The Walls of St Paul

More random bullets to round out the past 14 days or so...

2009-06-28T22:05:00.004-05:00

June 13th

Working on master course updates in my outdoor office. Smells like peonies and roses. Beautiful day in Minnesota...3:31 PM

June 17th

Can I get all my grading done on my big computer before the thunderstorms start tonight? Stay tuned...5:49 PM

Weather radio firing off tornado warnings (not 4 me), Rachel #Maddow on TV, kids running around crazy. I should give up on the grading.8:12 PM

June 19th

Lunch time retail therapy at Macy's 1 day sale. Score: blk skirt, bl slvless top, aqua shy slv top. #flylady12:06 PM

June 24th

Stated more clearly: RT @WillAtWork: "The biggest self of self is indeed self." -Mark Sanford, the biggest tool of tool #Maddow. Still LMAO8:23 PM

June 26th

TGIF. Party w/some old college friends tonight. Trader Joe's opened today 3/4 mi away.3:00 PM
I think I just stepped into the party bus. These guys are having way too much fun on public transportation.3:06 PM

Unsettled

2009-06-25T15:21:00.002-05:00

It's been a week where things feel up-in-the-air. Unsettled. Some of that is due to the weather, which I've been whining about here. But there seems to be something else. Restlessness mixed with inertia.

That's an odd combo. But that's the best description for it. Or just-don't-wanna-do-nuthin' disease. But somethings gotta be done.

It's farmer day. The day we get our farm share for the week. I didn't even look up to see what we're getting. More salad greens, I suppose. I still have turnips and arugula from last week that we haven't eaten. It's like the heat hit and we all lost interest.

On top of everything, we've had our periodic visit from the head lice fairy. I went 44 years without dealing with it. I think I've made up for that downtime in the last 6 years. Yuck.

Now to summon up enough energy to get off the bus.

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Hot Birthday to John

2009-06-22T15:32:00.002-05:00

My dear friend Kay (R.I.P.) use to say "It's not the heat, it's the whining." Let me whine a bit about the weather.

One of the Titans has uprooted my fair state and dropped into a super-sized Finnish sauna. Literally, my breath was taken away when I left work just now and stepped outside. It is hard to breathe. It's 92 degrees, 70 degree dewpoint, 98 degrees heat index. Yuck, whine, whine.
We turned on the a/c for the first time yesterday, and was happy to find it still works.

Tonight we celebrate John's birthday. His wish was to go to Big Bowl. I have to finish his cake (frosting) before I can go off to work for Metro.

Is it fair to leave squirrelly kids with your Spousal Unit on the SU's birthday? I am really going to work and earn money, not sitting ina coffee house and schmoozing. I'm not the schmoozing type.
I think the ethics here are sketchy.

The cake is from scratch. It's a recipe called Grandma's Thunder Cake. It's from a book Rachel and John read together a month ago. The kids and I call it Dada's Thunder Fart Cake. I don't know if that's a by-product of the cake or not. It's made with tomatoes, so anything is possible.

A happy hot 62nd Birthday to John.

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Invaders from the Planet Cute and Furry

2009-06-17T22:31:00.003-05:00

Our chuck of St. Paul has been taken over by rabbits. Old rabbits, baby rabbits, mama and daddy rabbits. There all here on our block. One morning, I counted seven rabbits in one yard.

About a month ago, while walking down the alley, I noticed nine rabbits total: 3 senior, 3 juvenile, 3 babies.

I'm not sure how many we have now -- I haven't looked up the breeding cycle of the bunny to find out how many more may have been created in the last month.

They are terribly cute, hopping their way down the alley or across the yard. There's an older rabbit (I'm guessing that by the amount of white fur around its eyes) that I have named The Easter Bunny. This particular rabbit has been around since Easter, and it has a strange habit -- it doesn't run right away when the kids and I approach. And I think it laughs when Laddie has a rabbit-inspired barking fit.

For as cute as these rabbits are, they sure can destroy things in a hurry.

I have several new rose bushes, including three that are in a semi-fenced part of the backyard, next to the tomatoes. I had watered the tomatoes and roses one evening. When I came home from work the next day, all the leaves were gone from the rose bushes -- as were several about-to-bloom roses.

The neighborhood rabbits must have had a party in my roses. There were a lot of leaves and buds. More than just one or two rabbits could eat. I think it must have been the Bunny Eat-In of the Year.

I mentioned to John that my bushes had been stripped of their leaves by a rabbit dining club. He was surprised. He had noticed the rose were missing their leaves earlier that morning. He thought I had some weird new rose bush pruning approach this year, and I had stripped the roses myself the night before.

A week later, the roses are starting to sprout new leaves, but it will be a while before I get new rose buds. The roses are recovering behind wire structures that look like a Gitmo exercise area.

Not So Random Bullets of Tweets

2009-06-12T22:10:00.004-05:00

My tweets over the last week. As you can see, I'm not exactly a consistent tweeter on Twitter.
As they say on "Rate Your Students", enjoy the flava.

Thursday 6-4

RT @maddow: My inner 8 year old will not let me do anything today that does not somehow involve this website: http://whopooped.org/ 6:46 PM
@ maddow Thanks to you, I now have a 20% discount coupon for the kids to use at the MN Zoo this summer. 6:46 PM
No one knows more about poop than a mom... 6:47 PM
... well, a daycare provider and a proctologist would be knowledgeable, too.6:48 PM
Is this hashtag working? #edublogger 7:12 PM

Saturday 6-6

@twitopain Missed the poop reference*, but loved the "Hey, that guy looks like me" (or something like that) at the Pyramids. 7:21 PM Jun 6th from TweetDeck in reply to twitopain

Going to Grading Jail now. Will not resurface until all 27 papers are graded! 7:48 PM

Monday 6-8

Out of grading jail. It's so bright out here...6:43 PM
Amen!!
RT @Ali_Davis: Maybe Newt is meant to be the Republicans' clean energy solution? Less power from gas, more from gasbags? #maddow 8:45 PM
Looks like I'm missing another good #maddow. TG for the repeat! 8:46 PM

-----------------------
* According to my friend twitopain, President Obama made a poop reference sometime during his visit to the Pyramids of Giza. I missed it.

Lost, Then Found

2009-05-04T20:30:00.006-05:00

My computers need some serious Spring Cleaning. I have junk scattered all over them, and scattered all over my thumb drives. I need to bring some order to my computing life again. But that's another task that has to wait until the grades have been submitted.

Fortunately, I found this little gem in a folder in a sub-directory. And it's still relevant!

I will be so glad when the Senate race is settled. But that'll happen just about the time the ground freezes this fall. That's my prediction.

Last week on The Rachel Maddow show, Senator Amy Klobuchar predicted the race would be settled when "the corn is knee-high on the 4th of July". And if not then, she'll "be mad". The prediction talks at 6:50 into the piece.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I think our solo Senator is an optimist.

Felled by Rose Fever

2009-05-03T20:26:00.000-05:00

I couldn't hold off. By Saturday afternoon at 4:00, I was the proud owner of five new roses. It would have been six, but I forgot about the Jens Munk. Plus I picked up a Winnipeg Parks.

They are waiting for me to dig some big holes. But that won't happen until I get all the papers and final grades submitted later this week. But they sure look good!

Forget the Swine Flu, I've Got Rose Fever

2009-05-02T08:46:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year when my sinuses clog, my nose twitches incessantly, and I stock up on Puffs Plus. Spring is here, and my thoughts turn to my roses. My wonderfully fragrant roses. Which cause my clogging and twitching. But that's why God made allergy meds.

Last year was a very bad year for a bunch of my roses in my oldest rose bed. I don't know exactly what happened, but by mid-July, it was clear my favorite of the bunch, Cuthbert Grant, was dying. Maybe it was old age. Cuthbert was 15 years in my garden when he died. Even the tomatoes I planted nearby didn't perk him up.

My William Baffin, which is only supposed to get to 10 ft at the max, is way above 15 feet and is now draped over a portion of the deck. He's getting sparse at the bottom, and old, too. Queen Elizabeth never did get the hang of her environment, and she barely hangs in each year.

I think the soil is warm enough to be dug out. It's time for me to go rose shopping.

My rose criteria is very simple: must thrive on neglect and be smelly. High maintenance, looks-good-no-smell roses need not apply.

Here's my shopping list:

two Cuthbert Grants
John Cabot to join Bill and Liz in the climbing area
Frau Dagmar Hartopp (yes, I'm using the German name) to sit on the other side of my other old timer, Henry Hudson
Jens Munk to fill in the space next to my grandma's farm rose.

That should set me back a hundred or two. But they're worth it. There's nothing like sitting on our back deck, with the scent of roses in the air. Pure bliss.

22 Years

2009-05-01T23:09:00.001-05:00

There was a reminiscing thread on my tech writers list this morning, recalling the days of DOS and old word processing programs of the past.

I realized that it was 22 years ago, April 1987, when I first became really interested in computers.

I was writing procedure manuals and training materials using the department IBM Selectric. I would sit at it for days at a time, because I was creating the first training materials for the branch loan processors. When a procedure would change, I'd have to retype the whole page from scratch.

About 3 months before, a new manager had gotten an IBM PC/AT for our department. Another area had an original IBM PC with dual floppy disk drives they used for customer form letters.

After watching someone use the computers, I got curious, and asked if I could use it for my manuals. So, I learned Word 2.0 for DOS, learned how to tear a computer apart to change/upgrade components, and the rest is history.

That AT opened doors that I had nailed shut. By college, I had decided I was never going to work with computers. I had no need to learn about computers, they had no relevance to my life.

Now, I feel lost if I don't have some kind of keyboard and software to push around.

It's been wild, living on the near cutting edge of technology. While I'm not an early adopter, I am close to the front of the pack. The things my kids take for granted, like Firefox and the web, I remember what it was like before they existed. I even used Gopher and BBS for a short while at home, before the web became more mainstream.

The biggest lesson I learned from all of this was to never say "never". That's like an invitation to have my mind changed. It's been more interesting to say "well, maybe" and see what happens.

No, Barney! Not on camera!!

2009-04-25T10:18:00.002-05:00

I was watching Olbermann last night, and noticed Barney the Scottie in the background of some old shots at the Bush ranch. And then I noticed he (Barney, not fmr Pres. Bush) was taking a dump. I think the cameraman noticed too, because the camera starts zooming in on Barney.

I laughed my ass off. You can always count on a Scottie to do something obnoxious in the background during a serious moment.

If you want to see, go here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30395233

Go to the #5 story "Cheney preparing his defense?", and move the video to about 4:49 and watch. Also note that the video scene changes and Barney is no longer in the background, but Bush and Friends are in the same positions they were in during the dump (Barney's, not theirs).

I love the Interwebs!!

Deck and Tornado Weather

2009-04-23T20:05:00.002-05:00

It was 87 degrees today. The hottest day yet. We've had all our deck furnishings out for about a week now. I am writing this from the deck right now, as the light slowly fades on this April day.

OOH Shiny! Moment -- A Great Blue Heron just flew overhead. Way cool.

Today was the day to practice for tornado season. The kids had drills at school today. I was in a meeting when the sirens blew downtown for the business/school day drills. Everyone in the room started when the sirens blew. Then the word went out: just a siren test.

More OOH Shiny! A big, red cardinal is sitting in the bushes, chirping his heart out.

This evening, we had the family drill. When the sirens blew, the girls ran over from the neighbors, grabbed the dogs, and hit the basement. It took me much longer to get my computer crap off the deck and get downstairs. It's clear I'm the weak link in this chain.

A rabbit just ran through the yard.

There's just so much going on outside. Critters, sun rays, tornado sirens. I love this time of year.

Downtown Adventures

2009-04-20T15:10:00.002-05:00

After the warm weather comes another cold streak.
As I was coming out of work just now, a big gust came up, turned a gal's umbrella inside out, which made her drop her phone. The umbrella got the worst of it.
I had to step around part of what I think was a woodpecker. The only recognizable part was a wing. It had the white and black markings of the woodpeckers in my neighborhood.
Lastly, a guy was running a to catch the bus. Except he really couldn't run because his pants were half pulled down.
The mama in me wants to yell, "Pull up your pants!!" The 12-year-old inside hoped he'd do a face-plant.

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Everything In Its Place

2009-04-16T10:04:00.003-05:00

I took today off to get somethings in order. My workroom is an absolute pig sty since the kids moved in with their laptop. But I thought I'd mess with my blogs for a bit before doing the heavy-duty cleaning and lifting.

And I found the sporatic posts I've thought I've sent to this blog, have been posted instead on my craft blog. So actually, I have written some stuff since November 4th. It just never got here.

So, all the blogs are straightened out now, and everything is in its proper place. Amen.

And now the ranting can begin.

BBC Book List

2009-03-16T21:36:00.000-05:00

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X +
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X +
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X + (Read it 23 times -- so far)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams *
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X+
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

29 book read on the list. Not too bad. But most of them were read pre-kids. Right now I have 10 books started, several of them started several years ago.

Blast From the Past

2009-02-28T09:49:00.001-06:00

I walked into my usual Saturday pre-Chinese class study area to find this:

I didn't think Selectrics existed anymore. This one looks like the typewriter that Snookie's mom kept in her kitchen.
On the whiteboard were other reminders of my past -- chemical equations.

I don't know what these mean anymore, but I remember trying to understand what they meant 25+ years ago.

It also seems that chemistry students named "Pete G." are still out of favor. There's a none-too-flattering definition of this generation's "Pete G." on the whiteboard as well. Which I didn't photograph. I try to keep this blog clean, unless I'm talking politics.

We had a "Pete G." in our chemistry classes, too. Very smart, but a dweeb. We picked on him so much in Chem Lab. I'm sure he's rich, famous and living a fabulous life in spite of the folks in A-Chem and P-Chem at SJU.

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In the Air

2009-02-24T16:30:00.000-06:00

As I left work this afternoon, I noticed a different scent in the air. It was very subtle. The smell of Spring approaching. Even though we have another month (or two or three) of cold weather ahead, the atmosphere is changing.
The family has a bad case of cabin fever, right down to the dogs. We're ready for a change.

It's -16 Fahrenheit...

2009-01-15T21:38:00.000-06:00

... why am I craving ice cream?

Big Day

2008-11-04T05:20:00.002-06:00

I've been awake since 3:30 am. I blame that partially on the time switchover this weekend, and the other part on my nerves about today.

Election Day is here.

My things are packed and ready to go out to my car for the two block ride to the precinct where I register voters. It's going to be a very busy day. In 2004, we registered over 100 voters on Election Day. I'm expecting the same type of numbers today. My head judge, in his wisdom, has assigned me a helper.

My nerves aren't so much about what is going to happen today. This is my third presidential election that I have served as an election judge. November 2000 was my first election as a judge. I've worked every election since then. I know my job well. John and the girls drilled me for a 1/2 hour last night on "what if" scenarios -- I had solid answers for everything. I know what I am doing.

I'm nervous because I don't know how this will all come out. I know I would like a broad Democratic victory across the country, starting with Barack Obama. It would be the perfect birthday present (I turn 50 today).

I have a big bottle of Pepcid packed, along with an even bigger bottle of Advil. I bought for myself a huge bouquet of flowers: red, white, and blue with a pop of Autumn. The designer at Johnson's did a wonderful job - the flowers are fragrant and triggering my allergies. Thank God for Claritin and Zyrtec! I have a book and a magazine to read at lunch break, cookies, towel paper, and my lunch. And my tiara. A birthday girl's gotta celebrate as she can when she'll be working at 17+ hour day.

Time to do a last check of the hair, put on the earrings and lipstick, and head to the rec center to set up.

P.S. - Sarah if you read this: happy belated birthday!!!!! Send me your address, would you?

More Bragging

2008-10-06T20:39:00.002-05:00

More stuff to brag about:
In gymnastics, both Sarah and Rachel were promoted one step up the ladder.

Sarah is now a member of the Petite Elite Extra group. The next step up after this would be the Jr. High gymnastics team. So, I guess I'm on track to be a gymnastics mom. I've warned Sarah that if/when she competes on a team, I will put Debbie Phelps to shame.
Rachel is now a member of the Petite Elite group, the group Sarah just left. Once again, she's totally non-plussed about it.

And in dog news, Laddie finally learned to lift his leg. John is so proud of his doggie boy.
Unfortunately, I think Laddie is also lifting his leg against the piano leg. John's not so proud or excited about THAT.

oops...

2008-09-27T20:06:00.002-05:00

I just came over to the local coffee shop for some Mama Time. I knew there would be a jazz group playing tonight, so parking and tables would be tight.

I walked in the back entrance while the trumpet player was doing a solo. I immediately thought, "That trumpet player really sucks. What kind of band is this?"

By the time I walked to the counter I saw ... that this band consisted of 7th graders. Oops.

They're not bad for a bunch of 7th graders.

It's nice that the owner of this place would let a bunch of kids play a gig.

The Girl's a Genius

2008-09-25T21:52:00.002-05:00

Maybe not technically a genius, but I know Rachel is pretty darn smart. As I have told some of my friends, she is a frightening child -- the depth of her thinking is not typical of her age. That I knew.

She used to repeat back the addition tables when I would drill Sarah. I thought she had a good memory, was an excellent parrot.

Truth is -- she actually understood what she was saying. She liked math, enjoyed adding the numbers.

The other day she brought home a request from the school that she join the advanced math class. Totally floored me. I didn't think they had advanced math in 1st grade. They do now, and my scary smart kid is right there.

What I Sent to My Reps

2008-09-24T08:02:00.001-05:00

I'm still fired up about this corporate bailout. I composed this letter in my head on the way to work, and have now sent it on to Norm, Amy, and Betty (Coleman, Klobuchar, McCollum).

*********
I have to live with the consequences of my decisions. I have to think through all the possibilities before I decide. If my decision is a poor one, I have to deal with it. If circumstances outside of my control make a previously good decision come out bad, I still have to live with the consequences of that decision. I have no one to bail me out. I sink or I swim.
The same should be true of these corporations that are now looking for a bailout. They should have to sink or swim. If their decisions turn out poorly, they have to deal with it on their own. No sugar daddy should come in to rescue the corporation.
If the corporations' bankruptcy is bad for the economy well, the economy already stinks. The recession is here, and has been here for several months. I'm working hard to survive the recession. These Wall Street firms and financial companies need to dig in, garner their internal strengths, and work to survive -- or not.
If corporations have rights like individuals, they should also have the right to fail. True, the corporations actions impact others. My actions impact my family. We all have to sleep in the bed we made.
No bailout.
**********

I don't know if it will make a difference. But I've said my piece. That's what democracy is all about.

No Different

2008-09-23T13:07:00.001-05:00

Fed chair Bernanke says Congress risks recession if Congress doesn't give Wall Street $700 billion NOW.

I'm here to tell Mr. Bernanke -- we're already in a recession. Maybe not according to his tools and calculators. But those are just numbers and guesses. The proof is staring him right in the face. "Recession" is just a scare tactic.

Frankly, I'd like to see all those greedy bastards go down. Yes, it could impact me. But I know we'll be just fine. Because I have confidence in myself.

No one is going to bail me out. I have to get by on my wits. My wealth is not in any bank. My wealth is my confidence.

I'm a survivor. I use my brains, think things through thoroughly. I have to if I want to survive. This is the lesson I teach my kids.

The Wall Street Investment Idiots were too busy caring about profit. Money. Fame. They deserve to fall and fail and have rise from the ashes. Just like any person. (Corps legally have rights as people. Did you know that?)

So... Drop, Baby, Drop. Fail, Wall Street, fail. You're no better than me. I have to work without a safety net. So should you.

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How to Perplex Your Children

2008-09-23T00:38:00.002-05:00

... start singing lyrics from Pink Floyd as a part of your everyday conversation.

Right now, I'm quoting heavily from "Comfortably Numb".
Situation: Kids mumble something after preceeding their mumbling with a frantic "mamamamamama!"
Response: "Your lips move, but I can't hear what you say."

Works on spouses, too. You know the situation -- they are yacking at you from two rooms away, while you are cooking dinner and running an exhaust fan in the kitchen, listening to Thom Hartmann on the radio. "Your lips move, but I can't hear what you say."

Come to think of it, the lyrics to "Money" are pretty appropriate, given the current economic circumstances. It's a gas.

My New Mortgage and Insurance Company!

2008-09-18T21:07:00.002-05:00

Congratulate me! I now own two mortgage companies and an insurance company.

Come to think of it, you own them too. Their names are Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG.

I'm not sure they were playing with a full deck when they made me an owner. As I frequently tell my co-workers, you don't want me in charge of anything. I'm too tough. I don't mind flunking people who won't pull their weight. I can't stand liars. My standards and expectations are very high.

Or as my kids say, I'm a Mean, Mean Mama.

Unfortunately, I don't truly get the option to rule a segment of the financial services world. But if I did, I'm not sure what I would do first to turn these entities around.

It sounds like the government is planning to take away all the bad stuff in Freddie/Fannie/AIG and park it in another entity never to bother Freddie/Fannie/AIG again. Seems like a corporate absolution of financial sins. I wonder how many Hail Marys they'll need to say.