Please tell me you know what this is.

Yes, yes, we all know it's a submarine. I mean, specifically, please tell me you know what that part sticking up in the air is called.

See, there are some things I know that I think everyone else knows, but then it comes out that not everyone does and sometimes I'm like "Huh? How can you not know?"

I realize that a large part of this is just that we all have different areas of knowledge or interest. Murphy could post a photo of his service weapon and I would have no idea what it is. But then, I don't expect that he'd recognize a Mark-48 torpedo on sight, either.

But submarines are a bit more common knowledge than that, right? At least, their general existence & parts. I don't expect random people to know that the submarine in the picture is a 688i, or what differentiates a 688i from a "normal" 688, or even that they're all Los Angeles class submarines. But surely we know what the general parts of them are called, right?

I ask this, because as I was reading the Stars & Stripes article on the collision between the USS Hartford (which, for the record, is a 688i) & the USS New Orleans (which is a target surface ship), the author went to great pains to explain exactly what the sail is, as if this isn't common knowledge.

So what I want to know is this: Is the author an idiot, and this is common knowledge, or am I that much of a geek?

And on a side note: An 85-degree roll? Holy shit, people! That's damn near sideways. No wonder there were 15 injuries.

And on yet another, this time completely unrelated side note: that photo is of the USS Boise in the Suez Canal in 2003, on its way to help lay the smack-down on Saddam. It should have been the USS Oklahoma City on that deployment, but alas they tried to surface underneath a Norwegian Oil Tanker, & thus were in no shape to take their surge deployment.

My middle daughter was born exactly 9 months and 4 days after the Boise returned from that deployment. There's a fairly good chance that my ex-husband is in that photograph, but I can't make out who's topside in the sail.

Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me!

I was all set to blog about local politics tonight, until I came across this website on a message board I belong to:

Udder Covers.

Excuse me? UDDER COVERS? What the hell--!? I can only imagine that the woman who founded this business (and though I don't know for certain, there's no doubt in my mind that a woman is behind this) saw the Hooter Hider website and thought to herself "Wow, that's offensive! I wonder if I can come up with something more offensive for my business name? Let me think..."

Now, let me be clear. I find nursing covers offensive to begin with. There's nothing logical to me about a gigantic fabric drape that says HEY LOOK AT ME I AM BREASTFEEDING DISCREETLY.

But this takes it to a whole new level.

I don't have udders. I have breasts. Comparing me or any other woman to a cow is rude. Comparing a lactating woman to a cow is even worse.

In exactly what other industry is it considered acceptable to insult prospective customers? I have yet to see advertisements for Fat Fuck Treadmills. Or the Desperate and Ugly Dating site. But nursing moms? Go ahead & insult them.

The tinfoil hat wearer in me wonders if this shit is sponsored by Enfamil. Gah. I'd totally vote with my pocketbook here if I was in their customer base. But I'm not. That the Hooter Hider folks are successful enough to inspire a copycat like Udder Covers only feeds into my uncharitable belief that nursing cover users are a self-hating lot. (Yeah, I know. I'm mean. We established that years ago.)

Because it's late; An Easy Post

Listening to WOAI this morning on my way to take Bobbie to school, once again someone floated the economy-stimulating idea that we should take a year-long income tax holiday (usually this is floated as a withholding tax holiday, from what I have seen).

My thoughts on this are the obvious ones: 1) It would probably work and 2) It'll never happen.

I'm a huge supporter of the FairTax. I have been since I first heard about it on Boortz's show years ago--in fact, the only autographed book I own is the original FairTax book. It's fair. It's a truly progressive tax.

One of the chapters in the FairTax book is on the history of withholding. The authors make an excellent point in that chapter. Most Americans have no real concept of how much money the government skims off the top of their paychecks every week or two. Even if they look at the gross and then at the net & notice the discrepancy, it doesn't seem to incite much feeling. We accept these off-the-top taxes as par for the course. Because they are. Gross pay is a nice concept, but it's merely a concept. What we actually take home is what matters.

Of course, we actually work for and earn that gross amount. But we don't get it. We have no real expectation of getting it, so we have accepted the current system as inevitable. It seems as if it has always been that way, just as it seems as if Social Security has always been here, and Medicare, and television, and the polio vaccine. None of these things have even a century's worth of existence behind them, but we accept them as unchanging facts of life. Pillars of our society.

And that is why we will never have a tax holiday. Not even an income tax holiday, and certainly not one from all withholding. Because once the American people get the experience of getting their entire paycheck, they're likely to get attached to it. And maybe, just maybe, wake up enough to demand change. Not Hope'n'change™. Real, actual, substantive change.

I am home from vacation, & my ex-husband is buying a gun.

Rob put a Glock 23 (think he said) on layaway. Once I finished snickering at the idea of putting a handgun on layaway, he explained that once he has his security credentials, he'll get a $200 discount. He was going to buy the one right below it, but there's a waiting list, the gun shop was out, and apparently Glock is more than a thousand handguns behind when it comes to filling orders.

He's already mentioned, offhandedly, going to court to get child support adjusted. I hope he doesn't, because we're getting along fairly well right now, and I don't want to have to ruin that by telling the judge it's my opinion that he took a lower-paying job just to get out of paying so much child support. See, he was the only person in his office at Roto-Rooter not making any money, and after getting fired he refused to apply for any higher-paying jobs than this idiotic rentacop position. Seriously, Via was all set to hire him before Roto-Rooter did, and they'd certainly hire him now, and they start at $12.65/hr. SAPD is aggressively recruiting right now, and during training they pay $2,300/month. He's going to be making just over $1500/month before taxes. He did not reapply with either the bus company or the PD, but he's going to cry poverty because he's paying just over $600/mo in child support? Shit.

We had a good time on our mini-vacation, even though we didn't do much of anything. I was going to hit the Whitehead Museum yesterday before we left, but between the nasty weather & the fact that the kids had decided to act like a bunch of rabid little monkeys, I just did not feel like dealing with it.

We went down 277 to Eagle Pass, then caught 57 north to about 35 miles south of San Antonio, where we hopped on I-35. There are only two English-language radio stations in Eagle Pass--one bad pop station & a Christian station. That was FM. I found nothing in my native language on AM.

West Texas is lovely, but empty. Which I kinda knew, intellectually, but hadn't had the chance to experience it before. I now want to write a short story set in Del Rio. I think I learned just enough about it to have my main character pay a visit, but I'd never dream of having a character actually live there. That's one thing that annoys me about most novels set in Texas--it's clear they're written by people who've maybe visited but never lived here.

I even found a trailer park in Del Rio. Right behind the McDonald's. The kids would love that. I bet that MickeyD's gets real crowded during the summer. Dollar menu + indoor play place = lots of air conditioned fun for the po' folks. Ask me how I know.

I was driving along yesterday, looking at all the nothing and thinking, on the one hand I'm enough of a city girl that I'd hate living out there, but on the other I can see how the settlers looked around themselves and said Shit, I gotta have this place! Because it is lovely, acres upon acres of scrub brush. I saw a sign yesterday: "Ranchitos for sale: 20 acres." And I had to laugh, because around here they consider 3 to 5 acres to be a big plot of land.

Notes from Vacation

This will probably be updated throughout the next couple of days (it's a short vacation):

• In Hondo, there is a store called Oasis that boasts, among other things, guns & BBQ. I love Texas.
• There is nothing between Brackettville and Del Rio, and Brackettville itself is only a small break in the nothingness between Uvalde and Del Rio.
• Saw, on the other side of the highway, a Border Patrol checkpoint. This was roughly 15 miles west of Uvalde; 18 miles or so east of Brackettville, & probably 70 miles away from Del Rio. I was unable to determine whether it was permanent or not. It took a while for me to figure out it was most likely Border Patrol; I'm not overly familiar with their uniforms & was glancing over as I sped past at about 70mph.
• It seems as if everyone in Del Rio is going somewhere, though there doesn't seem to be much of anything here. The traffic is very heavy; it's comparable to San Antonio during rush hour, though the speed limit almost everywhere is 30mph.
• We're staying in a very nice hotel. Paying much more than I had planned, but it is only for two nights. And we've got a "mini-suite", which means that there are two televisions. Which means that the munchkins can happily watch cartoons while I'm watching Cash Cab.
• There's a pool. And a fitness center. And a playground. The fitness center is open 24 hours, and I'm damn tempted to sneak down there tonight once the girls are asleep. But I'm not entirely comfortable with that.
• I still have no idea what one does in Del Rio. Besides go to Mexico (which we're not) or to Laughlin Air Force Base (which we can't).

ROAD TRIP! *updated*

I have determined that the girls & I are going to have a real vacation this year (it is real, in spite of Linda's insistence that only vacations which involve train rides are real vacations). So we are taking a portion of the tax refund & heading out west. Where, I'm not exactly sure. It's kind of open-ended. We'd originally planned to go up to Austin to meet up with a friend of mine from high school, but it seems that she was mistaken about when her son's Spring Break is. So we're gonna hit I-10 and go straight for a while. Two or three hours' worth of driving once we get out of San Antonio, I figure.

I've got load of snacks, small cans of soda, juice boxes, & el cheapo toys & games from Dollar Tree. Just cleaned out the car. The oil has been changed recently, & I will check all fluid levels tonight. Tomorrow I'll rack the girls out fairly early and give them a carb-heavy breakfast so hopefully they'll zonk out fairly soon after we hit the road. (I've got enough goodies to give them something new every hour, though, in case they don't.) Since I drive a station wagon, I can put one girl in each row of seats, if need be, & keep them from fighting that way. Ah, I will also air up the tires in the morning. I've got extra antifreeze, oil, & jumper cables. My spare tire & jack are both in good repair.

I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't been on a road trip since I lived in Virginia. Bobbie's teacher gave me a funny look when I told her we didn't have a definite destination in mind, but that's half the fun! I'm going to do some looking online in a few. I'll be taking my laptop & my cell phone & chargers for both. Everything's accounted for that can be.

***Update***

Looks like we're going to Del Rio, y'all. That's what Googling "3 hours west of San Antonio" got me. It's actually out Hwy 90, not I-10, but a) I-10 heads northwest, not due west, & b) there's not a damned thing out I-10 between San Antonio & El Paso except for Kerrville, & I'd like to go a wee bit further than that.

Now I just need to figure out what the hell there is in Del Rio. 'Bout the only thing I know about it is that's where Radney Foster is from (I know this from his album Del Rio, Texas, 1959.) Maybe there's a Radney Foster museum or something, but I somehow doubt it.

Oh hells, but does that boy land on his feet.

Robert got the boot from Roto-Rooter two weeks ago today. He just called me from Allied Barton. My ex-husband is now gonna be a rent-a-cop. No word from him on my opinion that he should go ahead & do that while he studies to get TCLEOSE certification. Or on my opinion that when SAPD is hiring, the fake cop route that pays <$10/hr maybe isn't the smartest. (Not that I ever really was a fan of the law enforcement route for him, but he's definitely cut out for the job; even in the Navy he was toying with the idea of going force protection.)

They are apparently gonna be sending him over to work at the Via main offices, which means he will be right across the street from where I go to school. I shall resist the urge to taunt him, though I did point out that damn near everyone who walks past him in that building will be making at least $2/hr more than he is. I also suggested that, while he's over there, he go see if the ACCD "police" are hiring, but he demurred as he does intend to one day be armed security. (Yes, for the eagle eyed, that means that our campus police are basically limited to asking very nicely for folks to stop committing crimes. Thank God, violent crime is low & the city police respond quickly.)

A few more job changes, and the man will be the entire Village People (he already worked in construction back in high school).

I'm so proud.

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:*

• gun (15x)
• hell (11x)
• shit (5x)
• steal (3x)
• kill (2x)
• suck (1x)

That makes me feel all warm & fuzzy inside. Apparently, I've said "gun" fifteen times recently. Gun gun gun gun gun.

For comparison, JayG's blog:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:*

* gun (23x)
* crappy (11x)
* hell (7x)
* fucking (4x)
* shoot (3x)
* bastard (2x)
* zombie (1x)


He said gun 23 times! I'm only 8 times behind JayG in saying gun! And I can easily beat him in the "saying zombie" category. 'Cause, man, I could talk about zombies all day long. According to one of their tests I took a while ago, I would not survive a zombie apocalypse for very long. This is because I refuse to abandon my loved ones to the zombies. There, that should take care of the zombie issue. Now I only need to catch up talking about guns. What's the recommended gun for shooting zombies? How many guns would the average family o' five need to survive the zombie apocalypse.

How many guns am I going to need to survive my daughters' teenage years?



* Please note that the "badge" the widget gives you is only the graphic. The info on word frequency was copy/pasted from their website. And oh yeah, if you go there, they will try to get you to sign up for a personals site. It's annoying.

Yay. My analysis now reads:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• gun (26x)
• hell (12x)
• shit (6x)
• zombie (5x)
• steal (4x)
• bastard (3x)
• ass (2x)
• bitch (1x)

I'm not sure where that random "bitch" came from, though...

Oh yeah, here's the zombie apocalypse one:

40%

Told ya I suck at zombie survival skills. I bet Murphy could survive. And JayG.

(Can you tell I don't have school on Tuesdays? Can ya?)

A few select photos:

If you are on Mama-Drama or on my friends list on MySpace, you'll see all 18 of these. Here are the best:


Flaming Barbie:


Scary, scary crochet hook:


Giant craft set, which cost all of $10 (God bless after-Christmas sales):


Seven years old is still a little girl here:


Y'all who were looking forward to the demise of the Bratz dolls will be disappointed. They're still there:

My kids are now all prime numbers.

Bobbie Catharine Doyle was born 7 years ago today. So my kids are now 7, 5, & 3. Not sure when they'll all be primes again. Not for a good long while. (When Bobbie is 11, Linda will be 9; when she's 13, Linda will be 11, but Esther will be 9...) I'm enough of a nerd I actually care about things like this.

I was 22 when Bobbie was born. That sounds so young, but I had been married more than three years by then, and we had been trying to get me pregnant for 15 months by the time I got pregnant with her.

This is the first split birthday we've had since the divorce was final. Bobbie was with Rob until about 1730, & she's been with me since. We're delaying her party until tomorrow. She wants to go on a picnic, so we will go to the park. I was able to convince her to get the doll-in-a-cake. I've been trying to convince the girls to go with that for a while, but no one ever wants it. (Note that's not her actual cake, just a random one that Google pulled up.)

She's sitting on my bed surrounded by gifts, & there will be more tomorrow. I let her open six when she got home, and she's supposed to be picking out where we go for dinner. So it's all good. I'm happy. She's happy. I'm failing in my public-school-mom duties, 'cause I'm not planning to take in cupcakes. I was going to, but completely forgot to ask permission.

There will be pix within the next 48 hours.