• A vacation breakfast should be more than oatmeal with honey and sliced pears.
• My morning was spent scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom and scrubbing the floors in the rest of the house.  I love the smell of good oil soap on hardwood floors.
• It is amazing how much a wife appreciates coming home to a clean house and a hot meal.
• Ladies giving vision exams should not wear low cut tops and push up bras.  
• Telling the lady doing your eye exam that you are right eye dominant is a good thing.  Her not blinking an eye when she finds out you know this because you’re a shooter is a good sign.
• Decided to try contact lenses for the first time.  Getting them in was a pain in the butt, but my vision is good with them and it’s not as irritating as I expected.
• I have it on good authority that I will mix up cleaning solution and saline for my contacts precisely once.
• I’m afraid BooBoo has my sense of fashion.  He’s currently wearing a pair of galoshes, a long Raiders tee-shirt, and a viking shield to finish off the ensemble.  

• Between what he got from us, Irish Woman’s family, and our friends, BooBoo has been eating candy like he had one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.  
• Dark chocolate covered espresso beans are better than any rabbit I ever got.
• While coloring eggs last night, Boo was disappointed that putting the eggs in the dye did not cause them to hatch.
• Apparently the correct formula for a young boy with the thousand yard stare, who has a crying jag while getting his shower, and between sniffles asks where his Easter basket went is to give him a hug, put his blanket and pillow on the couch, and let him watch a movie until he falls asleep.
• Having Lebanese food for Easter may sound strange, but to be honest, it’s probably at least as appropriate as ham.
• Easter dinner is not the time to have your father notice your new gauged ears.  Thankfully, it wasn’t one of my kids.
• Girlie Bear wore her new dress for Easter.  I am in so much trouble if I haven’t properly prepared her for teenage boys yet.

Bruises for Freedom

• If I ever get someone to take a picture of me when I’m volunteering as a role player out at Fort Knox, I’m going to caption it “Yo dawg, I heard you liked bruises, so I put bruises on your bruises so you can bruise where you were bruised!”
• Even if the end of the muzzle is sealed and it’s loaded with blanks, an AK-47 with a happy switch is a heck of a lot of fun.
• Flash bangs are great crowd control devices.
• It is amazing how fast you will back up when a flash bang grenade that hasn’t exploded yet bounces off your chest.
• Every time I go out there, I’m reminded how lucky I am to have people such as the soldiers I meet to deal with the things that go bump in the night.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew were blown off course and made land in a country populated by people who did nothing but eat a fruit that was so good that they cared for nothing else.  After members of his crew tasted the fruit and lost interest in continuing the journey home, Odysseus ordered the remainder of his men back on the boat and forced those who had tasted the fruit to get on board.  He then rowed away to continue his journey.

In our lives, we are confronted with lotus eaters every day.  Some are harmless, some annoying, and some destructive.

There are the obvious ones who are addicted to some substance or other.  Their addiction can rob them of their jobs, homes, families, and ultimately their lives.  These poor people can not only ruin themselves, but can also rend the lives of all who care for them. 

There are the lotus eaters who are mesmerized by the distractions of the world around them.  Maybe they are buried deep within television, or their books of romantic or action fantasies take up their lives.  These tend to be annoying because they sometimes cannot relate to what is real, preferring to try to cast everything in the stark light of a Harlequin romance rather than what real life is like.   These can also be the people who do not truly believe in evil because they have either never seen evil or if they have, deny it.  To them, the bad things in the world are far away, and life for them will be good as long as they don’t think or speak of the bad that is or that may be.  Bad people live somewhere else, bad things happen to someone else, and bad thoughts bring bad things.  An extreme example of this is the person that believes that no-one is truly bad or evil, and that those who do bad were forced into it by circumstances.  To this strain of lotus eater, possessing the tools that can be used to do evil is the cause of evil.  Remove the tool, and the evil cannot happen.

Then there are the more insidious lotus eaters, the ones that continually eat from the public trough and give no thought as to where it all comes from or consider that they should provide for themselves.  They are the ones that have never known a day’s work for their food and shelter, and denigrate those who prefer to work for their bread.  To me, these are worse than addicts because they can never be satisfied, even temporarily, and it is impossible to overdose on the forced charity of others.  They will eat and eat, always assuming that those who fill the trough can always get more. When those who produce what they are glutting themselves upon attempt to reduce the ration, they squeal and rant until the free bread is given just to silence them.

We all know lotus eaters, and we must all guard ourselves so that we do not become them.  How easy it would be to stop the struggle to be a real person, conscious of the world around us, in control of our own faculties, and providing for ourselves and our families.  How inviting it would be to lie down in the shade, eat of the delicious fruit, and let someone else worry and work in our stead. 

That we must never do.

We are all born free, and free we must remain.  We must have the honesty to look ourselves in the mirror and say “Today, I have earned what I have and protected it from the evil that is in the world.”.  We must teach our children, both in what we do and what we say, about the real world and how they should act when confronted by it.  To the lotus eaters in our lives, we must be a shining example of what they are not and should be.  If possible, we should save those we care about from a life of oblivion, even to the point of forcing them to look into a mirror and see the person they have become.

The fruit of the lotus is sweet, and the freedom from caring about what is happening to us and around us beckons.  But as free people, we must resist that seduction, look life squarely in the eye, and be prepared to struggle with it.

• Ever wonder why it costs so much to have someone come out and clean out your septic system?  It’s expensive because it’s worth it.  
• Fact – Many pieces of a dishwasher are quite sharp
• Fact – There are many nerve endings in a fingertip, and your left hand has five of them
• Fact – If you slice open three out of the five fingertips on your left hand on parts of a dishwasher while in the presence of a four year old, you have to hold it in so as to not scare him or teach him any words that he shouldn’t use.
• The only thing better than finding $40 in the car that you forgot you had is finding three boxes of .45 ACP and a box of 9mm Makarov when you’re cleaning up your basement.
• Last night, I went to sleep alone in the bed.  This morning I woke up with an Irish Woman, a four year old child, two cats, and a Labrador Retriever.  I remember nothing.
• I’m not sure what the incantation is, but the proper ingredients for a “Summon Deluge” spell appear to be washing your minivan and making plans to go to Knob Creek for the day.
• Going to the Stop’n’Stab to get a soda 30 minutes prior to the Louisville/Kentucky basketball game was as close to a riot as I’ve seen in quite a long time.
• The third time in an evening a parent has to go into his son’s bedroom, extricate his son from whatever he’s gotten himself tangled up in, remove 17 toys from his bed and put them away, return said child to bed, and go back to evening activities, he starts to become a little testy.

This morning, I let Boo watch Sesame Street while we got ready for work and school.  One of the puppet characters was asking people on the streets of New York asking people of they knew any words that started with the letter M.

My question:

Am I going to hell because in my mind I heard some big fat guy from Brooklyn say “Yeah, I got your M word right here: Your mother!”.

Someday, I hope to be the man my son thinks I am.

I am:

• Responsible for my own actions and those of my children
• Responsible for the safety and security of myself and my family
• A responsible gun owner, shooter, hunter, and CCW carrier
• An American of Northern European descent
• A veteran of a peacetime army who had the opportunity to see parts of the world and things in those places that most people don’t even know exist
• A citizen that reads, learns, discusses, and votes.

I am not:

• Responsible for the actions of any other adult or child that is not my own, no matter how similar they are to me and mine.
• A victim, nor am I afraid to convince someone who wants to see if I am willing to be one that there are sharp teeth in my friendly smile.
• A policeman.  I am not expected to try to stop someone from breaking the law if they are not causing bodily harm to me, my family, or my friends.
• Responsible for however many centuries of repression, aggression, discrimination, and ignorance that came before me.  I may share a complexion with the people who make life hard for other people just because of their skin tone, but that wasn’t me.
• A ticking time bomb of anger and fear just waiting for a trigger event to set me off, all of which is caused by that amorphous term “the military”.  People like that are rarer than Hollywood would make you believe, and my psychological issues are much older and deep rooted than anything that the Army did to me.
• Part of a reliable voting block, nor am I a party man.  You want my vote or support?  Convince me that your idea is better than that of the opposition.

• Here’s an album you don’t want to see flash across your playlist:  “DaddyBear Sings The Klingon Love Songs Of His Youth”.
• It was kind of depressing to realize that I’ve done something that sucks so often for so long that I now make it look easy and am expected to do it every time it needs doing.
• Not sure what Disney is making their DVD’s out of so that they can charge what would have been a week’s grocery budget for me a few years ago, but whatever it is, I’ve been told by CinC House that I’m willing to pay for it.
• When told he could get something from the gift shop at the zoo yesterday, Boo decided he wanted an orange miner’s helmet with working light.  Not sure what that predicts for his future, but I know it means I need to lay on a new supply of AA batteries.
• Bill Cosby, followed by Rob Zombie, Mozart, Lewis Black, and The Doors. Not sure what my iPod thinks it’s doing, but it’s really harshing my calm.
• My ex-wife didn’t seem to like it when I told our son that he may come from trash, but he is not trash.

In life, there will be inconveniences, some major, most minor.  These will either kill you, or they won’t.  If they will, then act like an adult and look death in the eye.  If not, then shut the !@#$! up and get through it so the rest of us can get on with our lives.

This message brought to you by DaddyBear, who’s had one too many people come to him with minor crap that seems to be sapping their will to live.