• Irish Woman Wildlife Rule #1 – Do not feed the Canada Goose that is visiting the yard.
• Irish Woman Wildlife Rule #2 – If you feed the Canada Goose that is visiting the yard, do not include blueberries and sliced grapes in the food.
• Irish Woman Wildlife Rule #3 – If you include blueberries and sliced grapes in the food you give the Canada Goose that is visiting the yard, do not include bits of hamburger buns and cat food.
• Irish Woman Wildlife Rule #4 – If you include cat food and bits of hamburger buns with the fruit you are feeding the Canada Goose visiting the yard, do not attempt to pet it while it eats.
• Irish Woman Wildlife Rule #5 – If you pet the Canada Goose that is visiting the yard while it eats the fruit, bread, and cat food you have given it, do not name it or it will become a pet.
• Irish Woman Wildlife Rule #6 – If your new pet leaves the inevitable results from being fed blueberries, sliced grapes, hamburger buns, and cat food behind it on the driveway, porch, and sidewalk, it is not DaddyBear’s responsibility to clean it up.
  • Unless we are expecting a monsoon, then no, the rain will not take care of it.
• In related news, we have a new pet.  Boo named it “Moose the Goose.”  It has white patches on its cheeks, likes hand-prepared organic fruit and bread with its cat food, and really doesn’t care for Siamese cats.
  • If it hangs out too long, I will do experiments to figure out how much it likes Labrador Retrievers.
• Ladies, you are all beautiful and attractive in your own way.  You bring light to a dreary world, and we all benefit from your presence.
  • However, if you’re old enough to have owned the first album of a band that is taking its 40th anniversary tour, you really ought to be honest with yourself before dressing in the same clothes you wore when you saw them in high school.

• DaddyBear’s college financing fix – Four years of public university study is free to the student, but we are going to put a 33% tax on the first 10 years of that student’s income that is more than double the national poverty level.
  • It goes up to a 50% tax on any income if it takes you more than 10 years to get to that income level.  This should incentivize folks to get a degree that leads to gainful employment and to get off their butts and get a job after graduation.
  • You can get that tax rebated to you if, after five years of working at that income level, you quit and take a lower-paying, but important, job, such as social work or  inner-city / rural teaching, for five years.
  • We will defray the start-up and maintenance costs of the program by putting a 15% tax on the income of the top 10% most highly paid employees at state colleges and universities.
  • I might even be amenable to a special tax on ‘instructors’ or ‘professors’ who do not devote 75% of their work week to personally giving instruction, grading student work, or meeting with students to work on their education.
  • Participation is, of course, voluntary, but I don’t want to hear a peep about how unfair it is that folks have to pay to get their degrees in Klingon Studies or whatever if they choose to go with how we finance college now.
• When I was a kid, we were told that nuclear winter would tip us over into a new ice age. Now, we are worried about retreating glaciers and melting polar ice caps.
  • Am I the only one who sees a possible solution to the new problem by invoking the old problem?
• The Kentucky Derby is in a little less than two weeks, which means that the drought of available manpower and employee attention, which started when the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament brackets came out, will soon be over.

• You know, for a guy who makes his living dealing with technology, I’m really starting to hate technology.
  • No, that’s OK, mister work phone, please spontaneously reboot and reset yourself to factory settings.
  • Of course, miss laptop screen, it’s perfectly fine for you to start having fuzzy weird digital ghosts at odd moments while I’m scrolling around.
  • Oh, no, please, excuse me, mister TV remote.  It’s entirely my fault that you have decided that you will only work at angles ranging from 0 to 15 degrees from center of the television screen.
• The peanut butter eggs in the white wrappers are not, in fact, ‘diet’ peanut butter eggs.
  • I stand corrected.
• I can wait another week or two for the movie I ordered to arrive because Amazon has it on backorder, or I can cancel that order and go to the local Big Box Retail Cooperative and buy a copy there.
  • The downside of waiting is, well, waiting.
  • The downside of buying local is that I’ll have to go to Big Box Retail Cooperative and deal with, shudder, people.
  • Oh, well, movie’ll get here when it gets here.
• One advantage of working from home a couple days a week is that my lunches are of higher quality.
  • You see, when I take my lunch to work, I usually just have leftovers microwaved on a paper plate.
  • When I’m at home, I can get fancy and use an actual dish to heat up my leftovers.  Perhaps I can even use real silverware.
  • Not only that, but I can have tap water cooled in my very own refrigerator.  At work, I have tap water that’s cooled with ice chunks like a peasant.
• Apparently, “‘Tear down the flood walls, bulldoze it flat, and salt the earth with radium” was not the answer the young lady with the clipboard was looking for when she asked me what I thought the mayor could do to make Louisville better.
  • When that answer seemed to confuse her, I told her to just put down that I thought we ought to hire more teachers.
• I saw an ad the other night for a company called ‘Dads Heating and Cooling’. I imagine their service calls involve a lot of demands for you to get out of their light and to fetch them the 3/8’s.

• I’d like to send a shout-out to the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, who has been working hard on the roads hereabouts lately.
  • It takes real talent to make a road worse after the repair.
  • Here’s a hint – If the only notification that your road crew is removing barrels after dark is when my headlights hit their reflective vests, you’re doing it wrong.
  • Yes, I was doing the speed limit, and there were “ROAD CREW” signs posted. I got over onto the shoulder a bit to give them room once I knew they were there, but lights are cheap and road workers are worth the expense.
• A rural SUPERDUPERMART on a Sunday night is a real cultural experience.
  • There was a lot of mutton dressed up as lamb, a lot of lamb dressed up as breeding ewe, and a few rams dressed up as… well, not as rams.
  • Folks from all over the hemisphere, of all ages, seem to congregate there to mix and mingle.
  • I must be weird for needing an ironing board.  I got more looks than the older woman who was wearing clothing five sizes too small.
• There was a strange point during my drive tonight where a rock station faded out somewhat, a country station faded in a bit, and they both mixed in with a Spanish station on the same frequency.
  • The condition only lasted for a few minutes.  I was hoping to hear some station identifiers so I try to figure what kind of weird hop would cause that.
• I have done my yearly mowing of the lawn.  I do not plan on doing it again until this time next year.
  • The act of clipping the top six or seven inches off of a perfectly good blade of grass is alien to me.

• Somewhere, there is a religion which believes that the punishment for a sinful life is trudging randomly back and forth, hemmed in by harpies and sloths, always seeking, but never finding.  I know this because I stumbled into their hell the other day when I went grocery shopping.
• The only thing better than going bowling on a rainy afternoon during spring break is going bowling on a rainy afternoon during spring break and getting cheese fries as a bonus.
• On one side of us while we were bowling yesterday was a group of adults with developmental disabilities.  On the other, there was a pair of young mothers with five school-age children.
  • Guess which group was better behaved and were better sports?
  • If my kids had ever acted like that in a bowling alley, they’d have been fed into the ball return pour encourager les autres.
• Since the weather was nice today, I had the great idea of taking Boo to the zoo this morning.  Unfortunately, every parent in the tri-state area had the same idea.
• I need to look back at what was going on last last summer, because we must have had some major weather event or something that shut folks into their homes.  At least half of the crowd at the zoo was either extremely pregnant or carrying/carting around itsy bitsy babies.
• Boo seems to be entering another growth spurt.  He had yogurt this morning at 7, a hearty breakfast at 8.  He was given an apple as a snack at 10, and we had lunch at 11:30.  By 1 PM, he was starving to death, and after another piece of fruit at 2, was giving the cat that lean and hungry look I always associate with wolves at the end of a long, hard winter.

• It’s officially allergy season here in Indiucky.  By that, I mean that every darned tree and bush Irish Woman has planted in our yard is trying to kill me with its reproductive cycle.
  • On a side note, you know you waited too late to take a Benadryl before bedtime when you wake up the next morning and have trouble working the coffee maker and toothbrush.
• Boo has begun doing extra chores to make money.  So far, he has learned how to do a load of laundry with supervision, clear the table, bring empty trash bins back from the curb, and pick up branches and sticks that have fallen out of our maple.
  • He is working to save enough money to buy one of those horridly expensive Lego sets.
  • I have suppressed my urge to make up a tax statement and keep a portion of his wages to support the pets.
  • I think I’ll leave that until he’s 12 or so.
• Irish Woman is aghast over the fact that our 9 year old is almost as tall as she is, wears the same shoe size as she does, and is giving all of the early signs of a growth spurt.
  • I, on the other hand, am just looking at this as par for the course.  I shot up four to six inches between 2nd and 3rd grades.
• Girlie Bear was issued a kevlar helmet in ROTC this week.  Apparently they didn’t have any that are big enough for her.  She thanked me for giving her a bucket head.  I called her a long-haired hippie and told her to get a hair cut and make room in the helmet.
  • That’s me,  just a great big cuddly bear of a parent.
• I’m taking a week off to spend spring break with Boo.  We have the usual fun father and son things planned:
  • Fishing
  • Archery
  • Shooting the BB gun
  •  Walks
  • Yard work
  • Cleaning out the basement
  • Preparing garden beds
  • Washing the dogs
  • Laundry
• Boo has begun learning how to safely use a pocketknife at Scouts.  He asked for a knife for his birthday.
  • Part of me wants to get him a really nice Case knife or something in that vein so that he will always have something useful to remember his dear old dad.
  • The rest of me is a realist that knows that a young boy is likely to trade, lose, or destroy anything I get him, so he’s probably going to get a chunk of scrap iron that I’ve sharpened against a rock until he grows a bit more responsibility.
  • I have been officially banned from giving him one of my more…. sizable knives.  Something about blade length and not scaring the other children.
• Last weekend we re-did three of Irish Woman’s strawberry beds.  This entailed removing the weeds and crabgrass, saving the strawberry plants, and adding rocks and soil to replace that which has eroded away in the rains.
  • My main activities added up to purchasing, transporting, and depositing about 800 pounds of topsoil, about 100 pounds of peat moss, and about 500 pounds of large rocks to better shore up the bottom of the beds.
  • Oh, my aching back and pocketbook.
  • I am advised that these will be the best strawberries I’ve ever had, which is good, because at this point it would have been cheaper and easier to fly Irish Woman to Watsonville so that she could pick as many strawberries as she wants.

• A lot of folks are shocked, yes, shocked, I say! that the Central Intelligence Agency has probably found ways to exploit weaknesses in devices connected to the Internet.
  •   Personally, I’d be pissed if I found out that they hadn’t developed these capabilities.  I know it’s a surprise to a large section of the populace, but gentlemen do indeed reach each other’s letters.
  • If only the intelligence and law enforcement agencies had earned enough trust from the American nation that we could know with some certainty that such tools would never be misused or turned against us.
• I believe that I’ve parsed the illegal immigration problem into two camps:
  • Those, like me, who see immigration into the United States as a privilege we extend to those we feel deserve it, regardless of the prospective immigrant’s origins.
  • Those who believe that immigration into our country from other parts of the world is a human right, which we as a nation have no right to moderate, regulate, or object to. Interestingly enough, I can find no historical example of a nation that survived long after opening its borders for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wanted to come on over and set up their yurts.
  • I still believe that a wall on the border is nothing more than a dam that can be overcome by the draw of jobs in El Norte.  Cut off the supply of jobs, either through litigation, legislation, or defenestration, and the flow of illegal immigrants will be reduced significantly.
• The brawl over repealing/replacing/reforming Obamacare is gaining steam, both in the halls of Congress and in the media.
  • Somewhere along the way the nation went from looking at comprehensive health insurance as a fringe benefit brought by hard work at a good job to seeing it as a human right that has to be paid for by the productive minority.
  • Here’s my suggestion –
    • The ACA is repealed in total. Buy insurance, don’t buy insurance, not my problem.
    • Medicare is not touched in any way. Lord knows old folks have earned it after putting up with the Baby Boomers, Gen X, and the Millenials for the last 3/4 of a century.
    • Medicaid is clawed back to cover only poor families and those who are incapable of supporting themselves.
    • The bar for being declared incapable of supporting yourself gets raised quite a bit.
    • The American taxpayer provides precisely zero toward the healthcare of anyone who is capable of working and paying their own way, but doesn’t.  I’m a big fan of “Those who refuse to work, do not eat”.
    • To make up for this, donations to charity hospitals, clinics, and other health programs would be 100% deductible from personal and corporate income taxes, with no limit to the amount that could be donated. Let those who want to screech that the rest of us aren’t doing enough put their money where their mouth is.
• There are some who say we can’t kill our way out of the Islamic terrorism problem.
  • I say we can’t know that unless we really try.
  • We spend too much time trying to be loved.  I’m about ready for everyone to realize that it’s more feasible to be left alone because of the terror our displeasure strikes in the hearts of men.

• The good news today is that I was able to rise from my bed and go to work without wishing I could just lie down at the side of the freeway and die.
  • The bad news today is that I wanted to lie down at the side of the freeway and die during the drive home.
• If I ever want to go into writing horror stories, all I’ll need for inspiration is to catch a bad head cold, take a large dose of green death NyQuil, and sleep for about 13 hours.  The fever dreams must have been close to what Stephen King saw when he was still writing horror.
• I finished the rough draft of “Lady of Eyre”, the last part of the current Minivandians book, and sent it off to alpha readers.
  • Of course, being doped off my gourd on cold medicine made the writing easier.  Whether it’s at all readable remains to be seen.
• When using tissues with lotion embedded in them, it is not suggested that you use them to wipe your eyeglasses off.

Warning:  I wrote this before I had coffee and after a night of stress dreams.

• Your business is none of my business until you start making me pay for your business.  At that point, it is most certainly my business.
  • Corollary – If you stop making your business my business, I will be happy to go back to minding my own business.
• Standardized testing at the end of the school year seems unfair to the teacher if it’s to be used to decide if they’re doing their job.
  • I mean, what if the students were woefully ignorant of the subject on day 1?
  • How about this:  Do standardized tests at the beginning of the year, then give the same test at the end.  Evaluate the teacher’s performance based on the difference between the two tests.
  • I know, there I go again, thinking it’s a good idea to see if the billions we dump into the public education system are actually going toward educating students.
• Another way to say “America First” is “What’s in it for us?”, and I’m perfectly OK with that.  If we can’t articulate what the United States is getting out of any relationship or commitment, be it tangible or intangible, then why are we doing it?
• One thing that I think is missing from the way we educate people is that we don’t tell folks that while they are still being educated and trained, their opinion on all but an exceedingly small number of subjects is most likely worthless.
  • For a lot of folks, this condition does not change after their period of education and training is over.
  • At the moment, I may or may not be part of that group.  I’m gonna go make coffee.