Paul Stanley there is our 2006 jack-o-lantern. The guy on the right was carved by some friends of ours.
Happy Halloween.
Paul Stanley there is our 2006 jack-o-lantern. The guy on the right was carved by some friends of ours.
Happy Halloween.
Joey took his first trail walk on this perfect autumn weekend. It wasn’t too scary and it seems he’ll make a good hiking dog. Phoebe came along too, but Joey tended to stand between her and the camera.
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Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.
If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.
Yes, I’m meme stealin’ from George, but I love the randomness of the ipod giant shuffle. I’ve had the thing for almost a year, but I’m nowhere near getting all of my CDs ripped and itunesified. I’m about halfway, though I think I’ve gotten most of the jazz (exluding all of the rarities, alt-takes, and obscurities from the all the Coltrane and Miles box sets), which is interesting since this comes out as a jazzless ten:
Okay, I see now that that’s eleven. I suppose there’s a reason I don’t teach math.
Anyways, that’s what’s been playing the past hour or so.
When you go to the grocery store and they ask you, “Did you find everything all right?” what is the correct way to answer?
Do you say, “Yes. I was able to locate every item on my list.”?
Or do you say, “Yes. I had a pleasant shopping experience.”?
I’m never sure.
Oh boy, oh boy! My first batch of political junk mail arrived today. Let’s start with a nice crisp folding card stock piece with a matte finish from the Texas GOP. It suggests that I “Vote for Your Texas Republican Team” just above pictures of the very same Texas Republicans who have already demonstrated what amounts to either an inability or an unwillingness to govern.
The inside portion is a handy list of all the early polling locations in my county along with the times that the polls will be open as well as what appears to be a booger (an act of bioterror?) above the name of the public library in Round Rock. Well, that’s helpful (the info, not the booger), I thought until I read the message at the bottom:
By voting early for all Republicans, you can zip in and out and make sure your vote is counted for Texas’ future.
I guess if I vote for Democrats my vote won’t be counted for Texas’ future? Or will I just have to wait in a longer line? Well, I better vote a straight GOP ticket if I want to make sure my vote will count.
Ok, let’s take a look at the next one. It’s from Republican Lt. Governor David Dewhurst. He’d like me to vote for him so that he can lead the effort to pass Jessica’s Law. The flyer ticks off all the ways sex offenders would be punished and has a picture of Jessica Lunsford who was raped and murdered by a previously convicted sex offender. This sounds good to me, and I applaud Mr Dewhurst for wanting to protect kids, but why, Mr. Dewhurst, haven’t you done anything about this already?
You’ve been the lieutenant governor, which means you’ve been in charge of the senate, for the past four years in a state completely controlled by your party. Was redistricting more important to you than protecting kids from sex predators? Well, Sir, I appreciate your concern for this issue, but I think I’ll vote for someone who hasn’t already squandered her time in office, thank you.
Now that the Texas GOP and the Dewhurst campaign have each wasted a few pennies trying to convince me that they care deeply about their party this state, I will apply the final insult… off to the RECYCLING BIN!
<evil laugh>BWAAAA-HAAAAA-HAAAA</evil laugh>
I decided to try out Slate’s Green Challenge co-sponsored by Treehugger. It’s described as an eight week carbon diet:
For the next eight weeks, Slate, in collaboration with eco-Web site treehugger, invites you to consider your own individual contribution to global warming—and challenges you to go on a carbon diet. The goal is to reduce the amount of CO2 that you put into the atmosphere by 20 percent.
You start with a test that estimates your individual carbon load. I used my car (not the hybrid my wife drives) and came out with a carbon load of 18,274 lbs, which is the equivalent of 1.79 cars. According to the results page for my test, the US average is 44,312 lbs per person so I’m not doing too bad there. I guess it helps to already be aware of some of these things.
Each week for the next eight weeks, I’ll log in and make a series of ‘pledges’ to do things that will reduce the carbon load in a specific area. This week it’s transportation. I will keep my tires inflated, make sure the air filter in the car is clean once a month, and drive 25 fewer miles per month by combining errands. I also realized that I can save 10 miles per week by taking an alternate route to work. If I do these things, I can supposedly take the equivalent of .25 cars off the road.
I could take more had I been willing to ride trains (Nope. I live in Texas.), carpool (with whom?), purchase carbon offsets (not sure I trust that one), and buy a hybrid in the next six months. The hybrid would be nice – we love ours – but reality is reality and greyhounds are big dogs and I need something that can haul them all. I’ve got a Honda CR-V and it’s great and gets decent mpg, but I’ll probably wait on the hybrid until hybrid CR-Vs come along. Honda sales people say it’ll be in a year or two.
Here are some other transportation things you can do courtesy of Slate:
So, there it is. If I keep my pledges, I will have reduced my carbon load by 14% or 2558 lbs. If my math is right (a large if), I only have to lose 6% more carbon, but I’ll go for as much as I can. Won’t you join me?
Yesterday, The Austin American Statesman gave its endorsement to Rick Perry in an editorial that was, shall we say, less than ardent:
We would be more enthusiastic in recommending Perry’s re-election if we were sure that the governor will follow the direction he set for himself the past 18 months. Our reservations notwithstanding, Perry, 56, is the best of the five-candidate lot.
The best part of the editorial is actually the headline, which is – get this – “Perry best fits Texas’ need for serious leadership.” After a quick check to make sure I wasn’t reading The Onion, I realized that the Statesman really was endorsing a man whose performance doesn’t exactly inspire the phrase ‘serious leader.’
Maybe I’m missing something here, but the man who sent a budget of 0’s to the legislature, who only truly committed himself to one issue in the past six years – congressional redistricting re-gerrymandering, who only made school finance a priority when the courts forced him to isn’t the most serious of leaders. Leaders, after all, lead, but Perry typically follows, and the people whose orders he follows? Grover Norquist, James Leininger, and Tom DeLay. You can tell a lot about a guy by the company he keeps.
The only thing Perry has succeeded in doing is acting on school finance and only because the courts forced him to deal with it, and ‘deal with it’ is about all that was accomplished. True, the last eighteen months have been better than the previous four years in the same way that a cold is better than the flu, but why not support a candidate who doesn’t have this kind of record of poor leadership, a candidate who would actually work with both parties rather than just the Republican majority?
A Democrat, Libertarian or Independent would have to govern in a bipartisan way. It simply makes no sense to return an empty suit governor to power when there are four other candidates any one of whom could easily clear the low bar set by Perry.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why the Statesman picked Perry unless, perhaps, they haven’t been reading their own paper for the past six years. Of course, they also choose Bush. Twice. Fool me once… oh, never mind, now that I think about it, I’m not at all surprised.
One year ago today, Action Phoebe, the hound of adventure, came to live with us. Over the past year, she’s learned to go for walks, got an education, had a few baths, and made herself at home. She came to us as a spooky greyhound, but she’s come out of her shell so much that people have remarked that she’s turned into a lab.
Her real birthday is November 8th when she’ll turn 3, but we celebrated today with a long walk down the trail near our house and perhaps, later, they’ll enjoy a bowl of Frosty Paws. She’s a great dog, but then aren’t they all?
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Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.
If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.
During the summer of 1979 we moved from Washington, DC to Subic Bay in The Philippines. Along the way we stopped in Austin to visit my aunt. She lived in a duplex on Arroyo Seco and her dog shared the backyard with her neighbor’s golden retreiver, Jeremy.
The first morning we were there, we heard my brother screaming, “He’s eating me! He’s eating me!”
We went out to find that Jeremy was introducing himself by licking my brother who was pinned up against the house. I took this picture of my sister after we learned that Jeremy didn’t actually eat people and was in fact very friendly, but the look on her face suggests that maybe we weren’t so sure.