If I ever work in a cubicle again

I'm SO making one of these.

Right now, my office actually has a window. Go figure - In all my working life, I've only once before had an office with a window.

I love Boing Boing for many reasons

Here is one:

Food company's annual report needs to be baked before reading

How cool is that?

Is it Friday yet?

About a month ago I started two new jobs. I'm a part-time secretary for the school M goes to, and I'm tutoring three girls in 6th grade math. I also took my first paid gig as a face painter for a kid's birthday party, and made the cake as well. (It was a pirate ship, complete with sails, water & a shark.)

As soon as I pay off some old debts, I think the first thing I might put my paycheck towards is one of these. I have to have some help keeping track of my schedule. Between stuff for the kids, doctor appointments for my father & aunt, work, tutoring, and everything else, I either need something like this or a personal secretary.

Yes, I'm still alive

This is a great idea.


Nothing more to add.

When you lay it out like that...

Thanks to Senate 2008 Guru, here's a run-down of Republican corruption scandals JUST SINCE JANUARY 2007. It's a bit mind-boggling.

January 23, 2007: Republican radio personality Scott Eller Cortelyou of Denver arrested on suspicion of using the Internet to lure a child into a sexual relationship

January 29, 2007: Republican former Jefferson County, Colorado, Treasurer Mark Paschall indicted on two felony charges "in connection with an allegation that Paschall solicited a kickback from a bonus he awarded one of his employees"

January 31, 2007: Republican Congressman Gary Miller is named by Republicans as ranking member of oversight subcommittee of House Financial Services Committee despite the FBI's investigation into his land deals

February 14, 2007: Major Republican fundraiser Brent Wilkes and former CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo are indicted by a grandy jury for corrupting CIA contracts

February 16, 2007: Major Republican donor Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, aka Michael Mixon, is indicted in federal court on charges of providing material support to terrorists

March 5, 2007: Ethics complaint filed against Republican Senator Pete Domenici for his role in the Attorney Purge scandal

March 6, 2007: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney found guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury

March 8, 2007: Republican former U.S. Congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich admits to extramarital affair

March 23, 2007: Former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became an architect of George W. Bush's energy policies, pleads guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee

March 27, 2007: Criminal charges filed against Republican Pennsylvania State Senator Robert Regola in connection with the death of a teenage neighbor who was shot with the senator's gun; he is accused of three counts of perjury, allowing possession of a firearm by a minor, recklessly endangering another person and false swearing

March 27, 2007: Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, "indicted on charges of defrauding investors and banks of $1.6 billion while chairman of Collins & Aikman Corp., an auto parts maker that collapsed days after he quit"

March 28, 2007: Robert Vellanoweth, a Republican activist and appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is arrested on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter and felony driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, after a crash that killed three adults and one child

April 18, 2007: The FBI raids the home of Republican Congressman John Doolittle, investigating his ties to Jack Abramoff

April 19, 2007: The FBI raids a business tied to the family of Republican Congressman Rick Renzi, as part of an investigation into his business dealings

April 23, 2007: The FBI questions Republican Congressman Tom Feeney about his dealings with Jack Abramoff

April 23, 2007: Federal auditors find repeat violations of federal election law from the 2004 Senate campaign of Republican Senator Mel Martinez

April 26, 2007: David Huckabee, son of Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, is arrested at an Arkansas airport after a federal X-ray technician detected a loaded gun in his carry-on luggage

May 4, 2007: Bruce Weyhrauch and Pete Kott, former Alaska state Republican legislators, were arrested and accused of soliciting and accepting bribes from the corrupt VECO Corporation

May 4, 2007: Republican state Assemblyman Michael Cole is censured and stripped of his leadership position after the married father of two spent the night at a 21-year-old intern's apartment

May 11, 2007: A field coordinator for Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry is indicted for voter fraud in North Carolina

May 12, 2007: NBC News breaks the story that the FBI is investigating Republican Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons for suspicion of accepting bribes in exchange for securing government contracts

May 15, 2007: Connecticut Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy is arrested for drunk driving (he pled no contest on June 1, but didn't publicly disclose the event until June 11)

May 18, 2007: Republican former South Dakota State Representative Ted Klaudt is charged with eight counts of second-degree rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, one count of sexual contact with a child younger than 16, two counts of witness tampering and one count of stalking against two foster children in his care

May 21, 2007: Republican state Senate candidate Mark Tate is indicted on nine counts of perjury and two counts of election fraud by a grand jury

June 11, 2007: Republican Senator Larry Craig is arrested for lewd conduct in the men's bathroom of an airport

June 19, 2007: South Carolina Republican state Treasurer and South Carolina Chairman of Giuliani for President Thomas Ravenel is indicted by a grand jury on cocaine distribution charges

July 2, 2007: President George W. Bush commutes the sentence of former Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby following Libby's conviction on obstruction of justice and perjury

July 3, 2007: A grand jury report declares that the sale of public land to Republican Congressman Ken Calvert and his business partners violated the law

July 11, 2007: Republican state Representative and Florida co-Chairman of McCain for President Bob Allen is arrested for soliciting a male undercover police officer, offering to pay $20 to perform oral sex

July 16, 2007: Republican Senator David Vitter holds press conference acknowledging being on the D.C. Madam's list and past involvement with prostitutes

July 16, 2007: Story breaks that Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was involved in a sweetheart real estate deal

July 19: Republican former state legislator Coy Privette is charged with six counts of aiding and abetting prostitution

July 24, 2007: Michael Flory, former head of the Michigan Federation of Young Republicans, pleads guilty to sexual abuse

July 26, 2007: Media report that Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski will sell back land purchased in a sweetheart deal, following close scrutiny of the shady transaction

July 29, 2007: Glenn Murphy Jr., recently-elected Chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, is accused of sexually assaulting a sleeping man

July 30, 2007: The FBI and IRS raid the home of Republican Senator Ted Stevens following investigations into Stevens' dealings with the corrupt VECO Corporation

August 2, 2007: Bush administration senior adviser Karl Rove disregards a Congressional subpoena and refuses to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee

August 6, 2007: Investigation called for after House Republican Leader John Boehner leaked classified information regarding a secret court ruling over warrantless wiretapping

August 8, 2007: Republican Senator Larry Craig pleads guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct following his June 11 arrest

August 9, 2007: Major Republican donor Alan Fabian is charged with 23 counts of bankruptcy fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and perjury

August 15, 2007: Republican state House candidate Angelo Cappelli is arrested for perjury and grand theft

August 22, 2007: Republican political consultant Roger Stone resigns his role with the New York state Senate Republicans after reports surfaced that he made a "threatening, obscenity-laced" phone call to the 83-year-old father of Governor Eliot Spitzer

August 27, 2007: Story breaks that Republican Senator Larry Craig was arrested and pled guilty - he had not publicly disclosed the events to that point

Has anybody seen a Democratic equivalent? I'd be curious to do a comparison...

The beat goes on

Whistleblowers about corruption in Iraq get thrown into jail and interrogated - BY U.S. FORCES.  

Gonzales is finally gone. I'd throw a party, but I want the bastard prosecuted - and I'm afraid of who Bush is going to put in his place.

I knew corruption in Iraq was bad, but this is enough to make you vomit.

I spent the evening in front of the old capitol with an end-the-war rally.  The response from the cars driving by was amazing - there is definitely a majority of people (at least a majority of the ones that drove by us) that want the war to end now.  I've never heard so much honking in my life.  I wonder, though, about the few who flicked us off.  Most of them were young men - made me want to point out to them that if there's a draft, they'll be first on the chopping block - will they then be so gung-ho?

J sent me to Good Reads.  It's similar to other things online, but looks like it might be fun.  Drop by.

Remember the Milk looks like it could be really useful - I'll have to see how well it fits into my life.

I... I have no words...

I've joked about something like this for years now - you know, the "Just wait! Some horrible something will happen and Bush will claim it's not safe to hold an election, etc. etc.... ha ha!"

To see it proposed as a serious idea makes me physically ill.

However, President Bush has a valuable historical example that he could choose to follow.
When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.
Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.
He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

Entire article entitled Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy.

Just a bit of stuff you might enjoy

And stuff to (hopefully) make you think...

How to Achieve Career Happiness by Being Gay on the Inside



Do We Need Another Jungle? - has some great fair trade links, among other things

Here's a book I'd like to read sometime soon...

Here's a GREAT blog entry from a stay-at-home dad - something I hope J can do soon...

This reminds me of some of the frustrations I feel: Oh, but it’s atheists who can’t have morals

I'm tempted to read this to find out what they'll arrest me for that is unconstitutional so I can go find some public event involving the president to attend... I could use $80K!

Tis almost the ides of August

J & I had a lovely dinner at the Melting Pot last night for our birthdays, courtesy of my mom.

I woke up this morning to a note left on our door in probably 92pt font: ROVE QUIT. I think I'll consider that a birthday present. Now if they'll just get him to testify!

So I get online and jump on some of the political blogs to see the details, and while I'm reading various and sundry articles, I see a link to an article in The Observer (a UK paper) "Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq" and after reading it, I think to myself WOW, that's pretty blunt - gee, I wonder if any US news organizations are reporting on this?

Can't find much. Found an article in the magazine The American Conservative talking about how Bush has broken the military - but all the rest of the articles I've found are elsewhere. For example:
"For an exhausted, disenchanted army there is still no end in sight" - The Independent (UK)
"Army Chief calls for return of draft to ease fatigue" - New Zealand Herald


Well, here's one from the US - but you note the article's title doesn't mention exhaustion:
"Military Is Ill-Prepared For Other Conflicts" - Washington Post
I'm guessing that the title is meant to point out, AHEM, that BOMBING IRAN IS STUPID. (Cheney has evidently been walking around chanting "bomb Iran" - given the amount of oil that China buys from Iran, wouldn't that bring China into a fight? Or is that what he wants, a proxy war with China?) After reading the article, I'm thinking maybe the title understates the problem.


So in looking for US articles about our exhausted military (you get slightly better results if you look for "broken" military, since several high ranking US people have used those words) I notice that our War Czar has basically called for the draft to be reinstated. I'm surprised I've not heard the administration backpedaling furiously.

In other news - watch out, the market is looking scarier and scarier. I'd like to point out that I saw this coming 6 months ago. Here's a quote:

Bottom line: there are a ton of problems in the credit market that aren't going away anytime soon. The main reason for that comment comes from Countrywide Financial's report on Thursday. Countrywide is the largest mortgage lender by volume. That means they have a ton of stature and clout in the market. The problem is simple: they can't find liquidity for their mortgages right now. They had to place $1.8 billion of loans into their investment portfolio and devalue both investments by between 14% and 20% when the transferred those assets. The devaluation tells me that buyers are pretty scared about the whole mortgage mess right now.

Add to this the news that BNP stopped withdrawals from some of its funds, a Goldman Sachs fund lost over 20% since the beginning of the year, Washington Mutual agreeing with Countrywide's assessment of the credit markets, and the central banks pumping liquidity into the market, and you have a recipe for increased volatility and concern.

And in case you thought that wasn't enough:

But, he adds, the full weight of resets on adjustable-rate mortgages have yet to been felt. From the beginning of 2007 through the middle of 2008, over $1 trillion ARMs will reset, many from low "teaser" rates. Then the extent of the declines in home prices and the financial fallout will be apparent, Magnus observes.

The news has continued to come out in a very negative vein. And it's the big players who are making the announcements. That is all the more concerning. When the mortgage mess first started in last 2006/early 2007 it was the smaller players making the announcements. While this was disconcerting, it wasn't earth shattering. Now the big boys are saying, "boy is it rough out there". That should concern everybody.

There's just too much to comment on. I've got the bad news fatigue that seems to be hitting almost everybody. US military lost over 100,000 weapons in Iraq? Whatever. Our people are probably getting killed by our own weapons. Gotta love it. FEMA tries to hide the toxic outgassing of its emergency trailers that is making people sick? No surprise. Bush now talking about creating tax cuts for corporations? Sure, why not.

I think I'd better stop reading the news today. You'd think news of Rove resigning would make me happy... *sigh*

Today was great!

Well, yesterday, at this point, I guess.

Got up early, got to chat with J before the kids were up. Took my meds eeeeaaaarrrrly. Made breakfast for me, the kids, and dad. Went outside with the kids & scrubbed two chairs, a booster seat and a trashcan - getting soaked in the process, and creating much mud for the two munchkins to play in. While they played in the mud, I trimmed the bushes along the front right of the house (that haven't been trimmed in probably years at this point) and the pyrecantha bush (that is not a bush, the damn thing's a tree - it's taller than the house at this point! I told J later "I wonder how many of the bushes in our world are just oppressed trees? I can just see them saying "well, I'd be taller if you'd just STOP CHOPPING MY TOP OFF!"" Got a great laugh out of that. Anyway, got those bushes done, chopped down some unruly growth in the front of the yard, and managed to find 5 or 6 fire ants that hadn't died off yet from me putting fire ant killer on their mounds yesterday. They got my feet. Then managed to find a few more that must have dropped onto me from somewhere else - got a couple of bites on my neck & back; should be entertaining. Then brought the kids in, we watched a short movie, read some books and took a nap. Then got up, picked up Dad from his art class (yay, he went! Even if briefly, and without art supplies! I'm under orders to bring him back and bring his supplies next time.), went by the grocery store, came home & unloaded the dishwasher, made a fruit salad, made dinner (meatloaf, baked potatoes & spinach), fed everybody, took kids into bedroom, read books, put kids to sleep, and spent some quality time with my husband.

And was in a good mood pretty much all day. Sang, hummed or whistled all thru making dinner. The latest news about Westboro Baptist church heading up to the funerals of the bridge collapse couldn't even break me. And even hearing about some ex-friends of ours didn't hijack my brain the way it sometimes does! Of course, that might be because of WHAT I heard, hee - ran into somebody who knows them now, and said "Oh, yeah, I know them. She's a CUNT. Total bitch, you know? And HUGE, too, man!" I know I shouldn't find that as amusing as I do, but damn, it makes me laugh every time I think about it. Considering the BS she put me through, I have a hard time being a nice person about her. I mean, if I found out her house burnt down, I'd probably laugh. Isn't that awful?

Anyway, I'm going to go listen to some political commentary and cuddle with my babu. I just wanted to write this day down so in a few months I can look back and try to figure out what went right today, so as to do it again. :)

A comic worth reading

If you've never read xkcd, you should. It's frequently very amusing, especially for geeks. Part of the funny is always the image tag, I guess it is - the text that pops up when you rest your mouse on the picture.

So Todd, go take a look at the text for this one.

What an AWESOME little application

Any of y'all out there heard of "Monolingual"? Because my friend Patrick is the shiznit, it was already on my computer - I clicked on it a few minutes ago to see what the heck it was.

It deletes all the language files for programs that you don't need. (I really am not going to used simplified chinese, no matter what the program, thanks)

I HAVE ALREADY REGAINED MORE THAN A GIG OF HARD DRIVE SPACE AND IT'S STILL RUNNING.

Sweet. If I tried to do this by hand, I'd be here until Christmas. I should find whoever wrote this little gem and send them cookies. (And Patrick, too, for putting it on my computer. Thanks, Patrick!!)

I'm back!

Through the efforts of my husband and our friend Patrick, I am computered once again. The kids spilled a coke on my laptop, and I'd pretty much resigned myself to not being online a whole lot for 6 or more months - we can't exactly afford a laptop right now. However, because my babu is an amazing sweetheart, he arranged to trade work for a laptop for me! I am now the proud owner of a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4! With the light-up keyboard, oooooooo. Sure as heck faster then my old iBook... with a bigger screen... and a hard drive twice as large... yes, I'm aware I'm both spoiled rotten and lucky as hell. In husbands, I mean. Among other things.

I'm awake at 7 something this morning because M was sleeping with me and she wet the bed. Nothing like waking up in a pee puddle that's not your own. *sigh* I'm hoping she doesn't have the same trouble with bedwetting that I had as a kid - we'll see.

It's been a rough month. Great Aunt Mary died - she was our favorite. We took a whirlwind trip up to Tennessee to check on Mamaw & Papaw (her younger brother), to make sure they were doing okay - Aunt Mary's son was returning from Iraq to take care of things and he's always been a little nutty anyway, so we wanted to be on hand just in case. They were doing fine - aside from Mamaw having congestive heart failure, a leaky valve, and a hole in her heart, of course. It was frightening to see how weak she is. During this time Mamaw's brother in California had a stroke, and is not doing well - I've not heard any more about him yet.

Before we left to go up there, an old family friend of 15 or so years, Tom, had taken ill and they'd discovered tumors in his liver. He & his wife went up to Boston & stayed with his brother while being seen in a hospital that specialized in difficult cancer cases. It turns out that it was originally colon cancer, and because he didn't go to doctors and had never had a colonoscopy, it hadn't been caught until it had metastasized and taken over 90% of his liver... he died yesterday morning. Another 3 days and it would have been his 66th birthday. I still can't wrap my head around it... every time I think of his wife I get weepy; she was my 2nd grade teacher and we've been friends with her pretty much since then. They were such a pair - thinking of one without the other is like peanut butter without jelly or something. It's just off. It occasionally leads me to think about what would happen if something suddenly happened to J - which of course makes me fall apart totally. He's promised, by the way, to always get colonoscopies -- LET THIS BE A LESSON TO ALL OF YOU. The prep for a colonoscopy is shitty - pun intended - but the test itself is not a big deal. You're either sedated or knocked out; it's just pooping all day the day before that's not much fun. However, I think dying in four weeks is much worse, don't you?

In the middle of all this, the little boy turned three. We're having his party on Saturday - drop by Winthrop around noon for cake! I'm making a peaches & cream cake, and you know it's gonna be delicious.

I think that's all the news for July. Bill, I've not had time to read, so I'm way behind. I'm hoping to finish it in the next week before the copy of Harry Potter that a friend bought for me shows up in the mail. (Did I say I was spoiled? Wheeee!)

It's 11am and I'm going back to bed

It's days like this that the old idea of becoming a hermit-lady with a zillion cats starts sounding good.

I'm not sure what to do with this

Perhaps Bernard Goldberg put it best, while chatting on Fox News with Michelle Malkin:

“We go to the American people and we ask them if they can pick out Kansas on a map and they can’t. We ask them if they can pick out England on a map and they can’t. We ask them who the Vice-president is, they don’t have any idea. Who’s the Secretary of State? “I don’t know.” Then we go to them and ask them what they think of the Lewis Libby commutation? I don’t care what the American people have to say about these things.”

I'll admit I've railed against the general un-informedness of the American population before, and have made fun of idiots near and far. However, hearing someone say that because Americans are generally uninformed on some things that the government shouldn't listen to them - it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. There's a difference between general knowledge and ethics - even a person who can't quote Shakespeare can tell you if something is right or wrong.

That said, I agree with what someone in the comments said:

To Goldberg:
How about this, then — you can ignore the idiots, but if we pass the general knowledge section of the poll, you must follow our opinions. Fair enough?

Because I guarantee you, most of us liberals can indeed find Kansas, England, and even countries where they have mostly (gasp!) brown people(!) on a map. We can also name the VP and the Secretary of State, AND tell you what stupid, unethical, and/or illegal things they’ve done lately.

Politics lately makes me tired. I wonder if the Founding Fathers had days where they thought about telling everybody to f*$& off and finding their own island to move to...

Um.....

After last night's dreams, watching Steve from Blue's Clues with my children is somehow... wrong.

I think I'll go take a shower.

About Scooter Libby

Two things:

Some very good answers for people who aren't clear on what happened:

Bogus Spin #1: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went after Libby even after learning that Richard Armitage had been Bob Novak's "primary source" for his column outing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee.

Wrong. Armitage made his admission in early October 2003, nearly three months before Fitzgerald was appointed. So it should be clear that Fitzgerald wasn't appointed just to find out who leaked to Novak. In fact, this means that -- even with Armitage's confession in hand -- there was so much evidence of wrongdoing that a longtime GOP loyalist like John Ashcroft felt he had no choice but to recuse himself and allow the appointment of a special counsel.

Bogus Spin #2: Even so, Libby wasn't the only one who leaked about Plame.

Maybe not, but it turns out that every other Bush administration who leaked did so with information they got as a result of Libby's actions. Ari Fleischer testified during Scooter's trial that Libby told him over lunch about Plame working for the CIA, and Karl Rove reportedly told a similar story to the grand jury that indicted Libby. Meanwhile, Armitage and Bushite press flack Dan Bartlett both found out through a State Department memo that was produced in response to questions that Libby had asked a top department official about Wilson's trip to Niger. If Libby (and his boss, Dick Cheney) had been content to reply to Wilson's criticisms on their merits rather than by rattling cages in search of fodder for personal attacks, none of the other officials would ever have been able to leak about Plame.

Bogus Spin #3: The trial was just Libby's word against that of a bunch of reporters.

Although three reporters did testify, they were preceded on the stand by six different government officials who each testified to having conversations with Libby about Joe Wilson's wife before the date when Libby first claimed to have heard it from a reporter. It was these officials' testimony, more than that of the reporters, that convicted Libby.

Bogus Spin #4: Libby was convicted for having a faulty memory.

It's never mentioned in the mainstream media, but Scooter didn't just "forget" telling reporters about Joe Wilson's wife working for the CIA, and deny it when he really had told them.

No, Libby's "faulty memory" caused him not only to deny where he had learned about Plame -- a note produced in the trial showed Vice President Cheney had told him she worked in the Counterproliferation Department of the CIA (where the majority of employees are covert) -- but to invent stories saying he HAD leaked to reporters when he hadn't. He claimed to have been the first to tell Matt Cooper about Wilson's wife, thereby covering up the fact that Karl Rove had done so. And he shielded Fleischer by falsely claiming to have told the Post's Glenn Kessler as well, apparently trying to cover for the Post's October 12, 2003 report that a journalist for the Post (who turned out to be Walter Pincus) had been leaked to -- a news story that was found, with key passages underlined, in Libby's files.

Thus Libby was convicted not just of perjury but of intentionally lying in order to obstruct the investigation. And what George Bush did yesterday was intended to make sure he got away with it.

and a great example of Bush's inconsistencies. Or hypocrisies. Or both.

What's excessive? President Bush, who suddenly hates excessive punishments, once refused to commute the death sentence of a 33-year-old mentally retarded black man with an IQ of around 60 and the functional skills of a 7-year-old boy.

10 years ago last May, President Bush and Alberto Gonzales received a request for clemency on the day Terry Washington was to be executed for killing a college student in 1987. President Bush skimmed Gonzales' incomplete summary and denied clemency.

Terry Washington was dead before the sun went down.

Regarding the record 152 executions during his two terms as governor, Bush "wrote" in his autobiography, A Charge To Keep, "I don't believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own."

A good quote

Robert Kennedy once said,

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man [or woman] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [s/]he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Can't find my journal, so this goes here

Sorry, I know a person's dreams aren't interesting to anybody but themselves. Feel free to skip this; it's just me recording it so later when the psychiatrists try to figure out where I went wrong they'll have clues.


I think ingesting moldy flour helped - I don't remember dreaming this much in forever.

First dream, was visiting Bill & his wife in Seattle. Except his wife was Erin, my friend Matthew's wife. (Probably because I've never met Bill's real wife.) He was running a D&D game for us. During the conversation he told us about her new hobby - buying distressed houses and turning then around. One of the things she was doing was creating murals on the walls, at which point I exclaimed something like "Oh, I HOPE you've got pictures!" I then go to use the restroom (which ends up being a potty chair in the middle of the living room floor where their 2 nephews & niece are playing that they're babysitting) and as I'm sitting there everybody's walking toward the front door with car keys - evidently they're going to SHOW me her latest house; very cool. Oddly, mom is there, and keeps saying things like "you don't have to go NOW..." and "are you sure you feel up to it?"

So the end of that dream wakes me up to go pee. (If I'm peeing in a dream, it's a pretty good bet I have to go, isn't that standard?)

Back to sleep - next dream is that I've moved onto a new street with a bunch of really nice duplexes/quattroplexes/condos up and down it. I'm in my place, and I get online and look at Erinn's webpage, to see how she's doing. She's got a lot of pictures and video of the kids & us from when we all lived together (of course, these videos make it look like we lived together this year, as both the kids are relatively old) and I decide to walk down the street and ask her for copies of these (and anything else she's got, as these are pretty good). So I drop in to her place - I don't remember knocking or anything, just walking in. Strangely enough, I don't remember any more of our interaction, other than she was perhaps slightly nervously bubbly and I was quiet but not angry or unhappy - we didn't make up; we just sort of glossed over everything.

Next dream I'm driving into the parking lot of my new apartment (same one? Maybe; it's somewhere further north than I am now) and as mom behind me somewhere yells "be careful!" or something, I distractedly drive right into the 8ft deep or so hole that's there with the construction going on around us. My neighbors good-naturedly drag me & my station wagon out, and I say "You know, it seems I want your company so badly - how about we start a breakfast club rather than me falling into this hole?" (I've evidently done this before.) Several people express interest, and mom & I head up to the apartment. Mom expresses some doubt about a breakfast club, and talks about how it's not polite to make people host get-togethers at their places and making people feel obligated, blah blah blah. I tell her I'm not going to make anybody do anything; I'd just like to invite my neighbors over more! Then I guess there's a knock at the door, and mom goes into her room. Either the kids are already in bed or mom takes over putting them to bed while I answer the door. It's my old neighbor Chris (that I used to have a crush on in high school) and a friend of his, and I invite them in and we sit around and catch up on each others' lives - somehow Chris has gotten hold of a paper I've published that is somewhat objectivist in nature and he tells me I've done a good job. Things get a little flirty, but it's all very quiet and understated - and I'm just being a tease, I'm not really interested. Oddly enough, it seems that Justin hasn't moved with us yet - there's some feeling that he'll be moving up soon, and then I'm planning on letting him stay home with the kids for a while, to give him a break, since I have a good job. Then we head out to join up with Nathan (an ex-fling) and one of his friends, and they're in the front seat driving. Chris can't stand him. We're all talking about all kinds of things - everything from life back in Tallahassee, the hell that was high school, to philosophy, politics, etc. We then pull into a parking space in front of a row of swank townhouses, and Chris makes some comment like "what the hell, do you expect us to walk home?!" Either I or Nathan says no, it's not his car, it's mine, doofus. So Nathan & his buddy get out, and I get in the driver's seat and the rest of us leave.

Old home week inside the skull tonight. Maybe I can get another half hour of sleep.

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.