Monthly Archives: May 2009

I have been scanning old family photographs for the past several days, and there seems to be no end in sight.  But, it is keeping me busy, which is very important for me, since I just quit smoking.  I’ve only felt mildly psychotic a couple of times, and it passed pretty quickly.  In fact, my children might actually say that I’ve been exactly the same!! LOL

Seriously, though, it is going far better than I thought, and the key for me really is to stay occupied.  If I am thinking of something, or busy in the middle of doing something, then I’m not as likely to think about smoking.

I also just bought the iLife upgrade for Mac, and it finally got here today, so I think I’ll install it and see what ‘new stuff’ there is to play with.  I think I will be able to upload straight to my Flickr account from the new iPhoto, so that will be very cool.  And, I think I will be able to publish a website directly to my url, so I might actually get that genealogy site done that I’ve been threatening to finish for, ah, probably a few years now!  So maybe this quitting smoking thing will work for me on several levels.

One last thing:  I am NOT quitting smoking because it costs too much, or because it “causes cancer”, or because some amazingly insensitive obnoxious non-smoker said something snotty to me.  It’s my decision, and I chose it for my own personal reasons, which has not been easy, because I absolutely love to smoke.

Okay. . . I think maybe I’ve heard it all.  One of my favorite blogs is the “Creative Minority Report“, and they posted an entry called “CMR’s 8 Signs of Apocalypse (Vol. X)“.  I really didn’t have to get past the first sign to become a believer, but the rest of the ’signs’ are worth the read, too.  Click on the link above for the full post.  Scary. . .

Whether you like the person sitting in the Oval Office or not, I think it is our duty, as Americans, to be aware of what is going on, and to try to do our best to keep tabs on what the president and Congress are doing with our money.  Yes, we are all used to  hearing lies from Washington, but this administration is setting a new standard for deception.  Here is information from “The Patriotic Resistance“:

Today, the Obama administration unveiled program details of its $3.5 trillion federal budget for the fiscal year beginning in October. Conservatives, don’t be fooled. Obama’s Socialist Budget is the largest budget ever proposed by a President with the largest deficits in American history. President Obama and his team are lying about their 1500-page budget and their supposed “budget cuts.”

{edit}

Obama claims that after Congress passed its budget resolution, his team scoured the budget and saved $17billion from next year’s federal budget. Unfortunately, much of what the White House is sending up in its documentation of cuts was already proposed as part of the budget outline that the White House already sent up to Congress in February.

They aren’t cutting the budget. In fact, Obama’s budget is over $400 billion larger than the government’s 2009 budget and $100 bill larger than the bloated budget resolution Congress just passed. This is the SAME budget as released two months ago. In fact, President Obama’s bill still includes:

- The $2 Trillion Carbon Tax

- It adds over $9 trillion to the national debt—doubling the total debt accumulated from the start of our country through the Bush presidency

- It includes the massive socialized healthcare overhaul

- It even ignores the $3.4 trillion budget Congress passed and reverts to Obama’s original $3.5 trillion budget.

Simply put, Obama’s team is lying. As the Chicago Tribune reported, the “news” of the budget cuts grabbed the headlines even thought the supposed “cuts” were all in Obama’s original budget! There is nothing new. No new budget cuts. Obama has simply repackaged his bloated budget—ignoring Congress’ meager reductions—as a fiscally responsible document.

Additional Resources:

White House Office of Management and Budget

House GOP Urges Administration to Get Serious About Cutting Government Waste

Chicago Tribune, Budgets, Mirrors, Media: $3.5 Trillion

Washington Post, Obama Releases Details of $3.4 Trillion Budget Plan

As a mom, I feel a bit silly writing something about motherhood on Mother’s Day, but please indulge me.  I love being a mother.  I don’t think I’ve managed to do much else worthwhile with my life, but being a mom is truly the most wonderful and meaningful thing I’ve ever done.

I am a “SAHM”, or “stay-at-home-mom”, and I am so grateful for that privelege and blessing.  I am especially grateful for my amazing husband, who makes that possible and supports me in that calling.  We are a dying breed, us SAHMs, but I think we are as important as ever.  Nobody knows my children like I do, and nobody can love them like me.  No school, no teacher, no ‘caregiver’ can ever measure up to a Mother.

Now, I’m not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination!  (Just ask my kids).  But, thankfully, Jesus left the Church a role model and mother than we can all look to for encouragement and hope:  His own Mother.  I am relatively certain that I will never have to suffer the horrors that the Mother of God endured faithfully.  Just knowing that there was a real, live, mother who went through the things she went through, and still remained faithful, gives me so much hope and motivation!  And it makes it seem quite trivial when the kids don’t want to make their beds or do their history or physics homework.

So yeah, I love being  a mom, and I am so grateful that I have gotten to do it full time.  I wouldn’t trade it for all the money and prestige or “freedon” in the world!

I’ve been tagged, and I’m supposed to tag 6 more blogs.  I don’t actually know, at least personally, six other people who blog!  I have a couple of friends with websites, but no blogs. (If my friend Noah still had his blog, that would be one more. . . !!)  So, I’m tagging the two people I know with blogs, even though one of them is Kendall, and he’s yet to do anything with his blog.  Maybe this will motivate him??  And then I am tagging a couple of cool Catholic Homeschooling blogs, and “June”, over at “June Cleaver After A Six-Pack”, which is the only blog that consistently makes me laugh out loud and snort my coffee through my nose!  And last, but not  least, the blog I read most frequently, the Creative Minority Report.  Also complete strangers, but I love their blog!  So, I apologize in advance to “June” and the wonderful people at Love2Learn and Unity of Truth and Creative Minority Report for a stranger tagging them.  I feel like such a stalker!!

Anyway, here goes:

A. Mention the person who nominated you.

The amazing Laura M. Rice at One Time.

B. List six (un)important things that make you happy.

1. The smell of fresh-baked bread. . . ummmm. . .

2. My cat, Pippin (although he would tell you he is VERY important!)

3. All the leaves being back on the trees

4. Thunderstorms

5. Spending an evening watching M*A*S*H and crocheting.

6. A professional pedicure!

C. Tag six blogs, state the rules & notify them with a teeny comment on their blog.

1.  Mommy Moments

2.  June Cleaver After A Six-Pack

3.  Fuego B. Pyre

4. Love2Learn

5.  Unity of Truth

6. Creative Minority Report

President Truman first declared a national day of prayer back in 1952.  In 1988, Reagan amended the law, clarifying that the day would be observed on the first Thursday in May.  It comes as NO suprise to me that Obama has decided to celebrate the day “privately”.  Of course he has.  He doesn’t salute our flag, even when visiting military bases, nor does he participate in opening prayers.  In fact, when he recently visited Georgetown University, the White House demanded that all religious symbols be covered during his speech. (Shame on Georgetown for obliging!!)

How dare he ask a Christian University to cover it’s identity while he speaks there!  How amazingly creepy that he is afraid to take the stage if there are Christian symbols around.  Did he not know that Georgetown was Catholic?  Okay, yeah, it is getting harder to tell if an institution of higher learning is Catholic or not, based on the fact that they keep inviting speakers who are passionately against their religious beliefs, and then giving in to their ridiculous demands.  But the fact remains:  Obama didn’t want to share the stage with God.  Now, I’m wondering if it would have been the same at a Muslim university.  (Is there such a thing?)

Is he afraid of offending atheists?  At a Christian university???  If that were the case, then he should not have accepted their invitation to speak.  Of course, they shouldn’t have invited him.  Neither should Notre Dame have invited him.  But I digress.

Here’s the deal, and I don’t think it should take much more than a lab rat to figure it out:  if you are an atheist, and you don’t believe in any god, then why on earth would you be threatened by people who do?  I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, but I’m not alarmed or offended when someone else does.  If atheists truly do not believe in a higher power, then WHAT ARE THEY AFRAID OF?  Nobody is making them pray.  That’s ludicrous.  Yet they are doing a tremendous amount of what we here in the South refer to as “carryin’ on” about prayer, and national days thereof.

The Freedom from Religion foundation in Wisconsin has actually filed a lawsuit against said day of prayer!  According to the ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice) website:

While the lawsuit discusses specific prayer declarations and the efforts of the National Day of Prayer Task Force (headed by Shirley Dobson), it presents a broad attack on the National Day of Prayer itself. The lawsuit claims that official prayer proclamations “convey to non-religious Americans that they are expected to believe in God” and “send a message that believers in religion are political insiders – and non-believers are political outsiders.” The lawsuit argues that “[t]he designation of a National Day of Prayer has the intent and the effect of giving official recognition to the endorsement of religion; a National Day of Prayer has no secular rationale.” The lawsuit seeks a court declaration that the federal statute recognizing the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional and that specific prayer proclamations issued by President Bush and the Governor of Wisconsin are unconstitutional.

Give me a break!  Don’t these people have anything better to do?  Apparently not.  Because I sure don’t see any hospitals or homeless shelters or any other sort of community service facility being erected or run by atheists.  Or Muslims.  Or any of the other mouthy, selfish, special interest groups.  Apparently only the Jews and Christians are interested in helping/healing people.  Wonder what would happen if they only started helping Jews and Christians?  If all those other folks running around bashing “people of faith” would cry ‘Foul!’ when they needed a broken bone splinted or some sort of emergency surgery?  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. . . they would invoke the new “Hate Crime” legislation they are so rabidly panting after.  (See: “Thought Crimes” in 1984 by George Orwell).

I’ve been reading a lot of really good blogs lately, and can’t help but think that there are so many ways that I could improve this one.  I could make it look more “professional”, somehow.  I could focus on just one of the things that interest me, like political commentary, or family life & homeschooling, or genealogy (which I think I will still just make an entirely separate website for that), or Catholic Issues/Apologetics, or, or, or. . . .

The problem is, my brain goes in too many directions at once, all the time.  And I can’t even blame the children for that, I’ve always been this way!  For example, last week, I wanted to blog about so many things that I wound up not blogging about anything.  For example, I had a really great blog post floating around in my head entitled “Dude!  Where’s My Plane?” about Obama pretending he didn’t know that someone took AF-1 and did a low flyover of NYC, terrifying the people of Manhattan and causing them to evacuate buildings and have major PTSD flashbacks of 9/11!!  All for a “Photo Op”????  I hope Obama is smarter than that, but at the same time, that would simply mean that he really is that sinister, to intentionally terrify his own people like that.  (Good thing he didn’t try a stunt like that over Dallas or Houston!)

Or I could talk about homeschooling.  About Faith, and how she’s been so busy lately digging up herbs in our yard and woods, and drying them, chopping them and making herbal remedies!  Our kitchen smells kinda funny from time to time, but I am so proud of her! Or about Alex, and how he did so well in school this year, and how funny he was co-hosting the HCHA Talent Show last week (see pictures all over Facebook!!), or about how Kendall is finishing up his first year at UNC-A, and how much he is enjoying studying Journalism, and how cute he is running around with a digital microphone and interviewing everyone he can.  I could say that Gaylon is still in Texas, and that we’re still in North Carolina, and it still stinks!  Our house hasn’t sold yet (duh.) and we are going to move to Texas at the end of the summer anyway, to be with him and get the kids plugged in.

Then I thought about how I’d like to discuss how well my genealogy research has gone lately, and how much I have enjoyed getting in contact with cousins I didn’t even know about down in Central Texas on the Adams side.  We’ve exchanged pictures and information and it’s just been incredible! And did I mention I’m building a website just for genealogy?   That way I can not only separate my genealogy from my political and religious views, but I can keep from boring to death the few readers I have who are not related to me!

And then there is my Catholic Faith, which I am usually pretty low-key about, because I have so many friends who are not only Protestant, but have been taught that Catholics are not Christians, and must be ’saved’!!  My Jewish friends are much more understanding of me being Catholic, probably because of that whole persecution thing.  But I absolutely LOVE being Catholic, and there are so many things I could ‘blog’ about, that might help people understand our faith, our beliefs, our Christianity.  That would probably be best in a separate site, as well.

So, what to do?  What to blog about??  It’s not like there are all these people reading my blog, and hanging on the edge of their chairs waiting for my next post!  Most of my close friends don’t read my blog at all, and of my family, I think only Gaylon, Kendall, Mom and occasionally Faith read it.  And of course, Lishi, (Kendall’s fiance) who is one of the only people who ever leaves me a comment. (And of course, Laura R. and Laura S.!!  I love my Lauras. . .)  I know there are a few folks scattered across the country who read it, but they never comment.  I tried a Poll once, and only a few folks participated in that, so perhaps the bottom line is this:  I blog for me.  If someone doesn’t like what I have to say, they certainly don’t have to read it.  Lishi’s brother, Steve Skojec, always has really great taglines for his blog, like “Cogito, Ergo Blog” (I think that was it. . . . I don’t remember exactly, and now he’s changed it) or his current one “You Didn’t Ask, But I’ll Tell You Anyway”.  Okay, that one really fits my situation, as well. LOL.  I’ve never met Steve, but I love his blog!

So, yeah.  My blog will probably continue to be a collection of randomness, and my title, “Chasing Thoughts” is probably very appropriate.  Maybe someday I will actually be able to focus on one thing for a great length of time.  But then, I will finish writing those books I’ve started, and not worry about blogging!