Schools Out

So I've been thinking of politics lately. I don't know if in the past I just wasn't aware of it as much but it seems to be ever present this time around. I can't listen to radio or watch TV without being urged to vote. I can't even walk the street without having voter registration clipboards thrust at me.

I was reading about a religious conference that was held where the interfaith attendees weighed heavily on the question, "Who would Jesus vote for?". The decision was a split one. "He would either vote Democratic or Rebulican" the shrewd counsel surmised. Afterall Jesus loved the poor and afflicted so he would vote Democratic. At the same time Jesus had high morals so he would vote Republican. I wonder if the notion that Jesus would have exercised his right not to vote ever came up . . . at all . . . maybe . . . just one dissenting voice . . . anyone?

Everything I know about politics has come recently from a children's book on U.S. Presidents that we bought for Mina. For some reason she has really been interested in George Washington, FDR, and George "The Dad" Bush. I particularly enjoyed reading about the development of the U.S.'s two party system. In the beginning the founders of the U.S.A. were against the idea of political parties reasoning that individual difference of opinion would keep everybody in check. Advocates of parties eventually won out and party lines were drawn on the heated subject of slavery. Republicans were against slavery and Democrats were either for it or apathetic toward it.

Schools out.


I ran last night at 8:00 pm. The late night run is unusual as I usually try to do it at the crack of dawn. (I overslept from sweet joy of work hassels fading away.) My running seems to have inpsired my father-in-law to give it a shot. He wants to attempt a half-marathon. That's fine. But now my mother-in-law is starting too. It's enough to make me want to totally give up. She has a ton of made up ailments which running will surely highten. She'll be laid up for weeks and we'll all have to suffer through her war stories. She's such a killjoy.

a zillion misc. thoughts

Here's a zillion misc. thoughts:

One thing that I know for sure is that margaritas on your lunch break is never a good idea, especially when mixed with questionable Messican food. I was sick for two days and it went way beyond the typical. Uggg. I'm going dry and avoiding South of the Border cuisine like the plague.

We ditched Mina on Friday and went to the book store. I was still sick and spent much time contemplating making a #2 in a public restroom which is never a good idea and always a last resort.

We picked up "The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary" which is not really official come to find out. You can't use it for tournament play but it's great for JW play. There's no profanity in it. But the dictionary is dangerous because it validates archaic misspellings of words. For instance "chetah" is a perfect alternative to "cheetah".

I love beehive hair-do's. A young teenage boy in our hall just got a perm. My hair is really, really bad right now. I look like the lost beetle. I take that back. With my uni-brow and beetle do, I look like Oasis.

My running program is the only thing keeping me from having an eating disorder. I need food to run. Unfortunately.
I spent $23 dollars on cookies. We ended up giving some away to Rebekah's mom just do get them out of the house.

Mina is rebelling. She just said that she liked the band Yellowcard. Arrgg. (By the way "Arrgg" is Scrabble legal along with "Arrrggg" and "Arrrrggg".)

I need to go to bed.

tah.

T.

on the verge of collapse

Last night at the BS, Jason was talking about turning 29. I asked him how he felt about it. He said that he had never felt better in his life.

How sad then that everyday I feel like I am dying. I can't put my finger on it. I don't know if I'm depressed, or sick, or aging or what. Everyday I wade through the day and then get home and feel on the verge of collapse.

dreck and qat

Saturday night we went out to eat with inlaws and the came back to the house for a game of Scrabble. I came in second. I should've won but my words didn't appear in the moldy old dictionary we had laying around. I lost to two seperate challenges for the words "dreck" and "qat". Poop.

Sunday we went to the City Museum. It's a cross between a playground and a giant found art project. It's insane in scope and execution and there is room to grow. We were climbing five stories up in the fuselage of a plane before sliding down a three story slide. They are planning a ten story slide that will start at the top of the building and spiral down to the man-made "caves" in the basement. I also like how the place is semi-dangerous, harkening back to the time when the line between playground equipment and midieval torture device was blurred. Thumbs up. It's expensive but definately worth checking out.

Hot-or-Not?

Last night I was lamenting how my name isn't sexy. Then Rebekah pointed out that an old flame of mine used to pronounce my name as Aunthony. Perhaps an attempt to imbue it with sexiness that didn't exist?

Also last night I went to a business networking dinner type of thing that was being serviced by a cajun restaraunt. I walked in and was greeted with mounds of stinking crawdads, all bug-eyed. The alligator sausage at least was tasty.

Later last night we watched Word Wars. The documentary was about tournament level Scrabble players. I love Scrabble but these guys just about zapped the joy right out of it. The doc focused on the weird/strange/creepy/geeky players. I couldn't help but to wonder if there were normal players (albeit less interesting) participants hanging out just outside of camera range. The filmmakers had a very superior attitude to the people within it. It works for a Christopher Guest Mockumentary but for a legitimant documentary it feels too much like grade school finger pointing and name calling.

And even later last night I dreamed I killed a guy by slamming his head in a door, continuously.

360

Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is 360. We may have to be indentified by our social numbers but we still rely on nicknames to ease things up. I wanted to use 720 but it was taken by an in/famous pornstar. Someone I definately didn't want to be associated with. 360. One revolution.

--

My run today was laboured because I was choking on humidity and soot. An area boardinghouse burned to the ground. So far there is one confirmed death. A fat guy couldn't squeeze out the window to escape so he burned to death. (An incentative to lose weight for those of us still living.) They don't know if there were any other deaths because the place was the kind of place strangers could rent by the week and come and go. Some of these people are probably rejoicing that they can pretend to be dead and pick up again with a new name. No debt. No criminal history.

They haven't ruled out a meth-lab explosion. It wouldn't be the first time a bathtub drug lab blew up a house in our neighborhood.

The police raised an eyebrow when I ran through the "POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS", arms raised, just like Bruce Jenner at the finish line.

Cold, chilly, frigid

It's August and it is down-right cold, chilly, frigid.

So we had a more or less busy weekend. We ate at Nobu's, Steak-N-Sheak, Tequila. We fixed some awesome 5-cheese tortellini that Amanda brought us and I topped it with a quick and easy, semi-homemade sauce.

After knocking the summer olympics early this week I now find myself totally enthralled with them. Now one thing abundantly clear, I really want one of those form fitting, full body swimsuits. There is a water slide at Walt Disney World's Blizzard Beach where it's possible to reach a speed of 60 mph. And that's in baggy swim trunks. Can you imagine what one of those shark-skinned swimming outfits would bump that up to?

I played tennis last night and was sooooo rusty. I kept trying to hit home runs or something. It's really a blow to the self-esteem sometimes. I should've went running instead.

Brisk, cool, and verty autumn like.

The weather here is brisk, cool and very autumn like. It is wonderful.

Superstar

Surf-N-Turf. So yesterday I grilled steak and salmon which was kind of an unsual dinner for us. What can I say? It was bland. The internet was down so I couldn't find any good marinades. Bleh.

I finally managed to locate a copy of Todd Hayne's Superstar; The Karen Carpenter Story. I was hoping to burn it to DVD but it is in some wacky MPEG-2 format that iDVD bawks at. I've got it downloaded to my work computer. I guess I have to watch it on my lunch hour sometime.

Last night I dreamed that I knocked on a door and inside was Johnny Depp dressed up like Libertine. He attempted to scare me and then kiss me.

Marvy ... Absolutely Marvy

Rebekah and I went record shopping. Specifically she went and I tagged along. She was really jazzed about this place because she is into old records and it is absolutely massive. I think it used to be a library that was gutted and lined with record shelves stacked on top of record shelves.

So I nosed around and found some cheap ($1.00) copies of all the Carpenter's albums because they have some absolutely wonderful songs and I'm too cheap to buy a greatest hits CD for twenty-bucks. (I'm really hoping to catch that 70's AM radio feel someday.)

I also dug out Nancy Sinatra's "How Does That Grab You?" because of the song "Bang Bang" that I'm in love with. It was a wee bit pricey ($8.00) but that is a awesome song and the album cover is the best ever. Also the text on the back reads like a Japanese person with a penchant for 60's slang:

How does that grab you? Asks Nancy. It grabs us good, says all the people. Lovey tunes and marvy melodies, all them gravid with meaning. All of them sung by the niceness of Nancy. All of them like to mess your head forevermore.

Let God be found true

When the Internet was first taking off I thought it was awesome how instantly you had all this information immediately accessible on any subject. I loved the Web and still do. I would glady give up TV before I would disconnect my cable modem.

But lately I've really been wondering about all this information and how it really blurs the line of truth. So you research a subject you'll be confronted with several contrary sources of information. Each one seemingly valid. Each one sincere.

You are forced to pick a belief and at the same time you can never be fully confident in it. On the Internet even readily established "facts" cannot stand up.

As long as you are "open-minded" you can never believe that there is such thing as truth. Everything is a leap of faith.

The easiest route is go with the flow of majority opinion. Perhaps the best is to be adamantly ignorant.

I expect that everything we know is riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods. History. Science. Religion. Medicine. Government.

Can we take any of it at face value?

The only thing I believe these days is the Bible. If I'm going to put forth a leap of faith in something I might as well go for the one with the biggest payoff.

"Let God be found true, though EVERY man be found a liar"

Be prepared to one day wake up and discover that you've been wrong.

Grocery Store

First off I created a seperate blog so I can track my running progress and not bore the two or three people that read this.

Perhaps I need to also create a seperate blog to hold my numerous rants at my local grocery store. I'm starting to rearrange my diet to be heavy on the carbs. This includes a lot of pasta. It never fails that my grocery store doesn't carry the pasta I need for the recipes! Last night we tried to grab orzo. Nope. They have ninja turtle pasta but not orzo, they have alphabet but not campanelle. I HATE Shop-N-Save. They've got a whole isle of frozen pizzas but nothing else.

I'm becoming increasingly aware of the need to start managing my work and home time better. There is stuff that I want to get done in both arenas that I'm missing out on.

Sun Dried Tomato Sauce

On Friday I made Spaghetti with Creamy, Sun Dried Tomato Sauce. I substituted pancetta bacon for regular bacon and added a little olive oil to make up for the reduced amount of bacon fat. It was actually pretty good and scrumptious. Next time I'll chop the tomatoes more finely and add some mushrooms.

We went school shopping for Miss MIna, supplies and clothes. We still have some items to get - two boxes 24 color crayons, one pair new balance sneakers, etc. Rebekah disagrees with me but I would much prefer school uniforms.

I'm in love with our new song, "Felicia". I love making music (./period)