The Pentagon’s attempts to keep photos such as these from being made public reminds me of myself as a teenager hiding receipts so that my mother would not realize just how much I had spent. Only in those cases it was my own money I was being irresponsible with.

How do the pictures make me feel?

They hurt. Just knowing that there is an actual human body lying in each of those boxes - a human who will never laugh or kiss or yawn or stretch ever again. Worse is thinking of the people waiting for the arrival of each of those boxes. Mothers and wives and children so small…

Asked on CNN’s “Late Edition” if the war was worth the lives of the 564 U.S. soldiers killed, Rumsfeld said, “Oh, my goodness, yes. There’s just no question … 25 million people in Iraq are free.”

The Yahoo News article that I copied this from is no longer avialble

Because I am sitting here thinking about just how much packing and such I have to do tomorrow and how tired I am and wishing I could go to bed…

But Baby Girl, who should be extremely tired as she only had one nap today and it is now many hours past her bedtime - is playing happily on the floor right here and absolutely refuses to go to sleep.

Alas, I can’t go to bed until she is willing to go to sleep. When we last tried - about an hour ago - she refused to stay still and kept rolling all over the place and whacking M.

No sleep for me, it would seem.

this morning or possibly last night..

When she’s in he exersaucer and wants to come out, she holds her arms up to me as I approach to pick her up.

Isn’t that neat?

We’ve got the cabinets in and the guy came out to measure for countertops yesterday morning. The walls in the living space are painted. The new baseboards and casings are painted. That little funny half wall has been ripped out, and the wall around the stairwell has been heightened. We are about half-way done with the flooring.

Put like that, it really doesn’t seem like we’ve done that much. What in the world has taken so long?

We should be done (or rather they should; I don’t want Baby Girl breathing in the dust from cutting the laminite flooring, so we’re staying away today) by tonight. Then we still have to install the dishwasher, put the hardware on the cabinet doors and drawers and hang them, finish the nearly complete rails aroudn the stairwell, and nail the baseboards and casings back on.

Then we have to pack up here. Yuck.

Next Friday morning the movers come. Yay!

At some point in the future we will pain the bedroom (it desperately needs it, but we have too much to do now), paint and put carpet in the upstairs bedroom that currently has linoleum, and fix up the guestroom downstairs. In the far off future we will need to put flooring down, change the ceiling (it’s an ugly drop ceiling right now that they put in incorrectly), and paint the basement family room.

This house stuff is a lot of work.

We have keys! Or rather, we have one key.

One key is enough though.

Soon I will head out to the paint store to buy a quart of paint to splash on the walls. From there I will head over to let myself in the door of our very own house for the first time.

M. will join me when he leaves work, and then we will decide if the paint color (Julesburg, I think?) is the right one for us.

Then comes a weekend of toil as we try to paint and redo the kitchen (our cabinets will be delivered Saturday) and do the floors.

Then in two weeks we move.

I have a new journal, by the way. I have been writing in it a little and sending out notifies, but I haven’t mentioned it here before because I still haven’t gotten around to changing links to point to it, and I don’t like the design.

I mention it now simply because I about a months ago I put up an entry with house pictures.

- We get the house this week. Thusrday. Wow. I can’t believe it is now so soon.
- They found someone to rent our place. Yay!!! This means we will only be responsible for the $300 fee for breaking a lease rather than the three more months rent until the lease is up.
- My kitchen is about the cleanest it has ever been. I even scrubbed all the cabinets and got down on the floor to scrub the places that it is hard to get with the mop.

Only three this week, but that is because the first two are biggies.

The Complaint Station is kind of a neat site. You can share your stories of terrible employees or company practices and commiserate with those who have experienced the same. You can see who else has had problems with a store before you buy from them.

Walmart has over a thousand entries.

The Complaint Station is kind of a neat site. You can share your stories of terrible employees or company practices and commiserate with those who have experienced the same. You can see who else has had problems with a store before you buy from them.

Walmart has over a thousand entries.

… to go to Canadian Tire to check out the prices of ladders as one will most likely come in quite useful with a lot of the renovations and painting and such that we plan on doing in the new house.

M. ocasionally does take Baby Girl out on him for quick errands if I am trying to get stuff done or just need a little bit of time to myself, but not so often that I have grown used to it. I think I can probably still count the number of times I’ve been separated from her by more than a flight of stairs on one hand.

I keep forgetting that she isn’t here. Twice just now I was in the kitchen scrubbing away when I had a moment of shock and horror as I realized that it had been quite a while since I last checked on her. Then a second later I would remember that no, she wasn’t playing by herself just around the corner in the living room, she was out with her daddy.

I guess that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have a minute when I am not completely and immediately responsible for the safety, well-being, and happiness of a very small person.

I’ve never bothered with any of the MT comment spam hacks because they really weren’t necessary. I don’t get much comment spam, and I do get an email every time I get a comment, so I usually have it deleted within a couple of hours.

The current spammer is darn persistant though. He/she/it has posted (and had deleted) one spam per day to the same entry for the last three days. It’s an old entry too, one about a new skin.

What’s up with that?

I’ve now used IP banning for the first time, so we shall see if that takes care of the problem.

I’m looking forward to MT 3 and comment registration.

I’m also halfheartedly thinking of trying out Word Press because it has complete registration and password protection for individual entries, and I’ve never gotten around to installing that particular hack for MT. I don’t have time now, and I’m happy with MT, so I guess I’ll wait on that one though.

I’m now worth about $200,000 - dead, that is.

We just finally got around to getting life insurance on me. We’ve had about half a million on M for a while now, but it was important that I get it as well. While I may not have any income now, he would have to hire a nanny or something should something ever happen to me, so we needed to be sure that was provided for.

We also are going to make an appointment to do our wills with the same lawyer who is handling our house stuff just as soon as we are in the new house.

I don’t like thinking about these kinds things. Preparing for them just makes it seem all the more real that they could happen. I just have to remind myself of Murphey’s law and make myself believe that preparing for them makes them less likely to happen. Logical? No, but if it makes me feel better, who care about logic?

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Via Sheepy, who is also a Grammar God.