Puppy-lover for President! Yeaahhhh! Jubilation, etc.
And here's the only other "Obama" pic I currently have hanging around:
Jean has been making Obama face all morning to signify her pleasure with the election results. Also, she came upstairs and tucked herself under the blanket on the futon because it is very cold, because we have not turned on the heater yet, because...
...well, the magazine folded and I have no job any more. Bam! Happy freaking holidays!
However, my beloved buddy Suzy is coming over this morning to help me hammer out a heck of a resume so I can get a heck of a new job. And I am also turning to Craigslist to advertise custom-designed holiday cards: either template-based digital photo cards ($25 for a simple design; $50 for a complex one) or handmade traditional paper cards ($2-$4 apiece depending on design). And, um, well, we've already been working on the being-happy-to-eat-dried-beans part, so hey, what else can one ask for?
(Jean's little head sticking out from under the blanket is very cute. Almost cute enough for me to venture downstairs, where it's a good eight degrees colder, and get the camera so I can capture this temporary preciousness for posterity. But, y'know, not quite that cute.)
I was just thinking about Mike Gravel--my first candidate of choice for the Democratic nomination--this morning. And then John Cole at Balloon Juice reposted this video today, which truly brings the crazy:
So I think the certifiably insane probably couldn't do a worse job of governing the country than we've got going on right now. Why not give wacky a chance? Gravel 2016! Helter Skelter, baby!
Yes, I think I might have posted this one before. But srsly, it's worth another watch.
The Humane Society has made its first-ever endorsement of a candidate in a presidential election. And the winner is...
I admit it. I am only posting about this so I could include a picture of Obama holding a puppy. Does it get any freakin cuter than that?
(The dog in question is Baby, a former puppy-mill inmate who had to have her leg amputated after contracting an infection because of the cramped, unsanitary conditions she was forced to live in. Then her pained whimpering started to annoy the puppy mill owners and they had her vocal chords cut. Baby is now a traveling ambassador for anti-puppy mill education campaigns.)
Get the skinny on Obama and McCain's respective animal-rights positions (or lack thereof) here. (One big fat guess what the Humane Society thinks of Wolfchopper Palin.)
...about animals, and perhaps also a bit off-the-wall on the subject of Sarah Palin as well.
So I felt it best to share this ad with you, launched this morning by Defenders of Wildlife. (Warning: it's got some fairly graphic images in it.)
Fuck. Shooting wolves from planes and chopping off their forelegs for money. Fuck. It's bad enough when you hear about it, but it's even worse when you actually see it.
Will someone please explain to me how this activity is a true expression of the self-reliant and rising-to-the-challenge nature of the Alaskan frontier spirit? Looks like a bunch of bloodthirsty rednecks doing the equivalent of slaughtering buffalo from the train to me.
the horrible pukey feeling I get whenever I see, hear or run
across a mention of Sarah Palin. I think I've figured out why I have
such a viscerally negative reaction to her--it has to do with the
perfecter-than-thou mommies at MOPS who offer up chunks of godly advice
like "if your three-year-old son isn't potty-trained yet, try sticking
him in a cold shower whenever he messes his pants"--but I'm trying
really freaking hard not to dwell on it.
feeling helpless and paralyzed about anything career-, goal- or money-related. Can't someone just come tell me what to do? I
promise I'll do it, or at least try.
freaking out over the smudgy light switches which have been
bothering the hell out of me for like four weeks now so you'd think I'd
just grab a Magic Eraser and wipe them down already. God.
the waves of self-loathing that wash over me whenever I look down at my big ol' muffin top jelly belly. Which I then try to push back into the generalized tide of dissatisfaction with the help of a nice big slab of cold leftover roast beef out of the refrigerator.
Worth it:
hearing Fisher and Rhys cracking up over the dopey homemade Lego Star Wars videos on YouTube.
snuggling up with the boys for our daily read-aloud of a chapter from the Landmark biography of Alexander the Great (how retro is that?).
listening to Rhys read through another Little Bear story (this time, my favorite: "Little Bear Goes to the Moon") with growing confidence and a genuine giggle at the silly parts.
having two boys (three if you count Jim) who genuinely appreciate my cooking and get all excited about corn dog casserole.
going for a solo stroll through the neighborhood on a perfectly beautiful almost-fall day, earbuds screwed into my ears, Beck's "Peaches and Cream" cranking, crows and squirrels scolding as I pass under their tree-limb stakeouts.
wriggling on my belly through the narrow spooky part of Ape Cave Lava Tube and emerging on the other side to a constellation of flashlights in my face.
lifting weights and doing pushups 'til my arms get all trembly and I'm reminded how good it feels just to move.
spendingtwo and a half days in Vegas with two of my favorite co-workers learning awesome stuff about Photoshop on the company dime... and picking up a stellar Betsey Johnson coat in the process.
getting Lightroom 2, Photoshop CS3 and Photomatix HDR tone-mapping software all working together in beautiful harmony.
waking up half an hour before I have to be out of bed and spending that half hour with my head snuggled up on my sweetie's shoulder and, um, ahem.
discovering that the boys have a previously-unsuspected love for the music of Kenny Rogers. (Shut up. Kenny Rogers rocks.)
moments like this (rooty hair, smudgy-faced boy and all):
(That's "It's OK If You're A Republican," if you didn't already know.)
Damn. I have been wanting and wanting and wanting to write a nice snarky post on Sarah Palin. Originally to be titled "Sarah Freakin' Palin?!" But the bombshells won't stop dropping long enough for me to compose myself & my post. So I'll just do the best I can here, and exhibit the most restraint possible.
So Obama's campaign and the overlords of the liberal blogosphere have been pleading for people to stop pointing out the Palin family's personal idiosyncrasies and focus on Sarah Palin's grasp (or lack thereof, really) of the issues instead. But it just seems to me that if your political life has been dedicated to punishing women for having sex (even sex against their will), banning books that threaten to inform kids about sex and attending churches that go on and on about how dreadful and horrible all non-married non-hetero sex is (and about how those who oppose Bush are traitors and those who voted for Kerry won't be going to heaven)...
...maybe you should at least be able to keep your daughter from getting knocked up by a self-described "fuckin' redneck" whose passions include guns, fish and "not having any kids."*
That's abstinence-based education at work, folks. That's Sarah Palin's (and John McCain's) vision for the future of this great country. Shotgun weddings of underinformed teenagers... teenagers who will then go on to crank out more babies for Jesus.
So maybe this makes me an elitist. An evil, Cabernet-sipping, left-coast liberal elitist who can't see past people's crusty (ew) Alaskan exteriors to the hearts of gold that beat within them. Well, if not wanting decisions about my family's and my country's future to be made by someone who offers a $150 bounty for each wolf's foreleg a hunter turns in, someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old and wants creationism taught in schools, someone who thinks it's God's will to build new oil pipelines and slaughter Muslims makes me an elitist... well, then, I say bring on the Cabernet!
*Please note that I'm not blaming Palin's daughter's having had sex on Palin herself. Hell, high school kids have sex all the time, and more power to 'em. However, I do blame her anti-contraception, anti-information, anti-reality stance for her daughter's pregnancy. My older kid isn't even ten yet and he knows about where babies come from and about the existence of reliable contraceptives. Fercryinoutloud, people.
Probably some of this just falls into the "you're a bad parent" camp as well.
1. Your kids yell "Five-oh! Five-oh!" when a police car drives by. (You taught this to them yourself, because you thought it would be funny.)
2. You wholeheartedly applaud the University of California's decision, recently upheld by the courts, to disallow religious curriculum from being used to fulfill science course requirements. Because "Goddidit" is not a scientific explanation. Also, since you used to work for a UC campus' admissions department, you are fully aware that any homeschooled student admitted to UC is there as the result of an Admission by Exception decision, and so it seems silly to you for homeschoolers to care what sorts of curriculum UC will or won't accept anyway.
3. When people post to the homeschooling e-mail lists to which you subscribe with missives such as this:
Hi ,
I recently joined this group.I have a one 4.5 year old Son and 2 year
old daughter and fairly new to the HS world.My son recently started
writing and he would love to have penpal too.We are in NE .If anybody
is interested pl email me too.
you think to yourself, "Ought this person really to be in charge of the education of other people?"
Because a good homeschooler would think, "Wow, it's so great that this parent has decided to take responsibility for her own children's education, and she'll probably find that she learns just as much as they do in the process." And a bad homeschooler thinks that learning alongside your kids works great for things like the details of World War I aircraft or the plots of the thirty-eleven Shakespeare plays you haven't read yet or heck, even the basics of organic chemistry... but not so much for the essentials of freakin' English literacy.
4. Your intended curriculum for the first year of full-time two-kid homeschooling: math, phonics, grammar, art history, geography, vocabulary study, science science science. Your in-practice curriculum for the first year of full-time two-kid homeschooling: Legos, math when they show an interest in it, library books.
Your intended curriculum for the second year of full-time two-kid homeschooling: Legos, high school geometry when they show an interest in it, library books.
5. You have a nanny. What kind of homeschooler has a freakin' nanny?
6. Your nanny is a pierced, tattooed, Orange County-originating, horse-training lesbian who's majoring in mortuary studies. Your kids adore her and are sad when she's not around. (So are you. She's lots of fun.)
7. Your kids already have their first tattoo designs picked out. (Fisher's: a heart with "Mama Didn't Love Me" written across it--he picked this up from Raising Arizona. Rhys's: a unicorn with a skull impaled on its horn--he made this completely up out of his awesome little head.)
8. You let your kids watch "Metalocalypse," but only the episode where Nathan Explosion tries to get his GED and Murderface competes in the Celebrity Spelling Bee. Because it reinforces the importance of education.
9. Your kids have memorized multiple Eddie Izzard routines. Especially the Death Star Canteen one, which I know I've posted here before but is really worth revisiting. (N.B.: When reciting this one, Fisher voluntarily, and rather inexplicably, replaces all the swear words with "bleep." Rhys does no such thing.)
10. You've been putting off buying a very cool-sounding chemistry curriculum because it costs $30, but you saw an iPod boom box for $50 in the Target ad in today's newspaper and think that owning it would add immeasurably to your kids' lives.
11. Your kids are never, ever home. Right now they're driving with Grandma and Grandpa back from Colorado. They've been gone for almost two weeks. They were gone for two weeks earlier this summer. They were gone this spring, and just before Christmas, and you think last fall too. And every time they're gone, it sucks a little more. (Maybe there's a glimmering of hope for you after all. Maybe you could still turn into one of those good homeschooling parents whose children are never more than three feet from the shelter of her denim jumper.)
I think it hit close to 100 here today and it's supposed to top out at 105 tomorrow. Wah. It's hoooot. I want a cold shower and some iced teee-ea. Wow, from my wussified response you'd never know I grew up in the
Central Valley (home of ten-day hundred-plus temperature streaks),
would you?
This evening, I've brought Jim's laptop down from our attic office (where it's currently at 102 according to our lovely portable weather station thingy) and created a satellite office on the dining room table, complete with labelmaker, external hard drive and gigantic box of fresh Uni-Ball pens. Oh, and an enormous box fan that hums like a helicopter engine. Ah, comfort restored!
Anyway... here's another political video for ya. But at least this one's funny.
(how retro is that?).