"Are they going to send the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths, so when they bark they shoot bees?"

-Homer Simpson

Ed has begun his college classes. YAY! I drove up to Seattle last week and moved him into dorms. Actually had a nice visit with Kirk - stayed at his apartment while I was there. Met his wife (they're separated, but she's at his place a lot) Melissa. She's a sweet gal.

Ed's got two roommates, both Asian, and so far he's getting along with them. He got enough grants and a stafford loan to pay all his tuition and most of his room and board. Kirk's parents are paying for books. He'll have to take a short term loan and get a job to fill in some gaps, but overall its working out well for him. He's taking 16 credits this quarter, which I think is a lot but he thinks he can handle it. He's taking 2 linguistics classes (1 lecture/ 1 lab), 2 computer science (1 lecture/ 1 lab) and English Comp. UW is HUGE with 40,000 students (30,000 under grads and 10,000 graduate students). It has its own damn zip code its so big, and its own police department. He'll be 18 on the 9th. I can hardly believe that.

Anyone wants to write, he's at sewerbird@gmail.com or send money/food (ha) to:

1101 NE Campus Pkwy
Terry Hall #715
Seattle WA 98105-6604

cell # (908) 884-3651 (my old phone)

Lotsa fun....how fast can YOU spank it

Whip it....whip it goood

Gotta love it

Just fyi - I posted more photos in my blogs ... http://www.leisl.blogspot.com and http://www.podia.blogspot.com.

L side 

HITMAN - Professional Killings (Assassinations & Contract Killings)

Island Park lodge has an open wifi network. I stopped in for ice during my hunting trip and Voila!! WIFI in the woods.

I broke my fingertip yesterday spanking the piano bench. It doesn't hurt so much today. It just feels ... weird. :-/

I'm working on putting together a few online stores - one for me and 2 for Brian's stuff. Here's what we have done so far.

http://www.cafepress.com/leisl

http://www.cafepress.com/bonell

http://www.cafepress.com/bonellphotog

I'll still be adding lots of stuff - probably daily for the next little while - but the stores are now open! Spread the word!

Happy Birthday Ronnie! I hope the next year is a wild adventure for you!

Sorry guys I forgot to post the chat transcripts and now the're gone forever

I was looking for the IPOD urls from last Thursday night's chat. Ronnie or Tami...do you remember them?

Happy 38th Birthday, Melvin!!!

May all your dreams & wishes come true!

Don't you be fargettin' maties Sept 19th is talk like a pirate day
ArrrrG!

Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19

Now it is my turn to ask for prayers. My friends dad has been diagnosed with liver cancer. They are not sure where it metastatized (sp?) from. He has been given 6-12 months.

Le - it is Kitty's dad. You know what she and her family mean to me. Pray hard. Post it, please!!!

interesting reading on the flooding in New Orleans

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4797

Today I had my 18 year anniversary at work. Can you believe it?! I'm not old enough to have been working at the same company for so long. ugh!!

Spam sucks

Especially on our blog. I've changed the blog settings so that only members of our blog can post comments.

This is like the 3rd or 4th time that some A-hole has posted a comment hawking some crap on the net.

The way we were....

$87,000,000,000.00

Dad has received an award for the best Multicache in Southern Cali. Based on the sheer numbers of caches down there....thats quite a big deal. Congrats Pops!!!

Radio Central

The ticket was dismissed. I still have to get the confirmation in writing but the prosecutor told my lawyer he would drop the charges but wanted to wait to put it in writing until he broke it to the cops. Yippee!!

Painting is done. Man is it bold and pretty! I love it!!

Wallpaper steamer machines are great! I decided this weekend that I could not stand the wallpaper in my kitchen any longer. My friend loaned me his steamer and I got the paper off the wall in about an hour. Indy 'helped' by trying to eat all the paper as it came off the wall. She then got put outside until I could finish. Henry wanted to check out the machine which wasn't much help either. I am going to tape tonight and then prime and paint the wall tomorrow after work. Lovely!!

As much as I tend to complain about work, they are really pulling through with the Hurricane relief. All of our employees in the area have been accounted for. In some cases their managers went door to door to locate them. The company has found temporary housing for our employess and has started a fund to help them out. In addition they are matching donations 200% and distributing the money now not at the end of the quarter as they normally do for donations. The claims people are already working on settling claims and doing what they can for our customers even though some have lost everything themselves. This was not mandatory, they just went to offices that were open and started to work. Amazing!

pulled this from a forum I read

Katrina - The other story.

From The Intellectual Activist
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski

Sep 02, 2005

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it
has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The
reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are
confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is
obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural
disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not
expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about
rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has
gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an
emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying
that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what
we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to
keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an
enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than
waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a
hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had
gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as
impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large
ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
description from a Washington Times story:


Quote:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives
and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and
rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in
to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas
National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she
said. 'They have M16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how
to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I
expect they will.' "


The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an
armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly
like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of
the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as
they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable
squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of
the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational
phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some
vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans
had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who
remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack
Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN
and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the
prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is
no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a
large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects,
and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two
groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over
decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The
welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration
of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the
city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted
by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of
handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to
ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for
failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an
adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the
Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on
American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos
was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the
difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster
as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do
they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are
going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do
they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way
of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Some people complain they can't find President Bush.

Just in case you need to incriminate someone in a crime

Gas Prices Drive Man to Commute by Horse
Increasing Gas Prices Drive North Dakota Man to Commute to Work by Horse

The Associated Press

Sep. 5, 2005 - Jim Jundt was so determined to rein in his spending on gasoline that he got out of bed early and rode his 14-year-old quarterhorse mare to work.

Jundt lives 15 miles south of Minot and works as a mechanic at Goodyear Tire & Auto Service in the city.

He said he and his co-workers had been talking about rising fuel prices, and he joked that he would ride his horse to work if gasoline ever hit $3 a gallon.

His co-workers laughed, but when the price at the pump soared to $3.20 last week, Jundt headed for the barn.

He said he was only five minutes late riding his mare, Patty, to work.

While he worked, Patty waited patiently, eating hay out of the back of a truck.

Prayers and positive thought energies to the survivors & victims of Hurricane Katrina.

http://neverstarwaslost.blogspot.com/


Brian's employer is matching all donations to disaster relief funds made by their employees. Thank you to HW Lochner, Inc. for doubling our donation!

So, I'm sitting here watching the news about the hurricane, getting all pissed off because nary a country has stepped up and offered us their help. After a few choice words Nettie asks "Is there anything else we can do to help?" (redcross donation is already sent). I decide to do some websearching and see.

I came across this site.

We decided it wasn't a bad idea and since we have a spare room, I filled in the blanks.

I'm still angry that the rest of the world seems content to watch us suffer this disaster alone. I believe it shows their true colors, and I'm not surprised.