I'm about to ruin your day: HR 4752

I stared up at the cold, uncaring stars, and shreiked in unholy madness as I read House Bill 4752, introduced into Congress this year:

Purpose: To provide for the common defense by requiring all persons in the United States, including women, between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.

(Emphasis mine.) It's currently locked up in the Subcommittee on Military Personnel and will probably go nowhere, but doesn't it warm the cockles of your heart (or maybe the subcockle region, maybe your liver, maybe your rectum! No, that's just clenching...) to know that Representative Charles B. Rangel cares so much about his country?

Okay, the guy's a Democrat, and a one-man "I move that the house recognize so-and-so for his or her acheivements in..." yadda yadda yadda machine. It's probably a publicity thing. But the fact that it's there at all annoys me. I hate politics.

Ah, the irony

This morning, I stumbled across a quote by Genghis Kahn that needed writing down somewhere in my paper journal:

The greatest joy is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you. To see his cities reduced to ashes. To see those who love him shrouded in tears. And to clasp to your bosom his wives and children.

I then put my bookmark into the page, the bookmark with the symbol 慶 on it. The symbol is commonly interpreted as "Joy."

Camping, Day 2

There was a leak in the mattress. We awoke lying on rocks.

The girls have a muffin breakfast.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

We had Omaha's famous breakfast muffins in the morning, warmed over the fire. I'm not sure what they're made of, but they're incredibly moist and yummy and I bet they keep you reg'lar too. The girls drank a yogurt drink with their muffins and then ran for the playground while Omaha and I cleaned up.

We first went to the Remote Visitors Center near Crystal Rock, which has a beautiful view of the mountain many miles away. We took the short "nature hike" around the wetlands, where we saw lots of reeds, a few fish, and a pair of nested Ospreys. The Ospreys were way cool. Unfortunately, the camera can barely resolve their huge nest and I never got close enough to one of the birds to get a decent photograph.

We returned to our campsite for lunch-- tuna fish and apples, then went for a hike up around the state park itself. Several times we worried about becoming lost, but Omaha kept us on track and eventually we did the whole circuit. I'm sorry I forgot the camera for this hike as we found an ant mound decorated with pine needles two feet high and three wide, enormous!

An Osprey nest.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

We returned to camp and tried to fix the mattress. We found the hole but the only repair we had was duct tape. Garrison Keillor says that duct "keeps something together long enough for you to figure out how to live without it." We'll see. Omaha tested it with a nap while the girls made a new friend who's apparently a state horseriding champion in her age group. They were enthralled with this very rural girl and her tales of 4H competitions.

We made beercan chicken and it came out better than last year. If the Carribbean spice rub I brought added any flavor, though, I couldn't taste it. Still, it was very, very good chicken. Mmmm, meat!

The buffoon in the next campsite brought a portable DVD player with outboard speakers and he's watching something while he eats a TV dinner. What's the point of camping if you're just going to bring your living room out into the woods? I suppose my annoyance is arbitrary; after all, I'm taking these notes with more light and better paper than Lewis and Clarke ever had access to. Note to self: see what the waiting list is for Undaunted Courage at the local library, or maybe Half Price Books has a copy.

LDVS Attack!

The day I left to go camping-- leaving behind every writing instrument I own except for my beloved Miquelrius A5 Quadrille notebook and a Jetstream Uniball Finepoint Blue pen (gosh, no, I'm not at all picky about my tools, why do you ask? And why is the Jestream Finepoint Blue a special order item now? What's up with that?), my Muse assaulted me on the road and said, "Y'know that break between Book 2 and Book 3 of Aimee? The one where you can't think of a good reason why Darynn should go to the Imperial Capital? Well, here's your plot! Eight chapters, fully plotted, with a main character and a protagonist and everything. And it maintains the same format used in Aimee one. Boom, instant consistency!"

Fucker. Of course, the second I did have a chance I wrote it all down. Now I have to actually write the story, not just the outline.

On Saturday of the campout, naturally, my other Muse shows up and says, "You know that problem you have at work with unit testing? If you inherit and extend the Forms manager's startTag() method to embed a comment field about the validation state, and add an implicit method to run the validator but not actually commit anything or change the view, your problem will go away."

Of course, I wrote that down as well.

Problem number one: I can't write The Talented Princess until I finish Nymphs in November. I promised myself that.

Problem number two: "We're in the final phase of development, so you can't make any infrastructure changes to the application server now. And we don't have time scheduled in the next rev for it either."

Why do these things happen when I can't be productive about them?