NYE Laundry

Darling pjHusband this morning: What do you want to do to ring in the New Year?

Tired Mom of sick toddler: I don’t care as long as it doesn’t involve vomit.  Fever-free would be grand, too.

Dare to dream.

News from my hung-head coffee perusing for your enjoyment.

Fun stuff happening at Potluck.  Just a Conservative Girl asks if a civil war brews for the GOP.  And Pundette asks if NYC unions did intentionally slow the snow clean up this week, resulting in the death of a newborn.  Another infant dies as a result, too.  Heads should roll.  But since these are union heads not private industry heads, the media won’t care, nor will Big Brother. 

A laugher: Democrat regrets “death-panel” language.

JWF: Our esteemed AG says the Black Panther case a “made-up” controversy.  I’m torn as to which will blow up for the O administration, Black Panthers or Pigford.  What say you?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air ponders the green-induced government-backed destruction of jobs and food (and countless lives) in California’s Central Valley.  This is shameful.  Victor Davis Hanson writes about California’s self-induced woes regularly, and Ed’s column reminded me of this VDH gem on the Central Valley earlier in the month. Also related: Quite Rightly questions the government’s new role in regulating food “safety.” 

Pundette highlights the idiocy of the WaPo’s wizard of smart columnist, Ezra Klein.  Seems as though the boy-genius doesn’t understand the Constitution because it’s “old.”  Heh.

Katie Couric thinks we need a Muslim “Cosby Show” because we’re all so racist, and it would help build bridges of understanding or some such liberal nonsense.  Hey Katie: Here’s my vote for Cliff.  At least he wasn’t caught building bombs, no?

On the eighth day of Christmas…

The fever spiked, the vomit started and the snow poured forth.  Apologies for the lack of posting.  It’s a little nuts around here.  pjToddler is wicked sick with no end in sight.  The google reader feed is current–the Android/google reader feed has come in handy for sanity’s sake.

On the first day of Christmas…

Fun!

My best to you and yours this Christmas.

Recipe: La Bete Noire

Doesn’t it sound fabulous?  It is.  Every wickedly fattening chocolate bite.  (Take that, Michelle).

We made it last year for our Christmas dessert, and I regret to say that I’m … afraid to try it at altitude.  For Christmas.  With in-laws.  I have yet to break the news to my darling husband who declared it the best chocolate dessert evah last year. 

What to make instead ponders the procrastinator?

If you’re at sea level, I dare you to try it.  And please tell me how delightful it was!

Candy Cane Carnage

Oh the horrors.  A group of 10 high school boys homegrown terrorists,  members of the nefarious Christmas Sweater Club, were accused of “‘maliciously maim[ing] students with the intent to injure”. 

What were their methods – Explosives? Poison?  Nay.  Far more heinous, my friends.  They are accused of….(I shudder to type the words….) tossing candy canes to fellow students as they entered the school.

And not just any ole’ candy canes.  These were the 2 whole inch ones – complete with sanitary plastic bags around them.  (I can imagine our FLOTUS nodding her head in sad acknowledgement – it was only a matter of time before something like this happened).

According to one of the accused, junior Skylar  “Sven” Torbett, also a junior (and possibly a  Lutheran) administrators told him, “They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them.” 

I’ll pause while you reread that.   Yep.  You read it right the first time.  

The perpetrators were given a fairly light sentence as far as “zero tolerance” rules and regs go (considering they had those candy cane weapons on them)  – just a couple of hours of detention and cleaning.  The official note from the school limited their offenses to littering and creating a disturbance. The group does admit that littering was possibly one side effect of their attempts to spread Christmas cheer (darned old wrappers)  but denies disturbances since it happened before school started.

The parents thought the school went a tad bit overboard too. 

Mother Kathleen Flannery said an administrator called her and explained “not everyone wants Christmas cheer. That suicide rates are up over Christmas, and that they should keep their cheer to themselves, perhaps.”

Yeah! Because the last thing you want to do to someone who is depressed is to try to cheer them up or something…

The boys say they are  still spreading cheer.  Clearly unrepentant,  I have it on good authority that next year they are planning to leave a 12 inch Christmas tree out in plain sight.

Christmas in America, circa 1776

Via Ed Morrissey, an early present from Bill Whittle on the meaning of Christmas in American history.

(Disclaimer: for those who feel “excluded” by the sight of Christmas trees, this one might not be for you.  Our nation was founded with Judeo-Christian values and ideals.)

Ed Morrissey notes:

Bill quotes John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the requirement for a free people to be of high moral character, something they considered implicit in the Americans who fought for the freedom of self-governance. That didn’t require a theocratic institution for government, but instead a government that interfered little with their choices and room for the natural character of the people to assert itself. They did not view Americans as children who could not be trusted with choice, but adults who by and large would act on their inherent, God-gifted goodness for prosperity and liberty […]

The problem, Whittle says, is that those who don’t govern themselves end up creating pressure for a government that strips away those choices. It’s a little more complicated than that, however. Those who want government to dictate choices usually consider people inherently incapable of making those choices on their own — and that’s not a dynamic limited to non-believers, either. It usually comes from a misanthropic view of humanity, the exact opposite of the views of men like Adams and Jefferson, and a belief in the wisdom of “elites” who know better than the individuals what their self-interests are, and not because of an objective inability govern one’s self, but because the “elites” simply dislike the choices others make. It’s that arrogance that creates nanny states.

Enter Michelle’s “We can’t just leave it up to parents.”  And Obamacare–since neither patients nor doctors can be trusted to make the most cost-effective decisions.  We need to reignite the desire of Americans to fend for themselves.  In a strange way, Obama has helped light the fire, and the resulting birth of Tea Partiers across the nation.  Watch and enjoy:

A wedding for the ages: when two narcissists hook up

And destroy everything in their wake.  There’s much to be said, but I’ll let the NYT wedding announcement (under the ironic heading, “Vows”) do the talkin’. 

WHAT happens when love comes at the wrong time?

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

Part “Brady Bunch” and part “The Scarlet Letter,” their story has played out as fodder for neighborhood gossip. But from their perspective, the drama was as unlikely as it was unstoppable.

Ah, unstoppable.  Freight trains are unstoppable.  But an attraction to someone married when you’re married as well?  No, not unstoppable.  Unless you care absolutely nothing about your vows, your spouse or your children.  But I digress. 

Ms. Riddell was a reporter and anchor on WNBC television in New York and a mother of two. A glamorous, petite woman with a strong handshake and stronger opinions, she is not the type to be easily dazzled, yet she was struck by Mr. Partilla’s exuberance.

“He bounds into a room,” said Ms. Riddell, who was 40 when they met. “He doesn’t walk in, he explodes in.”

Mr. Partilla, then a 42-year-old triathlete and a president of media sales at Time Warner, recognized a kindred dynamo. “She’s such a force,” he said. “She rocks back and forth on her feet as if she can’t contain her energy as she’s talking to you.”

The connection was immediate, but platonic. In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners, Christmas parties and even family vacations together.

So Ms. Riddell was surprised to find herself eagerly looking for Mr. Partilla at school events — and missing him when he wasn’t there. “I didn’t admit to anyone how I felt,” she said. “To even think about it was disruptive and disloyal.”

Disruptive and disloyal.  BINGO.  Yet she ended up leaving her husband and children and watching her now-husband destroy his family as well.  So they could be … happy.  What about their kids?

Oh, angst:

“The part that’s hard for people to believe is we didn’t have an affair,” Ms. Riddell said. “I didn’t want to sneak around and sleep with him on the side. I wanted to get up in the morning and read the paper with him.”

As if that motive makes breaking your family apart any better?  Because you wanted to get up in the morning and read the paper?

With that goal in mind, they told their spouses. “I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could,” said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children. But he returned only days later. Then he boomeranged back and forth for six months.

So reluctant.  And honorable–moving in and out for six months, giving your wife and children hope that you might stay with them.  Redefines honor brilliantly, no?

How ’bout this gem:

 The pain he had predicted pervaded both of their lives as they faced distraught children and devastated spouses… 

Easy to predict that one, eh?

“He said, ‘Remind me every day that the kids will be O.K.,’ ” Ms. Riddell recalled. “I would say the kids are going to be great, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives making it so.”

The problem was she could not guarantee that.

All they had were their feelings, which Ms. Riddell described as “unconditional and all-encompassing.”

Gag me.  Your kids will be scarred forever.  All because of a choice you made to find “true love” outside of your marriage.  Yes, you can delude yourselves by thinking love “found”  you “at the wrong time,” but that doesn’t erase the truth of what you’ve willingly put your families through. Because you met someone with whom you’d rather wake up to and read your NYT, who “explodes” into a room.  How utterly selfish.

They finalized their divorces this year. “I will always feel terribly about the pain I caused my ex-husband,” said Ms. Riddell, 44 and working freelance. “It was not what I ever would have wished on him.” Or on her children.

You didn’t wish it upon him!  How hard is that, really?

“My kids are going to look at me and know that I am flawed and not perfect, but also deeply in love,” she said. “We’re going to have a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it.”

Yes, more love in it to cover up the love you threw away.  How fitting.  And the lesson to your children is that love excuses your behavior in toto?  What about vows?  How will you explain how it’s different this time, that your vows mean something? 

You can’t.

Nanny Michelle thwarted by terrorists

“We can’t just leave it up to parents,” she said, ignorant of her statist slip showing, on her mission to force salad bars into every school and veggies into every gullet.

I wonder if Nanny Michelle knows that a dirty sneeze guard on the salad bar isn’t the only lurking threat? Via CBS News:

In this exclusive story, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports the latest terror attack to America involves the possible use of poisons – simultaneous attacks targeting hotels and restaurants at many locations over a single weekend.

A key Intelligence source has confirmed the threat as “credible.” Department of Homeland Security officials, along with members of the Department of Agriculture and the FDA, have briefed a small group of corporate security officers from the hotel and restaurant industries about it.

“We operate under the premise that individuals prepared to carry out terrorist acts are in this country,” said Dec. of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on Dec. 6, 2010.

The plot uncovered earlier this year is said to involve the use of two poisons – ricin and cyanide – slipped into salad bars and buffets.

Regarding the salad bars, maybe our esteemed First Lady can persuade those evil-doers to only poison the fatty items on the hot food buffet thus sparing the vegetables? And what way to strike at Americans than harm the kiddies?  Terrorists reminded the Russians of that a few years ago.  Salad bars, here we come!

This just in: the terror plotters in question aren’t those evil blonde Lutherans, either.

Why can’t Christmas radio play more music like this?

Instead, my toddler has learned the lyrics to this by osmosis.  She croons it to Baby Jesus in her Nativity.  Maybe this will be the catalyst to force me to figure out the Ipod dock for the stereo and why it doesn’t work when it should?

Help-my-in-laws-are-on-the-way-and-I’m-buried-in-Christmas various and sundry

Pardon my absence for a few days. Insanely busy doing what normal people   procrastinators do before Christmas, i.e. fix beds and clean rooms for incoming visitors, chase toddler, assemble packages to be mailed for family and friends, make the candy for aforementioned packages, cursing the rising humidity due to snow, chase toddler, finish making cards, searching high and low for the address changes.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But I did pause from Mount Washmore to see that the DREAM Act cloture vote failed.  Wrap that up and put it in my stocking, Harry Reid, you just made my day.  Michelle Malkin has the play-by-play.

Pundette’s brave enough to venture out in NOVA to shop the weekend before Christmas.  May the force be with you.  She celebrates Mark Steyn’s return at Potluck.  And the young adult reading guide she wrote for Right Network is first-rate.

More Potluck action: Zilla on Femisogyny. 

Quite Rightly has some music to bake by–will add that to my playlist once I figure out how to use the ipod dock that connects to the stereo that came with the house.  Yes, it’s been one of those weeks. 

Fuzislippers warns us to bunker up in the Age of Obama (oh, the twists and turns of fate, no?) 

And Retriever has officially scared the lights out of my Christmas tree.  Oh, it’s watered, three times daily, but the dry Colorado air might mean a fake tree next year.  Watch these if  you’re not faint of heart.  My favorite: dry tree vs. high moisture tree.  Oh why did we get one so early?!  Oh, because they were on super sale at Costco and its was gorgeous.  In all fairness, most of the branches feel fine.  Ours just has weird dry spots that make me wary.  So much for keeping it up till Epiphany this year.  Death-trap tree will have to go.