Beth's Contradictory Brain

Thursday

Wow, it's been pouring down rain with lots of lightning and thunder since about 4 am. Thankfully it's all supposed to clear out before tomorrow. We're getting up early and hitting the road again. We can't wait to spend time with Zach, although with all the stress my family is under, I don't expect this trip to be tons of fun.

There's really not much else going on. I could write about our property rights devolving into those of China, but why. I could write about Bush's speech, but Nerdstar wrote about it for us.

My biggest excitement these days is trying to grow things from seeds. I used one of the little tomatos from my plant to get some of the seeds and planted them in a cup. They've broken thru the soil and are on their way. Although, the original plant is now about four feet tall and I'm not sure we really need another one. Tuesday I took seeds from a Nerdstar favorite - Japanese Cucumbers - and planted them in some dirt. And decided to try to grow a little limon tree and planted some lemon seeds. I figure if they grow - fantastic, if not, nothing lost. But I do find it really cool to see the little seeds become growing plants!

Cool

"This is better than an Oscar" Jennifer Tilly won the No Limit Texas Hold Em tournament at the World Series of Poker.

Last year I watched the College World Series and thought how cool it would be to go see some games live. This year I'm thinking it would be way more cool to be in Vegas for at least part of the World Series of Poker next year!!

Home Again

at least for a couple of days. The trip to visit Nerdstar's sister was ok, not my favorite vacation, but ok. Her sister is in the process of selling her house, which is really good news. Once that's all done, she's moving down to Houston to stay with the grandparents for a while. That should be good for everyone. Except maybe her dog. He's a talkative little beagle, and we're not sure the grandparents will like listening to him.

We've found out just how much Ramen doesn't like other dogs in the past few days. Before we left, our neighbor across the hall had the cutest little white husky mix puppy they've probably given away by now. We took Ramen out in the hallway to meet it. He didn't want anything to do with it. Then at Nerdstar's sister's place, he didn't much like her dog either. I think Woody was too noisy and excited for Ramen's taste. He's like me and likes things very quiet!

We can't wait to see Zach this coming weekend. I talked to Mom yesterday, he's apparently learned to wisely use the words "never mind" when they don't understand what he's trying to tell them! And he's asked almost every day if today is "Ramen day." Awww.

That's about it for today. I'm too tired to think much more.

C Town

We made it up here safely, and it was a decent drive. Lots and lots of corn field. It's amazing to contrast the wide open places in this country with a city as massive as Chicago. I grew up near Dallas/Ft. Worth, but neither of them comes close to the scale of Chicago. Really, of all the places we've been, only New York and San Francisco come close.

We're mostly hanging out. Went to Taste of Chicago today. I heard there were over 250,000 people there yesterday and maybe more today. Wow. It was hot and crowded.

That's about it from here.

Outta Here

We're getting up bright and early, no really, the alarm goes off at 6, and doing our usual road trip breafast at McD's and then driving through parts of the county we haven't actually driven through before. Up to Des Moines and across Iowa and then across Illinois and up to the far northeast corner. Very exciting.

We actually bought a pretty big wall map of the US with highways and have highlighted our roads traveled. I think there's maybe a dozen states we haven't driven through.

Nerdstar's sister is pretty excited about us coming to visit. She's been pretty lonely since the divorce. Neither Nerdstar nor I have been to Chicago, so we're looking forward to it.

All that said, not sure when I'll blog again. Probably over the weekend, but you never know.

There is tons of good reading on my blogroll, or probably on your own as well. Don't miss me too much.

Hook Em Horns!!!

Blog Conversations on China

I recently emailed Pundita with a few thoughts/questions on her ongoing blog conversation with Simon about China. She has graciously posted the email and her reply.

It all makes me very worried about the 2008 election. This far out it appears to me that Condi Rice would have to be my first choice. I don't know of anyone else who shares the vision and knowledge necessary to continue this push for more real democracy in more areas of the world.

I know that limiting presidential terms to two four year terms prevents many, many problems. But I can also see in dealing with countries, like China, where so much empahsis is placed on tradition and continuity, it can make America look a little schizophrenic. Imagine if after almost eight years of strong efforts to implement the Bush Doctrine, in '08 we change gears completely and actually elect someone like Hillary. Yes, you can argue that some in Europe would be thrilled. But I think a radical change in American foreign policy could be disastrous.

I had thought that the '04 election was the most important in my lifetime. And while there's a lot of time left before '08, I might have to revise that sentiment and say that '08 will be.

what a girl wants, what a girl needs...

I totally loved this post by Cyn. She lists the ten things MSN says every girl should have, why that's stupid, and what they should have instead. The comments are pretty darn good, too!

I'm not big on lists, but maybe Nerdstar and I will come up with something, maybe not.

update:

here's what Nerdstar and I came up with, in no particular order:

toys - you know the kind
tools - know how to use them
birth control
money in the bank
cooking skills - to feed yourself, not him
good friends
pets!
a hobby
a cool car
confidence

College World Series 2

It Ain't Over Till It's Over!!

Wow. The two games today are why I love to watch sports. Poor Nebraska lost to ASU in a heartbreaker, being down, then taking the lead on a home run in the top of the 9th, only to have a home run tie it up in the bottom of the ninth and go on to lose in extra innings. But it was such a fun game to watch.

Then in game two Baylor was down 7 to 0 and came back in the 7th, 8th, and won it in the bottom of the 9th as well.

Now Baylor and UT play again tomorrow night. Baylor would have to beat UT two games in a row to advance. But after today - you just never know!!

All About the Food

Since Nerdstar hasn't bothered to write about her traveling food, I guess I'll have to get it started. As you know, we both feel we've been sentenced to culinary hell since we've moved up here to the Midwest. The dinner we had the other night was the worst I've had at a restaurant. We went to Copeland's hoping for some decent seafood, we checked the menu out online and thought - sounds nice. It just wasn't. Hell, Long John Silver's has better seafood. We decided not to complain to management, instead just resolved we'd never go back.

Fast foward to the weekend and Nerdstar going to Houston to visit the grandparents. She threw some undies, a change of clothes, a book and some lotions into a backpack and was off. She packed so little in order to leave room in the bag to bring home goodies from the local Chinese stores. Not only did she fill up that bag, she also filled a paper grocery bag and brought it on the plane. The TSA people just laughed when she told them there's no good food in KC.

Now if I can just get her to list all the stuff she brought back...

Thankfully we know we're going to eat really well when visiting her sister who lives near Chicago, and we're trying to decide between Salt Grass Steak House and Pappadeux's to take my folks to when we head to Dallas.

What do you think?

Via Ann Althouse, I read this post by Tonya about a woman who spent a couple of years living the lesbian lifestyle without actually being attracted to women. Here's the intro:

Earlier today, one of my favorite radio programs aired on This American Life. The program, My Experimental Phase, includes "three stories about people who decide to try out a new life ? the kind of life their parents never wanted for them." The first story profiles a woman who spent two years believing that she was a lesbian and actually lived her life as if she were a lesbian even though she wasn't really attracted to women.

She asks: Okay, so maybe my advice isn't very sound. Most of us probably can't pull an Anne Heche. It probably won't work out even if you regularly watch Showtime's The L Word -- a propaganda machine for lesbianism that disguises itself as a prime time cable series. It probably won't work even if you are just a little bit envious of all your hetero friends who have had same-sex experiences in their past. And it probably won't work because if you had any latent tendencies toward homosexuality, those feelings would have emerged by now. People can't just decide to be lesbians. It just just doesn't work that way. Right?

I left a couple of thoughts in the comments, but probably not very artculate ones.

Any of my lesbians readers want to tackle this??

Update:

This is Maxine's comment that wasn't accepted for reasons beyond me:

Why not? Why couldn't a woman just decide to be lesbian. If the L Word
was held up as the example of what a lesbian is, does, etc, I know I
would certainly find some appeal to that lifestyle.

Not sure what of the above is questionable, just my two cents.

Deadwood

I don't think I've ever felt as fond of a cast of characters as I do those of Deadwood. I've been watching the first seasons this past week, should finish it up today. In fact, last night my brain spent most of the night making up new story lines and side plots that ran as pseudo dreams. Weird.

College World Series

I had a great time yesterday driving up to Omaha to see Baylor and UT play in the College World Series. It was a nice surprise that UT won, seeing as Baylor had beaten them all season! Even better was getting to meet Mup, who was a great hostess for the day. The highlight of the evening was her catching a foul ball - way cool! I was also happy that I didn't come home with a sunburn.

I realized yesterday that in ten years of living in Austin I never went to a UT sporting event, yet in two months of living near Kanasas City, I've seen UT play baseball twice. Go figure.

Nerdstar doesn't return home until late tonight, so I'm taking it slow today and maybe getting a few things done, like buying the poor dog some food.

On The Road Again...

We're just going to name this the summer of driving around!

Actually, tomorrow Nerdstar flies to Houston to check up on Grandpa. He's doing amazingly well! He's feeling good enough that Grandma was threatening to divorce him the other day and he found a blank piece of paper and signed it and said, "go ahead." They crack me up! I can only hope to have that much spunk after seventy years of marriage and almost ninety years of life!

Saturday I'm going to drive up to Omaha and see Baylor play UT in the College World Series. I have no idea who to root for, my university or my city! I have a feeling Baylor's going to kick UT's butt like they've done for most of the season.

Next Friday (the 24th) we're taking a four day weekend and driving up to north of Chicago to visit Nerdstar's sister and eat some good food! It's just another 9 hour drive.

The very next Friday - yes, three days after driving back - we're driving to Dallas to visit my family and spend some time with little Zach!

Then, July 15th Nerdstar's supposed to head over to Japan for work. I'm pretty jealous and sad I don't get to tag along. She'll only be there a few days, and mostly attending a boring converence, but still...

And it looks like mid August she's going to get sent to Monterey, CA. I'll definitely meet up with her there if at all possible. She's been there one other time for the military's language olympics.

Who knows from there!

B.D.F.

Well, as I sort of expected, the grand jury didn't land on my brother's side. But that might not be a totally bad thing. His custody lawyer recommended another lawyer and also suggested rolling the custody stuff in with the other charges she's filed. We hope that's possible, because we feel it's all related. And if the whole story is to be told, what jury would listen to a young woman who's twice left her son with his father for months on end without visiting her son at all.

Anyway. My family isn't known for having good luck. We're praying that changes.

The immediate problem is coming up with the $15,000 for the lawyer. My brother barely makes ends meet and my parents are having to come up with the money. They paid off their house a few years back, but might take out a home equity loan or cash out some of their retirement or something.

So, if you guys feel like contributing to my brother's defense fund, well, I'd be more than grateful. I might even send cookies.

required reading today

Democracy Stage Show Kit

Some really insightful writing on achieving democracy. We tend to think of government in terms of those folks in DC and tend to forget that so much of the nuts and bolts of what keeps this country running takes place in city councils, school boards, and local juries. Throw in the even more taken for granted property rights, which are stunningly rare around the world, and then try to imagine being "free" without these things and how much effort it would take to set them up from scratch - especially if the people in power thought it best if you didn't set them up.

Then read what's being achieved in Iraq and tell me we're losing over there.

New Reads

The best thing about Nerdstar taking the job at Ft. Fartknocker is that it's led me to really expand my reading and thinking into a more global outlook. That, in turn, has led me to find some really smart thinkers and amazing writers in this big ole blogosphere.

Two more that have caught my attention today:

Pundita who tries to make US foreign policy interesting and easy.

Zenpundit

so tired

I'm so tired of battling this damn depression. So tired of feeling like a complete loser. So tired of second guessing every decision I've made for the past few years. So tired of believing this life just isn't ever going to be worth living. It's fucking exhausting.

WTF?

Un fucking believable! MJ Not Guilty on all charges. Simply amazing.

Well, California is two for two in letting black male celebrities go free.

Frustrating

Another long weekend that was both good and bad, and lots and lots of rain.

Saturday morning my mother called all upset. My first thought was that something was wrong with my dad's health. Fortunately it wasn't that. But, my brother's ex wife is being a complete cunt. (Sorry, I never use that word, but it works this time.) For reasons that are beyond our ability to even guess at, she's trying to make my brother's life hell. We're praying it doesn't work. After she abandoned my nephew when he was a few months old, my brother was gracious when she showed back up and wanted at least partial custody. He should have cut her off at the knees then. Then when it finally went to court, a judge decided that they should both have him every other week. Fine. The third week in she picked him up Friday night and brought him back Saturday and went back to picking him up every other weekend, not week. Again, he should have gone to court that week and formalized it all. Several months later she decided she wanted Zach every other week again. WTF? The only way she is able to keep him at all is because the older couple she lives with mostly takes care of him. (No, they are not her relatives, we don't know how she met them, but they are good with Zach.)

Now she's causing more trouble. It's so frustrating being so powerless. Worst case scenario is she gets total custody of Zach, then my parents would step in and fight for custody of him or at a minimum, grandparents' rights.

We know that she really doesn't want Zach. What kind of an upbringing would he have with her? He hates having to go with her every other week. And as stubborn as he is, I can't imagine trying to keep him somewhere he doesn't want to be, or keeping him from his granny.

I'd be more optimistic, but you just never know what the hell a judge and or jury will decide when it comes to kids.

Anyway. Add to that that I didn't get either of the two jobs I was hoping would work out, and then lunch with Nerdstar's roommate from Iraq, and it wasn't all fun and games this weekend.

Summer of History

I think I mentioned earlier that this seems to be shaping up as the summer of history for us. Watching C-Span I ran across some interesting books and made a list. We couldn't find any of them at the library at Ft. Fartknocker (as Nerdstar has decided to call it). Fortunately, Amazon sells used books, and while it cost more for shipping than the books, I still got four books for under $25.

The first one showed up the other day, Ghost Soldiers. It's the story of the rescue of POWs in the Phillipines who had been held by the Japanese. It was simply heartbreaking, as all stories of POWs are. It wasn't a totally in-depth book, but the author gives lots of information on other resources on the subject. I'm going to see if there's a book available of some of the soldier's diaries.

We finished up the first season of Carnivale the other day. It's interesting, but not the best show I've ever seen. There were many things in it that reminded me of Buffy - even preacher man's eyes went black just like Willow's used to. But it did spark my interest in the Dust Bowl of the 30s. Can you imagine such an event these days and the reaction (or should I say overreaction) of environmentalists. I'll be interested to read what they thought the future of the states affected would be and how long it actually was before the land was able to be farmed and grazed again.

Now we're watching season one of Deadwood. The West seems to be the topic for us this month.

Part of the fascination with all of these stories is to also see how much things have changed in this country in relatively short periods of time.

How sad.

This story in the BBC news is about a lesbian couple in India who are no longer allowed to see each other. The comments at the end of the story are as interesting as the story itself.

Small Blog World

Sometimes it's just funny where a link takes you.

The other day Nerdstar and I watched the final couple of rounds of the National Spelling Bee. One of the words was derived from Samuel Pepys' name. We'd never heard of the man, or his diary.

Today I'm checking out the older parts of War Historian's blog (which I'm reading for maybe the third time) and see a link to this site about Pepys' diary. How weird!

Interesting

Over the weekend Nerdstar and I were discussing the politics of China and Africa and what the US and other countries policies are and could be. So I find this post on Simon World about Live8 and China and Africa to be pretty darn smart.

My thoughts on China were brought up by blog posts on Rebecca MacKinnon's site about China requiring all websites to be registered. My reaction surprised even me. I was telling Nerdstar that if the people of China are not being killed or starved by their government, and are in fact experiencing levels of economic and infastructure growth that appears to be real, then that seems ok to me. No, there may not be very high levels of freedom of speech and such, and we can certainly hope that changes over time, and I assume that with a growing economy it will. There are certainly places - like Africa and North Korea that should be getting the attention of our government. Let the free market increase freedom in China. Besides, as we have seen repeatedly in this country - people are more than willing to trade security for freedom, and maybe that's the choice the people of China are making. (As I said, my reaction surprised me.) The interesting debate is whether the people of China have a choice - and that's not something I know enough to write about yet.

As for Africa. I don't know. Having read stories of people who have traveled the continent extensively, I know that more aid is not the answer. And to overthrow the many evil governments on the continent - well, where to start? It's nice to see a dialogue on the problems.

Good weekend

It's been a nice, quiet weekend. I don't even remember Friday night. Oh yeah, after asking Nerdstar, we went to try a new restaurant. It was decent. But I can't tell you how much we really, really miss the food in Austin.

Yesterday we went to watch the Texas Rangers beat the KC Royals. It was a good, high scoring game. Like Nerdstar said, it's not the best stadium ever, but it was nice enough. There was a group of guys in their mid 20s who were obnoxious asses, but that can happen anywhere.

Other than that we watched a huge storm blow in and thru. I can imagine the storms being scary if you moved here from somewhere that doesn't get huge thunderstorms with 70 mph winds and hail, but I lived thru the same thing my whole life in Texas. As long as the hail isn't bigger than pea sized things are usually fine.

We've also been watching UT's women's softball team in the women's college world series. If you ask me they're the best looking team! At the beginning of the games they have the part where they have the video of each player saying her name and where she's from and some other little tidbit. I laughed and told Nerdstar it'd be hysterical just once to hear one say "My name is Blondie, I'm from Austin, and I have a great collection of vibrators." Or, "My name is Red, I'm from Houston, my favorite bong is the one I made myself back in high school."

I've got a second interview sometime this week for two different jobs. They both have their pros and cons, sort of waiting to see what works out for either of them.

Heh

I'd love to post dozens of pics of our dog Ramen, but the poor thing walks off every time he sees the camera. He has the best facial expressions. There is a link to one decent photo we got of him over there on the side.

Anyway. You can't tell by looking at him sitting still, but our dog is totally swishy! His tail curls and fans out which just makes him look that much more swishy. So the other day when we were walking him I told Nerdstar we should get shirts that say:

I'M NOT GAY - MY DOG IS.

We won't even talk about how almost every boy dog he meets totally wants to hump him.

The Upside

The job search continues. I've found the upside of job interviews... not only do I get to get out of the house and talk to someone, I get to talk about ME and how wonderful and smart I am. Heh.