Pittsburgh will win this one, but it will be close.

Well, the storm has broken here. We got a couple more inches of snow today, but not too much to keep Junior Bear from shoveling out our driveway pretty quickly.

We didn’t suffer any significant damage from the ice, at least not so far. The breaking sound that made me think we had lost part of the maple tree was in the neighbor’s yard. All of our trees and bushes are drooping, but not breaking.

The news reports that over half a million people across the state have lost power. We’ve had a few more flickers, but so far so good.

I’m not having to work tonight, so if day care is open tomorrow, I’m going into the office. If not, I’ll work from home. The roads are mostly clear once you get out of the neighborhoods, and my office building still has power.

So, we’re doing OK. A lot of my friends aren’t as fortunate, but hopefully LG&E will get the power on for them soon.

Well, the little critter will be poking his head out soon, and if you don’t like his prediction, you can at least cook and eat the son of a gun.

You know, I never noticed recipes like this before I moved to Kentucky. Funny how your environment can change you.

Now, I have groundhogs living within eyesight of my front yard, and if the S H’s The F, they may just end up smoked, pulled, and smothered in the Irish Woman’s signature barbecue sauce.

MMMM, barbecue rodent.

“Poisonous Fish Testicles Send 7 Japanese Diners to Hospital“

Seeing that made me do both a double take and a spit take.

Now, I loves me some seafood, and I have a taste for sushi if it’s done right. There aren’t many fish, mollusks, or bi-valves I won’t eat.

But I don’t eat testicles. I guess I’ve never been that hungry. And I seriously wouldn’t special order them because they come from a fish that might or might not poison me if I eat it.

It’s amazing what people will eat just for the sake of saying they ate it. Food isn’t a sport, it’s a necessity of life. Leave the blowfish and his testicles alone and have some tuna.

Well, our first real winter storm this year has arrived.

We got a few inches of snow last night, and intermittent ice and freezing rain since this afternoon. Power and cable has blinked a couple of times, but so far no extended outage. We’re lucky compared to some. Apparently large sections of Louisville either have no power, or the power is very flaky.

Kentucky is under an emergency declaration, and I’m staying off of the roads.

My employer has asked a few of us to stay up and monitor our systems from home. I’m currently on a chat line with a few of my co-workers while we watch the servers and databases. My bosses decided to let us do this remotely because of both the danger of being on the roads and the chance that once we got to work, we wouldn’t be able to leave safely for days.

It’s kind of fun to picture what the situation is across Louisville and southern Indiana by seeing who drops off the chat line and then gets back on when their power/Internet gets restored. Several folks have reported trees falling in their neighborhoods due to the ice.

So far, I haven’t heard anything too big break, although I’m pretty sure we lost a branch or two off of our maple tree. I’ll go out tomorrow morning and check on how things look.

We’re all snug here at Casa de Oso. We have plenty of firewood and candles in case the lights go out, and I’ve kept a fire going all day so that the kids could warm up when they come in from playing outside.

Junior Bear did a small amount of shoveling this morning so that we and our neighbor could get to and from our houses, but I’ll wait until it stops snowing to get out there and shovel for real. This isn’t the Great White North where you have to shovel every 2 hours or you end up shoveling 36 inches of snow at once.

The kids were off school today and will be off tomorrow as well. Luckily, they were able to get out of the house for a few hours this afternoon when there was a break in the weather, and they did their snow gopher imitations. They had to be brushed off at the back door because they looked like snowmen when they wanted to come in. Even with that, they were going stir crazy this evening until I told them to break out the Uno cards and go downstairs. They’re good kids, and love to play board games. Better that than watching TV all day.

I’m going to hibernate this morning once my relief gets on-line, and then Junior Bear and I will be shoveling our way out of the snow/ice bank. Where’s that global warming I’ve heard so much about?

This list includes a lot of things, and geriatric sexual revolution is one of them.

Apparently, a retirement community is having a boom in VD due to a boom in old people dancing the horizontal mambo.

I love my grandparents, and I would want them to enjoy their retirement. But I draw the line at imagining Nana and Papa running around like a couple of college students on the make.

Not that old people shouldn’t get busy. Hey, they lived that long, let them do whatever. My father was the youngest of 12, and his father was 65 when he was born. Family tradition. I hope when I get to that age, I’ll still be chasing skirts.

But somebody get these people some condoms. Heck, they’re the World War II generation. Show them those Army VD movies they made in the 1940’s that my drill sergeant forced me to watch in 1989. If that doesn’t scare them off the stuff entirely, it’ll at least convince them to wrap their rascals.

Over the weekend, it was suggested that any Gitmo prisoners who can’t be returned to their home countries be put on a newly re-opened penitentiary at Alcatraz, smack dab in the middle of San Fransisco Bay and Nancy “The Joker” Pelosi’s congressional district.

While the idea was quickly belittled and taken for the joke it was, I’m not so sure that this isn’t such a bad thought.

It would give a boost to the local economy as new facilities would have to be constructed out on the island. And when the prison is built, staffed, and manned, then supplies needed for the haute cuisine the detainees have grown accustomed to would have to be brought out daily. The seafood and rice pilaf can’t be made from shelf stable or frozen food. Only the freshest arugula will do for these guys.

And the hippies in San Fransisco and Berkeley won’t have to get special flights to the Carri bean to inspect the facility and determine if it fits in with the groovy new idea they have for accommodating these killers, er I mean, poor men who have been taken from their homelands by an uncaring imperialist government.

And all of this can be done in the political backyard of the Speaker of the House. Let her and her constituents come to learn how nice it is to have a group consisting of terrorists living a few miles from their bay view homes.

This idea gets better and better the more I think about it.

This morning, after feeding Baby Bear his morning cereal, I gave him a handful of Cheerios to gum/chew while I got my breakfast. My coat was across the back of the kitchen chair next to the high chair.

Apparently, Baby Bear decided to stash away a few Cheerios while Dad had his back turned.

When I got to work this morning, my coat pocket had about 10 cheerios in it. For Baby Bear, that’s a pretty good snack. For me, it was a sticky handful of oat flour.

He’s learning to stash away supplies against lean times already. I’m so proud.

When an old soldier meets a young soldier in the Army, occasionally he will ask the young trooper his age. A wise ass old NCO may say “Heck, I’ve got boots older than you!”. It’s a light hearted ribbing to show just how ancient the NCO is in comparison to the young pup.

This man (H/T to The Best Defense) most certainly has boots that are older than me.

CSM Mellinger went through basic training and jump school while I was still learning to walk and talk. He’s jumped out of a military aircraft more times than I’ve been on a commercial airliner.

After 37 years on active duty, he’s got to be close to retirement. If he truly is the last draftee, a whole generation that remembers compulsory service will be gone.

The other day, I made a prediction that President Bush would come out with a raft of pardons for people in his administration in an attempt to protect them from investigations by either the Congress or the new administration.

Unless something comes out in the next few days, I was wrong. President Bush issued no pardons at all, and only issued commutations for two Border Patrol agents who were convicted of shooting a suspected smuggler and then covering up their actions.

Here’s another prediction: In the next 6 to 12 months, Speaker Pelosi or Senate Leader Reid will open wide ranging investigations of just about everything the Bush administration did that they find objectionable. Subjects that come to mind will be the intelligence used in the run-up to the Iraq War, Guantanamo Bay and the other prisoner/interrogation issues, use of non-competed military contracts (Halliburton), the firing of U.S. attorneys, and the intelligence gathering programs that tapped into the communications of terrorists.

What President Bush and his assistants will have going for them, at least in a couple of things, are that the courts have already ruled on a couple of things, and they have cleaned up things that have gone wrong.

The FISA court recently ruled that the NSA surveillance program was legal.

The perpetrators, at least those on ground, who mistreated prisoners have been disciplined.

The bad intelligence from the pre-war period will be hard to explain, but intelligence is not a game of certainties, and the administration tried to act like it was. They will now take their lumps for that.

The U.S. attornies scandal will go away quickly. These government prosecutors serve at the discretion of the president, so it would be hard for Congress to argue that President Bush was wrong to let them go. I expect that President Obama will let some or all of the currently serving U.S. attornies go.

All of this won’t stop congressional investigations from happening, but at least it’ll give some cover from the political fallout.

I hope I’m wrong. The country doesn’t need all of this when we’re still fighting a war and trying to bring the economy out of a downturn.