dirty low-life scum

Some bottom-feeding lowlife has somehow acquired/forged a copy of my credit card and just spent $211 at Giant Food and another $178 at Toys-R-Us. We don't even have Giant Food on my side of the country.

Fortunately I keep a close eye on credit card activity and have canceled the card. As the fraudulent charges were made in the last two hours, I have the thin satisfaction of imagining the dirty scum getting declined at the next check-out stand. But that is all that will happen, they will just be declined.

I want ill-tempered German Shepherds to burst out from underneath the till and pin the toad-faced buggers to the ground whilst onlookers boo and hiss and pummel them with rotten eggs and slimy old produce and then cheer as grouchy policemen with halitosis haul the thieves off to jail, where the heat is off and the food is maggoty.

That's what I want.

But what will happen is that the clerk will say, "I'm sorry Mrs. Chandler, your card didn't go through." and the Fake Mrs. Chandler will mutter something about credit limit and so forth and look confused and then find a way to get out of the store. That's all.

One more reason to have low credit limits on one's card. If I hadn't caught it, they could have charged 10 grand before maxing it out. I'm having the new cards set to a very low limit and continuing with my daily balance check.

The ZooKeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

I bought this book for my sister but it got damaged so I didn't give it to her but kept it for myself. (Turns out she had read it anyway).

I'm adding to to my (yet unpublished) list of books necessary for understanding WWII. It is the real story of the zookeeper in Warsaw Poland during the German occupation.


Diane Ackerman writes beautifully. If she decided to write the life-cycle of slugs, I'd read it and enjoy it; she is that talented. You may recognize her from A Natural History of the Senses.

She has carefully researched and documented the lives of Jan and his wife Antonina as they care for the animals, and later the people, that are in their care.

I find it fascinating that Diane Ackerman has not put words into her characters' mouths. In all cases, when a person in the story speaks, Diane has used documented quotes from letters, journals, and personal accounts. I can hardly fathom the work it took to rebuild the story from written archives and then to present it in such a readable manner.

No Snow NO! Go Snow GO! NO SNOW. GO SNOW. oh no! It's BLOW SNOW!

Okay, so over a foot of snow fell in about eight hours and it is still falling and now the wind is picking up so all the neighbor's snow, all 20 acres of it, is skeedaddling into my front yard, from whence it will melt (we assume) and flood my basement again.

magical castles

So Dandy is day-dreaming of a magical castle and he is narrating the dream to us.

Dandy: So we walk in and we know it's magical right away.
Chickadee: How?
Dandy: Mom's fingers stop hurting and M&Ms are falling from the ceiling.

He is such a sweetie. Mom's fingers came first.

We are All Socialists Now: I's in your government, stealing your freedoms

For a long time now, I have assumed that the problem was that the American people had not noticed the Socialist take-over. Then I saw this:




So the problem is not that Americans haven't noticed. It's worse. We apparently don't care.

One of my high-school friends sent this to me today. I'm still working on verifying the quote sources (do you know where the quoted passages came from?), but I wanted to share it with you in the meantime. The biographical content is straight from Wikipedia.

Norman Matton Thomas (November 20, 1884 - December 19, 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911. As a candidate for President of the U. S., Norman Thomas said, in a 1944 epoch speech:

The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "liberalism", they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

He went on to say:

I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.

I have friends and family who support the Democrats and I am sure that they have no idea what it is they are actually supporting. It all sounds so charitable and nice on the surface, but it tyranny underneath.

25 random things

As promised, the 25 random things:


1. I am an INTJ. I am married to an ISFP.
2. I really dislike scrapbooking; this is a problem as I am supposed to make LifeBooks for my kids and they are sure to be maladjusted adults if I don't get going on this.
3. I've flown all the way around the world - west-bound.
4. People think I am more competent and confident than I really am. I just don't put myself forward unless I know what I am doing.
5. I hate TV. Blech.
6. I have a manuscript-in-progress.
7. Now that we have a wii, I may get to work on my manuscript.
8. I was blessed with really good people for parents. I love to spend time with them.
9. I like to cook and bake.
10. I have significant arthritis in my hands which is interfering with #9 more than my family realizes.
11. I've never been pregnant.
12. I have two kids.
13. I don't gamble or smoke.
14. I drink wine or dark beer and very rarely, a martini.
15. I really like technological wonderments: iRobot, iTouch, etc.
16. I'm a dusty house-keeper. This drives my husband nuts.
17. I teach community college English classes online and often in my PJs.
18. We bought our wedding rings at a gold mine in Wales.
19. I own 2 power drills of my own and know how to use them, but I don't sew. In fact, I am rather sewaphobic.
20. I call my husband My Gift from a Generous God.
21. We have six house-pets.
22. I really enjoy learning new software.
23. I do most of my shopping on-line, except for groceries.
24. I keep a blog: :: Adventures In Daily Living ::
25. I'm a homebody. It would take weeks at home for me to get cabin fever.

grouchy!

From the announcement page of my on-line class.

Asking me to find a way to improve your grade after you have ignored the usual route of earning a grade is not going to work. If your grade matters, consider coming to class and doing the assignments.

Can you tell that I'm a little frustrated with my class?