Category Archives: General

Jun21

Miscellaneous Stuff, I Guess.

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Miscellaneous Stuff, I Guess.

I really wish I were better at long-term planning. A lot of the yard work I have to do could have been done in the fall or in Spring, instead of staring me in the face now shouting the accusation, “You have the sloppiest yard in the neighborhood! Everyone with nice yards hates what you’re doing to property values!!!” No matter how long I’ve worked at silencing the inner guilt-inspiring voices, some of them still come back to haunt me!

The fish pond is low on water, so it’s the perfect time to vacuum it out and cull some of the brown shubunkins and retrieve things that fell to the bottom before refilling it – and this should be done before the marginal plants die of thirst, too.

My duct tape double is mostly stuffed, and it wouldn’t take more than a few hours to finish it, secure all the tape ends, and make a cover so I can start sewing clothes for myself that fit right. I have a pile of t-shirts that are all ready to remake creatively, but since I haven’t had the time, I hit Target and restocked on new ones.

I’ll need to run the vacuum around the house before the Smart Carpet salesman comes tomorrow, too. We’re going with the least hassle option – carpet – because it’s the thing they’re least likely to mess up installing. They said that they wouldn’t charge for new installation, but we’d have to pay for an upgrade. The thought of these guys fouling up on the installation of an even more expensive floor was too much to bear. Nobody seems to want to tell us if we’ll get any kind of credit for a less expensive floor (since carpet is generally less than laminate) but if they say no, we’re going to get the best carpet and pad they’ve got. I’ve been researching, and I’d like to get PET or PTT polyester. They’re not as plush or long-wearing as nylon brands like Stainmaster, according to the experts. However, I’ve had Stainmaster, and not only was I not terribly impressed by how well it stood up to wear, I also had a terrible problem cleaning it. Yes, the stains come out, but so does the dye. One of the reasons it’s popular is the variety of colors it comes in, but because it’s easy to dye, it’s also easy for the dye to be sucked out. I can get almost any stain out eventually, but I’m not interested in making up a matching dye so it’s handy to re-color the stupid spots. The PET and PTT polyesters are also made from recycled plastics, so I like that, too. So we shall see tomorrow.

I’ve also really been wanting to finish up my polymer clay color samples and refine my clay/fabric decoupage technique, but the art studio has been acting like a garage lately. Not only do we have the stuff that needs to be kept until we sort it and arrange it logically after we finish the walls and wiring, but we had to put litter boxes in because of Spencer’s poor hygiene habits, and all the stuff from the living room/office and bedroom had to go somewhere while the floor guys were futzing around.

I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, though. (Well, I do, but mostly after I’m tired from NOT sitting around doing nothing all day long!) Audrey and I rode to the bike store and got baskets put on our bikes, and rode to the supermarket for a two-bike-basket-size trip. I’ve been back and forth to the pool store trying to get the sludge out of the water (I love what happens when the water pipes get cleaned in this town!) I created more yard waste by trimming a big tree out front and pulling up the junk from underneath, and have been planting and moving things. I’ve been in the car to visit a friend for a day, take the kids to the dentist up north, take them to art classes in Red Bank at Colorest, then back to drop off the art I forgot to bring for the show, then up again for the show itself, to Monmouth Feed for pond supplies, doing laundry and hanging it to dry, teaching Audrey how to do applique on one of the items we picked up when we went thrift-store shopping. . .and I did clean up a lot in the garage so I could get to my clay (that took an entire day, in between hanging up laundry!)

I think that we’re going to haul one vanload of brush over to the recycling center, then I’ll take care of the fish, and then I’ll spend the day being an artist. I see a couple of cool showers in my future. . .

Jun19

The Power of Prayer. . .

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The Power of Prayer. . .

Not too long ago, I passed on a story about a young girl who died because her parents were treating her diabetes with prayer. A different church attempted the same thing with young Ava Worthington, with equal success, and now Ava’s cousin has had the same results.

Fortunately, Oregon, unlike Wisconsin, has laws that hold parents responsible for withholding medical treatment from children in favor of faith healing. (In the articles from kgw, it looks like this particular church was a driving force in this law.)

Colorado had just changed their law granting exemption from prosecution for faith-healing parents when this happened:

March, 2001
Grand Junction — Charges have been filed against the parents of a 13-year-old girl who died from a common infection that turned into gangrene after her parents opted to treat her with prayer but not medicine.

Randy and Colleen Bates, members of the General Assembly Church of the First Born, were issued summonses Friday on charges of criminally negligent homicide, reckless manslaughter, reckless child abuse resulting in death, and criminally negligent child abuse resulting in death.

Church of the First Born members believe there is a biblical injunction against medical treatment. They treat illnesses and injuries with prayer.

Amanda Bates, one of the Bateses’ 11 children, died Feb. 6. Someone at her home called 911 early that morning to report an unattended death. Paramedics were able to revive the skeletal youngster, and she was kept alive until evening on machines at St. Mary’s Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver. An autopsy showed she died from complications of diabetes, which include an increased risk of infections. Amanda’s infection began with an easily treated vaginitis, which eventually spread and turned to gangrene.

Even a group called Religious Tolerance lists faith-healing sects, including their incidences of unnecessary deaths. Our tolerance, as well, should be exclusive of beliefs that cause this kind of suffering. Perhaps we must allow people to hold their beliefs, no matter how ridiculous, but they have to be held responsible for the actions they take because of their beliefs. People whose beliefs include animal sacrifice or grave robbing for human remains to be used in ceremony find themselves charged with crimes if they’re caught sacrificing animals or robbing graves. There is no reason that people who withhold medical treatment from children until they are clearly ill, even until they die, should not be charged with a crime. The evidence of faith healing’s failure as a treatment is abundant – evidence of its success is wishful thinking.

And yet. . .our tax dollars just paid for Ken Ham to speak at the every-Wednesday Pentagon Prayer Breakfast.

Despite the fact that Ken Ham is delusional, as any look at Answers in Genesis or a brief tour through his ludicrous Creation Museum shows. But our military leadership wants to hear what he has to say.

Despite the fact that the prayers of devout believers directed at specific individuals has failed to save their lives, our government supports prayer to save entire troops (who were sent into danger by the very same folks soliciting the prayers) both ideologically and financially.

Despite the fact that parents avoid simple, proven medical treatments in favor of wishing really hard end up killing their children, many states exempt them from prosecution.

Am I wrong to object to my government endorsing religion in this way? Does it not seem like letting people die is OK as long as you really wish hard that they don’t? Is doing nothing, in the form of waiting for your invisible friend to grant your wishes, a get out of jail free card?

As long as prayer is held up as a viable course of action, practiced loudly and publicly by influential people, and allowed as an excuse for people to act in otherwise inexcusable ways, it is indeed an establishment of religion. It is a violation of the Constitution, and a violation of common sense.

Jun3

Sometimes. . .

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Sometimes. . .

it’s so hard to be nice. Yes, I’m a really nice person, sometimes disgustingly so, but I’m only human. I need to blow off steam just like anyone else, but that side usually comes out only in front of friends (who can forgive me) or on the internet (where it’s de rigeur and hardly noticed.) Bingo night usually gives all of us a chance to blow off a little snark, but last night I had to take a little retreat!

Let me give you a little exposition here first.

The end of the school year is always crazy, what with the concerts and kids’ parties and end-of-school things that I always have to do coinciding with the beginning of gardening season. There have been additional things this year, much of it relating to marching band in one way or another. I’ve been busy almost every waking moment. Ummmm. . .busy doesn’t necessarily mean productive. I have to be honest. I have done a lot of stuff, though.

Among the things I’ve been working on have been teaching myself a little more Excel, in the form of updating the band roster and getting it to have multiple tabs for different orders of the list. Hubby had to help, but I am definitely ascending the learning curve a lot on my own. The other thing I’ve been doing is honing some photoshop skills, assembling and editing images for band buttons. I thought it would be a cool thing for the kids to have buttons for orientation night that showed their section instrument. I was able to find some free clipart images of a number of instruments, but not all the ones I needed. So, it was off to Google image search, then a good amount of time trying to make photos look more like drawings, layer, resize, and skew multiple images (and then try to make them look the same so that I could then make them look more like drawings. . .) then play with the layer styles to make them look related without totally obscuring the background image. I think they turned out pretty neat.

So, I go to do the Bingo thing last night. I usually sell two different game sheets, and the money for these goes into separate boxes. However, people who are buying both usually give me a single bill to pay for them, so I need to make change and transfer money to the other box. It’s not such a big deal for me, but last night we had about 30 more people than we usually do, different jackpots, and a couple of new games. Even the cranky people still got smiles and thank-yous from me – and believe me, some of these people seem to be so stressed out by every little thing that you wonder why they even come.

Well, we get to one game, and a woman asks me how it’s played – it’s one where you have to get two bingos in two separate squares, but I don’t play this game, so we had some regulars yelling at me from the back that I was explaining it wrong. This table is our crankiest by far, but I figured I’d head over there and be all agreeable and let them explain it to me. I did this knowing it was probably a bad idea. There are certain sacrifices we disgustingly nice people have to make.

So this little group starts telling me that it’s two bingos in a column but they can be rows or columns or diagonal but it has to be two out of three and they can be in different columns but they all have to be in the same column and I’m saying wait, they don’t have to have two B columns or two N columns, so what columns are they talking about and they start screaming at me two out of the three, not the columns, it’s two bingos in the same column but they don’t have to be up and down!!! Holy crap, it could have been a comedy routine about people who don’t know how to explain things, but it wasn’t funny. I smiled and said that as long as they all knew how to play it, then we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting it wrong, and as I walked away they began talking about me to each other. “How can someone be that stupid?” “She’s so stupid she can’t even understand Bingo!” Mmm-hmmm. Smart enough to know the difference between stupid and deaf, which would put me a step ahead of them. . .

As it turns out, a rational person explained to me that the two bingos could go any way in two separate boxes, but that the boxes on the sheet were arranged in three rows and two columns – therefore, a bingo in row one, column one and another in row three, column two wouldn’t win, but any two rows in the same column of boxes would. Aha! Believe me, I’ve been spending enough time with Excel to know what rows and columns are, but when I see a grid, the rows and columns within that grid are the first thing I think of!

Oh, the things I would love to say and/or do to these people! The huge, steaming piles of snarkiness I could unload on them in one fell swoop! What a thrill to contemplate an act of revenge, delivered with the unbesmirchable sweetness I have perfected through years of practice! But no, what about an actual snub, a wise and witty retort guaranteed to cut them off at the knees? Why, they’d never see it coming! Perhaps I could be too stupid to be able to sell them eight of each game and give them correct change for a fifty? Maybe some choice phrases from several different languages uttered before them, followed by a sugary “Oh, you don’t know Latin? I’m so sorry. . .” The direct, in-your-face confrontation enumerating some concrete differences in our levels of intelligence and/or education just to see who exactly is stupid around here. The possibilities were swirling through my head, tempting and intoxicating.

Let’s get real, though. These people come every week, and spend an embarrassing amount of money that helps support the band. I have to deal with them only once every four weeks, and for such a short time in the grand scheme of things. On top of that, I am unaware of anyone who would find them a credible source of character judgement – I don’t have to worry about getting a reputation for stupidity on their say-so. Whatever I might fantasize about doing would never have any positive result in real life.

Still. . .I might just have trouble adding and subtracting money next month. Just a teensy little bit, and I’ll be really, really, really nice about it. . .