Archive for November, 2008

Yesterday was a momentous occasion for us. Our son got married late yesterday afternoon.I wish them the best as they are made for each other. Watching the ceremony brought back memories of when I took his mother for my bride. Its been almost 29 years but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I stood before the preacher and said my “I do’s”. Then exactly 1 year later she gave me the best anniversary gift one could ever get and that was a son. The lord blessed me with a wife who could put up with me and a great son and daughter, and now I have another daughter. Truly I am blessed. May they share many years to come happily.

Son and Daughter-In-Law

A test on civic knowledge given to elected officials proved that they are slightly less knowledgeable than the uninformed people who voted them into office. Elected officials scored a 44 percent while ordinary citizens managed an amazing 49 percent on the 33 questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It is a sad state of affairs when our elected officials have such a poor understanding of civics for our country. Actually it is sad that the citizens have such a poor knowledge of our government and its history. ?It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI?s civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned,? said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). I managed to find the actual test they administered, (google is your friend) and took the test for myself. I didn?t do as well as I hoped but still managed an ?A? with 96.97% only missing question # 30.

Take
the test and see how well you can do.

Thousands of people lost their homes after hurricane Ike washed ashore and thousands more had flood damage that precludes them living in their homes until they are repaired. FEMA is supposed to have thousands upon thousands of trailers just for emergencies like this but so far since the storm hit on September, 13 They have only installed somewhere around one thousand homes. Even counting the approximately 400 or so homes that are delivered but are in various stages of being set up that is still less than 1500 homes. My question is why is it taking so long to get help to these people. What is wrong with our government in general and FEMA in particular? This is a crying shame. I know from my own experience setting mobile homes up that when I was younger and still in good health I could have set 1 or 2 of the small units a day by myself and with a crew of 2 men to help me we could have set 3 or 4 a day as long as they had them parked in the right spots. I never did any work for FEMA but I know some that did and they told me that it paid good and that rules were relaxed for hauling the trailers, even letting some of them be hauled at night. So my question now is, are there not enough contractors working for FEMA? Is there some trouble finding drivers willing to haul these trailers for one reason or another? Whatever it is they need to get their act together and help these people. That is their entire function, implement plans to handle disasters and then to follow through with them and get the help out there as fast as humanly possible and that they are not doing. A word or two from their boss President Bush could speed them up if he were so inclined to help people of his home state. It appalls me that after the disaster after Katrina we still have not gotten up to speed helping victims yet.

Even though I was up early I am still dragging around today. Still trying to recuperate from yesterday it seems. It was a rough day physically on me as I was really hit hard by my fibro and barely even got out of bed all day. After two weeks my insurance finally authorized my lyrica for me.They don’t have to suffer when they refuse to pay, and I didn’t have a few extra hundred dollar bills lying around unused to buy it with. The only thing I actually accomplished was getting my daughter from work at 11:00. I never got around to posting or even reading my news and emails. I did look at my blog and Connies
trying to determine why we are stuck in the html mode when we write in our wordpress blogs. Hopefully today will be a better day for me and possibly a fruitful one as well cause I miss using the visual mode. I myself write and edit all my posts in Nvu and then paste the finished post into the write new post page and all the links or other formatting I have done pastes right along with it and there is no need to use the wonky html functions of wordpress.

I was watching NCIS last night as I usually do and just had a feeling that something wasn’t just right and popped online to see how my friends were doing. It must have been a psychic feeling cause sure enough my friend Connie over at Brain Foggles was having trouble with her new blog Conniesview. It had stopped displaying and was reporting an error instead of showing a page. We had this error ;
Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘<' in /wp-includes/post-template.php on line 734
She of course was panicking so I jumped right on it. I host her blog and give her hands on support something we plan on being able to do for others who wish to blog but have no knowledge of being a web/blog master. A quick search showed it was being discussed on the message boards of wordpress support. The post-template.php file was only supposed to have 733 lines of code instead of the 734 it was reporting though in dreamweaver it showed about 6 lines or more of apparently undecipherable code. A quick ftp of the now fixed page had her up and running in no time. Everything was lovely once more, or so I thought until I checked this blog and it to was reporting the exact same error. wow quick fix or so I thought. After fixing the file I got another error in the comment mailer plugin, seeing as how I don’t use it anyhow I simply deleted it ,and once more the world is revolving and everything rosy again. If you have problems with yours or need some help maybe this will help you out. I did post the fix on wp support forums too in case you need to look.

I kept myself occupied pretty much of the morning by making a change in my sidebar. I wanted a double head over the left and right columns and had to work it out to get it to display correctly. Jenn over at Everyday Randomness pointed me in the right direction telling me that I needed to mod the sidebar.php page in my themes directory. Of course it was a little more involved than simply adding a few lines of text. I had to add a division to the page plus add a division to the style sheet also. Not too bad but I sure am glad I know how to cut and paste. Its easier to copy then mod some code rather than writing it from scratch. You can see the result of a few hours of off and on work by looking at my ad on the right. I have been hosting websites for friends for some time now and intend to expand hosting to blogs also. Let me know if I can help you, or any input you might have. Thanks.

I can tell I no longer have the constitution I once did with me catching viruses and not getting over them as I once did. I am miserable now with a sinus infection that has its grips on me. I have been thinking of getting a flu shot too but they won’t give it to me until I am over this and with me have less bounce back ability I don’t know how long that will be.I have never taken this antibiotic or actually until recently I never even took them. This one (Ceftin) is nasty. It is chalky and tastes terrible as soon as you place it in your mouth it starts to dissolve and even worse it belches back on me later. At one time I felt almost immune to colds and respiratory problems. I do know that even though I worked outdoors in all weather including rains and occasional snows that I went for well over a decade without ever catching cold. Now my immune system has taken a hard left I believe. If I were able to work like that once more I think the outdoors helps build your tolerances up to things like colds and sinus/bronchial infections. I hope to be on the mend and out into the great outdoors again soon. Hunting or fishing soon would be nice. I feel so stifled inside all the time with central heat and air. I prefer a little cold and the heat to certain degree. I think it makes you stronger if you can stand it. Hopefully I will be over this soon and back to my old disgruntled self.

Its cooling off here in the south and time for me to quit going barefoot so much. Actually me being a diabetic I have read I should never go bare footed but that goes against the grain for me. During the summer time I would go without shoes pretty much everywhere if stores didn’t have rules against it. So when I do wear shoes I tend to go for a good pair of?work boots. Myself I prefer a lower top pair so I can get into and out of them easily. But that is going to depend on what I am doing. If I am just out for a daily walk or a day hike low tops or brogans as they used to call them are just fine but if I am going hunting or anywhere that gets me into the brush or if I do a little welding a pair of high tops are needed. Nothing much is worse than a hot piece of steel falling into your boots. A hot foot is a bad day for me and a long time to heal also. It seems that it takes me forever to heal up after any kind of cut, bruise, or burn. Maybe Santa Claus will hook me up with a new pair this year.

After a few months of bloody wolf killing a federal court ruled against the Bush/Cheney administrations proposal to remove wolves from the Endangered Species Act. In response the administration withdrew that proposal a few weeks ago. I do not know what the administration has against wolves but they are once more attacking them with a proposal that would lead to two thirds of the population being slaughtered. Please take action now to insure this does not happen by contacting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They are only accepting public comments until November 28th. Speak up now as they can not speak for themselves. We as a people own the land they are on and need to have the wilderness preserved.

Yesterday was a historic day with Obama winning the election so handily. I myself even though I was voting for him still held a secret fear that hidden prejudices would rear their ugly head and him not get the votes that everyone expected. I am so happy and proud that we as a nation rose above that and chose the candidate by the content of his heart rather than the color of his skin. We have came so far since I was a kid where I was made fun of and called names for even having a black friend. And it wasn’t just whites that openly showed their prejudices it was black also. I never dreamed we would come so far in my lifetime. But we have and it speaks volumes for us, the American people. Now we can count down the days until Bush, who has ran this country to the ground, leaves office and is replaced by Obama. ?I couldn’t stay awake last night and fell asleep not long after Ohio was placed in his column but woke back up around 11:30 to see they had called the election in his favor. It is very difficult for me with all the meds I have to take everyday to stay up late anymore. This is a complete turnaround from me in my younger days. I used to go weeks at a time with very little sleep but no longer. I can’t even make it through the day without a nap much less stay up all night. Anyhow we have a brighter prospect in the White House and Congress to look forward to. Lets hope they live up to our expectations.