Desert Tracks

Good posts I found today:

Making Early Memories from Child's Play x 2.
Stand and Deliver by Greyhawk.
Tell Me Why - Another great one by my latest favorite.

And I found this over at Melanie's. Thought it was pretty awesome. Being in the military rules.


create your own visited countries map

blogging

Spring Hath Sprung

The roses blew apart into full-bloom this past weekend, despite the 40 degree low the night prior. I managed to fertilize the lawn and started retraining the dog how to take walks civilly. Its 78 degrees outside right now and we're supposed to have a baby here in three days.

Spring has sprung in Tucson.

I grew up in Massachusetts, where the high tomorrow will be 57. I loved the snow--making castles on the side of the road where the snowplows had piled up huge mounds of it. We would just burrow in until we had our own little cave. These would last for days, sometimes. On Memorial Day I had a tradition of being the first one to jump in the pool every year, regardless of how cold it was. The water was usually somewhere around 65. Now we don't even look at the pool until it breaks 80.

You could say that my blood has thinned a bit.

The monkies will swim in there until their skin turns blue. I eject at around 78 degrees. SW, tough as she is, won't touch it until its 85.

I miss snow, but not enough to live in it. I feel bad because that was a pretty significant part of my childhood and chances are the clan won't ever have that.

Doing the last preparations for the steady influx of parents and baby that will soon flood this house. We've cleaned it from top to bottom several times, each time thinking Odie will be here any minute. Took today off to do it one last time.

random

Life Lesson

I was hesitant to post a link to this story because I try to be relatively upbeat on here. But I couldn't let this go by.

Read this story, say a prayer for the family, and go hug your children.

family

Blogger's Code of Conduct

Rapid-fire blogging today...

I guess I just didn't look hard enough when I said that there weren't that many Daddy Blog's out there. Found another great one--The Blogfathers. Child's Play x2 writes a reall good post about the "blogger's code of conduct" that I totally agreed with:

1. Be nice.
2. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
3. Start your own damn blog.
4. Don’t take me (or yourself, for that matter) so seriously. Really.
5. I’m not out to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
6. Remember. I’m a real person.
7. If you can’t handle these simple rules, you will be subject to a viscious hit courtesy of the Blogfathers.

blogging

Last Day of Work

Today's my last day at work for 2 1/2 weeks.

Ah the sweet release of leave.

Things appear to generally be lining up. SW's blood pressure is doing just fine (although we still need to go listen to Odie's heartbeat twice a week, in addition to her normal doctor's visit once a week), my Mom is inbound and will be here Saturday (after spending the last two weeks helping my sister with Jack), and the sun was shining and warm on my way into work today.

SW's last day of work is today, too, unless she elects to go the last 10 hours and show up for work tomorrow.

Things might fall apart here at work, but probably not. Honestly I don't care at this point. It's strange actually knowing the date that your kid will be born ahead of time. It actually adds to the stress, like knowing that you need to have dental work done ahead of time.

Bags are packed. Tank is full. House is clean.

Ready to go.



family

Daddy Blogger

Well, whaddaya know...I've been invited to be a conributing writer on a big blog.

I love MommyBloggers. I can't get enough of reading them. If you look at my blogroll there's a few of my favorite ones on there. But it always struck me as strange--that there were never any "Daddy Bloggers" out there. In fact, I bet you that women bloggers outnumber the men by two to one.

So imagine my surprise when Doug from DadBloggers dropped me a line yesterday and invited me to be one of the contributing writers on his website. I checked it out--great writing, looks like it gets some good circulation--so I'm going to take him up on his offer. It does have a Christian theme that may be a bit much for me (I'll expound on a later post) so having me around may shake things up a bit...I guess we'll see.

family

Thursday 13

Thirteen Search Queries That Led People to My Blog

1) princess

2) chefinator

3) bahadir ozdener

4) i left my boyfriend to go to yokota ab

5) john popper skinny

6) staff weenie

7) video hot girls

8) we had sex

9) military monkies

10) bareback

11) mass chaos images

12) cindy sheehan grave

13) And my favorite: www getting lucky

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Thursday 13

He Works in Mysterious Ways

Got this GREAT post from Jo at Jo's Cafe. Not sure if it's true or not but I certainly wish it is:

An Army Spec Ops grad was attending some civilian college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day he shocked the class when he came in, looked to the ceiling, and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.”

Read On...

The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God. I’m still waiting.”

It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Spec Ops troop got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold.

The soldier went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence. The professor came to a couple minutes later.

Noticeably shaken, looked at the soldier and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you did that?”

The Spec Ops troop calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting America’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit. So He sent me.”

military

Perhaps a Tad Overzealous...

I am married to a Mexican. My father-in-law is native Spanish, my mother-in-law is naturalized american-born Mexican. So hispanic heritage is often a topic of discussion in the Lucky Ranch.

I was, believe it or not, impressed with the protests that took place a few days ago. It isn't often that you get to see that large of a number of people protest anything relatively peacefully. In fact, I thought that they even may sway some voters/politicians to their side.

Until now.

Michelle Malkin posted about a group of Pioneer, California students who decided to join the fight by skipping school and running their own protest. They topped all of it off by flying the Mexican flag over the US Flag on the schools flagpole--with the US Flag upside down.

I was, like I said, impressed with the movement. I felt that with proper legislation and laws that we could co-exist with immigrants from our southern neighbor. Radio stations in LA (the ones that actually organized the protests) told their marchers to bring AMERICAN flags, since that's what they are presumably trying to get to be--American. Instead the wonderbrains, so overwhelmed with home-nation pride, flew Mexican flags. So now what you see on TV, instead of a persecuted populace, is a Mexican invasion.

These picture personify it. I agree with Michelle--this one little teenage punk act is going to torpedo anything positive that could come out of all of this.

In fact, a girl who brought an American Flag to the protest was actually violently criticized for having such a blasphemous item in her posession. Looking at these pictures I am aghast that this occurred on US soil.



politics

Interesting Post

Mama at Morphing Into Mama made an interesting post the other day. She got so many responses (and hate mail) that she turned her comments off. I haven't really decided how I feel exactly, but I thought it was an interesting post:

I don’t think it’s fair to say that being married caused these women to bebulimic – especially since being in a relationship can make one conscious about one’s weight just as being single can. When you’re single, you want to be in good shape not just for yourself, but so that you can feel confident about how you look and feel like you can attract a partner. When you’re married – and especially after having kids – you’re conscious about your weight, which may motivate you to watch what you eat and exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll develop an eating disorder. I am conscious of my weight, so I don’t snack, and I exercise. Personally, I think it would be unfair to Husband if I gained a bunch of weight and did nothing about it.

Read the whole post here and come back to discuss.

family