Against the Wind

Photo from the end of March posted the end of June. I used to run one month behind and thought that was abysmal. But I’m good at attitude adjustments when it comes to things I need/want to accomplish. I hope the adventure has been about right for them. The baby is one month old and doing well. B– is still jobhunting, and I’m still offering prayers of concern. They seem to be ok, but it’s been a long spell of unemployment.

Meanwhile, the reason I read so much on the internet is that now and again, like the gambler pulling the lever on the slot machine, you hit a winner.

Awakening from the Collective Dream is just such a find. A source I’d not seen before.

DYAF, and read the whole thing. But a couple of quotes to whet your appetite.

The entire Western world is suffering a painful lesson about the fantasy of limitless government resources. The pool of evil, faceless rich people who can be taxed to provide socialist benefits turns out to be quite limited indeed. Absurd benefits promised to unionized employees are not a perpetual motion engine for State growth. They’re a locomotive racing toward the brick wall of insolvency.

and closer to home…

The mythology of wise and compassionate government is drowning in a mixture of oil bubbling up from the Gulf of Mexico, and sleaze pouring out of Washington. The government has many vital duties to perform, but as it grows in size, it becomes less interested in performing them. Its own ambitions take priority over its responsibilities to a private sector it increasingly comes to view as an adversary… since the State must both demonize the private sector to conceal its own failures, and use compulsive force to extract resources from workers and businesses. No one should harbor any further misconceptions about maintaining the transparency of the State as it swells in size.

Spent a good bit of the day getting to the big city to watch the boys, and help Marianne with wedding preparations. We were decorating little take out type containers, she is making some cute little decorations with embroidery hoops and fabric. The wedding is rolling at us!

This photo is a disappointment on so many levels. My quilt is badly out of focus. My bedroom looks stark and uninviting. Is that why I don’t even turn on the light as I turn in at night? Guess I’ll get some pictures hung in there tomorrow.

The quilt is on a queen sized bed at Marianne and Barry’s house, their wedding present. It’s the second round robin quilt. I’m still plugging on the first one, and all the hand quilting on it. I paid for machine quilting for this one, so I could get one done!

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Most interesting reading today was in One Cosmos. He’s digesting a book on the cardinal virtues, Faith, Hope and Love. Today’s post was difficult reading, but some nuggets jumped out.

…hear us now, believe us later: there is no knowledge of higher things in the absence of purity, for you will just bring your impurities with you and confuse them with reality. Purity is to theology what, say, integrity and intellectual honesty are to the scientist. Without it, nothing they say can be trusted.

I’m so frustrated by all the politics that I read. No one cares about truth, but catchy soundbites and whatever grabs attention. Some of Gagdad’s riff on Aquinas as a teacher and what constitutes great teaching stuck to me through the day like a sand burr.

Thomas (Aquinas) was, above all else, a teacher. True, he was probably the greatest philosopher who has ever lived, but he would have been the last to characterize himself in those terms. Rather, he mainly prayed for two things: truth or wisdom and the ability to impart it to others. Oh yes, and a third thing: that “his life would not outlast his teaching.” Since there was no internet in those days, — I think that’s correct — this was by no means assured, especially since Thomas left not a single disciple at the time of his death. We’re lucky that someone didn’t just toss it all in the nearest dumpster.

So many great books, and I can fill a day reading the intertoobs.

The blueberry bush gets random acts of excessive prunning. So in March I photographed the new growth. It always speaks to me of possibilities. I remember when Wonderwoman, my wonderdog discovered as a middle aged dog that she could jump the fence. I took that as a sign that we can all bust loose and run free a bit, even just a tiny bit ahead of senility.

Now I have little interest in jumping fences. My time has passed for such energetic exertion. But the new growth on a butchered bush is still a glad sight.

H– needed someone to go with her to the reunion of her high school class down on the bayou. They had a reunion at the race track, and I’d not been for years and years. It was a fun day. The track has changed from what I recall. You used to be able to go into the paddock and see the horses about as close as you would want to see them. Maybe I was only able to go because I was with the wife of a trainer, but I’m thinking it was open to anyone who wanted to see the animals. Now they’re kept pretty far from the crowd, behind glass, on the other side of the grandstands from the area I recall.

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Now for the baby story of the day. When Cameron, age 4 was given Miranda, a few hours old to hold, someone asked him how it felt to have a new cousin.

He thought about it a bit, and said,
“It feels warm.”
“It feels soft.”
“I think it loves me.”
“It smells good.”

He’s a serious superhero, and didn’t like it when we all laughed a bit at this response.

March in the swamp, and there’s just a touch of the hopeful red from one of the first blooming trees. Wish I knew what the tree is called. I’ve pictures of it for several years.

So as busy goes from one level of ridiculous to the higher level, I’ll just blog old photos that I’m enjoying looking at.

Survived serving dinner this evening, and I’m ready to go commune with the pillow. Tomorrow I’ve got an appointment finally with the accountant, and there are papers to be gathered in preparation for that. And Friday will be a whirlwind again. GIVE ME a Break! Please.

I prepared this photo last night thinking it would be nice to have a bit of a head start on blogging, and it was among quite a number of photos of the marshes and swamp in the Big Branch Wildlife Preserve. So when my walking buddy said she couldn’t make the walk today, I hustled out to the marsh to see what it looks like in summer. At 7:30 ayem it was already 83 degrees, but the grasses are all green, the flowers are blooming, it looks very different than this wintery scene.

The ear worm that accompanies swamp pictures is from Once Upon a Mattress, a musical Carol Burnett played in when she was a young thing, and I listened to the sound track until I could just about sing it all. Winnifred the Woebegone, Princess of the Swamplands is the heroine. And don’t you know looking for the lyrics on the intertubes, I found this performance of the song on You Tube.

I’ve had my swamp moment today. Tonight I was making a lasagna for entertaining Winnifred and Paul tomorrow. All good but as I’m putting it in the oven, I tasted some of the ricotta and egg and spinach mixture. AARRRGH! Too much salt. It burns from too much salt. So I may have to go see if I can buy some gumbo tomorrow. I was having a great time playing with noodles and grating cheese and now I have this picture of disaster looming. I am not meant to entertain. Panic is cooking mode. Ahh well, time for bed. No time tomorrow to recook, so it’s live with it or replace it.

Back in March, I was worried about my budget, and trying to figure how to make the cruise fit into the picture. So I went and bought myself some tulips daffodils. They always cheer me.   Ok, they’re not tulips, but in that wonderful group of spring bulbs that remind me how good it is to be alive. And I photographed them, so the cheer might last well into June.

Today, I am working through the budget for the Trinidad extravaganza to come, and ….

I read the news/blogs this morning, and it’s not a pretty picture. Obama and McChrystal are crosswise of each other. Hard to hope Afghanistan will improve. Congress is cutting the budget to Iraq, while the transitions continue. May as well leave them to be another Taliban pick up. Obama played golf last weekend, the CEO of BP went to the yacht races. They’re both concerned about the oil spill. NOT!

Wretch seems to see the tea leaves pointing toward… lots of possibilities, probabilistically, none good. One interpretation of the tea leaves I found was that the White House has figured they have BP in the noose, and are ready to pull the trap door, and nationalize it, using the model of the auto industry.

What’s a girl to do? Guess I’ll head to the Gulf Coast and see if I can find a perfect Mother of the Bride outfit for the upcoming wedding. There’s always a bit of retail therapy available!

Press bias? It’s one of those canards that you just don’t really question if you read enough of the rightosphere. I rather like the answer, “it’s more complicated than that.” Journalists have some biases that are a result of how they work and think. It’s a lofty perch trying to be always the skeptic. Maybe more thought than you would care to read, but I can’t seem to excerpt tonight, so read the whole thing.   Press ideology

An indication of how people are reacting to this video is the fact that I’ve seen it twice today. Christy is a rising star in the Republican party. I know many of you aren’t Repubs, and some not interested in politics, but this guy is worth a look, because we’re all going to be hearing from him.

He looks like a really good high school principal! He reminds me of my brother in that he’s articulate and willing to explain what he believes and why. So, you may not want to draw the plane ticket with him in the middle of the row of seats, but maybe he rides first class? He’s the sort of personality you have to believe would travel coach, even as the governor, cause the state is broke.

“But of what are you taking a photo?”

That question nearly stopped me in my tracks photographically. I had taken a photo of an old forlorn wheat elevator on some nearly abandoned tracks in Southern Kansas, but I had no idea why I’d taken the photo, what it was a picture of. The rust and decay appealed to me, as we all wither away, no matter our former utility. You see, I’m still thinking about what the photo is to represent!

You don’t need to read much about symbols to find that water, especially standing water denotes something about the subconscious. So I guess this is a photo of a few quiet intimations of what lurks down there and how it breaks through the surface and surprises us sometimes.

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Mother was just getting to the bit in her magnus opus about my father’s sister. Granny had a baby, her first born who died of appendicitis at about age 5. After Dorothy, there was my father, Paul, his two year younger brother George, and then a few years later was the year of the twins. Granny had twins, Jessie Dan and Betty Ann, Aunt Edith had twins, Merle and Earl, and the old cow had twins all in one year. Granny had three other children after, but the point here is that Betty Ann was the oldest girl in a family of finally seven children.

Mother says she always remembers that Granny was all day long, “Betty, go get milk for the kids,” or “Betty, go put the laundry on the line.” Betty had something of a Cinderella complex. But she had a sweet gentle disposition, and obediently did as was needed. She went to college, got her degree in Music or Music ministry. She was pianist at a church, and went out one icy Sunday to play at church. She lost control of the car, fell out on her head, and was never right again. She was unconscious for weeks on end, and suddenly looked up at the TV in her hospital room, and said, “oh! Perry Como.” She still didn’t recognize her family.

She had to regain her living skills just like she was a baby, but the sweet disposition was lost. She was very angry with her Mother, and made Granny’s life so miserable that my mother ended up taking on the care of Betty for some time, though Mother was carring for infant Dana, and me.

“I’ve learned to live with Kleenex, though I was raised on the principle of the handkerchief,” was one of her pronouncements. She went through a stage where she was “Goth,” wearing all black way before that was popular. The head injury just scrambled her brains a bit.

Not too many years ago, she took an airplane down to visit her sister in Florida. I don’t know if she went with someone, but coming back, she didn’t know where to go to catch her connecting flight, so she sat down somewhere in the air terminal and started reading the Bible. When she never showed up as expected, Daddy had to fly to whereever the connections were, and get her on the plane to get on home.

How different would her life have been if she’d felt a bit less the Cinderella? And if she’d never whacked her head? Somehow, one person died in that car crash and another came to live among us. Sadly, no one in the family was very patient or loving toward the new incarnation.