[ Wednesday, August 05, 2009 ]
Hello again...
Wow. I forgot about this thing.
Granpa died.
SIL got house and dog.
Obama won.
Daughter got license. Moved out.
Abilify still rocks.
Got commercial drivers license.
(passed drug test to do so too!)
Dear friend Dave died. Colon cancer.
Blondie still lives! Dagwood had stroke, but has recovered.
Cancer still sucks.
Camped out at Assateague. Mosquitos and wild horses and ocean and sand. Nice.
Camped out at Shenandoah. Luray Caverns worth the price. Feral deer at campground.
wild bears in road, hot showers, good water.
'Still do forum at BaltimoreSun.
Still work on yachts, both between driving assignments.
Being on the road everyday is good.
It's good to be outside, yet protected from the worst of the weather.
Company is great, customers nice, equipment top notch.
Pay's a little low, but steady.
Summer in Annapolis.
Not too hot this year. Good varnishing weather.
I've not sailed this year... yet.
Not having a boat of our own kinda sucks.
Canoes just don't hack it for being on the bay.
Now what?
gonzoliberal [4:15 PM]
[ Thursday, April 12, 2007 ]
Vonegut dead.
Imus canned.
Bush still preznit.
Daughter still without driver's license.
Abilify rocks.
Blondie still alive. Hormone therapy rocks.
Grandma dead.
Crazy brother in law dead.
Grandpa has new dog, and is teaching the care-lady to sing in Hawiian.
Old cat still alive.
Front yard bulbs are up.
War in Iraq still going strong, 3294 Americans dead to date
source;
http://icasualties.org/oif/I might be back.
gonzoliberal [8:51 AM]
[ Monday, March 13, 2006 ]
Well, so much for that idea.
After a week or so, things started getting a little edgy, so I stopped and went back to full dose. 'Feels good, but I'm still apparently avoiding this place. I go see the shrink this morning... we'll see what he thinks about the whole "brain freeze" thing...
gonzoliberal [9:16 AM]
[ Wednesday, January 18, 2006 ]
Winter marches on. It's fifty degrees and raining.
Obviously, I don't write much in winter.
The darkness settles in mildly, short-circuiting thought.
The Holidays came and went in a medicated fog. The inlaws are ancient and loosing lucidity. We care for them and smile a lot, making the present pleasant.
Geek daughter is about to graduate from tech school in the top of her class. 'Now wants to work on a two year degree at community college. 'Still doesn't really want to drive.
Blondie is officially in remission. Still on mountains of morphine, tumor hasn't really started to shrink yet, but things are moving in the right direction. The bills are staggering. Dagwood shoulders on, getting help where he can find it. Sometimes, good news still hurts.
Local politics like cartoons, as Ehrlich and OMalley square off. WalMart bill, minimum wage overrides, and the session's just started.
Nationally, the beat goes on. The way the media enables this administration is historic, and criminal. That alone would be enough to get a sane man depressed.
"Darkness" sucks. Brain like molasses. Everything requires extraordinary effort, but rewarding when done. 'Will try to surface more often.
gonzoliberal [9:13 AM]
[ Thursday, September 29, 2005 ]
Another rite of passage marked.
Daughter's driving lesson.
She's nineteen. Graduated from high school last year, is now in a one year tech school for computers. She's always been afraid to learn how to drive, afraid of the traffic more than the car. She's not progressed further than backing the car in and out of the driveway.
So, out the driveway and down the road we go. Traveling about 15 mph, down one block, make a signalled left turn, then a quick right into the beach parking lot. So far, so good.
Turn around, retrace route back to house. She was understeering and not quite making the turns, but she made it back to the house without hitting anything. Until I asked her to "pull over".
Across from the house is one of the county parks. There are three large telephone poles lying parallel to the road marking some parking spots. I asked her to pull into that rather large area. Here's where the understeering bit us in the ass. Pulling in, she failed to turn back out in time and hit one of the telephone poles with the right front tire. Not a glancing blow, but a full-on hit to the butt end, speed about 5 mph.
Yup, it busted up the front end good, to the tune of about $1500. The old truck had to make a few trips to Columbia whilst injured mini-van was in the repair shop. Daughter has big self-inflicted guilt trip going. Dad (me) has a different lesson plan in mind for the next installment... I envision a large, empty parking lot with daughter pulling in and out of the marked spaces without hitting any white lines... and maybe the next driving lesson will be in the old truck...
gonzoliberal [7:59 AM]
[ Wednesday, September 07, 2005 ]
I've been in a kind of shock, I guess.
The destruction caused by the storm breaks the imagination. We've all gotten a little jaded about hurricanes of late. They come, they cause a little damage, a couple of deaths, they go. Suffering and rebuilding go on largely out of public view. But this is different. The scale of the disaster uprecedented. It is at times like these that general innumeracy kicks in, preventing us from understanding the magnitude of the destruction.
Then, there's our various governments' response.
For days, the people of three states' coastlines were pretty much left on their own. Cities destroyed, citizens abandoned. Basic relief, now, a week out, has still to arrive in some places.
But here, in suburban Annapolis, Maryland, I wonder. How prepared is my local and state agencies for a disaster on that scale. Hurricane Isabell came and went, a little damage, no deaths that I can recal. But what about something on the scale of Katrina?
What would it take to throw the Baltimore-Washington corridor into the type of chaos witnessed in New Orleans? And what would be the effect over here in Annapolis, or for that matter, in any of the surrounding counties?
A forty foot flood surge in the Chesapeake Bay would rival or exceed damage done in the South by Katrina. It would flood our little house, sitting two blocks back and twenty five feet up. It would turn my family into refugees. What is our plan? What are the plans of my state and county?
Now, a week later, the south still struggles with Katrina. Now, a week later, I realize that this was a very personal event, and not just for the people that went through it. It's time for all of us, no matter where we live, to familiarize ourselves with our local and state emergency planning. It's time to get serious about our own (your own) personal and family planning. Most of all, it's time to realize, on a gut level, what the limits of government are. The governments failures in the face of Katrina are easy to see. But these failures must be internalized by us all, so that we can, first, adapt to this reality of inept government and second, work to make the necessary changes. This must be done personally and locally, as well as publicly and nationally.
I know nothing about my own local, county or state emergency planning. Even going through Isabell last year, I was able to remain unaware of official efforts. I guess that's a good place to start.
gonzoliberal [8:18 AM]
[ Tuesday, August 23, 2005 ]
I've been thinkin'...
There is NO WAY Kerry was going to "win" that election.His campaign jet would have had an "accident" before the Bush/Cheney/Saudi cabal would have let him near the White House.
A Democratic preznit was doomed the night of the Bagdhad invasion. With the start of that war and the subsequent movement of American forces from Saudi Arabia and into Iraq, a machine was set into motion that no one man can stop.
The 2004 election was a bit of unpleasantness that the Rovians and Bushies just had to live through, like a trip to the dentist. With both parties firmly in the grip of American and foriegn corporate interests, the outcome was certain.Iraq now belongs to the neo-cons and the corporate interests that own them. As BushCo's standing in the polls show, more and more Americans, especially those that voted for him, are starting to see the lies, deceipt and outright fraud that is the Bush administration.
It will take a "Watergate moment", a national convulsion, to turn the political tide in this country. At the moment, the Democrats, the so-called opposition party, lie neutered and firmly compromised by the very corporate interests that finance the other side. All grassroots liberal discourse is shut down; all non-mainstream Democratic-ne-neo-con thought is marginalized and ignored. Mainstream liberals now find themselves in a similar quandry to mainstream conservatives; our parties have left us, used us to gain power and legitimacy, then tossed us out like the lower class trash we are. Mainstream liberals and conservatives will increasingly find our fortunes linked, our personal success dependent on the sucess of our neighbor. I fear any political change will have to come, not from one of the major parties, but from without, perhaps in the form of an increasing number of declared Independent candidates.
There's more to be said for the parallel marginalization faced by both mainstream libs and reps, but ... a parenting moment just arrived.
gonzoliberal [3:28 PM]
