Saturday, September 24, 2011

A Long and Wonderful Saturday

Hello beautiful world! 

Today was a long and beautiful Saturday at house Bingham.  I have started my Christmas knitting projects already.  I really enjoy making things for Christmas, but I never start early enough.  Especially considering that my Uncle Sal and Aunt Melanie just moved here with their five adorable children, there are SOOO many people who need wonderful scarves and hats and other such gorgeous knits. 

Today I made Casey some gorgeously tasty peanut butter chocolate chip cookies...testing a Christmas recipe.  They turned out really really good, and they have that "not quite perfect circles" homemade look too, which I was kind of going for. 

I also finished a hat for my cousin Lealani, who LOVES to wear colorful and wild things.  So I used this ridiculous yellow yarn with all these difficult color yarn and ribbon pieces coming out.  It's gorgeous and I think she'll love it.  I alternated stockingnet and seed stitch, I love it.


Thtat's a shot of me holding it.  Here's a shot of the top:




While cooking and cleaning and baking and knitting, Casey I knocked a few oldish movies off our Netfix Instaque: Father of the Bride; Parenthood; and To Be or Not To Be (Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks).  All in all it was a wonderful day!  Now if I only had a wideout I could hope that tomorrow would be equally awesome.

Friday, September 23, 2011

It's a Sad, Sad, World

Ok , so I don't know how many of you play Fantasy Football, but if you know me, you KNOW I do.  I LOVE me some Fantasy Football.  I'm in first place in this one league, and I was just totally CRUSHING.  And then, Miles Austin thought some last minute acrobatics would be an ok thing...now I have to start Randall friggin Cobb...

I'm so depressed.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Now What

I hate looking for a new job. It's times like these when I seriously wonder about my career choices. I mean, I LOVE being a lawyer to be sure, but good lord - my brother has a BS in Speech Language Pathology and he makes more than many associates. Why is a good job so hard to find?

You'd think with a beautiful resume and bar license in hand you could get a job...but apparently not so.

Le sigh - le weep.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Pachyderm Underground

For all of you who read my blog, I thought I'd tell you that I've just launched my newest blog, The Pachyderm Underground. In an effort to separate the political things I discuss on my personal blog, I've banded together with a few others to create a blog that is all politics and all conservative. Now, that's not to say all Republicans or Conservatives will agree with every author all the time, but I think you're all in for a good treat!!!

Friday, September 12, 2008

Passing the Buck

Somewhere almost too far away to sense winds are tearing trees out of the ground as fifty-foot waves drown barrier walls. From the safety of my house, only a scant 50 miles inland, a strange feeling rushes over me: are those in danger paying the price for my relative safety?

As hurricane Ike was forming in the Gulf only a few short days ago, I was going about my business...working on a brief, an article for a symposium, filling in missing album artwork on iTunes and religiously updating my facebook status, when I stumbled across the first projection for Ike's path...right through my front door. Less then pleased, I called my dad at work and let him know we ought to consider re-stocking our pantry. We have hurricane stuffs, but Dolly kinda cleaned us out and then we got to lazy to the store and buy water to drink when there was a perfectly good stash righ there in our house.

We bought more tuna than any platoon of men should eat...I'm looking at it now in the family room as it makes its own preparations to sit and wait for the next diaster.

Since hurrican Dolly, my hometown and surrounding cities have been suffering - badly. Over 1/3 of the Valley is impoverished [as compared to the 1/10th of the population national average] so natural diasters hit us hard. The wealth and abundance in places like McAllen must try to outshine the unappealing qualities of shacks and shanties inhabited by the immigrant workers and illegal alliens who probably picked, packed, or shipped whatever you're eating as you read this. These areas of poverty are prone to flooding, and since Dolly, our grounds have remained saturated. You may not believe it, but the post-storm mosquito infestation has gotten so bad, we now have confirmed cases of Malaria and West Nile Virus here...as if left Africa only b/c I missed watching House on Tuesdays.

With all this in mind, I was speaking to a dear friend of mine in Houston early in the Ike saga, and the thought suddenly occured to us - how do you pray in this situation???

If he prayed for my safety and my home's protection...what would be the best case scenario in the back of his mind?? In other words, what was it he REALLY wanted? If my friend asked for the hurricane to be otherwise diverted, someone else's life would be in the balance. Just because that life isn't mine doesn't make it less valuable...or does it? Say I prayed for the hurricane to change direction...where would it go? Houston? What if the hurricane shifted North? What if shifted South? What if what if what if...the fact of the matter is prayer, now matter how effective...couldn't make the hurricane go away. It has to go somewhere...

And somewhere it did. I spoke to this same friend yesterday and he was on his way over to his parents' house after work to help his father ready their house - their home - for Ike. He says he's thankful the hurricane was redirected because Houston at least would be less saturated and more capable, in his mind, of handling Ike...we'll see.

As Ike's potential for devestation became more evident, the lesson this teaches about life becomes more evident. I remarked to my father that watching Ike over this past week is like watching an army of the world's most powerful soldiers slowly desend upon your castle - it's like watching your death. And as momentarily scary as that may seem, the inevitability of it all takes some of the edge off. What I mean is, once the hurricane's path was set, you could only do so much to prepare yourself, and then you just had to wait. It will come when it comes, and it's the waiting that's the most difficult. As Dr. Wilson says, "Dying's easy. It's living that's hard."

I've never seen a tornado disappear into thin air. I've never heard of a tsunami disentigrating in air; never known a monsoon to stop in mid pour while still leaving the eco-system balanced. Hail storms do not turn into lemondrop and fruit roll-up parades. Weather patterns dissapate, not vanish. It's one of Newton's laws of motion - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction - forces come in pairs.

Even Jesus, when he ordered the demon[s] Legion out of the man, ordered them into the pig. He didn't smite them into nothingness...when bills come due...they will be paid...by SOMEONE.

I have my tuna, my passport, my bottled water, a truck full of gas, a knife, a first-aid kit, two months supply of medicine...and the weather channel...now I just have to wait...maybe I'll watch something else instead.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Blessings of the Burdened II - Guilt is a Disease

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.


To preface this, with a disclaimer/warning - I have been reading Atlas Shrugged. I have read it before, but it has been a while. If you know of Atlas Shrugged, you probably are also aware as to its author's political and phillisophical persuasions - so when I say "I love it" you may now make a decision as to whether or not you'd like to continue reading. I'll give you a moment to decide.

[crickets chirp]

Here's something that's really fascinating to me - Christian guilt. To expand on my last entry, I'm not sure I ought to be so paternalistic as to say one way or the other whether or not "poor" people are happy. I'm sure they have just as much right to be unhappy or happy as Bill Gates does. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's none of my business whether they are happy or not. Because people ought not be what makes other people happy. If someone can make you "happy" then they can also, [insert appropriate obnoxious latin phrase to demonstrate I went to law school], make you unhappy.

In the traditional American Christian, we find a particularly interesting breeding. Here is a capitalist - the more successful the better. This person has a sense of individuality not to be found in inhabitants of other countries, especially if he were raised here. He is moved to joy by the fruits of his own labor - who among us is not proud when we finish something that doesn't turn out shotty? The American Christian is self-motivated - he succeeds at work because he doesn't make decisions based on irrational motives, but on fact. That which will yield the better result, will make the bottom line fatter, that is the one he chooses. And when he makes the wrong decision from time to time, we are ok with that. But what if he is always right? What if he makes TONS of money? Then, suddenly, we villify him. His name is synonamous with greed and evil: he is selfish. He only wants to make money, he seeks to make a profit. As we ride on his airplanes and talk to our friends on his iPhones, we make sure to point out what a horrible person he is - he has no social conscious. I mean, what has he ever done for society? [Never you mind that competition breeds innovation, and that the all-mighty dollar as a motivator probably pushed the development of the vaccines that kept you alive so far to read this on your wonderful machine that I suppose appeared out of thin air without the aid of any entrepreneurial intervention.] How has his money grubbing done anything for a single human being on earth [besides of course keep him in business - but who ever needed pasturized milk anyway]? Selfish, selfish, selfish: disgusting.

When we approach this American Christian at church or in a religious setting, we remind him that he has much and others have little. We inform him that he has no right to be joyful in what he has created, invented, improved, because others don't even have that which he has improved upon. We tell him that he is responsible for the weak - that he owes to them all that he has because to he whom much is given, much is expected. And if the guilt works, the American will allow himself to live a dual life - one in which he believes in self-motivation and self-reliance as virtue, and one in which his guilt at others' failures and lack of opportunity enable them to live off of him. Our ability to control his giving depends not on the quality of his conviction in the value of life, but in his acceptance of guilt. Now, unable to remain consistent, he begins to be afraid of himself. He fears what his instincts tell him - that he should pursue the right decisions in business -those that make him profit. He is now unwilling to act on what he believes in. Supposing that were the definition of virtue, what sort of stumbling block is our social conscious?

Can this really be the way in which God wanted Christians to tend to the hurting world? Consider this excerpt taken from Atlas Shrugged, that would demonstrate the absurdity in this line of thinking:

"I mean, we're only human beings - and what's a human being? A weak, ugly, sinful creature, born that way, rotten in his bones - so humility is the one virtue he ought to practice. He ought to spend his life on his knees, begging to be forgiven for his dirty existence. When a man thinks he's good - that's when he's rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he's done."
"But if a man knows that what he's done is good?"
"Then he ought to apologize for it."
"To whom?"

"To those who haven't done it."


When we apologize, as a nation for having more money than [insert country here], we allow them to live off our system, and our government, our people, they just hand over the money. What does that do? It eventually will destroy the American Christian's ability to make a living and live comfortably, and his apology to those who do not live comfortably will be his joining them on a lower socio-economic level, standing in solidarity with the poor he can no longer afford to assist. This would be the consequence of the ever expanding social conscious, would it not?

But what if we were selfish? Would that help anyone? Next installment - same bat time, same bat channel.

Out of Africa - How Would Jesus Vote?

Just in case your curious, there are people who mistakenly find me intelligent from time to time, despite my inability to spell anything without spell check. Above please find the link to my latest article. It's been up for some time and I'm sorry to say I was too lazy to put this link up...
sue me