Saturday, August 19, 2006

We Are LEAVING....!

Yesterday was Mom and Pa Utah's 19th anniversary and Mom's XXth birthday.

Dinner at Tucano's Brazillian Grill last night, and today we are just getting the hell out of dodge (in the Dodge, oddly enough) until sometime tomorrow. We are thinking Moab and then back up through central Utah on blue highways - Cedar Breaks, Panquitch, whatever.

We didn't have time to get presents, no cake. Between work and end of summer socializing for the Goddesses, we have been way too busy.

So, we go. Then, we come back.

Hope the war doesn't start while we are on the road. Trying to wait it out or predict with any certainty is futile, though, so, WE GO!



I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Corpsman Up

I grew up in West Texas and have worked outside exclusively since leaving home. Over the years I have had regular visits to my GP for sessions with the liquid nitrogen bottle. The docs have never found anything to freeze but patches of actinic keratosis until today.

This afternoon the Physicians Assistant zorched about twenty patches on my arms, face, and back. He pushed his fingertip between my shoulderblades for a moment then asked if my family had any history of melanoma. I'm adopted, but my father (adopted) was taken by the diesease in '91. Five months from diagonosis to death.

Seems I had a mole back there. Now that's not surprising - my wife has mentioned it to me before, and it's been seen by my doctor before, too. Today it was both irregular and varicolored, and about eight millimeters across. It's gone now. He made two passes with the sharp pointy implements in order to remove all traces of the growth and then closed with two stitches.

I get the biopsy results back in a week or ten days.


How 'bout that U.N. ceasefire, eh?


More news later, if necessary.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Read It

From the Sandmonkey:

"I think the problem is that those people don't have any dignity, or at least have the wrong definition of dignity. Don't be hard on them, god knows I was one of them before I saw the light. I always thought the definition of dignity was that you have a good job, a decent house, could afford your kids a decent living in a peacefull country with a future. What american zionist propaganda. Dignity is getting attacked due to the actions of your leader, to the point of losing everything, and still refusing to hold that leader
accountable.
"



Via: Little Green Footballs.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Coming Soon

244 Marines.

Chunks hanging from a bridge.

A retired Jewish guy in a wheelchair.

Various diplomats, journalists, people flying to grandma's house, and miscelleneous stockbrokers, DoD civilian and military folks, NYPD/NYFD.

Multiple embassies.

Rangers in Somalia.

A Navy diver on leave.

A Navy ship making a port visit.

Air Force in Saudi Arabia.



You know, I started to put links to all the germaine backstories connected to the subjects of the above fragments but then I though "why bother?". If you read blogs, chances are you know history and know what my random recollections have in common.

The list was easily twice what you see above - but I threw out Sbarro's, Munich, and the like. Or kaytushas. And mentally deficient Palestinian teenagers. Honor killings in Holland, dead movie directors, and burning cars in Paris suburbs, and decapitated Thai Bhuddists, and dead Aussies carpeting dance floors in Bali.

And so on, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. What does it take, when you get right down to it, to ignore (as a culture) a threat as real as a knife against your own throat?

History runs in cycles. I don't have all the answers, but even I can recognise the pattern so clearly unrolling before us. The enemy has not only published his intentions, but has provided communiques and graphic video on practicaly a daily basis for literally generations in case we miss the point.

I'm with Mr. Batchelor:


"There is a strange parallel right now to the first days of December 1941, before the Japanese sneak attack. America was still not in the war in Asia and Europe, but it was busy getting ready for a momentous calamity and was filled with the presentiment of doom."


The U.N. is Sudetenland; we allowed the enemy to occupy that particular (un)real estate because all it seemed to cost us in the short term was money. But the next step in the cycle we see repeating - serving up real estate populated by real people in order to feed the wolf - is where things are breaking down. Israel is no Czechoslovakia. They have teeth and will not go quietly again into the ditches - not for france or stability or good press from the Beeb.

Given any thought as to where you will be on August 22d? The day after?