Wish Me Luck

All together now…."WHEW!!" Company is gone and I am on my own again. But it’s not like I can sit back and watch TV and pop bonbons into my mouth. (Since I gained three pounds over the weekend, I don’t intend to be popping much of anything into my mouth for the next couple of days…) I did a terrible thing yesterday…the husband decided that he needed to have a "sit and veg" day after the company left, and I let him suck me right into that vortex. We sat on our dead asses and watched hour after hour of sappy holiday weekend television specials. Now that my brain has been properly turned to oatmeal, I’m in a state of mind where I can commence my "speed-decorating."

I really wanted to get the outside lights up yesterday, at least the ones where you have to climb around on the roof. I am not comfortable playing "mountain goat" up there all by myself. But, then, what could the husband do if I started to fall? Stand there and watch me disappear over the edge? I suppose he could call 911 after I hit the concrete… Nevertheless, I am going to suck it up and get out there in about 45 minutes (I am mentally ticking off those minutes, gathering up my courage…) and do the deed myself. If you never see another entry here, you know what happened… I promise pictures if I am not dead or in traction.

Sneaking a "Quiet" Fix

Here it is, 9:00 am on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  I am sitting here on the john, with the computer in my lap, typing away... (a little trick I stole from the husband, after dissing him mercilessly the first time I caught him at it.)  But right now, this is about the only place in the house where I can be assured of privacy.  And I couldn't even be sure of THAT if I hadn't locked the door...!

Much as I look forward to this opportunity to have the whole famly together under my roof, my normal everyday life does NOT prepare me for the constant hubbbub of having a house full of people.  I guess you could say I'm becoming quite the old fart.  I spend a lot of time on my own, and though it can be a somewhat lonely existence, I am on the whole quite comfortable by myself.  So much so that when I DON'T get my quota of "alone time," I get a little rattled.  To put it midly.

Well,  my fifteen-minute "toilet vacation" from the melee is just about over.  Now, I have to decide whether I want to rejoin the human race, pull on my bathing suit and go out and sit in the hot tub with the group, or stay inside to get caught up with the endless straightening, dishwashing, laundry, and zookeeper duties.  Hmm...where did I put my suit....?   

 

Holiday Wishes

           

Some Places To Go....

Please go to Jackie's Journal and read her entry for today.  It's just beautiful. I haven't yet found the peace inside of me, since the upheaval of the election, to go to the places in my mind where this kind of writing comes from...

Also, for those of you with access to "Brainsurfing," I added an entry to it today (which has a pretty funny story attached to it, which I will explain in my next entry...)  But, for some reason, it isn't sending out alerts these days.  So go take a look if you're so inclined...

The "Professional" Cook Does Thanksgiving

I literally spent the day in the kitchen. I’ve never done that for a holiday before. And, when I look at the fruits of my labors, they don’t seem to be much to show for twelve hours of galley slave work. I created one batch of homemade salsa and one batch of spinach dip for pre-Thanksgiving-dinner munchies. Aside from the chopping, thawing, draining, and mixing, these recipes were pretty straight forward, so I managed to sail through them almost unscathed… "Almost" because I ignored the conventional admonishment to wear gloves when seeding and chopping the jalapenos. Found out you definitely don’t want to do that the day after having a manicure. Terminally burning fingers!

Unfortunately, I had less luck with my baking projects. Since I consider myself a baker by profession, I probably shouldn’t admit this. I tried some new recipes, and purposely did my baking today, instead of Thanksgiving morning, or the night before, so that if I had disasters I had time for "do-overs." And I did.

I owe my lack of baking success largely to my attempt to come up with desserts that are low-fat but still edible. The two I made today, I tried to modify to cut out as much fat as possible. My first gingerbread turned out like a flat brick of slightly damp sawdust, and my premier attempt at pecan pie ended up with this thick brown skin over the top. Come to find out you can NOT replace the eggs called for in the pie recipe with egg substitute...I knew something was wrong when, thirty minutes into its baking time, my pie began to look like a brown leather "jiffy pop." It dutifully sank after I took it out of the oven, but, unfortunately, the leather didn’t magically disappear. Had to start all over again, using honest-to-god real eggs…and since the "lowfat" quotient was now in the crapper, I decided to throw in half a bag chocolate chips as well. Husband and I ate the reject…it tasted fine. It just didn’t look like something you would serve to company. And then, of course, I had to keep trying samples of the gingerbread---the first batch in order to judge it a reject, and the second batch to make sure it was really edible this time. How many "points" did I use trying to come up with low-fat desserts for the holiday? Can you say "counter-productive?"

I also managed to guilt one of my sisters into bringing a vegetable dish for Thanksgiving dinner, along with her home-made cranberry sauce. Which means, on Thursday, we’ll be down to the bird, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, and the rolls. Maybe I won’t be stuck in the kitchen all day,,,   And since I'm nodding off trying to write this, I guess I'd better quit here and get some shut-eye.

Holiday Handicap

Here they are, my major holiday indulgence. Well, one of them, anyway. Wonder of wonders, the girl who did my nails last year was still working at the little salon down the street. Yes, it IS the same salon where I got the haircut from hell last April. But I didn’t see the point in holding that against the manicurist. So I went in and got my nails done ***On Sale*** for $29. Not bad, since I seem to recall they cost me over $40 last year.
And now, I’m sure everyone will be relieved to know, I am definitely typing-impaired. I guess I’ll have to give up those long, impassioned political rants until after New Years when I ditch the nails. I’ll have to fill my page with pictures of Christmas stuff. Along about January 5, I’ll bet that y’all will be "Christmased" to death, and will welcome a nice political rant or two!

And in TODAY'S News...

Five Dead, Three Hurt in Wisconsin Hunting Dispute

By JOSHUA FREED, AP

BIRCHWOOD, Wis. (Nov. 22) -- A deer hunter shot and killed five people and injured three others in northwestern Wisconsin following a dispute about a tree stand during the hunt's opening weekend, authorities said.

What a perfect illustration of exactly what I was talking about in my last entry.

Our constitution requires that we allow people to go off into the woods armed to the teeth with semi-automatic weapons. Background checks? Waiting periods? Outlawing of certain kinds of extremely dangerous weapons? Unconstitutional! After all, those deer can be tough…gotta have the ability to pump as many bullets into ‘em as it takes to bring ‘em down! VERY sportsmanlike!

I can’t wait to see the fur fly between the NRA and the gun control lobby on this one.

The Few...The Proud...

I’m amazed at how the military, the media, and the population at large are springing to the defense of the marine who killed the unarmed Iraqi insurgent in a mosque last Saturday. We are supposed to "understand" that what this man did was caused by the horrors of war, by the trauma he had suffered through things his unit had recently experienced, by sleep deprivation…you name the excuse, we will float it out there. I’ll admit, I included a reference to the incident in one of my previous journal entries, even though I had not heard the full story. This evening, I went to Slate.com, and found an article (http://www.slate.com/id/2109904/) which described the incident, then went on for several hundred words in an attempt to defend it. I’m sorry…I couldn’t see how the authors (Owen West and Philip Carter) made the leap from the actual fact of the shooting, to the excuses they made in the subsequent paragraphs.

"A Marine shot an unarmed insurgent in a Fallujah mosque on Saturday. We know this because we saw it. The digital video footage of the shooting—recorded by NBC reporter Kevin Sites, who was embedded with the Marines—is running nearly continuously on cable news channels worldwide. We heard it, too. A Marine says: ‘He's f___ing faking he's dead. He's faking he's f___ing dead.’ The Marine comes into view with his rifle shouldered. There is a rifle shot. An Iraqi leaning against a wall slumps, leaving a blood stain behind. According to CNN, another Marine says, ‘Well, he's dead now.’ "

Am I the only person in America that finds this absolutely abhorrent? The authors begin the article with this description, and then proceed to tell us why what the shooter did was not a war crime, but simply an error in judgment. First of all, they suggest that the shooting is not counter to the Geneva Convention, because the marines were not yet certain that the mosque was "theirs," so the man couldn’t really be considered a prisoner. Then they go on to describe the horrors of battle, the "kill or be killed" atmosphere, the sleep deprivation suffered in a protracted offensive, and on and on and on.

So now I’m supposed to feel sorry for this marine, this professional soldier, who has benefited from arguably the finest military training the world has to offer. I’m supposed to assume that he was ill-prepared for the reality of battle stress, did not know enough to understand whether the battle was still being engaged, had not been trained in the finer points of treatment of prisoners, didn’t have enough moral foundation, or at least common sense, to understand that you don’t shoot an unarmed man. Especially not while the cameras are rolling.

If it had been some nineteen-year-old draftee who had pulled the trigger—a frightened boy who was wallowing in war up to his neck—I would be willing to allow all these excuses, and more. But, no… This atrocity was perpetrated by one of "the few…the proud." If this is an example of the finest fighting force on earth, the one that is supposed to be the staunchest defender of American interests throughout the world, then I am very, very disappointed. And embarrassed, and frightened, and saddened. But I can’t say his actions are not reflective of a decay that has swept across our land. We no longer recognize what is good or fair. Gratuitous violence is so pervasive in our culture, we don’t even know enough to be outraged by it. Life is all about winning at any cost. Give up everything—your friends, your family, your moral fiber, your humanity—to make sure you are the last man standing. That is what commands respect in American culture today. And you never take responsibility for a negative outcome. You blame it on society, your parents, your superiors, the victim, the weather… We’re becoming so skilled at pointing the finger at the other guy, it has almost replaced baseball as the national pass-time.

All I can say is, "WAKE UP, AMERICA!" Open your eyes, look past what you would like to see, or what the Bush machine would like you to see. Our military is broken. Our relationship with the rest of the world is broken. Our ability to recognize goodness and fairness, and to walk that walk, is broken. We’re running our country into the ground by promoting a culture of fear, hatred, domination, and selfishness. Our military is a reflection of our values around the world. WE shot that man in cold blood in a mosque in Fallujah. Will we defend and excuse it, or will we take responsibility and punish it? And will we take steps to rehabilitate our culture, so that we don’t continue to send soldiers abroad to broadcast such evil in the world?

Foreign Policy

Headline on the AOL Welcome Screen this morning:

Will Iran Be The Next Iraq?

For a moment, an icy finger of fear and dread stabbed into the pit of my stomach. But after I gave some thought to the Bush Administration’s track record, my fear melted away.

First of all, one has to remember that the American media are throwing this problem in the president’s face. They are merely acting upon their latest mission statement: "Create fear, panic, controversy and sensationalism wherever and whenever you can. And, oh yes, see if you can squeeze a few lines of news in somewhere." But, to give the media a slight nod, Mr. Bush himself handed them the interpretation of his administration as the hard-line WMD watchdogs of the world, when he settled upon the search for and destruction of such weapons as his raison du jour for attacking Iraq. Who can blame the media for assuming he must now apply that hard line to his administration’s dealings with nations like Iran and North Korea, who actually pose a real WMD threat to the world? Or for at least throwing these nations into Mr. Bush’s face, just to see what his reaction will be.

Truly, I don’t think Iran is as much of a problem to the Bush administration as we would like to believe. Mr. Bush has already shown himself perfectly capable of contradictory foreign policy. Have we forgotten how he literally turned his back on North Korea’s saber-rattling, while at the same time ramming his obvious intention to attack Iraq down the world’s throat? It isn’t much of a leap to realize that WMD were never the real issue in Iraq. What does Iraq have that North Korea does not…and the United States needs very badly? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

It could be argued that Iran, being a middle eastern nation, might stand a better chance of falling victim to Mr. Bush’s hard-ass foreign policy. Attacking Iran, which has been looked upon as an enemy nation ever since the Carter administration, would probably even play well with the American people—the hawkish, bloodthirsty faction, anyway…which seem to hold the reins these days. But there is another very real obstacle to an American attack on Iran. We don’t have the manpower. We are hard-pressed to scrape together enough military presence to clean up our own mess in Iraq. We donned our big-ass boots and stomped into what we thought was a mud puddle, but turned out to be wet concrete. Which has since hardened and has us firmly stuck in the urban battleground of Iraq.

So, don’t think it is by accident that the Bush administration has handed the Iran question to the diplomats of "Old Europe," who are actually doing a credible job at the negotiation table. Funny how France and Germany have suddenly become our wise allies again…

Field Trip

Yesterday, I ran an errand that sort of made me feel like an eighteen year-old again. I drove over the state line to buy liquor. Only this time I wasn’t trying to circumvent the drinking age in my home state…I was just looking to stock up my liquor cabinet for the holidays without having to take out a loan.

Back in the olden days, when we lived in Chicagoland, you could just drive down to the Jewel and throw a bottle of whiskey in your cart, along with your milk and frozen peas. Or, there were always the gigantic free-standing liquor stores, that were the size of small department stores, if you really needed to load up. Prices were kept dirt cheap by virtue of the fact that the stores were all competing for your liquor buck.

Out here in Oregon we have state liquor stores, which carry a small, prescribed inventory of hooch, charge outlandish prices that are set by state regulation, and close at 8pm sharp. And you can forget buying liquor on Sundays. They seem to think that they are saving us from ourselves—if the stuff is hard to come by, we won’t indulge our lust for demon rum. However, you can buy all the beer or wine you want at the 24-hour grocery store down the street. So we are a state of beer-a-holics and winos.

There is a state liquor store about a mile from my house, but I decided to investigate the prices on the other side of the river, in Washington. So I loaded the dog in the car and went on a field trip. You have to drive about thirty miles one way to get to the closest bridge over the Columbia, but it’s a lovely drive this time of year, and it’s not like I have a day-planner full of other important appointments. I did a map-quest thing for directions to the closest liquor store…even so, I managed to drive around Longview for about 45 minutes before I finally found the place. It turned out that Washington has state-run liquor stores as well…but the prices were somewhat more believable. Of course, if you add the cost of the gas I burned getting there and back, I probably didn’t save a sous. Oh well.

The sun came out, and I got to enjoy the fall colors on the drive.  (I could have kicked myself for forgetting my camera.) Also found a beautiful park in Longview that runs along about six blocks in the older section of town. I think it’s built alongan old mill race…it had a lovely expanse of glass-like water running through the middle of it, anyway. And bright-robed trees leaning over the water primping at their reflections. And, oddly, every other building along the way was a church. I started out admiring a building that was half red brick and half dark stained wood, with arched doorways and an alpine-looking roofline, that turned out to be the First Christian Church. Two doors down was the Lutheran Church, and then another church, and another. The crowning glory was a gorgeous light brick building that held a huge square bell tower against the blue of the autumn sky. I was thinking it must be a monastery or some kind of Catholic edifice. Above the great wood door, etched in the stone, it said "Community Church." I would have loved to learn the history of that building. It didn’t look like any community church I’ve ever seen.

Dog and I took the tour through about half of this wonderful park. For some reason, it spoke to me of my roots in the midwest. Must have been all the brick…you really don’t see that much brick construction out here in the west. A pang of homesickness struck my heart…in my mind’s eye, I could see the pond glazed with ice, surrounded by snowdrifts, and covered with skaters. I do love living in the Pacific Northwest, but it does lack a certain "Currier & Ives" quality this time of year…