Testify brother.  I’ve been there, and I refuse to go back.

Junior Bear and I went round and round the last year or so he lived at home, and I sort of wish I’d taken the stuff I took away from him to the range instead of just giving it away.  I might have felt better.

I had a heck of a bad day yesterday.  The kind that I will look back on someday and say “Well, at least today wasn’t that bad.”

So when I got home last night, I needed to burn off some steam and raise my spirits.  A good dinner whipped up by my loving, wonderful, beautiful wife, hugs from the daughter, and a protracted light saber duel with Boo helped a lot.  After the kids went to bed, I thought I’d cap it off with a couple libations and shooting a few electronic Nazis.  Never did finish that level in Call of Duty, but I finished off the last bottle of beer, then had a bit of fine, aged corn liquor. 

I didn’t get drunk, but I was definitely relaxed and happy by the time I went to bed.

What tells me I was a bit more tipsy than I thought is a sticky note I found on my laptop this morning:

Blog Ideas:

Turret mounted potato guns
Koi ponds as emergency  food source
Presidential debates with physical challenges
California succession – pros and cons
Airdrop Hi-Points into Syria

I really need to either drink more often or drop it entirely.

Condition #1:  The original owner of the house put in an under-the-house garage with a rear driveway.  This necessitated the excavating of a humongous amount of earth and the installation of several retaining walls.
Condition #2:  We have a small child, and our next door neighbor had a baby in October, so we will have another rugrat roaming the back yard.
Condition #3:  We have several fenced areas in our backyard for safety and to restrict the roaming of children and dogs, but there is nothing on the side of the retaining walls that faces our next door neighbor.
Condition #4:  I don’t want our next door neighbor’s child or anyone else to get hurt.
Condition #5:  I don’t want to get sued.

My Solution:

• Build a picket fence from the corner of the house to the corner of the detached shed/garage in the back corner of the property, with a walking gate in it that has a hasp and padlock on it.  
• The fence will run just inside and parallel to the property line.

The Solution that I ‘agreed’ to after discussing my solution with Irish Woman:

• The fence as I conceived it shall indeed be built.  
• Extend the fence that surrounds the upper part of our back yard toward the back of the property, marrying it up with the fence for the dog’s area, with a new gate on that new section of fence.  
• Rip out two sides of the fence to the dog’s area, opening up the back yard.  
• Add a gate to the back portion of the upper fence so that we can get to the back part of the yard without leaving the yard.  
• Move two raised 4’x8’x3′ garden beds, and construct another.  This includes moving the dirt.
• Extend a retaining wall to cut down on erosion and ground shifting as the earth tries to move back into the area that some idiot dug out the backyard so that he coud have a walkout basement.

Note to self:  Next time, just go buy the lumber and concrete, dig the holes, and build the fence before discussing it.  You’d think I would have learned by now.

Well, Irish Woman has arrived safely back in Kentucky, and all is right with the world.

On the whole, the week went really smoothly.  I was trying to be funny with my last update.  The kids have been real champs.  Boo had absolutely no separation problems, which surprised both us and his teachers.  He just kept on with his routine, talked to his mom on the phone a couple of days, and was a happy little boy.  Girlie Bear has been a big help, and I think she was just as happy to have Irish Woman home as I was.

For the most part, I was able to keep the balls in the air pretty smoothly.  The house never looked like a tornado had come through, the kids weren’t reduced to ramen noodles and hot dogs, and the pets haven’t gone feral.  Yes, I’m tired, and I plan on recharging over the weekend, but I’m not totally beaten down or frustrated.

I think the fact that everyone did so well took a lot of worry off of Irish Woman’s mind.  She’ll be going away every so often for training and to work in other cities, so knowing that we’ll be OK for a while will help.

Thanks to everyone for their words of encouragement.  I’m not looking forward to the next time, but at least now I know that I can do it.

Supplies are dwindling, as is morale and hope.  The little one has figured out how to sharpen his toy light saber, and the wound he inflicted when he tried to hamstring me is festering.  Girlie Bear has taken to wearing a black beret and making polemical speeches about the proletariat.  Irish Woman will be home soon, and I hope she comes with reinforcements.

They have taken the bridge and the second hall. I have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes, drums… drums in the deep. I cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. I can not get out… they are coming.

The other night, I was listening to a few podcasts, and they’ve gotten me to thinking.  (I know, scary). 

On the Ben Howe Show, actor Adam Baldwin did an excellent interview on his career, his politics, and how life goes when you’re a conservative in Hollywood.  He made a really good point when discussing the politics of rank and file people:  they just want to go to work, have a life, and get on with it.  Politics may come into it every so often, but for the most part, they have better things to do.

He articulated something that I have felt for a long time.  To be honest, until a few years ago, I was pretty apolitical.  I was Republican out of habit, not out of some deeply held belief in the party.  I decided as a teenager that the R’s had more in common with me than the D’s, and never really took the time and energy to re-examine that conclusion.  I paid attention to politics during election cycles, but I had other things to worry about the rest of the time. 

I suspect that that’s how most of the people considered the base of their party work.  They get up, go to work or school or whatever, take care of their kids, go to bed, and do it all over again the next day.  Every once in a while they take part in some kind of political activity.  Every couple of years, they take a few minutes to see who’s running on their party’s ticket, and if they’re excited enough, they go to the polls.  It takes something catastrophic, like the Great Depression or Jimmy Carter, to get them to pay more attention and maybe switch to the other party or no party whatsoever.

The key to electoral success is in convincing the minority of people who are not aligned with either party to come over, getting the people in your own base excited enough to get involved, and maybe convincing some of the rank and file from the other side of the equation to switch, if only once.  I’ve only seen that happen twice in my lifetime, in 1980 and in 2008.  Both times a charismatic  candidate was able to energize the base, capitalize on dissatisfaction in the squishy middle of independents, and carve off a few of the people who would normally vote for the other side.  Both candidates were assisted by a struggling economy and a less than stellar opponent. 

Anyone want to take bets on how that equation will look in November?

Bryan Suits took a few minutes of his radio show to discuss a leak at the San Onofre nuclear plant.  I guess that initially there were reports that there had been an incident, but no leak of radiation.  Later, authorities reported that there had indeed been a small leak.  Mr. Suits took them to task for saying anything until they knew something for sure, and how their lack of candor or common sense might cause someone to believe that things are much worse than they actually are.  He also mentioned the series of escalating reports out of Fukashima after the Japan earthquake last year.  That one was of course much worse than a small leak at San Onofre, but the authorities seem to have followed the same playbook of either downplaying problems or making rosy reports based on sketchy information. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I believe that nuclear power plants in one form or another are probably the best way to go in order to generate electricity.   They don’t pollute much, the waste they do create is easily contained and localized, and they seem to be pretty dependable.  My problem with the nuclear power industry is that they tend to step on their schwanz every time something bad occurs.  First they deny that anything happened, then they paint a rosy picture, then they fumble finger their way through telling us what really happened.  Someone ought to slap the next person who thinks that telling us what we want to hear about nuclear power issues is at all helpful.  If they’d been at all good at being honest and transparent in the 1970’s, we wouldn’t be bickering over how to keep power plants that are almost as old as I am up and running.

Suits expands on this by saying that things like that are examples of why so few people trust information from the government.  It follows a pattern of obfuscation, minimizing, and ass-covering that we’ve seen out of the government for decades. 

By now, you’d think that people in authority would know better than to lie or even shade the facts.  The truth eventually comes out, and every time we learn we’ve been misled, our trust in those who are supposed to be working for us goes down a little more.  Want to know why conspiracy theories are so popular in our culture? I think it’s because we’ve caught our government out in half-truths and lies so much that now a lot of us are willing to believe that it’s capable of trying to do just about anything. 

Finally, Dan Carlin did an episode about class in the United States.  He took issue with Rick Santorum’s recent assertion that there are no classes in the United States.  Carlin went on to discuss how not only are there economic classes in the United States, but it is becoming harder and harder for someone from the lower economic class to move up into the middle or upper class, and the middle class is getting squeezed down into the lower class. 

I tend to agree with Carlin. 

There have always been economic and social classes in our country.  Our founders were wealthy ‘gentlemen’ in an age where that distinction came from breeding, economics, and education.  Our country has always had a way to move from one economic strata to another, either better or worse.  The difference here is that the government and members of upper classes aren’t supposed to be doing the things that make it impossible to move up in the world and keep those at the rarefied levels from sinking down into the middle or lower classes.  If you are born into the lower class, no-one in this country should stop you from being hard working, brilliant, lucky, or a combination of these things and raising yourself up.  Is it easy?  Heck no, it’s not.  It never has been.  The Waltons, Vanderbilts, Asters, and all the rest can all trace their families wealth back to a common ancestor who started out much poorer and worked his butt off to amass wealth.  Nothing says that in 100 years that there won’t be a wealthy Gates or Jobs clan who can point back to their early 2000’s ancestor as the one who worked hard. 

What I am seeing, however, is that the motivation to do better and the knowledge that it is even possible to do better is drying up in our lower economic class.  The motivation to keep yourself out of the poorhouse and to put food on the table evaporates when someone else is making sure there’s a roof over your head and food in your belly. 

Additionally, the main way that Americans can move up in the world, education, is becoming something of little value.  Even the most motivated families can be stymied in a quest to get a good public education, and the cost of a good private education has become so prohibitively high that few people of the lower economic class can even consider it.  Until we reform/rebuild the American educational system to concentrate more on educating children in safe, disciplined, and well-staffed schools than on indoctrinating them in broken down, chaotic work programs for union teachers, upward mobility in the lower classes will continue to only happen to those gifted with artistic or athletic talent or those willing to break the law in order to make money.

A wise man once told me “The only easy day was yesterday.”  He didn’t know how right he was.

The day started out OK.  I got Girlie Bear off to school with no problems, and Boo and I had a few minutes to play with the light sabers before I took him to preschool.  I expected today would go well.  I was going to be working at one of our offices across town from where I normally work, but quite close to home.  I expected to work there all day, be able to get Boo from school without having to break some or all of the state speed laws, then head home.

Those hopes were dashed when my cell phone rang at about noon.  The world was falling in at the office, and I had to drop everything and rush over to hold it up.  I arrived to find that one of my co-workers had already done most of the work, but since I was there, I stayed with the group working on the problem.  When I mentioned to the manager in charge of our impromptu task force that I needed to leave to get Boo, he said he wanted someone from my work group to come down and sit with his group until they were done working.  Of course, calling someone at their desk at 3 PM to drop everything and come down to work on something else didn’t go very far.  Eventually, I found one of my co-workers who was able to re-arrange his schedule for a few hours and take my place.

I had to rush to get Boo, but luckily I didn’t kill anyone or cause major traffic pileups doing so.  I had to get home to dial in, so dinner went from being pizza from our favorite pick-up only place to Little Caesars.  Girlie Bear must have been salivating at the thought of her favorite pizza, because she looked like I’d just shot the dog when I got out of the car with those pizza boxes.

She got over it enough to eat her share of pepperoni and cheese, but not before commenting on the condition, ingredients, temperature, and consistency of the pizza.  I had to remind her that there were still leftovers in the kitchen if she didn’t like it.

Boo, on the other hand, ate like a lumberjack.  Of course, all the carbs in the pizza quickly translated into a burst of energy that will be talked about by our grandchildren.

Irish Woman called to talk to us, and seemed very excited to be coming home tomorrow.  Her flight should land at about dinner time, so I think I’ll take everyone out for something on the way home from the airport.

While she was on the phone with Boo, she directed him to another “treasure” she’d hidden in the house.   Monday night was a slinky, Tuesday night was a red light saber, Wednesday night was the flute from hell, and tonight was the most annoying thing on earth:

Mama, you are in so much trouble

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a talking Darth Vader mask.  You’ll notice his Lego Star Wars PJ’s, red light saber, and now he’s walking around telling me “I am your father” and “Now I am the master”.   Yep, I’m raising a nerd. I must do something just as nice for Irish Woman someday.

Halfway there.

Had a good morning getting Boo off to school.  He seems to enjoy using his toy lightsaber to get me moving a little faster in the morning.  Kind of like an ASP baton for midgets.

I found I was out of ground coffee this morning, and had fall back on instant.  I’ll have to rectify that situation for the sake of humanity.  I don’t drink much coffee anymore, but when I do I want it to be good coffee.  Life’s too short to drink dishwater.

Dinner tonight was leftovers, which happens to be my favorite meal.  Girlie Bear ate up, but Boo turned his nose up at the warmed-up hotdish I gave him, instead asking for “toast and cheese and chocolate pudding”.  I relented for the sake of domestic tranquility on the toast and cheese, but we don’t keep chocolate pudding in the house, so I had to disappoint him.  He wasn’t very happy about that.

While I was fending off yet another assault from the young Jedi and his whirling baton of pain, he spied a ‘present’ Irish Woman had left for him in one of the end tables.  Neatly wrapped in pretty tissue paper was a plastic flute.  I’m not sure what I have done to deserve that, but efforts to remove the offending shrieking whistle from Boo’s hands caused protests louder than the flute.

Tonight I’m going to do some housework, get fully caught up on laundry, and try to get some sleep.  Irish Woman comes home Friday night, and I don’t want the house to look any worse than it did when she left.

Tomorrow night I’m going to assume my secret identity of Indulgodad, able to order pizza at a single bound.  That’ll give me a little extra time to do last minute straightening up and might do something about the morale of the children.

Halfway there.

Dear Father,

Please forgive me for the evil thoughts and words I had for other drivers while going to and coming from work today.  I truly do not wish they would all find out their mothers were the cheapest prostitutes in Bangladesh, nor to I hope their cars all spontaneously catch fire after impacting a dirty hog hauler.

Forgive me for the harsh thoughts I had for the woman in the grocery store who was complaining to the checkout lady about how inconvenient it is to use government supplied healthcare.  I did not mean to upset her when I told her that if she didn’t like Medicaid, she should consider getting a job or paying her own way, even though I meant every word.

Lord, please apologize for me to the ancient craftsman who first created the flute.  I truly did not mean it when I wished he would spend eternity scrubbing the hairy testicles of Satan after Boo found the example of his craft that Irish Woman stashed for him to find while she was gone.

Heavenly Father, please make me more patient, kind, and forgiving of my brothers and sisters, even especially when they all seem to be making a hobby out of pissing me off.

In your name I pray,

Amen

OK, you rugged individualist Reaganistas, which of your favorite quotes did I miss?