Friday, February 26, 2010

I FINISHED THE SHAWL!

Pic spam, I can't help it:



YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSS!

And then Arthur helpfully modeled the shawl:



...and so did Chris!




...And one more vamping it up, just for fun:



I started this damn thing in August and put it down (several times), but now it is finishéd, and I love it to pieces. I think I should wear it absolutely everywhere, for a while, and just preen. RAVELYMPIC GOOOOOLD!

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Pic spam day, part one: Impossible Cuteness of a Cat Nature

I haven't shared photos in a long time.

I have a lot.

So easiest may be to do it in waves, and just link you to pics on photobucket. So round one:
The kitten album.

If you want to just ooh and awww at all the collected sweetness (or rather, the fraction of the collected sweetness I have uploaded over the years - they just had their second birthday, btw!), you can go there and peruse new and old at your leisure. But here are the new additions broken down:

Alex thinks Chris is a chair and a catbed. (Or maybe a jungle gym, s'hard to say.) Alex is also huge.

They are both impossibly snuggly, with one another and with us.

Talk about love, man.

But here's one pic of them being both impossibly snuggly and impossibly cute. HB (the stuffed Bunny) is in the pic with them.

One, two, three: Awwwwwww



Later today (possibly): a very Fred and Albert Christmas, a very monochrome Halloween, and at least one good picture of my enormous, FINISHED, Blocking-as-We-Speak shawl.

Man I'm behind.

LOVE to you all!

Sunday, February 21, 2010

SWEETNESS!

Mom called to point this out to me.

This photo which I link is from the website of J.R. Celski, USA Olympic Speedskating Bronze Medalist and All-Around Cutie-Pie.

Three boys in this picture. Said Cutie-Pie is on the left. And the shaggy-haired delinquent on the right...

(Lakewood in the house!)

...is my baby* cousin!

Is it not a small world?

(Cousin has talked about his friend a number of times in recent memory, including mentioning the Olympics. It took me until about four days ago to put it together. Or rather, for my mom to call and remind me, and me then remember. Go me!)

I estimate they were maybe 14 in this picture, and are obviously a lot more grown up and (at least in cousin's case) significantly less shaggy. Ah, how the time flies...


*He is not really so much a baby, being something absurdly like 21, but I retain the right to label him in this way, because I remember his birth. It counts!


ETA: The more I look at this picture, the more I am certain I have met this boy at least once. Probably briefly, while said boys were transiting through (as teen boys do) from one door to the next during a family function. I could easily be making this up, though.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Memo to Meg:

Your priorities are (according to your ad spots that I cannot seem to escape) to create and keep jobs, cut government spending, and fix education...

And you say you're disappointed to see how far California has fallen, in the 'many years' you've been here, and that you want to bring us back to where we were...

But I gotta' help you out with your California history, here. Or else with your connective logic; I'm not sure where the problem is.

Do you know when California had the best educational system in the country, Meg? With incredible access to higher ed and successful K-12?

When we had higher property taxes. Before we decided we needed 2/3 of the legislature to approve any tax or fee or pass a budget, rather than a simple majority, but that a simple majority could cut a tax or fee, or write in corporate loopholes. Before we started giving corporate welfare to Wal-Mart.

Yes, on the surface, our business tax is very high, in CA. Much higher than other places. But the effective tax rate - after all of the gaping loopholes - is one of the lowest in the country.

Yes, we had very high property tax rates, in the '70s. But now, they're (again) one of the lowest in the country.

Our spending per pupil has also dropped to 49th. We were first in the nation, when our K-12 was dazzling. You know what property taxes paid for in California?

Education.

Our budget crisis is not a crisis of excessive spending; there is no public spending left. Our budget crisis is a crisis of inadequate inflow.

So the second point is a point of connections.

Education--all education in California--is critically, criminally underfunded. Access has been destroyed, as individual costs have skyrocketed and funding has crashed. Education is a large part of the public sector - a little over half of our general fund goes there (which makes sense; we have 6,259,972 students in public K-12 alone - add in 191,000 in UC, and 417,112 at CSU, and around 2,500,000 students in our community colleges; around 9.4 million students all told.)

"Education" is government spending. It cannot be cut any further. Even Schwarzenegger has accepted this point. It's been cut too far; we cut so far we screwed ourselves out of stimulus funding, if that's not the irony to beat all ironies. We've cut so far that we've failed to follow our own laws about how great a percentage of high school students we will accept into higher ed.

So I guess what I mean to say is this: You cannot both cut government spending and fix education. You cannot both cut government spending and take us back "to where we were." You certainly can't create a corporate capitalist version of tax utopia and fix the schools.

And I'm so, so disappointed that you have so much money that I'm seeing YOUR ads all over TV already, and have yet to see a spot for Jerry Brown.

(Brown, by the way, was governor when we DID have a functioning educational system, when we were rolling in the fucking milk and honey. If you want things back "the way they were," maybe you should throw some funding behind him, hm?)




Now. Back to my Olympics (and consequently, my Ravelympics: I'm participating in Event WIP Dancing, though if I get far enough ahead, I may take up some Event Sock Hockey or Hat Halfpipe - wish me luck!). Just needed to get that out, first.