Things I'm Not Going to Write about Today

As you know, I’ve been a tad obsessed with the U.S. government shutdown and the Tea Party lunatics in the House of Representatives for the past week or so.  While it looks like our political leaders are crawling in the direction of a solution, I remain pretty skeptical that much can be accomplished as long as this bunch is in office….

But I think you need a break today from all my negativity – and so do I – so here’s what I’m not going to do:

·         I’m not going to say mean things about John Boehner.  I’ll just think them instead.

·         I’m not going to speculate on issues of global and personal financial disaster.

·         I’m not going to bug my husband about the things on my list he hasn’t accomplished during his nearly 2-week “shutcation.”  As you know, St. David has been busy casting the snakes out of our house!

·         I’m not going to scold former Republican congressman and big-time US cable TV personality Joe Scarborough for being a loud-mouth bully, a flip-flopper or an insincere egoist (even if I think he’s all of the above) despite the fact I’m really starting to lose patience with him and his morning program.

·         And I’m not going to castigate the “Know Nothing” fiscal geniuses of the Republican Caucus for unnecessarily costing our Treasury up to $300M a day. (Way to go, guys!)

 Instead, I’d like to use what little hold I still have on your attention to celebrate my wonderful husband, as he approaches another 39^th birthday.  My life is better every single day because he’s in it.

So I’ll see you next week after the holiday, during which time I hope to celebrate Columbus Day by cooking a pretty good meal and a birthday cake for the man I love.

Bye for now.

Blind Mice

 “It really is irresponsible of the president to try to scare the markets,” said Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, while acknowledging to the New York Times that “some” economists disagreed with him about the impact defaulting on the debt would have on our economy and, well, the world’s too.


Representative Paul Broun , Republican of Georgia believes the greatest threat to our economy is “Obamacare”  and not a default on our national debt. 

Stupid is as stupid does. 

And then there’s Representative Ted Yoho, Republican from Florida and former large-animal veterinarian. He believes we should be running the world’s largest economy like he runs his veterinary practice.  “Everybody talks about how destabilizing doing this [defaulting on the debt] will be on the markets,” he is quoted as saying to the New York Times, “but heck, I’ve seen that in my business…we’re just not going to pay you today…..”

You’re kidding me, right?

I’ll leave you with this thought from columnist William A. Galston in today’s The Wall Street Journal – the conservative paper of record in this country.

 “By contrast, some conservatives have convinced themselves that the consequences of refusing to raise the debt ceiling wouldn’t be so terrible….

Rand Paul.

“This is a dangerous delusion…

Ted Cruz.

“…and it’s time for the adults in the Republican Party – starting with the speaker of the House – “

John Boehner.

“…to say so.”

See how they run?

Snakes in the House

We have snakes in the house.  Slithery, stealthy, dangerous.  And I’m not even talking about the U.S. House of Representatives!  

I’m talking about real, live black snakes in my house -- the place where my family and I eat, sleep, read the paper, watch TV, and live.  The first one appeared Sunday evening near the front door.  My daughter noticed it, bounded into the family room by saying, “I think I just saw a snake and I almost touched it,” and my husband indeed confirmed the intruder.
Then he took my brand new, All Clad stainless steel frying pan – one heavy sucker, that – and bashed its snake brains in.  My hero.

Yesterday afternoon, I phoned my non-essential government lawyer/husband/snake killer to see how his “shutcation” was going and he told me he’d had an exciting day:  Snake number 2 received a big boink on the head. 

Two down, two days in a row.  Eeeeewwwww.  Call me superstituous, or call me stupid, but is this an omen or just a really bad metaphor for the state of the nation and the state of my house?

My husband rightly decided it probably made sense to get professionals on the case.  So today, snakehunters from Paramount Pest Control appeared on the scene to seal up the house inside and out.  When they were done there, we recommended they head over to the Rayburn Building....

Remember those famous (nearly) last words of Dr. Indiana Jones?  “Snakes.   I hate snakes.”  Me too.  And don’t even get me started on John Boehner….

Day 7 of Shutdown Nation comes to a close at Mrs Sedd's home.

 

 

Hot Water

My husband and I have had an ongoing power struggle over what is now a 14-year old hot tub.
Purchased in the early days of our marriage, the hot tub served as a much needed remedy for my husband’s middle-aged aches and pains (and mine, too). 

For the last 5 years (give or take a few months) the hot tub has remained empty and unused due to some mechanical something or another.  Woodland creatures have chewed one of the exterior siding panels, which have faded from the elements. 

The first year, maybe I didn’t mind this so much, but by this Spring, I was pretty tired of looking at the decaying hot tub that was taking up nearly one-quarter of the real estate on our small patio.  Not too long ago, I vowed to my husband that I would hire minions to take it away one afternoon if we didn’t repair it.

Thanks a lot, John Boehner.

My husband, as most of you know, is presently a non-essential worker of the U.S. government.  He has some time on his hands while the Tea Party anarchists who are currently running our country into the ground make it impossible for him to work. 

Anticipating the lengths that these radical wingnuts would go to, I helpfully made a list of things – suggestions, really – that my husband might want to do to occupy his time during a government shutdown.

He made his own list and at the top of it?  The hot tub.

The scrubbing took a few days last week but I have to confess my husband did a great job.  Next, he went to Home Depot and had a piece of wood cut to exact specifications. This week he’ll begin to reconstruct and stain the exterior of the hot tub so that it doesn’t look like a hideout for survivalist vagabonds (or rats).

At the end of this week will come the ministrations of an electrician, who, I have been lead to believe, will resurrect the hot tub as a working symbol of the good life.

We will have roiling hot water again, to soothe our aches and pains.  And I will never be able to get rid of the damn thing.

John Boehner’s fondness for hot water has seeped into my life in more ways than one, it seems.  Then again, I guess I have lots of company on that score.  

 

Screwing the Pooch

One of my favorite books of all time is Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, a highly entertaining if occasionally profane history of the Mercury 7 astronaut program that made Alan Shepherd and John Glenn national heroes, among others.

If you lost control of your plane, got something wrong in flight, or generally lost your nerve as a pilot, Wolfe’s flyboys would say you “screwed the pooch.”  For a pilot, screwing the pooch is hard to live down and ultimately shakes your confidence to the core.

Much has been written in recent days about why John Boehner has completely lost his nerve, if not all of his marbles, by failing utterly to step up and actually behave as a Speaker of the House of Representatives. 

Some of my political friends are eager to give the Speaker the benefit of the doubt:  he’s “playing chicken,” they say, waiting for his moment to do the right thing.  Other friends say he can’t see a way out of his predicament or, worse, doesn’t have the courage to act because he cares more about his title than his country.

I’m leaning – uneasily – in the direction of the first point of view.  Because Speaker Boehner can turn this around if he wants before our country becomes completely ungovernable and your job security, home values and retirement savings disappear in what the smartest people on Wall Street are saying will be a financial Armageddon if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.

But if the unthinkable does happens, members of the Tea Party Caucus will quickly realize the high cost of being reckless “true believers.”  How will they know?  They’ll see if in the eyes of friends and family, knocked back on their heels as they open their 401K statements.  They’ll see it in the number of “For Sale” signs that suddenly and desperately blossom on their district streets as interest rates go through the roof.  They’ll see it in the distracted, distressed way their once-strong supporters look at them when they pass by. 

They’ll see it when they look in the mirror. 

And that, my friends, is screwing the pooch.

 

My Non-Essential Man Around the House

Although he couldn’t have planned for it -- even if he did predict it a few weeks ago -- my lovely husband is just another non-essential government employee on a “shutcation” this week.

As those who read me from time to time know, I suggested a few things my beloved could do to occupy himself during the shutdown showdown that Tea Party Republicans were so keen to have.   This list included decluttering the guest bedrooms, a bit of yard work, some interior painting, that sort of thing.

Mr. Sedd took my little list a little seriously, so I’d like to give a quick progress report on his efforts to do some kind of work on Day #1 of the US Government Shutdown of 2013:

I proposed that perhaps our shed needed some TLC with respect to the overstuffed nature of that property and, well, the inability to get anything in or out of it without risk of losing life or limb.

Update:  My wonderful husband not only cleared and reorganized the too many items in said shed, but he took items to the Goodwill Store which, as Martha Stewart likes to say, “is a very good thing.”  We get a little tax deduction slip, and an unknown shopper gets a Karastan rug (among other things) for pennies on the dollar.  Not too bad.

I suggested that my husband work on his culinary skills during his little unpaid vacation courtesy of Ted Cruz (who, god willing, will get his own unpaid vacation from the Senate the next time he’s up for reelection).

Update:  My daughter and I were treated to Crisp and Juicy Salvadorian Chicken at Chez Sedd last night…and a fine take-out meal it was, too!

I had 10 tasks for my dearest and he has made significant progress on 1 of them but gets bonus points for feeding his family.  Given the current state of politics in Washington, D.C., there will clearly be more updates to come from me.

 Stay tuned.

 

Speechless

Sometimes it is better to say nothing than to say anything.

Words have consequences.  If you call your boss an idiot, you may get fired, or at the very least, marginalized.

If you shout at a driver in a car that has cut you off or made it impossible for you to merge into a lane of traffic, you invite road rage.

If you raise your voice with your child, you’re making the kind of memories that may require years of therapy to undo – for both of you.

And if you argue with your spouse in a mean-spirited way, you can leave bruises on your heart.

Yesterday, a very close friend and I sparred – at times angrily – over the truly harsh invective, abdication of responsibility and lack of leadership on the part of our federal government and its representatives.  Before our “discussion” spun out of control, we took a breath, walked our comments back a bit (but not a lot), then agreed to disagree so we could go about our business for the rest of the day.  Although my friend and I have often viewed politics in very different ways, our 2-decade old relationship matters to us both so we try not to test it too often.

Now I’m not Queen of the World, or even mistress of my own destiny most of the time…but I do know that sometimes you have to put the rhetorical bullshit aside to move head and get the task at hand done.  You don’t always like the job you are given to do, or the person you are doing it with or for, but there you go -- that’s life.  And no one ever said it was going to be easy. 

It’s time for our elected officials to put the rhetorical bullshit aside and do the job we sent them to do, as distasteful as it may seem to many of them:  to protect and defend this great country by serving our collective interests through compromise and commitment to the greater good.

There is dangerous kabuki theatre playing out in our nation’s capital this month, and I pray to God cooler heads prevail.  Until then, I guess I’ll remain, like many of you, speechless.  For now.