My Friend Joe

Tonight was Joe's retirement party. Joe is a very good friend of mine. I started working with Joe almost 18 years ago. Through the years he has been a mentor, a coworker, my barber and a very good friend. For the last 10 years Joe's office has been the place I go to think. If I get stuck on a problem I could always go visit Joe and talk to him while my subconcious looks for a solution to my problem of the moment. While talking with Joe or listening to the details of his latest task or sharing stories about our children I have solved countless problems over the years.

Joe was my mentor when I first tried my hand as a program manager. He taught me everything he could. But it took several years for me to realize that while Joe relished the challenges of program management, I hated it. But during those years Joe became my friend. Of course that was easy. Joe is naturally a likable guy. It helped that we had so many things in common. We were both draftsmen in our early careers. We both like home improvement projects. Once he badgered me into trying golf and got me hooked we were able to share that also.

Today was Joe's last day at work. He didn't want to anyone to make a fuss over his retiring. He told his wife and coworkers that he didn't want a party. He didn't want plaques or presentations. He didn't want anyone making a lot of speeches. Joe just wanted to ride quietly off into the sunset.

So of course being the wonderful wife she is, his wife ignored his wishes and planned a surprise party. So Joe thought that his children and grandchildren were coming into town to celebrate his retirement by going to dinner with him. So when Joe got to his retirement dinner, there were 30 of his closest friends and coworkers waiting there to celebrate with him.

We had a delightful evening. Joe got a load of gifts, plaques, and stories told about him. We all had a wonderful dinner up at the Indian Wells Valley Lodge.

I'm glad that Joe has retired while he is still young enough and healthy enough to enjoy it. But I will miss him at work. But then it's not like he is leaving the area. He will still be living only 1 mile away. So it will only take a little more effort to see him regularly.

Mardi Gras

I'm a 6th generation American of German and Norwegian decent. I'm Lutheran. I was born in South Dakota and raised there and in Wyoming. So Mardi Gras doesn't mean squat to me. But to my dear wife's family is from Louisiana. She went to college in Lafayette LA. She was born and raised Catholic. She loves Mardi Gras. She went to several of the parades and celebrations while going to school in Louisiana. My dear wife has an entire trunk full of beads, doubloons and other souvenirs. A brief clarification, she collected her beads the hard way - with her shirt on.

So to my wife and children Mardi Gras is a fun time. They wear beads to school and work. We have gumbo or jambalaya or etouffee for dinner and my dear wife usually bakes a king cake. This is the part of Mardi Gras that I have learned to love - the food.

Dinner this evening was sausage and chicken jambalaya. We also had king cake for dessert. This year however, my dear wife didn't bake it. As part of our personal attempt to help rebuild New Orleans after the hurricanes we ordered our king cake from Haydel's Bakery. I ordered the cake Friday afternoon and it arrived via UPS this afternoon. The cake arrived in remarkably good condition considering the box was pretty beat up. The cake was delicious. I shouldn't admit this, but it was as good if maybe just a little bit better than my wife's. But don't tell her I said that.

Happy Mardi Gras!

30th Class Reunion

I just found out that my 30th High School Class Reunion is going to be held in Cheyenne Wyoming on Aug. 11-13. They are planning an Icebreaker on Friday evening. A formal dinner with the our cross town rivals East High School on Saturday evening and maybe a picnic on Sunday.

If you are interested there is a link to our reunion information here:

Cheyenne Central Class of 1976

I would love to be there for this event. But my family is already planning on spending a couple weeks in Wyoming in July. The University of Wyoming has a volleyball camp the third week in July that my oldest daughter wants to participate in. The family is going to spend some time at Yellowstone and then back in Cheyenne for a few days to catch a little Frontier Days action.

So I don't know if I will be able to get back there again in August. That weekend is one week before Chaos starts school. It will also be really close to coinciding with high school volleyball tryouts. I may be able to get back there by myself, but I doubt that the family will be able to go with me. Also I will have to be hoarding my vacation time since my middle school volleyball season will be starting the end of August and I always end up using a lot of vacation time with that.

However I do have some concerns about the decision to combine our dinner with our old cross town rivals - East High School. Granted we are all 30 years older now and should be able to behave like adults. But I wouldn't count on it. If everyone gets to reflecting on the good old days the dinner may end early when we all sneak out early to go egg each others buildings or repaint the rocks outside of each other's school buildings.

Now that said, my lawyers tell me I should make it clear that I never threw eggs at East High School. I never painted their landscaping red. I never wrote crude comments in chalk on the sidewalk outside their front door. I never wrapped underwear over the head of their thunderbird mascot. I never drove past their outdoor activites yelling rude things or mooning the crowd. I never wrote "East High Sucks" all over the seats on their side of the stadium before our football games. I never wrote "Go Central" in ketchup on the seats on their side of the gym before our basketball games. I never sat in the parking lot during their home football games and threw snowballs over the back of the bleachers into the crowd.

I'm also sure that none of my fine upstanding classmates ever did such things either. We were good, hard working, hard studying students who would never commit such rude acts. We respected and enjoyed the friendly rivalry that we shared with our cross town classmates.

Thats my story and I'm sticking to it.

Raining

It has been raining here since about one o'clock this afternoon. It has been a nice gentle rain. The kind of rain the desert needs but seldom gets. We usually get these violent little gullywashers that turn into flash floods. This rain has been slow and steady. Giving it plenty of time to sink into the soil.

I like rainy days like this. Mostly because we don't get too many of them. I would probably get tired of them if they happened all the time.

Internationalism or Isolationism

Hillary Clinton is confused. She doesn't know whether or not she wants the United States to be Internationalist or Isolationist.

Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations on Dec 15, 2003 she had this to say:

We need a tough-minded, muscular foreign and defense policy, one that not only respects our allies and seeks new friends as it strikes at known enemies, but which is understood and supported by the majority of the American people. The consequences of unilateralism, isolationism and overtly expressed preemptive defense, I think, are severe. We will end up with fewer nations, fewer intelligence services and fewer law enforcement personnel internationally helping to protect us against attacks, fewer nations helping to counterattack when we are struck, and less leverage in advancing democracy, freedom, open markets and other values that we believe elevate the people of the world even as they protect our people here at home.

This is not to propound some golden rule of international affairs, because I think it's rooted in the intelligence and the success of the 20th century. The more we throw our weight around, the more we encourage other nations to join with each other as a counterweight. We have a lot of problems besides Iraq and Afghanistan on the horizon. The number one problem remains the spread of weapons of mass destruction and those falling into the hands of either rogue nations or borderless terrorists. And so we have to have a united front of the world that cares about life more than death; that consists of builders instead of destroyers, standing together, fighting together, working together.

Then just last week Hillary and Democratic Senator Robert Menendez (N.J.) announced that they plan to introduce legislation barring the sale of port operations to foreign governments.

That's right. All foreign governments. So I'm guessing that when Hillary said that we have to be "builders instead of destroyers, standing together, fighting together, working together" she should have added "unless you are a foreign company".

Now I will admit that on a gut level the thought of an Arab company running some ports makes me nervous. Does that make me islamophobic, or a racist, or an isolationist? Nope it makes me human. We were attacked by radical islamists on 9/11 and are currently fighting a global war on terror against more radical islamists. So the thought of doing business with Arabs makes a lot of people nervous. But not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are radical Islamists.

So I suspect that eventually this business deal is going to go through on way or another. But in case it doesn't, I would like to recommmend that they contract be awarded to APM Terminals of Denmark which is part of the shipping giant AP Moller Maersk Group, a publicly traded company that is controlled by the Moller family of Denmark.

Eminent Domain - part 2

As I mentioned here, the rights of all property owners in Ridgecrest is under threat by the Community and Economic Development Director Gary Parsons said Ridgecrest Redevelopment Agency.

Rite-aid, a company that already has a business here in town wants to buy a lot at the corner of Ridgecrest blvd and China Lake Blvd to build a new store. The fly in the ointment of Rite-aid's plan is that the property owner at the corner where they want to build wants more to sell his property than the Rite-aid developer wants to pay.

Rite-aid's solution is to petition the Ridgecrest redevelopment Agency and the City Council to use the power of eminent domain to force the property owner to sell to them at a lower price.

This is a completely absurd situation. In the last few years there have been several eminent domain cases in the United States where people who did not want to sell their homes were forced to. But this case is different. The property owner is willing to sell. Rite-aid is just not willing to pay his price.

What ever happened to the rule of supply and demand? What ever happened to the rights of property owners? If Rite-aid wants this property then pay this owners price. If he is asking more than you want to pay then let him keep his property and buy somewhere else or better yet keep doing business in the location where you are already located. If Rite-aid really wants to move, there are a lot of empty buildings in town and lots of other empty lots. Buy one of them.

It seems like our City Council and the Gary Parsons, the Community and Economic Development Director have lost touch with what the people of Ridgecrest want. There have been several letters to the editor of both our local papers all condemning the use of eminent domain for this cause. Most of the authors of these letters all say the same thing. They believe that this is wrong and they will not shop in the new Rite-aid if they gain this property through eminent domain and they will also vote against any member of the city council who supports this action in the next election. Talking to people in town about this issue I haven't found a single person who thinks this is a proper use of eminent domain.

Yet, in the face of these objections to this use of eminent domain Gary Parsons seems dead set in making it happen. In the Tuesday Feb 21st edition of the Daily Independent Mr. Parsons had this to say.

"He’s going to sell it," said Parsons. "The question is at what price."

Sounds pretty theatening to me. Sell your property on your own or we will take it away from you, then pay you what we think it is worth and tell you that you sold it.

I personnally don't know what the big deal over this piece of property is. I think the property on California St. where the City Council, the Police Department, and the City Offices are located would be a great place for a new Rite-aid. Maybe we should get the Council to excercise a little eminent domain and sell that property to a drug store, or better yet a new Super Walmart.

One last time:

I disagree with this action and I promise that I will never set foot in any businees that acquires it's land through eminent domain. Additionally I will use my blog and my voice to convince as many others to also boycott said business. I will also not vote for any member of the city council who supports this action. I will also use my blog, my voice, and my wallet to champaign against said council members.

Car Raffle

My dear wife, daughter Chaos and I all attended the annual car raffle that Saint Ann School holds as a fundraiser each year.

The car raffle is held on the last Saturday before Ash Wednesday. The festivities trend towards a mardi gras theme and include dinner, open bar, a DJ for musical entertainment, the main raffle, and several impromtu showstoppers.

The car raffle is a reverse raffle and they only sell 200 tickets. The last ticket left in the barrel wins the car, or $13,000. There is a $1000 prize for the 199th ticket drawn. The 196th through 198th tickets win $500 each. There are 19 other $100 prizes. Several businesses donate products or services that are awarded during the drawing.

This was our fourth year attending this event. This evening was the most fun we have had. My daughter and two of her friends were the "Vanna's" for the evening. They take turns drawing the numbers and moving numbered signs from one tally board to the other to keep track of the winners.

Dinner was catered by Victoria's - a local restaurant. The food was good. Tri-tip, chicken, fried rice, mixed vegatables, etc. The food was very good and there was plenty of it.

The last few years we didn't make plans to attend the event with other couples. Many folks do, they have a regular group that they sit with. We spent the first three years just picking an unoccupied corner table and seeing who showed up to sit with us. This year we did the same thing. However the first people to approach our table were the other two "Vanna's". Eventually three more of my daughter's classmates wandered by to visit. By the time dinner was served they had all gotten their parent's permission to sit with us. So we shared dinner with 6 middle school kids. This gave my dear wife the chance to experience one of the things I like best about spending time with these kids. The two of us just sat there quietly and ate and let the kids visit among themselves. It was very entertaining. We learned more about what goes on during a normal school day during that 45 minute meal than we hear in a week from our own kids.

The gossip was hilarious. Fortunately all the news was just amusing middleschool kid kind of stuff - who talks in class, who irritates who, which teacher gives the hard tests, who is grounded this week and what they did to deserve it, etc.

The down side of having these dinner guests was once the drawing started our "Vanna's" had to go to work and the rest of the kids wandered off to visit other friends. We were all alone. As the drawing progressed and people left, another couple who's table guests had left once their numbers had been drawn moved over to our table and spent the rest of the evening with us.

We had a lot of fun. We didn't win any of the big prizes. But then we never do. We go for the dinner and entertainment. My dear wife always explains why we never win drawings and such by saying we are lucky in love. I think she's right.

Selling our Ports to Terrorists?

I have to admit that at first glance the administrations determination to allow a United Arab Emirates company to manage six major U.S. ports seemed like a bad idea to me. After all, on 9/11 we were attacked by radical Islamists, two of which were United Arab Emirates citizens. We are currently at war against radical Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I decided to take a deep breath and try to examine both sides of the issue. This turned out to be more difficult than I imagined because most of the opinions flying around are all negative. Finally I found a calm rational sounding article on the Wall Street Journal Online that was able to answer all my questions.

I couldn't understand why President Bush would be so anxious to turn over our ports to people who attacked us.

Yes, some of the 9/11 hijackers were UAE citizens. But then the London subway bombings last year were perpetrated by citizens of Britain, home to the company (P&O) that currently manages the ports that Dubai Ports World would take over.

so I guess one could argue that our ports are already being run by a company from a terrorist nation. Not that I would ever characterize Great Britain as a terrorist nation. But the London Bombings were carried out by British citizens. So denying a UAE company the rights to contract because two of the 9/11 highjackers were thier citizens would be like saying that no United States company could bid on this contract because Timothy McVeigh was a US citizen. You can't condemn an entire nation because of the behaviour of two of its citizens.

But what about security. Wouldn't turning security of our ports over to a company that is more likely to employ terrorists than a western company be dangerous.

Dubai Ports World would be managing the commercial activities of these U.S. ports, not securing them. There's a difference. Port security falls to Coast Guard and U.S. Customs officials. "Nothing changes with respect to security under the contract," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday. "The Coast Guard is in charge of security, not the corporation."

In a telephone interview yesterday, Kristie Clemens of U.S. Customs and Border Protection elaborated that "Customs and Border Protection has the sole responsibility for the cargo processing and cargo security, incoming and outgoing. The port authority sets the guidelines for the entire port, and port operators have to follow those guidelines." Again, nothing in the pending deal would affect that arrangement.

Personally I trust Coast Guard to defend our ports. At least I do as long as guys like George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are in charge.

But now I have to come to grips with the fact that Jimmy Carter and I agree on this topic. Ow! That makes my brain hurt.

More Ricky Williams

From Jay Leno on the tonight show:

Miami Dolphin's running back Ricky Williams may be suspended for an entire year after he tested positive for marijuana again! Ricky has always marched to a different drummer -- apparently, now it's a reggae drummer.

Q - What do Ricky Williams and the Winter Olympics have in common?

A - They both do the half-pipe.

Miami Dolphins Running Back Ricky Williams may be suspended for an entire year after he failed a drug test - again. This is part of the NFL's strict 300 strikes and you are out clause.

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Yeah, I know that yesterday I said that I wasn't going to say anything about Ricky Williams until his protest of his failed drug test was complete. But what the heck, he's a pot-headed quitter that I have no respect for anyway.

Tequila

According to this site the number one song on the Billboard Pop Charts the day I was born was "Tequila" by The Champs.

My dear wife's song is "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton.

Chaos was totally unimpressed to find out that her song was "End of the Road" by Boyz II Men.

Noise and Destruction's response to "Un-Break My Heart" by Toni Braxton was "Who?"

Ricky Williams

According to ESPN's Hank Goldberg Miami Dolphin's Running Back Ricky Williams has failed another NFL drug test, his fourth.

I have written here and here before about my opinion of Ricky (Quiter) Williams. I'm not going to say much now because Ricky is protesting the results of the test. But I do have one comment. If this results of this test are upheld it will result in at least a one year suspension for Ricky. If that happens at least I will be able to cheer on my Dolphins next year without feeling guilty.

Olympics Medals Ceremony

One of my favorite part of the both the summer and winter Olympics is the medals ceremony. I like seeing the athletes receive their medals and watch their reactions as their national anthem plays and they see their flag rise into the air.

I like the SBC commercial that has been playing during the Olympics where a medal ceremony from the games is being shown to people around the world who are gathered in bars and other places listening to our National Anthem play. It's too bad for us viewers and for SBC that we aren't getting to see that happen for real in these olympic games. For many of us this commercial is the only time we have seen or heard the National Anthem of the United States.

I accept the fact that NBC does a truely horrible job of broadcasting the olympics. They refuse to show anything live. They are also fantastic at taking all the surprise out of the events. You can bet that at the start of an event, any athlete who the broadcast focuses on, talks about, or shows on the screen more than twice will play a prominate role in the results of the event - good or bad. If NBC is talking about them at the start of the event, they will either come from behind to win, set a record, have an accident or do something else to lose their shot at a medal.

What I can't understand is why NBC is not showing any of the medal ceremonies. My family and I have watched a lot of the Olympics this last week. We will probably watch a lot next week. It is all that has been on our TV every night this week till almost midnight. In all that time I have only seen one medal ceremony and that was at 1 AM this morning.

They have showed several clips of ceremonies. But they have been only brief shots of athletes waving with their medals. The only anthem I have heard played so far was the Italian anthem at the Men's Cross Country Relay this morning.

As of today the United States is tied for the lead in the Gold Medal Count and are tied for third in the total medal count. There have been 7 different American athletes standing on top of a podium while the American Flag rose into the air and our National Anthem played. How many of those special Olympic moments has NBC broadcast for us to see? I haven't seen a single one. If they are showing them at all it is in the wee hours of the morning when no one is watching.

Why is NBC not showing the medal ceremonies? Are they afraid that we might start feeling good about being Americans? Are they afraid to show us an American athlete celebrating reaching the pinnacle of their sport? Or are they just so stupid to think that we might not be interested in seeing all the Olympics instead of just seeing their processed canned replays.

NBC Olympics Coverage - the potted meat of sports broadcasting.

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Update: Wow, they showed the Women's Ice Hockey Medal Ceremony this afternoon. The American's won bronze. It was nice seeing a bunch of women, any of whom could beat the crap out of me, wiping tears out of their eyes while their national anthem played.

A Lesson for a Lifetime

Today in the first ever Olympics Women's Snowboard Cross gold medal race, American and World Champion Lindsey Jacobellis competed in a tough race against two Canadians and a Swiss rider. Lindsey Jacobellis fought her way through a tight start, and some jostling in the upper half of the track to come flying to the finish with an unprecedented 140 foot lead over the second place rider. That's when things went wrong. On the second to last feature (jump) of the race Lindsey glanced back and noticed that she was essentially alone on the track. As she launched herself off the feature she twisted in the air grabbing the edge of her snowboard in a method (trick) that snowboarder's call a "backside method grab". She landed back on her heels and fell over backwards. By the time she had struggled back onto her board and started back down the course she had been passed by Switzerland's Tanja Frieden. Lindsey Jacobellis had to settle for the silver medal and a lesson of a lifetime.

I feel sorry for Lindsey. It's tough to work the years she has to get to the Olympics then to get through 3 preliminary rounds and to have a commanding lead only to lose it all with one moment of showboating.

That said, as a sports fan who has had my fill of showboating, egocentric, spoiled superstar athletes it was kind of nice to see an athlete pay for their showboating in a very real manner. The media seems to love showing us the showboats, the showoffs, the over-the-top attention grabbers. What we don't see enough of is the hard working athletes who do what it takes to win and then celebrate. I don't get a thrill out of watching some multimillionaire NFL wide receiver dancing in the endzone, or some defensive lineman doing a sack dance. Isn't that what they get paid for? I don't see the need for 360 degree spins or tomahawk slams in basketball when a lay up or simple dunk scores the same two points. I've just had enough of elite athletes concentrating more on image and fluff than on playing the game well.

As a middle school volleyball coach I stress three main things that I want my players to learn. First: to learn to be a good volleyball player. Second: to be a good teammate. Third: to be a good student-athlete.

That third one is the tough one. There is so much involved in trying to turn little girls into good student-athletes. Requiring them to get good grades and backing up their parents when they are kept away from practices or games because they aren't getting their homework done is easy.

Demanding good sportsmanship is also pretty easy. I explain at the beginning that poor sportsmanship will not be tolerated. Trash talking, rude comments, gestures, or behavior will not be tolerated. Players are required to respect and be polite to their opponents, coaches, referees, fans, parents and themselves. They get no other warnings. First violation of these rules earns a player a seat next to me on the bench for the rest of the match. I have never had to issue a tougher penalty as we have never had a repeat offender. Now if I could only get the parents to behave as well as my athletes.

The hard lessons to teach are:

Stay in the moment. Forget the last play, concentrate on the current one. Don't worry about what's for dinner, the mistake your teammates just made, or what you mother is yelling from the stands. Concentrate on making this play the best one in the game.

Stay connected with your teammates. Communicate with each other. Pay attention to each other. Try to learn to act with one brain. Everyone concentrating on the same process at the same time.

Stay in the game. There is no such thing as too big a lead. In a game to 25 points you can be up 24-0 and still lose. Don't back off on a weaker team. It is the players job to play their best all the time. If they get into a game against a weaker opponent it is my job to modify the lineup accordingly. It is their job to play full out all the way to the end.

Play the game well. Work on your basics. A free pass to an open spot on the court or an off-speed hit to the corner score the same point as a powerful floor denting spike. I played a lot of volleyball for many years with young men just out of high school or college who put a huge amount of effort into jumping as high as possible and hitting the ball has hard as possible. They just never seemed to learn that a 38 inch vertical leap was useless if you couldn't get your spikes over the net and onto the floor in bounds.

Lindsey hopefully learned a good lesson today. Apparently she hadn't learned it earlier. Lets hope it sticks this time.

Eminent Domain in Ridgecrest

The main intersection in downtown Ridgecrest is where Ridgecrest Blvd and China Lake Blvd. cross. Traffic at this intersection is controlled by a stoplight. There are two through lanes and a turn lane in all four directions. This intersection is essentially the center of town.

Three of the corners at this intersection contain shopping centers. The Bank of America in on the fourth corner.

The Northwest corner used to house a Mobile Gas Station, a night club and a couple small shops. A few years ago the small shops were bulldozed and the Mobile Station went out of business. The night club, JDs, was the place to party 20 years ago when I moved here. But it has been closed for several years. This corner has rapidly turned into one of the ugliest corners in town. A run down night club, a boarded up gas station and several cement slabs just aren't most people's ideas of a thriving business center.

There have been several rumors about different businesses developing that corner. For about a year folks were thinking that a Marie Calendar’s was going in there. Then last year it was going to be a Walgren's Drug story. Marie's never happened. Actually it never started. Walgren's bought some property about a mile north and built there instead. Now the latest rumor is that Rite-Aid wants that corner.

Now here is the problem. Rite-Aid wants to buy the property on that corner and put in a store. However the owner of the building that has the old nightclub in it wants a lot of money for his property. This situation is complicated by the fact that they backside of old nightclub contains a Chinese restaurant. This restaurant in one form or another had been in business there for over 20 years.

Since Rite-aid and the property owners have not been able to reach an agreement for sale the City Council has been asked to exercise Eminent Domain and force the existing property owners to sell their property so that the city can sell it to a different business.

Most of the people I have talked to in town all agree on two things. We would really like to see that corner cleaned up. But we all really disagree with the idea of taking away a person’s property so that another private business can have their spot.

This situation is even more ludicrous because we already have a Rite-aid here is town, just a mile up the road in the main city shopping center.

I have seen several letters to the editor of the newspaper claiming that they will not shop in the new Rite-aid if they acquire the property via eminent domain. I will be one of the citizens in town who will not patronize any business that uses Eminent Domain to get their property. Additionally, I will immediately stop supporting any member of the city council that votes for such an anti-American action. I already cast my School Board votes for anyone who doesn’t have the word incumbent next to their name. I can always do the same with the City Council.

Hunting with Cheney part 2

OK, I made pretty light of the Vice-Presidents situation regarding his accidental shooting of Harry Whittington. When I wrote my last posting it appeared that Mr. Whittington was recovering from his injuries. Today he had a mild heart attack as a result of his injuries.

So no more jokes until Mr. Wittington recovers. Making jokes about an embarrassing accident is one thing. But if this accident changes from an embarrassing one to a tragic accident it won't be very funny.

So pray for Mr. Wittington's speedy recovery, there are a lot of lawyer hunting jokes out there just waiting to be told.

Hunting with Dick Cheney

The antique media is having a field day with this story. Mostly they seem to be harping on why it took the White House 18 hours to say anything about it. They seem to think that this is a major news story. After all, The Drudge Report had it as the banner story for over 36 hours. Right now the Olympics is going on, idiot Muslims are burning embassies over cartoons, we are fighting a war against terrorism, and all the media can talk about is a minor accident between a couple hunting buddies.

I think the story, while potentially serious, is mostly just embarrassing, and maybe even a little funny. Back home in South Dakota and Wyoming this type of story is usually shared along with a few cold brews and starts with the storyteller sporting a sly grin and asking: "Did I ever tell you about that time I shot Harry?" This is the kind of story that starts out embarrassing for the Vice President, but eventually evolves into him one day sitting in a rocking chair, surrounded by his grandchildren while they beg him to tell about the time he went lawyer huntin'.

Understand, this is an historic event. Vice-President Cheney is only the second sitting Vice-President to ever shoot a man while in office. The first was in 1804 when Aaron Burr, Vice-President for Thomas Jefferson, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a dual. At least Dick and Harry weren't dueling, and Harry sounds like he is recovering well.

But it's time for the antique media to lighten up a little. This evening I heard an NBC news anchor refer to the BUCKshot that the man was shot with. Which just points out the cluelessness of the antique media. Powerline has a report that explains:

Cheney was shooting a 28-gauge shotgun. That's closer to a .410 than a 12-gauge; it's a little gun.

Hunting quail--a little bird--they'd be shooting 6 or 8-shot, I suppose. This is not like shooting 20-lb geese. I suspect that the biggest quail on earth weighs a pound. The point of the tiny shot is to do little damage to the meat. References to "buck-shot" and "B-B"s are ridiculous. At 30 yards, buck and B-Bs might be lethal. The risk with light bird loads is the eyes.

A White House Correspondent continually referred to the Vice-President as "the shooter". Like she thought Vice-President Cheney was hunting quail from the window of the Texas Book Depository.

So if you are looking for some fun with this, Expose the Left is selling a bumper sticker that says:

I would rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy

Cox and Forkum have this cartoon:



Hugh Hewett had this to say:

When I saw the story about Cheney's hunting accident pop up in my e-mail, the first thing I thought was, "when did they start sending Saturday Night Live skits via e-mail?"

Today on his radio show both Hugh and several callers were having a lot of laughs about the whole thing. I don't think it is going to take long for the 'lawyer huntin' stories to start.

Even the White House was making jokes:

President Bush's spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn't be confused for hunter's safety wear.

"The orange that they're wearing is not because they're concerned that the vice president may be there,"

I'm glad that Harry Whittington is stable and recovering. I'm sorry that this accident happened to him. I'm sorry that Vice-President Cheney has to endure the antique media assault that he is going through. I'm sorry that the White House has to take time out from the important things that it should be paying attention to in order to deal with this minor accident. But I would really like to get a nice framed picture of Vice-President Cheney holding his shotgun and standing next to Harry Whittington for the Vice-President to hang on his trophy wall.

Trying to Learn Something

I was suppossed to be in a training class this week. At least that's what I thought for the last 3 months. When I started my new job several months ago I needed to learn the Microsoft .NET programming Framework. Fortunately for me the training center at work simultaneously announced a class in C++ .NET that was going to be taught this week. I signed up immediately. Since the Training Center offers very few technical training classes they fill up fast. When I completely my online registration the system told me that there were 12 seats in the class and there were still 7 available. So I didn't worry about it. I was in.

This morning I show up for class and find out that I am not on the roster for class. I'm also not on the list of 14 standbys who are hoping that one of the 12 registrants don't show up. So I stopped by the office at the training center to find out why I'm not on the roster. It seems that I used the wrong double secret hidden process while registering. I had stuck my right finger in my nose, my left finger in my ear, crossed my eyes, and jumped up and down while pushing the Enter key with the second toe of my left foot.

Today I found out that this process has been changed. Now you are supposed to do all your registration online. The process has 21 steps. Unfortunately the online software only walks you through the first 20 steps. Steps 1 though 20 are covered in the online regustration process. However it makes no mention of the most important last step:

21. Inform the supervisor that there is a workflow item in their business workplace.

This is where the entire process breaks down. I assumed that since the system asked for for my supervisor information so it could get his approval. That they system would contact or notify the supervisor that an approval was needed. So when system didn't prompt me for any more information I assumed I was registered and quit.

The nice lady at the training center did tell me that she was very frustrated with the registration system that we were stuck using. My case is apparently not an exception. It seems that class registrations not getting processed properly is more the rule than the exception. She was so disillusioned that she claimed she would rather do away with the whole system and have people just call her to register. That way they would at least get signed up.

I will probably do that next time. But I don't expect that system to last. The moment our management finds out that she is circumventing the system in order to help her coworkers they will make her stop. After all, our new management phliosophy is "The process is more important than the results."

I would like to think that this is a Navy plot to keep registration for classes low so they have data to support not offering many technical classes. But I am a firm believer the the axiom: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetance."

Olympics Opening Ceremony

The whole family watched the opening ceremony of the Torino Olympics last night. It had its unusualy moments but for the most part we enjoyed it.

Mostly we enjoyed all the 70s music that they played during the Parade of Nations. We did think it was a little unusual for an Italian Olympics to focus so much on old American music.

We were very pleased to see the warm reception that the United States athletes received from the crowd. Even better was the music playing in the background. Aretha Franklin's song Think, with its chorus of Freedom, Freedom, Freedom...

I plan on watching a lot of the Olympics over the next two weeks. But don't count on me reporting much here.

Wiretapping

On 23 January 2002 the Congress of the United States passed Joint Resolution 114 also known as the `Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002' .

This resolution in part says:

Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;

Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;

Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);

I have one question. If congress truly meant for the President to “take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations” did they really mean that he should take "all appropriate actions" except for listening in on their phone calls while they plot the deaths of American Citizens?

Because if that is what they meant then they are even stupider than they act on television.

Steelers!

Congratulations to the Pittsburg Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks.

But the Steelers get to go home the winners and the Seahawks get to complain about the officiating.

Best memory of the suoerbowl? Watching Jerome Bettis stand there with the trophy in his hands and tell his fans that the bus made it's last stop in his home town of Detroit. Can it get any better than to have a career like Bettis had, play your last game in you home town, and have that win be for the superbowl. Thanks for all the years Jerome. You were a fun one to watch.

Class act of the night - Bill Cowher handing the trophy to team owner Dan Rooney and saying "This belongs to you Sir." Cowher has had some rough years with the Steelers and the Rooney family has stuck by him. The Rooney family has a reputation for loyalty and that feeling seems to be eched by their employees. That's a lesson that several other owner in the NFL should be paying attention to. Do you think anyone named Bidwell, Davis, Jones, Modell, or Irsay is listening?

Best play of the superbowl - Willie Parker's 75 yeard touchdown run just 22 seconds into the second half. I got to see Marcus Allen make his 74 yard run in superbowl 18 against the Redskins this one was almost as pretty. Willie Parker is no Marcus Allen, but for about 10 seconds today he was better.

Best Commercial. I liked the Fed-ex Caveman commercial. I think I used to work for that boss, and we've all had days like the caveman had.

We all loved the streaking lamb in the budweiser spot, and the dead fly in the hospital was hilarious. My sister in law who travels a lot said she could relate to the lady try to get out her airline seat past the two sleeping travelers. But she wouldn't go into anymore detail.

Our party was really low key. Not many folks showed up. Over the years our regular crowd has moved away or found better things to do. We're either going to have to find some more football fans to join us, or start teaching our kid's friends to like football.

Noise and Destruction Turn Nine

Noise and Destruction turned nine today.

Nine years ago I had stayed up late the night of Feb 1st. Really late. Our first child was spending the night with Grandpa and Grandma, our twins were due in 6 weeks and my dear wife was very tired. So she went to bed early and I stayed up late reading and watching old movies. I finally turned in about 2:30 in the morning.

At 4:30 AM after I had only been asleep 2 hours my dear wife shook me awake with a worried "Honey, I think my water just broke."

I groggily rolled over and asked something really brilliant like "Are you sure?"

Then the odor hit me. When our first child was born we had rushed to the hospital after my wife's water broke while she was fixing dinner. Once we got checked into the hospital and my wife was being prepped for her first C-section (Chaos was four weeks early and a Frank's Breach). A nurse handed me a plastic bag with my wife's wet clothes in it. I took it out to the car and tossed it and the towel she had sat on into the trunk. Many hours later with my new daughter and wife well and sleeping comfortably in the hospital I headed for home. I stopped on the way and bought several newspapers, and some supper. Then went home and programmed the VCRs to record the Tonight Show and several late night news broadcasts. Then I called my parents, and finally ate my now, cold tacos. Finally I remembered the dirty laundry that had been aging for the last 8 hours at around 80 degrees in the trunk of the car. I walked into the garage and popped open the trunk. The odor that wafted out of that trunk almost knocked me over. It is a smell I will never forget no matter how tired I am.

So now convinced that my dear wife's water had broken I rolled out of bed and asked if we had time for me to shower before we left. My dear wife assured me that there was no rush as she still hadn't packed her hospital bag yet. So she packed while I showered and dressed. Then we leisurely drove to the hospital, unlike the first time when I was reaching speed nearing 80 mph getting there.

We strolled into the emergency room. Told the nurse that my dear wife's water had broken. They checked us into a examination room and the nurse told us that she needed to do a quick exam. She got my dear wife into the right position and started to check how the babies were. After a few seconds she got a really surprised look on her face and said "Opps! Something just grabbed my finger."

Immediately everything changed. Where everyone had been moving calmly and deliberately they were now running and talking very fast. I heard the nurse in the hallway holler, "Get their Doctor on the phone now!"

They called Doctor Graves at home, waking him up and telling him what was happening. Doctor Graves had been delivering babies in Ridgecrest for many years. He delivered my dear wife's younger brother, and he performed her C-section four year earlier.

10 minutes after calling him, Doctor Graves who always presents a slow, steady and calm demeanor, came running through the door of our room demanding to know why we were not already in surgury like he ordered when they called.

The nurses were frantically trying to get an IV line into my dear wife. The nurse who had just succeeded with the IV, hopped up onto the edge of the bed, and continued her setup while the rest of them bundled up the bed and started wheeling it down the hall towards surgery. I was walking next to the bed holding my dear wife's hand. We were suddenly both very frightened and worried.

As we started down the hall the smallest nurse (petite, slender, maybe 5 foot tall) started to try and pull me away from the gurney. I ignored her and kept walking along side it. She was explaining that I would not be allowed in surgery like the last time because my wife would be under a general anesthetic this time, instead of the spinal she had before. I ignored her and kept talking to my dear wife, trying to calm her down, even though my own heart rate had to be pushing 180 at the time. As we neared the doors to the operating room my dear wife was finally starting to relax. The petite nurse was still pulling on my arm and insisting that I had to stay there.

As the gurney entered the doors to surgery the drugs they were pumping into my dear wife were knocking her out quickly. I released her hand and let them go through the door. As I stood looking thorugh the little window in the door, it suddenly occured to me that the petite nurse was still pulling on my arm and demanding that I move away from the door.

I turned to her and demanded "I want to know what is wrong, and I want to know RIGHT NOW!"

Still pulling on my arm she tried to tell me that nothing was wrong. I refused to move and just stood there. The nurse kept telling me that everything was OK. She tugged on my arm and I demanded to know what was wrong. She pulled I demanded. Finally she told me that I had to go sit down or she would go get help to sit me down. So I moved away from the door.

The nurse then sat down next to me and explained that the first of my twins to be born, the presenting baby, was in the transverse position. Meaning she/he was trying to be born sideways. The first body part to enter the birth canal was an arm. Trouble being two things, first because there were two babies there really wasn't room to turn the baby. Secondly they could not even be sure that the arm belonged to the presenting baby.

So for the moment, everything was OK. But things were not going to stay that way. The birth process was going to continue regardless of what position my babies were in. She told me that very soon many things were going to start happening, most of them bad. So the Doctors were trying to get my babies delivered as quickly as possible, while everything was still OK.

15 minutes later I was the father of healthy, but 6 week premature twins. One hour later I was in the nursery with both of them just crying their lungs out. So I picked up the phone, called my mother-in-law, gave her a few seconds to wake up enough to understand who I was, then I told her that someone here wanted to talk to her. Then I held the phone down so she could hear the stereo crying.

The twins were 4 lbs 11 ozs at birth. They each lost weight those first few hours. Since they were under 5 lbs they had a hard time maintaining their own body temperature. So they had to stay in warmers for several days. I learned from the nurses that calling them ovens was not funny. They kept reminding me that they were babies, not muffins.

My dear wife was released from the hospital after four days. They babies had to wait an additional six days.

It is hard to beleive that I have been the father of twins for nine years. Actually it only feels like about 6 years. The first three years are just an endless blur of crying, pooping and screaming.

We thought we really had our hands full when our first child had colic for 6 months. We weren't too worried about the twins. After all there is only about a 20% chance of a baby having colic and we were 1 for 1. Then we brought home our two new babies and found out that a 20% chance sometimes means going 3 for 3.

It was a rough start but we finally got through it. My dear wife and I kind of divided up the worrying. She concentrated on the immediate worries of figuring out how to hold two babies, feed two babies, rock two babies, change two babies and comfort two babies at the same time. I just did whatever she told me to do to help out. Meanwhile I concentrated on figuring out the long term plans on how we were going to fit one more child than we ever dreamed of having into our lives. I started planning on an extra seat in the car, a larger stroller, an extra crib, an extra bedroom, an extra education, an extra car, etc.

It's been nine years. They have gone by too fast, my babies are growing up too quickly. I never realized how fast they were growing up until lunchtime today at the kid's school when I was playing around on the volleyball court with three little girls from the kindergarten. We were playing throw the ball back and forth over the net. They were so small and so young. Then my 3rd grade twins show up and the differences were amazing.

My little ones aren't so little amymore.

Thrown?

I was watching President Bush's speech at the Grand Old Opry this morning on Fox News. They had a news ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen. One of the news tidbits that scrolled across the screen right at the end of the President's speech was an short blurb about how British Prince Harry who has joined the armed forces in Britian may be sent to Iraq next year.

The 21 year old third in line for the thrown will serve in the ...

Suddenly I don't feel so bad about the spelling errors I make blogging here.

John Kerry's Math

This morning on the NBC Today Show John "I don't fall down" Kerry was talking to Katie Couric when she asked him about the President's plan to train 70,000 new math and science teachers.

John Kerry responded with:

That's terrific. But 53 percent of our children don't graduate from high school...

Well Gee Whiz John, it only took about 2 minutes with a good online search engine to find out that according to the U.S. Census Bureau:

Population 25 years and over: 182,211,639
High school graduate or higher: 146,496,014 = 80.4%

Would expecting you to actually do a little research before shooting your mouth off and to have the moral and intellectual honesty to try and tell the truth be asking too much? If you want to publicly bash the president try doing so with truth and documented facts instead of just lying your face off.

In John Kerry's America 53% = 19.6% which is just one more reason why I'm glad I don't live there.

Sheesh! What a moron. I guess that most of the 49% of voters who wanted Mr. Kerry to be President are among the 53% who didn't graduate from High School in John Kerry's America.

-------------------

Update: Michelle Malkin has a link to the video here.

State of the Union

Tonight President Bush gave his State of the Union Address. I enjoy being able to sit and listen to the President's speeches. Its not like I'm a great political junkie. But for the 8 years of the Clinton administration I rarely got to listen to anything old slick Willie had to say. Everytime I would see him on television, I'd start muttering something about "listening to the lying sack of s--t" and then change the channel.

I'm not going to go into a deep analysis of the State of the Union Address. There will be plenty of those flying around the internet and the main stream media. Often this analysis will be provided by much more politically astute or more intellegent people than I am. But here is my impressions of tonights speech

I liked most of the Presidents speech. I liked the parts about staying to course in the War of Terror. I liked when he explained why he had the authority for the wiretapping and why it was necessary. The only thing that would have made this part of the speech better would have been seeing the President stick his tongue out at Ted Kennedy during the applause. OK, maybe not really but it's fun to imagine

I wasn't really pleased with his new ethanol initiative. Sounds just like more spending on farmers who we pay too much not to grow things already. I mean really, who thinks that more ethanol is going to solve our oil problems?

I thought it was amusing that the only thing that got the Democrats on their feet and cheering was the Presidents remark that the senate failed to do anything about fixing Social Security last year. Isn't it kind of telling that the Democrats are proud of thier ability to obstruct an attempt to fix a large looming problem? I wonder if the Democrats who were standing and cheering thier obstruction of an attempted Social Security reform understood how stupid and idiotic they looked standing there cheering their failure to do something.

I would have liked to hear the President be a little more forcefull about stopping illegal immigration. I would also like to hear more about his science and math education intiatives.

Overall it was a pretty good speech. The President was upbeat and positive. But it was a typical State of the Union Address. The Presidents party loved it and the opposing party hated it. Just like every year.

Then I decided to stick around and see what kind of train wreck the Democrats sent out to do their rebuttal. I was actually shocked at the rebuttal given by Tom Kane the Governor of Virginia. Where is the world did the Democrats find a calm rational soft spoken member who could get through a speech without yelling, turning red faced, spraying spittle around or just ranting incoherently? Guys like Governor Kane worry me. If the radical right wing of the Democratic party keeps letting men like him speak people might actually start listening to them.

Now that said, what did Governor Kane actually have to say. He said "There's a better way." The only thing he didn't say was what the better way was. What I heard during his speech was that the Democrats don't really object to the job President Bush is doing, they only object to the fact that it is him doing it instead of one of them.

So in the interest of fairness and because this is my blog and I can do so if I want to I can offer my own rebuttal to both speeches.

To President Bush:

More non-corn ethenol is not going to solve our dependance on foreign oil. Illegal immigration is a major hole in your war on terror and needs more than just some lip service. Yes immigrant labor is an important part of our national economy. But so is the drain on our economy that the cost of welfare, education and health care that is spent on illegals.

I liked the Presidents comments on both parties working together for the good of the nation. But surely you have figured out after 5 years that holding your hand out to the democrats is only going to get you bit. You need to stop worrying about trying to include the Democrats wishes in your plans. Do what you think is right and if they disagree with it let them win enough elections to stop you. Otherwise let their obstructionist policies continue to push them into obscurity.

To Govornor Kane.

If there is a better way, tell us what that way is. You gave a wonder travelogue style retrocspective of what Virginia is like. Sure it's a nice state to live in. But that is because it is a red state. Now show us a blue state that is prospering as well and we might be impressed.

Maybe it's time for your party to stop telling us that there is a better way and start concentrating on doing what is right for America. Not what is best for your political party. Your partisan politicing has become the showcase for everything that is wrong with America. When our enemies start sending out tapes and press releases that sound like your press releases maybe it's time for you to start asking yourself whose side you are really on. America's or Howard Dean's.

Relief - Sort of.....

I spent three and a half hours in the dentist's chair today. My sore tooth has been root canaled and crowned.

Under normal conditions this is something I would want to avoid. But this morning I was looking forward to it. I have been in a lot of pain for the last week and it wasn't getting any better. If it makes any difference to anyone, the pain was intense enough that it took two ampules of novocane to get me numb enough to start. Then once he started drilling I was still getting sharp stabs of pain. Finally the good doctor had to give me an other injection directly into the core of the tooth. After all that I still had several sharp stabs of pain when he started filing. But at least I didn't jump out of the chair when they hit.

Later in the procedure the doctor, nurse and I learned something new. I had a lot of saliva collecting behind the rubber dam he was using to protect the open tooth. It was difficult to swallow with the dam in place and my jaws wedged open. Eventually I started choking on that saliva. To prevent this from happening the dentist hung a vacuum in my mouth under the rubber dam. This worked pretty well for a couple minutes then the trouble started. When the vacuum wasn't sucking up saliva it was sucking up air. Unfortunately there wasn't any air coming into my mouth because of the rubber dam. So the vacuum was sucking air in through my nose. This didn't seem so bad at first since I was breathing through my nose anyway. Then this constant flow air started drying out my sinuses. After about 20 minutes the sinus cavities on the right side of my face were dry and starting to hurt. Then over the next half hour that hurt grew into a sharp, burning PAIN. I couldn't say anything with all the stuff that was in my mouth so I had to just lay there and wait. Eventually they finished and removed the rubber dam, the vacuum and all the other stuff. The relief was almost instanteous. It took about an hour for my sinuses to recover but they eventually did. When I told the Dentist about this he was surprised. He never imagined that something like that would happen but assured me that they would watch out for it in the future.

So I'm home now. Sore, tired and aching. My tooth doesn't hurt much. But the rest of my mouth, head, neck, shoulders and back feel like I've been battered by a Narn Bat Squad.

President Bush is getting ready to deliver the State of the Union speech and I want to listen. I'll try and write something else later.

Sore tooth blogging

I haven't been blogging much the last few days. It is hard to concentrate. I'm having trouble with a tooth. One of my molars has occasionally hurt when I bit down on it for the last couple months. So being the rational adult that I am, I naturally ignored it until it stopped being a minor inconvienence and started hurting more.

It turns out I had cracked one of the cusps. This tooth was like most of the others in my mouth, full of lots of old dental work. In the past this has made repairing damage to some teeth difficult, which has resulted in repairs requiring crowns instead of just fillings. This tooth was no exception.

The crown prep was fairly routine. Except for the syringe and needle the size of 16 penny nail that the doctor used to numb me up. OK, it wasn't really that big, but it felt like it was.

So I left the doctor's office with lips the size of spare tires and a temporary crown. I really don't care much for the new temporary crowns that dentists use today. My last temporary was metal and didn't fit well. These new ones are cast and fit just like the original tooth. But they taste bad. The dentist says I'm imagining things but I disagree. I have had a bad taste in my mouth for two weeks now.

My poor tooth had been irritated for several months to start all this. On top of that it didn't take kindly to the crown preparation. As a result, the pulp became ittitated and started to hurt. This last week has been excruciating. Left alone the pain pretty much dominates the entire lower left quarter of my face. It makes my neck, ears and jaw ache.

Now I should point out that historically I have a pretty high pain toleranace. As a youth I was upset that my Dad always complained about how expensive my dentist bills were. So in my youthful, ignorant of the way things really are way, I figured out that I could save Dad some money by refusing to let the dentist give me a novocane injection. I didn't realize that the price of the filling was the same with or without the novocane. But I assumed that since I was not getting that shot the dentist would charge my Dad less. So, during my middle school and high school years I had somewhere between 20 and 30 fillings done with out novocane.

I finally started using novocane again right after college because the dentist I was seeing refused to work on my teeth without it. He would not believe that I could sit there without jerking or moving.

I needed to point that out so that you will understand that when I say that the pain from this tooth is at times so bad that I comfort myself thinking of different ways to forcably remove it from my head. This afternoon it got so bad that Tom Hank's ice skate and rock method from the movie Castaway was looking pretty good.

I have been taking an inordinate amount of Extra Strength Tylenol and Advil. The Dentist gave me a precription for Tylenol 3 (with codine). But they actually provide about 30 minutes less relief than just 2 Extra Strength Tylenol.

So blogging has been kind of light the last few days. Since my ability to concentrate has been hampered by intense thoughts of door knobs and string, toasters and string, vicegrip plyers and watching the clock anxiously waiting for my next dose of pain mitigator.

I'm scheduled for a root canal on this pesky tooth next tuesday. I should be able to concentrate better then. In the meantime I may try writing some during those periods where the pain medication is working.

New Ridgecrest Blogger

I just got an e-mail from a new Ridgecrest Blogger. Let's see, that makes a total of two of us now.

Erik with a "K" has just started a blog. Today is day one for Erik, so give him a read and lets hope he keeps it up.

XL = 40

Unfortunately those old Romans seemed to know what they were talking about when they decided that:

40 = Extra Large

Why Blogging Part 2

Back in March 2005 when I started this blog I wrote a rather flippant article about why I was starting a blog. I had reasons like:

Working late into the night with the lights on pisses off the cockroaches

While these reasons for blogging are still mostly valid they did not cover why I decided to call this collection of blabbering that almost no one reads - Ridgecrest Blog.

I'm not trying to set myself up as the voice of the City of Ridgecrest. I don't pretend to even attempt to discuss everything that is happening here in town. I don't try and be fair and open minded. I'm writing my opinions about things that catch my attention, stick in my craw, make me laugh, make me angry, that I just want to make a snarky comment about or thoughts I want to remember later.

So why did I call this Ridgecrest Blog instead of something more personal? There are a couple reasons.

First off, I didn't have any good ideas for a name. I sat and scribbled ideas on a couple sheets of engineering paper for days and nothing really jumped out at me. Google and Technorati searches seemed to indicate that there weren't any regular bloggers from Ridgecrest. The name Ridgecrest Blog was available on Blogger. So I grabbed it and started writing. I figured if a better name came to mind later, I could change.

My second reason for calling this the Ridgecrest Blog wasn't really apparent to me even as I started this blog. I knew one of the things I wanted to happen with my blog, but I didn't know how to word it until recently. It took an e-mail exchange with a former Ridgecrest resident to get my thoughts solidified enough that I could express them with words.

Will Brown is a regular contributor to the Warrior Class Blog. He moved from Ridgecrest about the same time that I moved here - 20 years ago.

Will found my blog the other day and sent me an e-mail reminiscing about his favorite fishing hole at Lake Isabella, the City Council, our Gateway to Death signs and how the City of Ridgecrest has changed through the years.

I checked out the Warrior Class Blog and then wrote back to Will. My response to him led him to write a blog entry called Blog How You Want to Be.

The title of that short blog posting pretty much summed up a lot of the reason why I named this blog after a town that I don’t like living in. That right, for most of the last 20 years I have hated living here.

I moved here in November of 1985. I had been working in Amarillo TX. But things had changed. I was recovering from a severe knee injury that was preventing me from doing almost all of the things outside of my job that I enjoyed doing. My career had taken an ugly turn and I was looking at the possibility of spending the rest of my professional life being bored out of my freaking mind. So when I was offered a job here I jumped at the chance.

My career here in Ridgecrest has had a lot of ups and downs that have forced me to reinvent my career several times. My kids like to joke that Daddy doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up. But for most of my 20 years here the work has been interesting and I have managed to feel useful. Something I wasn't feeling in Amarillo.

But outside of my work, I hated this town, for several different reasons:

I'm apparently not a desert person. I find nothing attractive about sand, creosote bushes, sand, wind, sand, spiders, sand, brown everything, and sand. The only time I want to see this much sand is at the beach. My idea of Mother Nature at her finest is trees and mountains. The outdoors should be green and hilly. There is nothing better than a hillside with the sunshine sifting through a heavy forest canopy while the light breezes stir up the wafting odor of rotting leaves or the soft crunch of pine needles under your feet accompanied by the rustle of the aspen trees in the next draw. I just don’t see the beauty is brown hills, sandy soil and scrub brush.

The almost complete lack of a sense of "community" here. I used to tell my parents that Ridgecrest isn't a town, it's a wide spot in the road where 20,000 people built their houses and somebody paved the streets. Ridgecrest is improving. But for many years there was little sense of community here. There were, and still are, lots of clubs and organizations. But they only worried about what is good for their own little circle of friends. There seemed to be no overwhelming concern of "What is good for Ridgecrest." I blame this attitude on Ridgecrest's age. Ridgecrest is a young town. Founded in 1941, Ridgecrest is only 65 years old. I have furnishings in my house that is older than this town. Since I have always lived in towns that have been around for over a hundred or more years I never paid much attention to the community spirit and history in those places until I found myself living where there wasn’t much.

The heat, dust and wind. There is only one good thing about 115 degrees with 40 mph winds blowing so much dust in the air that you can’t see or breathe – you never have to shovel snow in it.

The small business owners. A large number of the businesses in town are run by truly good smart and caring owners. But Ridgecrest seems to have more than it’s fair share of small business owners who only want their customers to throw their money on the counter and get out of their store.

The architecture. Is there any style of house homelier and less appealing than a frame and stucco house on a concrete slab?

So for somewhere around 18 years I lived in a town that I really hated. I didn’t hate my life here - just the here.

But a couple years ago I started to really examine my life here. I have a nice home, three wonderful children, and a fantastic wife that I’m hopelessly in love with. I have a career that provides us with a comfortable living, private school for my kids and occasionally a few luxuries for ourselves. I just wished that we could have these things somewhere else.

So why stay here? There are places all over this country that need engineers/computer scientists. But there are very few small towns were I can do the kind of work I get to do here. I don’t want to raise my children in a big city. I like working for the Navy. I have never served in the military but I have always felt that spending my professional career helping to make sure that our military is the best trained and equipped fighting force in the world was a way to do my part in defending our freedom.

So if I want to keep those things, I have to stay working here. But more importantly, my family is here. My wife and kids were all born and raised here in Ridgecrest. It is their home. I have always regretted that I wasn’t able to grow up in my home town of Madison SD. I loved spending my summers there with my grandma and always wanted to move back there. I didn’t mind living in Rapid City SD, Cheyenne and Laramie WY. But they were places I moved to, not my home town.

My dear wife and I have often talked about leaving Ridgecrest, but every time we do she is always so glad to be back home again. This is the only home town she has ever known. I just don’t think that she will ever be able to leave.

My children would probably adjust to life in another town but it would be hard on them. We would have to pick a warm climate. We have trouble getting them to wear shoes and long pants even in the winter here. They would freeze if we moved to someplace like Wyoming or South Dakota.

It took 18 years but I finally admitted to myself that not only am I stuck living here in Ridgecrest but I will probably die here. So maybe it was about time that I stopped hating this town and start trying to make the best of it.

I made a few changes in my way of thinking and some of my attitudes. It didn’t change too much about my feelings for Ridgecrest. But it was a small start. Then last year I decided to start a blog. I needed a title. But more than either of those things I need a chance to occasionally talk about Ridgecrest is a positive light. So I started Ridgecrest Blog as a way to force myself to look at this town and the surrounding area and try and find things about it that I might be interested in writing about.

One-Peat?

Do not click on this picture unless you got really really fed up with the media manufacturing a mystical threepeat National Championship for the USC Trojans at this year's Rose Bowl.

Spelling Bee

Just before Christmas my oldest daughter won her school spelling bee. The ability to spell is a talent that she inherited from her mother, or acquired via hard work. She certainly didn't learn it from me.

Today we drove over to Bakersfield so she could compete in a spelling bee there. She was joined in this competition by 6 other students from the other smaller private schools in the county. The winner of this competition would represent this group of schools in the overall county spelling bee in February.

I had never been to a formal spelling bee before so I didn't really know what to expect. It was surprisingly interesting. It started out with a minor controversy. The second word in the first round was "bowl". However when the pronouncer said the word, I heard "bold". Apparently so did the competitor, and most of the rest of the audience. When the student repeated the word before starting to spell he said "bold" and then as all three judges started to stop him to correct his error he blurted out the letters b-o-l-d, said the word bold and was immediately told he was wrong. His mother immediately objected that the word was not clearly pronounced in the first place. I think the judges were swayed by the entire audience nodding in agreement when the little boy's mother objected that the word sounded like "bold" not "bowl". So after a brief conference the judges decided to use this little boy as an example to the contestants to ask for definitions or sentences. Then they allowed him to approach the microphone and they gave him another word.

This may have not been the correct thing to do, in the strictest interpretation of the rules. But the audience believed it was the fairest thing to do. The contestants didn't mind, and it did serve as a good lesson for the rest of the students. Granted some of the other parents may have complained if this young man had won, but he was the second contestant eliminated, 3 rounds later.

My daughter did very well especially since she didn't study very hard for this. She finished in a tie for 4th place and was eliminated in the 6th round. The word she missed was "nausea". So immediately her Principal, who had gone with us, and I started making jokes about her being asked to spell what her stomach was feeling at the time.

It didn't help that she admitted after the event was over that her stomach didn't hurt any longer.

She laughed the jokes the first couple times, but by the time I got done telling her mother this evening she informed me that it wasn't funny anymore.

Yellow Feathered Friends

The weather today was incredible. The temperature topped out at a very confortable 65 degrees. I spent a large portion of the morning taking down and packing up the last of the outdoor Christmas decorations.

While I was taking down the lights that I had strung in the trees in the front yard I really irritated this little fellow.



He was just trying to enjoy the thistle seeds that my dear wife had hung out in the front yard tree. But me, the ladder and the long pole that I was using to get the lights out of the tree kind of spooked him. He would squawk at me, if you can call the noise such a little finch makes a squawk. Then he would flutter madly about making as much noise as possible.

After I got the camera and zoom lens out of the house I had to park myself about 6 feet from the feed and wait. Evenutally his hunger overcame his worry about me standing there and he fluttered down to eat.

So while my yellowbellied friend had a couple other finches over for lunch, I finished putting away all the outdoor Christmas Decorations. Meanwhile my dear wife finished packing away all the indoor decorations.

What Senator's Are Thinking

I have watched bits and pieces of the Alito confirmation hearings over the last few days. One thing that has really stood out to me is many of the Senator's almost pathological inability to allow Judge Alito to talk without interupting him. Senators Leahy and Binden seem to be the worst offenders (for interrupting). Both will drone on for several minutes jumping from thought to thought and eventually they reach a place where they ask a question. Judge Alito will begin to answer the questions but is invariable interrupted by the Senator who then starts another rambling disassemblage.

Now thanks to a miraculous new technology, the source of which I'm not at liberty to disclose, we can finally hear what is going on in these Senator's minds during these hearings.

Senator Leahy:

"Oh Crap he is starting to make me sound like a fool, I'd better interrupt him and ask a different question. Oh Crap he is starting to make me sound like a fool, I'd better interrupt him and ask a different question. Oh Crap he is starting to make me sound like a fool, I'd better interrupt him and ask a different question."

Senator Binden:

"Hey? He's talking again. Why is he talking again? The Chairman said I would get 20 minutes. Why is he talking during my 20 minutes. He's still talking. What is this? He has used up almost 30 seconds of my 20 minutes. Why is he talking? Did I remember to tell him that I hate Princeton?"

Senator Feinstein:

"OK, don't open your eyes really wide or they will think you are Nancy Pelosi. Be careful, don't close them too much or they will think I'm talking in my sleep like that idiot Boxer always does. Now, get my scowl set just right, i need to find that balance between wicked witch of the west and ranting harpie. Now, timing has to be perfect, just as he starts to actually answer my question I need to shake my fist in the air and point out that this isn't about him, it's all about Johnny Depp. Man he makes a cute pirate, I really like the beads in his beard. Careful, don't let your eyes open too far."

Senator Kennedy:

"I wonder if that hottie in the third row likes beer. Do you think she likes quiet rides in the country? I wonder if she can swim? Damnit, that new rule about not dating anyone who can't swim is really cramping my style. Man is it lunch time yet, I'm really thristy. Wow, when DiFi opens her eyes really wide she looks just like Nancy Pelosi. I wonder if Nancy can swim?"

Senator Schumer:

"Ha! We made her cry, we made her cry, we made her cry. I love it when their wives cry. Whoa. DiFi really does that ranting harpie scowl well. I wonder if she can teach me how to do that?"

Senator Spectre:

"I guess it's about time to call a recess, Teddy looks like his blood alcohol level is dropping again."

Latest BRAC News

Just to set the record straight this is the last place anyone should be looking for definative word on the BRAC realignment and its effect on the City of Ridgecrest. I am not in the loop, the know, or the inside for BRAC information. All I really know is what I hear on the radio, read in the newspaper or hear in the hallway.

Many folks in our fair city have been almost giddy with excitement since the BRAC report was finalized and we were told that there would be about 2500 new jobs moved here. The real estate market has boomed and the city council has been feverishly plotting, planning and preparing for up to 10,000 new residents.

This is not the first BRAC realignment that we have been through and anyone who hasn't forgotten their history should remember that the President signing the Base Realignment And Closure into law doesn't end the politics. Just because the BRAC says we should get 2500 jobs does not mean the we will get them.

At lunchtime today I heard on the radio that 2100 of the jobs most folks were expecting will come from Pt. Mugu. Now apparently that number has been reduced to around 400. Some folks think that number may reduce even further.

Personally I think that when the dust clears 5 to 6 years from now we will be lucky not to have lost jobs. I don't have any reason for this other than when it comes to political manuevering between China Lake and Pt Mugu, China Lake almost always comes out on the lossing end of the deal.

So if you are one of the salivating throng waiting for all the new residents to show up. don't hold your breath until the moving van pulls into the driveway next door and you feel obligated to go help unload their sofa bed.

Thank You Senator Leahy

I turned on Fox News this morning while eating breakfast in order to watch a few minutes of the Alito hearings.

I happened to tune in during Senator Leahy's (D-Vt) grilling of Mr. Alito. The 15 minutes of the hearing that I watched were very illuminating. The difference in personality of the two men is remarkable. Leahy just drones on, shifting from topic to topic. He rehashes questions over and over without ever actually asking any questions. Judge Alito meanwhile sits quietly and listens to this drivel. When Leahy finally slips up and asks a question Alito will start to answer the question. Granted I only got to watch about 15 - 20 minutes of the hearings. But in that time period Alito only got to speak three times. Each time he was only allowed to speak for less than a minute before the Senator would interrupt him by either refuting Alitos statements, discounting Alito's statements, or just simply changing the subject. It was very obvious that Senator Leahy was not nearly as interested in hearing Judge Alito's responses as he was listening to his own voice.

I should be surprised, but I'm not, Senator Leahy, even after saying his time was up and turning the floor over to Alito for a final comment, Senator Leahy interrupted Alito one last time, preventing him from finishing his final sentence.

However I have to give Senator Leahy credit for one thing. He finally found a way to make me want to go to work in the morning. It is that, or i have to scoop my brains out with spoon. I suppose I could just change the channel, but that would require me to reach for the remote, and the spoon was already in my hand.

A Sharp Blow to the Head

Last week CA Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, during his state of the state speech proposed over 220 billion dollars in additional spending for the State of California over the next 10 years.

Now over the weekend the RINOator, with his son riding in a side car, ran his motercycle into a car that backed out in front of him. Our RINOator and his son suffered minor injuries. Schwarzenegger needed 15 stiches in his upper lip.

I real rino would have ripped that car to shreds and not needed stiches afterwards so I guess our Governor will have to settle for being a RINO in name only. Does that make him a RINOINO?

Let's all hope that this little incident will jar the RINOator back to reality. You know? The reality that many of us fiscal conservatives in California were willing to vote for him knowing that he was a social liberal, because we felt having an electable fiscal conservative was worth it. But since the Rinoator seems to have given up on fiscal conservativism also. I don't seem much reason to keep him around any more.

The Rinoator's new spending plan for the State of California is the antithesis of everything we elected him for. If he continues with this line of thinking I hope he enjoyed his time in Sacramento. Because come Novemeber we will send him and his stiched up lip home. Maybe he can use his new look to get a part is the new Rocky movie.

Hook 'm Horns

Congratulations to the University of Texas - BCS and AP National Champions.

How about Vince Young - 30/40 passing for 267 yards, 20 carries for 200 yards. Can you say one-man-wrecking-crew?

Wow, I great game, a great finish, and the satisfaction of being one of a small handful of Texas supporters in a bowling alley full of USC fans. I didn't bowl all that well, but my team went 2-2 for the night.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not really a Texas fan. I cheer just as loudly for anyone who plays against USC. Which is unfortunate, because I really like Pete Carroll as a coach. I just can't stand the team he coaches.

Bowl Championship Series

Where to start? There are so many things about the BCS that I hate that it is hard to figure out where to start. Actually starting is easy, it's doing so in a coherent manner that is hard.

The BCS was started in 1999 under the fiction of being able to make sure that the two best teams in the country play for the national championship. However what they didn't take into account is that choosing which two teams are the best in the country is usually not very cut and dried. In the past the National Champion, or champions were selected by polls. Which like all things so subjectively judged turns into a popularity contest. This system put Division 1 College Football in the same bracket as gymnastics and figure skating. Your ability to win a championship was dependant solely on other peoples opinions of your performance.

The biggest problem with the BCS is that they did nothing to change this. The rankings are still bases on polls, or other peoples opinions on how good a team is.

Now it seems like it would be a simple thing to just put in a playoff system for Division 1 college football. But it is not. That is because there is too much money involved in the current system. The college presidents who would have to approve a palyoff system would have to face up to and deal with the loss of millions of dollars of bowl money every year.

The 2006 Bowl Championship Series Revenue Distribution is budgeted at $96,160,000.00.

CONFERENCE BREAKDOWN OF BCS REVENUE: $96,160,000

BCS FOUNDING MEMBERS:
Conference with one team in Fiesta, Orange or Sugar Bowl: $18,322,222
Conference with two teams in Fiesta, Orange or Sugar Bowl: $22,822,222
Conference with one team in Rose Bowl: $3,455,556
Conference with one team in Rose Bowl and one team in Other BCS Bowls: $ 7,955,556
Total: $89,200,000

PAYMENTS TO OTHER I-A CONFERENCES:
Conference USA: $1,050,000
Mid-American: $1,050,000
Mountain West: $1,050,000
Western Athletic: $1,050,000
Sun Belt: $960,000
Total: $5,160,000

PAYMENTS TO OTHER I-AA CONFERENCES:
Atlantic 10: $225,000
Big Sky: $225,000
Gateway: $225,000
Mid-Eastern: $225,000
Ohio Valley: $225,000
Southland: $225,000
Southern: $225,000
Southwestern Athletic: $225,000
Total: $1,800,000

That is a lot of incentive for the founding members of the BCS to not to want a playoff system.

As long as the BCS is in charge, or the bowl games are involved in the national championship system Division 1 will never have a definative national Champion. Until the championship is decided on the field there will always be arguement and disagreement about who should have played.

The other major problem with the BCS and the bowl game system is that the entire system is designed to make sure that the big six conferences which have all the money to start with get to keep getting all the money. Each conference is assured of a spot in a BCS bowl game. The other conferences are told that they have a shot at one of the at large BCS spots. But in order for that to happen a team from that conference has to go undefeated for the season. They also have to hope that not too many other schools go undefeated. Just ask Boise State who in 2004 finished the season 11-0 and played in the Liberty bowl instead of a BCS bowl. This slight was probably caused because Utah was also 11-0 and they managed to get one of the two at large BCS bids. The big six conferences certainly weren't going to give up two of their money spots in one year.

Lastly the BCS system that assures that the 6 founding conference champions play in the BCS games often puts inferior teams into the big bowl games while higher ranked teams with better records play in the smaller bowls. A prime example was last night's Orange Bowl. Florida State went into the bowl game ranked #22 with a 8-4 record while 13 other schools who were ranked above them in the BCS rankings and had better records played in smaller bowls.

Now I like thed the Joe Paterno - Bobby Bowden match up last night. But I still don't think Florida State deserved to be in that bowl game.

USB Insanity

USB = Universal Serial Bus. What a joke. Every computer that I have or use has USB ports on it. They are all the same shape and size. So how come the cables that plug into these ports all have different size and shape plugs on the other end.

My desktop computer has USB connections for two different Kodak cameras, a Pentax Camera, a printer/scanner/copier, three different Palm brand PDAs, my daughter's iPod and a film scanner. Each of these devices uses a different cable.

I would like to know why two Kodak point and shoot cameras need to have two different USB cables? Why do three different Palm brand PDAs need three different cables? At least my Printer/scanner/ copier, film scanner and external hard drive will all use the same cable. Although the film scanner did warn me:

Note: Your scanner may not work correctly if you use a USB cable other than the one supplied by Epson or if you connect your scanner through moe than one hub.

At first I though USB was a good idea. Since the Universal part of USB seems to mean something different to each manufacturer. Even companies like Kodak and Palm can't make up their mind what type and size of universal connector to use from product to product.

What would have been so wrong with a standard USB connector for the end of the cable tha plugs into the computer, then three different connectors for the other end - regular, small and mini.

But I guess that would make too much sense.

Well I have to go rescue my kid from the mass of cables hanging out from around my computer. I think they are trying to eat him.

First Snow of the Year

We woke up this morning to find snow on the mountains.

OK, its not a lot of snow, and the upper elevations north of us have been getting snow for a couple months. But this is the first snow that we have seen on our high desert mountains this winter. Definately the first snow of the new year.

There is not enough snow up there to take the kids tubing on, yet. I took the kids up to Walker pass tubing last winter and they had a blast. I hope we get the chance to do so again this winter.

Rising Cost of Medical Care

I've been going through a box of old pictures from my Dad's Mother. I'm getting them scanned and put into albums. In with the pictures I found a folded paper that turned out to be an invoice from the hospital for my Dad's Birth.

From St. John's Hospital - Rapid City SD - March 4, 1934

Board Room and Care Delivery Room and Anesthesia Medicine Laboratory Miscellaneaous Total

$39.60 $10.00 $01.25 $00.50 $01.00 $52.35

Reading this got me to thinking about what the hospital charged for the births of our three children. Granted we didn't pay this amount, our insurance covered most of it. But they charged somebody a lot. I couldn't remember the exact numbers, but my dear wife reminded me that the hospital bill for our first born in 1992 was around $10,000. For the twins, in 1997, the hospital bill totaled around $25,000.00 (I'll guesstimate to half for only one baby).

In 1934 the average national salary was $1,368.00
In 1992 the average national salary was $22,935.42
In 1998 the average national salary was $27,426.00

Using these numbers, the cost for the hospital stay for a birth of as a percentage of the average annual salary in the United States is:

1934 1992 1998

03.8% 43.6% 45.6%

I know this isn't very scientific, and there are a lot of variables that I did not take into account such as insurance (and it's cost), locale, national average salary vs actual salary, complexity of the births, length of stay, etc. I didn't start this to be a research project. I was just wondering...

But those increases, if they are even close to accurate, are big....

Happy New Year

I wish for anyone reading this a very happy New Year. Just try and remember that 2006 is a magical year. It is the only year that could possibly fill the 365 day long void between 2005 and 2007.

We survived my 13 year old daughter's New Years Eve party. They girls just hung out and giggled and laughed until midnight. Then they all went outside and yelled, screamed, blew noisemakers, and created a terrible din. After a couple minutes we convinced them that we didn't want the police at their party and they quieted down and moved inside.

Once inside they settled down to watch movies and talk the rest of the night away.

I got up at 9:30 to make carmel rolls for breakfast. They were all still sleeping. My daughter admits to being up until around 4:30. The others wouldn't say. They pointed out to me that my parting instructions to them were "Don't destroy the house, don't light anything on fire, try and keep the noise down, and try and get to sleep before the sun comes up." The assured me that they were asleep before the sun came up.

Most of them finally got moving around noon. In a couple cases it was the smell of fresh baked carmel rolls that got them moving. For the others it was the torment and teasing of their friends that got them up.

So I settled in for an afternoon of NFL football, snacks, and a nap.

I only made one New Years Resolution this year. I'm going to try and live a little healthier. More exercise and less junk food. It's not very objective, and doesn't really have any concrete metrics I will be able to measure other than how I feel. But it will have to do.

Happy New Year!