This morning I have:

• Made Breakfast
• Done dishes
• Done laundry
• Chased a three year old
• Scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom
• Picked up the dining room and living room
• Mopped floors
• Scrubbed the bathroom from top to bottom
• Chased a three year old
• Picked up Boo’s room, with his help
• Put dinner in the crockpot
• Chased a three year old
• Taken the trash out
• Taken the trash cans out to the curb
• Begun preparing Thanksgiving goodies
• Chased a three year old
• Done more dishes
• Done more laundry
• Brought the trash cans back in
• Chased a three year old

Russian President Medvedev has threatened to deploy missiles to Kaliningrad and other parts of Russia with the mission of destroying NATO missile defense sites in the event of war.  Russia objects to the sites in principle, and seems to be peeved at the fact that NATO won’t agree jointly running the sites with the Russians.

I’m not going to get into the usefulness of the anti-missile effort, or what its effectiveness would be in the event that Iran decides to launch missiles at Europe or North America.  That’s a debate for another time.  And I think we all agree that the anti-missile program wouldn’t be very useful in the event that Russia launches everything but the kitchen sink against the West.  By the way, I see that situation as being less and less likely the more that Russia and the West integrate politically and economically.

If Russia wants to station missiles of any kind on their soil, so be it.  Far be it from me to tell a sovereign nation what to do with their openly declared weapons.  But the Russians should remember that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction still applies.  A fusillade of Iskander missiles launched against Poland will be treated as if they were launched against Wisconsin.  Rattle your saber all you want, but unsheath it, and we will have a problem.

Oh, and someone needs to remind the Russians that pointing missiles at the people who are making Russia rich buying their petroleum and natural gas isn’t the smartest thing in the world to do.  Something tells me the Poles won’t have any second thoughts about buying their energy from the Scandinavians if the Russians make aggressive moves against them.

This weekend, Girlie Bear and I will be braving the wilds of Fort Knox in search of the elusive Whitetail Deer.  My goal is to not be making Deer Tag Soup when the season closes.  Posting will be light.

Guys, I’m not getting deployed. I’m just volunteering to be a training aid Jihadi at Fort Knox. Thanks for the thoughts, though.

Sorry about the confusion.

Y’all play nice while I’m gone, ya hear?

Update – I am, in fact, not being deployed.  I was only doing some volunteer work as an OpFor role player out at Fort Knox.

The Atomic Nerds took a hit earlier this week, or rather, their hosting company did.  Stingray describes it in the way that only he can:

Then, one fine Saturday morning, Jihadi Joe killed those magic elves, so they couldn’t sort things to make sure the right info got to the right people, and all that particular machine’s elves knew how to offer up is Peace & Love & Stonings & Hijacking and yi-yi-yi music. People wanted their obscure WWI pistol information, and other people wanted their over-long scientific analysis of pop phenomenon and pointless profanity but there were no elves that knew where that douchecocking information lived anymore!

 Glad to see they’re back, and I’m looking forward to reading my periodic reminders that I’m rarely the smartest guy in the room.  

DaddyBear, watching Faith Hill sing the opening song for Sunday Night Football – Ummhmmm.  You know, sweetie, you’re just as pretty as her, and I’d love to see you in a leather outfit like that.
Irish Woman – Are you crazy?  She has absolutely no body fat.  Never happen.  Someone would poach me.  Same reason I don’t wear animal prints.

Yep, it’s love.

Borepatch gives a pretty good run down of freedom.  The owners of the hotel have the freedom to tell their employees what not to wear on the job and to fire them when the employees don’t comply.  We, as consumers, have the freedom to point out this ass-hattery and take our business elsewhere.

The scumbag who robbed a pharmacy in New York and while doing so murdered four people, including two people that he ambushed after they came into the store in the middle of his crime, has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.  His wife, who drove the car for the robbery and murder, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.

This trash blamed his wife’s ‘need’ to take massive amounts of prescription drugs, including hydrocodone, for this outrage.  He also maintains that he shot his first victim when the gun he used in the robbery went off accidentally, then apparently he just followed through.  By following through, I mean he went and found the other employee at the store, murdered her, then stalked and executed two other people who entered the store.

Hey, jerkoff, no gun goes off ‘accidentally’.  I’m probably taking a very simplistic view of this, but if you don’t hold up a pharmacy, you don’t take a chance on ‘accidentally’ shooting the pharmacist.  If you didn’t want to shoot anyone else, then you didn’t have to.  Even assuming that the first murder was ‘accidental’, which I don’t buy for a moment, you still, in cold blood, ended the lives of three non-threatening people who just happened to be in a place they had every right to be in at the same time that you were.

The gun didn’t magically start shooting people all by itself.  Your wife didn’t ‘need’ all of the drugs you stole.  You aimed the pistol and pulled the trigger of your own volition, and I will never be convinced that you didn’t plan on doing it that way to begin with.  Your wife either chose to start taking that crap in the first place as a recreational activity, or she didn’t do what was necessary to get off of it after using it for some truly therapeutic reason.  Either way, no-one but you two wastes of good protoplasm are to blame for the shattering of four families.  Not the gun, not the drugs, and not the doctors who prescribed them.

Personally, I hope they stick you both in the third sub-basement of some old, stone building, and you spend the rest of your very long lives listening to the roaches in the walls.  It’s still better than you deserve, but Death by Duracell wasn’t prescribed by the law in this case.  If there ever was a case that made me wish for public, gruesome executions, it’s this one.

Fox News is discussing five myths about cast iron pots and pans, including whether or not to use soap to clean them, and whether or not cooking with cast iron adds nutrients to your food.

At Casa de Oso, we cook a lot in our cast iron pans.  We mostly use two griddles, one large and one small, and a couple of frying pans, but we also have large dutch ovens and a few saucepans.  We are forever in the hunt for a large frying pan for making fried chicken like Irish Woman remembers seeing used as a child.  Nothing says “I love you” in Kentucky like a big cast iron pan full of hot lard and spiced chicken parts.

I prefer cast iron for sauteing and frying foods over the aluminum cookware we have.  We have to use so much more oil to keep things from sticking to the aluminum and it’s so much more work to clean the shiny pans that it’s just not worth it.  And aluminum cookware just doesn’t have the soul that a good, well-used, black cast iron pan does.

One thing I can tell you – a teenage boy, who is doing dishes against his will, takes his life in his own hands when he loads his step-mom’s cast iron skillet and griddle in the dishwasher and turns it on.  Luckily we caught it before it got beyond the ‘pre-wash’ cycle, but he was banished from the kitchen for a while.  It took us an entire day to reseason those pans.

Also, contrary to popular belief, a cast iron frying pan does not make a very good weapon.  The two foot by one foot cast iron griddle with big handles on either end makes a much better flail or club, and it also makes a dandy shield. 

A cast-iron dutch oven is a wonderful cooking implement for camping, especially for those who want charcoal ash in their cobbler after the kids start taking the lid off to get a second helping.

And finally, the proper way to get stuck-on food off the bottom of a cast iron pan is to boil water in it for a few minutes, then scrape it out and reseason as necessary.  It is not to fill it about 1/3 of the way up with camp fuel and burn out the scraps.  Remember folks, behind every pyromaniac is a Boy Scout leader with bandages and a shovel full of dirt.