I've always been partial to Patrick Stewart

For many, many reasons.

Here's another one:







Mad props to Amnesty International who put this together.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (semi-evil laugh)

KARMA'S A BITCH, AIN'T IT?
Woohoo, and I didn't even have to wait for her next life!

Here's a brief explanation: my ex-mother-in-law (the first one; the 2nd one was a sweetie) did me wrong. While I suspect she got rid of my cat, I have no proof of that - however, I DO have proof that she deposited the joint income tax return check - that required both mine and her son's signature - into a bank account in just her son's name. (She attempted to lie about it in the divorce hearing and say she hadn't seen the check - when I said 'oh, that's okay, I've got the IRS running a trace on it to track it down', she quickly changed her tune. THEN she made up all this BS about me owing her money to the judge.) Anyway, I suspect she was in her sheriff's uniform at the time, which may be part of the reason why the bank teller didn't require my signature. (Or the bank teller was just incompetent - wonder if karma has hit that person yet? hrm...)

Anyway, I read the newspaper and VOILA! Guess who just had the Office of Inspector General where she worked (yes, past tense, she resigned "citing stress-related medical reasons and office tensions and said she'd been planning to leave the state for some time to be with her children" ha!) release a report finding her at fault for participating in the hiring process for a person with whom she shared a mutual financial interest (she was part of a committee that chose her boyfriend to fill a grant-funded position for which she was the grant coordinator), using department e-mail improperly, submitting travel reimbursements with false information and providing false information to OIG investigators.

Take that, bitch!

Let this be a warning to all y'all out there who have wronged me - yours is coming. It may take ten years, but it's coming, and when it does, expect massive humiliation.

Apologies are being accepted now - get them in while you can!


Bwahahahahahahahahahaha

Looking for an escape

Wish all my books weren't in storage.

Saw the link to Library Thing from Todd's page, I think, and am trying to enter books from memory that I've not seen in 8 months or more.

Family news update

J's grandmother is NOT having open heart surgery after all - more because of worries about how she'd handle it than because she doesn't need it.

Mom is going to have a couple of lumps looked at - since her sister had breast cancer, I'm assuming she's worried. That might be the source of her behaviour.

Dad still sounds like he's drowning in phlegm; hopefully at his upcoming doctor appointment there will be a suggestion to help reduce the mucous.

Kids are great; crazy as usual. Greatly enjoying swim lessons and getting tan.

J's new-old job is treating him okay so far. Adjustment is always a little stressful, of course.

I'm doing research on hormone imbalances and trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me and how I can fix it.

Everybody else I don't know about. Feel free to let me know.

Turn off the light - Adventure continued

You pull the chain and turn off the light.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.



After a few moments, you realize that the white squares of the checkered ceiling glow faintly - all except the one in the far corner, where the black wall and the blue wall meet.


You choose to:

Turn the light back on

Examine the white square that doesn't glow

Sit and wait to be eaten by a grue

Do nothing

Too mentally strung out lately for a real post

So you get this instead.

Doubleplusgood

I can't imagine why I consider myself an educated, cultured person when there is so much classic literature I've not yet read. Definitely ungood.

Well, today I began to rectify that.

Are any of you out there good duckspeakers?

heeheehee

Ever wonder what actually moves your mouse around the computer screen?

Wonder no longer.

I'm glad somebody actually put this together

I've often in conversation said "Geez, think of all the things we could have done with the money that's being pissed away in Iraq..."

Here are some of them.

Add your own - there or here, I'd love to see them.

How fricking cool is this??!!!

Okay, so there is a small conspiracy theorist who lives in my brain who looks for patterns that aren't necessarily there.

But COME ON!! Music encoded in the Chapel at Rosslyn??

As J says, Brown is cackling his ass off and crowing "I just sold more books!"



Here, take a listen: Rosslyn Motet

Irregular Webcomic

Ah, how I wish somebody else I knew read this comic strip as well and could enjoy a laugh with me over four deaths sharing a victim, so to speak.

Temporary insanity

The Depo shots have evened me out quite a bit, it seems. I do still have a couple of days at the end of the month that get rough, however - when the normal menstrual cycle would start. Today is April 29th. I'm at the point that a little voice inside my head is screaming "shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!!!!" almost every time somebody says something.

Mom may get out of the hospital on Monday. They think they've got the diagnosis right, finally - pyoderma gangrenosum. It took a week & a half to rule everything else out, basically.

I try to ignore dad when he mutters "nigger blah blah blah" when Barack Obama is on television. I've not heard him say it in front of the kids again, so that's some progress.

I'm currently in the strange position of taking care of my parents - but I don't know if they need me to step in and take over, and take care of them, and I'm pretty sure they're not at the place where they WANT me to step in and take over. Part of me says I should just go ahead and move out, but then I'd be driving over all the time anyway... although there's that voice in my head that asks why drive over all the time? Either they're able to take care of themselves or they aren't...

I'm going to play rummy cubes and ignore the world for a little while. (I found a mac rummy cubes game! woohoo!) Hope all of you are doing well. Go have a cup of tea.

News from Iraq

While listening to the news from the war in Iraq today, I wished momentarily that I was still friends with somebody from my high school drama group so I could call them up and say "Good fences make good neighbors!" and have them reply "Good neighbors make good fences!"

You had to be there.

This says it much better than I do

I had started this huge long post about grief vultures and how people will watch nonstop news coverage of something like the shootings at Virginia Tech and had started to collect other disasters that don't get this kind of attention (Darfur, tsunamis, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, etc.) and then found this at ThinkProgress:

University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole pointed out last night on PBS’s Newshour:

Remember that we’re all concerned, as we should be, about these events at Virginia Tech today. In Iraq this is a daily event. Imagine how horrible it would be if this kind of massacre were occurring every single day. And the people of Iraq feel that either the Americans are not stopping it or they’re actually causing it.

******EDIT*******

And then I found one of the comics I read has created a visual! Here ya go:

This is what I live with.

So the little boy & I sit down at the table to have breakfast. Dad has already finished eating and is reading the newspaper.

Dad says, somewhat to himself, "What a burden on the taxpayers..."
I say "You know, it's funny - I'll look at government programs that cost $85 million, and think DAMN that's a lot of money... and then I remember that they spend more than that on one plane."
Dad - "huh?" (yes, he has his hearing aid in)
I say "They spend more than 85 million dollars on ONE PLANE."

There is quiet for a bit while C & I eat.

Dad then says "You know, these programs trying to get rid of poverty... the Lord says we'll always have the poor with us."
I say "Yeah, but that's no reason not to try."

After a pause, I ask "Is that something Jesus said? I mean, in a red-letter bible, would that be in red text? Or is it just somewhere in the Bible?"
Dad replies "I'm not sure, it's somewhere in the Bible... there's a lot in the Bible."
I say "Yeah, it says you should stone people in the Bible, so forgive me for not going by it."

There is quiet for another little bit.

Dad then says "I forget where it says something about when women start dressing like men... maybe Revelations..." (Where the hell did this come from? I happen to be wearing a dress...)
I say "Yeah, and it also says that when a woman is menstruating she can't live with her family and has to go somewhere else because she's unclean."

(I was honestly hoping he was going to say something else about what teh Bible says, so I could reply with the point that the Bible says not to eat pork, either, and I'd not seen dad turning down the bacon lately.)

There is quiet again temporarily. Then dad says "You know what makes me angry? These addicts, these drunks, that lose their families, their jobs, their homes, and then expect the taxpayer to feed them and clothe them."
I say "Well, if we would get over ourselves and start treating it like the illness it is rather than a character flaw, there would probably be a lot less homeless people." (I have to repeat that for him.)
Dad - "You think it's an illness??! Pfft." (waves his hand dismissively, then proceeds to tell me a story of one of the guys he was in the army with who would repeatedly go get STINKING drunk, and dad would cart him back to the tent, and the guy would say "Boy, I wish I could be like you and stop drinking when it felt good!" And dad replied "You CAN!")
I say "Okay, given the choice between an addict or drunk continuing to drink, losing their job, their family, their house, and becoming homeless - and giving a person help so they stay productive members of society, which would you choose?"
Dad replies "Well, if helping them would DO anything..."
I say "well, that's the problem - we're not trying. It's like mental illness. I'm a mentally ill person. Is it an illness, or a character flaw? How do we treat it?"
Dad says "Mentally ill people should be in institutions where they can get treatment."
I stand up with my empty plate and say "Thanks, you can sign me up for one when you get around to it!" and take it to the kitchen, then on my way back past the table push my chair in. (Yes, I'm angry.)
Dad says "That's the problem with you! You fly off the handle! You've got this fiery temper!"
I interrupt him to say "Where do you think I got THAT from?"
He continues "You can't talk to you about anything!"
I get in his face and say, with quieter controlled anger, "Dad - I just told you I am a mentally ill person. You reply with 'mentally ill people should be put in institutions.' What am I supposed to take away from that??"
He makes a dismissive gesture with his hands and says "Oh, you're not mentally ill."


This is when I lose it.

I start shouting at him. "Oh, sure. Two suicide attempts and everything else, but I'm not mentally ill, I should just get over it, right? It's just a character flaw!"

J calms me down and talks to me after I storm out of the room with Dad. I told J that what I should have said when Dad said that you can't talk to me is "well, if the things you said weren't stupid, bigoted and uninformed, I would be able to talk!" He laughed and agreed. He said that I should tell dad that the plane my brother-in-law is on in the Air Force costs $100,000 to run for (I think) 12 hours - that's just the cost in fuel. damn.

The more time I spend with my father, the less I like him. Misogynistic, bigoted old fart. Love him, but don't like him.

If anybody would like to make my husband an incredible-I-can't-refuse job offer somewhere out of state, I'd like an excuse to move away...

OOOOOOOOOOOO

I am seriously, SERIOUSLY thinking of springing for one of these.



My birthday is coming up in a few months, anybody feel like giving me a present?

Book Club Meeting

Not that there's a book club or anything, but have any of you read Imperial Hubris - Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror?

I'm currently on page 75. Anybody want to pick it up and read along with me so as to discuss it?

How's life with y'all?

I feel like I've not posted in forever. I've been busy doing other things - laundry, taking kids to gymnastics, grocery shopping, running errands for everybody... typical stay-at-home mom stuff.

I've also been kind of busy reading the news...

Iran has released the British servicemen/women. That's good. I'm hoping that the retired FBI agent who disappeared from an island belonging to Iran doesn't become a casus belli. Haven't heard a whole lot about the U.S. Attorney kerfuffle in the last few days. McCain took a trip to Iraq and went shopping. Bush is trying to get into a pissing fight with congress about the Iraq supplemental bill - first about going on vacation - and then leaves for the ranch himself. And about how many days it's taking them to pass the bill. Why isn't Feingold running for president? Let's draft him rather than Al Gore. Why is Cheney lurking in the bushes? That sounded like an odd metaphor. The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has it in its power to regulate emissions that cause global warming. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Inhofe. We're supporting guerrilla raids into Iran (which surprises me none). The FBI has been spying on us all (which also surprises me none), even war protesters. Josh Wolf got out of jail finally. David Hicks is going to jail... for 9 months... and Cheney might have had something to do with it?


The list is enormous and there's no way I can even list them all. I have to say, though, I LOVE these: George W. Bush Scandals & Fuckups Collectors Plate Series.

I'm going to go play with my son.

Yo Todd, got this shirt yet?

I've found a new artist

He's not new, but he's new to me. I like his stuff. Reminds me of Dali. Mark Ryden. Check him out.