Still Crazy

...between work and kidstuff.

Last night I picked up the littlies at daycare and we got home just as night was falling. Everyone got a juice (OK, I got a beer) and the two little settled in to watch some Scooby-Doo and the one big got to work boiling pasta noodles and spuds. Just then the phone rang: it was Mojo, working late and worried about the dark and the cold and the long bike ride home...could we pick her up?

I turned off the stove and went out to the front room and announced that we had to get back in the car and go help the Mommy.

Those of you with kids know how dicey a moment this is; there's a world of possible whining, refusals, tantrums and delays in sudden changes of plans when you have five-and-a-half and two-and-a-half.

But the little folks sprang to action like heroes. Shoes and coats went back on and we drove downtown singing the WonderPets song ("We're on our way/to help the little Mommy and to save the day!"). And after we rescued the Mommy we all went to dinner at Widmer Gasthaus, where the little peeps were adorable and so good that they were instantly punished by many savage hugs and kisses.

Anyway, I'm still slammed, so here's a quick update: playing Bingo at Astor School on "Bingo for Books" night -My little sister sent us this conex-sized box of citrus fruit for Christmas and I hadn't the slightest idea what to do with it - we just don't eat THAT many oranges and there's no real constituency for grapefruit at all around here. So for $2.99 the old-fashioned juicer was the best deal I've made in a long time. And the fresh-squeezed OJ and grapefruit juice were puckeringly tart and sweet...No real message here - just two kidlets snuggling in their "nests" on the couch.Little Miss HAD to get a Hello Kitty sticker book, and as a result I was branded with the Mark of the Beast.

Big Iron On His Hip

Sorry for the hiatus but it's been fucking insane around here. I was working until 2am Wednesday, and I'm just now (10pm Friday) finishing up work for today and getting ready to go back to Salem for more tomorrow.Woof. I'll get back on track this weekend, promise. Until then, enjoy the Peeper and Missy's Wild Basket Ride of Death:Update 1/31: Apparently Mojo sacrificed the right black chicken, because the crane (see above) died about 10am today, so I'm back in town, putting in my timesheet and ready to do some business!

Perhaps sleep.

Sleep would be good.

U R pwned, noob.

Okay, I don't do online gaming (don't have the time, gah). But even I get the funny here:US Democracy Server: Patch Day
Version 44.0

President
- Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
- A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
- Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
- Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
- Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
- A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.Vice President
- The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
- No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
- The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
- Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
- A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.

Read the rest. Thanks, Armchair Generalist.

Bears! Why did it have to be bears!?

Remember this post?

Well, I was violently reminded of it while enjoying this little treasure: the "Nine Most Badass Bible Verses".

I know my friend Al has a soft spot for the good parts of Christianity, but...

When it comes to pure-D, hands-off, gut-slam, freaky-deaky, whattheFUCKyoutalkin'about, why-do-people-believe-in-this-stuff wierdness, religious texts are pure gold. We're talking some you-couldn't-make-a-horror-movie stuff. And don't EVEN get me started about the freakin' Book of Mormon!

Jesus was a stand-up guy, and the religion he preached was a thing of great depth and beauty. And Muhammad, too, and Gautama, and a whole bunch of truly spiritual folks all the way down to the Dalai Lamas and Mohandas Gandhis of our own day.

But a lot of the stuff that made it into the Bible (and the Torah, and the Koran, and the Vedas) just makes you say hmmm...and, sadly enough, it seems like many people prefer the she-bears and the Gospel of Prosperity and the Rule of the Fearful Sky Daddy to the hard, lonely, self-sacrificing faith of folks like Jesus and Buddha.So generally I treat all religious enthusiasts as my maternal grandfar would have dealt with a Jacobite and an armed one, at that.

(h/t to Balls and Walnuts, for the awesomely freaky Bible verse link. Dude!)

You Brain Too Short To Box With Santa Claus

So the Peeper wanted to sleep out on the living room sofa. I made him a cozy nest on the big down couch, tucked him in, kissed him goodnight and went back to shove some wood filler in the uglier of the out-of-plumb gaps in the window mouldings. In less than two minutes I heard crying from the living room.

"I had a bad dream" announces the Peeper as I entered, wiping wood filler of my fingers.

"Peep,you haven't even been to sleep yet..." I replied, sitting on the couch next to him. That layed him a dead stymie.

"Well...I had a scary thought in my head and I couldn't get it out."

Well, that's different. So I cuddled him and we talked about scary stuff and how the daylight is nice but the dark changes stuff and makes it scary. I showed him the tree outside that was the same, and the cars were the same, and the houses. He said that trees grow and change, they start out little and change and grow. I reminded him that that was over years, not one night.

He was okay with that.

Then he struck out on a completely unexpected tangent. "What happened before there was anything? When there was nothing, before everything was made?" I said I wasn't sure, that there were lots of different ideas, but that lots of really smart people thought that there was this time when everything was all together in one tiny place, and then, in an instant, it rushed outwards like the hyperspace in Star Wars (Note: parents will recognize this as the "find a kid hook to hang your concept on" strategy) and all the universe and the galaxies and stars and planets started.

He thought about this for a little.

"I really want to know about that stuff, I think about it a lot." he said, "I really think about what was there before everything and how everything is."

I agreed that that was something to know about, and that he could learn a lot about it and think about it and he might be the one to find out the answer.

"I think only one person knows everything, maybe two." he announced, a little sleepily.

"Who's that?"

"I think maybe Santa Claus." he yawned, "And God."

"Goodnight, Peeper." I kissed his soft, little-boy-smelling hair.

"G'night, Dada." he said, snuggling down into his blankets.

And I turned down the light.

Tortured Logic

What he said.

Minstrel Boy lays it out just fine. I don't really need to add anything except this: I've been accused of being too pessimistic about my country when I state my belief that we have passed or are close to passing the point of No Return to the republican ideas that produced our Constitution.

I don't think so. This, more than any other facet of our ludicrous Terrorgegensitzkrieg (sounds better in the original German, eh?), lays bare to me the poverty of our supposed "freedom" and our committment to the Constitutional rights that supposedly make us what we are. If we are "debating" the use of torture we're way beyond the decline that Caesar ended crossing the Rubicon. We're the barbarians, roaring and brawling amid the ruins of the classic glories of our Republic. Even at our worst, when we were chasing Cheyenne women and children out to die in the cold or torturing Filipinos trying to free their country we admitted that we were wrong. Just that we we needed to do wrong because it was good for us. The defenders of these acts refuse to even admit the wrongness. That is below contempt.

Because at the very heart of our U.S. system is a distrust of personal motives, panic and mobocracy. The Founders were our aristocracy, after all, and they also had the bad example of the French Revolution before their eyes, with accusations and counter-accusations, imprisonment without hearing, execution without trial. They had just won the dirtiest of all kinds of wars, a civil war against their "mother country". They knew all about terror, betrayal, judicial and extrajudicial murder, and the danger of forgetting in the fear of death that there are worse things than death.The Republican scum we chose to elect eight years ago - and their Democratic enablers in Congress - and continued to preserve as our "leaders" over the intervening time have compounded torturous treason with the utmost in sad incompetence. We are a disgrace to ourselves and to the world.

They have shat the bed so thoroughly with regard to these pathetic chattels that it would almost be a mercy to put a bullet in them, provided that we could throw the corpses of their torturers, and those who issued the orders for torture, and those who lied and covered up and defended the torture in the grave with them.

I can't believe that there's even any "debate" over this. Every time I read items like this I think of the catchphrase Driftglass used to use: you can now be a good American or a good Republican.

But you cannot be both.

Update 1/27: And, pat as the Fairy Queen in the pantomime to prove my point, here's Abu Gonzales on NPR yesterday (via The Rude Pundit - amendations his):

"Most fascinating was Gonzales's reaction to AG nominee Eric Holder's simple statement that waterboarding is torture, as we have understood torture for, let's say, ever: "I think that one needs to be careful in making a blanket pronouncement like that if you don't have all the information because of the effect it may have, again, on the morale and the dedication of intelligence officials and lawyers throughout the administration. Nonetheless, the very discussion about it is extremely discouraging. And I have talked to officials, senior officials at the CIA, for example, who tell me that agents at the CIA no longer have any interest at doing anything, anything remotely controversial, for fear that they are going to be investigated and that they have to go out and hire lawyers in order to do their job. And so, it has a very discouraging effect, and the net result of all of that is that people will not be doing what they need to be doing to gain intelligence that will help us connect the dots and protect our country from another attack."

Hmmm. Okay, well, then, here's a safety tip: if the idea that people investigating what you're doing makes you all depressy and sad and mopey and thinking about HIRING A FUCKING LAWYER in order to do your job and has a discouraging effect and makes you not do what you need to be doing than maybe YOU'RE DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB THE WRONG FUCKING WAY.

By, like, y'know, torturing people?

Baby Jesus On a Fucking Stick, people! How goddam hard is this?

Inching towards the finish.

It seems like forever - and it was over a year ago - that Little Miss slept in the converted co-screamer/playpen in the back hall closet. And that there WAS a back hall that was nothing BUT closets (Cue chorus of "In The Ghetto").IT was early in 2008 that we took the sawsall and the sledge and wrecking bar and got to work. It was ugly, remember? The "former people", who constructed structural walls and ran wiring like they were building a children's playhouse built crappy little closets like they were constructing the Gold Repository at Fort Friggin' Knox.But he hammered and bashed and sawed and cleared out the nasty little cluttered closet space...(note the dead Christmas tree - we put everything into that skip)...and even had some fun doing it.Slowly Little Miss' bedroom began to look less like a mess of closets and more like an actual place where a cute little girl could cuddle in her big-girl bed.In March, Brent helped the hell out of us taking down the siding and......installing the new windows, so now it REALLY began to look like a little bedroom.Everybody got to work and put up insulation and hung drywall (ugh - drywall!)Even the Grandpa helped install the lovely new corner windows to make the room bright and cheerful.And so they did!We took down the old texture off the existing drywall and matched the new and the old sheetrock.And, meanwhile, were still hauling off loads and loads of debris and wood waste to the dump...And then we primed the walls,and painted. We got the tongue-and-groove ceiling up, and Mojo and her dad rolled on the adorable tropical blue wall color...and suddenly, it really looks like a little girl's bedroom, doesn't it?And the best part is when our little girl toddles down to the end of the hall and looks around and announces proudly; "Maxine's room!"

Yes, it's your room, baby girl. Soon now. Very, very soon.