Our New Addiction

We finished pet-sitting the other day. Chris and I help take care of his aunt and uncle's dog while they're in Michigan. Twice a week or so we go over and spend a few hours there keeping her company (we generally bring a movie). Lately, though, we've been playing endless rounds of Dominion. Seriously. One of the best games I've played in quite a while. Un-complicated enough that Chris and I are pretty much on equal footing (he's better at strategy games than I am). Plays just as well with 2 players as with 4, albeit with a different strategy. Endless variations, so we never seem to get bored. Of the group of people that we play board games with on Thursdays, I think about half of them are now hooked on this game, us included. We even broke down and bought the expansion when Chris won a gift card from an online game store. A game that plays well with two players is a rarity. One that Chris and I both like is even more so. If you're looking for a great 2-4 player game that's different from anything you've tried before, give this one a go. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Meh. Just haven't had time for a real update. I have 26 kids on my schedule this week. Granted, I've had a few cancellations already, but generally once I have the time blocked out its hard to redeem it, or I have more than enough paperwork to keep me busy. Right now I have about 20 minutes until I need to leave for an appointment. I've knocked out most of the little quick things on my to do list. What's left is things that I need large chunks of time to accomplish. I just haven't figured out where I'm going to find that time. Maybe next week. Its mostly just monthly reports, but I do best when I can knock out a bunch of them at one time. Granted, first I need to go in to the office and make copies of paperwork, so it will definitely have to wait till next week.
The company I work for is having a luau on Saturday. It should be lots of fun- there will be raffles, swimming, and lots of opportunity for families to meet each other. I have several families who are interested in coming, even better since its not exactly close to where I live. I may or may not bring a camera and take pictures. Even if I do, I'll likely not be able to post them here, unless I put smilies over people's faces or something. Depending on the pictures though, I may just do that.

Ode to Joy

I always did like Beaker. :)

Amen!!

I don't have the original link, but I read it here first.

An Open Letter to Our Nation's Leadership

I am Janet Contreras, a concerned, home-grown American citizen. I am 53, and I have been a registered Democrat all of my adult life. Before the last Presidential election, I registered Republican because I no longer feel the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. I now no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me.

There must be someone, please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me you are there and are willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please do it now.

You might ask yourselves what my views and issues are that I would feel so horribly disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me? These are briefly my views and issues for which I seek representation:

* Illegal Immigration--I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S. I am not a racist. This not to be confused with legal immigration.

* TARP Bill--I want it repealed and no further funding supplied to it. We told you "NO!" but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze! Repeal!

* Czars--I want the circumvention of our checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the Czars. No more Czars. Government officials answer to the process not the President. Stop trampling on our Constitution and honor it.

* Cap & Trade--the debate on global warming is NOT over, there IS more to say.

* Universal Health Care--I will not be rushed into another expensive decision. Don't you dare pass this in the middle of the night and then go on break. Slow down!

* Growing Government Control--I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. Shrink it down. Please mind your own business; you have enough to do with your REAL obligations. Let's start there.

* ACORN--I do not want ACORN or its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them on every real estate deal that closes. Stop all funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audit and investigation. I do not trust them with the taking of the census or with taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before the taxpayers get any further involved with them. It walks like a duck and talks like a duck--hello... stop protecting political buddies. You work for the people. Investigate.

* Redistribution of Wealth--No. If I work for it, it is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs. That is the only redistribution of wealth I support. I never got a job from a poor person. Why do want me to hate my employers? What do your have against shareholders making a profit?

* Charitable Contributions--although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities where we know our needs best and can use local talent and resources. Butt out, please. We want to do this ourselves.

* Corporate Bail Outs--knock it off! Sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we will be better off just getting to it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful, like ripping off a band aid. We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us a chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.

* Transparency and Accountability--how about it? No really, let's have it. Let's say we give the "buzz" words a rest and have some straight, honest talk. Please stop trying to manipulate and appease me with cleaver wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.

* Unprecedented Quick Spending--stop it, now. Take a breath. Listen to "The People."

Let's just slow down and get some more input from some "non-politicians" on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed reading our bills into law.

I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant nor a violent person. I am a mother and grandmother. I am a working woman. I am busy, busy, busy and tired, tired, tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawns and wash our cars on weekends, and be responsible, contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same, all the while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.

I entrusted you with upholding our Constitution and believed in the checks and balances to keep you from getting too far off course. What happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think that I find humor in hiring a speed reader to unintelligibly ramble through a bill you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not! It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face! I am not laughing--the arrogance!

Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it, but you expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children? We did not want that TARP bill. We said "NO!" We would repeal it if we could. I am not sure that we still cannot. There is such urgency and recklessness in all the recent spending. From my perspective, it seems that you have all gone insane.

I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back!

You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on you to bring our concerns to Washington.

Restart

I finally got fed up with the snail pace of my computer, and reformatted last night. What was stopping me before was the thought of using my factory restore disc, including all of the garbage that comes pre-loaded on store bought computers (AOL or Napster anyone?). My goal was to use Chris' system builder boot disc without any added rubbish and get a nice clean reformat. Unfortunately, Gateway apparently rigs their computers NOT to reformat that way. After several restarts fiddling with the BIOS settings and trying everything we could think of, we could NOT get my laptop to read the boot disc. I finally gave up and used my factory restore disc, then spent the next 2 hours downloading Windows updates and cleaning the aforementioned rubbish off to leave myself with a fairly clean reformat. It did turn out to be a little bit TOO clean. I lost some bookmarks that I had (mostly crafty ideas), and the updated version of my federal mileage voucher (which I had to recreate from my work forms), but other than that I did pretty well. As to whether the computer is actually running better or not, its hard to say, but it SEEMS better.

Sitting here staring at a blank blog screen, once again not sure what to write. I have a busy week this week- we're doing a "retreat" at work on Thursday and Friday. Really, what that means is that we have meetings or discussions both of those days and that I had to shuffle my entire schedule around. I'm doing 17 visits in 3 days. I did 6 today, although to be fair I "only" visited 5 different houses. I saw one set of twins. 110 miles. Moved one of my regular appointments from Mondays to Tuesdays to accommodate another therapist's schedule. Works out just as well for me, so I don't mind. My car is acting up and only getting about 21-23 mpg, when normal for me is 28-30. Means I'm stopping for gas 2-3x/week. First attempt to fix it was to have the tires rotated and rebalanced and such. I'm not sure that will account for that much of a drop in mileage, but it was worth a try. I should know tomorrow if it worked. If not, then I don't know what. We already had the CV(?) joint replaced 2 years ago, and those are supposed to last 60,000 miles. I drive a lot, but not THAT much. Diagnostic at a place we trust is expensive, any work would be expensive because I hate to bother our resident handyman/mechanic since he's been having health problems lately. Granted, the extra gas is expensive too. Don't really have the extra money normally, and definitely not this month since I just bought my plane tickets to Michigan for October! Yay! Plane tickets! 2 whole weeks at home in Michigan! Nichole's wedding, then time to hang out and visit with family and friends. Have a few projects to finish before then, but I should have time in August when Chris is in Chicago with Scott. Lucky guy gets to leave the desert when the heat is at its worst. Oh wait, that's right now. And crazy me is still running every other day, although I did take the weekend off. It helped. Don't worry- if I don't make it out the door by 7:30 I consider it too hot to even think about running. I'm debating whether or not planning to run a marathon in January makes me crazy. Keep in mind that I don't have a time goal in mind, other than to FINISH. I think Ava actually gets tired of running before I do; her "tell" for that is when she decides that every rock in every yard needs to be individually sniffed. Or maybe that just means she's hot and bored and ready to go home. I'm not sure yet. We took her to PetSmart yesterday and she was REALLY good. Hardly pulled at all, didn't bark at the other dogs, let people come up and pet her. She went through a 16 lb bag of food in just about 3 weeks. Our 2 cats go through maybe 3 40 lb bags of food per YEAR. We aren't over-feeding her. Her food gets measured out every day.
And no, I don't feel like paragraphing today.

What? READ a Bill??

It is utterly insane that they would scoff at the thought of being required to actually READ bills that are being signed into law, AND give the public access to them. Wait...didn't Obama promise that?

Democratic Leader Laughs at Idea That House Members Would Actually Read Health-Care Bill Before Voting On It
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
By Monica Gabriel and Marie Magleby

Washington (CNSNews.com) - House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

"If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes," Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. "I'm laughing because a) I don't know how long this bill is going to be, but it's going to be a very long bill," he said.

"Members clearly--and staff and review boards, they read them in their entirety. They go over it with members, and members read substantial portions of the bill themselves, but the issue is--I don't know who signed this (pledge), but frankly the opposition has been very vociferous, not of the verbiage and bill, but on the concept that it incorporates," Hoyer said.

Let Freedom Ring, a Delaware-based conservative organization, is circulating a pledge that asks members of Congress to promise to read the entirety of the final text of a health-care reform bill before they vote on it. They also are asking that the full bill be made available for review by the public for 72 hours before Congress votes on it.

Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, said Hoyer's comment is evidence that lawmakers in Congress are "off-track."

"It tells the American people how off-track our legislative process has become," Hanna said. "I think if the framers of our Constitution ever saw an entire legislative body vote on a 1,500-page bill that no one had read, they would shudder--if not go into fits of apoplexy."

Hanna said the pledge to read the full health-care bill--and all future bills--is one way for lawmakers to show that they are not casual in their commitment to constituents.

"We think the American public expects their legislators to know what's in a bill before they support it, and we're urging legislators to sign a pledge to that effect," Hanna told CNSNews.com.

By signing the "Responsible Health-care Reform Pledge," lawmakers commit to reading the entire bill and making it available to the public for three days before they cast their votes.

The pledge says, "I, (Name inserted here), pledge to my constituents and to the American people that I will not vote to enact any health-care reform package that: 1) I have not read, personally, in its entirety; and, 2) Has not been available, in its entirety, to the American people on the Internet for at least 72 hours, so that they can read it too."

Earlier CNSNews.com stories revealed that few - if any -congressmen read the 1,550-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 or the 1,071-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 before voting on the bills.

After about 2 weeks of hard work, Ava has gotten to the point where she's actually good company on a walk, instead of constantly pulling on the leash. We even took her to Petsmart on Sunday just to walk around, and she did pretty well. The day we got her, she was literally yanking the leash and pulling us through the store. On Sunday she hardly pulled or barked at the other dogs/people. On the advice of the lady she was living with before, we're using Bark Busters. Unfortunately, the website doesn't give many details, but it literally was a 100x improvement in a day or two- like we finally settled the dominance issue. Best of all, it didn't require the shock/beep collar, and we're debating whether or not she'll ultimately need a training class. As it is she goes running/walking with me every morning, and once it cools down a bit we plan to take her hiking too.

100 Bible Stories, 100 Bible Songs

I received a copy of 100 Bible Stories 100 Bible Songs through Thomas Nelson's book review bloggers program (which is a great way to get free books btw). I don't have kids, but I thought this book and cd combo looked like something fun and a little bit different to try. While I'll definitely be setting it aside for "someday", there are a few things I would change. Most of them are related to the organization of the book and the music. First of all, I would include the track numbers from the CD on the page for each devotional. Secondly, when you put the CD in a computer, many of the song titles are incorrect. Thirdly, all of the songs are sung in kids chorale style- some variety would have been nice. Overall, the devotionals are written on a 3-6 year old level, but they do include the Scripture references so that helps.

Go ahead, call me crazy

I'm used to it, it doesn't really bother me. I'm now committed to running either the half or full Rock N Roll Marathon in January. I haven't decided which one yet, but I really want to tackle the full marathon. A life goal of mine is to complete a marathon- just so I can say I did it. I'll be running to benefit Phoenix Children's Hospital through their Miracles in Motion program. Through this program I've also committed to fundraising $1500 for PCH, which actually scares me more than the thought of running the marathon. I have lots of kiddos who go to PCH, though, and they've overall been very happy with the care they receive. I also know that PCH will not turn away families, regardless of their ability to pay for treatment.
I think the official training and fundraising starts in August so I'll have more info about it then, along with a website that people can use to donate. For now, I'm just trying to get out walking/running every day, which isn't as difficult as it sounds since I just take Ava with me in the morning. I'm attempting to work through the Couch to 5K runs again, in hopes of being able to up my mileage when the official marathon training starts in August.

RIP Donne

In a time when people hardly know their next door neighbors, this man was our neighbor growing up, and we knew him fairly well. He actually sold my parents the property that they built their house on. He and his wife were Old World Italian, and it showed. At Christmas and Easter they would always bake us bread and other goodies. We always waited for that phone call to come down the street and get our bread. They would also call whenever they had extra tomatoes or peppers, or when they had some plants for us to put in our garden. Here's the complete text of his obituary:

"Francesco Oliverio, age 91, of Chesterfield Township since 1973, died July 7, 2009, at Mount Clemens Regional Medical Center. Born March 19, 1918, in Guardia Piemontese Calabria, Italy. He was an avid farmer and also retired from Ford Motor Company. He served in the Italian Army for seven years during World War II and came to the United States in 1956. He loved and provided for his family. He is survived by his wife Maria Rosa (nee Condino) whom he married October 7, 1944, in Italy. One daughter, Emma (Carlo) DeAngelis of Chesterfield. Former daughter-in-law Kathleen McCaffrey. Grandchildren, Paul (Suzanne) DeAngelis, Tom Collins, David (Annie) DeAngelis, Natalie (Brian) Ziehmer, Julie (Mike) Rickel, Steven (Denise) Collins, Maria (Mike) Latucca, Jaime Collins, Carla (Scott) Dickson and Nicole (Michael) Honore'. Great-grandchildren, Marian "Mary" Caporuscio, Christian and Andrew Rickel, Isabella Latucca, Jagger and Kylie Ziehmer, Mia and Enzo DeAngelis, Adam and Adreanna Dickson, Rocco DeAngelis and Francesco Collins, and many loving relatives and friends. He was predeceased by three children, Josephine "Pina" (Jim) Collins, Antonio and Olimpia."

He had a wonderful life, and will be missed by many, including our family.

Should have known

Chris and I opted to sleep in this morning, but that created an issue with Ava. See, I generally take her for a morning walk/run when I get up. However, because its summer and this is Phoenix, if we leave any later than about 8am its too hot. We made that mistake once already and I realized the problem when I stopped and saw her picking up one paw at a time trying to keep them off of the scorching pavement. You truly could fry an egg on the sidewalk here in the summertime. Anyways, since she needed some exercise by the time we dragged ourselves out of bed, and a walk was out of the question, we figured it would be a good opportunity to try out the dog park nearby. If Chris and I were smart, we would have thought twice upon noticing our car was the only one in the parking lot. But stubborn (foolish?) ones that we are, we decided it couldn't hurt to let Ava run around a bit. Famous last words. The park itself wasn't bad, but there was a severe lack of shade- a few sparse trees scattered about and not much else. Even Ava wasn't interested in playing. She walked around a bit, but when we tried to throw a ball for her to fetch she looked at us like, "ok, YOU go get it." By that point we were out of water and all pretty warm, so we gave up and headed for home. Along the way, we passed a thermometer that read 107*F. Yuck. Just in case you were wondering, this is our weather forecast for the next few days. If anyone happens to have free tickets to somewhere cooler, I wouldn't turn them away.
Other than the weater, I'd say Ava is adjusting pretty well. We're working really hard on leash training, as well as getting her not to jump up on us. The kitties are slowly getting braver- Chiam will stand and hiss at her but he doesn't puff up and run away anymore. David is just starting to venture out from under the bed during the day (we crate Ava at night so the cats can have the run of the house). We have a baby gate that we use during the day so the cats have a "safe" area. Ava can get over the gate more easily than I can, but she only does it if she wants something from us. We're hoping the gate will be temporary, but for right now it seems to be helping.

So Sad...

Tuesday I went to visit a new kiddo. Up until about 2 weeks ago, one of my co-workers had been seeing him. However, he's in foster care, and in that 2 weeks he'd moved to a new home. I'm not sure why. When I talked with Alicia, we were curious as to how he would be bonding with a new foster family since he'd been in his previous home for quite a while.
I arrived just as he and his younger sister were getting home from day care. The good thing was, the kiddos have obviously bonded well with their new foster parents. The sad thing was that the little boy (3 y/o in September), was obviously petrified of me. In talking about it with the adults, we're reasonably sure that he figured since a new person was there it meant that he was going to be taken to a different home...again. He literally sat in Mom's lap and cried for 45 minutes straight. Any time I tried to talk to him he turned away from me, and any time Mom tried to detach him a bit or engage him in something, he just cried harder. Breaks my heart that such a little guy has had such upheaval in his life already. We did manage to make a bit of headway- I fed him and his sister a snack, and that at least made him smile and talk to me a bit.