Everybody's Doing It!

Gee, thanks, Cubachi, for roping me into writing again. I guess it's time to put those thousands of dollars of education to work.

Well, the Delaware Senate primary is tomorrow. Everyone and their cat is weighing in. Right now Hex, our male cat, is unsuccessfully stalking our female cat, Bel, so does that mean Christine O'Donnell will escape the clutches of Mike Castle? Or will the stray cat that taunts them through the window (Chris Coons) come by and win yet again? There's a mental image for you: Congress run by cats. Would it really be all that worse than the hooligans we have now?

Here's my take: O'Donnell isn't as much a nut as she's made out to be, Castle is an idiot, and states need to stop having primaries so late.

Seriously? Mid-September? A primary is held so that a party can put up a candidate, that candidate competes against the other party cadidates (normally, I wouldn't be talking in plurals here, but thanks to power-hungry Lisa Murkowski, anything is possible), and voters have time to decide between all of them. But this year, states are having primaries so late that military servicemen cannot get ballots in time. That's a violation of the MOVE Act, and it's disenfranchisement of a group that just so happens to vote conservatively, which is why the DOJ is choosing to ignore it. Also, it is a disservice to voters to know who each parties' candidates are less than two months before the general election. With such a short time to introduce themselves to the general voting public, candidates are forced to flood the airwaves with advertisements, relying on bigger organizations like the DNC and RNC to fund their last push. The McCain-Feingold Act was supposed to take the money out of politics, but as in so many other instances, it makes things worse as candidates are forced to navigate through absurd laws while third-party organizations throw up accusatory ads.

In O'Donnell's case, time is not in her favor if she wins. The RNC shockingly does not have a lot of cash to go around, and she does not have time to make amends with the Republican Party of Delaware, who just filed a formal complaint with the FEC accusing her of recieving illegal contributions from the Tea Party Express. The state parties should not be arms of one candidate or another before a primary, but this whole race is a study in the misapplication of ethics. She's got to get a positive message out, and she has to do it fast.

Time is not in favor of Castle, either. Should he win, he has to don the conservative mantle that RINOs haul out every election cycle and convince riled-up Delaware Republicans that he's better than sending a Democrat into the seat. The fact that there is honest debate about that last point makes me wonder what sort of chance he has against Coons. I really do not care what PPP is threatening, polls have a hard time predicting a crazy race like this one.

Fortunately for O'Donnell, I've heard her interviewed more than once, and she does it well enough that my husband happened to hear her once and asked me who she was because he was so impressed. He's quite the cynic, so that should tell you something. I groaned, then tried to compress the whole race into five minutes. A few days later, Sarah Palin endorsed O'Donnell, leading to this exchange:

Pooky: "So, let me get this straight: They [some commenters at Hot Air] are complaining because Palin endorsed someone they don't think is electable?"

Me: "Yes."

Pooky: "I thought that the point of Palin's endorsements were for her to designate who she thought was the true conservative in the race, not who would win."

Me: "I know that, you know that, Palin knows that, but apparently they don't know that!"

What a mess! I hope (vainly, I know), that the media doesn't paint this as some sort of Palin loss, because her endorsements cannot win every single time. If they did, I'd start believing the Kos Kids' theories about Diebold voting machines. Well, maybe not. But I would buy stock in tinfoil and market tinfoil hat patterns on Etsy! :P

Am I A Coward?

I generally don't think of myself as such. I've moved 1000 miles away from family and friends, supporting them in tough times. I agreed to let my husband put himself in harm's way. For a number of years, I took care of and comforted the sick and dying. I helped get fellow workers out when the paint plant we were working in threatened to explode.

Then why did I want to go back to bed and ignore reality for one day yesterday, on the ninth anniversary of 9/11?

I really didn't have a chance for heroism on that clear Tuesday morning. I was driving to high school in my dad's Buick LeSabre (loved that car, cried when he sold it) because I had my Certified Nurse's Aide clinicals right after school. I remember the morning show announcers saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. They also didn't know how big the plane was. At the top of the hour, there wasn't much more information than that. I was walking into school when the second plane hit.

For the rest of the day, we did nothing but watch TV. In Theology, we spent the period praying, hard. When we played hackensack at break, some of the guys were giving a classmate of mine a hard time, saying that because of our proximity to SAC Omaha, if it got nuked, we'd either turn into glass or die horrible deaths from the radiation. She was a fairly fragile person, so I tried to stop it immediately. I did hear a lot of "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" sung in the hallways by the guys trying to be brave. I don't think it really hit them until the next day.

I would have rather not gone to my clinical, but we were halfway through the 75-hour course and our instructor promised us an easy day. A line was beginning to form at the gas station across from the nursing home. I helped out on the east wing and then went into the dementia ward. We were there to observe and couldn't do very much, so I sat next to a resident who was watching TV. She was blissfully ignorant of what was going on, and as I was holding her hand, it suddenly hit me how much I envied her. Chaos and terror reigned, and she just smiled at me and squeezed my hand.

I needed that peace when I got home. My father was frantically calling a number over and over while my mom searched through old Christmas letters. My dad's college roommate of three years worked at the Pentagon, and Dad couldn't get ahold of him. It took two days before we heard from him. Thankfully, he had just retired from his contracting position. However, he lived two blocks from the Pentagon and his family was prudently checking into a hotel.

We were all overwhemed with information after 9/11. How many people died, the heroism of NYPD, FDNY, and ordinary citizens; where bin Laden was supposed to be, the intelligence failures that let al-Qaeda slip through the cracks, and what we were going to do about it all. Being more of the political animal, I focused on that last part. This was not a normal war, so what were going to do militarily?

I remember the anniversaries of 9/11, but they didn't impact me very much. My brother had not chosen to go into the Reserves when his 6-year enlistment in the National Guard ended in 2000 because of his wrists. A classmate of mine went into the National Guard (the same one scaring that girl on 9/11) and served two tours in Iraq.

Then one year they re-aired the Naudet brothers' documentary "9/11" for an anniversary. I watched it with my parents, and we all could barely stand it. It wasn't the sound of thousands of Americans screaming in the street as the second plane hit, as Allahpundit put it. It wasn't the horror of the towers collapsing with thousands of Americans inside.

It was the jumpers.

The firefighters in the lobby stopped in their tracks, horrified at the thought that conditions were so bad that people considered plummeting into the glass ceiling of the lobby better than being burned alive. The emergency personnel kept doing their jobs, but they cringed every time there was a loud thud. They knew what it meant.

That's the moment 9/11 became real to me. I have medical training. I know what those poor people went through as their lungs were being seared so they leapt out a window 100 stories from the ground. A commenter at Michelle Malkin's wrote about a lady trying to hold her skirt down as she jumped. These images are so horrific that news corporations refuse to re-broadcast them.

And I can't stand thinking about the jumpers. I have the gift of empathy, and it's why I got out of the medical profession. There are some things my brain cannot handle, and every year it gets worse, because I force it back into the front of my mind to remember why we fight. Is it cowardice to not want to have to go through that every year?

Three years ago, my fiance was not enjoying college. I was three years into an English: Writing degree, and had taken a year off to work while he was a Computer Sciences student. He wanted to join the armed forces, and Air Force looked like it had the best toys. (They do.) It was also the safest of all the branches, which is why I agreed to it. He took a special test, scored absurdedly high on it, and convinced the Air Force that his mind was worth pouring half a million dollars of training into it.

Is it cowardice that I am glad that my husband will never serve in the traditional sense? He will put himself in harm's way from time to time, especially with the assignment he's looking at, but if they are handing him a gun, it will be the end of the world.

I am support personnel. I make my husband's job in the military possible (trust me, he can barely wash his ABUs). I send care packages to troops. I welcome home our chaplains, who tell of ministering to Americans and foreigners overseas. I do all these things and try to come up with more to support the War on Terror (it will always be that to me, no matter what Obama says). I always worry that it's not enough.

I am inspired by one thing that will never change.

Have you ever seen a disaster in a Third World nation? People run around like chickens with their heads cut off. They honestly do not know what to do.

What does an American do? We run back into the building if we happen to be present. We send in our military to help. We flip open our phones and text money to the Red Cross as we're walking down to the blood bank. We email people in the area and set up charities on the spot. The first thing we ask is, "How can we help?"

We run back into danger, because, in the immortal words of my husband's commander, "We're Americans, damnit!"

Award? Award!

Unfortunately, Kiwi, you're really the only person who knows about my blog, so I'm able to comply with just half of the rules.

Thank you, Kiwi, for this Beautiful Blogger Award! And thank you, all the little people who.... Oh, wait a minute. Someone get me some little people!

Seven interesting facts about me:

1. I don't do well with these sort of lists, either.

2. Contrary to popular belief, I like both cats and dogs.

3. I make wire jewelry, when Michael's has what I need in stock.

4. I also make books! (Hmm... Pictures needed.)

5. I love living on an Air Force Base.

6. I am not a morning person, thanks to insomnia and an overactive imagination.

7. I am a gamer at heart, even though I'm not very good at it. Probably that overactive imagination kicking in...

Once again, thank you Kiwi! I was glad I was able to do a light-hearted post. My next one won't be so fun. :(

Becky

Two weeks ago, I said goodbye to a woman who had shaped my personality more than she had shaped my life. My aunt Becky died suddenly at the age of 55, taken over by the diabetes she’d struggled to keep at bay most of her life. My aunt Ruth found her on the day she was supposed to take part in a clinical trial that would help her finally get control of a disease she’d been fighting for so long.

Aunt Becky was… well, she was Aunt Becky. You can’t live your life with just two cats as companions and not have people wonder about you. But the great thing about Becky was that she wasn’t crazy, just fiercely independent. People think I’m joking when I say I got my mulish stubborn streak from all four grandparents. I’m not. Becky and I were fairly close in personality and looks, and, let’s not forget, devotion to cats.

I’ll never forget the grin on her face when I finally got Music, a cat with a history of abuse, to let me pet her after three days of coaxing during a visit when I was 12. She also graciously let me play Gustav Holst’s The Planets a few times after I found it in her vast CD library. My aunt and uncle have the unenviable task of sorting out the large collection of not only CDs and DVDs of other people’s work, but also of Becky’s. She was an accomplished photographer who was humble about her work, even though it was taken in exotic locations. I was always “Senorita” to her after the years she spent teaching missionary children in Costa Rica. Nicki, my cousin, was lucky enough to go to Costa Rica herself and experience some of the things Becky had.

The hardest thing to hold on to, at least for me, will be the memory of her voice. I say her voice because I have a hard time recalling my aunt Deb’s voice. She died of cancer ten years ago, and it’s so hard to remember the sweet voice of my youth rather than the voice taxed by drugs and lungs struggling to operate. Grandpa I can hear as if he were standing next to me ("Well, Squirrelly..."), and I can hear Becky ("But, Dad...."), but Deb is starting to slip away from me.

Becky saw more of my parents than me these last few years, although I kept track of her through our family group emails. I have been waiting for mail to come into my inbox to bump down the email she wrote the day before she died so that I won’t have such a hard time every time it loads. I just can’t bring myself to put it into a folder.

The night before the memorial service, my cousin Jack was still putting together a video tribute, and Dad and I were digging through highly unorganized shoeboxes of photos just in case there were more pictures of Becky out there. (Bless Jack’s heart. “It was really easy,” he told me, but I knew it wasn’t tough on him technically, just emotionally.)

Mom didn’t want to join us-she was tired, she wasn’t in the mood for it, Jack had enough pictures, this was impossible because Becky was always behind the camera, etc. Dad finally managed to reel her in with a picture of Becky and Mom at my parents’ wedding. It was just their faces, with Becky looking a lot more sure of herself while my mom wore a veil.

Mom smiled, and reached for a shoebox. I think that may have been the first step of healing for us all. Here was Becky, rarely the focus of the picture, usually with a child her arms, letting us envelop her while she did her own thing.

This is Jack's video. It's a better picture of Becky than what was in the shoeboxes, but she'll always be my aunt Becky.

Becky's Memorial Video from jack maatman on Vimeo.

Jewelry update

This fall, I spent many hours making jewelry as Christmas gifts for various female relatives. Since I had just learned how to make wire jewelry, it took a lot of time and effort. Here are pictures of my finished products:

I made this butterfly necklace for my paternal grandma.

I made a butterfly necklace, earrings to go with it, and a Celtic heart necklace to go with a pair of earrings I'd given previously for my mom.

I made this repeating bead necklace (you are seeing about a third of the bead pattern) for my maternal grandma.

I had to enlarge this picture because of all the jewelry. I made a necklace, earrings, and bracelet for each one of my sisters-in-law and sister. The bracelets were the hardest thing out of all the presents to make, because everyone has different wrist sizes! I even wound up having to add links to one bracelet at the Christmas party. The whole project was a lot of fun, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it again next year!

Global Warming and the Towel of Babel (updated)

Genesis 11:1-9 (New International Version)

The Tower of Babel

¹ Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. ² As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

³ They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

⁵ But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. ⁶ The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

⁸ So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

I've been thinking a lot about "climate change" lately, or, as it used to be called, "global warming." Climategate, the shocking scandal in which the researchers in the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University were found to be manipulating and destroying data that did not fit with their preconceived notions, has been in the news a lot this past week. Well, at least all the actual news sources. The mainstream media reminds me a lot of the dodos from Ice Age 1 (would post a clip, but I can't find it anywhere online-stupid copyright laws!). They're running around, trying to save themselves (and asking for federal bailouts) while destroying their sustenance and making sure the current generation doesn't spawn a new one.

But enough about the idiotic media! It struck me as we ducked snow (in south Texas!!!) and the forecasters are warning about a cold winter ahead that this whole apocalyptic business is nonsense. First it was that the earth was warming, and then, when the snowstorms hit and the hurricanes didn't, it became "climate change." So, what is changing? Not the temperatures, because that's been proven false. Not the frequency of storms or sever weather. Climates change gradually (or suddenly, when there's a volcanic eruption), as anyone who has studied history knows. Minnesota used to be covered in glaciers. Greenland was, when the Vikings discovered it, green land. The Sahara Desert was once a jungle. Yes, climates change, but man is not a factor.

All of this brings me to my point. Don't you find it interesting that just as the world is in a frenzy to do something about global warming and punish those who produce wealth and goods that we are in one of the coldest years on record in some places? We almost had snow right after Thanksgiving, which is unheard of down here. Man is busy displaying his hubris (the Israelites, not the Greeks, should have invented that word), while God gently reminds us that it is He, not man, who shapes the world by wind, rain, snow, and a myriad of other mechanisms.

As I write this, a cold, cold rain is falling. Message received, now can we please get some warm, sunny days? ;)

Update: Sarah Palin, a woman who we should all admire, has more to say on Climategate.

Coming In From The Wilderness

Hey, thanks, Kiwi! Very first blog award. Quite sure I don't deserve it, being that I never update.

Well, hey, look at that! An update....

No, I won't leave you like that. ;) What has been going on besides the Yankees buying the World Series? (Rarr rar rar rarrrrr) Three thoughts on that: The Dodgers were on a skid right before the NLCS. The Phightin' Phils put up a good phight. And the Yankees have basically told baseball players worldwide that steroids are, indeed, okay to take. Seriously, how is it fair that Manny gets yanked for fifty games while A-Roid and Jeter are touted as the pinnacles of success? We need some serious soul-searching in the MLB.

But, enough about those losers. On to the winners! Tuesday night, the GOP wons the gubernatorial races in Virginia and, shockingly, New Joisey. The voters in New York sent a message to the party leaders: RINO hunting season has officially started. The DIABLO candidate (Dafyyd ab Hugh's term for Democrats In All But Label Only) also undermined RINOs across the country by endorsing the Democrat, who, sadly, ran on a more conservative platform than she did.

I was going to post pictures of my new hobbies, but a) those are for Christmas presents and b) Bel chewed through my camera cord. While it was attached to the computer. Shorting out my USB ports, briefly. Sigh.....

Pooky is considering a few jobs in exciting places, which his wife is thoroughly encouraging. Military life can get quite interesting sometimes.

Just for future reference, the only Jane Austen novel I have not read is Mansfield Park. (Yes, I know I'm supposed to underline that, but Blogger won't let me.)