Friday, October 31, 2008

another wonderful house


Another great one.

613 93rd St SW
Everett, WA 98204


$275,000

Incredible Value!What a charmer this is. While quaint on the outside this home is roomy and spacious on the inside. Original LR has refinished hardwoods, wainscoting, brick fireplace and built-ins. Two large bedrooms have hardwoods and cedar-lined closets. Addition/remodel features large kitchen w/newer appliances (all stay), oversized , light-filled family room and dining room. King-sized master has private bath and walk-in closet. Extra Room to serve as office/den. Large, level fenced yard.
Listing Image Listing Image Listing Image




Bedrooms: 3
Bathroom: 2.00
Sq ft: 1910 SQFT
Built: 1952
Heat: Natural Gas
Roof: Composition
Garage: 0 Car None
Lot Size: 12197 SQFT
Fireplace: 1
Floors: Ceramic Tile, Hardwood, Laminate, Vinyl, Wall to Wall Carpet
Interior: Bath Off Master, Ceiling Fan(s), Dble Pane/Strm Windw, High Tech Cabling, Walk-in Closet
Exterior: Wood
Site: Cable TV, Deck, Fenced-Fully, High Speed Internet, Nat. Gas Available, Outbuildings, RV Parking
Taxes: $2819
Status: Contingent
MLS ID: 28087356

This listing is courtesy of:
Keller Williams Rlty Everett
Contact your local Windermere Agent
Visit www.windermere.com/28087356 for more information

Reading too much

Yup, I have a problem. I'm reading too much. If that's possible, then I am doing it. Outside of, say, college. In college, there's definitely a problem of reading too much, but that's forced, and this isn't. Did I mention that during my first semester at college, my mom sent me the first five books of the Redwall series? Do you know how Not Good that was? I already was trying to read what I was assigned, and then there were these fabulous new books that I could read. Wow. Don't do that if you have a bookworm for a kid. Don't worry, I didn't lower my grades. Luckily for me, education is not a hard major at all. Not lucky for the kids we teach, but lucky for students becoming teachers. But that's another post.

I just want to write down how ridiculous this is. I am still leaning toward a book journal. Here is what I've started on and not finished:

1. A Cry of Stone by Michael O'Brien
2. The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis
3. How Not To Share Your Faith by Mark Brumley
4. Volume One: Thoughts on Spirituality by "Anne", A lay apostle
5. Amazing Grace for the Catholic Heart by Jeff Cavins; Mathew Pinto; Patti Armstrong

Hmmm... obviously we have a theme here, don't we. Lest you think I'm one-sided, I do go through "phases". I go through fiction, then non-fiction, housekeeping books, then Harry Potter, then Sci-fi,then parenting and marriage, and on and on. But two of those books were gifts for my birthday, and two are from our parish library, and the other I picked up at the All Saints Day party the other night for free. So at least I'm not paying for my habit!

If I were going to recommend one of these for busy people right now, I'd recommend CS Lewis' Abolition of Man. It's practically an introduction to why to homeschool for me! I know that sounds weird, but he just totally made my case for why I'm not "socializing" my children in the regular school system. Between the watered down curriculum and the things I don't want my kids to learn yet, I will find other places in the community to get them to meet people. It's very hard for me to explain in my own words, though. Sometimes I'm not good with the "words coming out of my mouth" thing. I could never, ever be a politician. I'm just not quick on the draw.

If you go to www.amazon.com, you can leaf through the pages of some of these books while you are waiting for my book report. That's fun stuff, that is.

Also, How Not to Share Your Faith is an extremely good book on arguing in general, and how to be a good person instead of a jerk while you disagree with someone. For the record, I think I've probably committed all seven of the sins he talks about in the book. Oops.

Good, good stuff.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

This is free speech?

Wow. My friend Abe thinks I have nothing to fear, but I don't know about that. Things are getting weirder.

Secret Service visits Lufkin woman after 'death threat' allegation from an Obama campaign volunteer

By JESSICA SAVAGE
The Lufkin Daily News

Monday, October 06, 2008

A Lufkin woman received a surprise visit from the Secret Service last week because of a "death threat" comment she reportedly made about Sen. Barack Obama to a campaign volunteer asking for her support of the presidential candidate.

Two federal agents arrived at Jessica Hughes' home Thursday to ask her if she said, "I will never support Obama and he will wind up dead on a hospital floor."
Jessica Savage/The Lufkin Daily News
(ENLARGE)
Jessica and Micah Hughes say two Secret Service agents showed up on their doorstep Thursday after a campaign volunteer for Sen. Barack Obama accused her of making a 'death threat' during a phone conversation a day earlier.


Hughes said her words were deliberately twisted by a volunteer who was apparently unhappy Hughes was rude during a phone conversation the two had. The Lufkin mother, a Republican, said she received a call on her cell phone Wednesday from a woman with the Obama Volunteers of Texarkana.

"She asked if I was an Obama supporter, to which I replied, 'No, I don't support him. Your guy is a socialist who voted four times in the state Senate to let little babies die in hospital closets; I think you should find something better to do with your time.' (And then) I hung up."

(Hughes is referring to a "born alive" Illinois bill that did not pass in the Illinois state Senate in 2005 and had previously been opposed by Obama because he said it undermined Roe v. Wade, according to FactCheck.org, a non-partisan organization. A federal version of the bill, which Obama said he would have supported, passed by unanimous consent and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.)

Obama Campaign Communications for Texas director Josh Taylor declined to comment Monday, refusing to answer any questions and referring the matter to the Secret Service, which he said is conducting an investigation. A message left with a Secret Service agent in Houston was not immediately returned.

Hughes said she was surprised to see two Secret Service agents at her door, and upset to learn that the conversation she had with the volunteer apparently had not been recorded.

"I find it hard to believe that (campaign volunteers) don't tape these calls. They call people unsolicited and they aren't monitoring the calls or recording them? I think that is absolutely ridiculous," she said.

"I mean, how often must this happen — that someone is rude to a volunteer that they don't want to talk to?"

Hughes said she wants to file a countercomplaint against the volunteer.

"She has made a charge that will follow me the rest of my life," she said.

"I find that repugnant and violating — that some person got her undies in a bundle because she didn't like what I had to say."

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Ludicrous Speed

I did a "bloggy-cat" and copy catted this over to my blog from my favorite again. We must really think alike, only she's 10 times better than I am at finding stuff. They are so productive on that blog I can't even believe it.

This is a great, truly great, comedy of what is wrong with our culture that we are all unhappy all the time even though was are so very, very blessed.

You just gotta watch this. I laughed til tears came out my eyes.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Medjugorje Message this month

If you know about Medjugorje, you know that Mary appeared to several children in the mid-80's. She still gives messages to some of them, and they are a little older than I am. This apparition site is not approved by the Catholic Church yet, but it is a huge pilgrimage draw, and I know many people who have been touched by it. In fact, my favorite Rosary is one someone gave me from Medjugorje.

If you are interested, there are many, many books on the subject. The main one I read was called Medjugorje: The Message by Wayne Wiebel, who is a Lutheran, strangely enough.

Here is the message for this month. I thought it was a little more than usual, but I am not sure. I don't follow them every month.

Message of October 25, 2008 "Dear children! In a special way I call you all to pray for my intentions so that, through your prayers, you may stop Satan's plan over this world, which is further from God every day, and which puts itself in the place of God and is destroying everything that is beautiful and good in the souls of each of you. Therefore, little children, arm yourselves with prayer and fasting so that you may be conscious of how much God loves you and may carry out God's will. Thank you for having responded to my call." 10/2008

Sunday, October 26, 2008

A Novena for the Election, starting today

Nine days til the election, folks. I'm going to try to do a Novena, a prayer for nine days surrounding a specific intention. Here's a website if you'd like to join me.

Please pray this prayer with me!

Keep on praying!

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Where the media went wrong

I was wondering, but didn't think there was a real answer. And then I read this, with the link posted at www.heartkeepercommonroom.blogspot.com. Wow. Well, that explains it.

Here is a sample:

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the Big Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play. The few instances where I think the press has gone too far - such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy McCain’s daughter’s MySpace friends - can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.


But now that Pandora's Box is open, how do we shut it?

Friday, October 24, 2008

Omigosh? I'm on google?

Hey, I played with sitemeter and I found out that if you type in "catholic persecution vietnam", I'm like the fifth one down on a google search.

No way! That is cool! I think....

Mid-life Crisis?

Do you ever get the feeling you have too many ideas and not enough bodies to do them all? Or that you have so many ideas that you can't figure out how to prioritize them and mostly feel like pulling your hair out?

Time for some therapy. Now I remember what I wanted to blog for. It's all about cheap therapy.

First, I think my blog might be getting old enough to need a purpose. There are many I could pick from. I could do a homeschool blog, but there are a zillion of those. I could do a Catholic one, but I'm not feeling knowledgeable for that, and again, they are a dime a dozen. I could just do a family life blog, of which there are many, but they really are so much fun. I could do a "what my kids and I learned today homeschooling and doing life" blog, which could be a really good way to record what we do anyway, since I stink at recordkeeping anyway.

The last thought would be to keep a book journal online. I keep reading really good books and thinking, "I really want to share that bit with all my friends, but I can't reach them all and besides, they are busy." That would be really fun, and relaxing.

One thing I've learned is that blogging politics is NOT relaxing. In fact, the amount of time I spend on the internet may be related to my stress level, which is unfortunate. I do enjoy it, but it isn't helping me work on myself, which is one of my goals I gave myself for this year. I've considered swearing off the darn thing and taking a vacation, but it's kind of like the phone to me, now, and I might miss something important if I do that very often. There are so many messages about homeschooling, scouts, soccer and the like, that I don't want to miss anything for very long.

I'm also having a small homeschool style crisis, but it's mostly in my head, and worth a separate post.

Does anyone have any opinions on what kind of direction they'd like from the above choices? I'm leaning toward the book journal, actually. Simplification is always good for me, and I need to spend more time on house and kids and less time here. That, or homeschool recording.

Thoughts, ideas, dreams, hopes, wishes? :)

Double standard politicking

This article sums things up nicely for me. If Biden were a Republican, he'd have been laughed right out of the campaign right now. Sometimes I think that Biden was picked so no one would want Obama outta there. I mean, Biden as president with a worse foot-in-mouth problem than Dan Quayle? Foreign relations nightmare, here we come!

Go Palin!


Commentary: Liberals let loose on Palin and Joe the Plumber

* Story Highlights
* Ruben Navarrette: I thought liberals were tolerant and non-judgmental
* Navarrette: Liberals have attacked Sarah Palin on many fronts
* Joe the Plumber was criticized for raising a legitimate issue, he says
* Navarrette: How many more caricatures of Palin can we expect to see?

By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Special to CNN

Editor's Note: Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist and a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Read his column here.

SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- I thought liberals were supposed to be good-hearted, open-minded and non-judgmental.

Tell that to the angry Left's favorite piƱata, Sarah Palin. As far as liberals are concerned, Palin can do no right just as Barack Obama and Joe Biden can do no wrong. In fact, Biden is catching more passes than an NFL wide receiver.

As Palin herself pointed out in a recent CNN interview, imagine if she had been the one to imply that electing Obama would invite calamity. Biden does it, and the media shrug.

I also thought the Democratic Party was supposed to go to bat for the little guy, the everyday Joe the Plumber.

Tell that to Joe Wurzelbacher, the Ohio resident who got his 15 minutes -- and 40 lashes -- because he dared question Obama about his tax plan. Obama insists that the plan would raise taxes only on those Americans earning more than $250,000 per year. It was then Obama made his clumsy "spread the wealth" comment.

What was Joe thinking: that we live in a democracy where everyday Americans who pay the salaries of elected officials can dare question their policies? That just isn't done.

To prove it, the elites who run the Democratic Party -- along with their surrogates in the media and organized labor -- went after the plumber.

We now know that Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher owes back taxes, doesn't have a plumbing license (he told the Associated Press he doesn't need one because he works for someone else's company), and may not be registered to vote.

Commenting on a CNN.com story, one condescending reader wrote that Joe the Plumber should pipe down and "get back in my bathroom and unclog the toilet."

Even Biden and Obama got in a few licks. Biden quipped to Jay Leno that Democrats wanted to take care of "Joe-the-real-plumber-with-a-license," and Obama sarcastically asked supporters, "how many plumbers do you know making $250,000 a year?" The implication being that Joe the Plumber isn't who he pretends to be.

What worries me is that the Democrats aren't what they pretend to be.

Obama supporters like to talk about how the Democratic presidential nominee has lived the American Dream. So why is it to so hard for them to conceive of a situation where someone dreams of earning more money a few years from now than they earn today. Has Barack Obama consumed all the social mobility this country has to offer, so there isn't any left for the rest of us?

Now, the Obama-Biden boosters have refocused their attention on their earlier irritant, Sarah Palin.

The latest media template is that the vice presidential nominee is a drag on the GOP ticket. Pundits detect a backlash, not just among Democrats who love to hate Sarah Palin but also among women, independents and seniors. They cite polls showing Palin with an unfavorable rating of 50 percent.

So what? We're in the post-Clinton, post-Bush era of polarization where any politician with a pulse -- Sorry, Joe Biden -- will be loved by half the country and hated by the other half.

It's surreal. Before McCain put Palin on the ticket, he was getting 200 people at campaign rallies, and now, when he appears when Palin, he gets 20,000. Yes, definitely a drag. iReport.com: Rock star welcome for Palin in Ohio

McCain oversold it when he said Palin was the most qualified vice presidential candidate in recent history. Better than Dick Cheney? Could she be worse? Obama might have paid Biden the same compliment if his running mate hadn't already told supporters that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice.

Then there is the faux-scandal that the Republican National Committee shelled out $150,000 in the past several weeks on Palin and her family for campaign wardrobe, accessories, makeup, etc.

Many Americans don't see why it's a story. Fellow hockey mom Page Growney of New Canaan, Conn., asked The Associated Press, "What did you want to see her in, a turtleneck from L.L. Bean?"

Still, we're told, this tempest in a Gucci bag has some Republicans worrying that shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue might undermine Palin's everywoman image. To think, just last month, the criticism was that Sarah the Moose Hunter wasn't sufficiently sophisticated or glamorous. Now her wardrobe signals the hockey mom is high-maintenance.

Just how many more caricatures -- some of them contradictory -- can we expect the left to throw at Sarah Palin before time runs out on this election?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Interesting Poll

I thought this was interesting, from Investor's Business Daily. Take a look at their percentages of voters based on what. For instance, did the respondent belong to a union? Did they fly a flag outside their house? Did they have kids? Many came out in the wash, but I'd say the most striking difference was that in 18-24 year old voters, a huge percentage were voting for McCain vs. Obama.

Really? Then I'm going to chalk that up to something I've thought for a long time: Conservative, religious families are outright having more kids, and have been for a while. Our kids are growing up and voting. If liberal families, for the most part, had only one or two children, and the first group has 4-10 kids or so, in a generation or two, that is really going to matter in voting.

My Dad says that is also a problem, because extremists of all kinds often have lots of kids. Say, Islamic terrorists. That is a good point, but I'm going to stay positive, and admire all these wonderful families!

In any case, here's the link to the poll:

http://ibdeditorials.com/Polls.aspx?id=309635713550536

got food!

I thought you'd be interested to know that the big white bucket of food from Costco only arrived three days after it was shipped, which means it only took 6 days total to get here, including the weekend. Isn't that great? It smells kind of like maple syrup or brown sugar. It seems pretty hypoallergenic as far as food goes, too.

In other news, one of those babies in our group was born two days ago, and we got to see her. She was just gorgeous. I went with Rikki, so imagine the eyeballs when we showed up. Five kids already in the hospital room, followed by me and four kids, followed by Rikki and 3 kids. I'm glad those maternity suites have cable, because our kids got to watch junk tv with ... commercials! Our kids often forget whether a program is the show or the commercial because we only watch videos these days, and when we had cable, we usually watched PBS, which has only PBS commercials. Hilarious.

In other news, my DH is applying for a job with Microsoft, and I'm hoping very much he'll get it. He made it past the initial phone interview, and another one will be scheduled either today or Monday. A friend from his current work who went over asked him to apply on his good word, so we hope that is a good sign. We know several people who work there, but none except this one person work in anything related to what DH does. It would be lovely if he got in. Just the lack of insurance premiums would be a raise, and there is tons of room to grow professionally at a company that large that seems to treat its employees right.

Prayin' hard, honey!

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Fifty-seven

As has been mentioned before, we live where we live mostly because of something our college friends started, which we simply call "The Rosary Group". It never got a cooler name than that, and now it's so entrenched in our minds that it's not likely to change. The idea is that we are forming community, starting with people inviting other fairly like-minded people to bring their family and pray the Rosary on Wed. nights in each other's homes, snacks usually included, potluck style. About two years ago, we got too big to fit anymore, so now there are three rotating groups and a fourth stationary group which is in the north end of town. We keep inviting families and it is really fun. Praying is very important, and a way to support each other, but there are side benefits we never anticipated. One of them is that these people are often more like family than our own families are. Our kids don't have many cousins, and they all live in CA. But these kids are like cousins. If anyone has a baby, and emergency, loses a job, etc, we are all there to help and often good things happen. We bring food, we find work, we babysit each other's kids like crazy. Our family's chiropractor shares four of the families, and he thinks we're all going to form a commune. He's sort of a leftover hippie, not Catholic, but he thinks it's great what we do, which is very open-minded of him, considering that we invade his very small office and take up a lot of time.

Anyway, today one of our members updated the list, in order to reflect all the pregnancies and newborns. There are 57 children, outside and inside the womb. Three are in foster care, so that could change the numbers, but otherwise, as of the holiday season, that's how many kids there are. That's not counting adults.
I'll be posting at least one Halloween picture, and one All Saint's Day picture, because we'll be dressing up for both. We have the coolest families!

Talk about Catholic Community Services... :)

Yay US!

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Great Palin joke

Ahh.... nothin' like a joke that combines two of my favorite people. Thanks, Mom!

Palin Meets the Pope -
>
> Sarah Palin is invited to meet with
> the Pope while he is vacationing in Venice. The
> liberal press reluctantly watches the semi-private
> audience, hoping they will be able to allot minimal
> coverage, if any.
>
> The Pope asks Governor Palin to join
> him on a Gondola ride through the canals of Venice.
> They're admiring the sights and agreeing on moral
> issues when, all of a sudden, the Pope's hat
> (zucchetto) blows off his head and out into the
> water. The gondolier starts to reach for the
> Pontiff's cap with his pole, but this move threatens
> to overturn the floating craft.
>
> Sarah waves the tour guide off,
> saying, "Wait, wait. I'll take care of this. Don't
> worry." She steps off the gondola onto the surface
> of the water and walks out to the Pope's hat, bends
> over and picks it up. She walks back across the
> water to the gondola and steps aboard. She hands the
> hat to the Pope amid stunned silence.
>
> The next morning, the topic of
> conversation among Democrats in Congress, CBS News,
> NBC News, ABC News, CNN, the New York Times,
> Hollywood celebrities, and in France and Germany is:
> "Palin Can't Swim!"

Friday, October 17, 2008

Buying emergency food




I decided to buy the Costco tub of emergency dehydrated food today, only to be told they only sell those in the summer in stores.
However, online, it is still available.

Get this: Due to overwhelming response, this item will be delivered in 10-15 business days.



Can I just say I'm not the only one who thinks social unrest is around the corner?
I bought water, beans and rice, and we know where we're going at each stage of an emergency. If you are wondering, it's a friends' house, then my parents' OR house, then my parents' CA house in case of serious long term depression-like conditions.

Yes, I know I sound like a nut job to some people. But I will feel much better even in an earthquake than a lot of people, and we do get those around here. If we got a major one, no one could go anywhere because of the bridges, and Seattle would be in serious shape. Let's see, 3 million hungry people. Maybe we should have emergency plans after all.

Go to www.3days3ways.org.

When parenting becomes too much

Found this today. I thought it was wonderful that someone gave voice to this, and I am sad for the first family mentioned. I would love to reverse time and convince them not to take on too much. This is something that happens when we think we know God's plan, but we don't know our limitations. It's hard, as a parent, to know our limitations, but we must keep working on ourselves, no matter how painful that may be. Please pass along the following if you know anyone who needs to read it.

http://catholicexchange.com/2008/10/17/114165/

on depression and foster/adoption

Wow, who knew being a plumber was dangerous?

The Obama camp is starting to show it's ugly head of accusing everyone in the world of being racist if they don't want to vote for him, and discrediting anyone who criticizes him. They are hollering "Joe the Plumber doesn't make 250K a year!" He didn't say that! He said he was interested in buying the company he works for, which makes about that much, and is it going to be overly taxed?

Michelle Malkin has more on her website, but here's a sample:

The Left declares war on Joe the Plumber
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

Six-term Sen. Joe Biden’s got some nerve going after citizen Joe the Plumber. But the entrenched politician from Delaware, who fancies himself the nation’s number one Ordinary Joe, had no choice. Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.

The Left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life, and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.

Wurzelbacher, in case you’ve been in hibernation, is the small businessman from Ohio who questioned Obama this weekend about his tax plan during a Toledo campaign swing. The revealing exchange was caught on tape and broadcast widely across the Internet and TV airwaves. In response to Joe’s question about why he should be “taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” Obama sermonized that Wurzelbacher needed to “spread the wealth around” because “it’s good for everybody.”

John McCain flung that chilling Marxist mantra back in Obama’s face during Wednesday night’s presidential debate and repeatedly cited Joe the Plumber’s plight. Obama squirmed. The dirt-diggers started Googling. And the next morning, six-term Sen. Biden launched the first salvo against the Ohio entrepreneur on NBC’s Today Show, challenging the veracity of his story: “I don’t have any ‘Joe the Plumbers’ in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year.”

Under an Obama-Biden administration, they’ll make sure no Joe The Plumbers ever earn such a salary. “It’s good for everybody,” don’t you know?

Biden, as is so often the case, twisted the facts about Wurzelbacher. No surprise there. Slick Joe is the one who tells fables about visiting a diner in Delaware that hasn’t been open in years; spins yarns about getting “forced down” in a helicopter over Afghanistan because of perilous conditions that turned out to be weather-related, not al Qaeda-related; and continues to slander the family of the man involved in his wife and daughter’s fatal car accident (crash investigators cleared the now-deceased driver of drunk-driving, despite Biden’s insinuations). But I digress.

Wurzelbacher never claimed to be making $250,000 a year. He told Obama that he might be “getting ready to buy a company that makes about $250,000, $270,000″ a year. His simple point was that Obama’s punitive tax proposals would make it more difficult to realize his dream.

Obama’s followers couldn’t handle the incontrovertible truth. Left-wing blogs immediately went to work, blaring headlines like “Not A Real $250k Plumber!” Next, they falsely accused Wurzelbacher of not being registered to vote (he’s registered in Lucas County, Ohio, and voted as a Republican in this year’s primary).

Next, they called him a liar for identifying himself as undecided. Only registered Democrats and fake Republican tools used in mainstream media stories and YouTube debates are allowed to use that label, you see.

Next, award-winning liberal blogger Joshua Marshall cast Wurzelbacher as some kind of rabid freak for calling Social Security a “joke” – as if no working-class Americans could believe that the federal government’s entitlement programs were a rip-off unless they were bought and paid for by the McCain campaign.

Then, suddenly, the journalists who wouldn’t lift a finger to investigate Barack Obama’s longtime relationships with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright sprang into action rifling through citizen Joe Wurzelbacher’s tax records. Politico.com reported breathlessly: “Samuel J. Wurzelbacher has a lien placed against him to the tune of $1,182.92. The lien is dated from January of ‘07.” Press outlets probed his divorce records. The local plumbers’ union, which has endorsed Obama, claimed he didn’t do their required apprenticeship work and didn’t have a license to work outside his local township.

Hang him!

After Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Obama’s rhetorical tap dance was “almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.,” the inevitable cries of “bigotry” followed. (There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for “Joe the Plumber racist.”)

Welcome to Joe the Plumber Derangement Syndrome. If you can’t beat him, smear him. It’s the Obama way.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Before you get married...

Uh oh, too late. I've been married for nine years.

On the other hand, despite the fact that my husband and I don't add up to this, we do have a pretty happy marriage, I like to think. Yay for us!

I just rolled all over laughing at some of these. For me, #6 stood out. Probably because there are no cats or dogs in this house right now. But there will be this weekend, we are dog sitting for the neighbors.

This came from a website for something called Touchstone Magazine under "Mere Comments". Thanks, Jeff, for posting it. I really loved it.


September 29, 2008
The Rules

Visiting Grove City College last week -- that brave school that has long said to the government, "We shall not bow down before you" -- I was struck by the normality of the students. I don't mean that as faint praise. In fact, I have plenty of good things to say about the college, and maybe I'll say them in my next post, but the one thing that struck me most forcibly was that the students were, well, normal. Let me give you a few examples.

I was sitting in the Student Center, waiting for my host and idly looking at that only remaining section of most newspapers that a thinking person can sometimes skim -- I mean the sports section --, when I overheard a conversation among three men, discussing the stock market, how various investments were faring, what Hoover did and did not do in 1929, and how an intelligent investor should treat his debt in a time of tight credit. I figured they were three economics professors, but no, they were only undergraduates. They were normal undergraduates, in the sense that they were cut from some reliable norma or T-square, rather than dilapidated shambles of appetite and fad. The evening before, as I was walking through the giant quadrangle at the center of campus, I overheard baritone strains of opera, and looked over to see a burly young fellow filling the area with Puccini (I think) as he ran down a frisbee sailing over his head. Again, it struck me as rare, these days, but wholly normal that a young person out of doors on a pleasant day should want to sing. And it was like that all the time I was there. I was even told the undergraduate men and women had an eye to marrying one another. "Ring by Spring" is the merry proverb at Grove City. You put over a thousand good looking and healthy young men in the company of over a thousand good looking and healthy young women (the numbers are exactly even at Grove City), and it's no wonder that there are a lot of marriages. That's normal.

Now Mrs. Esolen and I have talked quite a lot about this business of marriage, especially as our daughter enters her junior year of college, and as many of my favorite students, now family friends, grow older and are looking for someone to marry. Their choices have occasionally been, alas, less than satisfactory. We've concluded that although almost everybody recognizes that a lot of students graduate high school whom only a fool would hire, the bigger problem is that even more young men and women are out there, many of them graduates of college, whom only a fool would marry. They are common, as common as nails. But they are not normal. You can have a bucket of nails bent out of shape, and that wouldn't make them normal either, not if there were a thousand to every nail that you could actually drive into a board.

So then, whom could you marry? A long time ago we came up with something we called "Esolen's Rules." They're only half facetious. But they are an attempt to get at the normal:

1. Don't marry a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs. You may marry a woman who doesn't like either, or whose reason for not liking dogs is that one of them bit her when she was a toddler. But a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs will be a Joan Crawford or Jane Wyman. Ronald Reagan married Jane Wyman, and look how sorry he was about that.

2. Don't marry a man who is neater than you are. You may, however, marry a man who polishes his tools and puts them away after use....

3. Don't marry anybody, man or woman, who says, "I'm going to call you at eight," and then leaves you waiting by the phone for an hour. Exceptions can be made for people who are kidnapped by Arabs, or who have epileptic seizures.

4. Don't marry anybody who insists on a separate bank account, bed, bathroom, vacation, or zip code. It makes no sense to be one flesh and two wallets.

5. Don't marry a woman who spends more on makeup than she does on food. In general, don't marry a woman who engages in the sin of reverse gluttony.

6. Don't marry a man who does not like dogs. Such men do not like children. Don't marry a man who does not like children. On the other hand, I have known at least one excellent man who thought he didn't like children, until he had some; seven, I think, at last count. Perhaps the rule may be rephrased: Don't marry a man whom you cannot imagine rolling on the ground in a wrestling hold, with a Labrador retriever or three children, or hollering on a ferris wheel, with a Labrador retriever or three children.

7. Don't marry a woman who exercises so frequently that you cannot tell if she is a woman or a very strange looking 13-year-old boy. I'm going out on a line here, but the real purpose of the rule is to determine whether she will mind getting fat, as happens when you are going to have a child. In other words, don't marry a woman whom you cannot imagine having a child. Do not marry a woman who does not like children.

8. Do not marry a man who treats his mother or his sisters discourteously. As he treats his mother, so will he treat you. But by all means do not marry a man who takes his direction from his mother, or who is ruled by his mother's ambitions. Mama's boys are unhappy, and they make their wives unhappy too. So are the mothers of mama's boys, come to think of it. Unhappy days are here again.

9. Do not marry a woman who sneers at innocent male pastimes, such as football. Such women do not really enjoy the company of men, and after a period soon reached, do not enjoy the company of their own husbands. They are also the most ignorant of what men are really like. You may marry a tomboy, so long as she's a girlish tomboy and doesn't take the sport with dreadful seriousness. You may marry a Daddy's girl, so long as she is not spoiled when it comes to money.

10. Never marry anyone who is secretive about money. Such people are also secretive about sex.

11. Never marry a man who lets you take the initiative in everything. You want a jellyfish, maybe? You want Burt Lancaster instead.

12. Never marry a woman who never lets you take the initiative in anything. You want a porcupine, maybe? You want Maureen O'Hara instead.

13. Never marry a woman who does not laugh at your jokes or your buffoonery. That is one of the nicest ways in which men "serve" women, and women respond by taking delight in the antics. That is why God made impersonators of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, and Homer Simpson. It may in fact be the principal justification for the existence of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, and Homer Simpson. This rule is simply an instance of the more general rule that you should never marry a woman who does not genuinely admire you, nor should a woman marry a man whom she does not admire.

14. Never marry anyone who delights in "exposing" you in public. Teasing does not count; in fact, never marry a man who cannot be teased. You can marry a woman who cannot be teased.

15. Never marry a man who is not admired by respectable male friends. The people in the world who know a man best are the men he works and plays with. They know well if he is a cheat, a thug, a loser. You may marry a man who does not have female friends. If anything, you should be suspicious of a man whose friends are principally female. The men may be avoiding him, and there is a reason for that.

16. Never marry anyone who is not interested in looking at your fourth-grade yearbook. This means: never marry anyone who seems unaware that he or she is marrying also a family, a hometown, a past, silly friends, comedies and tragedies. Never marry anyone who does not want to meet your father and mother. If your sister doesn't like him, dump him. If your sister doesn't like her, dump her. That is why God created sisters. Their approval, however, is not a sufficient condition; they will occasionally like losers, but they almost never detest good marrying material.

17. Never marry a feminist of either sex. That would be as bad as marrying someone with the soul (not the occupation, but the soul) of a lawyer.

18. Never marry anyone whom you catch in a lie, even a little one. Trust us on this one. People in love are about the most gullible creatures on God's green earth. In fact, beside the dictionary entry on "gullible" there's a picture of a woman in love, eyes looking dreamily upward, hands holding her chin; and a picture of an indignant young man defending the honor of his beloved, who would never do such a thing, no sir!

19. Never marry a woman who does not like to feed people, or a man who does not like to help out with the removal of a junked car, regardless of how much he knows about junked cars. By all means marry a woman who enjoys seeing men eat, or a man who looks at a mudslide and says, "I can make a really fine wall out of that."

20. Never marry anyone, man or woman, who scoffs at virtue, who reduces "good" and "evil" to arbitrary counters in the war of all against all, whose humor is flippancy, who looks down upon janitors and maids, who cannot delight in making simple things (like a batting T or a thank-you note), who thinks tradition is old and shopworn (such people are followers of every fad that comes), and who is never, ever, just relaxed, grateful for a shady seat under the maple tree in fall. That is another way of saying that you should never marry anyone who does not know who God is.

Posted by Anthony Esolen at 09:41 PM | Permalink

DH surgery went well

Today was a really long day.

DH needed surgery for his deviated septum. He neglected to tell me the doctor had commented that this is a "day surgery", but "just barely". Meaning this is major surgery. We arrived at 9:30, he went in around 10:20, I guess they started late, and then I finally got to take him home around 4:30. Egad. All this time Rikki-san was babysitting our kids, but she did have help from Grandma, so I think it was relatively ok. On the other hand, I think she was trying pretty hard not to kill me when I finally showed up. But tonight's girls night will probably take care of any hard feelings. A little tiramisu will go a long way.

DH is feeling ok, if you consider a he had a big fight with a roto-rooter and lost. He is bleeding from the nose and will continue to do so for a while. We get to squirt saline up there and give him lots of drugs, mostly oxycodone, and he has to sleep sitting up so it drains out his nose. I am glad I don't have too much planned for the next several days.

Thanks to anyone who was praying for him. The surgery should be a success, and he says he can already tell there is room in his nose where there wasn't before, even though there is lots of swelling. On Wed. they take out some sort of stilts, and we'll see how he feels after that. I hear it will feel a lot better. I got some cute pictures of the kids feeling sorry for him. Poor Daddy.

The bill Obama did sponsor

I listened to the debate last night. While Obama is much smoother, the content was awful. Let's see...

First, he lied right there that he and Ayers were connected. They are. He could just explain the connection, but he doesn't. He actually looked quite ruffled.

Second, he says he did not vote to let infants die in Illinois if they survived abortion, but he did. He says the Hippocratic Oath covered that, so a law is already in place. Normally I'd agree with that reasoning (who needs more laws!?), but then why were babies dying, if that is the case? He heard the testimony, but he still voted against further laws, ostensibly to avoid any infringement on Roe vs. Wade. However, I hear Clinton and NARAL did not agree with Obama, and that tells me he goes too far for sure, more than anyone else.

However, that is NOT the bill I'm referring to here. There is one bill he sponsored that completely counters what he said last night. He said we should stop sending so much money overseas, and spend our tax money on America. I heard him, that's what he said. Yet he is a key promoter of this bill, which sends LOTS of money overseas. Lots and lots. It also promotes many things most Americans don't agree on, and it promotes the "one world" idea that many people think is a great idea. Here it is:

http://www.heritage.org/research/foreignaid/wm1878.cfm

Here's the thing. It all sounds great in theory, but if you unite the whole world and the government you get out of it is awful, where do you go? Mars? Diversity is a good thing, including diversity of government.

If you haven't read "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, I suggest you do. It takes one day, and has lots to say about when everyone wants to be "fair". It sometimes takes away all that you were living for. It's a very short book, and is banned in some places because of some content that is "political". Ha. We don't want people to exercise their brains, now do we?

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Joe the Plumber is not a socialist

Joe the Plumber has something important to say:

My sister's first "grown up" visit

My sister B came up to see me in her own car, using her own cash, and it was very fun. She is 21, so we can finally act like adults! I'm so glad! We had fun with the kids, saw at least half the people I know in the area, had her babysit the kids for one of "those" afternoons where you totally overschedule yourself, played with her ferret, watched "Hancock" and "Life", and went out for drinks at Red Robin as well as a little trip to Half Price Books because I love it so.

We got to talk about lots of things, but nothing in true depth, which is totally fine, I don't want to scare her away! We got to really enjoy each other's company as friends and sisters, instead of as me being the mega-third-parent person. The kids loved every minute of it.

I will have to post a video of the ferret in action. She is white and her name is Pirhu (?), meaning "potergeist" in Finnish. Fun pick. She is "like a snake with legs" and smells a little funny, like a rat, but she is one of two creatures in the world so far that Francis is not allergic to, the other being poodles. So we have a choice of a poodle or a ferret for a pet. I think I lean toward things that can go for a walk and are more affectionate, but the ferret is very fun in its own way. Dominic is really into animals.

Time to clean up around the house. Rosary Night is here tonight, and we have a few things to do. If everyone would stop sleeping around here all the time, I could vacuum the stairs! Oh well, dishes and laundry are doing well, so I'll call it a win. Homeschooling went well, too, thank God.

I have so many things I could blog on right now, and I just can't do it all. Be assured that my brain is very excitable right now, so if I get any time on my hands at all, I might post ten things in a row.

Prayers tomorrow for my DH, who is going in for surgery tomorrow. He has a deviated septum, so they are basically going to break his nose and re-set it, to put it very, very simply. He'll be on some pretty fun drugs, too, so maybe we should take video of that, too. :)
Love you, honey....

Monday, October 13, 2008

Setting the record straight on Obama

is a hard thing to do.

However, I am a Libra after all, and I like to be fair. I do not like people smearing people just because they can. In this internet age, people can start rumors and the darned things won't die. I realize smear is cutting both ways right now, and I still have serious, very serious doubts about Obama. Abortion, too much government, and certain associates are a huge problem for me, not to mention uncanny love affairs with the media. However, I thing this other guy should be in the funny farm, the one who started all the Muslim rumors.

If anyone has news contrary to this, I'll put it up, but I think this guy is giving us conservatives a pretty bad name.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27157703/

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Third Culture Kids

Yes, I did steal this from my favorite blog again. My husband was so thrilled with this website.

http://www.tckid.com/what-is-a-tck.html

When I started reading the "you know you are a TKC when" I immediately recognized the list as a list of things he's said, like "I don't know where 'home' is.". I thought that was interesting. I think military kids, foster kids, or anyone who has moved a lot for whatever reason would benefit from talking to each other. I'm not one of these, but sometimes I do share one thing. I often say I have a "split personality" when it comes to where I'm from and a physical location (not people) that I call home. I love Mendocino, and I spent most of my childhood in Astoria, but I do not love Astoria. Sorry, Astoria. I never did like it when it was near impossible to make friends, and all the fun parts of my childhood, like raising sheep and bring a ranch kid, mostly ended. I still had horses, and that's huge, but it was never the same after the move, when I was eight, nearly nine. In my mind, we have before Astoria, and after Astoria. BA and AA? Ha ha. So in that sense, I do understand the "I don't know where I'm from" thing. I do know where I'm from physically, and it's Mendocino, but my family is in Oregon, and when I see them, I'm also home.
Enjoy the site! Comments and reflections welcome!

Friday, October 10, 2008

HPV vaccine killing people

This is rather interesting. I didn't want this vaccine for my girl, because if my daughter does not fool around, she has no risk of getting HPV, and if we get to the point where she is no longer listening to me, then she'll need that vaccine... maybe. But I think she'd be an adult by then. They don't exactly tell you that the only way you GET HPV is to be promiscuous. That's important to know.

Anyway... here's a website to hit. Some sites are being a bit sensationalist, which makes their message less credible, but if the facts are there amidst the clamor, then I think we should be very, very alarmed.

Most of the deaths are happening in countries who have been doing the vaccine longer, like the UK, but some are happening here in the US. Several Catholic schools in countries where vaccines are mandated (Canada) are fighting their own health departments so they don't have to give kids this particular vaccine.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08070316.html

Good movies for times such as these

I had an inspiration as I sat upon the couch this evening.

Ok, these are not movies everyone likes, be warned. But if you have a bent toward quirky movies, and don't mind if they are just plain weird, and if you like Mel Gibson, it helps, then here are a couple of movies you should watch to get in the mood to watch the news.

1984 and Brave New World would be excellent book recommendations right now, as well.

I am reading an excellent book right now, and I will post about that sometime next week. I think I'll be done by then.





That's it....

No more watching or reading any news til November 6th.

I'm almost serious about that.

It's really depressing looking and most of it is so slanted, I'm not sure if the truth can be found.
Any opinions on this?

By the way, when I say slanted, I say everyone is slanted one way or another, conservatives, liberals, you name it. Are there any places that simply report the news? I remember as a kid, I could watch the news. I watched Beirut get bombed, for instance. I can remember that. The Berlin Wall fell. It was reporting. Editorials did not happen during the news, they happened during separate shows.

ARGH.

Time to go babysit and have a good ol' appointment day. At least I got the dishes started and my coffee in hand.

Have a great day, and don't watch the news.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Not that I need one right now, but if the shirt fits...

40 Days for Life pics

See this blog for pics from all around WA. I'm in the Everett picture, with almost all people I know from our Rosary Group up here.
The testimonials are worth reading, too.
:)

http://40daysforlife.com/blog/?p=145

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Expanation of the financial circus

My mom sent me this one, and I thought I'd put the whole thing on here for all of you so you don't have to log in to the New York Times website, if they ask you to do that.

This seems to be a fairly unbiased article, and it's fair to say everyone got too excited at the same time, Dems and Republicans both. I have also seen that people are trying to nail McCain with it because of his role in the Savings and Loan Scandal, but like this one, it seems to me everyone had a hand in that one, too. The only reason Obama doesn't is because he was still in school at the time, I believe. That's not exactly fair, now is it?

In any case, here is the article that explains a few things, and as a side note, I am laughing into my sleeve, because all the banks that deal with us are the ones that are failing. I'm not sure what that says about us. Countrywide has our mortgage (they bought it from the lender we actually dealt with, and ours was a first time homebuyer loan, but we are not defaulting, nosirreee!). Wachovia has our car loan, which we hope to pay off by Christmas. Wells Fargo is our regular bank.

I'd say, go with credit unions, and if gold dips lower, buy it.


October 7, 2008
Talking Business
A Day (Gasp) Like Any Other
By JOE NOCERA

Is it ever going to end?

We woke up Monday morning, all of us, hoping for the best but bracing for the worst. The federal government’s $700 billion bailout package had been passed into law, which offered hope of a respite from this unrelenting crisis — or at least a chance to catch our breath.

We all needed a break. But we didn’t get one. Instead, we got yet another horrible weekend. In Europe, the credit contagion raged like a wildfire. The Dutch government seized Fortis, the Belgian-Dutch bank. The German government bailed out a huge lender, Hypo Real Estate. European governments raced to follow Ireland’s lead and guarantee all bank deposits, fearing that if they didn’t, depositors would move their money to “safer” countries with guarantees. The euro and the British pound sank against the dollar.

In America, meanwhile, Citigroup, Wachovia and Wells Fargo spent the weekend in a circus of court hearings, as Citigroup tried to get a state judge to enforce its F.D.I.C.-approved merger agreement with Wachovia — while Wells Fargo and Wachovia sought out other judges, both state and federal, to overrule him, and allow the Wells Fargo offer to proceed. Not exactly confidence-inspiring.

And by the time we got in the shower Monday morning, we knew what the day foretold: bailout law or not, the Asian markets had been hammered. European markets were falling. Russia shut down trading. So did Brazil. In the United States, the Dow dropped a frightening 800 points by midafternoon. It rallied in the last hour of trading, closing down “only” 370 points. That wasn’t confidence-inspiring either.

But the situation on Monday was far worse in the credit markets — as has consistently been the case during the crisis. “There is no liquidity anywhere,” one hedge fund manager told me. “No lending available. No interbank lending available. The fixed-income market is completely shut down. There is no activity going on anywhere.” (He asked me not to use his name because he didn’t want to spook his investors.)

The Federal Reserve announced yet another enormous injection of liquidity into the system Monday morning, saying it would make as much as $900 billion available. “What the Fed said was that it wasn’t just opening the window,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital. “It is taking out the window sill and chipping out the bricks around it.”

The Fed’s move was barely noticed. Now there’s talk of another intervention by the Federal Reserve to help thaw the frozen credit markets by buying up short-term commercial debt.

“What I am worried about with all these bailouts,” said the great Wall Street historian Ron Chernow, “is whether they are going to eventually tax the resources of the federal government. The numbers are already getting very, very large. What is especially scary and unsettling is that even actions of this magnitude have not seemed to restore confidence. Each time, you thought that would be the one to stop the contagion. It hasn’t happened.”

This panic is taking place in such a compressed time frame that it is just astonishing. Mr. Chernow pointed out that while the stock market crash of 1929 took place over three brutal trading days in October 1929, it took nearly three years to reach bottom. By then, stocks had lost a shocking 89 percent of their value.

This crisis, by contrast, seems to be moving at hyper-speed — one day it is Lehman Brothers, the next A.I.G., the day after that Washington Mutual. This crisis doesn’t wear you down over time. It hits you over the head with a two-by-four. On a daily basis.

Of course the crisis is also playing out in Washington, and that is where the spotlight shifted Monday afternoon. Richard S. Fuld Jr., the longtime chief executive of Lehman Brothers, was testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee’s chairman is Henry Waxman, the Democrat of California who loves nothing more than raking C.E.O.’s over the coals. The blame game was starting in earnest.

To give him his due, Mr. Waxman has conducted hearings that have been truly important. In one of the most memorable scenes in modern Congressional history, Mr. Waxman pushed the chief executives of the country’s biggest tobacco companies to deny under oath in 1994 that cigarettes were addictive and caused cancer. He was also the congressman who gave the country its first up-close look in 2002 at the combative, delusional personality of Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief executive.

But Monday’s hearing was illuminating only in what it showed about Congress’s sorry willingness to use a national emergency to score political points. Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, pressed a panel of experts who appeared before Mr. Fuld to say whether the crisis had been caused by the abolition of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that had separated commercial banks from investment banks. (“Yes or no!” she demanded.)

She was implying that Republicans were the villains by tearing down financial regulation — which may well be true, though the example she picked was a poor one. The companies that have best withstood the crisis are those that took advantage of the end of Glass-Steagall to form one-stop-shopping banks: Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America. The companies that have fallen are the stand-alone investment banks: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Representative John Mica, Republican of Florida, railed about the lack of witnesses from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — “Any hearing that does not start with Fannie is a sham,” he complained. He was trying to pin the crisis on Democrats, for pushing Fannie and Freddie to offer more mortgages to low-income home buyers. That has become the Republican rallying cry. It too has a grain of truth but it is hardly the whole truth.

For his part, Mr. Waxman seemed to care only about one thing: the tens of millions of dollars Mr. Fuld pocketed as Lehman’s chief executive. “Is it fair?” he kept asking — a question Mr. Fuld was never going to answer, as Mr. Waxman well knew. But he wasn’t looking for a real answer. This was theater.

Which is a shame. This hearing was billed as an effort to get to the bottom of the Lehman collapse. That would be genuinely useful for the country to understand. Flogging Mr. Fuld on his compensation — enjoyable though it must have been for Mr. Waxman — was a sideshow.

Mr. Fuld, in typical C.E.O. fashion, claimed to take “full responsibility” for his actions — but spent the entire time blaming others for Lehman’s downfall. Early in his testimony, he even blamed “naked short-sellers” who passed along “false rumors” that started a run on his bank. As both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal pointed out in lengthy stories on Monday, Mr. Fuld had assets on his books that were wildly overvalued.

It may well be that failing to save Lehman was the single worst mistake the government has made in this crisis — the event that set off this latest, scariest stage. But Lehman’s own mistakes put it in a position where only a government bailout could save it. This, however, is not something Mr. Fuld was prepared to admit.

Sad to say, the crisis does not appear to be winding down. One reason the market acted so skittishly Monday is that it simply can’t wait six weeks or so before the government is ready to start buying the first $250 billion worth of toxic securities from troubled firms. In normal times, this would seem blazingly fast. In these compressed times, it seems terribly slow. The markets want to know — right now — whether the bailout plan will work.

Another reason is that certain ominous dates are fast approaching. One is Oct. 23, when the auction will take place to settle the credit-default swaps relating to the Lehman bankruptcy. I saw one estimate that the amount of money firms will owe each other could be as much as $400 billion. Why? Firms that insured against the risk of a Lehman default are going to owe billions to other firms — but they’ll want to collect from the firms with whom they laid off the risk. And so on down the line. The upshot is that many firms are not going to have the money to pay off the insurance claims they owe, and they are likely to be ruined.

A third problem, though, is that confidence keeps eroding. The latest wrinkle is that many hedge fund investors, fearing big losses, no longer have confidence in their hedge fund managers. Thus, hedge fund managers are preparing for huge withdrawals at the end of the year, and so they are selling billions of dollars worth of stock preparing to pay redemptions. That is one reason the stock market is under pressure.

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said one hedge fund manager. Firms fearing redemptions sell off stocks, which hurts their performance. Which undermines their investors’ confidence. Which means there are likely to be even more redemptions. Around and around it goes.

Twelve years ago, Alan Greenspan invented the term “irrational exuberance.” That era seems tame compared with this one. What is going on in the markets is anything but exuberant — at this point, though, it is undeniably irrational.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Monday, October 6, 2008

Class of 1998 Rocks!

I was gone all weekend and did not have access to the internetz til now. Four days with no email! Francis could pick up an unsecured wi fi connection most places on his PDA, but apparently yahoo mobile does not translate well, and I could not check email. Oh, the withdrawals. They were awful. Ha.
The only bad thing is that there are 160 emails to go through. But I did most of that already.

A good thing was that DH put on his good suit for the first time since May, and guess where my pink cell phone has been all that time??? YES! I have my favorite cell phone back! I can now enjoy it again. The one I got to replace it was awful.

My 10 year reunion at Gonzaga University was awesome. There were lots of people I knew from all kinds of clubs and activities and the halls I once lived in. Honestly, my first hall and my freshmen year is where I met most of the people I saw, with a few I met over the course of four years added in for fun. Most of them I lived with, rowed with, or did service projects with. We also added to our scholarship fund, so now our class has a $25,000 endowment with which to fund a $1000 scholarship every year for someone who needs it. Not too shabby.

Also, 17 buildings have been built since I left. No kidding. The place is nearly unrecognizeable. Some of us were worried that maybe the spirit of the place had been diminished by the huge growth in the last 10 years, but no... I can tell it is possibly even a better place than before. Amazing. The friendly, giving, loving spirit of the place is still palpable, and not just because they'd like me to donate money. Fr. Spitzer was also helpful in allaying our fears that we'd never ever be able to afford the place for our kids, so I'm hopeful that if they want to go, they might be able to. Maybe without owing a zillion dollars, if we're lucky. We're still holding out for that soccer scholarship, though.
We enjoyed very much staying with the parents of our family friends. Their hospitality is unbelievable. It made the visit very nice because we could really relax between events and not be expected to do much. We stopped in Leavenworth on the way there to get fancy wine and cheese for our hosts, because we had three nights for free and were so incredibly grateful.
The kids are now all sick, of course, because we drove 700 miles in a weekend and kept them up til 10 pm. Of course, their parents weren't as sick as some parents were, who decided that the call of Jack and Dan's was too much to resist, and so the bar crawling went on til 2 am or so for two nights. I would like to have joined folks, and unbelievably, I've never been to Jack and Dan's or the Bulldog for drinks, but maybe it will have to wait til Francis' 20th, when we can leave kids because they are big kids and don't need babysitters.
We had the best time. It was nice to know so many people. The funniest part to me is to see people become parents when you know what they did in college when they were drunk, and now they are all responsible and stuff. I'm glad we all were happy to see each other. Apparently this was the largest turn out from one class for a reunion ever, so we must be a pretty awesome class. I had a good class in high school, too. Must be something special about the year 1975-76. Something in the water that year.
Time to go unpack. I'll be back to blogging like usual soon.