I finally remembered how to log in to MT from this computer (D'oh). I've posted a couple of baby pics. I'm sure you'll all agree that she's the Most Beautiful Baby in the whole world.
Not that I'm prejudiced or anything.
I'm flying out this afternoon to visit the new granddaughter. And of course thunderstorms are predicted for this afternoon, as well as for Sunday when I'll be flying back. I'm cursed I tell you.
So I've got packing to do, last-minute errands.....including making sure Mike has an ample supply of cat crack. Both cats are now hooked on it since I've been rewarding our old grouchy kitty with it for not ripping my arm off when I treat her with her lotion. Sure she sits there & growls at me, but she hasn't actually bitten me. Yet. BTW the treatment seems to be helping so maybe she's not gotten senile.
Apparently my kids have been arguing for the last couple of days over exactly whom will be picking me up at the airport. As of last night, they both are. They say it's just because they've missed me, but I'm not buying it. I've learned to be highly suspicious when those two start buttering me up.
Guess I'll find out tonight.
This I gotta see.
The Hot Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau says it plans to use a recently discovered photo to market the area. It shows notorious gangster Al Capone and two other people posing on donkeys.
I've always had a mild fondness for ol' Al. Not because he was a thug. But I like to bring him up whenever some idiot starts trying to tell me that paying income tax is voluntary.
O rilly? I says. Tell that to Al Capone. Oh wait you can't he died in Federal PMITA prison after a conviction for tax evasion.
And then I laugh and laugh.
Well the old kitty is in pretty good health, considering her age. She's about 11, best we can tell. She'd suddenly started losing hair off the top of her butt & back. We're still not sure why. The vet prescribed some cortisone lotion. The entire area has to be wetted, then liberal amounts of lotion rubbed in....3 times a day for a week.
AHAHAHAHA!
I laugh because I'm leaving for San Diego Wednesday and won't be back until Sunday. So Mike will get the bulk of that unpleasant task. I just gave her the first treatment and it wasn't too bad once I got her cornered. It's the 'getting her cornered' that's tricky.
We hope it works because otherwise it's likely she's gone a bit crazy & is doing it to herself. Which, as the vet said, at her age isn't entirely unexpected. But that will mean either hormonal or steroid pills.....and I'll be in the market for some kevlar body armor to wear when I try to get those down her.
She gets really pissy about things like that.
The grouchy old cat has a vet appointment this morning, which should be interesting. Time for her annual shots, and she will probably need medication for what appears to be arthritis in one of her shoulders. It takes two of us to give her liquid meds; I can only imagine what giving her a daily pill will be like. Or like I told the vet last year as he was preparing to give her a de-worming pill, that cat'll take your arm off even though she's been de-clawed in the front.
He paused briefly, and then suggested we use a new topical de-wormer. Hehe. A wise choice.
Anyway, since our vet's out in Farmington, and then I have a doctor's appointment in Fayetteville this afternoon, I'll be on the road most of the day. So here's a WildChild story to keep you entertained in the interim.
The drive from his house to ours is long & boring, so to keep him entertained Friday afternoon I told him about a silly dream I'd had the other night. Short version: It involved a monkey-faced panther that could talk, and that was threatening to kill me until Mike appeared and told it that it wasn't killing anyone & to shut up. We were waiting for the police to arrive & get it out of our house when I woke up. (Told you it was silly)
After I finished, WildChild sat there frowning for a few minutes, and then blurted "No, Ma! I have to be the hero!"
Hehe. The kid cracks me up.
When you're bagging up a mixture of leaves & trash, and the top of your bare hand brushes across one of these.
Yes I know they're harmless. But at the time, my brain only got as far as SNAKE! Classification took a little longer.
We found a total of 3. We stopped cleaning up long enough to let them all find new hiding spots. WildChild told me not to worry. If I saw any more snakes & one tried to bite me, Pa will kill it with his blowdryer.
It took me a minute to figure out he was talking about the leafblower.
What's this all about?
At least three crude bombs exploded and two others were disarmed Friday at the homes of people who work for a federal aviation contractor in Grand Junction, Colorado, prompting evacuation of the air traffic control tower at the city airport, officials said.
Lemme guess. This isn't terrorism.
Riiight.
Pardon my absence but it's been a Kurosawa morning on TCM.
I mean, I like y'all and everything but....
not that much.
This certainly wasn't true for my kids.
A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
My daughter the whiner is more moderate than liberal. And my son the non-whiner is way more conservative than I. Though I certainly wouldn't extrapolate from either, as they're both outliers in many respects.
Though I would say, from observing them & their many friends over the years, that whiners are probably pretty equally distributed across the political spectrum. Just as they are in other aspects of life. And omg, do they get on my nerves.
What do you think?
As Fayette-nam is discovering. Its lovely little smoking ordinance is, once again, being re-interpreted to, no surprise, further limit the businesses in which one can smoke. First, a little background.
The smoking ordinance permits smoking in bars, which it defines as
An establishment, whether termed a private club or public establishment, that is devoted primarily to the sale and service of alcoholic beverages for on-premises consumption and where the service of food, if any, is incidental to the consumption of such beverages. [emp. added]
'Incidental' is such an interesting word, isn't it? All kinds of wiggle room in that word. There'd already been a minor fuss when the ordinance was first implemented over exactly what it meant. When is a bar a bar and not a restaurant? Not as easy to define as you'd think, as most of the eating establishments on Dickson St. are varying amalgams of both.
But they'd settled on the solution of 70/30....in other words, if more than 30% of your sales were from food, you were a restaurant, not a bar. Sounds sensible enough, though it put the local police force in the unenviable position of determining which businesses sold too much food to allow smoking.
Enter Alligator Ray's, a Dickson St. restaurant/bar which recently announced its intentions to eliminate most of its food sales in order to qualify as a bar and allow its patrons to smoke. Now you would think this wouldn't be a big deal, but you'd be wrong.
The city went into hysterics and re-defined its definition of 'incidental'.
Police Deputy Chief Greg Tabor said letters were sent last week alerting 40 bar and restaurant owners of the changes, which will begin May 1.
"If you serve any more food than something poured out of a bag, you will not be allowed to smoke there. If any food served has to be prepared, warmed or cooked, it will not be considered customary bar food."
As a former denizen of Fayette-nam, I can just sit back and laugh & laugh. You can see where this is going, can't you? Banning smoking entirely in the city.....which was the true agenda all along.
They're going to tweak and nudge that ordinance into something so restrictive that smoking will effectively be banned. Period. This 'adjustment' isn't going to work either. Someone's already brought up a potential problem.
What about oysters?
Hehe. Indeed.
Apparently this guy wasn't kidding.
Dreary, wet and cold here. Snow predicted for tonight & tomorrow morning.
Happy First Day of Spring!
Bah, humbug.
Whose bright idea was this?
After stops for protests in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., [Sheehan] will breakfast in Manhattan with actress Susan Sarandon, who is set to portray her in a biopic movie
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Now I know Hollyweird has lost its collective mind.
As a former pysch ward nurse-turned-sociologist once taught me, the key to understanding clinical paranoia is that their delusions are not illogical. If you accept their first premise, the rest of their argument follows, completely logically. It's that first premise that is off the wall.
Like these people. I'm not going to excerpt from the article because frankly I don't want to attract any of their followers. So go read.
Doesn't sound too bad, does it? A little wacky but relatively harmless. 'Voluntary' taxes, no vaccinations, 'real' money standard, states rights, state 'militia'. Take a good look at the photo accompanying the article. Do you really think those gentlemen acquired those firearms without the sincere belief that they would one day have to use them? And do you really believe they keep all their firearms at their 'meeting house'?
Me neither.
If you closely examine their publicly touted 'harmless' beliefs, there's a common thread. Their first premise, if you will. The government is out to get them because only they understand the conspiracy. Someday they will have to overthrow the government to 'protect' the peoples' rights. Hence the arsenal. And they expect that 'someday' will come soon.
Scary crazy, that's what they are.
Time to pretend you're Irish and drink green beer until you puke.
I think I'll pass.
I think this little spat is incredibly funny.
It's George Clooney versus Arianna Huffington in a standoff worthy of "Good Night, and Good Luck."
The newly minted Oscar winner says he did not write a blog posted Monday on commentator Huffington's Web site, though he gave her permission to use a compilation of his critiques of the Iraq war from interviews with Larry King and London's The Guardian.
Funny because we all know Clooney is way too busy and important to blog. If he ever deigned to begin one, he'd just have someone compile a bunch of his media quotes and pass them off as a post.
Uh....
Hmmmm.
I posted an incorrect link to a tornado photo in my earlier post. The original link went to a photo of a May 29, 2004 tornado around Tulsa. Someone submitted the photo to one of our local tv stations, as a photo of the Bentonville tornado. Which wasn't true nor very nice.
Brian Emfinger, one of our local stormchasers and who actually took the originally linked photo, was kind enough to email & let me know of my error. He also pointed me to another blog, Storm Driven, that has great photos of the Bentonville tornado. Thanks again, Brian.
If you've linked to the bad photo, please re-link to the correct ones.
I apologize for my stupid mistake and the inconvenience.
Mea Maxima Culpa.
Don't forget! Today's the 4th International Eat an Tasty Animal For PETA Day. (Link via Laurence)
Of course, we do that just about every day. Last night was chicken livers. I'm not sure about tonight, maybe a nice pork roast. After all, NWA is the home of the Razorback.
Soooie!
Here's a cool video of the hailstorm around Avoca Sunday night. (Language possibly NSFW) Pretty amazing.
I've been in many over the years. Probably the worst was one when I was a kid. My dad & I barely made it to the cellar before it started. Good thing we did, as softball/baseball sized hail began to fall fast & hard right after we got inside. We stood in the cellar door and watched as the huge hailstones turned the ground white. They were hitting so hard they would carve out divots in the ground and bounce way back up in the air. As my dad said at the time, if we'd been caught out in that, it would've beaten us to death in a few seconds. I've never seen anything like it.
Thank goodness.
Our granddaughter is finally here! 7lbs. 9 oz. Mom and baby are doing well. My son called from the delivery room and I could hear the baby crying in the background.
Welcome to the world, baby girl.
On a happier note, our DIL was supposed to be admitted to the hospital yesterday at 5 pm (Pacific) for labor inducement. Our pending GrandDaughter is about 1 1/2 weeks overdue. Either someone isn't very good at math or she's just like her father and is refusing to come out until she finishes her Worlds of Warcraft game (fetus version).
I suspect the latter.
I think we were all doing this Sunday night.
"We were praying to God and kissing our asses good-bye. It was very real," said Taylor, whose home's walls separated from the foundation.
And this seems to be the prevailent attitude among survivors.
“I have great people to help me and I have a god who protected me. You know you go this many years and you live in an area like this, chances are it will happen to you sometime or other,” homeowner June Townzen said.
Townzen’s home was hit by a falling tree.
“You gotta look back and smile and be thankful for the things you actually do have,” Buelin said.
Things can be replaced. People can't.
UPDATE: Should've checked my blogroll before posting. Matt has some photos of the damage over by NWACC. BloodSpite has some incredible photos taking while he was helping with search & rescue.
There's raw video footage of today's flyover of the tornado's path available here. I've seen them and all I can say is Holy Shit. It was much, much worse than I realized, especially in the Centerton area. You have to wonder, seeing some of the destroyed houses, how anyone could've possibly gotten out alive.
Great storm chase photos are here. And the best (and scariest) tornado photos are here. (Incorrect link corrected)
Latest estimate I've heard is that 60-80 people are homeless. If you'd like to help, call the Red Cross at 1-800-HELP-NOW. Or if you're local, any First Security Bank will take your donation.
On a lighter note, this morning I was teasing WildChild about his sleeping through it all. He looked at me solemnly "Ma, my snoring chased the bad storm away and made the good weather come back."
When I could stop laughing, I told him it was a good thing he stayed asleep then.
Seriously. The tornado missed us by this much....well, by a little less than a mile, the best I can tell. We are fine, no damage that we've found so far. But it was pretty scary for a while.
We'd been tracking the storm since it crossed over from Oklahoma. I'd just got WildChild to sleep when the tornado sirens sounded. From the radar, it appeared it was going to pass a little to the southwest of us. But we were keeping a really close eye on it from the front door. The winds were gusting pretty high, when suddenly we saw a bright blue light flash in the distance....a transformer blowing. A few seconds later, another bright blue flash, not too far to the southwest. The roaring we'd been hearing for a good 20 minutes got louder. Then I could hear large hail approaching.
That's when we grabbed WildChild out of bed, rounded up the pets and made a beeline for the basement. I don't mind telling you I was more than a little scared....and very thankful we had a sturdy basement.
We stayed down there until we heard the all-clear from one of the local tv stations. No damage in our neighborhood that we could see, and everyone appeared to be ok. Mike found some golf-ball sized hail in the front yard, but nothing like what our neighbor found. (BTW, glad to know you folks are ok)
From the news reports this morning, there are many, many damaged or destroyed homes in the tornado's path. But thankfully, I haven't heard of any serious injuries so far. Bentonville airport was hit pretty hard. And the roof is gone from the million-dollar new high school stadium....which is less than a mile from us as the crow flies. I've heard, via e-mail, from a good friend who lives in the storm's path. They are ok, but lost tiles from their garage roof and the crown of a large tree in their back yard was broken off.
Probably the worst part happened while I was trying to herd the dogs downstairs. Smokey ran down there as soon as I opened the basement door. Sassy went pretty easily with just a tug on her collar. Stupid Sollie, OTOH, ran away because he's afraid of the basement stairs. I spent more than a few minutes chasing him around the living room, all time hearing the storm getting closer, and the hail beating harder & harder against the windows. Talk about a dog getting a cussing. And all the time I was thinking, great. I'm going to die because the dog is too f*cking stupid to walk downstairs. To top that off, once the storm passed, it took both of us to catch the little idiot so we could carry him back upstairs.
Stupid dog.
As for WildChild, he slept through the entire thing. I've always said once he got asleep, he could sleep through a tornado.
And he sure did.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention a couple of things. One, the Benton Co. Dept. of Emergency Management has more details on the storm here. I haven't seen any photos posted yet, but I'll update with links as they become available.
Second, Matt says there were reports of several railcars that were lifted off the tracks & deposited in the roadway just east of them. Pretty scary.
Found another NWA blogger, via Matt, White Knuckled Wanderer. He is apparently a neighbor, since he mentions being able to hit the soon-to-be-opened Ice House with a well-hit baseball. And I've been calculating the odds of hitting it with a well-thrown rock myself....though my accuracy ain't what it used to be since the rotator cuff tear.
Welcome to the jungle, neighbor.
And y'all thought I was a mean, mean woman. (link via Fark)
Yet another reason why I'll never own a Jack Russell.
Alternate link here. (Thanks Keith)
Or maybe I should call it 'Bitch, Piss & Moan'.
*sigh*
I used to think lawyers had the highest asshole per capita ratio. I was wrong. It's doctors.....including, but not limited to, one who recently told me that he hated treating patients with fibromyalgia because if you even got around them with a needle, they just complained for forever.
Yeah, thanks for caring jerk. I hope you get to spend a few years in my shoes. You might say we didn't exactly part on good terms.
This has got to be one of the more frustrating experiences of my life...right up there with dealing with my jerkwad ex while my kids were growing up. And believe me, that's bad.
At any rate, I'm in the market for a good neurosurgeon. Preferably one who doesn't think his/her middle name is Jehovah. Or Vishnu. Or Kokopelli.
I don't think that's too much to ask.
UPDATE: Or maybe it is.
Via Matt, there's a new NWA blog the fiveforty. Check it out.
Heck, one of these days we may have enough bloggers to have a real live blog meet down on Dickson.
I'm not sure Fayette-nam is ready for that.
I love things like this (via The Corner).....mostly because I have the same problem switching from one language to another. In ASL, I constantly mix up the signs for 'work' and 'hard, difficult'. In Spanish, my problem words are 'married' and 'tired'.
But really, some days there aren't much difference between those two.
This gave me a good laugh.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that colleges that accept federal money must allow military recruiters on campus, despite university objections to the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays.
Earth to professors: Government money comes with strings attached. Don't like the strings, don't take the money.
It ain't rocket science.
WildChild came down with the flu while visiting weekend before last. He's feeling better, but guess who has it now?
That's right, Mike and I do. And yes, all three of us had our flu shots.
I was coughing so hard last night it was waking me up. So I finally got up & took some prescription cough medicine I had left from the last time I got sick with the Christmas crud....then I was waking up every 30 minutes or so because of the weird dreams I kept having.
Like most narcotics, codeine is not my friend.
Just saw this warning on a package of extra sharp cheddar cheese:
Allergy Warning: Contains Milk.
Are there really people on the planet too dumb to know that?
Seen in my hometown newspaper:
Someone asked a local lady what was the best thing so far about reaching the age of 104 years.
Her answer?
No peer pressure.
There's way too many things like this happening.
A Missouri man was arrested in Rogers on Wednesday in the beating death of his girlfriend’s 15-month-old daughter in an Oklahoma motel room after an argument over drugs, police said.
The argument, it is alleged, stemmed from the girlfriend's refusal to pick up some meth while she was in Rogers.
But drug use is a victimless crime....much like Brutus was an honorable man.
Well that was weird. Couldn't get to most blogs this morning, including this one. But everything seems to be working now.
Not that it matters, because I have to go get more bloodwork done this morning. I'm fasting, but it's not for Lent.
Dehydrated, low blood sugar and a no-caffeine headache. What a great way to start the day.