a more generic capacity; I will finish out the remaining three weeks of this job and then say my goodbyes.

With karmic timing, more foam houses arrived this week, so I will be making Easter-themed castles. But I plan to smile while I do it, because I have gotten darned good at it. I am a quick-draw with that glue gun these days. It will be my last hurrah there at the store.

And as much as I hated that foam when I first started, I think I will miss it, in a small way.

Not enough to buy one though.

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THE RAW DEAL

BigD sent me a link that was just genius. It was exactly what I was looking for when I wrote about the New Deal.

Why The New Deal Failed

Now before we get into the specifics of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, which was the name of his government program, I wanted to begin by announcing some of the results from a Fox News poll that was done over a year ago. The poll asked, "When the government spends money for programs, does it get the money from taxpayers, or does the government have an independent source of revenue?"

Let me start with the answer this way. Eleven percent weren't sure. They were undecided. Forty percent said government gets its money from taxpayers. Forty-nine percent said they have an independent source of revenue. So the answer to the poll was 49 percent said government has an independent source of revenue that it uses to spend money for programs; 40 percent said no, every time it spends a dollar on programs it has to get the dollar from taxpayers; and 11 percent were undecided.

Can you see why after this poll, when we have government programs that fail, it does not result in throwing those who perpetrated the program out of office? You have one group that gets a sizable vote-forty percent-that is mad about it. But there are others who say: "Hey, it's not my money. It's the government's money. At least they tried."

And it gets better from there...

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SWING AND A MISS

A lady here in town kept insisting to me that Bush was going to invade Iran before the end of his presidency. For months, she insisted that the "bombing," as she called it, that she was hearing from on post was the most frequent since the Gulf War, which obviously meant that Bush had something up his sleeve.

I tried to gently contradict her along the way, saying that a surprise attack using infantrymen from here in town would not be something that Bush could hide from all of us. Airstrikes, perhaps, but not a Normandy Beach-style invasion. And that maybe the added noise coming from post was just training for regular old Iraq and Afghanistan missions. She insisted that Bush was cooking something up.

So when I saw her today for the first time since Inauguration Day, can I tell you how badly I wanted to rub this in her face? How I wanted to point out that for months she insisted that she had knowledge of some nefarious plot to invade Iran that plain old did. not. happen. And that maybe next time she oughtn't speak in such bold, declarative statements.

But I didn't, because I am a lady. But dadgum, I got tired of being polite while listening to her conspiracy theories.

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January 27, 2009

ENJOYING OUR TIME

I wrote at SpouseBUZZ about how we've been spending our block leave. One nice thing about just being at home is that we can be so lazy. We've been waking up and then spending about another hour or so talking and loafing in bed. It has been nice to be able to do that.

And we know it and keep talking about it in a meta-knowledge way.

I have been trying harder to live in the now, to live my real life and not the parallel one. We have been trying to find the good in not having a baby, and lazing around in bed until 9 AM is a definite start. We keep reminding each other that we can't do that anymore once we have kids, so we should enjoy it while we can. We are trying to be happier about not having a baby and focusing on the silver lining.

Another mental change I need to make is about my health. For two years, I have stressed out about what I was eating and drinking, in case it would have either a positive or negative effect on fertility. I have made myself sick with this cycle of guilt about having a glass of wine, etc. No more. I can't keep living this way, where I am freaked out that every little thing I do might injure this baby that doesn't even exist yet.

I also have put off diving into an exercise regime because you're not supposed to drastically change your exercise habits upon becoming pregnant. I never wanted to go to the gym because, what was the point?: If I got into a good habit of going to the gym for two weeks, I might get pregnant and quit going anyway. So I never had the motivation to start something that I imagined myself quitting. And two years later, I am just mad that I have been living my life in two-week intervals. So I'm going to start exercising, and we'll deal with baby if/when it happens.

We're hardening our hearts a little, mentally preparing ourselves for not having a baby, which is a hard thing to do when you also have appointments for fertility treatments. But I have hated the way we've been living for the past two years, so it's not like it can get any worse.

So we're enjoying doing whatever the heck we want with our time while our time is still ours.

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January 26, 2009

LAME

Professor: Well, it looks like I'll need my heroic bureaucrat back. At severely reduced pay, of course
Fry: What about me? Can I come back at severely reduced pay?
Hermes: You got it, mon. In fact, severely reduced pay all around!

That Futurama quote has been running through my head all day.

So Obama becomes president, and I lose my job. Causation or correlation?

Seriously, I just found out today that my job has disappeared. I can stay on as a regular associate, at severely reduced pay, if I so choose. Try this on for size: do all the same work you've been doing, for a dollar less per hour.

I'm sure it's For The Greater Good.

Oy.

Must decide by tomorrow.

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January 25, 2009

OH SNAP

My husband came in from the other room completely puzzled, because I was laughing so hard I was crying.

Iowahawk's parody of those pledging celebs.

(If you haven't watched the celeb video, you kinda have to torture yourself for four minutes in order to get the Iowahawk joke.)

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January 24, 2009

NEW FOR THE SAKE OF NEW

Apparently there's been a suggestion made that, now that we have a black president, our schools should stop teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. The reasoning, as also blockquoted by Joanne Jacobs, is:

Those books are old, and weÂ’re ready for new.

David Foster, who has made me think and smile for five years, reminded us of something he wrote back in 2003.

As C S Lewis said: If you want to destroy an infantry unit, you cut it off from its neighboring units. If you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from previous generations. (Approximate quote.)

How better to conduct such destruction than to tell people that previous generations were ignorant and that we have nothing to learn from them?

I recommend reading his whole blog entry, as well as the Stuart Buck link he provides.

In the comments at Jacobs' blog, someone said that To Kill a Mockingbird gets less relevant the older you get. I 100% disagree. I read it first as a high schooler and then again when I was engaged. I wept through many passages, over the kind of man and father Atticus Finch is. I am certain that if I read it again now, now that we are trying to have children of our own, it would seem even more poignant.

Dangit, I'm gonna do that. I'm adding it to my George Bush 2009 Reading Challenge.

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QUOTES

Two great quotes this week from Big Hollywood.

Ari David:

I despair that Americans, concerned with the economy above all issues, chose socialist solutions to address their fiscal concerns.

Doug TenNapel:

To conserve implies that something important is being lost that is worth holding on to. ItÂ’s also why we arenÂ’t terribly interested in future utopias, new forms we can evolve into, we donÂ’t dream a lot because there can be no hope for the future if the true things of the past are rejected or forgotten. So something must be conserved for there to be conservatism.

What we seek to conserve are not buildings, environments or kingdoms, but the true things the great men of old discovered. Notice, I didnÂ’t say these things were invented, because our values werenÂ’t invented, they were discovered, revealed and learned.

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PRIDE

Last year I wrote about how I'm not a citizen of the world. Victor Davis Hanson explains why:

Whether Obama is President or McCain had won, no matter; it is still the US, and as a Jacksonian I pretty much pull for America--all the time. I am not a Socratic citizen of the world--given the thugs that rule most of Africa, the creepy places such as Iran or Russia or North Korea, the land of the Lotus-eaters in Europe, or the tribal dictatorships I've seen in the Middle East

His main point is annoyance at how, all of a sudden, a bunch of people are now proud to be Americans again. Like those ridiculous celebrities who pledge to say hi to their neighbors now that Obama is president. Over and over I've seen people on Facebook and in articles say that they can finally stop pretending to be Canadian and be happy to be Americans again. What a douchey thing to say.

I am disappointed that Barack Obama is our president. But the United States is still a way better place to live than anywhere else on the planet. I'm still proud to live here, even though I think Pres. Obama is going to take us further in a direction I don't like and don't want to live in.

I know Europeans who are ashamed of their countries. I know more of them who just simply don't care, who don't know their own anthems, don't wear their own flags, and don't have a single ounce of national pride. I pity them. I wish they knew what it was like to feel what I feel, to be so happy to be a citizen of the greatest country ever conceived.

And for the record, I have never pretended to be Canadian...

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RUSH

Prez Zings GOP:

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

Who said anything about getting along? Despite all the talk of bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, most people I know have core values that they don't compromise on. Rush Limbaugh's program is about those core values.

Deltasierra says it best:

People are allowed to be unhappy with Obama's election, and they're allowed to be critical of him and of the government.

I will be critical of the government till the day I die. It's the only way to stay free in a free nation. That's Limbaugh's job, and that of those who share his beliefs. Don't disparage him his freedom to speak what he believes.

Just FYI: He has repeatedly said, especially in the last few days, that he doesn't want Obama to be a failed president. He wants his socialist policies to fail.

I agree with him. I don't want government health care. I don't want my tax dollars to pay for other people's useless lives – and I don't want anybody else's tax dollars to fund my life! I don't want to try to be friends with terrorists and I don't want them in our jails, or set free to terrorize some more. I don't like Obama's policies. I have never made a secret of this, and neither has Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative talk show host I respect.

It makes me crazy that now that Obama has taken office, I am expected to put all my objections aside and adore this new president. I'm supposed to think of him as a blank slate – as if all his campaign promises just vaporized after he took the oath of office.

Sorry. No can do. I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings – I'm filled with a passion to keep our country free from the things Obama has promised he will try to do.

I too want to keep our country free from Obama's promises. Rush spreads that same message to 13 million people. That's a lot better than my 300...

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January 22, 2009

I HEART THESE OWLS

In knitting news, I have been shirking my vow to knit two rows per day on the aran. I am still working on the second sock. I have been commissioned to make a baby sweater for a friend. I am making a child's chemo cap, which is horribly depressing.

But I want to push everything aside and start on this immediately.

owls.jpg

I am in love with that sweater.

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WOW

Meet the new boss,
same as the old boss.

I may actually have to start watching The Daily Show again...

(via Instapundit)

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