I need to take a moment to wish my mother a very Happy 78th Birthday. If there is one person in this world who deserves much of the blame credit for the wonderful person I turned out to be, it’s her.
She’s been an endless source of both inspiration and wisdom not only my myself and my siblings, but for friends and extended family. If you have a spare moment, drop by her blog and say hi.
Love you so very much, Mom. Happy Birthday.
New Years Day has always been a weird holiday for me. For much of my childhood I didn’t really understand what folks were celebrating. It just seemed like an excuse to drink and eat a lot and stay up way past your normal bed time. Not that that’s a bad reason, but the celebration always seemed to be way more than necessary for reasons as simple as that.
At the age of 45 I now realize it’s a celebration of having made it to the new year at all. Life can be rough and each year brings with it new trials and tribulations that makes arriving at the dawn of yet another year something very much worthy of the celebrations we engage in. It’s a time to remember those who didn’t make it this far and to hope for a brighter future for all of us to come.
Compared to past years, 2012 went pretty well for me. It was my first year as a full-time employee at my current job. I’ve been a contractor for most of my career — over 20+ years — and it was great to finally be a “real” employee for a change. It was also the year we said goodbye to Melvin, the Official SEB Cat. We enjoyed his company for eight years and he was as good a cat as you could hope for.
I am hopeful about 2013, but we already know that bad things are on the horizon. My father-in-law has terminal cancer and we expect he only has a few months left before we have to say goodbye to him for the last time. I am arriving at that age where losing loved ones is no longer an unexpected event, but a natural consequence of the passage of time. It’s a phase of life we are all destined to go through, but not one I look forward to. The are other smaller challenges ahead as well. This year I really need to get serious about dropping some of my weight as I am waking up with a sore back near daily now. I’ve been hovering at just under 300 pounds for too many years and it’s starting to get intolerable.
It’s going to be another year of trials and tribulations, but there will be plenty of victories large and small to celebrate along the way. If I should be lucky enough to surmount the troubles and ride the highs to find myself at the dawn of another new year in 355 more days I will once again pause to remember and celebrate my good fortune. Happy New Year to you and yours. May it have more to celebrate than to mourn.
Melvin passed away this year so I won’t be using his traditional Christmas greeting.
Instead, here’s an important holiday message from Grumpy Cat:
I’m surprised this guy hasn’t been sucker punched by someone yet.
I don’t know about you guys, but I am sooooo fully of turkey and stuffing and mashed taters and pecan pie right now. And it was so good.
Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving was as full of good food and memories as ours was.
Jasper got bored waiting for the kids to show up.
It took some time to get underway this year — it was an hour and 20 minutes after the scheduled start time before we saw the first couple of kids — but it was a pretty decent Halloween in the end. The weather was cold and damp, but not rainy and there were plenty of trick and treaters dropping by to collect their empty calories.
We pulled double duty this year as one of the neighbors came up to ask if we’d had out her candy as well because she had to to go work and her husband wouldn’t be home in time to do the honors. She had the same problem last year and had just set the bowl out on the honor system only to have the first couple of kids who showed up clean it out completely. We said we’d be happy to do so and she dropped by with a bowl full of suckers a short while later.
This proved to be more problematic than I first thought as several kids didn’t pick up on my invitation to take a couple of items from each bowl and thought that they could only choose from one bowl or take just one thing from each bowl. As a result, we both have left over candy again even though we bought less than last year. Good thing it’s stuff I like to eat.
Here’s hoping your Halloween was as festive and fun as ours was! I enjoyed it so much that I think I’ll do it again next year.
If it’s October then it must be time for the annual “Satan loves Halloween” message from overly credulous Evangelicals. This year’s warning comes from Linda Harvey of Mission America as posted on the WingNut Daily website.
Not only does she engage in the usual demons-will-get-you nonsense, but she manages to one-up previous year’s warning by linking it to homosexuality:
2. Halloween is now the second-most popular American celebration right behind Christmas. Why the growing magnetism of Halloween? Spiritual deception on a grand scale, using every enticing trick in the book, may be at work. And such trends call for heightened Christian discernment.
This event has become a huge annual celebration in the “LGBT” world, especially for the transgender/ gender-confused folks. Their affinity illustrates some of the problem: The core of Halloween is glittering artificiality. You can be pretend to be someone you aren’t for a night, you can flirt with danger, you can divine a different destiny – but it’s all void of the love or will of God. This “seduction unto death” is enticing: Don’t be afraid, do what you want, there’s nothing to fear. It’s one of Satan’s oldest tricks. Costume parties can be fun, but these costumes dare to disguise even our very souls.
Icky gay people like it so you know it’s icky!
Though it’s not just the gays that get the guilt-by-association treatment here. Reason #1 on the list makes sure that witches aren’t forgotten:
1. Let’s be honest about the spiritual force at the center of Halloween. The modern celebration retains its decidedly occult origin. Some say the “All Hallows Eve” designation on some church calendars marks it as a Christian holiday, but an eighth-century accommodation to local pagan traditions for appeasing evil spirits is very thin gruel, Gospel-wise.
Halloween remains the highest sacred day of the year for modern witches and pagans, called “Samhain” (pronounced, “sow-een”). Some rationalize that Halloween transforms ghouls and goblins into light-hearted fun, but is Halloween’s makeover into a big joke a biblical approach? While Christians need not cringe in fear of the demonic realm, nor be overly preoccupied, neither are we to mock and scoff, cavalierly entering Satan’s territory while dismissing the danger. We are especially not to encourage our children in such recklessness.
Keep in mind that this woman, and many other Evangelical Christians like her, literally believes that demons are real and are lurking in the shadows in anticipation of your kid playing with an Ouija board so they can swallow their souls. She must lead a very stressful life worrying about nonsense like that all the time.
That said, she and her like-minded brethren are free to keep their kids safely at home on Halloween if they really want to. It’s not like anyone has ended up psychologically scarred for not having been allowed to trick or treat as a kid. All they’re missing out on is a bit of harmless fun. It just means more candy for the rest of us.
It’s been a busy weekend with the family so we’re going with our annual message from the Official SEB Cat, Melvin, who says:
Here’s a little holiday timelapse to enjoy.
It was only a matter of time before someone applied Dubstep to a Christmas light display:
From the creator:
35,000 LED lights
64 Light O Rama channelsAll done by me, a 16 year old, and my dad. Come see it in Meridian, Idaho!
Or visit our website at www.cornellchristmas.webs.comALSO…. No, my electric bill isn’t that high, I’m on level pay all year for it so it’s cheaper. And no, my neighbors don’t hate me, in fact, almost everybody within a 10 mile radius LOVE the light show, And no, I don’t have anything against people with epilepsy…. I just enjoy making my lights flash a lot
