TO BOTH PARTIES

Read this article first. Rant doesn't begin to describe how I'm feeling right now. Call it the case of the straw and the camel.

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/gop-leaders-learned-of-foley-e-mails-in/20060929145509990001?cid=2194

To both parties. I've been watching my DVD's of Victory at Sea this afternoon and remembering certain World at War episodes.

Did the troops, American and Allied, in WWII and Korea go into the meat grinders of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, the merchant marine Atlantic convoys, Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, the Philippines, Iwo, the air war over Europe, D-Day and a hundred other battlefields so we could come to this?

I'm including the abomination that congress just passed and the misbegotten mental midget in the White House will sign. As far as I'm concerned we've just slapped the faces of every Allied soldier who died on the battlefield and every POW who died in atrocities places like Mathausen and Malmedy.

If we have an earthquake in Kansas or Missouri it'll be Ike and Harry spinning in their graves.

APPLE MUFFINS

Another experiment that turned out pretty well. Any good cooking or cooking/eating apple will work. This batch used an apple called Empire, nice and tart. Needless to say we did a produce run today. The galas and braeburns aren't on the market yet here.

 

Dry ingredients

 

2 Cups all purpose flour

1/2 Cup wheat bran

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

3/4 Cup chopped walnuts

1/2 Cup or so raisins soaked in hot water to soften. Say ten minutes or so. Finely chopped prunes would probably work too.

 

In the food processor

 

2 small apples cored and chopped (just wash don’t bother to peel) enough to make app. 1 ½ cups of puree. It works better to add the liquid ingrediants to the chopped apple and then finish processing the apples. Makes a nice puree.

 

Add

 

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1/4 Cup melted butter or cooking oil. Butter tastes better.

2 Tbsp honey

 

If your processor is big enough add to the apple mixture

1/2 Cup milk or buttermilk. If you use buttermilk add 1/2 tsp soda to the dry ingrediants. If it isn't big enough add the milk separately to the dry mix.

 

Puree and add to dry ingredients. Mix just enough to combine all the dry ingredients. Bake in 350 degree oven. Makes 12 cupcake size muffins. Muffins will be denser than usual and may seem a little dry when day old. They revive beautifully after 15 seconds in the microwave.

KEEP FIGHTING

I keep running across the idea of “the animal is going to go extinct anyway, let it go.” No matter that we created the conditions pushing the critter over the edge. Think they’d take the same attitude if they or a loved one were diagnosed with a life threatening disease?

 

No they’d fight, and expect everyone around them to join the fight. Imagine the reaction if they were told “why should we waste resources saving you, you’re probably going to die anyway.” The explosion would be heard from here to the moon.

 

Maybe if we fought as hard to save the web that supports us, as we’d fight to save ourselves, the future wouldn’t look quite so grim.

 

JUST CATTIN' AROUND

    

From left to right, Lucky, the Bandit (right after we got her and more of kitten than we thought) and the grey lady, Misty the Magnificent.

We're discovering that the Bandit has unexpected talents. It's no secret that cats love things that roll. But this one goes looking for them. And is smart enough to look at something in a bowl or basket and try it out to see if it works. Current favorites? Cherry tomatoes and the unplanted bulbs in a basket that is inside a large empty terra cotta pot in the garage. I haven't
seen any teeth marks on the bulbs or the tomatoes but she must have to get them in her mouth to get them in the house. Especially the bulbs. She has to get them up three steps from the garage to the house. They don't roll all that well so we find them abandoned later. I think the "hunt" is what matters. The getting it out of the pot and into the house.

Lucky "hunts" garden gloves. We find them all over the place. You can usually hear her while she's bringing them in because she meows while she's carrying it. I don't know if she's calling her kittens to dinner or if it's "see what little ol me can haul around." Last winter she even had a spell of hauling my terry cloth bathrobe off the bed. She actually got it into the living room once.

Misty hunts laps, sunny spots, toilet paper rolls (they roll, reeeeal good) and she likes to hold hands

FOR THE BIRDS

Please read the story at this site and then come back.

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/rare-woodpecker-sends-town-running-for/20060924114809990001

This entry started life as a posting on the board about the birds. After I started reworking it, it started to grow. Sort of like the batch of bread I did this weekend. Another one I did got called liberal crap. I guess I haven’t been paying attention. I didn’t know that protecting the world that protects us was crap of any kind, liberal or conservative. I thought it was bloody obvious. It’s called operation CYA. Anyway here goes, with additions.

 

This is probably themost times I've entered a board. And I had to make a last contribution. There have been some posters who claim that God gave us dominion over the world and any creature that doesn't serve us or gets in the way should be "eradicated." (One writer who posted on this thread suggested I might be using words that went over some folk’s heads. Could be.)

 

I don't think you've thought this all the way through. If you respect and love God and God created the world, you have to respect every creature on it because GOD CREATED IT. Frankly it seems damned arrogant to assume that we know what value the Creator puts, if any, on His/Her creation and that we can simply destroy a part of that creation because it gets in our way.  Creation has a value far beyond the dollar signs we try to attach to it. Somehow I don’t believe the Creator/ress was thinking in dollars/linear foot at the time.

 

Every creature "serves" us by supporting this wonderful, miraculous little blue world we live on by keeping the web of the Creator strong and whole. There may be other life sustaining worlds, but this is the only one we know of. It deserves our love, support and respect if only to save our own sorry asses. Evan if we found a world that would support our kind of life, and it didn’t appear to be inhabited, we don’t have anything approaching the technology to explore it much less colonize it. And in mom’s opinion we don’t deserve to make a discovery like this until we prove we can take of what we already have. You so ROCK girl.

 

<P class='MsoNormalstyle="MARGIN:' 0pt? 0in>And I am so tired of this “I can do what I want” attitude. It’s so, I want to say first grade but I’m probablyinsulting countless intelligent first graders. Most of us accept all kinds of limits on what we want to do for all sorts of reasons. Either because it’s dangerous to us or the good to all of us outweighs the inconvenience to ourselves. The arguments supporting public health, flight screening at airports, making sure our food and houses are safe spring to mind and are the tip of the iceberg. And the people, often men, who keep trying to tell women, you got pregnant, you gotta carry it and don’t come looking to us for help are there in the mix too. Hey, guys, can't have it both ways.

 

In fact I’m beginning to realize just how much so many Americans sound like a bunch of spoiled five year olds. And the rest of us have been too polite to call them on it. After all, how adult is it to answer any criticism or question with an accusation. From “your soft on terrorism” to “you liberals just hate America.” For any crazy ass claim they make, just ask why and keep asking why until you get an answer that makes sense or for the person you are asking to stroke out. It probably won’t be good for their blood pressure. And be prepared for the long haul. It may take awhile.  

 

Folks who have to spend any time at all taking care of kids or pets or elderly relatives find out real fast that what you want ends up way down the list of what is actually going to get done. No kids, but I kept an eye on my younger sisters and my nephews when they were little. Doing homework while you’re keeping track of a five year old is a lesson in dong it one paragraph at a time. Heck, there was a time where I’d automatically look up every couple of paragraphs to check on things whether there was somebody to check on or not. It was just such a habit.

 

I have to admit that far more posters fell in the "work around the birds" than the "just shoot 'em camp." And that gives me a glimmer of hope.

TWISTY SUBCONSCIOUS

I get a kick out of the ads for drugs for insomnia. I would have to be freakin'
desperate to go for these. I have this weird subconscious you see. It tries
to wake me at fairly set times. Around 5 AM for one. Don't ask me why, it
just does it. And Daylight Savings Time doesn't help. Within a couple of
days I'm back to 2 and 5 like clockwork. Oh, and I loath the alarm, so if I'm in
danger of oversleeping? My twisty little subconscious will bring out the
mental equivalent of the big guns on the New Jersey for that too.

So what does this involve? I've been chased by bees. Lots and lots of bees.
(that little gem was brought on by the buzzing alarm clock) I go on road
trips where the road disappears, gets impossibly narrow, mislays a bridge,
decides to go straight up, or turns into an impossible corkscrew of
switchbacks. I'm in a building where the doors disappear, the hallways lead
to nowhere or the stairs are blocked. The other night was a "triple header." We were visiting somebody, I don't know who, but the one story housemanaged to grow a three story set of steps on a weird ladder to get out. (Ihate heights, I really hate heights) In the middle of the drive home mom wassuddenly driving instead of me, the nice sunny day tuned into night, the road turned into a mountain corkscrewand we went over the side. End of dream, I'm awake at 5 right on time. Oh,and I don't know how far up we were but I saw stars under us as we left theroad. Went back to sleep and ended up in the shopping mall from Wonderland,as in Alice. I think I started out at Gateway Mall, but it got really strange after that. Reeeeeealllllllllly strange. Not scary, but something out of
Dungeons and Dragons or something. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. The straight ways got curvy, it got dim and dark and just basically weird.

Anyway I woke up in time to turn off thealarm before it went off. I think part of it could be blamed on one of myblood pressure meds. I think things have gotten a little more interesting since I started this one. Maybe they use Valeriian in it or something.

Anyway if my subconscious is going take me down the rabbit hole I don't want
to have any trouble waking up. No way, no where, no how. Oh, and mom is
still an excellent driver so I don't think that was the problem. My twisted little brain just wanted to go on a crazy road trip.

JUST TO KEEP THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE

Just to keep things in perspective.

 

I got these figures from Nicholas Kristoff’s column this morning. His research for his column is staking out territory on human rights and world health issues including AIDS. Good thing too, because nobody else seems to be doing it. The man’s been to Darfur more times than I can count. And did his job well enough that he has to slip over the border from Chad these days. Something about how his work has embarrassed the Sudanese government.

 

Figures he quoted today put the daily death rate at nearly 8,000 and new infections at approximately 14,000. So, more than two a half times casualties of the World Trade Center bombings die every day. Every day. But, most of them die in places like Africa, India, and Russia. Places with names we’ve never heard of and most of us can’t even pronounce. Places where it doesn’t matter if the drugs are available, most of the victims can afford them anyway. Places where men with the disease believe they can be cured by having sex with a virgin. So they do it over and over and girls who should still be dreaming of husbands and children end up infected. Where it's still "boys will be boys" and wives and babies end up with the virus.

 

In the four days between Saturday when Oregon played Oklahoma and Tuesday when the headlines hit the newsprint, nearly 24,000 people died and more than 50,000 were infected. Now Oklahoma is threatening to back out of the game with one of the Washington teams in 2008 if they can’t bring some of their own officials. Say it’s two years to the day that the game is scheduled. In those two years over 5,800,000 people will die, just from AIDS. Just from AIDS.