I have been such a foyleh!

The past two days have been an exercise in frustration and fatherly joy here at the Villa Sternberg. As documented earlier, I took the girls out sledding until the sun went down, and then we came home, where I played a couple rounds of Katamari Damacy with them, made dinner. Yesterday I made a risotto with prosciutto and vegetables; today, it was macaroni & cheese, with real parmesean and chedder in a lovely white sauce. I took my time and the sauce came out very creamy, even after it was fully baked. The risotto came out a little too salty; I think I should use very low-salt broth if I'm going with the prosciutto, which adds its own salt to the recipe. The girls ate it all.

Yamaraashi-chan makes bunuelos.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

After making dinner last night, Yamaraashi-chan got it into her head to have bunuelos, which are basically baked tortillas with sugar, anise, cinnamon on top instead of more savory toppings. Butter is brushed onto the top of the tortilla to keep the grind mixture in place. We were out of anise, but the girls didn't care. I don't think they even knew what anise was. Since it was her idea, I had Yamaraashi-chan make them. It was fun; she practiced measures including learning where they're kept in the house, how to use the liquid measure for the butter as opposed to the dry measures for the spices, how to set the oven and check the in-oven thermometer, how to loosen up crystallized honey in the microwave, and how to safely put things into and out of the oven. And she got to eat her delicious hand-made desserts afterwards.

Today, though, school was again cancelled. There is much handwringing from the various districts about how they're going to make up the state mandated but unfunded "must stay open 180 days a year" law. The girls were pretty good, keeping themselves occupied, although my living room has now been turned into a vast fabric version of Pony Island from the My Little Pony cartoons. When they ran out of store-bought beds, they made more with slabs of styrofoam, kitchen towels and washcloths, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

Yamaraashi-chan left around three this afternoon to go over to her mother's house. Fortunately, other neighborhood kids came out about then and Kouryou-chan was able to play with them until nightfall. We had leftovers for dinner. Risotto and mac & cheese make for plenty of leftovers.

Now I'm just waiting for Omaha to get home. Other than folding all the laundry and keeping the kitchen in a clean and workable state, I feel like I've gotten nothing done the past three days. I suppose "spending time with the kids" counts for something. Just wish I'd done more. There were a few times, usually late at night, where I found myself saying, "Stupid Internet, entertain me!"

Ugh. The Executive is not just incompetent, he hires thugs.

Cully Stimson, 44, a former member of the Navy Judge Advocate General and a member of the bar in the District of Columbia, is currently the man in charge of overseeing the legal representation for detainees in Guantanamo Bay. His official title is "Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs." You would think that a man with such serious responsibility and so much experience behind him, with so much education in the meaning of the law, both military and civilian, would approach the legal tradition with gravitas and moral authority.

You would think. But! But, he has his current appointment as a member of the Bush team. I don't want to imply that being a Bush appointee automatically implies that you are a man of compromised morals and values, but...

In an interview yesterday with Federal News Radio and completely unprovoked by the host, Stimson rattled off the names of a dozen high-profile corporate law firms who are

...representing the detainees down there [in Guantanamo Bay] ... I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms. ... Some [of the firms] will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they're doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving monies from who knows where, and I'd be curious to have them explain that.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings points out that an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which Robert L. Packard, a member of the WSJ editorial board, writes

This information might cause something of scandal, since so much of the pro bono work being done to tilt the playing field in favor of al Qaeda appears to be subsidized by legal fees from the Fortune 500. "Corporate CEOs seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists" who deliberately target the U.S. economy, he opined."

The stupidity! The arrogance! The evil! It burns, it burns!