An ultra-conservative's views on this and that

31 December 2013

2013

It's been a big year.

  • January: T and I started the new year as an engaged couple, having just come off our engagement photo session.  The country continued to reel from the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT.  I became a member of the NRA in response to the government's attempt to infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners in a shameless display of exploitation of a tragedy.  The Disaster Twins turned 4.
  • February:  Valentine's Day with my fiancee.  A meteor explodes over Chelyabinsk, Russia.  Pope Benedict XVI becomes the first pope to resign since 1415.
  • March:  My bachelor party with my future brothers-in-law-- BBQ, beer, and bowling.  Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez dies from cancer.  Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio becomes Pope Francis.  I complete the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation.  Because of a records snafu,  I undergo a Conditional Baptism.  I witness what I think is my first Easter Vigil mass.  I start to feel a closer relationship with God.  I wonder how many other young people stray from their beliefs, only to find their way back.  One of those signs of the maturity that comes with age.  Also, I suppose, as the illusion of invincibility commonly held by youth is dispelled, and certain things become more important.  One becomes more aware of one's mortality and beginning preparations for eventual journey from one life to the next.  I being to understand how important it is to believe in my faith as I make one covenant with God.  Confirmation ceases to be just a checkbox that must be ticked before I am to receive the sacrament of marriage.
  • April:  Roger Ebert passes away.  The big day arrives.  T and I are married in a small ceremony in a small church.  I get to see friends I haven't seen in 12 years, and family I haven't seen in 25 years.  The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, passes away.  My new wife and I relax on a beach in Belize.  My wife and I begin to combine finances and households, with plans to hold at least one or two garage sales to rid of us the extra items in our lives.  But organizing both our lives takes more time than we realize.  The Boston Marathon is bombed by two Chechen Islamist dirtbags.
  • May:  Wacky weather brings snow in early May.  It comes to light that the IRS just so happens to investigate conservative political organizations more than liberal ones.  Couldn't have anything to do with radical leftists in the White House and Senate, could it?
  •  June:  Edward Snowden commits treason.  Whether the government's actions are right or wrong, he most definitely acted improperly.  There's no other word for it. 

    Meanwhile, I join my new in-laws on a regular family outing to the Great Lakes region of Iowa.  While there, my mother-in-law is stricken with pneumonia.  She is airlifted to the nearest big hospital and my wife and her siblings join my father-in-law in keeping a vigil at her bedside.  The rest of the family bands together to support my mother-in-law in time of crisis.

    James Gandolfini passes away at only 51 years of age. 
  • July:   The A/C breaks down on our house at the start of the summer, and I learn how shrewd my wife is in negotiating a good deal on the replacement.  Egypt is the site once again of mass protests as the people decide they're not happy with an al-Qaeda-aligned president.  A road trip adventure to Chicago with my wife, her best friend, and her best friend's husband to attend the wedding of one of their college friends.  Dennis Farina passes away.  My tenant moves out of my house in Minnesota and I start the process of getting it ready to sell. 
  • August:  My wife and I make a couple of trips to Minnesota to get the house ready to sell.
  • September:  Engagement anniversary.  A straight-line wind storm downs lots of tree limbs in our neighborhood, but does no apparent damage to our house.  Plenty of firewood now!
  • October:  The Democrats have their little temper-tantrum in the form of a shutdown.  The PR doesn't look good, what with the Obama Administration closing an open-air WWII memorial or kicking people out of their homes on Lake Mead.  RIP Tom Clancy.  Happy Birthday to my wife.  One final trip to my house before closing on the sale.  It feels good to no longer have to drive up there so often to take care of things.  The ACA's website demonstrates how the government, despite spending over half a billion dollars, can still fuck up something so simple.  And with the millions now losing their health insurance plans, the ACA continues to vindicate the people who pointed out attempting to add more governmental control would be disastrous.
  • November:  Thanksgiving with the in-laws.
  • December:   RIP Nelson Mandela.  Christmas with the in-laws and with my family.  Temperature extremes.  The Left tries and fails to destroy Phil Robertson, resorting to lies when nobody buys that he's a bigot.
I look forward to the new year.

25 December 2013

First Christmas together

Merry Christmas to all.

Today marks the 1st one I get to spend w/ my wife.  After a Christmas dinner @ the Chinese buffet, T & I got on board a plane @ oh-dark-hundred this morning to fly to visit relatives. We're halfway to our destination, w/ about an hour to go before catching the next leg.

I'm not a huge fan of air travel these days, considering how the knee-jerk attitudes of elected representatives have made it so onerous, but her being here w/ me makes it all worthwhile.

21 December 2013

Enough of this already!

It's been a few days since the proverbial excrement hit the air mover, and it never ceases to amaze me how quickly people will jump on the bandwagon of public opinion without having the facts:

“Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Sin becomes fine.”
What, in your mind, is sinful?
“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
And this...

“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
My God!  The man stated his own viewpoint!  His own preferences.  And sorry to the homosexual community in case you didn't already know this:  Most denominations of Christianity view homosexuality as a sin.  They also view sex outside of marriage as sinful, even heterosexual sex.  Guess what?  Many heterosexual Christians have pre- and extra-marital sex.  Where's the media blitz on a preacher or religiously-conservative family telling them that it's sinful?

Or is it because gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders have armed themselves with pseudo-science, arguing that they were, to quote Lady Gaga, "born this way"?  I've always been amused by that.  If scientists ever identify the gene or genes in our DNA, if they exist, that encourage a preference to deviant behavior (in that it deviates from the mathematical norm), will we see abortions of people if they have that gene or genes, much like we now see sex-selective abortions if couples don't want a boy or girl?

But if no GLBT gene or genes exist, then logic tells us such behavior is learned, not innate.  In which case, the pray-away-the-gay crowd, while personally a bit odd to me, isn't illogical.  If the Christian viewpoint is simply that we needn't give into our basest desires like animals do, that we can be spiritually enlightened by contributing to a stable, nuclear family, where's the counter-argument?  A village is a collection of people, but families help it grow and thrive.  Despite all the advances of science, human life still can only be created by combining sperm and egg, be it in a woman's uterus or in a test tube.  But the creation of human life is not enough, it must be cultivated in an environment of love.  Now there are couples that hit rough patches.  What keeps them together?  For the sake of the children?  Why?  Love.  Is love enough?

Christianity, along with other religions, put a guarantee on this:  Marriages in the Christian faith are covenants made in the presence of God.  Husband and wife promise themselves to the other before God, an oath with more weight to it than a legal document.  Unlike a legal marriage, which provides for divorce (and subsequently leaves any offspring to potentially fend for themselves before they are ready for the world), an oath made to God is intended to keep parents together and in physical, spiritual, and emotional union only with each other.  Men and women would not indulge their animal desires to bed multiple partners, be they of opposite sex or same.  The end result?  Stability, which fosters growth and maturity on an individual scale as well as a societal one.

And Robertson's crime?  Expressing his viewpoint that any other kind of behavior was sinful.  That it wasn't logical.  To Robertson, it isn't.  Homosexual couples can't conceive, one of the primary purposes of Christian marriage.  To be fair, some straight couples can't conceive either, but we're talking about comparing the exception with the immutable rule.

In the eyes of the perpetually-outraged, Robertson managed to offend another group:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
 Notice Robertson said that he never saw the mistreatment of a black person.   He's not saying it didn't happen.  Just that he didn't see it.  Is it possible he's being naive?  Yes, it's possible.  It would help to know the context of the question.

But the attitudes of so many "enlightened" northern liberals (and their southern counterparts) seems like they think that all southern, Christian whites do to this day is oppress blacks.  Yes, there are bigots in the South.  I've come across quite a few in the North too.  The difference?  Northern bigots are quieter about it.  Some  may think they're helping blacks by making special rules for them, by giving them preferential treatment.  The reality is every time they treat blacks differently, they demean them. 

And that's nothing to feel smug or superior about.

They demean the "color-blind" attitudes of conservatives as being blind to the plight of minorities.  I'm sorry, when does the pity party end?  When can we stop reminding those that did not visit atrocities upon others because of their skin color, gender, or sexual preference of how terrible they are for not joining the mob?

13 December 2013

Chatty Cathys, part IV

Stock options, pay scale, Outlook

Is it Friday already?

UPDATE:

A colleague of mine just got engaged.  Now the CCs are talking about Life After Marriage, joking about leaving the wife at home alone w/ the milkman, how their firstborn looks like the milkman.  Devolves from there into talking about how they still deliver milk in Australia.

Bands from Australia.  INXS

09 December 2013

Chatty Cathys, part III

North Korea?

06 December 2013

The Chatty Cathys, part II

They're at it again.

Rather than work at work (novel concept), my neighbors in the adjoining pod are talking about economies of scale and T-shirts.

I notice they get started early on Fridays.

29 November 2013

The Chatty Cathys, Part I

Some of my coworkers need more work.

My cube isn't really a cube.  It's a two sided desk that's part of a pod of desks. People in the pod work on the same tasks.  Yes, we are peas in a pod.

My desk's pod neighbors with a pod populated with Chatty Cathys who seem to have an opinion on everything.  That's not what bothers me.  What bothers me is their propensity to share it out loud.  Being their neighbor, I get to hear these opinions all the time.  I consider it very distracting, but I also marvel at how, in times where unemployment is high, these people think it's wise to just run their mouths. Business owners and bosses notice how idle, non-work-related chatter impacts the bottom line by reducing productivity.  A reasonable boss tolerates the deviation from work because the idle chatter helps the employees temporarily forget they're at work, unwind a little bit, vent their frustrations, get something off their chest, etc., before resuming the work they're being paid to do.  It translates to happy employees, whom, studies have shown, are more productive employees.  But there is a line where allowing the employee some latitude starts to impact the bottom line more than the extra productivity that may or may not be garnered.

A very wise and worldly instructor I had for supervisor training once upon a time theorized how the different employed generations viewed work:

The generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II tend to treat their job as very valuable.  Their work ethic gets them to regard their occupation as sacrosanct.  They're less likely to expect pay raises on a regular schedule and prefer more to take what they get when applying for a job.  "Humble" is a word I would associate with these folks.

The baby boomers came of age during a time of economic prosperity in post-war America.  Couple this with the counter-culture movement, and this generation by and large feels like they can do anything and subscribes to the "work smarter, not harder" mindset.  Overtime is less common amongst baby boomers, and negotiating for more perks when they join a job is more common.  Additionally, baby boomers tend to display less loyalty towards a business, changing jobs every couple of years.  The job market they grew up in was different than now, favoring the employee over the employer.

Generation-X, my generation, has more in common with the Greatest Generation than the Baby Boomers.  The job market favored the employers somewhat when we came of age.  We were on the cusp of the technological revolution we see today, giving us the experiences of at times doing menial tasks involving paperwork, for instance.  Within our first few years of employment, however, things started to change:  We saw new ways to perform those menial tasks with the aid of technology.  Given reliability issues, however, sometimes the old ways still prevailed.  Gen X-ers are likely to more slowly adopt technology than the next generation, partly because we're a bit cynical about it.  Gen X-ers also were the first generation to grow up by and large with two working parents, giving birth to the term "latch-key kids".  We tasted self-sufficiency and independence at an early age.  This translates into us being self-starters in our jobs, something that bosses love.  Our sometimes-cynicism about technology also makes us an asset because we're more sensitive to cost and less sensitive to the "cool" factor of new technology.

Millenials, the generation entering the workforce now, grew up in an age of instant-gratification.  They cannot recall a time prior to getting information from the Internet.  They grew up with at least one computer in their house, possibly more than one, and possibly at least one laptop.  Cable and satelite television has been more ubiquitous in their time.  Cell phones are more popular than landlines. This generation is always connected.  Asking them to focus on work presents a challenge:  Unplugging themselves from their online presences is difficult.  Millenials and Baby Boomers tend to have more in common.

This morning's mindless conversation topic:  Parking between the lines.  One person, a Millenial, could understand someone parking a nice car across two parking spaces to protect their doors from being dinged by the drivers and/or passengers of cars in adjacent spots.  To him, the fact that parking such a way is inconsiderate to others, especially when parking spaces are scarce.  Factor in inclement weather, and the lack of consideration is more acute because now people are forced to endure more of such weather in their effort to get inside a building, all so some vain person can protect the sides of their car from what might happen.  Don't get me wrong, it sucks to have someone else's car's paint job on yours, but that's life.  Get insurance and trust in the consideration of your fellow man.

Another person in the conversation, a Baby Boomer, chimed in her two cents about how the requirements are parking between the lines can be an undue burden, and a person who expects such discipline has never had to "drop a kid and get to work when they're late".  This woman is a vacuous moron:  By her logic, it's OK to break the traffic laws if you're in a hurry.  Why stop at parking?  In a hurry, go ahead and run that red light.  In a hurry?  Go ahead and drive around the lowered railroad crossing arms.  In a hurry?  Drive over the speed limit.

I'm sure some might point out how violation of moving traffic laws poses a greater danger to people than the parking violation.  Maybe they're just more obvious dangers?  You ever walk across an icy parking lot in January?  Take a spill and you break a bone, mess up your back, etc.  The point is that if every person is inconsiderate, you are greatly inconvenienced at best, potentially injured at worst.

25 November 2013

Infandous

Some of my coworkers really need more work.
I've never heard so many people engage in such mindless conversations.

18 October 2013

Closing

... a chapter. A sale.

On a home that isn't one anymore, and hasn't been for a while.

In February of 2004, I closed on my house in Minnesota.  I was so excited to buy my first house.  Moving out of my apartment.  Parking my car in a garage.  Playing my stereo as loud as I wanted.  Doing laundry @ 2 a.m. if needs be,  & not needing to hoard quarters.

Then came mowing my lawn.  The conventional wisdom is right:  There are few things more satisfying than working in your own yard.  To tame the chaotic & wild nature of the grass, to battle the weeds.  Just the way it looks after it's been cut evenly.

Initially, it was too much space.  I went from a one-bedroom apartment in the 800 sq. ft range to a nearly 1800 sq ft 3-bedroom house with a spacious family room downstairs.

I enjoyed wiring the basement for my surround-sound system.  I enjoyed adding wire shelving to the garage, upstairs bathroom, and upstairs bedroom closets.  Laying out and planting a vegetable garden.  Wiring up electrical outlets on posts in the front yard to support my array of Halloween and Christmas decorations.

I even enjoyed shoveling snow in the artic cold of a Minnesota winter.

Over time, I replaced appliances:  The refrigerator.  The water softener.

Over time, I acquired things:  A kitchen table and chairs, a patio table and chairs, crystal stemware.  Bed, sofa, bookshelves, and a desk.  A lawn mower, a trimmer, shop vac, power tools.

After months in the house on my own, my girlfriend moved in with me when her apartment became a potential health hazard from the suspected drug lab next door.  At times, the house didn't feel empty, but crowded.  Pets played in the basement.

Then my employment opportunities changed.  I found myself 250 miles to the south of my house.  For a year and a half, it sat empty.  Well, empty of my presence.  I periodically drove up and checked on things.  When my contract job in Des Moines became full time, I moved the rest of my belongings south.  A couple of months later, an opportunity arose for me to rent the house, so I hung on to it for another two years, checking in on it with less frequency, especially after I started dating the woman who would become my wife.  After proposing to my wife, I saw the house differently:  It was extremely unlikely I would reoccupy it, so I saw it more as anchor around my neck.  Late this summer, I put the house on the market.

I didn't get what I wanted for it, but I walked away with some money in my pocket nonetheless.

Five days ago, I saw my house for the last time.  As I pulled away with the trailer attached, I felt somber.  Closing on the house was a closing on a segment of my life.

But it was easy to drive away:  It was just a piece of property.  No longer a home.  It hadn't been one for years.

No my home was to the south, about 250 miles.  And there was a woman there, waiting for me.

A house is just a structure.  A home is much more than that.



15 June 2013

Family

An ambulance picked up my mother-in-law this morning after she had trouble breathing.

Here we are, on vacation with a bunch of my in-laws and some of their families.  As if there's a good time for a family emergency.

But what I saw humbled me in new and profound ways today:  My father-in-law and his two sons and two daughters (including my wife) are with my mother-in-law in a hospital an hour away.  Tomorrow evening, when I get home from this vacation, they will be over four hours away.  They won't be coming back to the resort tomorrow, when we were slated to go home.  Instead, they will stay with their mother as doctors work to stabilize her.  So my mother-in-law's siblings, their families, and my wife's siblings' spouses all pitched in to clean the resort room and pack the father-in-law's car.  My father-in-law and his children returned from the local hospital just long enough to say their goodbyes, bring us up to speed, and make their way to the hospital an hour away.

Later, as I sat by the pool and helped my in-laws' spouses watch their kids, I realized something:  I was part of this family.  What I had in common with the other would-be strangers around the pool was that we had become part of this family.  We have married into it.  In my fellow strangers' case, we had added children to it.  Taking the kids to miniature golf, ordering pizza for them.  Despite my railing against the notion of collectivization, what occurred today was just that.  Nobody simply took care of his or her self.  We pitched in and got it done together.  As the only collective that ever comes close to truly working:  a family.

This evening, the clanging bells of the ice cream truck summoned children from around the resort like moths to a flame.  I took a picture and texted it to my wife.  Her reply?  It was just the pick-me-up she and her siblings needed.

So tonight I close with a prayer for my mother-in-law:  That she may recover quickly and enjoy many more years with her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews.


06 April 2013

Key moments

Every life has those key moments.  Some are happy, some are sad. 

All of them shape who you are.

Today, I'm thankful for each of those moments, even the sad ones, because they've taught me a powerful lesson in life:  That our time upon this planet is short, and seizing the moment, enjoying life to the fullest, is one of the gifts our Creator has bestowed upon us.

Those moments helped me get over my reluctance to move out of my comfort zone, where I had a home, a portion of my life that extended over twelve years.  But I drove south and made a new home in Iowa.

Those moments helped me ask a beautiful woman out on a date.  In my solitary existence, I had the companionship of pets, and a schedule that was all mine, to eat, sleep, and exercise when I wished.  I stepped outside that comfort zone to know love and companionship.

Those moments helped me speak with another man about how I loved his daughter and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and ask for his blessing.

Those moments helped me take that beautiful woman on an unusual date involving a helicopter ride, at the conclusion of which, I got down on one knee and asked her to be my wife.

Those moments led me to today, when she will become my wife, and I her husband, in front of family and friends.

Thank you, God, for all those moments.

30 January 2013

From http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/node/8759

This past weekend, a small group of perhaps a dozen protesters gathered outside Dayton's Hara Arena to protest the sale of modern sporting rifles at Bill Goodman's Gun and Knife Show.
From the article:
"We know that guns are being sold on the floor inside Hara Arena illegally" said Jerome McCorry. "No background checks no identification of any kind."
McCorry said "AK-47s and M16s are not gonna be used for hunting, they're not going to be used to protect anybody. These are the weapons that are coming back and being used in mass murders and mass killings."
After reading the article, a Buckeye Firearms Association supporter decided to contact McCorry, the apparent protest organizer, to inform him about the inaccuracies in his statements about firearms (it isn't illegal for private individuals to sell a gun at the show without a background check, people aren't selling M16s or fully-automatic AK-47s at Hara Arena, modern sporting rifles are used for hunting, gun shows are rarely used by criminals as a source for guns, rifles [of any type] are used in murders far less than fists or baseball bats, etc.).
The supporter quickly found more than he bargained for. A simple Google search for Jerome McCorry reveals that the man trying to tell the public what weapons they should be allowed to own is a convicted felon.
 A convicted rapist, no less.  Hmm, guess he's not hot on a woman having to "explain how her attacker how he ended up with two bullet holes in him", as Ann Coulter once said.

23 January 2013

What part of "Shall Not Be Infringed" don't you understand?

The beauty of Constitutional rights is that I don't have to justify or explain my need to exercise that right to anyone, least of all a Briton by the name of Piers Morgan.

02 January 2013

A long year

It's been a long year.

  • January:  After fighting with MediaCom cable for two months, my cable TV service was restored.  Never is a long time, so I'll just say I'm extremely reluctant to give them my business again.  So far, Qwest/Centurylink hasn't pissed me off.
  • February:  Short month.  Nothing memorable besides Valentine's with the girlfriend.
  • March:  This is when my job situation started to change.  One co-worker was fired, and my boss announced his move to a different department.  In early March, I was contacted through Facebook by neighbors of my aunt, whom had been discovered by police in her home after having passed away some ten days prior.
  • April:  All alone at work, as my colleague returned to India as his year's tenure in the States expired.  I was excited to see the 1940 U.S. Census.  And I took my girlfriend on her second and my first cruise.  To the Bahamas.
  • May:  RIP Morgan.
  • June:  RIP Bailey.  Dori has a health scare.  801 Grand.  Okoboji.  John Deere turns 175.  One year since I met my girlfriend.
  • July:  God-awful heat.  Cooler in Florida!  Telltale signs of the drought:  Waist-deep water at the buoys at Storm Lake.
  • August:  Dori develops tooth problems.  And I suffer from a month-long affliction of high body temperature and general lousy feeling.  But I don't let it deter me from educating myself on diamonds and doing a little shopping.
  • September:  My first helicopter ride.  And I ask her:  "Will you marry me?"
  • October:  My folks visit.  The two set of parents meet.
  • November:  Thanksgiving in Kansas City.
  • December:  Blizzards, icy roads, dead batteries, and a Boxing Day cold.  My last Christmas as a single man.