Darned Diaryland, won't let me add a new entry today, so I had to update this old one... I'm off to ski Whistler!!

I have a random Italian lady living with me. Yep, Becca's House of Wayward Strays.

I slept all day Saturday. In my hammock. I made a remarkable discovery. I woke up and Apache was lying on my hammock on top of my feet. Who would've thought a dog could get on a hammock without flipping it or waking me up?

Yesterday, I weeded. I think weeding is giving me carpal tunnel syndrome. By the end of the day, I was having trouble making a fist. Oh, and my palm tree attacked me while I was clipping off the dead palm fronds. And one of my rose bushes put a few holes in my fingers. The wounds of war.

Its about time for that political rant

Today, while I was driving in, one of the radio stations I listen to had the nerve to play the Dixie Chicks. Now, in case you didn't notice from my writing, that comment was seeped in sarcasm. One of the Dixie Chicks made a comment in London along the lines that she was embarrassed that President Bush was from Texas. Now people are burning their CD's and concert tickets and lighting up the lines demanding that local radio stations stop playing the Dixie Chicks.

How ridiculous! Not only are they entitled to have their opinion. But the thing that REALLY bothers me is that the callers to the show seemed to think that if you were against war in Iraq that you were UNPATRIOTIC. Why is war = patriotism? I consider myself patriotic, even though I'm at least a little hestitant about whether we should go to war in Iraq. Apparently, even listening to Dixie Chicks is now unpatriotic. I'm feeling a witch-hunt coming...

Of course, the people who called the radio station are probably the types that are pouring their expensive French champagne down the toilet; and calling them "freedom fries" and abstaining from "french kissing". All this anti-French sentiment is really bothering me. First of all: France is our ally folks! Secondly, China and Russia are also against this war. China could definitely be described as more evil than France. So why aren't people boycotting Chinese take out? Huh? Not to mention, we are already in the mist of an International relations crisis with France, why should we make it worse by insulting their whole country because they don't want to go to war? Not to mention, the reason we have a Security Council is so that each country has a vote - its not like France is going rogue, they are just exercising their voting rights. If every country had to vote how the U.S. wanted it to, well, then, its not exactly a democracy, is it? I just don't understand how we can vilify a country for voting in a way that its public has clearly given them the mandate for.

Today we got an email about how the government was cracking down on official travel to France, you know, we have to really buckle up since apparently western Europe is a dangerous place to be right now!

While I'm ranting, I want to rant about Secretary Tom Ridge's new commercials comparing homeland security preparedness to hurricane readiness. First of all, when did the nazi-esque term "homeland" become a part of our daily vocabulary? Second of all, don't you think these commercials actually create more panic than they resolve? (it seems like any sort of preparedness would be at the ridiculously ineffective 1950s slogo of "duck and cover" in the case of nuclear attack). Third, don't you get the feeling that all this talk about potential attacks and the extremely ambigious alerts, is just to make Americans feel more threatened than they actually are, making them more worked up, to make a potential war more personally threatening. It just feels like a smoke screen to me. Maybe I'm wrong... and it would be awful to be horribly wrong about something like this.


This amuses me: