If you are reading this post, you will know that I was unable to access my computer to update it and have scheduled an automatic posting of this.
I headed to Aspen yesterday morning with my cousin, Julie, and her kids to spend the holiday with another of our cousins, Jean, and her family. I took my computer in hopes of gaining internet access, but haven’t. I will update this with a true PF post upon my return.
As of this writing, there is snow in the forecast, so the roads might be messy and our plans might have changed due to that at any point going or coming home!
Thanks to my friends Vickie and Carmen for taking prodigious care of my kitties in my absence!
O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also.
The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land.
O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.”
Psalm 95:1-6
In the midst of all the chaos and uncertainty that the world has to offer, the Lord is my refuge, my strength, and my provider, and for that, I am truly thankful.
May you all have the Happiest of Thanksgivings, or at least the most Thankful of Thanksgivings.
By now most of you have seen the news of the attacks in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) by Islamic terrorists. A tragedy whose proportions we may not truly know for days. At this time there are 82 confirmed dead, and between 200-900 injured. The target has been westerners (looking specifically for Americans and Britons), but this group has apparently killed whoever has come in their path, like the Anti-terror Chief, and the chef of the Taj Mahal hotel.
But do you know anything about the terror that has been going on in Orissa? Most don’t. I had only recently learned of the situation in an e-mail that had been sent to me. I was searching for confirmation of the information in the e-mail, but there were no reports in the media to be found. A few days after receiving the e-mail, a man came into my office for a vaccination. He had recently returned from Orissa, India. I asked him about what I had heard. And he confirmed that the information that had been passed along to me was in fact true, and that the horror there is ongoing, and there are threats for further and more wide sweeping attacks planned. In fact, what is happening in Orissa can only be described as a pogrom by Hindus against Christians and Catholics.
The pogrom apparently started in August of this year and is being perpetrated by two radical Hindu groups. From what I can gather from the reports of various organizations (none of them “media”), it started as payback for the death of a leader. A leader who was killed by Maoists (the communist party of India). The Christians in Orissa have been beaten, burned alive, or hacked into pieces. Nuns gang raped. Churches and homes burned by the thousands. Here’s a link to a blog which has chronicled some of the stories that came out of Orissa. There has been a systematic attempt to wipe out all Jesus followers there either through death or unimaginable coercement to convert to Hinduism.
More than 500 people have been killed. Ten thousand remain in refugee camps. The violence has cooled in the past month, but these terror groups have promised that the calm won’t remain. The Christmas season is the chosen time for these groups to attack.
This latest horror is not the first for the state of Orissa. There were attacks a year ago, and a decade ago. There have been attacks on both Muslims and Christians in the past 15 years. But I had never heard of Orissa.
Why is it that the media hasn’t been interested in reporting this? Perhaps with this new terror in Mumbai the media will begin to take a look at the other terror horrors being quietly played out in India.
Pray for the people of India. Pray for those caught up in the violence in Mumbai, especially for those still being held hostage and the families and friends of them who sit and wait for news. Pray for the Orissan Chrisitans and Catholics. These are sad and dangerous times in India.
I am proud to be a part of the profession that for the 7th year in a row has been ranked “most honest and ethical”. Nurses ranked #1 out of 21 professions about which Gallup annually polls. We scored a very respectable 84% “high or very high”. Nurses have actually topped the list (since it was added to the poll in 1999) in all but the 2001 survey, which ranked firefighters tops in the aftermath of 9/11.
The next highest ranked profession was pharmacists who came in at 70% high/very high.
After pharmacists came high school teachers, doctors, and policeman to round out the top five.
Not surprisingly, the bottom ranked profession polled was lobbyists. They got a dismal 5%, which I’m not sure is dismal enough, but perhaps Gallup polled a bunch of lobbyists and their friends and families.
What did surprise me is that clergy came in 5th with only 56% ranking them high/very high in honesty and ethics.
The nine lowest ranked professions were:
Labor Union Leaders – 16% high/very high
Lawyers – 18% high/very high
Business Executives – 12% high/very high
Advertising Practitioners – 10% high/very high
Stockbrokers – 12% high/very high
Congressman – 12% high/very high
Car Salesman – 7% high/very high
Telemarketers – 6% high/very high
Lobbyists – 5% high/very high
The numbers for those professions at the bottom of the list are largely unchanged from the 2007 poll results. It fascinates me that these are the people who pretty much run the country and are in the news ad nauseum lately in regards to our economic woes. Doesn’t it beg the question why we aren’t sending in nurses, pharmacists, high school teachers, doctors, and policemen to run the economy and the country??? We/they may not do better, but we/they certainly couldn’t do worse, and at least you might have some level of trust for us/them to at least be honest and ethical in the process!!!!!!
I snagged this link on the blog of an emergency medicine doctor. He plugged his blog into www.genderanalyzer.com to have it determine whether his blog was written by a man or a woman. Genderanalyzer got it wrong. So I decided to put Blah Blah Blog in there to see what it believed MY gender to be.
It determined that the possibility was 59% that my blog was written by a man, and went on to mention that it was pretty gender neutral. The ER doctor thinks the analyzer might have gotten his wrong because of the cat pictures! My blog has lots of those, too! I wonder why it “thought” MY blog was written by a man!!
If you run yours through it, let me know if it got yours right!
One of my Photo Friday friends’ blogs sent me to www.typealyzer.com where it had this to say about the author of my blog, I am an ESTP (Extraverted Sensing with Introverted Thinking) or a ”Doer”:
The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.
Got my Flickr mess worked out, sort of. I am still logging on using the e-mail address I was trying to get rid of, but at least I can access my account once again! Flickr never got back to me to help with the problem, so I decided in needed to be brave and try to fix it myself. I was nervous the entire time trying to fix the problem because I was fearful that I would do something that could never be undone, BUT, I didn’t, and for that I am soooo relieved! So, in that it is FRIDAY, it’s time to get back to Photo Friday!!
Today’s topic is “Facial Expressions”. I thought I’d try to get a picture of my new kitten, Lu Na Cee. In that she has the chemical properties of quicksilver, this is a more difficult proposition than you’d imagine. She’s slippery and fast and allllll over the place! My other cat, Mew Ling, is used to me putting the camera in her face. Lu Na? Not so much! Every time I’d get close to her, she thought I was wanting to play. And the camera cord was a delightful dangly for her to leap for. Even after I hid it in my hand, she still KNEW it was there. And then there’s the whole “why don’t cat expressions get picked up in pictures?” issue. I call this one “Huh?”.
Please leave your Linky link if you’re playing! If you’re not, why not?, and please go and visit the sites of the other players and check out what they’ve posted today! Drop ‘em a comment!
I don’t like Hillary Clinton, but I want her to stay in the senate. I think we NEED her to stay in the senate. I think she’d probably be a great Secretary of State, all things considered, but I think that Obama wants her out of the senate in order to neutralize her voice which is sure to be a dissenting one on many issues.
In that she is one of the more hawkish Democrats, I’d like to have her stay in this possibly democratically super majoritized senate in order to offer that dissent.
If she joins the Obama cabinet, she will not only have to toe the party line, she’ll have to toe the Obama line, and I think that could be a negative for the nation.
Barack is playing the “keep your friends close…keep your enemies closer” card.
If she joins that cabinet she’ll never be able to oppose Obama in 2012 and I think she needs to keep that option open because, while I hope and pray that Obama’s radical leftistness isn’t played out in full blossom, I’m afraid it will, and the democrats will need someone powerful, who has been voicing opposition all along, to get out of them mess we just might have gotten ourselves into with B.O.
“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded (as…the nation’s military services).”
If you lived in a country with a leader who believed that a national governmental police force (read STATE POLICE) is an ideal and a goal to be achieved, you might be worried. And you SHOULD be worried! Would you elect someone into the highest political office who believed this?
We DO live that country and “we” DID elect a man who strives for this.
These are President Elect Obama’s words, spoken on July 2nd of this year.
Click HERE to read an excellent commentary on this.
This is a day where we as Americans remember and honor those who have fought for us and our freedoms, and fought so that others could enjoy the same freedoms we do. It is a day where I remember and honor them. It also happens to be the birthday of my best friend and sister-in-law, Connie. Today I remember and honor her as well.
Connie was as brave as any soldier and truer than all.
This is Connie’s fourth birthday away from us. She would have been 43. I liked it when she had her birthday because it meant that for a few short weeks, we were the same age and she couldn’t needle me about being older than her, which I was, by a little over 10 and a half months.
It’s really more like the fourth anniversary of her 39th birthday. I’m way older than her now. That probably delights her…
The last time I filled my car’s gas tank, I was sooo excited because I got 10 cents off per gallon because I had made it to the magic $100 number in purchases at the affiliated grocery store. I filled up for “only” $2.29 a gallon!
I still have 1/3 of a tank of gas left and on the way in to work today I passed multiple gas stations selling gas for well under the two dollar mark!
Just how low do you think the prices will go?
My take on this? I think that maybe the middle eastern oil cartel is nervous. I think they’re nervous because Americans truly did cut their consumption dramatically this past summer and I think that for the first time we (Americans) are all on the same page of needing to change how much we rely on others for our energy. Our approaches to how this can be done are vastly varied, but we all agree that the time is now to start seriously affecting change. They see that this time we’re serious and I think they want to lull us into a place where we stop caring again by slashing the prices. If not in large part for America and its money for oil, the middle east is just a poor region that sits on top of a big gooey brown reservoir. They “need” us more than we “need” them, and I think they got a glimpse of that…
Don’t bother reading this post unless you want to be bored. The title tells the story, but if you want to read mundane minutae of my technological struggles, then read on!
I was so frustrated Friday night trying to get my wireless up and running that I was actually on the verge of tears. Stupid, I know, but true.
The router came with a Startup Wizard CD that I managed to misplace, but in the absence of that I was still getting a signal from it and could connect to it. HOWEVER, I couldn’t get it to acquire an IP address or connect to the internet. I talked to Dan in IT at work who gave me some tips on what to do, but that’s like sending someone who is taking Spanish 101 as a freshman in high school to the UN to translate for the general council meeting…
I attempted to find a downloadable version of the CD online and was met with failure. In desperation, I decided to call tech support at Netgear and plead stupidity and beg for help, but then while I was on hold waiting for a tekkie to help me, I remembered that I had put the CD into my OLD computer without ever running it. Gleefully I ejected it from there and popped it into ruby red beauty and I was on my way…
Unplug this, turn off that, plug this cord into that connection and that one into this one and do it all in EXACTLY the right order or…or what? what would happen? what would happen if I removed the sticker from the router that says “do not remove this sticker or turn on router until you have followed the instructions on the StartupWizard CD?” I had already done both of those things attempting to follow Dan’s instructions, had I ruined the router? Had I affected a change I could never undo?
Nah.
The Wizard did its thing and I had an IP address, and I thought I was ready to uplug the ethernet cable from the back of my laptop forever and once again be able to watch Instant Netflix from the warm cocoon of my bed. Alas, it was not quite that easy. The computer kept connecting to some random signal (without connecting to the internet, mind you) and not to MY fresh new Netgear signal. All the toolbar buttons are different than they were on my old computer, so I had to figure out how to get to a list of the signals within range and how to set up order preference for connection. I kept getting a prompt that Windows wasn’t managing that device and I was having a heck of a time finding what software WAS managaing the device. I’m sure there’s an easier way, but I finally found an icon in my tool tray that had a tab in it that led me there. And I deleted that other device from the list and put my device as number one, and I was connected, and I think I heard angels sing…
I also got my printer up and running with the new computer, however, I can’t get IT to work wirelessly, which it’s supposed to do. But I can live with plugging it in for now until I have the mental fortitude to face down another techno-challenge.
I got another canned e-mail from Flickr telling me they had forwarded my e-mail along to someone higher up to deal with. In searching through Flickr’s Help Forum, I see that dating back nearly two years people have had this problem. I hope they get back to me soon. Seems that if this has been a problem before for so long they should have figured out the solution, right??
Technology. The love of my life and the bane of my existence!
Don’t know if Mew Ling will decide if she can stay, or not.
And as if trying to safely integrate a new kitten into a well-established one cat home isn’t nutso enough…
1) I can’t get my wireless router to work so I am tethered to my internet provider by an ethernet cable
AND
2) I tried to change the e-mail address for my Flickr account, and now I can’t get into my Flickr account (hence no Photo Friday today) and I have NO idea how to fix that and so far tech support has only sent me canned responses which have helped naught
AND
3) Although I recently backed up my old computer onto an external hard drive before the old computer became unusable, when I transferred the files onto my new computer, a vast number of the files were not there! So, I need to now get the old computer fixed (including buying a new battery charger) in order to retrieve my files. Technology is sooooo not my friend right now!
Now, if Mew Ling decides the kitten can stay (and this kitten is lobbying hard for that to happen!) and if I can fix my Flickr issues, one of these days I’ll share a picture of Abby with you. (No, I didn’t name her that. She had the name already and she’s knows her name, and even though I don’t like the name I’m not sure renaming her at three months is a good idea…but then, I’m not sure bringing her home was a good idea either!)
Case in point, Abby just decided she had to pounce on Mew Ling and she got a big swat of huge Mew paw in response along with a hiss, spit, howl and growl of punishment.
Last week my nephew Mitchell spent Saturday evening through Sunday morning with me. One of the things I love most about him is the very funny things he says.
He found this pair of 1$ reading glasses I picked up at Target and decided he just had to wear them.
He’d been wearing them for a few minutes and I told them he needed to take them off. But then he told me he needed to put them back on because now “everything’s blurry”!
I took him to a park in the evening on Saturday. I noticed that the the zipper on his camo cargo shorts was down…
Me – “Your fly is open.”
Him – “Wha???”
Me – “Your FLY is open.” I repeated, and pointed to his zipper.
On the way to the grocery store to pick up a few things after the park, I smelled something less than fresh emanating from the back seat.
Me – “Did you fart?” (I have given up trying to get my nieces and nephews to use some other term for gaseous emissions)
Him – “No.”
Me – “Yes you did. I think you farted! (Smiling back at him) I think that if you had a super power it would be farting. Yes, I’m pretty sure you would be Fart Boy!”
HIm – “Nope. My super power is love.”
Good grief.
Later, as we got out of my car at the store, we were chatting. He looked down at the front of his shorts and then smiled up at me and said…
“Uh oh! My bug is open again!
AND finally, when we got back in the car, I told him I could still smell his super power in there.
…to be able to prove you know enough to be voting!
I’m not a fan of Howard Stern’s, but this bit is a good bit. It’s clean, don’t worry!
While this is just a couple of everyday people on the street who unabashedly claim support of (both) presidential candidates, they clearly are uninformed on the most basic issues. By extension, one must draw the conclusion that when it comes to the details and nuances of what the candidates believe and plan to do, they are completely ignorant of any facts. My guess is it didn’t take too long to find enough uninformed voters for this piece. I believe that uninformed voters will be voting en masse for both candidates in this election. I can only hope that there is an uninformed voter on each side to cancel each other’s votes out!
I have to tell you that the “get out the vote” movements bother me. If an American isn’t interested enough in the electoral process and in voting to get themselves registered and get out and vote on their own, I’m not sure I trust that they will then do the work necessary to vote as an informed voter. If the only information they are basing their vote on is gleaned from TV commercials or MySpace ads, I think they should best stay home. If you don’t even know who the running mate of your candidate is…well then, that’s just unacceptable.
Voting is a right. Voting and knowing who and what you are voting for is a responsibility.
And when it comes to voter registration and voter fraud, why can’t we dunk our thumbs in purple ink so that you get one vote, one time? It’ll be obvious if you’ve already voted. I’ve seen this work quite well somewhere else….
I close by saying, on Tuesday go and vote, but please do so responsibly.
