Slow

Had a traumatic cognitive breakthrough-type thing last month.  Useful in the long run, stressful in the short.  Completely physically and emotionally exhausted right now.  Trying to write about it.  That'll be a long post.  Have a series of short posts to get out of the way first, to clear the decks.  Hopefully before I start posting those I'll have regained the ability to type complete sentences.

Pretty Frazzled Right Now

Not bad but harried.  Will post more when circumstances (and I) calm down.

Pinning Down a Dream

For about ten years I've been longing for a website that would collect information on plus size athletes, dancers, and fitness instructors.  I get so tired of seeing stupid people spout off about how anyone who is plus sized must be out of shape, and I wanted one link I could use to refute their misconceptions.  So I made one on Pinterest.  Introducing Power Women: Plus Size Fitness Role Models.

Please let me know if there's someone I should include.  I may copy the whole thing over to Tumblr for greater exposure, but I'm not sure.  What do y'all think?

April Timeline

April 19, 1775 -- "The shot heard round the world" begins the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the American Revolution.  Commemorated in Maine and Massachusetts on the third  as Patriot's Day with the holding of baseball games in Fenway Park and the running of the Boston Marathon.  Also commemorated by Tea Partiers, "Patriot" groups, and white supremacists in less wholesome ways.

April 20, 1889 -- Birth date of Adolf Hitler.  Commemorated by white supremacists and other pond scum.  In America these commemorations are often combined with Patriot's Day.

April 15, 1955 -- Income tax returns are set as due annually on this date or the nearest next business day for most people living in America.  Protested by anti-government groups and other pond scum.

April 19, 1985 -- FBI raids the compound of The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) in Arkansas, a reactionary white supremacist Christian group wanted in connection with several murders with no loss of life on their major holiday, the 210th anniversary of "the shot heard round the world".

April 19, 1993 -- FBI raids the compound of the Branch Davidians, another reactionary Christian group with outstanding arrest warrants, hoping to recreate their success with the CSA.  Instead, 76 adults and children die.  Both raids are commemorated by other reactionaries around the country.

April 19, 1995 -- Right-wing nutcase Timothy McVeigh bombs the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City in retaliation for the Branch Davidian raid.  The most destructive terrorist act on American soil until 9/11, it kills 168 adults and children.

April 20, 1999 -- Junior right-wing nutcases Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 12 children, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School in an attempt to outdo Timothy McVeigh.  It's the worst American public school massacre -- until this winter.

April 16, 2007 -- Unable to handle stress and the "frightening prospect" of being "turned out into the world of work, finances, responsibilities, and a family," (according to the official review) college nutcase Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech in the worst massacre at an American college in modern times.  No one knows if he was commemorating Patriot's Day or just panicking over the end of the school year.

April 15, 2013 -- The Boston Marathon Massacre.

Yo.  You think we could maybe have a serious discussion on domestic terrorism in this country?  Or is everyone gonna stuff their heads in the sand and act all shocked, shocked, SHOCKED the next time blood flows in the third week of April?

In 2014 Patriot's Day falls on April 21.  Mark your calendar.

Preacher Wants to Enslave Non-Christians

Source.

In a recently posted You Tube sermon, the pastor of Chalcedon Presbyterian Church, Dr. Joe Morecraft says in a Biblical society, the godly must own “the fool who despises God’s wisdom” because it’s the only way to keep those with a “slave mentality” from ruining other people’s families.
Based on Proverbs 11:29, Morecraft makes a case for Biblically justified enslavement of a man who does not “trust in Christ” since slavery is the only way to “keep a fool under wraps.”
The dominionist pastor interprets the Proverb to predict that in a Christian theocracy, an unbeliever will “lose his family, his property, and his freedom,” and “his energies, talents and life will not be used as he himself pleases, but in the service of wise people who work hard to benefit the community.”
“Put him in somebody’s service where they can watch over him and make him do right even though he doesn’t want to do it.”
According to Pastor Morecraft, the consequences of being a “foolish person who is unwilling to live by the Word of God” is to “become a slave of somebody who is godly and who is wise.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSBauI1ETX4

Coming Up For Air

The family's been down with a seasonal bug.  Regular Life (TM) will resume at some later date.

The Grand Bargain

Brighteyes, my 13 3/4-year old is as tall as I am.  We tease her about how long she's been waiting for that to happen.

She and her 11-year old sister Sunshine have been drooling over bright, colorful, expensive workout clothes, so after church yesterday we drove to the JCPenney outlet store in Starkville where I found them two pair of capri pants each, an identical set of two-toned pants and a similar-but-not-identical set of solid-colored pants.

The girls wear the same sizes, so everything we bought them could fit each girl.  Such is the discrepancy in sizing that one set was a "small" and the other set a "large" but they all fit the same.

I found a solid pair of hot pink capri pants that both girls loved and that fit them both, but the only other pants in their size (and my price range) were black.  I bought both.

We had the following conversation in the car.

Me:  We've got a pair of pink pants and a pair of black pants.  Who wants the pink ones?

Chorus:  Me!

Brighteyes washes the dishes and Sunshine dries them and puts them up.

Me:  Okay, who's willing to both wash and put up the dishes for a week for the pink pants?

Chorus:  Me!

Me:  How about two weeks?

Sunshine:  Me!

Dad:  A bidding war.

Me:  Brighteyes?

Brighteyes:  She'll flood the kitchen like she did last time.

Me:  If she does, she'll forfeit the pants and they'll go to you.

Dad:  After you wash and put up the dishes for a week.

Me:  Is that fair?  Everyone agree to that?

Chorus:  ...yeah....

We'll see how it goes.

Fitness Update February, 2013

My weak knee is the hard limit on my exercising right now; I can only add on as much as it will put up with.  I'm trying to keep it at the level where it grumbles in the afternoon but not when I go to bed.  I'm doing strength training three days a week, cardio four days a week, and yoga daily for the cool-down.

After seven weeks with Wii Fit Plus I've almost maxed out parts of it while barely scratching other parts.  WFP is divided into four parts:  yoga, strength, cardio ("aerobics") and balance.  The aerobics weren't getting my heart rate up enough, so I started using Gold's Gym Dance Workout instead.  I'm doing 10 - 15 minutes of that for a warmup when I do strength training and 45 minutes when I do cardio.  All it does is cardio and some rhythm, though.  But it does have a 2-player mode, so when the girls get up in time to exercise with me I can do about 15 minutes worth with each of them.

The rest of WFP has given me a conundrum.  I've maxed out all the yoga and strength workouts that don't involve balance while showing little improvement on the balance games.  The game is obviously calibrated for someone a lot smaller than I am.  I need more strength training than I'm getting there.

The best strength training program for the Wii is EA Sports Active 2.  The just-as-good-but-only-a-quarter-of-the-p

rice program is NFL Training Camp.  Guess which one I got?  Right, the cheap one.  The testosterone gets a bit whiffy, but I can put up with that for the price.  It includes special monitors, although those present a problem when doing floor work.  The darn machine can't read though the wood table it's sitting on.

The program ("game" isn't really appropriate) is set up to use with the included resistance band, which is the flimsiest I've ever seen.  I've never owned a resistance band you can see daylight through before.  It's hilarious to watch these (literally) hulking NFL avatars supposedly straining to use something I could snap with my fingers.  But I can use my own bands and weights instead.  Yes, I know I can use my own bands and weights any time I want to, but it's nice to have someone notice what I'm doing, even if it's a virtual "someone".  The next problem is figuring out how to hold a hand weight and a Wii remote at the same time.  15 pounds of steel vs. 2 ounces of expensive plastic and electronics -- yeah, I know which one I'd bet on surviving.  Maybe I can rig up a sling with the wrist strap and hair bands....

The computer-generated 10-15 minute (which always turns out to be 17 1/2 minutes) "easy" program is enough for my knee, but I'm thinking about creating my own upper-body and core workout to do afterwards.

To my surprise, I did notice that I had lost some weight the other day -- in my shoulder and upper arms, about as far as can be from the hips and thighs where I need to lose weight.   I've read that endomorphs lose weight from the top down, but this is ridiculous.  At this rate my pants size will go down in time for the next presidential election....

Owl's First Journal

Owl (4) has finished the letters section of his preschool workbook.  The next morning he got out a sheet of typing paper and started writing letters on it.  He was thrilled when I pulled out a preschool writing tablet and immediately copied out the alphabet.  His parents are thrilled, period.

The Science of Football

Here's a fun way to teach basic physics:  Science of  NFL Football videos.  Let's hear it for Sir Isaac Newton.

An Unexpectedly Educational Stop

On the way back from church yesterday we stopped for dinner at Luigi's Family Restaurant in Louisville, which turned out to be a diner.  (That wasn't clear from the outside.)  We took the opportunity to introduce the girls to two of their offerings -- a "meat and three" and a Chick tract.  They weren't impressed with either, although the meal was at least comprehensible.  They thought the Chick tract was weird and stupid.   They far preferred Fred Van Lente's parody and with good reason.  Van Lente's a very funny writer.  I miss his work on Marvel Adventures.

We won't be going back to the diner, though.  Chick tracts insult 99.9% of the human race and God as well.  Jack's going to have some explaining to do on Judgement Day.

*blink*

I started using Wii Fit Plus a month ago, and Gold's Gym Dance two weeks ago.  As of one month later I've lost 6.7 pounds.

I'm sure it's a mistake, although I don't see how it could be.  Or maybe it's simply the super-easy part and now things are going to get incredibly difficult.



Well, dang.  I don't have much of a problem with pessimism and poor self image, do I? /sarcasm

Fitness Update

I first wrote about my body issues and fitness a year ago.  Since then the tendons in my knee have largely healed.  In Fall 2011 a steep flight of stairs left me in pain for weeks.  Last summer I could hike (with frequent stops) for two days before it would give out.  Now I can do an hour or so of moderate exercise a day with it only twinging.  Of course that leg is week and I'm still hauling around my pregnancy weight, but I can work on those things now.

We got Wii Fit Plus for Christmas.  Wow, feedback, what a novel concept!  Apparently I'm not nearly as out of shape as I thought I was, although I haven't tried most of the exercises that involve standing on one leg.  The yoga and strength training segments are good, but  the cardio's pretty light.  I got Gold's Gym Dance Workout, and the Latin Dance and "cardio boxing" handle the cardio segments well.  I'd prefer bellydancing, but I can see where that would be difficult for the Wiimote to pick up.  Since the goal of bellydancing is to isolate movements to one part of the body, you'd have to adorn yourself with motion sensors like a Christmas tree.

Brighteyes likes the Latin Dance segments.  Sunshine prefers Shaun White Snowboarding.  Owl likes to beat me at the 2-player race from Wii Fit Plus (their algorithm gives everyone the same stride length, so it's how fast you can pitter-patter that counts).

The weight loss chatter hasn't been nearly as triggery as I feared, although apparently I accidentally turned off a lot of that feature in WFP.  It's nice to see that program makers have learned to turn it down.  They weren't telling us anything we didn't know already.

3 Kids, a Spouse Who Teaches, and Another School Massacre: How I Spent Last Friday

I guess trigger warnings are appropriate.

The Vegas Connection

Right now my internet connection is based on Las Vegas logic:  just a tiny blip every few minutes, just enough so you'll sit there and keep punching away at it instead of getting on with your life.  It sucks.  I hope they get it fixed over the holidays.

Friday's news was bad.  Is still bad.  Isn't likely to stop being bad for a while.

Y'all take care, and if I don't get a chance to say it later, Merry Christmas.

Note to Evangelical Bloggers: Become Better Storytellers

I recently had an invitation to follow an Evangelical Christian blog whose posts consist of out-of-context verses from the Bible strung together in a rambling fashion that did not form a coherent story.  Blogging is storytelling.  If  your posts don't tell a story, even if it's just the story of how your day went, they're not ready to publish.

Best Black Friday Ever

I haven't spent a dime on Black Friday in over 10 years, since Wal-Mart stopped putting practical clothes on their Friday-after-Thanksgiving sale.  I'm neither an adrenaline junkie nor a pleasure shopper, and I like to buy Christmas presents early.  The biggest reason though is that the Christmas shopping period long ago became a making-money time of year rather than a spending-money time of year.  When jobs were scarce I worked my butt off at Christmas and made enough money to live on until the end of March, when hiring would pick up again.  That's why I'm puzzled by all this fuss over working on Thanksgiving.  Twenty years ago whenever I did seasonal work I worked Thanksgiving every year except when I was a paid Salvation Army bellringer.

But this year we actually spent a fair amount of money on Black Friday.  Some of my husband's students are Afghan War vets with pickup trucks.  We paid them to haul furniture from the old house for us, a task we previously hadn't been able to organize.

They brought down the piano and a lot of the older case goods -- mostly mid-twentieth century mass-produced junk, but better built than you can find in all but the fanciest showrooms today.  The only known antique is the wardrobe my great-great-grandmother brought from England.  She was a mail-order bride whose hand in marriage was sold to pay some of her family's debts, and the wardrobe served as her trunk when she crossed the ocean.  The dresser and the cabinets have little value save utilitarian and sentimental, but after two years without a place to put my socks I missed them.

Best money I ever spent on Black Friday.

Boo Hiss CBS! Thanks For Ruining the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

After 15 years of living without a connected TV, I looked forward to showing my children the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  We had CBS now, and CBS aired the parade.  All we had to do was turn on the TV and we'd see it, right?  Wrong.

What we found was a morning talk show being broadcast outdoors while all sorts of interesting parade-type things went on in the background where you couldn't see them, while the hosts chatted inanely with people whose bodies were blocking the view.  Doubtless they were important entertainment-type people, but right then they were in the darned way.  Clowns, dancers, and marching bands could be barely made out behind the guests legs, as could the balloon-wranglers whose balloons dangled frustratingly just out of camera range, cruelly teasing us with a flash of color at the very top of the screen.

After 10 minutes the children were begging us to turn it off.  I couldn't blame them.  I'd never seen worse coverage of an outdoor event in my life.  CBS needs to give the job to experts who actually know what they're doing.  It's a parade, not a blooming chat show!

There Will Be War By 2015

The Republicans lost bigtime this election, and watching them work through the various stages of shock, anger, and denial has been highly entertaining.  But as the hangover fades in the cold morning light, the few remaining sane people left in the GOP are taking a hard look at the facts:

FACT 1:  The only groups that voted Republican were old white people and blue collar white men.  One of those groups is dying, and the not-yet-old white people are pretty Democratic.

FACT 2:   The current wave of young people, the Millenials, turned out in large numbers in 2008 and 2012 (half of them voted Tuesday, and they made up 19% of the total vote, 2% higher than senior citizens) and overwhelmingly voted Democratic.  The typical pattern is that if young people vote for the same party in three straight Presidential elections they'll vote for that party for life.  If the Republicans don't convince a lot of Millenials for vote for them in 2016, they're toast.

THEREFORE:  The Republicans are going to have to come up with some way to convince young people, especially non-white young people, that conservative, patriarchal values are necessary, relevant, exciting, even sexy.

Why?  Because in their mind there's a:

GIVEN:  It can't possibly be the MESSAGE that's wrong, only the MARKETING of the message.  "We do not need to change our values, but we do need to find ways to communicate them in an engaging and welcoming manner." (Morrissey)  Every reasonable individual (as they see it) will surely become an authoritarian, conservative Republican if the package is only sold to them in the right way.

The HELP WANTED sign is already up.  Ed Morrissey is looking for "men and women who can think creatively, produce a positive agenda that isn’t defined by an oppositional nature, and who can eloquently communicate that agenda and the values that drive it."  There's a gig for an out-of-work colllege grad with a Creative Writing degree.

But this solution runs up against

FACT 3:  People who can "think creatively" and "produce a positive agenda" tend to be progressives, not conservatives.  It's going to be hard to find a genius who can take a worldview that's defined by an oppositional nature and sell it as something else, and even harder to find people who would buy that argument under normal circumstances (more on that later).  It's a long shot.  The very fact that it's a long shot runs up against

FACT 4:  The 1% lost a ton of money backing Republican candidates who lost.  Ralph Reed was given $10 million, Karl Rove $400 million, and that's not counting Adelson,  the Koch brothers and all the other conservative SuperPacs.  Rich people don't like losing money on what they had been promised was a sure thing.  (The fact that they could stand to lose it is irrelevant. They still don't like it.)  There's a lot of very wealthy, very angry white guys out there who want to make sure that a progressive Democratic landslide never happens again on their watch.  They're not going to want to back long shots.  They're going to want to back sure things.

FACT 5:  There is only one sure, time-tested, tried-and-true method to tilt the country to the right -- war.

THEREFORE:  Some foreign grievance against the US is going to be carefully cultivated for the next year until it erupts sometime in 2014 or 2015 to frighten this country into seeking solace in the jingoistic propaganda of the Republicans, just like so many people did after 9/11.  It'll happen just in time for Obama's "incompetence" in dealing with it to become a rallying cry for the Republican presidential candidate in the 2016.  It'll happen because it's the only guaranteed way to scare that many people into changing their worldview (and subsequently their politics) that fast.

Does my conjecture sound callous to you?  It does to me as well.  Only a cold-hearted cynic would do something like that, and only a blind idiot would let them.  But lest you think the Republicans wouldn't do such a thing, consider

EXHIBIT A:  Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Romney made his vast fortune as a job destroyer, closing down factories, shipping the jobs to China,and leaving vast swaths of the country (including the town I used to live in) that had been healthy, prosperous communities full of starving, destitute people bereft of income, jobs, and hope; yet Candidate Romney was sold to the American people as a "job creator".  Only a cold-hearted cynic would try to pull such a con game, and only a blind idiot would fall for it.

Halloween 2012: The Good, the Bad, and the Terrifying

Halloween was a little better for us this year.  We were a little more settled into the new house, and had a little more time and effort to spend on decorating the place.  Our neighbors didn't do that much.  The college students who went by on the hayride said we were the only house that put up lights and decorations, and my husband could only find four houses to take the children to in two towns.  The seller I bought some decorations from said people were under a lot of pressure this year from the churches to be "good Christians".  Apparently "good Republicans" too.  But there's nothing like oppression to breed resentment, so there's a probably a fine crop of angry teenagers coming along wanting everything they weren't allowed to have.

Only two kids came over this year, as opposed to the two dozen we had last year.  Still, it's better than the twelve years we went without a single trick-or-treator before we moved.

When the children got back, I put on How to Train Your Dragon, a wonderful movie that we hadn't seen before.  Now everyone is eager to see the cartoon Dragons:  Riders of Berk.

But all the ghosties, ghoulies, and goblins were only a momentary respite from the true horror of -- the election.  I've never been so stressed over a vote before.  I know what kind of a nation Romney would turn this country into, a nation where every state is governed just like Mississippi.  I don't think y'all want that.  I know for a fact I don't.