Monday, August 8, 2016

Catching up with July

Tabby turned 9!  She had a fun birthday party with Amber & Ella.  Becky took them to Ashwaubomay Park, they came home and played some party games, did some crafting, ate burgers & hot dogs and choreographed some dances with sparklers.  Oh, and played with Tabby's mice.

Mice!?  That's right, Tabby's fish died.  Tabby asked if she could replace him with mice for a pet.  So we got two, Cornflower and Springald, named after mice from Brian Jacques Redwall stories.  We quickly figured out that mice are messy.  Unsanitary.  But they are adorable.  We just keep a bottle of hand sanitizer around all the time.

Ben took a week long kayaking trip up by the Apostle Islands with the young men from church.  They had a great time.

We spent last Saturday at Eau Claire Dells for Ryan Chadderdon's graduation party.

We have some cool news.  This school year we will be hosting a foreign exchange student from Spain.  His name is Santiago and he'll be senior at Ashwaubenon High School.  He actually lives in Paris, has for a few years, but was born in Barcelona.  His father's career took them to Paris.  We are really excited.  Should be a fantastic experience for our family and, I hope, for Santiago as well.

Other than that it's just been entertaining watching the election.  I have stopped being shocked by what Donald Trump says.  It's just too absurd.  I tell myself he's too much a buffoon to win.  Then I remember that after watching GWB be a bad president for four years, we still reelected him.  I guess maybe we get the president we deserve.  I just hope we're not so debased that we deserve a Trump presidency.

The only thing that's really driving me nuts is Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson trying to pass himself off as some sort of centrist alternative for both disaffected Republicans and Democrats.  His line is that, "If everyone who says he doesn't like the major party candidates voted for me, I'd win."  Which may be true, but makes the pretty big assumption that everyone who doesn't like Trump or Clinton would like him.  Which is not true. Disaffected Democrats would find themselves very unhappy with a Libertarian President.

His social policy isn't liberal, it's laissez-faire.  His foreign policy isn't liberal, it's isolationist.  His most convincing argument to attract disaffected Democrats is "Dude, we'll let you smoke weed!"  I'm not even sure that's really a liberal issue anymore and I kinda' hope my fellow Democrats want more from their president.

I do think Johnson is a good, viable alternative to Donald Trump for disaffected Republicans.  Johnson's view on the proper size and role of government jives really well with theirs. Which shouldn't be a surprise. Johnson is a Republican, just running as a Libertarian after running as a Republican didn't work out for him.

I like Hillary Clinton for President.  She's just a very capable politician.  I think she'd do the job well.  I'm a Democrat because I like the Democratic view on the role of government and that means electing Clinton.  Tabby is thrilled that a woman might get elected president and I think that's pretty awesome, too. That shouldn't be THE factor in electing her, but it could certainly be A factor. During the last school year on a bad homework day, Tabby actually told me she didn't have to worry about her math homework because "Math is for boys.  Art is for girls."  I guess that's the societal stereotype.  Unintentionally, we reinforce that in our home and it is so limiting for Tabby to really believe that.  It struck me how important social role models are.  I want so badly for Tabby to see strong, successful women in every field.

I started reading Brandon Sanderson's second Mistborn trilogy.  Finished Shadows of Self and The Bands of Mourning.  I really like them.  I'm looking forward to book 3 as soon as he writes it.  They read like noir detective novels with steampunk elements.  And the heroes and villains have superpowers. They're fun.  And well written.  With cool characters.  This trilogy takes the same characters from Sanderson's Alloy of Law, a book he wrote because he wanted to write a Western.  But he brings the characters out of the wild frontier and into an industrial revolution age city setting.

Pictures will be forthcoming.

No comments:

Post a Comment