i L i n d . n e t

If you’ve been wondering what we ended up doing to celebrate our anniversary and my birthday, click on the photo and follow along on some of our three-day adventure. We’re too cheap to enjoy expensive restaurants, which we typically find aversive, and have trouble forking over what it costs for a very good bottle of wine. This year we found ourselves in the same routine, checking a few of the fun traps around town before settling in with the cats for a simple meal at home. Can’t beat that. Oh, you can also enter the time machine and get a peek at where this all began.
Meda’s latest book, Beyond Bad Girls, written with her UH colleague Katherine Irwin, is due off the presses at Routledge in another week or so, although it’s already been listed on Amazon.com for some time.

Here’s a sobering description of the neocon “obsession” with Iran from the blog, “The Washington Note”.

Speaking of what’s going on in the Middle East, the Washington Post reports the case of a South Carolina company and its owner who have pleaded guilty to defrauding the government via outlandish delivery charges, including “a single $8.75 elbow pipe that was shipped for $445,640″.  I downloaded the criminal charges from the court file, which you can read here.

“Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year during combat and training.” That statistic appears in a Seattle Times story by Jennifer Sullivan describing the ammunition shortage being experienced by police departments across the country as manufacturers focus on meeting the military’s demands.

An opinionated Washington State blog, horsesass.org, has stirred things up with an entry arguing that taxes are too low.

But at the end of the day, our taxes are so low that bridges are collapsing. Our taxes are so low, that we refuse to help the sick unless they are elderly, very very poor, or children of the poor and working class (or in Washington State thanks to the Democratic legislature last session, children). Our taxes are so low, that an American city drown a few years ago, and we’ll only build the levies back to where they were before. Our taxes are so low that soldiers — American Soldiers, for God’s sake — are scavenging garbage dumps for armor for their vehicles. Our taxes are so low that public transit is pathetic in the Puget Sound region, and worse in the rest of the state.

This is definitely an argument that needs to happen.

Well, I’ve fed the kitten, filled bowls of dry food for Harriet, Toby, Romeo, Kili, Wally, and Duke. I’ve got coffee beans thawing and ready to be ground, and the camera is ready to go. Now it’s time to start the countdown to our early walk. It won’t be too long before we catch up with the sunrise again. When we went out early one morning this past week, we actually got out of the house before the sun came up for the first time in several months. In another month, sunrise will have moved to 6:22 a.m., and we’ll be able to almost reach the beach before the sun appears.