The Daily Brief

Well, I suppose this is an improvement on spitting on uniformed personnel. As for a class assignment, I’m afraid that the spelling in some of the letters needs work, also, not to mention the geography— especially since you can’t get farther away from Iraq than Korea, not without going towards it again. And the historical perspective is a little lacking; for a meaningless, brutal and bungled war, World War I is still win show and place… don’t they teach anything in public schools these days?
If you want to ask about that, here’s a link. Remember, it’s JHS 51, Park Slope, and an air of courteous and civil enquiry is appropriate. It may not get you anywhere, but it is appropriate.

(Original story link courtesy of Rantburg, link to chancellors’ office, courtesy of LGF reader “pookleblinky”)

Sing, ye muses, about the joys of snagging the exact, perfect item that you need for a room or project at a thrift store, flea market or marked better than 60% down at a post-Christmas sale. In this world I know there exist people whose approach to home decoration is to throw lots of money at an expensive interior decorator, in the hopes that purchased good taste will eventually stick to their walls— I may even have met some of them, on occasion— but it always seemed a rather bloodless way to do it, and not very much fun. It is on par with that internet hunt that people were hyperventilating about last month in the blogoverse; a gun with a webcam set up, and a program that let people log on, and aim and fire the gun at whatever wandered within range. They were still working out the logistics and some of the practical aspects to this project, but primarily it just did not seem nearly as much fun to serious devotees… it was just too easy. Being able to just order it up, money no object, is just like that— too easy. There’s no challenge to it, no opportunity to overcome a sudden obstacle, no sudden inspiration, no chance to exercise the old ingenuity.

And since I don’t have heaps of money, and was raised by fairly frugal— but tasteful— people, I have to take the budget approach, even though they call it “shabby chic” , to sorting out a new look for my daughter’s old bedroom. She is planning to go to college, post USMC, so the week she spent at home over Christmas this year were devoted to ripping out the carpet, painting the walls and stenciling the floor, reassessing all the furniture crammed into one tiny front bedroom, and hanging shelves all along the walls on either side of the window. Anything new would be either from the thrift store, or something we put together ourselves, or bought on sale: the bed is new, but it came from an unpainted furniture place, and I am making new pillow covers and curtains from severely-reduced decorator fabric… and just this last weekend I scored the perfect bedside lamp from the thrift store for $2.49, and made a pair of hanging wall vases from a couple of yards of wired ribbon and some slender glass vases from the hobby shop. Oh, yeah, eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.

The framed pictures over the bed all came from the thrift-shop too, but I took them apart and repainted the frames to match. Blondie even zeroed in on a nice oriental vase and a framed print from the same thrift-shop, things which looked remarkably good, once removed from the disreputable jumble of the thrift store. We could have, if time and budget permitted, driven north of San Antonio to the legendary Buseys’ Flea Market, and bought everything at once instead of piecemeal…

Heck, you could outfit an entire house with gleanings from Buseys’. It’s a couple of acres of rambling, single-storey sheds, booths, stalls, ranks of wooden tables under tin and tarpaper roofs. The vendors are a jumble, both regulars, who have established premises with lockable doors, and others who come occasionally to sell garage-style stuff from the trunks of their cars, or spread out on trestle tables: antique furniture, and just plain junk furniture, clothes, socks and underwear by the bale, work clothes and tee shirts, Orientalia and Mexican pottery, books and potted plants, birds in cages, tools of all sorts, old military uniforms and memorabilia, garden art, wind chimes, old and new and cheap kitchen appliances and tools, cheap jewelry, old typewriters, horse brass, china and silverware, lunch boxes, camping gear, drawer pulls, area rugs, old chenille bedspreads the color of orange sherbet and peptol bismol, video tapes, cassettes and old record albums… the contents of dozens of junk shops, garage sales and small retail places all jumbled together, every Saturday and Sunday.

There are a couple of food stalls, too, and I think I saw a fortune-teller, last time. The smell of funnel cakes and hot deep-fat frying wafts from one direction, and mariachi music from the stall selling imports from Mexico spills out into the walkway by the ATM machine— Buseys’ has it all. 95% of it is total krep, of course— but that remaining %5, if you are sharp-eyed and know what you want, and have the wit to buy it as soon as you see it— oh, that five percent is worth the trip. I should think it would make a most wondrous reality-TV Home-Decorating DIY show: to go to a place like Buseys’ and tastefully outfit an entire house— furniture, accessories, bedding and rugs and all— just from what you could find there. All I’d need would be a pretty good budget and a pickup truck— send any TV offers through my agent, please.

Oh, and Buseys’ is about a half hour drive north of San Antonio, on I-35. Look for the enormous concrete armadillo.

Cross-posted from my personal blog….

My favorite thing to do on the morning of Nov 16 each year is to call my dad and sing happy birthday to him. 🙂

Today was no exception. I sent him flowers, too – a nice autumn bouquet to brighten up his day. They arrived shortly before I called him, he said.

He’s 74 today, and it’s only by the grace of God that we have him with us at all. In July of 1976 he had a stroke. Well, it started out as an aneurism, and it gave him a really bad headache. In fact, it was so bad that my mom called the emergency squad to come and get him (she didn’t drive).

Anyway… the squad took him to the hospital, and they determined that it was an aneurism on one of the 2 major blood vessels that we have in the back of our necks, and they said they would need to do surgery and repair it. (He had aneurisms on both of those blood vessels, but only one was causing a problem, so they were going to do that one first).

Later that week they did the surgery. Dad was prepped, anesthetized, and wheeled in to the OR. The surgeon opened up the area where the aneurism was, and no sooner did he expose it than it burst. Because he was right there, he was able to clamp it and minimize the damage. Had it happened when Dad was anywhere else other than right there on the operating table with the aneurism already exposed, he would have died.

People used to tell Mom that it was a shame this had to happen when Dad was on vacation. We understand their point, but disagree with their conclusion.

Yes, it sucks to get seriously ill when you’re on vacation.

However, the vacation was being spent at home, working on our new house. We had built it the previous summer, and to save money we had the company only put up the shell of the house, and do the electrical/plumbing etc., things that had to be done by certified folks, and pass inspection. We were doing the finishing work ourselves. Mom and Dad, with friends and family, put on the vinyl siding, installed the shingles on the roof, put up the drywall, laid the hardwood floors, etc. So Dad was using his vacation time to do that kind of stuff.

On top of that…..

Dad drove an 18-wheeler around a 7-state area. Had he been at work, driving a tractor-trailer on the highway when that aneurism burst, not only would it have killed him, but who knows what other damage might have been done?

So all things considered, it was a blessing that he got sick while on vacation.

They repaired the other aneurism in Oct 1976, and Dad has been going strong ever since. It took him awhile to get back up to a functional level, and he *is* handicapped, but he can take care of himself, and up until this past summer he was mowing lawns for a bunch of elderly folks in his town. He finally decided that he’s allowed to retire, so he’s not going to do that anymore.

I saw him a couple weeks ago, and he’s looking good. I wish I could have been there today to give him a hug for his birthday, but I called, and his card’s in the mail, and his flowers are there, so those will have to act as his hugs, for me.

I love him more than I know how to express in words, but I’m sure that he knows that.

To: Sen. Kerry
Re: Bad Political Advice
From: Sgt Mom

1. Presumptious of me to be offering my advice to you at this time, but if Lumpy Riefenstahl can presume to offer open letters to GWB, and cats can look at kings, then I can offer a few kindly words. My pity as a public relations professional is aroused most particularly because whoever advised you to base your campaign on the image of your service in Vietnam as a Navy officer did you no favor. To put it kindly, that was the second-worst bit of advice I have ever seen administered. The prize for worst in my experience, was that of an oldies radio station in Ogden-SLC ten or twelve years ago, who— when they re-formatted their playlist, took that occassion to announce that while the playlist was being updated and refreshed, they would be the “All Louie, Louie” station. And they played nothing but “Louie, Louie”, all day and all of the night, for an entire week!
I think they had lost every listener in the market by the end of the weekend, and carried on for another four days just to be sure. But I digress.
2. Senator, Vietnam was three wars ago, four if you count the Cold War of which it was a part. It is ancient history to most everyone under the age of 40, the stuff of movies and TV shows. To them, Vietnam is about as far away and irrelevent as World War I was to us. Not too much about it is applicable to the here and now of the war in Iraq, and what there is sometimes seems to have been bashed and warped and jammed to fit a wholly new matrix, shoehorned in any old way, according to the preconceptions of those doing the applying.
3. To those of an age to remember Vietnam and the aftermath, the memories are often bitter— especially for those who served in the military. The memories are of shame, of loss, and of being carelessly maligned by the public, levened with the salt of betrayal of people who trusted us, and finally paved over with a couple of decades of getting on with ordinary life. How your political consultants could think that re-opening the bitter divisions of that time would serve a useful purpose goes beyond malpractice. Had you, or they, any idea of how angry the average Vietnam veteran would be, given your prominence in the anti-war faction following on your service?
4. To see the world only as you wish to see it, not as it actually is, may be the particular hazard of those who live in an insular world, deprived of real-world feedback. To make decisions based on what you want the situation to be, and discounting— or being completely unaware of facts to the contrary— is a reciple for folly, and disaster. Your only hope for political victory may be that sufficient voters share your insular, floating world, soaring high above the rabble of cruel realities.
5. At this late date, you might still recoup the recent losses; downplay Vietnam, convincingly take up some rather more down-to-earth amusements, release your military records, confront the realities of this present war with bold, concrete and achievable policies; Audacity, my dear Senator, always audacity, but focusing well above just telling audiences what they want to hear at any one moment.
6. Up to the present, though, your course has been so disasterous and ill-advised, I confess to wondering in dark moments, if you were not set on it deliberatly, perhaps by a trusted someone who has ambitions for a second Clinton administration after the next election. As a rational person, I do not look for sabotage and clouds of conspiracies, but I can be tempted. After all, sometimes the paranoid do have people out to get them.
7. Seriously, Senator, I think you need to get out more.

All the best
Sgt Mom