A $270 mistake for the better.

I called the survey company this morning. They hadn't cancelled my order for the elevation certificate after all. Which would actually have been a rather disturbing error, since they assured me that it was cancelled, and the charges to my credit card reversed...

but as it is, that little mistake just means that the results won't be delayed by a day after all.

Whew.

Tuck me in.

"Owie. Owie. Owie."

Concerned, I pad out to see what could be troubling Isaiah so at 3:30 in the morning, but he doesn't appear to be in agony.

Instead, I find him sprawled on his belly in the doorway of his bedroom, chin resting on his hands, feet kicking in the air. The classic image of mid-afternoon boredom, not night-time distress.

"Tuck me in."

I look for his blanket, tossed off rather forcefully to all appearances, while Isaiah makes his way over to his bed.

"I need a book."

I hand him The Three Little Pigs.

"No, not that one. I need Mike Mulligan."

He holds the big red book up high while I arrange his blankets around him.

Instantly, he curls up, arms around his book, and is asleep before I am done kissing him.

5:07 PM

5:07.

That is when I got the email from the property manager, saying that they didn't have the elevation certificates after all.


5:07.

Which wouldn't be nearly so bad, except that I'd just cancelled my order with the survey company.

And they are closed now.

5:07.

One must never underestimate the importance of being bored.

Ah, the sweet sound of happy children.

I'd been feeling guilty for being such a homebody, not taking my children out of the house enough. But this week, that hasn't been a problem.

We've been running around non-stop, and it was all stuff they enjoy, too. I mean, going to the bank may be a boring errand for me, but the local WaMu branch has a terrific play area, so that's actually a special treat for the wuggies. And real estate contracts may be dull, but the Re/Max office is a new place they've never been before. And it was all interspersed with fun stuff particularly for the kids, like the McDonalds play place and the zoo.

But slowly, over the course of the week, well... let's just say that strangers have stopped remarking over the good behavior of my children.

This morning was rocky, and this latest bit of misbehavior resulted in a safety hazard which I'm not quite sure how to resolve in the short term. So into their bedroom they went, and there they will stay until lunch, and our afternoon of errands. And oh, there's quite an afternoon of errands ahead. Without the luxury of time, I'm running around collecting documents, rather than waiting for people to send them to me at their leisure. So we'll be taking a grand tour of the greater Houston area this afternoon.

Anyway the kids are in their bedroom, and happier than they've been in several days.

I wish I could just stay home and read to the kids and catch up on chores today.

But I think it's going to be okay, because the wuggies have had their dose of boredom, and that makes all the difference.

Works for Me Wednesday: Pretty Nails

A few months ago, a vendor at the mall did a little demonstration, buffing one of my nails to a glorious sheen. Seriously, it was amazing. It looked like I was wearing clear nail polish, except very, very nice clear nail polish, only better. It brought a natural rosy glow to my nail, too, and the vendor said that all the extra blood circulation would promote nail growth. I'm not sure about that, but it sounds plausible.

So I was definitely sold on the idea of nail buffing. Unfortunately for the vendor, I was not sold on the idea of paying $50 for a nail buffer. Not even if it came with fancy Dead Sea skin care products. And no, not even if they knocked the price down to $25.

I had absolutely no idea whether it was any better than the cheap buffers at the drug store.

Well, now that I've tried a few of the drug store variety, I can tell you that if you're wanting to invest in your nails, if the mall vendor will give you one for $25, it's definitely not a rip-off. Their nail buffer really is considerably nicer than the ones you can get at the drugstore, in addition to being nicer than a salon manicure.

But as for me? I'm using the two-sided Sally Hansen nail buffer that I picked up at Family Dollar for a buck.

The shine doesn't last as long as the shine on my mall nail did, but then again, the process with the Sally Hansen buffer is much, much quicker, so it really sort of evens out.

And whatever buffer you use (as long as you don't use one of the four-sided ones with built in emery boards to scratch your nails as you try to buff) the results are splendidly mom-friendly.

No chipping polish, no noxious chemicals, nothing for the kids to knock over and destroy the carpet with... just pretty nails.

Works for Me.

Ten Days

An agreement has been reached, our offer accepted. The contract has been signed by all parties.
Now we have 10 days to figure out if we really want to go through with this.

10 days to track down the condo association and make sure they're fiscally responsible. They certainly appear to be doing an amazing job of maintaining a tidy row of townhouses and a lovely pool for quite a reasonable monthly fee. On the other hand, I'm having a horrific time tracking down anyone who can provide me with documentation.

10 days to get the house inspected, make sure there are no red flags there.

10 days to talk with the someone from the sheriff's office, make sure that the neighborhood really is as safe as all the nice neighbors say it is.

10 days, for that matter, to decide whether or not we're really confident that out of all the neighborhoods in the greater Houston area, this is the one we want to commit to.

I think it is, though--provided we get the right set of answers over the next 10 days.

It's going to be a busy week...

In the dead of night, she cries for the morning sky.

We leave on the light, but that is a pale substitute for the sun.

She screams and she cries and pounds the walls, but to no avail. Her struggles and her strivings can never speed the morning.

Oh, my child, the morning will come soon enough. But it will be as darkness to you unless you learn to rest in the night.

Souffle

I probably would have been much to intimidated to attempt a souffle, except for a recipe that I found in a baby food cookbook, of all places. Souffles were not exactly what came to mind when I thought of easy, toddler-friendly meals, but that's what the book said. I tried it, and sure enough, it's become a favorite in our house.

The recipe was a pretty standard cheese souffle--make a white sauce, add cheese, add egg yolks, thicken, fold together with beaten egg whites. However, the mom-friendly version calls for baking it in an ungreased dish. It makes things a bit messy when you're serving it up, but it rises just fine, and you don't have to deal with the hassle of coating the dish, which I've never succeeded in doing properly, anyway. One little missed spot, and the souffle doesn't rise.

Anyway, tonight I tried out a different recipe. It calls for using hot milk in the white sauce. I'd always heard that was a big no-no, but it worked like a dream. Silky smooth without the faintest trace of a lump. But it was very, very thick. So thick I don't think you could honestly call it a sauce. So instead of thickening it with the egg yolks, this recipe said to allow the "sauce" to cool before adding the yolks. So since they didn't get cooked at this stage, the yolks actually thinned the mixture, rather than thickening it, and the resulting texture was approximately the same as with a more standard recipe.

Thus the mixture is much sturdier as it cooks, and you can actually bake it in a normally greased dish.

It was a gorgeous souffle, slow to deflate, easily slice-able, and silky-textured.

Best of all, it was all very straightforward and simple to make, with little room for disaster.

And that's always a good thing.

=)

Most eloquent political post of the year

http://beingsarahmarie.blogspot.com/2008/02/dear-huck-love-sarah.html

Go read it. Even if you hate politics.

=)

Good Weekend

Andrew's school held a classical education conference this weekend, and a couple of students volunteered to watch the kids, so I got to go on Saturday.

It felt so very, very good to spend the day with grown-ups.

Andrew gave his talk on the relationship between pure and applied mathematics, which went quite well.

There was much singing of hymns and folk songs, and it was astonishingly tuneful. Thinking and singing both! Ah, such food for the soul!

The main speaker, Dr. Markos, is a Lewis scholar, and had lots of good stuff to say about the role of literature, and the Tao, the Chronicles of Narnia, the myth of the Enlightenment, etc. etc. etc. We stayed afterwards for a long time talking with him, and in addition to being quite brilliant, he's a splendidly nice fellow. He teaches at HBU, which is only the other side of Houston, so I have high hopes that we'll be able to hear him again sometime.

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Markos happened to mention Cici's as a great place to feed a family on the cheap, and so when we got home, we loaded the kids up and took them out for pizza.

The food was exactly what you'd expect from a $5 all-you-can-eat buffet, but the manager was extremely friendly and personable, and did everything he could to make us feel welcome.

It's a strange thing, but having a really friendly pizza place makes life so much sweeter. Moreso than you'd think. It's one of those little things that turns out to be a big thing, even if the food isn't all that great.

Yup. It's been a good weekend.

Don't get to close to your computer screens...

In fact, maybe you shouldn't be reading this at all.

You do NOT want to get whatever it is that we have.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going curl back up into a ball and moan some more.

Mr. Rogers For President,. Part VII: The Emperor has No Gold

It was so weird. While all the other candidates spouted out the answers that Republicans wanted to hear, Ron Paul was talking sense--at least on that one issue. More than that, he was the only one who was concerned not only with how he wanted the world to be, but with being scrupulously lawful in the way we go about making the world a better place. His words displayed a quality so strikingly unexpected in a politician... integrity.

So I thought it was worth listening what he had to say about economics.

Now I have to start out by saying that I disagree with Dr. Paul about the gold standard. The constitution does not say that only gold or silver can be legal tender, it merely says that individual states are not allowed to issue any other type of money. Since no such restrictions were placed on Congressional authority to regulate currency, it seems pretty clear to me that Congress is allowed to issue fiat money. It also seems clear to me that it's a good idea for them to do so. Mild inflation is fairly innocuous, and it prevents the economic disasters that come from even the tiniest bit of deflation, so I think a little bit of inflation is a wonderfully reasonable way for the federal government to fund itself.

Problem is, that's not what's happening.

I'd always wondered how we could possibly have such a huge national debt when the government could just print out money out of nothing.

It turns out there's a very simple answer.

The government doesn't print out money.

Congress has transfered its Constitutional powers over money supply to a privately owned bank, the Federal Reserve.

The government then borrows funds from the Fed... at interest. The income tax is barely sufficient to pay the yearly interest on the national debt, let alone any expenditures, and viola, the whole nation is laboring under a negative-amortization loan.

This is silly.

Moreover, it's unethical.

I think that inflation is a perfectly legitimate way to fund the federal government. It is not a legitimate way to fund private stockholders. The Bible has an awful lot to say about what God thinks of nations that allow the rich to steal from the poor, and it isn't pretty.

This system is also just about the most dangerous national security threat that I can think of.

When our money supply--and thus our ability to arm and support our military--is completely at the mercy of unsupervised private financial interests, this is an enormously frightening situation.

But in any case, the current system is stupid and immoral...

And nobody else is talking about it.

Mr. Rogers for President. Part VI: Authority

So I was pretty much convinced that the medical marijuana debate was much more than just a smokescreen, that there really were lives at stake.

Is it really conscionable to sacrifice these human beings at the altar of "sending the right message?"

Particularly considering that we don't have any problem at all allowing doctors to prescribe morphine and cocaine. It's not legal to take the drugs as a hobby, but after surgery, they give you the stuff so that you can get high instead of being in pain. Usually, I get by with ibuprophen--I think the only time when I actually took the powerful meds was after hemorrhaging when I gave birth to the twins. I'll take an awful lot of pain before I choose to ingest something that will mess with my head.

But whereas getting high is a legitimate method of pain relief for wisdom tooth patients, doctors cannot prescribe non-psychoactive doses of marijuana to prevent AIDS and cancer patients from dying of malnutrition?

There is something very wrong about this picture.

Still, I was pretty sure that states like California were out of line in passing laws that defied the authority of the federal government.

But then I listened to what Ron Paul had to say about it. And Ron Paul said that as a physician he does believe that marijuana can be medically useful in certain situations... but that it's really rather beside the point. The Constitution is very clear that such matters should be left up to the states. California should be able to allow it, Utah and Texas should be able to prohibit it, and as long as nothing crosses a state border, it just isn't any of the federal government's business at all.

I did a double take. That's definitely not the way things work in this country.

So I pulled my copy of the Constitution down from the shelf. I spent a good bit of time poring over it, searching for something that would give the federal government authority over drug laws, but it just wasn't there. The federal government has authority over currency, interstate and international commerce, military forces, post offices and roads, patents and copyrights. But the Constitution doesn't say a single thing about drug law, and the 10th amendment makes it clear that the federal government is not allowed to do anything not mentioned in the Constitution.

And then I looked at the Supreme Court majority and dissenting opinions in the 2001 case in which they decided, 6 to 3, that federal law trumped state law when it came to drugs.

O'Connor, Renquist, and Thomas dissented, saying that since backyard cannabis cultivation for personal medicinal use was neither interstate nor commercial, it could not possibly fall under the interstate commerce clause. He also gave an inspiring and eloquent argument for the importance of the federalist system, where the states serve as laboratories of justice. It's a good read.

But the majority opinion, written by Justice Stevens, states that the authority to regulate interstate commerce extends to purely non-commercial activities which have an impact on interstate markets. Stevens cited a case in which the Court decided that the federal government had the authority to regulate wheat grown for personal consumption. Apparently "regulating commerce between the several states" means that you can place controls on production in order to manipulate prices. So the government wanted to raise the price of wheat, and imposed production caps on the farmers. One farmer, concerned about the shortages that would likely arise, planted some extra for his own family's consumption, in addition to the crops for sale. The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government did indeed have jurisdiction over the non-commercial wheat crops, because they would have an impact (however trivial) on the interstate wheat market.

In other words, the authority to regulate interstate commerce brings with it the power to regulate any activities which might enable you to refrain from participation in interstate commerce.

And it is through this precedent that the Court ruled that federal drug laws trump state drug laws. Since there is a large and lucrative interstate marijuana market, and marijuana cultivation for private use would have an impact on that market, the commerce clause applies in this situation.

In other words, the Suprem Court decided that patients cannot be allowed to grow marijuana because that could impinge on profits in the illegal drug trade.

No, I'm not joking. Read it for yourself.

Early to bed, early to rise...

http://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=1281

In a little while I'll finish up my posts about why I've decided that Ron Paul is worth listening to, why I think he's more likely to be right than most, even on Iraq. I'll tell my little story, and reflect calmly and inquisitively into the thought processes that go into picking a candidate.

But for now, I write with tears streaming down my face.

I don't know which way is up anymore.

Or maybe it's just that for the first time in my life, I actually do.

I've always assumed that economics and foreign policy didn't make any sense to me because I just wasn't smart enough. Surely the smart people who run our nation understand how enforced liberty isn't really contradictory, how fiat currency is a perfectly ethical basis for a economy, after all. Surely.

So I trusted the smart people in my community, and voted for the smart people they told me to vote for.

And then, a little over six years ago, everything came crashing down. In abject horror, I watched the towers fall, and the planes, but I failed to notice that the terrorists had indeed hit their mark, that the idea of America was falling as well. They sought, through fear, to bring us to our knees, and they did.

Out of the corner of my ear, I heard the president's reports on how many terrorists had been apprehended each week, and my heart soared to know how well we were being taken care of. We were going to be okay. The president had everything under control.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the signs of the protesters, something about torture, something about oil, something about the Bill of Rights. And I shook my head in disgust at these unpatriotic souls who dared to dissent in a time of war. United we stand!

But how many have received fair trials, and how many have even been charged? How many have been tortured, and of the tortured, how many were guilty, and how many were innocent? How much evidence has been destroyed, and with it how much trust?

How long can we sit by and let this happen, how long will promises to increase the brutality be met with thunderous applause?

And now the world is wondering how long the Christians will still support Huckabee now that he has voiced his disapproval of torture.

But in this world gone mad, one man is speaking truth. One man has a lucid explanation, a likely story that neatly sorts out the tangled relationships between internal and foreign affairs, national security and economics. One man is ready to explain just where we are, just how we got here, and how to set about on the long, hard road of recovery. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that he is extremely sharp, and he is honest.

I'm still open to being convinced by McCain or Huckabee as to why their views of world are more accurate. But I need to hear some darn good answers.

Never again will I cast a vote out of ignorance.

Mr. Rogers for President. Part V: Nausea

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Synthetic marijuana, huh? Well, clearly marijuana must have some sort of medicinal property, then... why else would you bother imitating them? I'd never heard of marijuana doing anything except altering your state of consciousness, and maybe (or maybe not) causing brain damage. That and all the other lovely effects of smoke inhalation.

So I was curious. What else does marijuana do?

Well, apparently medical marijuana activists claim that it has all sorts of wonderful effects. And official-sounding organizations denounce these claims, and blah blah blah.

I have no idea.

But there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that low doses of marijuana are extremely effective in treating severe nausea and involuntary anorexia, such as in AIDS wasting syndrome, and cancer treatment side effects.

For the most part, nobody disputes that marijuana is effective for these conditions; instead, they argue that it is unnecessary, because there are lots of other, safer options out there.

Well, as little qualified as I may be to speculate on the effects of marijuana on interocular pressure or the progress of tumors, I do know a thing or two about nausea medications.

I thank God for the wonderful medications that took the edge off my nausea during my twin pregnancy. Although they had unpleasant side effects and came with the risk of damage to my heart and liver, they made it possible for me to keep food and fluids down most of the time--and that is a very big deal. I thank God for the enormously expensive wonder-drug that they gave me every time dehydration landed me in the ER, and I wish that it had been even remotely afordable at the time, and that it was possible to take it multiple days in a row without shutting down my digestive system. These drugs saved my life, and the lives of my sons... but nevertheless, I've spent an awful lot of time praying for a safer, more effective solution to severe nausea.

When that man in the wheelchair tells Romney that nothing else helped his nausea, I have no choice but to believe him.

Because I've been there too.

The Stakes on Torture

In this struggle against radical Islam, I believe that our respect for the dignity and liberty of the human soul is our greatest strength.

If out of expediency we turn away from that respect, we choose to seek power through cruelty rather than truth. If our cruelty is mild, then so will be our power. If that is the game we are playing, then we will surely be defeated unless we can muster up a cruelty as strong as our enemies'. I shudder at either outcome.

If we lose the ideological battles, can we hope to win the physical ones? If this ceases to be for us a war between good and evil, and becomes instead a mere power struggle, our situation is grave, because it is much more than that to them, and however we may twist our consciences, it is more than that to us as well. When we ourselves ignore the liberty and dignity of the human soul, the fervor of our cause can find no target but race and creed. We become an impotent shadow of the evil we are fighting.

Relativism

Mama: Torture is bad.
Isaiah: No, porture is bad for the Mama-Chicken. I think porture is happy for the Wugger-Chicken.

My son is a child of his times, it seems.

Moral Issues

I'm one of those "single issue values voters" who will always choose the anti-abortion candidate. It's not that I think abortion is the only important moral issue, or even the most important one. The next president of the United States will be making all sorts of massive life and death decisions, and very few of those decisions will have anything to do with abortion at all.

But although the moral decisions the president will have to make on issues like national security, foreign relations, and economic policy may actually be more important, they're also really, really complicated. All of these things are case-by-case issues, complex decisions with all sorts of facets that must be weighed very carefully. Especially in a time of war, the president is faced with all sorts of enormously compex ethical decisions. I'm not qualified to make those decisions, and certainly no one is qualified to make those decision who flunks out on the simple questions.

The abortion question, on the other hand, is pretty simple and straightforward.

Killing babies is bad.

Period.

Anyone who believes otherwise has some very serious problems with his moral intuitions. And that's not the sort of person I want making important ethical decisions for our nation and the world.

Period.

Torture is another one of the simple questions.

Torture is bad. Period. And however "vague" the Geneva Convention might have been, I think we all know that any attempt to extract information by means of cruelty is torture.

Anyone who can't figure that one out is not qualified to be making the sorts of complex moral decisions involved in the presidency.

I am astounded at how secondary an issue this is for voters who would never dream of supporting a pro-abortion candidate.

In discussions on the candidates, I kept hearing "well, I don't like McCain because of a, b, and c, but I do respect him for his stance on torture."

Silly me, in my naivete, I thought they were just talking about the active way he's spoken out against torture, how through his own horrific experiences he's been able utterly dismantle the notion that torture can ever save lives. He knows from experience that the torturer has no means of distinguishing between true information and false information, and that the tortured has absolutely no motivation for giving accurate information rather than rattling off the names of all the players on the Red Sox.

No, they meant that unlike other prominent candidates in the Republican party, McCain would refrain from authorizing torture.

John McCain and Ron Paul call a spade a spade, and speak clearly against torture. You'd think that would be a given--I guess not. Huckabee appears to oppose torture, but he leaves an awful lot of wiggle room in his words. It's not an automatic disqualifier, but I'm a bit nervous about anyone who needs to defer to McCain's experience in order to decide that "enhanced interrogation techniques" involving simulated drowning qualify as torture. The world has truly gone mad when Huckabee's wishy-washy statements are notably praiseworthy, rather than a red flag. Perhaps he has made--or will make--clearer statements, without the loopholes. If so, that's great.

As for the others, I could care less about any other qualifications they may have. They may be superb businessmen, governors, and mayors, but they have no business running for president.

Period.

The rose needs no adornment

The other day my wonderful husband took all three kids grocery shopping, providing me with a few hours of blissful peace and solitude--as well as a re-stocked pantry. And then he came back with flowers for me.

Yes, I'm very lucky.

Flowers brighten up a place so much, make everything so much happier. And I was pleasantly surprised to note that I didn't even have to constantly step in to prevent the wuggies from destroying them. I guess they must be growing up. They looked at the flowers, and smelled them, and that was it.

Until breakfast this morning.

September picked up her empty cereal bowl and balanced it upside-down atop one of the blooms, milk dripping down the petals and leaves.

"It's wearing a hat 'cause it's pretty!"