Fight over the TV

Yes, on Thursday night there will be a massive fight over the telly. The one telly in our house, no TiVo or DVR. And no, I am not talking about a fight between Jesus and I. I am talking about a massive internal fight - between me and myself.

Do I watch the Biden-Palin debate (yes!) or do I watch Dodgers vs Cubs at Wrigley (yes!)?

There are many more important crises around the world, yes. I know.

I Dream of Baseball

I dreamed that they were going to tear down Wrigley, and that I was at the last game. I was in the left field bleachers (always been a dream of mine to be a Bleacher Bum) and got Alfonso Soriano to sign my glove between innings. At the end of the game, they opened the field and I ran around the bases.

I had just gone into the clubhouse to meet some more players when I was interrupted...

...by a preschooler at tthe edge of the bed: "Mommy, we need to go to Wal-Mart. I need some big-boy scissors."

Ah well, at least Wrigley's still standing. :)

Being a boy mom

Being a boy mom means that I can burp loudly and it's hilarious, to both the boys in my house. :) Yesterday, Jesus told Daniel, "Come here, I gotta tell you something." Daniel goes up to him and Jesus burped in his ear. Daniel thinks this is AWESOME and says, "That's gross!" (it was) and at the same time (not on purpose) I belched out loud too. "Eww, Mommy you're gross. Everybody's gross in here!"

Being a boy mom also means that someone farting at the table is headline news.

Being a boy mom also means that all books at the library have to have something to do with bugs, sharks, snakes, or lizards.

Also means that I will invariably, at least once daily, trip over a train, or a fire truck, or a stinky shoe.

Or that I will be chased by a boy holding a booger on the tip of his index finger.

And I would not trade it for all the money in the world!!!

Our diagonal neighbors (great neighbors, good people) have put up a McCain/Palin sign on one side of their front yard, and a Pat McCrory sign on the other.

Our across-the-street neighbor (next door to the aforementioned people) is a senior citzen and a lifelong Democrat. She offered to pay me $5 to put an Obama sign front and center in our yard.

This is the same neighbor that gave Daniel the Beanie baby donkey named Lefty.

Ah, election years. Thank God they're only every 4.

Me: "You're a silly boy!"
Daniel: "Yeah. I'm a wild and crazy guy."

Helping

Those things in Daniel's hands are the eggbeaters. One is 'Larry Boy' and the other is 'Alfred.'

March of the Penguins

I had heard this movie was really good...and it was.

But why had I never heard how freaking sad it was?! For about the last half I had to hold a crying 3 year old and explain to him how the mommy penguin is in heaven! Guess that's what I get for not prescreening even a G-rated flick! He is fine now.

Israel for Obama

Found this and thought it was cool. I hope it airs around here.

Daniel funnies

1) Friday nights are not usually our best nights because Daniel is now aware that Mommy works every Friday night. So this past Friday night, I'm getting ready and Daniel is his usual whiny, pleading self. "Mommy, no. You can't go to work!" etc.

Me: "Well, I have to, or we won't be able to pay for our things."

Him: "Just stay here and let them be mad at you."

2) Daddy got a new cellphone w/ camera so Daniel now has Daddy's old phone that is just like it except no camera. So now they are 'two the same,' in Daniel's words. Saturday afternoon Daniel was playing around with his, punching buttons and what have you when the battery started to die. I watched this play out....Daniel punching buttons furiously to get the thing to work and when it died, an angry look on his face and an exclamation of "Stupid computer!"

Glad I don't swear (much).

Handsome

Follow up to last post

Jenny's comment got me thinking that maybe I should add on some here. That is the only time that someone in our church has ever made a comment like that.

Our senior pastor (not the guy who made the comment last Wed. night) is very adamant that our partisanship is not of this world and our party doesn't really matter. Not that we shouldn't consider our earthly votes important but that ultimately our affiliation is not with any earthly powers.

I find politics funny sometimes because my personal moral beliefs are (I think, anyway) pretty conservative. It's just that my feelings about what government's role should or shouldn't be lean more toward the left.

On an unrelated note, while I was sleeping today after working last night I dreamed that I was working 3-11 and it was 8pm before I realized that there were two patients I had not gone to check on. That is one of my biggest fears related to work!!!

Church story

So last night at church, the speaker was talking about how our only true hope is in Christ, and so to illustrate his point, says, "Our hope does not lie with the GOP; our hope lies with G-O-D." I giggled a bit and it must've been a bit too loud, because at that point he turns right to me and makes eye contact and is about three feet away from my face and says, "As excited as we may be about this GOP ticket, this is not our true hope." Now, I agree with the point he was trying to make. But I just thought it funny that he directed all that right at me - probably the least-excited about this ticket in the whole building. I tried to keep my poker face.

Happy Birthday Mexico!

Yesterday to celebrate Mexico's 198th birthday, we went to a Mexican restaurant:

And would you believe Daniel took the second pic???

Today Daniel told me: "Scuppernong is my favorite word."
We ate scuppernongs for our afternoon snack.

Something Fun!

I found this over at my good friend Miles' blog regarding the National Endowment for the Arts' The Big Read initiative. They've made a list of of the greatest books ever written, with their estimation that the average adult has read 6 of the listed books. So, the game is as follows:

From the list below of books you have to:
Look at the list and bold those you have read at least part of.
Italicise those you hope to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.
(Blogger ain't lettin' me underline today, so I had to use an exclamation point for these!!)
Put a # beside the ones you hate.
Put a * beside the ones you did not finish.
If you've read it more than once, put the number in ().
Add 5 of your own favorites to the end.

So here's my list: (and thanks Miles!!!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien !(3)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee !(2)
6 The Bible ! (don't know)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott #*
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien !
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger *
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell #*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens *
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis *
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis !
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (2)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen #*
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck !
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (although I loved 'A Walk in the Woods' more)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens !(2)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry !(2)
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White !(3)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90 The Faraway Tree Collection -Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery*
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
(the unlucky few books that found themselves with a #*, well, I hated them so much I couldn't finish reading them!)

Now for my five:
The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien
With These Hands by Daniel Rothenberg
The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis
Silence by Shusaku Endo
The Complete Works of O. Henry

Just finished watching a documentary from Netflix on the computer called "Born into Brothels". Very disturbing and sad, and if you ever get the chance to watch it you should.

Politics

Soo.....since all my friends in blogworld are posting about politics and I'm posting about music, I guess I better get with the program. :)

I watched the DNC, and got the highlights of the RNC (not feeling well last week). And I have to say, I'm not enthused with Sarah Palin. We would probably get along in real life but I'm not sure she's the best candidate for the job. Being a Christian doesn't make you a good veep candidate, any more than it makes you a good surgeon. And if I'm going to have surgery, I'm not going to ask my surgeon if he's a Christian...I'm going to ask if he knows what he's doing. And I don't think Sarah Palin does.

Not only that, I'm less than enthused with her record. Much ado is made over her 'fighting the Bridge to Nowhere,' when in reality she was originally for it, as it earmarked millions of dollars in funds for her region. I don't agree with her stance on same-sex couple issues. While I have my personal beliefs about it, I don't think the government should be the arbiter of those things, and she wants it to be. Ditto for abortion, which is why I think 1st trimester abortion should be legal. Not because I agree with it but because outlawing it is not going to improve things a bit, and it's not government's place to say so.

She stated herself that she did not think much about the war in Iraq...not until her son got deployed, and all of a sudden she's 'just like the rest of us' because she's got a son going to war? Why didn't it matter to her before?

Her family is really a non-issue for me. It's not really any of my business how many kids she has, or what their personal issues are, esp not Bristol. That kind of thing happens in the best of families. The only other thing I'm going to say is how much it annoys me that pro-life groups have praised her for not aborting the youngest baby 'even though she knew he was going to have Down syndrome.' Since when was that EVER a good reason to abort? I know of no pro-choice person that would abort because they knew the baby they were carrying had Down syndrome - and in my field, I know a lot of pro-choice people. It really gets under my skin.

Add to that that she has about zero foreign policy experience....I just don't think she's cut out to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. I don't think McCain would have picked her had a 'minority' not been running on the other ticket.

I don't care whether she was in FCA in highschool, I don't care what her nickname was on the basketball team, I don't care whether she hunts/fishes or not, and I don't care what her husband does. Let me rephrase that - none of those things affect my vote.

Where Sarah Palin stands on the issues

Which do you like better?

This is not a life-or-death issue, I'm just curious. I've long since been having this internal debate over which version of this song is better. I like both, but one is a cover of the original. Am looking for objective opinions (since mine is obviously not). Which one do you think is better?
One:


or
Two:

These guys are funny!

Just make sure the kids are asleep or you have headphones on...some PG (at least) language.