Had a few stray flakes, but nothing sticking.

Did see a few pretty impressive sets of spin-out tracks in the median on the way home.  Guess it got icy in spots.

We’re projected to get another storm in later in the week.  Maybe we’ll get a white Christmas.

Update – We had about half an inch of white dust on the cars and some parts of the yard this morning, so the weatherman was at least close.  I’ll post pics later.

I’ve been watching the case of David Goldman and his son for a long time.  I’m sure I’m not the only divorced dad who has been monitoring the plight of this dad and his child.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, Mr. Goldman married a woman from Brazil and had a son. She took the boy to Brazil for a visit and then divorced him in Brazil. Of course she got custody of the little boy.  She remarried, but then died in childbirth.  Her family has kept Sean, even though his father wants him back.  Mr Goldman has been fighting his way through the Brazilian courts to  regain custody.  It’s been an emotional roller coaster for him and no doubt for his son.

Every father who goes through a divorce fears that his ex will take the child or children away to a place where he can’t retrieve them.  I’ve been there.  That’s why I’m a computer geek in Kentucky instead of a government contractor in Arizona.  My lawyer in Arizona told me that if I wanted any rights to see my children, I had to go to Kentucky.  The courts just wouldn’t help me much if I lived halfway across the continent.  

It’s bad enough when you have to go between one US state and another.  It’s quite another thing when you’re fighting in the courts of another country altogether.  There are treaties to prevent just this situation, but Brazil is apparently not following their treaty obligations. 

The boy is a U.S. citizen, period.  A foreign country is holding him against the wishes of his remaining biological parent and in contravention of treaties that both countries have signed.  So far our government has only given lip service to getting the Brazilian government to release this young child to his father. Presidents Bush and Obama both made noises about this, but nothing has come of it.  The State Department is squawking now, but I don’t have much faith in that resolving the issue.

Congress is threatening to stop a trade deal we have with Brazil and its neighbors.  I think this doesn’t go far enough.  If I were president (OK, OK, I know, that thought gives you all shivers and night sweats) Brazil would be restricted from doing any trade with any entity that is headquartered in the United States.  I would stop our Olympic team from participating in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. I would recall our ambassador, and ask Brazil to remove theirs.  Yes, that would hurt a valuable trading relationship and negatively impact the economies of both countries, but I’m pretty sure that Brazil would hurt more than we would.

If after 30 days they still don’t send the boy home, I would go before the United Nations and ask that other countries join us in punishing Brazil for not living up to their treaty obligations.  Again, I think the global economy could survive losing Brazil better than Brazil can survive losing the rest of the global economy. 

If that still didn’t work after another 90 days, I would go to Congress for a declaration of war.  It wouldn’t be one of those  resolutions authorizing force.  I’m talking about an honest to goodness, re-direct the entire country to one purpose declaration of war.   Yes, that’s extreme, but the life and freedom of one American citizen is worth it. 

No country has the right to unlawfully detain a citizen of another, especially a child.  Until Brazil sends little Sean home to his father, then we have no business acting like Brazil deserves our friendship.

Well, I’ve almost made it through the week.  I can’t believe I did this for a couple of years when I was in Germany.  Guess it’s easier to be nocturnal when you don’t have kids.  Only reason I know it’s Friday night is the calendar.  My time sense is messed up beyond all recognition.

The guys I’ve been working with are pretty easy to hang around with.  For the most part we’ve been monitoring systems and watching bad movies on AMC.  The 1970’s King Kong remake is on at the moment.  Not sure if I like it or not.  I remember this movie scaring the heck out of me when I was a kid.  Guess I’m just jaded now.

I tried doing some coding last night, but it’s unreadable, which is pretty hard to do with PERL.  I must have been either hyped up on coffee or half asleep when I wrote it.  I’m going to scrap it and try again on Monday.  If you can’t read your own code, even if it somehow works, then it’s not going to work when someone comes back to modify or re-use it.

Hopefully I’ll get some sleep this morning and then get some Christmas shopping done in the afternoon and evening.  Girlie Bear went to her mom’s for the week last night, so all Irish Woman and I have to do is trade off on taking care of BooBoo.  I’ve gotten a few things, but I’m nowhere near done.  This is going to be a small Christmas, but even at that I’m way behind the power curve.

Girlie Bear and I went out and got a Christmas tree this afternoon.  It’s a little late in the season, so the pickings were a bit slim. We found a nice fir and got it set up in the living room.  So far, it’s just got lights on it, but we’ll finish trimming it tonight.  I’ll post a pic once it’s done.

It’s been raining here for about 12 hours now, and it’s supposed to move over to snow later this morning.  We’re supposed to get one or two inches, but the eastern part of the state already had 5 inches or so at dinnertime, with more to accumulate overnight.  That’s messing up some hunting plans.  The first modern black bear hunt in Kentucky is this weekend, and the area the hunt is occurring is the counties that are going to be hit hardest by the weather.  Here’s hoping that some people are able to connect and that everyone comes back safe.  A bear hunt is on my list of things to do sometime in my life, but I’ll wait until the state figures out how it wants to run the hunts.

Irish Woman got BooBoo a pair of snow boots, a hat, and a pair of mittens so we can take him out and play if we get an appreciable amount of snow.  My mental image of his snow apparel roughly equates to the suits that climbers wear while climbing up Mt. Everest, with a dash of space shuttle EVA thrown in.  It’s her babies first time out in the snow, so I guess she’s justified in overdressing him.

If the snow does come, I’ll take a few pics and post them.  One of these days we’ll get a real snowstorm and then we’ll see how pretty Kentucky is.  I’m not looking for a blizzard another ice storm, but I would love to get about 6 inches of snow that lasts more than a few days.  I miss sledding and making snow forts.

Day 3 – Halfway there.

I’m not feeling too bad.  I got a good sleep this morning and afternoon. 

Last night was rough. I was tired all evening, and nothing was going on, so it was hard to stay awake.

I read Day by Day Armageddon the other night to stay awake.  Pretty good yarn.  I’ll probably get the sequel when it comes out next July.  I seem to be on an end-of-the-world kick lately.  I may re-read Monster Hunter International this week.  Something that will keep me awake.

Irish Woman has been very understanding about my need to get sleep during the day, and hasn’t asked me to do much more than start on dinner after I get up in the afternoon.  I may get ambitious today and take Girlie Bear out to do some Christmas shopping today. She wants to get coffee mugs for all of her teachers, and we may make baskets out of them with cocoa and hot cider mix.

Our holiday schedule is firming up.  We have shindigs planned from Christmas Eve until late on the 27th.  Girlie Bear and possibly Little Bear will be coming back from their mother’s house Christmas morning, so it’ll be a full weekend.

goes to a young man in Arizona, who strangled a bloody rabid wildcat with his bare hands when it attacked him.

I feel that I’m an alpha male type.  I do my own lawn work, do all of the repairs to our house and cars that I can, and try hard to not be soft as much as possible.

But wrapping my hands around the neck of a rabid carnivore that wanted to eat me and wring the life out of it is not what would occur to me in the unlikely event that said carnivore would appear in my front yard.

Sir, you deserve this award, and I hope that you enjoy it for the rest of your life.  That is if you remember it as you spend the rest of your days wrapping and unwrapping barbed wire from around your biceps.  You probably do that instead of getting a silly tribal tattoo.

Currently 3 hours away from the end of my first graveyard shift.  One week on the 11 to 8 shift, then back to normal hours.  Not working too hard, just sitting around monitoring servers to make sure nothing bad happens during the Christmas season.

I’m starting to fade, and it’s the part of the night when things seem to move in slow motion.

I’ll be OK tomorrow or Wednesday once I get my sleep cycles in sync. I tried to get as much sleep as I could today, but life intruded, so I’m living on coffee and sugar at the moment.

The tough part will be getting back to normal next week.  Luckily it’s a short week and I’ll be able to sleep in a bit since the kids will be out of school.

Tune into this channel for updates as I begin to hallucinate from my circadian rhythms going on strike.

The only gun show that the Obama’s approve of is when Michelle is coming off of Air Force One in a tank top and shorts.

Stephen King, author of all things boogie-boogie, has shown that even the morbidly strange have hearts:

 King and his wife, Tabitha, who live in Bangor, are paying $13,000 toward the cost of two bus trips so that members of the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Unit can travel from Camp Atterbury in Indiana to Maine for Christmas. The soldiers left Maine last week for training at Camp Atterbury. They are scheduled to depart for Afghanistan in January.

 No matter how nice Camp Atterbury is and how hard leadership tries to make the holidays good for the troops, nothing beats a ride home and time with your family.

Mr. King, I was reading “Tommyknockers” when I was going through recruit processing many years ago, and I have to say that yours was the last civilian voice I heard for a long time.  Thank you for that and for looking out for the men and women who continue to serve.

Just finishing up watching “Star Trek The Motion Picture”.  It’s the first Star Trek movie, not “Star Trek 90210” from earlier this year. 

It’s a good movie, but it’s painful to watch sometimes.  The acting is really bad at points, and those uniforms are hideous.  You can tell they were searching for a way to take a hokey TV show and make it into a movie setting.

Junior Bear had never seen it, so I got it off of Netflix.  I have the rest of the Star Trek movies in my queue, followed by all 6 of the Star Wars movies.  Yeah, I’m going to be watching some really good movies, and a few horrible ones. 

It’ll be good to have some movies for the next few weeks that are fluff.  I’ll be too busy to sit down and concentrate on things like plot and deep characters.

The Irish Woman and I got a babysitter last night and went out for dinner and a show.

Dinner was at Cunningham’s in downtown Louisville.  If you like Kentucky cuisine, it’s really good.  If you’re on a low-salt, low-cholesterol diet, I’d suggest another venue.  There’s a reason that Kentucky ranks high on the heart disease listings for the United States.  It’s mighty tasty, though.

The show was Lewis Black at the Louisville Palace.  I’ve been a fan of this comedian for years, and it was great to finally see him live.  He’s definitely worth the ticket.  I was laughing so hard that I almost cracked skulls with the lady sitting behind me.  She was leaning way forward to laugh, and I reared back to laugh.  Luckily, no concussions.

We were celebrating our 5th anniversary.  It was a bit late, and it’s been a long time since we had an evening out without kids.  We have to do that more often.