So, it's not the money...

Much hand wringing at the Seattle Times earlier this week when spending disclosure documents proved that the 'Evil' NRA was actually outspent by a new Washington State Gun Control group for the first quarter of 2013...but new gun control legislation failed to gain any traction. 

So...what does it mean?  Well...not much.  We are talking roughly a $1,700 difference...roughly $16,700 vs. $15,000...and all that is being tracked is money spent on lobbyists and their expenses.  Campaign contributions are tracked separate.  It does prove that the Legislature works, and that they have memories. 

Yes...I'm sure the folks in Seattle, and most of the rest of the I-5 Corridor want background checks....but that is only 20 of 49 Congressional Districts.  I'm also willing to bet that if you truly did a random poll asking 'In a vacuum, do you support increased background checks?' that a majority of people(including some gun owners) would say yes, they do. 

However, what our elected officials have finally figured out, is that much like a woman scorned, you want want to piss off gun owners.  If you pass some type of gun control legislation, next election cycle, gun owners are MUCH more likely to get out and vote to punish you, then the gun control crowd is to get out and vote for you to thank you. 

It's another reason it doesn't hurt to send some type of thank you e-mail after a vote has gone our way...

Yawn.

Long weekend.  Drove to my mom's house in Everett to help her celebrate her 60th birthday.  For this once hard partying sailor, it's embaressing to admit that my single mom partied my wife and I into the ground, and had us begging for mercy at midnight.  Luckily we drove seperately, so we were able to leave before last call.

Usually when we go visit my mom, we do it on weekends where I have Friday's off.  It's a 7-8 hour round trip, so it feels a little more 'worth it' when it involves 2 nights(okay, it's ALWAYS worth it to see my mom, but...you understand).  Her darn birthday was just inconvient from that standpoint.  We hit the road Saturday morning, and were back home Sunday afternoon.  It even wore on my girls, who did some hard playing at nana's house on the lake.

When we got home, chores were waiting.  We had one of my wife's friends kids come take care of the chicks Saturday afternoon, but after two days in the mid 80's, the garden was begging to be watered, and my wife, tired of being cooped up in the car, went and bought a few flats of flowers, which was WAY more fun than actually putting them in the pots. 

All in all, at 9pm, it's quiet as a church in the house....looking forward to Monday so I can have a break. 

Just because no one answers...

Doesn't mean no one is home, as one bad guy found out in Issaquah Friday.

Homeowner shoots, wounds intruder in Issaquah

He's only wounded, so there is no guarentee he's never going to do it again, but one might hope that he uses this 2nd chance to learn more than just to always assume someone is home. 

As for the homeowner, good on him being ready to deal with someone breaking into his house as it happened. 

I would have never graduated.

A maddeningly frustrating story out of North Carolina this week, where high school student Cole Withrow, by all accounts a grade 'A' kid, found himself in serious hot water after ending up in the school parking lot with his shotgun in the back of his car, where he had left it after a trip to the skeet range over the weekend.

At that point, you kind of have three choices: ignore the problem and sweat it out all day, waiting for the other shoe to drop, jump in your car and drive home, missing some classes, or, his choice, call your mom and ask her to come pick up the contraband and bring it home.  He made what most people would call the 'Right Decision' and called him mom(for the record, I would probably have gone with choice, and just sweated it out all day...that's why I had grey hair in my late 20's).

By calling his mom from the school office, some school officials overheard his confession that he had a gun 'on campus', and he Zero Tolerance kicked in, so now the young man faces felony charges, and he's been expelled from school, and won't be able to graduate with his class.

Some updates have come in, trying to put a positive spin on this: for instance, he has been offered a full scholarship to Liberty University now, where his sister went.  Oh, and the school board has said he can still graduate, it will just be at the Alternative High School, not with the kids he has known most of his life. 

Lame.

Lame, Lame, Lame.

Boy oh, boy...rolling the clock back 20 years...I wouldn't have made it.  I usually carried a folding knife at school, and on at least three occasions, I had guns in my car at school.  To get the gun range from my house, you had to drive past the school, so it made sense to bring them with me when I was getting ready for elk season.  Heck...not a shotgun, but a .22 and 7mm Rem Mag...much safer.  I mean...there was one time we had a choir competition at another school, and I had to adjust the guns in the back so a few other kids I was giving a ride too could put their bags in the back of the my Citation.

What a world. 

Learned your lesson yet?

Last week we had day time highs in the 80's, so I went ahead and planted the main part of my vegetable garden.  Tuesday and Wednesday, there were freeze warnings for most of the Columbia Basin, even though our local forecast predicted lows to stay in the mid 30's.  Being lazy Wanting to do a science experiment for you, the loyal reader, I kind of ignored the freeze warning.

Well, it seems that this particular experiment is probably going to cost me $20-30 and a few hours of my life.  It wasn't a complete loss, but my zucchini and peppers took it rough.

Man, you can almost hear the sound effect made when someone goes over the asking price on The Price is Right.

I think 3 of my 10 pepper plants are total loses, with another 2 or 3 having a chance of pulling through.  The zucchini are even rougher, with only 2 of 7 looking alive.  The cucumber and cantaloupe bed actually looks okay, with a little browning around the edges, but plenty of green leafy stuff in the center of each plant. 

Next year, I make sure to have a stash of 2-liters and milk jugs...even that probably would have saved me the money/time of having to replant half my garden...

You are saved

I was hoping that today's post would be a cute video I took of my chicks eating lettuce, but my inability to upload a video from my computer to blogger has spared you that.

So, umm..how's about them Celtics?

Time Enough for Love

I am a chronic re-reader. I am also a pretty big Robert Heinlein fan, and yes, the mood I am in effects which book I might currently be re-reading. After 12 years of marriage, my wife has figured out which books match which mood, and it’s not unusual for her to walk into a room and have her say, ‘Oh, you’re reading that one again.  What's wrong now?'

Most often this happens when I am reading Time Enough for Love, the sequel to Methuselah’s Children, and what is supposed to be the memoirs of Lazarus Long, oldest member of the human race. She knows if I reading this book, I am probably going to be spending the next week or so in a funk. It’s not because of the book…it’s just that so often, Heinlein is able to express in writing things I am not able to put into words myself, or even fully form in my mind. When reading so many of his books, you realize that this someone who understood. He got it…not just the highs, but the lows. Much of Time Enough for Love is about how we all might have different life expectancies, but we live in the Eternal Now, and that is a part of life I have a hard time grasping. Back when I worked in the Shipyard, I was in serious danger of getting swallowed up by my job. It wasn’t just the 900-1000 hours of OT I worked a year, or the off station travel…there were times I made decisions that put the job ahead of my family, or worse, brought my frustrations home with me.

Things are different at Hanford, there is less frustration to bring home, but there is less satisfaction also. Here the problem isn’t bringing stuff home with me, it’s dreading ‘The Next Day’. Many is a Sunday afternoon I have sat on the couch, moping because I need to go to work in 16 hours. Never mind the fact that I still have 6-hours of a Sunday left to spend with my family…instead of enjoying that Now, I’m dreading the future. Time Enough for Love can help snap me out of that, even if it sometimes makes me want to sell everything we own just to go start all over again someplace else.

As I write this, I just got finished re-reading To Sail Beyond the Sunset(for about the 634^th time), the last book Mr. Heinlein published. It’s kind of a sequel to Time Enough for Love, and wraps up Heinlein’s World as Myth collection of books. There are some folks who don’t like Heinlein’s later books, calling them ‘self-indulgent’ and pointing out ‘wow, there is a lot of incest in those books. I can see both of those things being true…but I still get a lot out of the stories.(By the way, neither of these two books are ones I would recommend for the first time Heinlein reader…those would be either Starship Troopers or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) What I get out of To Sail Beyond the Sunset is that it doesn’t need to be an adventure to be satisfying. Subtitled ‘Being the Memoirs of a Somewhat Irregular Lady’, Sunset is the story of Maureen Johnson, mother of Lazarus Long, and the reason my younger daughter is named Maureen.

 

Maureen Johnson is not a war hero, or a super spy or a pilot. She is a house wife and mom, and later a business woman(and a bit of a sex-fiend)…but the overwhelming point of the story is how happy and satisfied she is with her life. Quoting one of her husbands ‘Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.’ Hence, I am often not happy at work, but going home and doing my fair share of laundry, and dishes, and gardening, and cleaning the chicks brooder box to get a smile from my wife DOES make me happy.

Now…

There are other books for other moods and needs.  Hell...Stranger in a Strange Land covers so much ground, it fills a couple of niches all by itself.  There is the religious side, the political side, and just...the nature of being what you are.  I read Stranger whenever I need to know there is a reason behind everything I do.  Not necessarily THE reason, just that there IS a reason to keep getting up every day.

 

Beyond the smiling faces of my wife and kids.