In the "Sabra is way too easily amused" file

Late-night Googling of myself last night (specifically, of Sabra Ellen, my first & middle names), brought this as the first image result:

Way back when, as in "when I was 19", I played Baldur's Gate on a religious basis. This is from Planet Baldur's Gate, which I must have signed up for at some point in time, and is undoubtedly what I was using as an avatar back in the day.

It's undoubtedly lifted from the cover of a Sword & Sorceress novel of some sort.

It's actually a lot funnier to Google just my first name, which comes up with (among a lot of other stuff) the following:

Random stuff...

I've got a lot of little things in my mind that either aren't long enough or interesting enough to merit their own entry, so I'm going to lump them all together here.



Foremost in my mind:



I really need to get internet access at home again. Between missing out on reading Prayers of the People at church this morning because I didn't know I was supposed to (haven't been able to check my e-mail for about a week) and random men making special trips to stare down my top this morning, I'm DONE with using the library's computers. (And no, I am not exaggerating on the cleavage-peek thing. Jesus, people, my top's virtuous enough to have earned me several compliments at church. I'm obviously not putting myself on display.)

Thank God for mobile internet and ol' Murphy's fart story. I've managed to wrangle his blog and a couple of others into appearing on my phone, but it's another story whether I can get them properly. I have to wade through something like 14 screens to get to Ambo Driver's actual entries, for instance.

I added two blogs and The Sub Report to my sidebar. I'm considering adding a couple more blogs, just need to see if they update more often than I do. Check out TSR for pix of the USS New Hampshire (SSN 778), just christened in Groton. Dunno where it's going to be homeported. The amazing thing about it? It was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget, made even more phenomenal by the fact that subs are built by two separate companies. If you're really bored, you can also check out The Stupid Shall be Punished for a pic of the new Servie Dress Khakis. Excuse me while I giggle myself sick imagining Rob's ex-roomie Larry Barkesdale in that uniform.

I updated my MySpace page. If you've got way too much time on your hands, send me a friend request. I'm at http://www.myspace.com/sabraellen MySpace Mobile works just fine for me, so I'm there a lot.

It rained here yesterday. Sorta. For about five whole minutes. Not enough to actually get anything wet, mind you. MattG and a few others will remember the soaked June we had here in Texas last year.

LawDog's entry about Juneteenth mentions that celebration of the holiday has spread to 29 other states. If my reading of USA Today was interpreted correctly, New York is one of 'em. I can imagine that conversation. "So, what are we celebrating today?" "The day the slaves in Texas were told they were freed." "Er, wha? Why?" It's always interesting to note that Lincoln only freed the slaves in territory over which he had no control. We weren't taught this in high school; it wasn't until I lived in Virginia that I learned it. (Oddly, at the same time I learned I share a denomination with Jefferson Davis.) Fort something-or-other in Newport News was under Union control during the whole of the war, and the slaves there and in other Union-occupied territories weren't given freedom until much after the fact.

It strikes me as odd that this statue has been complained about because it is "too confrontational." (Sorry for posting a link instead of the pic itself, but I'm not the copyright holder & I don't know who is.) I realize Dr. King was known for his nonviolence, but he was nevertheless somewhat confrontational by circumstances.

Riding the race rails...There's been a startling...noisiness...of anti-Mexican sentiment here lately. OK, let me offer a clue. You live in a city called...wait for it...San Antonio. Not Saint Anthony of Padua. It is in the southern part of a State named Texas (from Coahuila y Tejas). A State which used to be part of...wait for it...Mexico. So, um, exactly what do you expect to find here? C'mon, y'all, if you can't handle the fact that a city in this location, with this history, has a mostly Mexican population...Leave. Go the hell back to Louisiana or whatever racist hole you dug yourself out of.

That said...Can we all remember that San Antonio is also, from an historical standpoint, very strongly German? We're not Neue Braunfels (yes, I did that on purpose) or Fredericksburg, but we're just as German as we are Mexican, culturally speaking. Listen to conjunto music if you don't believe me. You think they got the idea to play polkas all on their own?

I am going to get home and realize I've forgotten about twenty things I intended to add to this. Sigh.

Remembered one while I'm still here:

I was talking at church this morning with an acquaintance who works for one of the hospital systems here. His wife, who is an RN, just got hired on in recruiting for the hospital. He said, "Come talk to her in a couple of years, she'll welcome you with open arms." I'd been joking with Rob that I could probably get on with their hospital because of knowing them from church. I did not expect to get a job offer before I even start college. (I know, not quite an offer, but close enough to be amusing.) I think it's a great idea to put an RN in a recruiting position, by the way. Eric said that one of the issues they've run across in trying to hire nurses is that they'll ask the recruiters questions that HR personnel just don't have the answers to.

Another one:

The very fact that gay people want to get married, to me, is enough reason to let them. I'm pretty sure homosexuals marrying in MA wasn't the reason for the downfall of my union.

This is the line.

Here's the line.

Here's the side of the line you're supposed to be on.

There are questions you don't get to ask anymore. There are demands you don't get to make.

You want to leave your wife? Go play house with a woman of loose virtue? Fine. You get to do that. You want a divorce, you get to have one.

But you have to pay for the privelege.

I'm sorry you dicked around with the discoveries for so long that the pay stubs you handed over to my lawyer were your biggest of the year. Child support was set in accordance with state guidelines. You had your chance to object and say you don't usually make that much money, but you didn't. You agreed.

That money--and it's really not that much, for three children--ceases to be your business when you hand it over to me. You don't get to demand receipts. You don't get to demand that I spend it on the children only in ways of which you approve.

You can show me your budget, and show me the shortfall, and that 75% of the shortfall is child support. You can tell me that your parents are making that up for you. Great. Good for you. Hell, if you want to offer to help me set a budget, great. I might go for that. But no, I will not keep a receipt for the money I spend and be answerable to you. Any money I spend is for the good of the children. That's the way it works.

I can explain that I've had to buy Linda new shoes, and new underwear twice and new clothes twice and that I still don't have enough clothes for her. I can explain that I spent $60 on food last week, and I'm spending money on things like gasoline. But I shouldn't have to.

Nor should I have to apologize for wanting to take my daughter out for lunch when it's her turn to spend the day with Mommy. We shared a meal and a drink, for what it's worth. As if it is your business. I asked for the child support six hours early, so sue me. No law says that it's supposed to come in the afternoons, and if you want to get really technical, the truth is that you're supposed to be giving me all of it, once a month, not part of it every week. I agreed to that weekly thing, and that means to me that I need to make the child support last a week. Which I did. Except, you know, for the part I spent to buy you some groceries. Come to think of it, that money would have paid for our lunch quite nicely. But I didn't even think of pointing that out to you.

Really, the money thing sucks. Shoulda talked to the other guys at work who are paying child support. You can't create kids, and tell your wife you want her to stay at home and take care of those kids, and think you get to walk out the door and leave them swinging. Life doesn't work that way.

Methinks, if you've truly got a budgetary shortfall, you need to look to yourself to address it. Quit leaving your computer and air conditioner running when you aren't even at home, for starters. Expend a little less gas running off to Wal-Mart and HEB to meet up with your girlfriend where her husband hopefully won't see. Talk to your boss and find out why the hell you've been working there for nearly two years and you're still just a drain technician when the other guys who were hired at the same time as you are gearing up for their journeyman's test. Or, here's a thought, don't give up a $525 job (that's your cut) because you don't want to miss having Monday off. Jesus, that alone would account for nearly all of the money you're expected to pay me.

Which is to say: it's not my fault. And I'm not your concern, by your own hand.


(File this one under: things I can't say because I'm trying to stay friends for the sake of the kids.)

Comin' right along.

Got a phone call from my lawyer's secretary earlier in the day. I have an appt at 2pm Tuesday to review the divorce decree before they send it over to Rob's lawyer.

My lawyer, thankfully, is Catholic, and though she undoubtedly deals with many divorce cases, she understands and respects the fact that I am being dragged into this not of my own will. The ECUSA hasn't had an issue with divorce for 30 or 40 years, & while I appreciate most of the progressive nature of my denomination, this is one place where I feel a little adrift from my church. But most Catholics seem to intuitively grasp it.

MattG, in the comments section to my last blog, linked me to his first post. I imagine that sort of optimism can be hard to hang on to for a police officer.

I remember reading a joke years ago that the definition of a pessimist is "someone who looks both ways crossing a one way street." Which I do. But I am an optimist, and that's sometimes a conscious decision. I took German for six years (and managed to forget half of it upon graduation) in junior high & high school, and of course you cannot do that without learning about the Holocaust. Two of my three teachers were German women who were born around the WWII era, and they share an equal determination that such not happen again with Holocaust survivors. At any rate, the point of the paragraph is this: If Anne Frank can go to her death believing in the basic goodness of mankind, I've got no excuses.

But sometimes, it's hard.

My lawyer said to me fairly early on in the process that she believes I'm going to be one of her clients who winds up much better off. (She's in Legal Aid, so she deals with those of us at the bottom rung of the ladder.) I'm working hard to live up to that; I've got three great reasons to.

It's going to be a long road, though.