You Have Something On Your Shoe

I'm trying to lose twenty pounds before the holiday season so I can put in all back on during the holiday season. I'm down five in seven days due in large part to my long walks with LMJ. We walk a five mile course - I walk, she rides in the stroller - that takes between an hour and fifteen minutes and an hour and a half. We were three miles in yesterday, and as far from home as we get, when she decided it was time to get out of the stroller. We were walking around Memorial Park, so I figured why not let her run around. It will tire her out and make bedtime much easier. Side Note: Ultimately, this plan is not going to work. Her body is going to get used to the activity, and she's going to stop sleeping all together. I've seen it happen with puppies. I released the beast into the wild where she managed to find each and every fire ant bed in record time. She was frustrated that I wouldn't let her scoop up hand fulls of ant bed, and tried to head fake me a few times. I think it would have been a good instructional device, "What'd we learn?", but I don't think that MJ would agree, and I also don't think I would have an acceptable answer for the questions: Why does the baby have ant bites all over her hands? Why did you let her scoop up hand fulls of ant beds? and How stupid are you? If I responded, "I bet she won't do it again," there's a good chance I would be physically attacked. LMJ was having fun running around and chasing anything that caught her eye. I had my running watch on and she covered a full quarter mile, which is pretty far for someone 2'8". When she gets tired she sits down wherever she is. She did and that's when I saw it, then I said it. There was canine scat on her shoe. Fortunately, I saw it before she saw it and took her shoes off as quickly as I could. I put her back in the stroller and found a napkin and wiped as much poop off of her shoe as I could. Then I started thinking about hunting down the jackass that didn't curb his dog, and beating him to death with LMJ's filthy shoe. Side Note: It is sooooo hard for me not to curse in front of my little girl, but I bit my tongue. As we were walking home I became more phlegmatic about the shoe dooky, and chalked it up to a baby girl first. Too bad I didn't take any pictures. Aww, remember when she stepped in her first steaming pile? Oh how time flies.

Sometimes They Kill Their Masters or The Lesson of the Golem

I hope this will be the last post about politics for a while. The Republicans are turning on their tulip. McCain advisors are going on the record blaming Sarah Palin and her team for costing them the election. John McCain had a sober quote about how campaigns are viewed by history,

“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etc. And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etc.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”

None of this changes the fact that they gave Attila her first taste of the limelight, and now they’re trying to tell her she can’t have any more. Didn’t they learn anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger? The Republican powers-that-be are a bunch of Ivy League, brie eating, chardonnay sippers whose every accomplishment began with, “Daddy may I have…” While Sarah Palin rose to be governor of Alaska and candidate for VP of the United States basically by herself. They may be willing to have someone stabbed in the back, but she is willing to personally, probably literally, stab someone in the front. She’s not as smart as Arnold, but she’s every bit as focused and ambitious. This country didn’t rise to greatness because we’re smarter than anyone else. It rose to greatness through determination and being in the right place at the right time. We have a lot more Joe Kennedys than Thomas Edisons. Ronald Reagan became the Great Communicator by saying nothing better than anyone else before him. He was also the butt of every joke after his run for President in 1968. What happened twelve years later? Sarah Palin is 44. She has a full twenty years to learn that Africa is a continent and not a country, and that Australia, through the power of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is both. Dutch was nice and didn’t hold a grudge against the Republicans that laughed at him, but I wouldn’t count on the Barracuda doing the same. I heard payback is hockey mom.

Uh-Oh

The New World Order without Hulk Hogan

Barack Obama was just elected President of the United States, and right now I’m thinking about LMJ in 15 years when she says, “so”, because it won’t be a big deal to her. “Yeah he was black. So is President Rice.” This is a “Where were you when,” moment in history. I was in my house on Oak Street in my PJ's. It’s the first good historical moment that I’ve personally experienced. I remember Ronald Reagan getting shot. I remember the Challenger exploding. I remember 9/11. Strangely, I feel pretty much the same way tonight that I did when the other events happened, with the exception of 9/11, which my brain couldn’t process. I remember Eddie Murphy joking about Jesse Jackson running – literally and figuratively – in 1984, worrying about someone shooting him if he won. I don’t worry about that with President Obama – PRESIDENT OBAMA (technically President Elect but right now it feels good to write it). Strangely enough, President Bush’s (W minus 75 days) draconian agenda is going to keep President Obama safe. Wire tapping Middle America is no longer just easy, it’s also legal. I don’t think the right wing Rambo wannabes thinking about gearing up to take the country back really have the stomach for a stay at Fort Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Those t-shirts aren’t so funny anymore are they Rush Limbaugh fan? I’ll put my money on the Secret Service. Catch one Neo-Nazi; you catch ‘em all. When I think about it, W made all of this possible. If he wasn’t the worst President since Ulysses S. Grant there is no way Joe Sixpack would vote for a non-white candidate. If W had gotten 9/11 right, or the economy right, or Katrina right, or The War on Terror right, or education right John McCain would be President. Even if he ran the ridiculous campaign that he ran.

The celebrating is over. You have 175 days (W minus 75 then your first 100)to get your s**t straight Mr. President Elect. Barack Obama is not going to be a good President. He’s either going to be FDR – we hope – or Jimmy Carter – we hope not.

A few pieces of advice:

· KEEP HILARY CLINTON OUT OF THE LINE OF SUCCESSION AT ALL COSTS.
· Unite the country. Reach out to the Republicans in Congress and make sure their minority voice is considered.
· Stop running for office and govern

Because I will vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 if you suck.

Election Day!

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU VOTE FOR!!!

The Consortium

We took LMJ for some proto-trick-or-treating Halloween night. She seemed to enjoy taking candy out of the bowl and putting it in her purse – more about the journey than the destination. She was a little bit fussy, and I don’t know if it was because we were getting close to her bedtime, or if there were too many other children around sucking up attention from the community. MJ and I did some parenting networking, which was long overdue. We met a few new families from down the block and our across the street neighbors. They all have children, and only one of them is over five. Fifteen years in and our neighborhood is turning into a neighborhood. I used to hate all my neighbors, but digging in like a tick has paid off, and now I don’t hate them anymore. I even wrote about it on here, but I’m far too lazy to go find it. It’s easier to hate people when you just stare at them out of a window. The networking is important because there are access points in all four directions – there’s water to the south and east, and ghetto to the north and west. If we want to keep as many of our children as possible alive then we, as a neighborhood, need to share intel and back each other up. We need to work together to keep the 2700 block as safe as we can: Putting up stop signs and gates to enter, chipping in with shovels and alibis if a boyfriend’s corpse needs to be disposed of because he brought a daughter home late without an acceptable excuse. Looking out for one another so no one gets caught in a conversation with the block drunk – yes we have our own Otis – etc. We’ll run it like the Mob. We’ll be the literal Five Families. I have to go. I need to get a pinstripe suit.