As you may have heard, yesterday Congressman Christopher Lee (R-NY) resigned after getting into some trouble for soliciting women on Craigslist. He began corresponding with a woman and even sent her a picture. Sigh, more politicians behaving badly; what’s new?

Probably the most hilarious part about this whole situation (to me at least) is that the picture, if you have seen it, is the typical MySpace in the bathroom mirror picture. Hey Congressman, 2005 called; it wants its dumb pose back. Hrm… it could have been better if he made the duck face.

Oh you classy, classy man! That particular pose is not cute on anyone let alone an unclad middle aged gentleman. Do not want.

Are you ever surprised anymore about these politicians’ scandals?

One of my friends posted this article on Facebook about my home county. Basically, the county commissioners voted to take away 2.3 mil in funding for Head Start, an education program for 3-5 year olds from families below the poverty line. The money will be used towards an almost 12 mil budget shortfall for the fiscal year. The commissioners stated in their decision and advised that ”Head Start mothers to stay home with their children, and not hold jobs outside the home.” Oh, and they all suggested that marriage is best for these families because certainly that’s the government’s place to say that

O rly?

I think it’s great when a family has the ability to have one parent (mom or dad, thank you very much county commissioners) stay home with the children. But to tell a family that is already struggling financially (remember Head Start is for kids at or below poverty level) that everything would just be peachy keen if the mother could stay home and it’s just not cool.

More and more, it’s becoming a luxury for families to have one stay at home parent. I know a lot of middle class families that aren’t able to make that arrangement work. It’s just not a reality for a lot of people. Raising a family is ridiculously expensive even if you don’t live extravagantly. And for someone to make that kind of statement just shows how out of touch they are with the reality.

I understand that state, local, and the Federal government are currently struggling with trying to come up with enough money to come close to balancing their budgets but there is absolutely no need to cut down the people who are already struggling AND taking away beneficial programs from them. All the commissioners would have had to say is that the county funding for the program is being cut in order to make up for some of the budget shortfall.

As some of you probably know, I’m pretty fiscally conservative and while it sucks that the county won’t fund something like Head Start (the county will still receive Federal funding for the program), budget cuts need to happen… we just don’t need to be nasty about it. Nor do I think it’s the government’s place to even suggest how a family should be set up and who should be the working parent. Don’t even get me started on the misogyny in the article… grr.

So my question to you is should governments be allowed to suggest what is best for a family?

So I think that I mentioned earlier that I joined a bookclub. Last night was my first meeting. I would say that it went pretty well. It’s always nice to meet book-minded people. It often seems that we are too rare of a breed.  There were about 10 people at the meeting so it was a nice, small group. We read “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.”

Most people didn’t really care for the book. I liked it okay. Some of it was hard to get through but it does have some really lovely lines in it. Really it’s about not living life linearly and allowing yourself to think and reflect on both your past and your future. For myself, I feel like it would do me some good to analyze the past a little less. Living in the moment is good, oh so good. Another point in the book is that we create our own circumstances, or our own sort of Science Fictional universe with its own context.

We had some pretty good conversation with only a few awkward pauses. I got the feeling that most of us are pretty introverted so that could be why.  I’m hoping that being at a book club with relative strangers will help me break out of my shell a little more and to communicate better with people I don’t know well. I’m interested to see how many people attend meetings with regularity. It would be nice to have some cohesion in the group. I might feel a little bit more comfortable that way. It’s so hard for me to speak up sometimes. I have stuff to say almost always but I get very self-conscious about speaking or even finding a good moment to speak out. On the other hand, if I know you well, I’ll talk your ear off.

Anyhow, I’m definitely looking forward to attending more meetings. The meeting was definitely a nice way to break up the week.

Here’s  some good quotes from the book, taken from my Goodreads:

- “Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backwards”
- “Can you live your whole life at zero?”
- “Time is a machine; it will convert your pain into experience”
- “Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down in the coming years.”
- “We break ourselves into parts”
- “Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life”
- “At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.”
- “Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane.”

Some of my long term readers may remember me talking about my college roommate before. This girl and I were really good friends through college and lived together during our Junior and Senior years. Something happened with her during our senior year where she just stopped going to school and got addicted to an online rp game (Second Life). She was lying about not going to school and wouldn’t talk to me about it when I finally confronted her.

We didn’t leave on necessarily bad terms, just weird terms. She was no longer the bright, funny person that I had moved in with and I couldn’t do anything to either move her to get help or even just to talk to me about what was going on. I moved out after graduation (2007) and she stayed in the apartment and signed a new lease with someone she found through Craigslist or something.

Anyhow, she pretty much cut off communication with me after I moved out.  She wouldn’t return phone calls and left me pretty confused. There was an issue with our security deposit where she was supposed to get the new roommate to give me a check for the security deposit, which she never did. I was upset at the time but it was water under the bridge awhile ago.

After that summer, she seemingly cut off communication with all of our friends from college as well as her good friends from home. Flash forward about another year, and her parents are calling me asking about her whereabouts after I hadn’t had contact with her for a year. They said that she had shut off her phone and they weren’t sure where she had gone. It was frightening to say the least. Cutting off all communication like that is never a good sign.

My sister, B, was out with one of her good friends last night and lo and behold, her waitress was the ex-roommate. B was in college when I lived with the roommate and was over at our apartment frequently so I definitely think that the roommate would have recognized her. B said that the roommate didn’t acknowledge that she knew who she was and was also putting out a vibe where B could tell that she didn’t really care to bring up that they knew each other. It was just weird. So dinner went on without either one acknowledging that they knew the other. It was kind of crazy.

All I can say is that one, it’s a really frickin’ small world and two, I’m glad that she’s still around. I was a little worried…

On Friday, I went to the doctor to get checked out for an ear issue that has come and gone over the past couple months. I’ve been having episodes where my ears feel just full, I lose a little bit of hearing and I’ll get dizzy like my center of balance is off.  It’s a little disconcerting, especially the dizziness (it’s always fun when you can’t walk straight, oh yeah). The odd thing is that my symptoms would come and go. The doctor diagnosed me with something called Meniere’s Disease and put me on what is essentially Dramamine, which is supposed to relax my ear tubes so they don’t close, I guess.  Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be happy if it just makes the dizziness go away! So far, so good.

Friday night, we went to see No Strings Attached. It was cute and pretty funny. I also got a new waterproof gymbag. I was using just a plain old backpack that didn’t keep my clothes and shoes very dry as I was trudging through the weather.

Saturday, we got up late and went for lunch at Buca di Beppo (Italian chain food that beats the pants off Olive Garden). Then we went to the Phillips Collection, a small museum with a really broad variety of art including some Impressionism (my favorite). I had never been there before but if you all ever make it to DC, we should definitely go. It’s amazing to me that one guy was able to collect so many masterful works. We ended our afternoon with tea and my favorite salty oat cookies at Teaism, a local tea house.

Sunday, we had breakfast with our landlords, two of the sweetest people in the world. They had us up to thank the Architect for shoveling this week. We were upstairs for about 3 hours. Afterward, we came back downstairs and I did a little housework while the Architect did a little garage work (gotta love the division of labor). I went to go change the laundry and noticed that the towels I had in the washer were absolutely soaking still to the point where I could just wring them out. I go to restart the washer on the spin cycle and it won’t work. So now we have to have a repairman come in to see if they can fix it. We think that the motor may have just died. Bummer!

Technically Maryland is the beginning of the South as it’s under the Mason-Dixon Line. However, in so many ways, it feels like the DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland area have a lot more in common with our neighbors to the north. I even take a little bit of offense to people calling me a Southerner (I just don’t like being lumped in with that group). However, as soon as white stuff starts falling from the sky, it’s apparent that part of this area’s soul is still very much Southern.

Last night DC got hammered with heavy, wet snow. Many of us got out of work early. And many of us in this area forget how to drive when there’s snow on the ground in general. (As an aside, I’m eternally thankful that my parents are original Coloradans and taught my sisters and I how to drive in the snow.) I had a co-worker who works 7 miles away from work and it took her 3.5 hours to get home because traffic was such a disaster. She finally ended up parking a few miles away from her house in a parking lot and just walking home. There were tons of stories about people simply abandoning their cars on the interstate and trying to walk home.

The Architect and I had a meeting with a trainer at the Y and it was still open so we trudged over there after work. Traffic in the city was at a standstill and the intersections looked like the drivers were trying to play tic-tac-toe instead of drive. It was pretty darn miserable. We had our session and then went back outside to walk to the Metro, which is maybe 4 blocks away. The snow was so wet that it would melt on us as soon as it touched us. It wasn’t long until our jackets and pants were soaked through. It was so bad that we were trying to look for a cab to just take us all the way home but there were no cabs to be seen.

Luckily a Metrobus heading in the direction that we were trying to go stopped right then. I’m not a big fan of the city buses because the drivers always seem to drive dangerously but the Architect and I agreed that it would do in a pinch. It was crazy crowded with people that were doing the same thing as us. Luckily we were able to get home without any major event as the bus driver decided to stick to the main roads. It was so crazy. It still took us about 30-45 minutes to get home (a mile and a half away).

This morning, things are still kind of a mess but it’s 40 degrees and sunny here so hopefully all this icky snow will melt. I’m ready for Spring!

How many of you have snow right now? Are you a snow lover or a snow hater?

I wrote something on Facebook last night about watching the State of the Union. One of my good college friends, who is a fervent Republican (but I love him anyway), commented, “How can you stand to watch that terrible man?” I replied something along the lines of “I want to see what’s going to happen.”  I definitely haven’t been happy with politics as of late but I do believe that it’s still important to watch the State of the Union, whether I agree or disagree with the person speaking. As the Architect can tell you, I have a tendency to yell at the tv whenever I don’t like what’s being said and I did do a lot of yelling, but I still watched. Besides, how else am I going to get to make fun of all the goofy Congressmen???

To me, the State of the Union acts as what the President sees as the ideal path forward. As many of us are aware, hardly anything is ideal in the political realm so chances are, we may not see a lot of the ideas in the SotU come to fruition. However, I do believe that it’s important for every single American to know the path that we’re about to go down (we do, in fact, have voices to use if we don’t like what’s happening). I just wonder why one wouldn’t want to know what’s going on.

My Impression of the Speech: 

The President spoke about a lot of big ideas but not a whole lot of specifics. It sounds great to say that we need another “Sputnik moment” and innovation (gosh, how many times did he mention innovation) but it doesn’t get you all that far. I would have liked to see more concrete ideas.

The POTUS also mentioned two things that I will believe ‘em when I see ‘em:

1.  A domestic spending freeze for 5 years (how is he going to ensure that???)

2.  He will veto any bill that comes to him with earmarks.

Nice thoughts but do they have teeth?

I know that I’ll be watching to see what happens.

Here’s a great article from Foreign Policy on last night’s speech.

What did you think about the speech?

Up now

So this weekend, we had a surprise party for my dad for his 50^th birthday. His birthday is actually December 31^st but we wanted to throw him off a little bit so we waited until now to have the party. We had the party at one of the Mexican restaurants in my hometown.  My sisters and I plus the Architect and T (B’s boyfriend) got there early to decorate.

We had the guests come a little bit early so that everyone would be there when my parents arrived. We had invited about 20 people so dinner was nice and intimate. My dad’s mom came in from Colorado to surprise him so there was that as well.

 My mom had told Dad that they were going out for dinner with another couple for the husband’s birthday. That couple drove my parents to the restaurant. When they arrived, first my mom and the other wife came in and then my dad. We yelled “Surprise” when my dad came in but he still thought that it was a birthday party for the other guy so he goes back into the hall to pull the other guy inside. It was hilarious!

My dad was absolutely shocked and surprised. He couldn’t believe that we had pulled the party off. KT, my youngest sister, put together a montage of music and pictures of my dad from when he was a baby until now. It was very cool. My dad had this big, huge grin on his face the entire night. I’m so glad that we were able to pull it off!!!

I have a four day weekend ahead of me with fun plans. We’re headed up to PA to visit the Architect’s parents and to visit the infamous Farm Show. We went with my now MIL last year and had a blast. It’s basically like a county fair on steroids. Having grown up in a county where we actually got a day off to attend the fair, I appreciate that.

Last year we were just there to wander around but this year, we’re on a mission; we’ll call it Operation: Sweet Beehive and we’re looking for honey. You see, back in September when we stayed in Assisi, we were introduced to the most amazing honey that I had ever tasted. And it came from right there on the farm. It had all of these amazing crystals in it and the texture was like honey mixed with sugar. I could have eaten that honey slathered on a ciabatta roll for the rest of my life. I love just about any kind of honey but this kind was on another level.

We bought one small jar back to the States with us and I savored it and used it sparingly. I scraped every last drop of honey out of the jar and was about as close to devastated as you can get over a food item. I tried looking for something similar in some of the grocery stores (including some of the higher end ones like Whole Paycheck… er… Foods) to no avail. I found raw honey, which is also very good but it’s. Not. The. Same. Every food-type place that we go, I keep my eyes out for something that comes close. I haven’t seen anything since we’ve been back in the States. My stomach finds this unfortunate… very unfortunate.

So when I realized that we would be able to make it to the Farm Show again, I was excited as there are tons of vendors selling all sorts of things and I think I remember seeing honey there. I’m hopeful! Otherwise I may just have to start importing my own honey from Italy…

Hopefully it’ll be a great success!

Edit:

There are many reasons that I feel like I won the In Law Lottery. My in-laws are really, really great people and super thoughtful. We got to PA late Friday night and early Saturday morning at breakfast, my mother in law presented us with honey that she thought might be what we were looking for. The Architect and I tasted it and it was most definitely our honey.

Here’s the deal: it’s raw honey; unheated, unfiltered, unpasteurized. My MIL found it at a local farmers market from an Amish farmer. So now we know what to look for but my MIL has already offered to get honey whenever we wanted! Score!