Synova

Check out Mingle2 - What's My Blog Rated? I got a G rating. (It seems it just checks the front page.) Most of the blogs I read are NC-17, which is just funny. It's because talking about suicide bombing or killing terrorists or using the word sex or gay or lesbian or death... it's hard to talk about anything. Even NeoNeocon got an R rating. Althouse got NC-17. Instapundit got an R rating. Blackfive , a milblog that makes a point of trying to stay work and family safe, got an R rating, Wizbang got NC-17 and GayPatriot, for repeatedly using the word "gay" also got NC-17. Tim Blair got a very sedate PG-13. Sake White got an R. Mario Burgos got a G rating, like I did. ;-)

Or maybe the year. The Democrats are the Barbie Dolls of National Security: "War is hard".

This is probably the only handy household tip I know. To mix orange Kool-Aid without getting little orange chunks floating on the top, mix the Kool-Aid powder with the sugar before adding the water.

Well, I'm trying anyway. Trying to be more active. I've got a nice sunburn from working outside today but now I can't remember what I did. I watered some plants that I planted yesterday. Oh, I planted a couple peppers and watermelon plants I bought yesterday and watered those too. Fed the chickens. Picked the eggs. Then I repotted one of my aloe plants that had bloomed... Oh, I have a picture of that. (Those are the tomatoes I planted last week.) I wish the color on the flowers showed better because it's my favorite color. If I could put it on walls I would. Peach, ivory and mint? The aloe had a couple of little off-shoots so I ran to the hardware store and bought the two little pots that I'd put back on the shelf yesterday because I didn't need them. Then I planted caladium bulbs that have been waiting for a few months... SAM's Club size... box of 50. So I had to go out and dig a spot for all of the ones I still had left, all 4...

Just a quick thought before I go to bed so all my muscles can seize up before morning... karate tonight was a bear. Or I suppose it was a dragon. Our school does animal forms, soft style katas that are performed with one or two other people doing one or two other forms. Tonight I worked on dragon. On the first posture of dragon. And then I did the first posture again. And again. And again. It's sort of hard to adjust your balance to take into account a "tail" that isn't there and I kept settling forward too much. So I did the first posture again. Anyhow... I was surfing through blogs a bit and a couple of references to dialog, or promoting dialog, stuck in my head just in a general way related to martial arts. Simply put... dialog and fighting aren't and should never be considered opposites or in conflict with each other. Being willing to fight and being willing to talk are entirely compatible. In fact, I'd say that was the only rea...

I realized I hadn't posted any pictures from my trip to Costa Rica in February. This is the zip-line day trip. It was hard to get pictures because we went from one cable to the next so quickly. My turn is next. The tree this platform was on was covered with orchid plants, none of them in bloom of course! Winter seemed to be the dry season and even some of the trees were dormant.

I planted 30 tomato plants yesterday. No, I don't need that many and I don't have room for them either. I put them way too close together. I've got some red plastic mulch to put under them that's supposed to improve yield. We shall see. This year I ordered heirloom varieties from Tomato Bob and started seeds. I tried to get all the shortest season varieties because our growing season here is so short and our nights are so cold. We're at 6800 feet, after all. So I picked a whole bunch of varieties I've never tried before to see which ones do well. And then Tomato Bob, bless his heart, sent me extra sample varieties because he obviously thought that 13 tomato varieties wasn't nearly enough for one person! So I planted two of each variety which makes 30. And two egg plants. I'm in pain. Digging always puts my hips out. What's up with that? By afternoon I could hardly sit down or stand up again. Better than usual thou...

We're trying to get my son employed so we stopped by a place he'd applied for a dishwasher job. Bumper stickers on cars in the parking lot.... "NO WAR!" My husband looked at it, humphed, said, "That would be nice wouldn't it." On another car.... "Teach Science in Science Class" I sort of humphed, said, "That would be nice, too." But somehow I don't think the person with the bumpersticker was thinking of global warming.

I tend to think that pushing education issues to the Federal level is the wrong thing to do all around. No doubt some funding is nice, but just about anything done works to take away the ability to make decisions on a local level. And *all* education problems are local. I'd say all solutions are local as well. What I'd like most is to see is the promotion of choice, alternatives, and local control. As for those who don't graduate. I tend to think that most people have a reasonably good grasp on the facts of their own lives. Making it *much* easier for people to *both* leave school and return to school and the school environment (the equivalent of Students Older Than Average in colleges, who participate in campus life as much as anyone else) and the availability of technical education in a *non* high school type environment for students who think school is lame and just want to start working, would be a good idea. But we've decided that all young people must endure (and ...

Why is "red meat" an insult?

My baby sister had a baby boy yesterday! I can't wait for pictures. Granted, they'll look like all baby pictures which all look the same, but I'll know who it is. :-) My kids now have 6 first cousins. All boys.

h/t to QandO. This map shows US states renamed with a country that has a comparable GDP. Very funny, to me at least, Minnesota is Norway!

The political world is aflutter after a party insider referred to Senator McBane, known for his ability to get wind energy bills passed as a "greaser." "He's a greaser for the wind lobby," the man said, "No doubt about it." (The only problem with this analogy is that far *far* more people have ever heard the word "greaser" used for Hispanics than have ever heard the word "spear chucker". Though it seems that we must now be responsible for what we have never heard or thought before. It's not our own thought crimes that matter but the thought crimes of others.)

I was complaining about stupid characters a couple posts back. Some authors do a great job but some are so annoying. The one book I tried to read started with a couple who were kidnapped and the employees of the super-dooper super-secret security-mercenary agency having traumas. The men were all worried about how their new wives would react to them going on the rescue missions and the secretary was sniffing and crying. And then the heroine was introduced, super strong and capable, a regular Amazon. (I gave up reading it soon after.) Well, I found a perfect example of what I want. Hayden's wife of 42 years, Katie, who was also on the flight, was less impressed. Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from "The Richest Man in Babylon," the book she was reading. "The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading," Katie Hayden said. "Bob's been shot at. He'...

The other roosters beat Jeff up so Jeff and Puffy Head live in their own little pen.

So I read the *very next paragraph* and.... "In his experience, the military molded women into a male image in order to help them survive. The military was unforgiving if someone -- man or woman -- showed vulnerability of any kind," I *seriously* doubt I'm going to be able to read this.

I was going to do a month long script-writing thing but some friends (my teen daughter's girl scout troops and related adult persons) are doing a month novel thing. So... I'm supposed to be writing. Instead I've been reading. Went to the library and grabbed a bunch of paperbacks. I was looking at them and putting them back and suddenly realized that was silly. I wasn't spending money if I picked up a book I didn't like, I wouldn't be forced to read any all the way through, and it didn't matter if I brought them back again without reading them at all... so I just picked some. I joke about how reading bad books inspires me to write. I'm not certain anymore that it's a joke. The first thin little category romance had a nice little mystery plot. The heroine even had a nice little "finding herself" progression... but oh how I wanted to take those things and write the book over with a heroine who wasn't a moron and a hero who didn...

These are a pale blue with yellow-tan edges and a dark blue beard. They are quite fascinating close up but at a distance the color just washes out. They are vigorous and bloom bang-busters though. And they smell nice.

Oh, this is GOOD.

Green flowered hedgehog growing wild. Okay, I moved it but it *was* wild just a few feet over.

I read on a Kurd blog sometime around the series of national elections in Iraq that in some parts of Kurdistan women outnumbered men by something like three to two because Saddam had killed so very many of the men. The point of pointing that out was that the vast majority of those voting would be (or could be) women. h/t Instapundit , of course. I should be keeping an eye on Gateway Pundit myself, but there you go. So check out what the Kurdish women are up to lately.