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.

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.

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?

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

Chatty Cathys, part III

North Korea?

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.