So how should I reward myself...

   February was a very good month, and I did ride rather well at the YMCA, getting a free team shirt that declared me as TEAM CAPTAIN, XL of course. I wasn't the best nor farthest rider, but I was in the lead a few times before things got serious and I fell into olde man mode. That is where I hide not doing my very best for many reasons, although the reason I am not my best is often because I am really getting old in all but my best features like love and wonder and smiles and laughter. Anyway, as I was interviewed for another wonder - the YMCA Member of the Month, I will get my picture posted and a brief statement of how the YMCA is an important part of my life - better than that bottle of rum I am mixing with my warm milk for the evening.

   I thought having a lovely young lady take my picture and ask me questions was reward enough, whatever they print my mother would love to see, to save and to share with all her friends. My mother loved when she thought I did something well. Especially when it was a bit tougher or different, or something she approved of... that was a challenge. I was always different, until I found others just like me, for various reasons. And often I did things she would never approve of, and I would always know without asking.

   Anyway, in my idle thoughts of I deserve something for being wonderful me (I don't really think that, just an excuse) I was toying with stopping for a mocha at a bikini barista place - there are two on my way between the YMCA and home, sometimes they do wear only Victoria Secret dainty things, lovely to see from afar, but I am adverse to exposure of more skin than I need for coffee or money or automobile sales - and since my whole sexual life is either in sin or my marriage I am adverse to sinning more than I can withstand. Although temptations are exciting, I would rather watch pole dancing for the physical effort and talent -- not for erotic arousal. So that was all out.

  Next choice is to get a couple pints of great ice cream, and we have some great ice creams - but being an olde fat man really wishing I was able to do more and better at what was once in my life so easy, I know that every added ounce of fat is holding me back from being my best. So I have to deny myself the temporary pleasure of a spoonful of ice cream, because one leads to two, leads to three, leads to a suddenly a brain freeze and an empty ice cream container -- the stomach is very elastic and will grow to what it holds plus juices.

   I get home, an empty home, without buying liquor, ice cream or fattening foods. Although there is a very full house with nourishment for Koreans and some American staples.  Peanut butter, butter on bread works.  I watch the movie StarShip Troopers, and love the naked showers and gratuitous sexual scenes - but then want to read the book again, cause Hollywood ruined an important story in my life of reading, and I need to wash it out of my mind, and am. I know it is a different medium, film to book and back, but if you don't understand what the book was about, you can't really make it into a movie.

Little old people, accepting the obvious reality...

   Haven't written much here, nothing is happening. Yesterday we had big fat snow flakes falling and if you came out between storm clouds you had to put sunglasses on to adjust to the glare. I have less hair, and seemingly the exact same amount of fat that I had in December, and this is two months later, whose fault is that?

   At the YMCA, the old guys (just three of us now) we carried wooden stocked M1's and M14's before finishing our career service with ARs and as Sergeants Major.  We go to be able to talk to good looking ladies and laugh with others over some such foolishness somewhere in our worlds. No, I don't talk to good looking ladies, I just quietly admire them and sometimes am very pleased they can't read my mind... for a science fiction lover like me, I have always been glad women can't read my mind. Yes, especially my wife.

    One of the Y staff is way ahead of me on the bicycle for this month, riders get a dime a mile paid to the YMCA, so I got a free TEAM CAPTAIN shirt for my service, but the young woman told me that the often first place rider or second place one ahead of me - is actually a composite of riders just logging in under a long number - all the other riders that don't get serious about personal records just knock out a dime or a dollar for charity.  The staffer was building miles by laps on mostly flats, then she decided to do some of the really long rides.  I was on my personal 2017 goal of doing all rides at least once, finished that yesterday. So, the ride of the week, and all rides have fallen to my vigorous pursuit of World Acclaim, or is it just wanting to be part of something somewhere for the NSA to get just a little more digital trail of how a once dangerous man is barely moving?

   Not excited about income taxes this year, haven't even filed and the paperwork on my desk is just waiting for my attention, about two full weeks so far. I have broken my addiction to Facebook and FOXnews.  I like Tucker Carlson, The Factor, and The Five. One of those three doesn't have a repeat later in the evening.  But I would rather read about the Norman Conquest than watch commercials on Fox, I go to Fox Business for a change of commercials. Otherwise I look for cowboy stories... but I have seen most of them, or I watch old LAW & ORDER shows.

   The church continues to change, the part that makes me sad is when good folks decide they need to find another because of personal affront or church politics. But then, it could be how the LORD is using those good folks to make another church stronger or that family find a deeper relationship with their future.

   My wife is getting out and around a little more, but her foot is still a bit stiff.  We will be busting out of the rut come March,  I figure.  For anyone that read that bit about reading my mind, if you are a man you know we don't think much at all about women, just like we don't really pay attention to what they are talking about above a certain speed of transfer. And that data transfer acceptance speed is really slowing down.

Endangered species

     In 1973, a very politically active era, the Endangered Species Act showed up as the war in Vietnam wore out. It didn't protect the most vulnerable top predator, Man, from his follies.

     Go looking for Americans, American families, and American values.  They only appear by accident and are suddenly attacked by rude comments, snide remarks and deploying faces of disgust. Oh, black and white movies have many of them for review, and the Hallmark programming would like you to believe they have them, but don't look too close.

    I do wish you all the fun of rebuilding a great lifetime, remembering everything changes, including yourself, find some of those things that George Washington and Robert E. Lee thought worth fighting and perhaps dying for... they are also the only things worth living for, but then you should already know what you are living for. Don't you?

Ah, it is all over now....

   Tuesday morning there was an early wake up, make the coffee, prepare breakfast and wait for the youngsters to wake and pack out. Most of their packing was done the night before, so a light breakfast and moving stuff to the Caravan, I have been allowing my son to do all the driving on his cellphone with Wave for the entire time, he only asked if I recommended something or knew a better way around. 

    All too short, lots of new to me places in Tacoma and Seattle visited with the family, my wife didn't always tag along, she is still recovering from her last foot surgery. But she had them to prepare meals for and talk to and hug. We said good-bye to them twice before they got into the TSA inspection area, and then they were gone. 

   We rode back home, parked the car and then went inside to collapse in the empty. House so large suddenly and we are just rattling around in it. I am taking the children's channel off to get back to cowboy western movies or FOXNews... seems there is about to be a sudden collapse of the foolish, a quiet resistance of the smarter ones and a victory speech by the incoming President's supporters. I like to see work and results, thank you.

  Friday the pseudo-coronation, Saturday the Woman's Walk without the ladies and nurturing mother types (seems killing the unborn is supposed to be a right of women - just Huns with sabres - hoisting the dying almost infants in the air). I do keep noticing not enough love in the air, lots of sex and noise, but not enough love.

   Our youth group  is providing twelve competitors for Bible quiz, I am now supposed to help them study, all stuff I should know, but we will see - have have portions of the Preamble to the Constitution still memorized, I could do Bible verses.

   There are guns and ammunition back in the home, and we won a dollar on my wife's last purchase for five from the lottery.  About right for a government program.  Fifty percent of a dollar goes to winners, the other fifty percent is for the folks running everything.  Netflix.com is a better value.

Sunday is gone but the memory remains...

  Off to church, heard Pastor Frank tell me about tithing, I would tell him later that he missed one of my favorites - the one I always called the picnic tithe. No, I won't quote which book and verse it comes from, but it is old testament. Then coffee and doughnut, didn't get one of either, and off to Sunday school. Good Sunday school, I was given two new students that spoke no American English, and the Children's Pastor knows I have no skills in Korean. Although I did get to use the phrase for being very sorry about myself and actions. It wasn't for me, but one of the boys decided to surprise and bother the young lady writing PEACE on the whiteboard. He slammed into the board erasing the first part of the word and scaring the girl.
   Way to go, clod. He would feel miserable for the remained of the class. I actually got to give them a lesson in economics and jealousy of different nations for the success of others. Getting ready for Moses and the basket on the water.  We gave the two new boys names like Thomas and Jacob, which were close enough to their Korean names, but biblical for church. The shocked and frightened girl went back to drawing on the white board behind me, she put pictures of herself crying and someone being knocked out and luckily she wasn't drawing me with my lack of killing the little goof, which may have disappointed her.
   Christine had come in looking sixteen with make up and heels, I had to tell her she was trying to look too attractive and too old. Didn't cross the line telling her that old men would be thinking awful things about her, her mother had better. Rachael (her younger sister) copies everything she does, and the world is a fool place already. from ten to sixteen they all try so hard to look older and pretty. And then from twenty-eight to seniority they want to have that natural blossoming of sixteen to eighteen again...  I got to send them all off to rice and seaweed soup - no meat anywhere nor turnips either. I waited and talked to some of the boys from another class. One had seen me at the base exchange, he told me that Anthony's Pizza there is the best anywhere. We discussed the military, his father is serving, and I mentioned that my son was in the Navy and most of the old men of the church had been in uniform, too.  When you meet old guys it is often difficult to think they were ever young and played football. There was a really young boy throwing perfect spirals up to the boys on the playground tower - I was amazed, and hope he gets to keep it up.
    Back home and I watch two playoff games, Green Bay and Pittsburgh were my choices, but the games were great because we never knew who was going to win. New England for the whole thing, right?  We will see, ever notice they don't do polls on the people's choice for performance competitions? Cause it just doesn't affect the game. 

Light posting life is moving too quickly...

   I should not blame Face book for my lack of blogging, but admit when I am thinking away from the computer nothing sticks and I don't have an interesting point of view. If I have nothing to say I should just sit in the corner and keep quiet.

   But family has come to visit the Seattle Tacoma area and us'ns (grandma and papa) and they all move faster than the speed of elders.  Which is wonderful, imagine not having to sit quietly absorbing all the fears of monetary collapse and buy gold and silver now. Or the really critical stuff like which dress designers are going to be making a statement at the inaugural-ball, or the giant list of all those really important folks that are boycotting the event so they can hold up the economy and get the cows milked and horses harnessed and keep the coalfires burning.  There just isn't room for 300 million plus and media coverage is going to be spotty.

Trip to the zoo was great. Saw three tigers, two snow fox, one polar bear, two musk oxen, one reindeer, lots of fish and sharks, four red wolves and a peacock. And finally a rest area to slow down in.

I don't know that the problem is gun violence or immediate communications...

  So, a human male flies to a city, takes his legally carried firearm and ammunition out of his checked baggage loads the magazines and then the weapon and then goes hunting victims. The victims have been conditioned to cower or flee confrontation with killers, the stone age types that would throw stuff beat their chest roar and actually attack the Towering Goliath have been civilized into prey-upon-us targets, or as I said victims.

   There is communication, the public employees are called to handle the ripple in the national fabric of watchers not doers. The killer is disarmed and taken into custody, everyone gets to carry on, unless they don't want to pay the extra fee for carrying on... sorry, that was a poor joke. But as I understand it, the national news and the higher up the reactionary command chain are just getting the news while the wounded are being carted off --- someone says (it is reported) that gun shots are happening somewhere else we must go to lock down... But I don't think they should ever go to lock down. That means the terrorists won, they make the national media and the really important stuff of building a strong nation and community values is shoved off to the side because there is a story here, they have dead in the port.

  That whole story and background have been shelved until someone wants to change the law about transportation of firearms - not realizing that the arms aren't the problem, that killer (what ever his reason) is the problem. Highly educated and highly paid Senators were asking a job applicant about universal background checks today -- again like the government in its great efficiency could really decide in its wisdom which citizens are safe and sane enough to carry a weapon. Having studied History and noted the number of assassinations completed by the professional dedicated body guards and security forces, it isn't the weapon that is the problem. It is the human in every case.

   The message from immediate communications is that someone far away can make the best decision, and if the human isn't on the ground where all is happening, that human can't. They can make their best decision, but Monday morning quarterbacks have never won a Sunday game.

   I begin to believe that communications are driving the need to broadcast and make things happen, and it had better be fast as light, cause that is how fast we can accept the response. I have been many places that I wish the response had happened long before I was in it up to my butt in alligators. There are prophecies that come true, but they always come from God, our problem remains the same - humans will act for or against them, we often pretend that government is our local representative of God in all His Goodness... and that has never been true.

    Now all the people that aren't quivering in fear of terrorists or hidden assassins just waiting for a camera crew or a local with a smart phone with connections to record his killing blow - are having the best life they can, including traveling to destinations they have purchased tickets for, unless some fool government official's best answer is they must be run across the taxi way waving their hands in the air to show they aren't shooting anyone. Sigh, have you seen what is happening? The effect of the terrorist is magnified by the communications and the inept government response. Thank your first responders and medial evacuation teams - they got the victims to medical aid. That was something the government got right.