Allright, this will be "Lightweight Monday" because I'm kinda fighting off a cold and the brain isn't hitting on all seven cylinders today. It was a good weekend with the party season kicking in. The hard part is deciding which event to attend. I have a scale I've invented to help me with the decision called the "Drive Home Factor". I like to get all the way home from these things. Since we live way out, if I get too tired from all the fun at a party, I will have forgotten how much fun it was by the time I've driven beyond a certain distance to get back to my own sanctuarious abode.

To help with this, I have learned that plain old water does just fine as a wine glass filler. This is a tactic from the old days when I was a raft guide. We were way too poor to have enough beer to drink so we would save up and buy kegs for a party. Kegs can go on forever, if you aren't careful. There's no sense in trying to win a staying contest with one. The keg will see the sunrise and you won't, losing at least one day of your precious time to the evil headache gremlins.

There's some kind of social thing involved with having a beverage in your hand as you cruise about being sociable, though, and that can be deleterious to one's evening plans, whatever they may be. The plans of my earlier partying days involved much more adventure than they do now, and getting home and having a good night's sleep has become the mission not impossible of the middle ages. The water in the beer mug has become a tactic of necessity, though the mug has transformed into a wine glass. My hostess of last evening made some kind of social statement to me as she pointed out that the goblet she was offering me was of the "unbreakable" kind. What exactly was she implying? I was home before ten last night, clear headed and smiling but today is still a slow Steve day.

Perhaps the band fruit citrus can save me. Not many things beat curling up next to a wood stove with a navel orange of good flavor and a little paring knife. The first taste of orange juice comes from eating the conical mound of pulp off the small plug I cut out as I performed the navel-ectomy on the orange, leaving a hole through which I will vacuum the liquid contents of my prize. After I have slurped all the juice I can extract that way, I can tear open the skin of the orange and eat the pulp without getting juice all over my face... well almost, anyway. Wiping up is part of the fun, you know!

If you guys didn't buy any band fruit, I'm sorry. There are a few things I won't readily share. Get your own! One should not share one's medicine!



Here's a really fun piece that has popped up in the Republican headlong rush to ban Gay Marriage. Some party pooper has tried to tack on an ammendment that would ban adultery in the same piece of legislation. The great moral leaders that are the Republicans in Congress are suddenly disappearing from their offices as "Seventh Commandment" advocates try to drum up public support for a constitutional ban on Adultery.

Imagine the fun!

I can just see the action going down as Republicans fall all over each other in their press to sign on to this bill. Each one declaring his or her purity in their marriage commitment...or maybe not, as it turns out:

Amendment follies


Sometimes I am surprised by the person chosen by the Nobel committee for its Peace Prize. Of all the titles our world society can bestow upon a citizen, I consider this one to be the most honored. I am also sometimes disappointed by the designee, but not this time. They have chosen an African woman who wishes to point out to the world that mistreating the planet itself is tantamount to killing ourselves slowly. Here is an excerpt but I strongly encourage you to read the entire lecture:

"...Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.
In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other."

Wangari Maathai – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 10, 2004