A couple snapshots of Alison

Weekends are great, because I get to spend some quality time with Alison.

We took Alison to several baseball games this summer. Now, every time the Star Spangled Banner is played on TV, she stops whatever she is doing and puts her hand over her heart.

Obviously, there is quite a bit of lounging around that goes on while Alison plays with various things.

An Exciting Evening

Tonight around 6:30 I was carving a roast for dinner. As I went to cut the twine I had tied it up with, the knife slipped and I cut the end of my index finger on my left hand. Off to the urgent care center we went, about 4 miles away.

I walked into the lobby, and they asked if it was an emergency. I said, "No, I cut my finger, but it isn't too bad."

Immediately, I was rushed in and a doctor examined the wound. It needed stitches, so I was shown to a treatment room, where a nurse cleaned me up and the doc stitched me up. Eight sutures, a tetanus shot, and some pleasant chit chat later, we were out the door and headed home.

The time on the car clock: 7:30 PM. So just about an hour passed between the moment I cut my finger and my return home. When we got back, the food was still warm and we enjoyed our dinner.



What a great medical care system we have!

Jay Tea at Wizbang! offers this post contrasting the Chilean president's handling of his mine disaster with our president's handling of the Gulf oil spill:

Not once did President Pinera talk about how he was going to make certain that the mining company was properly brought to account for their misdeeds, promising to hold his boot to their throats.

He didn't demand an end to all mining everywhere.

He didn't snub offers of assistance from other nations.

He didn't vow to "not rest" until it was over, then take off on vacations and go golfing at the drop of a hat.

He didn't try to demonize the mining company.

He didn't use the crisis to advance his political agenda.

He didn't make sure that federal government officials were overseeing and micromanaging every aspect of the disaster response, keeping outsiders and other levels of government didn't get in the way.

Nope, El Presidente Pinera did just what you'd expect from any two-bit jefe from a two-bit backwater banana republic. He marshaled his nation's resources; requested and accepted aid from anyone, anywhere; kept the spotlight focused, laserlike, on the actual immediate crisis; ignored such matters as blame and responsibility who to punish; and most critically, failed to shore up the critical golfing industry by keeping his tee times.

This via Neal Boortz, from one of his listeners. It's too good not to reproduce.

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President of the United States . Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there. So I asked her, "If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?" She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." Her parents beamed.

"Wow...what a worthy goal," I told her. "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my driveway, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"

I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

Food Nazis ratchet it up a notch

If it's good, just stop it:

Its conclusion is rocking the health world with startling bluntness: Processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption. Consumers should stop buying and eating all processed meat products for the rest of their lives. Processed meats include bacon, sausage, hot dogs, sandwich meat, packaged ham, pepperoni, salami and virtually all red meat used in frozen prepared meals.

Apparently, they want us all to live long, miserable, joyless lives.