trying to grok

A CAKE FIT FOR A DICTATOR

NEWS, EVERYONE!

Ho.Ly.Crap.
Saddam to be hanged by Sunday
This calls for one of my cakes!

ADDRESS WOES

We've noticed some weird spellings of our new street name. It's not a super common word, but it's hardly difficult. But we've gotten all sorts of strange looks and repeats, which we've found amusing. Today in the car we were looking at all the other street names and trying to decide which would be easy for people and which would be hard. (The best one we came across was Possum Holler Rd.) And my husband cracked me up when he said, "I suppose it could always be worse: 'What's your address?' '1532 Ecclesiastical Benevolence.'"

NIIIIIICE

This was a long read, but it was definitely worth my time. Hugh Hewitt interviews Joe Rago, the young journalist who said that blogs are crap.

WASTE

I just had one of those moments like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride, where he goes nuts and starts pulling hotdog buns out of the pack. I think that someone at the window factory got together with someone in the blinds factory and decided to screw the American public.

We went to buy blinds. Our windows are 54" wide. Well, you can buy 52" or 59". And 59" costs ten bucks more. So we proceeded to buy 59"s and have them cut about fifty dollars worth of blinds off and dump them in the garbage. It's funny because I'm not really mad about the price -- I would've bought 54"s for the same price -- I'm just ticked that I had to pay to waste blinds, that I had to sit for an hour and a half and watch them throw our money down a hole. Literally.

But at least tomorrow the sheets can come down from the windows.

NOW THAT'S CAMO

Hahahahaha! All ACU wearers have to go right now and see this photo at Jack Army!

THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS

Lileks writes about Kurt Gerstein today and warns that it's "not exactly holiday reading." But he hints that it is, and I'll take it one step further. We don't have kids. We don't have any family or friends here to celebrate with. We don't even have a tree up. So what does Christmas mean without all that? It means being thankful for all the blessings you have, and what better way to do that than to think about how absolutely worse life could be.

I heard Glenn Beck on the radio a few weeks ago saying something I haven't been able to get out of my head. He was talking about the so-called War on Christmas and how people get all bent out of shape about whether the Seattle Airport has any trees in the lobby. He said that these people are entirely missing the point about Christmas. He said that we can't even understand Thanksgiving -- that we've reduced it to food and football -- so if we can't even understand Thanksgiving, how can we possibly begin to understand the true meaning of Christmas?

What he said really got to me. Christians survived communism, a fate far worse than drama about airport decorations. People have been persecuted and killed for their beliefs, and they certainly didn't need a tree or presents to understand what Christmas means. People who truly believe in the meaning of Christmas don't need an airport tree to make them feel Christmassy, and they don't need to whine about any War on Christmas.

We don't need the trappings of Christmas to have the Christmas spirit in our hearts. But we do need the Kurt Gersteins, the deployed soldiers, the stories that remind us that all our bitching and moaning about where the tree should be placed or how long the lines are in the stores is really and truly absurd.

Read the story of Kurt Gerstein. And then wipe away the tears and think about how good your life is. And enjoy your Christmas, with our without a tree.

FAR OLDER THAN THEIR YEARS

On this Christmas Eve, be thankful for the men and women who serve our country, many of whom are too young to even rent a car...

ANNOYED

What I love most about being home from Germany is that I can get things done in the morning. I can get up and make it to Walmart before the majority of shoppers do so I don't have to battle the crowds. I love that I can grocery shop at 0700 instead of waiting until 1000 at the commissary.

So this morning we ran to Walmart to try to beat the Christmas crowd because we needed a few groceries and because when we plugged our four-year-old phone into the wall, it started smoking. Hence, a replacement was in order. We got everything we needed and headed for the self check-out. And as I rang my items out, the big red light started flashing and I needed customer assistance.

I had committed the unforgivable sin of trying to buy Miller High Life before noon on a Sunday.

Look, we come from the heart of the Bible belt, and I have never had to think about these ridiculous and archaic liquor laws before. For the first few years of my drinking life, I lived in the state with the loosest laws and the smallest alcohol taxes. It never even crosses my mind that we can't buy something until I walk into a dry Walmart in Kentucky and wonder where the booze aisle is. Apparently you can't buy hard liquor anywhere in this danged country except for designated liquor stores, which always manage to be closed when you need booze (like Thanksgiving). And you can't even buy the soft stuff when you're supposed to be in church, I guess.

Talk about meddling.

I kinda think that if I want to get sloppy drunk at daybreak on Sunday, that's my own business. Why do we still have laws that are related to the sabbath? Shouldn't some hardcore separation of church and state folks be in a wad about this? I'm a little steamed that if my husband wants to have a Christmas Beer, we have to drive back out to the store later in the afternoon. Maybe we should just set ourselves up like Sweden, where you can't even pick the stuff out yourself and instead have to take a number and then tell the clerk to bring you a case of beer. Good heavens, can't we be responsible for anything ourselves, even our drinking habits?

I'm gonna go downstairs and drink a shot of something just for spite! It's early Sunday morning and I'm drinking! Mwahahaha.

CHRISTMAS

I can't believe it's almost Christmas.

This holiday season really got lost in the move. I chuckled yesterday when I was unpacking boxed that hadn't been opened since Germany and I thought, "Wow, it's just like Christmas! Oh wait..." In the rush to buy a washer and dryer, a fridge, a sofa, two armoires, new brakes, and a host of other house needs (still no blinds -- that's today), I haven't even thought about Christmas. Not to mention that it's warm here, so how can my brain process it when a store clerk wishes me a merry Christmas and I'm wearing short sleeves? Does not compute.

Also my husband's present is lost somewhere in the house. I had hidden it in the computer room in the apartment, but I've opened all the computer room boxes here and it's nowhere to be found. I came across his present to me, which he had hidden in his underpants drawer. I told him that was maybe not the best place to hide it considering it was laundry day. Thankfully I didn't really see what it was, because I had an a-ha moment that maybe I shouldn't investigate further.

I have to shop for Christmas dinner. But first I have to clear away eight thousand glasses and dishes and bowls and tupperwares off the countertops.

PHONES

After six months in billeting at OBC, three years in Germany, and six months of just cell phones, we have our first home phone in a very long time. We've had it three days, and already I'm sick of the telemarketers. We've gotten so many pre-recorded phone calls that I can't even believe it. How freaking annoying.

HOUSE

So here's the latest. The showers had some sort of child-proof anti-scalding contraption, but someone went way overboard with it. So instead of anti-scalding, it became anti-warm. Plumber came out and it's fixed; thank heavens because it was my third day without a shower! Dishwasher is fixed too, so now we can start washing all these dishes that have been in boxes since Germany. I'm still sitting on a folding chair in front of the TV, but we should find a solution to that today. Oh, and the brakes went out on our car, so that was another fun activity to pass the time.

All in all, I can't complain. Except for the fact that we spent about a thousand dollars today. And we still have bedsheets tacked over the windows.

UPDATE

We're here.

We're a day late on internet connection due to a busted ethernet card, but now we're back in the saddle. Oh, and we've also discovered that our dishwasher is somehow not hooked up to any sort of water supply, and our shower doesn't have any hot water. And none of our furniture can fit through the doorway into our rec room. It's been a busy and fairly annoying two days.

But it's eight days before Christmas and the temps are still in the 70s. So we're lovin' that.

Also Charlie is completely freaked out by the move. He won't leave our side, which is unusual for the dog who hates to be touched. But he spent the first day walking around the house crying, so at least we're past that.

Five moves in four and a half years of marriage. Sheesh.

MOVING

The waves of PCS nausea are starting to wash over me.

My husband still doesn't have orders, but we're about 95% sure things will work themselves out soon. His control branch has been changed on his ORB to Civil Affairs, but we're waiting for that to trickle into orders. However, it was enough to put a silly grin on my husband's face, since he's been waiting for this day for over a year. Still, we might be the only couple in the history of Armydom who PCSes without orders. It could happen.

We leave on Wednesday, move in our house on Thursday, get our household goods on Friday, and get cable and internet on Saturday. What does your week look like?

STRUGGLE

My post from yesterday should not be seen as giving up or wanting out of Iraq or thinking we shouldn't have been there in the first place. This War on Terror is full of conflicting views for me. Well, not exactly conflicting, but complex for sure. No matter how freaking backwards I think Islam is and how often I think that these people don't deserve our blood to be shed to set them free, it's not really about that. This offensive war was started as defense, because they're the ones who wanted to kill us first. That's what I have to keep reminding myself when I wish they'd all just feck off and sharia themselves to death. I can't remember where I read/heard this recently, but someone smarter than I said that this war in Iraq is not like Vietnam because when we left Vietnam, we left our involvement with them altogether, but if we leave Iraq, it affects us. The result of what happens in Iraq deeply affects the United States. And that's why we can't let this be a Vietnam. We can't just wash our hands and go home, not only because it would be absolutely shameful for us to do that to Iraq again, but because this war is far bigger than Iraq. People scoff when talking heads say we fight there so we don't have to fight here, but if we left Iraq now, it would surely come back to bite us later.

And so I struggle, with wanting all men to be free, with hating absolutely everything about Islam, with feeling outraged that my husband is trying to get a job so he can help people who clearly don't want to be helped, and with knowing that in the end none of that matters. All that matters is that we win this. That we crush the fighting spirit in Islam that makes them think that they're winning. We have to. Period.

TRAINING IRAQIS

Political Critic posts a reaction to the Iraq Study Group. In it, he says

The ISG's second point focuses on the training of the Iraqi military, which should be the main focus. Unfortunately, the Iraqi military has not been trained properly for the 3+ years that we've been there and that is not addressed. Apparently, the ISG believes that all of a sudden the Iraqi military will get trained exponentially faster and before the American forces leave. The report is correct to focus on the training, but makes no mention of how to stop the corruption, infiltration, and safety issues that they face.

I think this is an easy complaint to make -- "the Iraqi military has not been trained properly" -- but proposals on how to be more efficient are hard to come by.

I've spent a lot of time around soldiers who've been to Iraq, and I've heard lots of stories about training Iraqi soldiers. That was one of the primary missions of my husband's brigade as far back as early 2004. Everywhere they went, Iraqis went with them. Everything they did, Iraqis were involved. I hate when politicians say that we'd be able to pull out of Iraq if we'd just concentrate on training Iraqis. We've been doing that since day one.

However, training Iraqis is not just a matter of teaching them to shoot and how to go on raids. Heck, I've heard that's nothing to sneeze at in and of itself: when you're trying to teach someone who thinks that bullets go wherever Allah wills them to go, it can apparently be a pain in the neck to get them to aim. And that's the larger point of training Iraqis: you're teaching culture as much as military training.

I heard a story about the Iraqi police, who proudly bragged that they had taken a suspect into their station and beaten him all night long. They were proud, telling the Americans because they thought that they had done something good. Look, we're keeping order! The Americans didn't know what to do except shake their head and try to explain why this was not a good thing.

In order to teach someone to stand up and fight for his own country, you have to teach him to love his country above everything else. How do you teach that? All the target practice in the world can't stop "corruption, infiltration, and safety issues." You can't teach Iraqis to be Americans, to all of a sudden erase decades (centuries?) of ingrained tribalism and mores and have them care about the same things we care about. It's like we're looking at this through the lens of our own history: settlers came to the US and learned to live in religious harmony and value freedom and democracy over everything, so why can't you? If we just teach them to use a rifle, then they'll rise up like colonial Americans did, right? But it's not that simple. We can't force them to want the same things early Americans wanted. That's the problem with this so-called Bush Doctrine, which was a noble idea because we Americans have been taught from birth that all men want to live free. But unfortunately we tried to free people who think sharia is the way to go. Just teaching them to raid a house and hunt for IEDs is not going to fix the underlying issues in their society.

I think this talk of training Iraqis has been grossly oversimplified in every discussion I've ever heard about it, except for the soldiers who've actually had to try to do it.

RESOLUTE

On this day that will live in infamy:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounding determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God.

OTHER PEOPLE'S INTERESTS

I'm with Lileks on this one: I like hearing about people's jobs. I guess soldiers must have massive experience with wives not being interested in their shop talk, because they always apologize for talking about it. But I love it. I want to know what people do, especially if it's something I know nothing about. My father has been in heating and cooling since college, and only recently have I started to understand what he does. I had the good fortune of being home on vacation on the night he taught a class on load estimating. He thought I was doodling the whole time; I was actually taking notes. And asking him questions in the car on the way home.

In fact, this desire to learn about other people's jobs was the source of my latest knitting project. One of my friends in Germany taught me binary code, which prompted me to make this:

With light blue being 1 and dark blue being 0, the bag says 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100111, or "my bag". Oh, and the handle says 01001001 00100000 01110010 01110101 01101100 01100101, or "I rule".

Binary is awesome. I'm so glad my friend taught me.

63 MORE THINGS

When I wrote my 100 Things post, some guy commented that I was narcissistic for talking about myself so much. I cracked up, because isn't that the very point of a 100 Things post? I found a post on Keeping the Faith at Fort Carson called 63 Things You Never Cared to Know About Me. If you really don't care, skip it. If you want, read the extended entry.

1) How old do you wish you were? 30. I can't wait to turn 30.

2) Where were you when 9-11 happened? Getting ready for school. I really didn't pay any attention to the TV because I didn't want to miss my bus.

3) What do you do when vending machines steal your money? I hardly ever use vending machines. I can't justify spending as much for one Coke or Snickers as I would for an entire box.

4) Do you consider yourself kind? Not as much as I used to. I guess I'm still fairly kind, but I am not very empathetic at all.

5) If you had to get a tattoo, where would it be? Why would I ever have to get a tattoo? I don't have one and I don't ever plan to get one.

6) If you could be fluent in any other language what would it be? Arabic, so I could get a job helping my country.

7) Do you know your neighbors? I've chatted with the lady upstairs. Their dog goes on the balcony and barks, and Charlie goes out on our porch and tries to figure out where the noise is coming from. It's hilarious.

8) What do you consider a vacation? Having my husband be both on leave and on break from his MBA program.

9) Do you follow your horoscope? No. It's like cold reading: dumb.

10) Would you move for the person you loved? Sure. How 'bout next week?

11) Are you touchy feely? I was in high school, but I've slowly grown less touchy feely. I like a nice handshake, and maybe a goodbye hug.

12) Do you believe that opposites attract? Not for me personally. I want to have the most stuff possible in common with my friends and loved ones.

13) Dream job? A specialist in the Army, working for my husband. We used to talk about this a lot in Germany, that I could manage all his paperwork and organize his schedule for him. And call him Sir...tee hee.

14) Favorite channel(s)? Food Network, National Geographic, TNT

15) Favorite place to go on weekends? See #8

16) Showers or Baths? Ugh. I hate all water, especially baths. Sometimes I think maybe I'll grow into them, and I pour a bunch of bubble bath in and get in. And in about five minutes, I am hating it and wanting to get out. I hate showers too, but a girl's gotta wash somehow.

17) Do you paint your nails? Sometimes.

18) Do you trust people easily? In some ways. Once I lent a boy at my college something like $900. I knew he was good for it. My parents nearly died.

19) What are your phobias? I don't know. I'm sure I could think of something if I wasted more time on it.

20) Do you want kids? Sure, in 2008.

21) Do you keep a handwritten journal? I used to write all the time before I started blogging. Now I still keep these books where I make my own calendars and organizers. Sometimes I write thoughts in there, or like glue in a picture of a cool quilt from a magazine, and other things like that. I have a ton of old journals that freak me out: I want to get rid of them because I don't want anyone to ever read them, especially pre-husband crap that was all needy and obsessive about stupid boys I hate now, but it seems silly to throw away something that was obviously important for me to write at the time. So I want to write in journals, but I never want to read them again.

22) Where would you rather be right now? In our new house instead of typing on a TV tray in a completely empty room.

23) What makes you feel warm and safe? Snuggling up next to my husband at night.

24) Heavy or light sleeper? Light. Once in Germany I woke up when my cell phone battery died and it beeped. It was in my purse downstairs.

25) Are you paranoid? No, not really.

26) Are you impatient? Not as bad as my husband. I wouldn't say I'm impatient, but I am definitely inflexible. If we say we're leaving at noon, we'd better be out the door at 12:00 or I'll start getting panicky.

27) Who can you relate to? CaliValleyGirl. Lately I've been emailing her a lot when stuff bugs me and I need someone to vent to.

28) How do you feel about interracial couples? What an odd question to be thrown in between 27 and 29. Um, they're fine. I don't care.

29) Have you been burned by love? What a high-schoolish question. Burned as in fallen in love with someone who was a complete jackass? Then yes. But looking back, it wasn't even love anyway. It's not love if you're both not happy. So no burning.

30) What's your life motto? My friend embroidered a Joe Dirt shirt for me for last Christmas that says "You can't have no in your heart." I love that shirt.

31) What's your main ringtone on your mobile? Some free choice preprogrammed into Verizon. I never did get my Dallas theme song...

32) What were you doing at midnight last night? Sleeping on a mattress for the last time in the next two weeks.

33) Who was your last text message from? Erin. It's been my only text message since getting to the US.

34) Whose bed did you sleep in last night? This is a very collegeish question. My own. Duh.

35) What color shirt are you wearing? oatmeal

36) What are you listening to right now? Absolutely nothing. Empty house, remember?

37) Name three things you have on you at all times? shirt, pants, underpants

38) What color are your bed sheets? Man, I have more sets of sheets than you can shake a stick at. My favorites are my cowboy sheets.

39) How much cash do you have on you right now? My purse is in the other room and I'm way too lazy to go check. Something like $40.

40) What is your favorite part of the chicken? Remember when Cartman ate all the skin out of the bucket of KFC? Awesome.

41) What's your fav city/place? San Antonio

42) I can't wait till . . . we move into our house.

43) Who got you to set up a blog? I wrote an email to Den Beste about something I saw in a college class, and it got so much traffic that I finally kicked off a blog to cash in on the glory myself.

44) What did you have for dinner last night? A filet mignon sandwich. Not as yummy as I would've hoped.

46) Have you ever smoked? not even once

47) Do you own a gun? not yet, but soon

48) Tea or Coffee? I'm ambivalent about both.

49) What is your secret weapon to lure in the opposite sex? Don't act "like a damn woman"? That's why my husband's here.

50) Do you have A.D.D.? No. But you might want to mark me down under OCD.

51) What time did you wake up today? 6:45, bright and early for the movers. They rolled in at 9:00.

52) Current worry? Someone will steal my husband's bike during the PCS.

53) Current want? Last week's warm weather.

54) Favorite place to be? at home

55) Where would you like to travel in the future? Anywhere in the US

56) Where do you think you'll be in 10 yrs? No idea. At our next duty station so we don't have to PCS again? Yeah, right.

57) Last thing you ate? Pizza Hut

58) What songs do you sing in the shower? I don't.

59) Last person that made you laugh? One of the movers, some guy they called Lemon.

60) Worst injury you've ever had? Minor stuff.

61) Does someone have a crush on you? Doubtful

62) What is your favorite candy? anything but licorice

63) What song do you want played at your funeral? "The Fairest of the Seasons" by Nico and "Please Don't Bury Me" by John Prine

STUFF

What happens when they pack you out for a PCS is that invariably you will start to have desires for belongings you haven't looked at in years. The minute your stuff goes in boxes, you'll find yourself saying something like, "Honey, remember that Korean woman I taught English to five years ago? No? Well, when we get home I'll show you a picture. Oh wait. Nevermind." All of a sudden you'll have indescribable urges to look up the Whiskey Rebellion in your old history textbook, a book you haven't touched in ten years. It never fails, every PCS.

I miss my stuff already.

Oooh, and we had female movers. Heavenly. Male movers want you out of their way so they can do their job as quickly as possible. Female movers ask you questions about how you want something packed, whether you actually meant to leave this item out to take with you, and so on. All my worries dissipated when women walked through the front door.

WAITING

I'm sitting here waiting for the movers to show up. Back in April, I was so stressed about the move that I started planning and packing about six weeks in advance. This time, I was so loath to go through the process again that I started packing on Saturday. Whoops. But I guess we're ready to go, as soon as the guys get here.

And I just found out that Conservative Grapevine is back in business! I loved this site because it was a great way to read blogs I'd never seen before. Check it out if you're looking for a directory of interesting blog posts.

FINALLY

I started a sweater while my husband was in Iraq, messed it up, and let it sit without touching it for two years. Well, I finally picked it back up, ripped it all out, and started over. I am happy with the final results.

But I'm kinda bummed that I now live in a place where I can't wear sweaters. Two seconds after taking this photo, I had to rip the sweater off before I suffocated. It's so danged hot here. Not that I'm complaining: my parents have been snowed into their house in Illinois for two days. Literally. They can't get out of the driveway.

But now I'm a knitter with a closet full of sweaters and scarves, and it's 76 degrees in December.

HEH

Wanna know what Stonehenge was? (Via Hud)

DEMOCRACY

Long ago I wondered if we're born with our politics or if we learn them. I still think about this a lot. But now I've thought of a new twist: If I had been born a Muslim, would I embrace Islam or democracy? Some Muslims break away from their religion -- like Ibn Warraq or Nonie Darwish -- but many accept the worldview they were born into as the only way to live their lives. It's very 1984 to me; I can never put my finger on why someone would want to live under sharia when they know democracy exists.

Andrew McCarthy:

Islamic countries, moreover, are not rejecting Western democracy because they haven’t experienced it. They reject it on principle. For them, the president’s euphonious rhetoric about democratic empowerment is offensive. They believe, sincerely, that authority to rule comes not from the people but from Allah; that there is no separation of religion and politics; that free people do not have authority to legislate contrary to Islamic law; that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims, and men to women; and that violent jihad is a duty whenever Muslims deem themselves under attack … no matter how speciously.

These people are not morons. They adhere to a highly developed belief system that is centuries old, wildly successful, and for which many are willing to die. They haven’t refused to democratize because the Federalist Papers are not yet out in Arabic. They decline because their leaders have freely chosen to decline. They see us as the mortal enemy of the life they believe Allah commands. Their demurral is wrong, but it is principled, not ignorant. And we insult them by suggesting otherwise.

Democratizing such cultures — in anything we would recognize as “democracy” — is the work of generations. It is a cultural phenomenon. It is not accomplished by elections and facile constitution writing … especially, constitutions that shun Madisonian democracy for the State Department’s preferred establishment of Islam and its adhesive sharia law as the state religion.

Having just read about the Constitutional Convention in my A Pocket History of the United States, I simply can't wrap my brain around this.

BAMBOOZLED

AWTM is collecting holiday cookie recipes. I have a story to go with my favorites...

I sent lots of cookies to my boys during the deployment. Usually I'd buy those bags of pre-measured stuff and send cookies down to my husband and his platoon, and also to Red6 and his guys. But one time I had to make "real" cookies for an event back home, so I set aside a few and sent a little baggie to my husband and to Red6. And I got the following letter back from Red6:

I used to be bamboozled by the Terminator paradox...you know, Reese being the father of John Connor but also being sent back by John Connor? Well, now I'm bamboozled by your cookies. How the heck did you make those? They were incredible. I couldn't figure 3 cookies 16 ways, so I ate 'em all myself.

So now we lovingly refer to these as The Terminator Cookies.

2 sticks butter, softened
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
3 ½ cups all purpose flour (sifted)
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
1 package Dove candies

Combine the butter, peanut butter, and sugars using a mixer on a medium to low speed until light and fluffy. Slowly add eggs and vanilla until thoroughly combined. Then mix in flour, salt, and baking soda. Cover and chill dough for 2-3 hours. Unwrap all the candies. Remove dough from refrigerator. Divide into 1 Tbsp balls and flatten. Place a candy in the center of each piece of dough and form the dough into a ball around the candy. Place on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 300° F for 15-17 minutes or until tops of cookies start to crack. Let cookies cool on a baking rack or waxed paper.

Enjoy the bamboozling deliciousness.

SO COOL

My friend sent me this game, and it's completely addictive. Click on this clever wallpaper at Virgin Digital. There are 74 names of bands or musicians represented. Can we find them all? Some are fairly obvious (Gorillaz) and some take a more discerning eye (Dead Kennedys). What do you see?