If I Were President

I'm probably the most apolitical person on the face of the U.S. Fact is, I don't much care who is President. One candidate is just about as bad as the other. I have two requirements for a "good" President:

a) (S)he prevents my home from being bombed, by adversaries either foreign or domestic.
b) (S)he keeps the monetary/banking system in this country stable. Long live the FDIC and the NYSE.

Other than that, I figure they will allow crappy laws to be made that benefit someone other than me. That's always been the case, I don't see it changing in my lifetime. Campaign promises seem to be quickly forgotten as soon as the newly elected sets foot in the Oval Office.

However, if I were running for President, this would be my platform.

1) Legalize abortion in all states for all ages upon request without any b.s. prerequisites aimed to coerce a woman out of said abortion. I don't think the gubmint should be mucking around in anyone's uterus for any reason. I think the decision to have an abortion should be the woman's alone after a consultation with a qualified physician. Nobody gets to dictate their morality on another person, especially not on another person's uterus. PERIOD.

2) Legalize marijuana; all amounts, either for sale or personal use. In fact, the vegatative matter should be inspected by the USDA and taxed and regulated like liquor and tobacco. One plus: anyone driving under the influence of marijuana would be going too slow to inflict injury on either persons or property. One drawback to legalization would be a nationwide munchies crisis and we already have a problem with obesity. Maybe we should just outlaw Twinkies and Doritos.

3) Legalize prostitution. This is just common sense. Quit hounding the hookers and let 'em be. Prohibition didn't work, why does anyone think making prostitution illegal would? Once again, the service should be inspected, taxed and regulated.

4) Express Lane Death Penalty (ELDeP). If a mope walks into a shopping mall and mows down a dozen shoppers, and his actions are witnessed by a dozen people plus a couple of video cameras, he just bought himself a ticket to the express lane. He should draw his last breath no more than 48 hours later. I see no reason to feed, house, entertain, and provide medical care for this cat for the rest of his life. Why should he take up my oxygen? I think ELDeP should also be provided for any prisoner who kills another prisoner, or who injures or kills a prison guard. Why should those folks be taking up anybody's oxygen?

5) Illegal Aliens. Illegal aliens should have no rights, and their U.S. born children should not be allowed an education in our public schools. They should all be deported as quickly as possible. I have no problem whatsoever with a citizen from another country coming to the U.S. to better their standard of living. However, they should come here legally and become a legal citizen and pay all the wonderful taxes we get to pay. Once again, tax and regulate.

6) Legalize Bloodsport a la gladiatorial combat. If gangs want to have gang wars, let them. The contests would be held in an arena with hand-to-hand combat weapons, not firearms. Innocent citizens would be safely in the stands and wouldn't be caught in the crossfire as it is now when the wars occur on the streets. Let the thugs fight to the death since this seems to be their prime directive anyway. Participation in the contests would be voluntary and legal betting would be allowed; taxed and regulated of course. In my opinion, violent people will always be violent. They will always be a threat even when locked away in prison. I don't think any rehabilitation will change that. They only cease to be violent when they are too aged to cause any more harm. Let these folks work their violence out on each other as well as raise a little tax revenue. This would be a nifty way to reduce gang populations in the prisons by the way.

I have a whole list of platforms on education reform, but those should be listed under the "If I Were Governor of Arkansas" rant. I'll get writing on that right away.

In the meantime I'll make my prediction on the presidential election: McCain will win. I don't think this country is really ready for anything other than a white guy. I think we will have four more years of decreasing personal freedoms and sucky foreign policies and invasions. Life in the U.S. will just be sucky. With McCain in the White House, the 2012 Mayan Doomsday Prophecy doesn't seem so farfetched anymore. McCain seems Red Button happy and we all may end up in a nuclear poof on Dec. 21, 2012.

I'm not a registered voter. If I were to vote, I'd probably vote for Hillary. I don't think Obama has a clue how cut-throat the office of president will be. I don't think he is ready; I don't think he has the 'nads. I think Hillary does. Plus I think she is crazy enough to scare the peedoodle out of other heads of state. We need that now.

I actually considered registering to vote in this election. The one and only time I have ever voted in my life I voted for Bill Clinton for governor when he defeated Frank White. I voted because my employer made me. He toted me to the polls and pointed a finger inside and said, "Go vote for Bill". There were 15 other races on the ballot that day. I voted for Bill and left the others blank.

I looked myself up on the on-line Arkansas Voters Registration website and, to my amazement, discovered I was registered to vote in the neighboring county. Considering that was not the county in which I registered to vote for Bill, I was a little shocked. I'm smelling voter registration fraud. But that's politikin' in the Gret Stet of Arkansaw.

Now ya know.

Speck in '08
The Sick-n-Tired of BS Candidate

Yet Another Weird Dream

Monday night was dream-free and I actually awoke this morning feeling rested. Hooray! A big dose of milk products before bedtime might have had something to do with that.

Sunday night, however, I had another weird dream. I want to record this dream (and all my other dreams for that matter) because I experience déjà vu fairly often. When I tell folks I'm déjà vuing, they look at me as if I've lost my mind. I thought the déjà vuing thing was common since somebody created a name for it and all, but apparently not. Once again I seem to be the odd duck. However, if I have my dreams recorded, I can go back and say, "See! Here it is! Told ya so!!!"

Back to the dream. I was getting married...again. The wedding was at my hometown church, but the room in the dream was unfamiliar. The wedding was to be a small, formal affair. Only family was invited, but with my family that would be about 100 people or so. All my cousins were there looking fabulous as always.

The dream started as the bridal shower was ending. The day's events were a bridal shower in the morning followed by a luncheon, then the ceremony and reception was later that afternoon. When the cousins come in from all over the state, we make a day of it.

Anyway, folks were milling around visiting before lunch and I was picking up all the cards and gifts. I was thinking to myself that my bridesmaids should be gathering this stuff up, not me, I'm the bride. I need to go start getting dressed. There were just a handful of gifts (third wedding, no gifts expected), but folks had brought tons of cards. Funny thing was I had opened all the cards but none of the gifts at the shower.

I was bustling around the room picking up all the cards and gifts trying to get them all in one place so none would get lost. There were about 7-8 small 2" boxes and one big shirt box. The big box was wrapped in a hideous dark rust-colored metallic paper with a huge matching net/wire bow and flowers. It was really ugly wrapping for a wedding gift. It looked more like a birthday present for a grandma.

Among the little boxes there were two round gold foil boxes; they looked kinda like little cheese wheels with rounded edges. One had a big glass stone on one edge, the other did not. They were supposed to represent an engagement and wedding ring. The boxes pulled apart to open 'around the equator' so to speak. I looked at them a moment and thought, "What a clever idea for a box for a wedding gift. I wonder what could possibly be inside this tiny box????"

Then I woke up. Hummm.....

Could this be a sign from the Magic Entrepreneur Fairy telling me the hottest new idea in wedding gift boxes? I love building boxes so that would be right up my alley. They would fly off the shelves if I could just figure out a clever wedding gift that would fit in a box that small. I need a marketing person post haste. Figger out what goes in the box Pris, would ya?

I can smell the money.

Bizarre Dreams

I've been having some really bizarre dreams lately. I've always been a vivid dreamer. They're in color with sounds and smells and I remember them on waking. Apparently that isn't ordinary because when I tell people about the details of the dreams, I get quizzical looks and the questions, "Your dream was in color???", or "You could SMELL something in your dream???" Well yes, of course. Doesn't everybody dream in color and smell-o-vision?

Anywho, I've been having a lot of covert military ops dreams. I've been crawling around through creeks and tunnels and trenches clutching some type of weapon in my hands. Hubby says I shouldn't go to sleep watching The History Channel any more.

THE COVERT OPS DREAM

Last night in my covert ops dream I was dressed in khaki fatigues and my platoon was trying to sneak out of our own base. It was in the middle of the day, the sun was shining brightly, and some huge luncheon awards ceremony was happening. The ceremony was held outside in a space the size of a football field and there was a tall stage on one end. Hundreds of people were on the field seated around tables listening to the speaker on stage.

The stage wasn't straight across, it curved in slightly, concave to the audience. Stretching across the front of the stage was a long table with red, white, and blue bunting draped across the front. People were sitting at this long table, maybe a dozen folks on either side of the speaker; non-military people in civilian clothes.

Our mission was to crawl under the table along the stage to a truck waiting on the other side. The speaker and the two dozen people sitting on the stage knew what was going on and they had pushed their chairs back from the table so we wouldn't be crawling across their feet. The bunting on the table was there to hide our presence from the audience because they weren't supposed to know what we were doing. There was a guy at our end of the stage telling each soldier when to go...."Wait, wait, wait....now GO!" Each soldier would then scramble up under the table and began crawling the length of the stage.

The weapon clutched in my hands today was an old, wooden pump shotgun. While I was standing in line to go under the table the shotgun racked loudly making that unmistakable shotgun racking sound. It was loud enough to give our mission away because the hubbub of the dinner eating was over and everyone was quiet, listening to the speaker. So I had to clutch the shotgun tightly so the slide wouldn't rack again. I clutched it so tightly it came apart in my hands. I had the stock part in my left hand, and the barrel and wooden slide in my right hand. I was squeezing it soooo tightly that the slide splintered into pieces.

Then it was my time to go under the table. I managed to climb onto the stage, which was about four feet off the ground, without a free hand because I was still clutching the shotgun parts in both hands. I was crawling along and had made it by about six people when I woke up.

I woke up in a sweat, realized I could unclench my fists and let go of the dreamland shotgun pieces, and turned over and went back to sleep. Then there was this:

THE NEWSPAPER OFFICE DREAM

It was my first day on the job at a small-town newspaper. I don't know what my job was at the newspaper, I was still unpacking my office supplies. About a dozen women worked in the office; no men. (OK, it was a nightmare, not a dream.)

I somehow knew this day happened to be the editor's first anniversary as the editor so I had purchased a greeting card for her. It was a really cool card. It was aged, hammered, embossed metal, almost like a thin book. It had all kinds of little gewgaw charms hanging on it here and there. The greeting was something benign like, "Congratulations on the First Year!" or something of that nature.

I showed the card to a couple of the women and like a ripple effect, word of the card spread around the office. Somehow like the telephone game, the card's greeting had been misstated with each retelling. In 15 minutes the office grapevine was all abuzz about the "inappropriate" card, and rumor had it that I was going to be fired for it.

Several of the clucking women had met the editor at the door as she arrived for the day and bombarded her with the tale that I had brought "inappropriate" materials to the workplace. They hadn't told her it was a greeting card for her.

She came into the office with a dazed look from all the hen clucking, and followed by all the clucking hens approached me at my desk. She then reamed me for bringing "inappropriate" things to work and told me not to do it again. She turned on her heel and sat at her desk and the clucking flock of hens dissipated.

I stood there just stunned. I picked up the card, walked to her desk, flung it down and said, "Here is the 'inappropriate' material. Read this and tell me what is 'inappropriate' about it." She opened the card, read "Congratulations on the First Year", and realized it was for her. She got a weird look on her face and said simply, "Oh."

I was enraged that she had listened to and believed the gossips without checking the facts herself. I was enraged at the juvenile, gossipy behavior of the women. The corporate culture that tolerates tongue-wagging on that scale will be a miserable place to work. My head was spinning.

I went back to my desk mad as hell to unpack the rest of my office supplies. After just a few seconds I mumbled, "I have to get out of here." I went outside to pace around, smoke a stogie, and calm down. I was back at my desk in about five minutes. I was standing up to unpack the box of supplies. I remember there was an old green stapler and two staple pullers.

(Vanessa, a real childhood chum from junior high, made it into this dream. She was a sweetie. I haven't seen her since about 10th grade.)

Vanessa had the desk next to mine. She said in a snide voice, "Well! You were sure out there a long time. Aren't you even gonna bother to sit down now?"

The office manager lady piped up at this point. The office manager was a little Napoleanette. She was about 4'9" tall and about that wide. She had mousey brown hair pulled back in a tight bun and horn-rimmed glasses. She piped up and said in a fakey sweet voice, "That's OK if she was out there a while. She can make up the time tomorrow." The fakey sweet voice came with daggers as if to say, "I'm gonna make your life a living hell, bitch."

Me: Tomorrow? Tomorrow's Saturday!

Her: That's right. We work half a day on Saturday.

Me: Why????

Her: Oh, it's not so bad. If we work on Saturday, we get to leave thirty minutes early Monday through Friday.

Me: But you work from 8:00 a.m to 5:30 p.m. now. When do you take off early?

Her: We leave thirty minutes early at 5:30. If we didn't work on Saturday we would have to stay until 6:00 p.m.

They came to work for a sixth day and worked four hours so they could get off 2.5 hours early the other five days of the week. The stupidity of that logic made my head explode. This was just my first few hours on this new job and I realized I had made a HUGE mistake coming to work here.

Then I woke up in a sweat again.

I don't know what is going on in my head to cause such bizarre dreams, but I wake up more tired and stressed than when I went to sleep. "Sweet Dreams" doesn't seem to be in my vocabulary these days.

Sigh.

Surry with the Fringe on Top

Today was bright and beautiful so Hubby and I snatched up Mammaw Speck and took a little road trip to the Jonquil Festival. One newspaper columnist snarked that it should be renamed the "Jonquil and Studded Snow Tire Festival" because you never know what the weather will be. Last weekend it snowed out the Daffodil Festival (daffodil - jonquil, same difference).

Hubby and I have gone to the Jonquil Festival almost every year for the past 25 years. It's the first outdoor festival of the season and all of southwest Arkansas comes out to shake off the cabin fever blues. We see tons of folks we know and it's like Old Home Week. We spent most of the day visiting with people instead of looking at the flowers and crafts. We went through the grounds about 25 feet at a time because that's how often we encountered someone else to visit with.

We had to stop and get a huge bag of homemade pork rinds because it just wouldn't be a Jonquil Festival without them. How can one enjoy an outdoor festival without an extra-huge bag of artery clogging cholesterol???

Just past the pork rind stand were two horse-drawn carriages giving rides.





I always wanted to ride in a "Surry with the Fringe on Top." Yes, I was having a Rodgers and Hammerstein moment.

The lyrics to the song are:

"Would y' say the fringe was made of silk?
Wouldn't have no other kind but silk.
Has it really got a team of snow-white horses?
One's like snow - the other's more like milk."

Well this is Arkansaw, not Oklahoma, so the fringe was polyester and the snow-white horses???....


...Mules!

I think mules are cool.

I thought it would have been more fun to ride behind the mules just so I could say I had done so, but luck of the draw landed us behind the horsies. The mules are sisters by the way. Of all the things I saw and heard this day, the only thing I can recall is that the mules were sisters. I'm weird that way.

Hubby, Mammaw and I climbed aboard and away we went. It was fun seeing all the folks from way up in the surry. The clop, clop, clop of the horses' hooves on the pavement were comforting and timeless. The sound connected me with my southern Arkansas roots somehow. After a few minutes the romance wore off rather quickly. Those carriage thingies have an awfully rough ride. I don't think I would want to load up in one for a long trip. They beat you to death. I was ready to get off when the ride ended.

But the mules were cool.

One Toke Over the Line

I grow old...I grow old....
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
-T. S. Eliot

Our local PBS station was having a pledge drive and aired the special "My Music: My Generation --- The 60s." It was a pretty good line-up of performers and tunes. Some had only the original lead singer, others had most of the original band members.

The Association - "Cherish" & "Never My Love"
The Buckinghams - "Kind of a Drag"
The Byrds - "Mr. Tambourine Man"
Vanilla Fudge - "You Keep Me Hanging On"
Iron Butterfly - "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"
Blood, Sweat & Tears - "You Make Me So Happy"
The Archies - "Sugar, Sugar"

I was grooving (do they say 'grooving' anymore?) on the tunes, especially the ones performed by the original artists. Iron Butterfly had four or five original guys and I yelled at Hubby, "Hey, come look at this guy in Iron Butterfly. He looks old enough to be somebody's great-grandpa!"

Hubby eyeballed him closely and replied, "That's because he *is* somebody's great-grandpa."

Oh.

The camera then did a long shot of the audience. With few exceptions they were old, bald, bespectacled men and their gray-haired wives. The were nodding in time to the beat and a few were tapping their feet. It's been eons since they were the drugged-out, long-haired hippies dancing with wild abandon at Woodstock. I chuckled to myself and thought, "Tee hee, they look like the audience on The Lawrence Welk Show."

The magnitude of that realization suddenly hit me right between the eyes. POW! I had become my grandmother!

I watching my generation's equivalent of the Lawrence Welk Show...music for the "senior" generation; old fuddy-duddy music. Arrrrrrgh!

I watched hours and hours of Lawrence Welk with my grandmother when I was little. I can sing all the words to the closing theme by heart. If my granddaughter were sitting at my knee at this very moment, she would be whining the same thing I whined at my grandmother's knee all those years ago, "Gee Mammaw, can't we watch something that was popular this decade???"

When did In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida become fuddy-duddy champagne music???

Where did all these gray hairs come from??? When did I get so old???

And for all y'all who think you aren't old fuddy-duddys, here's a little something just for you. Go ahead, sing along. You know you can't help yourself; you know all the words. You've been singing it in your head since you starting reading this post anyway.



A "modern spiritual"... um hum...

I think Lawrence has been hiding his ZigZags in the hymnal.

Triplet Update - With Pics!

UPDATED 3/11/08 3:31 a.m. - Finally got the pics to load!

---

Since their birthday the girls have continued to improve. They all developed jaundice which isn't unusual with any baby, so they spent two days getting a blue suntan under the bilirubin lights. The two who were on a vent had that removed in 24 hours and just got puffs of room air in their noses to remind them to breathe. That business is finished now too, and most of the lines and tubes and scary thingys are gone.

They all still have a feeding tube because it takes toooo many precious calories to suck during a regular feeding. Every third feeding is sucking a bottle, the other two are through the feeding tube. If they continue to feed well and gain weight, the feeding tubes will be gone in the next few days.

All in all, they are doing very, very well. The main goal for them is to eat and gain weight. In NICU terms, they are "grower babies." That means they don't have any life-threatening conditions that need critical nursing care, just poke stuff in at the top and wipe stuff off at the bottom. The NICU nurse said they are way ahead of most preemies, and will probably be out of the NICU before she gets to bond with them. (She was a little disappointed.)

Momma Butterbean was laid low by the delivery. She had pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal complication. That's why the babies were delivered when they were. Momma BB was crashing and the only way to fix it was to deliver. She was pale and limp after delivery and required a blood transfusion. Not good. Wednesday was a bad day. She was a little better on Thursday, and was finally strong enough to hold babies on Friday. She was released on Saturday and went home to her momma's house for a little momma-type TLC. She's still moving slowly, understandably so, but seems to be getting better each day. Whew!

We finally got pictures of the Butterbeans with their eyes open, no bili-shades, and almost tube-free. I would post them for all to see, but Blogger doesn't like my slow upload speeds and won't upload them. I'll post them in a few days when my ISP finally "gits right with God."

UPDATE:
My ISP still ain't right with God, but at least I can now upload photos.

Those black Velcro patches on the sides of their heads were where the bili-shades attached. They are gone now.


Almondine - Dark-haired; looks just like her daddy.

Butterbean - Blonde; has her daddy's mouth, but otherwise this is the milkman's kid. She doesn't look anything like our side of the family.

Collard Greens - Dark-haired; extremely long fingers, toes, arms and legs. "Woo-hoo! What long fingers!" seems to be the first comment about this baby. She also looks just like her daddy and a whole lot like her 14-year-old sister.


Life is good with the Tres Butterbean clan right now. Our prayers are that it will remain so until they all get pudgy enough to go home.

Snowman Poop

It snowed here yesterday, an odd occurrence for Lower Arkansas this late in the season. It was a thick, wet snow, also unusual for hereabouts. It blew in hard, practically sideways, and made the strangest doughnut shapes on the north side of poles.

I pondered on the physics of how the formations occurred and decided I am no climatological physicist. Them thangs were weird and joyful and I finally left it at that.

One of the doughnut shapes on our gaslight pole melted down in an unusual formation.

Snowman poop was the first thing that popped in my mind when I saw this:







Jus' one o' them weird thangs.

Valuing the Little Guy

In the business world, the folks who work in the bowels of the company don't often get the appreciation they deserve and rarely even get acknowledged: the accounting department, the warehouse crew, the janitorial staff. They are the heart and the guts of the business without whom there would be no business. It hacks me off that they are so easily overlooked.

I was once one of those people, toiling away in a dark cubicle on the financial paperwork of the little company. My boss, and owner of the company, told me I didn't deserve a raise because I was the accountant and, "didn't generate any revenue." The computer guy, who also didn't generate revenue and had been there less years with less experience and education, did get a raise to a salary greater than mine because, 1) he was a guy; and 2) he had a family to support. I was hacked. I gave my notice the next day.

That brings me to a bright spot email I received recently. I ordered some books through Amazon.com Marketplace where you pay Amazon, but the books come from another company. I received a shipping confirmation email with the standard verbiage: thanks for your order, this got shipped, it will arrive soon, come again.

But there at the bottom was a sig line, the likes of such I had never seen before. A sig line that shows this little company recognizes and appreciates the little guy. The little guy without whom the books would not arrive on my doorstep. The little guy who has a vested interest in my customer satisfaction. The little guy who is valued in this company.

This little company appreciates and honors all their "little guys" so much they include all their names in the email, including Buddy the Warehouse Cat. How cool is that???

Thank you once again from Sonja & Ed Mondazzi, Buddy & Staff............
Justin, Operations Manager, Techno Sound Engineer & Runs this place when Ed is away buying books and stuff.
Nicole, General Manager & Scientifically proven to be "Smarter" than Ed
Irene, Internet Manager & "Smartest" person Ed Knows!
Joanne, Inventory Manager & the "Silent Wisdom" for Ed
Leda, Shipping Expert & "Commentator"
Mike, Warehouse manager & Ed's Right Hand & Everyone's "Go to" Person
Sarah, Going to College and will be "Smarter" than Ed
John, Computer IT genius, Proofs Ed's E mails and needs a tan
Sonja, Wife of Ed, much "Better Looking" than Ed and plays with Buddy
Buddy, Internet Blogger, Boars Head Chicken favorite food (rejects store brands) and Loved by all :)
Ed, No one Knows what Ed does but he looks busy all the time:)

Mondazzi Books
570 Hayden Station Road
Windsor, CT 06095
(860) 285 0538

I would work there.