arTau

Three Encounters With Fire

There have been three times in my life where fire came close enough to my life to matter.

Fire #1 – Burn it all!

My paternal grandfather died in 1984. Since my dad was an only child, the task of clearing out the farmstead fell to our family. Long before the days of carbon footprints, the best way to dispose of a lot of the stuff, especially the wagonload of used cedar roofing shakes, was to put everything in a large pile, pour about five gallons of fuel oil over it, and light a match. Things were pretty fun, until about an hour later when the fire department showed up. Evidently, forty-foot tall flames on a farm raise a certain measure of concern in Superior, Iowa.

Fire #2 – Bathroom Wicker Explosion

April, 1991. The day I took the ACT exam. As I came home, chaos ensued. My youngest brother, Adam, was striking matches, blowing them out, and dropping them into the bathroom wastebasket, which was sitting in the middle of the floor. Problem was, it was made of wicker, and largely full of tissues. Once ignition occurred, the wastebasket turned into a fireball approximately six feet tall, melting the vinyl flooring. Best quote from Adam as he told my dad; “You’re really gonna spank me this time!”

Fire #3: The Apartment Fire

While I’ve covered this incident before in this post titled “Zoo”, it is worth mentioning again. Read that link to get the full picture, but here’s the rundown. Roomate leaves candle burning on top of aquarium hood. Roomate falls asleep upstairs at girlfriend’s apartment. Candle burns. Candle melts and catches aquarium hood fire. Smoke and melted plastic fill apartment. Ryan receives phone call during Thanksgiving break “Hey, we had a small fire in the apartment.” Hilarity ensues.

Those are three memorable ones. Probably not the only ones, probably not the last. Burn, baby burn.

How not What, or What not How

What better thing to do on election day than to bring together matters of church and state?  I’m not Congress, nor am I making a law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, so I think we’re safe.

At our Westwind Connection Group a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about prayer, and talking specifically about the Lord’s Prayer.  Remember the Lord’s Prayer?

9“This, then, is how you should pray:
” ‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven. . .

The major question was as to whether, when Jesus prayed this with his disciples, the prayer was descriptive or prescriptive.  Is it a description of how to pray, or is it a line by line instruction set?  I landed on descriptive, homing in on the word “how”  – as opposed to it saying “This, then, is what you should pray”.  I could be wrong.  It has happened at least four times in the past.

So.  Election day.  How in the world does that  relate to the way you vote?  I give credit for this idea to my pal Mark The Porsche Fanatic, with whom I was having a discussion about the election at church on Sunday.  I had previously whittled down my thoughts on how to vote to essentially one question.  That being; “what should the role of the federal government of the United States of America be in the lives of its people?”   That takes care of an awful lot for me.  He brought up the Constitution – and the question of whether it is fluid and dynamic, or whether it was pretty clearly set in stone by the framers.  Something crystallized in my mind, and I realized that it was the same question again.  Is the Constitution of the United States of America a descriptive or prescriptive document?

Those are some of the ideas that have framed my political thoughts over the last few weeks.  As much as concepts of change and outsiderism and leadership and experience matter, I’m disappointed that deeper, more philosophical questions aren’t being asked.  I can’t remember the last time I heard any real discussion among either party of what things the government should and shouldn’t be doing.  What are the things that our government is supposed to do?  Are there limits to those things?

I don’t really know.  I know we all want what we want, and putting limits on what our government does means people have to start saying “nah, I don’t want/need/deserve that” or “we can’t really afford that” or “that person needs that more than I do”.  Until some of those cultural changes happen in the hearts of people, I guess both parties will just try to keep doing everything to keep everyone happy.

That wandered around a lot.  These words may have been more for me than for you today.  Apologies.

Polling Places

This is my fifth opportunity to cast a vote for President of the United States. Places I have actually cast my vote in the past;

1992 – Pammel Court, Iowa State University.
1996 – Pammel Court, Iowa State University.
2000 – Branson Community Center
2004 – Presbyterian Church, Douglas Avenue, Des Moines
2008 – My dining room table, this morning (absentee ballot)

Extra Credit: in 1988, I helped as part of our 4-H group to read the vote counts from the voting machines and call them in. Polling place: West Des Moines fire station, 35th and Ashworth.

A funny story about the absentee ballot situation – last week, when we received ours, I sat down, filled mine out, signed the affidavit, sealed it all up, and then Shana realized that I had signed the affidavit with my information on her ballot. I disenfranchised her. Giddyup. However, I was able to re-enfranchise my bride by writing “SPOILED BALLOT” in orange sharpie, mailing them back, and getting new ones just in case. Next time I’m just gonna go vote.

If you’re within sight of this paragraph, and its Tuesday the 4th, and your polling place is open and you haven’t voted yet, stop, close your browser, and go vote. Do it now, because life will catch up with you at 3:34 in the afternoon and you’ll realize at 9:00 that you never made it over the American Legion Hall to cast your vote for change or maverickism or Naderization or to, at the very least, write me in and help me kick off my 2012 Presidubinitorial election campaign. Do it now.

Spy Pigeons Like Us

Amidst the signal-to-noise ratio of the news cycle the last few weeks, you may have missed a non-election story or two.  I’m willing to bet you missed this one.

TEHRAN (AFP) — Security forces in Natanz have arrested two suspected “spy pigeons” near Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment facility, the reformist Etemad Melli newspaper reported on Monday.

The story goes on to say that the pigeons had metal rings attached to their feet, hanging from “invisible strings”.  This is interesting on several fronts.  First of all, where can I get some of this invisible string?  I want to use it to build an invisible car.  Secondly, we (there is no organization on earth who would be using invisible string-bearing spy pigeons besides the CIA, so don’t even kid yourself that this isn’t the result of “we”) are using pigeons to conduct our covert operations.  I smell a screenplay!  “The Bird Identity”  should open in theaters next spring.

I’m also interested to know what other animals we might be using in our foreign reconnaissance services.  Feral cats?  Missle-toting alpacas?  Bats?  Wombats?  I want to know.  I want to believe that we’re a safer people in the hands of our furry (and feathered) friends.  Besides, the pigeon is the cousin of the dove (so say I), and the dove is the symbol of peace, so can’t we decide that the pigeon kinda wants peace in the way its kinda like a dove?

Fall Back

(alternate title – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Central Standard Time)

Today is, for the uninitiated, the end of Daylight Savings time. Evenings become darker, mornings brighter, and its the one day of the year you get an arbitrary extra day of sleep. The “why” of daylight savings time is something about farmers and evening hours. I’m to lazy to check Wikipedia – if you’re feeling adventurous, you can do that on your own.

I’d like to propose, though, that we stop falling back next year. Set the clocks again in the spring,, and then let them roll. The way I feel about DST is a lot like Marty DeBergi’s reaction to Nigel Tufnel in this excellent clip from “This Is Spinal Tap”. (note: the last ten seconds of this 2:10 clip are the relevant parts, but you really should just watch the whole thing due to the general awesomeness of this film)

Why not just make ten a little louder? These go to eleven. Why not just make DST our regular time? This is the weekend to spring ahead/fall back. Hugo Chavez changed the Venezuelan time zone by 30 minutes so they’d be ahead of us. If that dude has the power, we certainly have the power.

Just let me keep an arbitrary sleep in day once a year or so.

Tweets on 2008-11-01

• Drinking coffee, eating a Dahl’s apple turnover, wondering if the $.75 I paid for a Register (hello, 50% price hike) was worth it. #

A 90 Degree Rotation

I’m not sure if living in Iowa, with the caucuses and all, increases our election fatigue or not, since we get a pretty healthy head start. In any case, the moment we never thought would arrive, November of 2008, is finally upon us.

So we’re going to have an election on Tuesday. Its been eight years since everything changed – since we got to the end up election night 2000, and half of the country got angry. Not that everything about the last eight years has been perfect – far from it. I just think back to 1996 – Clinton won, Bob Dole decided he could lighten up and be fun, and we moved on. The last two elections have been different; the adversarial nature of things is not what politics as usual have always been in the United States. Blame the steady progression of history, blame the twenty-four hour news cycle, but we’ve turned a corner. Geometry says we’ll have to turn three more to get back to where we were, unless we’re on a triangular path, in which case my metaphor just becomes odd.

Which leads me to a thought about next Tuesday’s election. Give no thought to your own politics, your view of the exiting administration, your choice of candidate, any of it. Think about the path your country is on. My thought on things is that we desperately need a course correction back to the point where our politics put us on opposite sides of an aisle, not opposite sides of a metaphorical battlefield.

As things sit today, we’re approaching a foregone conclusion that we’ll hear the words President-elect Obama on Wednesday morning. As right leaning as I have been throughout my adult life, I’m not convinced those would be bad words for us to hear. On the other hand, if we see headlines on Wednesday that read: “SHOCK: McCain Wins!”, what will the tone of discourse be? Will we turn another corner? Will there be an assumption that McCain stole the election?

I have an absentee ballot sitting on my counter. I’ll get it filled out today. Go vote on Tuesday. No matter how you vote, no matter who wins, can we just all be friends on Wednesday?

Tweets on 2008-10-31

• Cleaning up the demo reel, hoping to land some new work. New stuff makes our old reel look like amateur hour. #
• Going out to dinner with the bride tonight. #

Tweets on 2008-10-27

• Labelling plants, thinking I’m not going to make my self-imposed deadline. #

Sofa, So Good. So Long.

When we got married, as is the case with many young married couples, we didn’t have a lot of stuff. We had love, right? The first real purchase of any size we made was a car, a palatial red 1994 Oldsmobuick, to be precise. I was all set to tell you that the second big purchase we made was the subject of this story, but I forgot that we bought a house or something in the interim.

In any case. Car. House. Dog. That’s three, isn’t it. So we needed some new furniture to replace the hand-me-down stuff we’d inherited from Shana’s parents. Furniture shopping, I hates it. I think it goes right above car shopping for me. It always feels like a scam. In any case, we stumbled into some random furniture store on Sunshine Street in Springfield, Missouri. We bought furniture. It was large. Very large. So large, in fact, that it required removal of a picture window to get it into our house in Beaverdale.

Lots of setup. I guarantee you, the payoff is not worth all that you have just read. The aforementioned furniture was purchased in the winter of 1998-99. I thought about looking for a picture, but decided not to. If you’ve been in my home at any time since 1999, you have most likely sat on this furniture. When we bought it, they said “great choice of fabric – you won’t wear it out.” They were mostly right. This furniture, had, however, experienced a total structural failure in the last six months or so.

Yesterday morning, we pushed that furniture off the back of a pickup into the trash heap of the South Dallas County, Iowa landfill. Quickly and unceremoniously, it joined torn-off shingles, scrap wood, dirty diapers, and other detritus of society. Just like that.

So – if you need a sofa and a chair and an ottoman the size of Rhode Island – I know a place you could get one, if the bulldozer hasn’t gotten to it first.