Fireworks galore

Some nimrod has been out there shooting off fireworks since at least 5:30 a.m.  It’s now almost 6:00 and he’s still going.

The new house has been bought and moved into.  It’s very nice, although going up and down the stairs all the time is taking some getting used to.

Bad week

It was a bad week to be a small mammal at my house.

One of the stray cats had a litter of kittens that had been living in the crawl space.  We thought she was too young to get spayed so we hadn’t trapped her yet, but I guess we were wrong about that.  Anyway, the kittens finally started coming out a couple of weeks ago.  One gray tabby, one black and white, one black with a white spot on the chest, and one all black (the mother is all black).

The black and white one got killed by a neighborhood dog a few days after they came out.  The tabby was killed the night after the first one was killed, apparently also by a dog.  The black one with the white spot on its chest developed a bad habit of hiding under the car to get some shade.  He escaped getting run over by the slimmest of margins a few days after the dog-kitten massacre day.  But then the next day he didn’t escape and I ran over him with the van.

Then another dead cat turned up on the porch a couple of days later.  At least I thought it was a cat — it had been all mangled and partially eaten and parts were scattered around the front door.  It wasn’t until I got a better look as I cleaned it up that I realized it was a squirrel.  I guess the cats caught it and brought it up to the porch to present it to us and had a snack while they waited for us to see it.

Then the all black kitten did not turn up for a couple of days.  We figured something had happened to it as well since the mommy cat was hanging around by herself and her nipples looked all swollen like nobody had been nursing.  But then the kitten turned up this morning and seems to be doing fine, so that was a relief.

Bungled

In order to distract the public with shiny blinky things, the Dallas city council provided an online poll to allow people to vote on which one of 5 names they liked for the soon to be upgraded and prettified Industrial Boulevard.  The problem is that the public picked the wrong name: Cesar Chavez Boulevard.  Now the city council is hemming and hawing about the name because they wanted us to pick Riverfront Boulevard, or at least one of the non-people names.  They know as soon as they announce that the (overwhelming) public choice is blown off in favor of the name they were going to pick all along that there will be a big outcry that the white establishment has it in for the Hispanic community.

I can tell you exactly what happened:  somebody  told the city council they could do this ‘vote’ and they had to come up with some names.  They put in Riverfront Boulevard along with a couple of other generic names like that.  Then they figured they had to throw a couple of bones to the minority communities so they had to come up with a ‘black name’ and a ‘Hispanic name’.  For the black name they added a choice to name the street after Eddie Bernice Johnson, a long-serving local black Congresswoman, but they didn’t know enough about the local Hispanic community to come up with a local Hispanic leader to honor.  Finally they landed on Cesar Chavez who wasn’t local but was at least Hispanic.  That way the minority angles were covered and nobody could say they were left out.

Then the public had to go and screw it up by picking the wrong choice and now the city council is on the hot seat to explain why they are going to go with a different choice.

New house?

So we put an offer in on a new house, and it has been accepted. It’s over on Bryan Parkway, about 5 blocks from where we are now. It needs some work but nothing major, it’s not like it is about to fall over or something.

Of course I haven’t actually seen it yet, just seen pictures and heard descriptions. I have been traveling for the last few days. We’ve got 10 days to get it inspected and the foundation looked at to make sure there isn’t something lurking in there that we (i.e. my wife) couldn’t see, and to make sure I actually like the house. Then assuming the deal goes through then we’ve got about 3 weeks to get our financing in order and start selling our existing house.

Artillery

Just finished reading In Diyala Province, Persuasion by Artillery Fire and this quote jumped out at me from the US Army colonel the post was about:

The artillery helps with “terrain denial” — driving insurgents away from potential safe havens, he explained. But the strikes are also aimed at persuading the local civilian population, and their leaders.

The rounds have a “profound… psychological impact,” Col. Lehr said. “They quickly get your attention, get you to start asking questions” about why the cannons are blasting.

“Six separate times” such strikes “brought tribal leaders to the table,” Col. Lehr noted.

There’s a word for inflicting terror on civilian populations to scare them into acquiescing to your political demands, isn’t there? I could swear there is. It’s right on the tip of my tongue…

Possibly related posts

WordPress.com’s new ‘possibly related posts’ feature is kind of interesting.  I think it is important to emphasize the ‘possibly’ part of the name.

My post about numb fingers from using spray paint now has a link to a page that shows a spray paint can gun adapter, which is indeed a related post.  But then my post about some obscure Bible trivia has suddenly started getting a lot of traffic from Mukhriz, ask your father to answer first, lah, which is a post about Malaysian politics that is completely unrelated to my post.  So thanks for the traffic, but sorry to my new Malaysian visitors that my blog isn’t more interesting.

Next year’s model

I have found my 2009 Halloween costume: Darth Kitty.  It will have to wait until 2009 since this year’s costume will be DJ Lance Rock.

Burial at sea and WWTBAM

A Moment to Pause and Remember: it turns out that any US veteran (not just active duty and not just from the Navy) is entitled to a naval burial at sea if they want it. Any of my reader who happens to be a veteran might want to file that tidbit away for future reference.

And it looks like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire must be doing another round of auditions. The number of hits to my post about the time I auditioned has jumped way up.

Indoor gardening

One way to grow potatoes indoors: Who Needs Dirt

The word is out

I had been keeping mum on the effort to expand Lipscomb Elementary to include 4th and 5th grades because I didn’t want to jinx it by mentioning it in public and run the risk of angering somebody on the board or at the district, but now that it’s been on the front page of the Dallas Morning News I guess it’s OK to talk about.

Of course now that I can talk about it I don’t really have anything to say about it except that I have my fingers crossed that we’ll get some good news soon.  The parents have been surveyed and although I haven’t seen the official results, everybody I talked to was in favor of the expansion.  Hopefully we’ll hear something soon.