… A day to remember.
As I wrote to you earlier this week, today was a day for myself and my wife. And a wonderful day it was; We got some coffee at a favorite coffee shop… Something we usually do only on the weekends, and then only in passing… We usually get it to go… So very much to do. This time, though we actually sat down and drank our coffee and ate the breakfast goodies we’d bought. It set the mood for the day, pretty much.
We did some shopping, we did lunch… We took a ride, and just spent some time reconnecting, and…. Well…. Simply reminding ourselves of the reasons we fell in love in the first place. I’m convinced that many relationships end for lack of this kind of time. Which is one reason I’ve relied so heavily on this day each year; We both have.
We spent a lot of the day, in talk of, as John Denver once put it, Poems, Prayers, and Promises Often, we were not saying anything to each other at all. Not vocally, or with hand signals… Nothing of that sort. Communication, after all, does not always need words to exist. It was a day spent in that comfortable companionship that only comes with a long established communication channel, one that is often not fully detectable to others. It’s amazing how this annual event brings out the kid in both of us; May that habit long continue.
Since I was otherwise busy today, I didn’t get much time to blog. But that’s OK; we needed the downtime. And anyway, I gave you folks a couple day’s warning I wouldn’t be here.
A quick look around shows nothing unexpected; I didn’t miss anything we’ve not talked about.
Peterson convicted…. Did anyone expect otherwise, really? Which is one reason I don’t think I’ve mentioned it much here. Such cases bore me to tears in any event, and as I’ve told you, I write here about what interests me.
Arafat tucked into his dirt nap, with the usual hysteria associated with radical Arab leaders… The usual leftists treating him like seven kinds of royalty. By their words, ye shall know them. If peace was the real objective, why didn’t we kill this bloodthirsty idiot after Munich in 1972? That sounds harsh, but think how many innocent lives would have been saved that way.
Had Arafat been gone, not only would innocent citizens of Israel not been killed, but the Palestinian people, too, would have had a chance for a better life… The billions stuffed away in the Swiss Bank accounts would have bought real prosperity for his people. Instead Arafat stuffed his own pockets with the money, and bought terrorists. His walking away from Oslo showed peace with Israel was never the intent. Now he is gone at last and there’s a chance for the advancement of real peace… But with the power struggles I see going on there I’ve got to say it’s a vanishingly small one. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
Price of oil dropping. Price at the pumps is dropping, too. At the current rate of decline, we’ll see some pretty substantial drops by the end of this year, assuming no further issues crop up. If the president is as smart as I hold him to be, he’ll be pushing again for drilling in ANWR.
My younger boy has picked up the trumpet, and he’s busy in practice with it just now. After some initial struggles in handling the mouthpeice, he seems to be doing rather well with it, particularly within the last week. His practice sessions sound like a cross between Herb Alpert on acid, and a large bull moose in heat, but it’s a glorious sound, to him; and to us; an accomplishment to be celebrated, given he didn’t even have his horn a couple weeks ago. My older boy is an accomplished trombonist. I’m rather hoping to hear the two playing together someday, but for the moment, I’m satisfied for now, to see them doing well individually.
Got a note back from the Vanning club I wrote to down in Binghamton. Nice chap, from what I can tell, and had a great conversation with him. He tells me there’s still a Syracuse area club, Salt City Vans. I’ll have to look them up again. For the meantime, he suggests I’d be welcome to park with them, if the chance comes along. I find myself looking forward to next summer. Still wish there was a club in the Rochester area yet, though.
The self-destruction of the Democrats continues… With Arianna Huffington [1]saying the Clintonistas ruined John French Kerry’s chances. Let’s do, please, continue this discussion for the next four years. With all the infighting, they may actually figure out that the product they’ve been selling all this time is the reason they’ve been losing elections.
Fallujah’s taking is around 80% done at this point; our people are doing a fantastic job. The press for the most part is comparatively silent about this, as opposed to the large splashes prior to the election where they were busy telling us how badly things were going, and so on. I wonder if the American people really understand how much was being pulled by the press on that score. Remember our servicepeople in your thoughts and prayers this day after veteran’s day and every day.
Not much else to relate to you at this point, but one thing, which involves the blog itself.
You’ll notice aside from my short sniping of the last few days, I’ve been trying to write at least one longer and somewhat more personal bit per day, in my daily updates. I’m not sure how these are being received. Certainly, my shorter and somewhat more acerbic writings have done well with readers.
However, in the rush toward election day, I often had so much going on that I didn’t have time to develop some more thoughtful, personal stuff that I’ve been thinking about; things going on in my own life. As such, I was pretty much restricted to those shorter and more focused comments.
That re-election having been accomplished, I now find myself with more time and space to become more personal in my writing. I make no promises; we’ll see how this effort goes. I haven’t gotten this daily inspiration thing down just yet. So far, it’s ‘when I feel like it’.
My intent in even mentioning this was to give long time readers an explanation for the slight change of flavor these last few days.