Changes

I am at one of those times where I find my life and my interests changing. I'm not exactly interested in anything *new,* I just find my priorities shifting. Part of that is because while I'm many years away from an empty nest, my daughters are becoming more independent. The Musician should be getting her driver's license within the next few months, which will be an enormous help. We had been putting it off, but this year the Musician has a wonderful opportunity. She is taking five classes at the high school, but she will also be spending part of her time either at the local community college, or student teaching at schools here in our town. She wants to be a teacher, and will be earning college credit for this, so it is fantastic that a senior in  high school can already try out student teaching. However, this will involve a lot of driving around, so we decided it was better to pay the few hundred dollars for driving school than have me schlepping her around all day.

This will give me more time for me, which I could really use. I want to get into sewing more seriously. I want to get in to sewing doll clothes more, but a big priority is also clothes for the family. I am down to wearing a t-shirt my husband wore while he was working at Applebee's over ten years ago, as one of my "at-home" shirts. Even buying store clothing on sale can add up, especially for plus-size me, so sewing at least a few things will be worth it.

Plus, the Musician needed new band shoes; her old ones were literally held together with duct tape and I insisted she needed something better for her senior year. And it looks like the Dancer will need pointe shoes every five to six months. Yes, that's a lot of money. The thing is, she's good at dance, and honestly this is the time for her to study it, especially pointe. She'll never had this chance again, and for that matter, the Musician will never be in high school again, so I want them to get all the experiences that they want, and we can afford. By the way, did you know professional ballerinas can destroy a pair of pointe shoes in a night???

Lastly, knitting. I have so many projects that I want to do, that I need to put more time into it if I'm going to have a hope of making meaningful progress on the list. I'm not a very fast knitter, but maybe with more regular practice, I can become one.

A Beginning and an Ending

This week the Musician will start her senior year of high school, and the Dancer will begin her freshman year. I can tell it's going to be a crazy year, because the crazy has already started. Band camp was Monday through Friday last week, and both girls went to two of the unofficial social events after band camp: eating at Red Robin, and going bowling. The Dancer is not in band, but her sister and two of her friends are now, so she went along to socialize. Today both girls had TWO birthday parties after church. I was supposed to pick them up at eight; got a text that said they would be there longer. Ah well. They will only be this young once.

Where I Have Free Speech

I belong to Ravelry, a knitting and crocheting community of forums, patterns, etc. On a forum about copyright laws, a regular poster, we'll say Ann, completely off-topic and completely off-forum, praised a comment that someone else, we'll say Jane, left at a New York Times article site, and how wonderful it was. I then had the joy of witnessing at least a three-way lovefest going about how wonderful Ann, Jane and someone else who jumped in, Susie, all are, because they are all so outspoken. I don't know much about what happened after that, because after I got no response to flagging Ann's post, I left the forum. I flagged Ann's original post, since I thought it extremely inappropriate to take something essentially about politics (because Jane's comment was political) and throw it in someplace completely off-topic, instead of sending a private message. But since I got no response from a forum moderator, and since I would get flagged myself if I tried to respond over there, I'm going to respond to Jane's "brilliant" reasoning here. Basically, Jane is an idiot.

Our hapless poster Jane loves her some Paul Krugman, first of all. She was responding to a Paul Krugman NY Times article in agreement. Paul Krugman, former Enron economic adviser. The one who says, "Debt? Why worry?" Who thinks austerity is stupid. Because the answer to having spent so much money that we're drowning it debt, is: Spend more! A man who seriously thinks creating a trillion dollar coin will help our financial woes. Why not make a two trillion dollar coin, and get us out of debt twice as fast, Paul? And who is also the genius who said: "when the economy’s depressed it’s good to run a deficit. You don’t want the government to try and balance its budget right now." and that we "can’t run out of cash because we print the money." "What do you mean, I don't have money in my bank account! I still have checks!" Krugman's economic ideas are naive and idealistic at best, deceitful lies at worst. In short, as Monty puts it at AoS just today, Krugman is "a little ratty dog who exists only to yap and pee on the rug." Would *you* trust him to run your household accounts?

This woman than proceeds to throw out some sentences and makes conclusions with no logic to link her conclusions, or even facts. 1. The Eisenhower freeway system and the Hoover dam are really cool. 2. We don't build stuff like that today. 3. It's all Reagan's fault from when he told us not to trust the government. Well, bless her heart. First of all, leftists are trying to get rid of the gasoline-powered engine and they're blowing up dams to save fish. Well, you reply, we just need to build things that are more applicable to our needs today. Like, say monorails! Monorails are such great ideas, and if they don't actually make any profit, we can just print more money, right? Oh, and let's spend $200 million on electric car companies! We've got $535 million to spend on solar panels, don't we? And somebody called Elon Musk has done such a good job running companies such as Tesla, he deserves even more taxpayer money to build something else. And no, we're not talking about Musk's $17 million dollar mansion. So cheer up, "Jane." The government is already spending plenty of your money. The problem is it's spending plenty of my money too, not to mention my daughters' money. And oddly enough, I'm on Reagan's side when he says not to trust the government. I wonder why?

ETA: I dug back and found "Jane's" comment, so you can read her shining brilliance for herself. Go here, then go to the reader picks under comments. She is number one. I also lol'd at the second top pick. We poor idiots don't actually want GOP representatives, we've been "convinced" that we do. Of course, my representatives, GOP or otherwise, aren't really representing me, and the GOP ones are being accused of selling out their base, but that's a whole 'nother blog post or ten.

Quick Observation

This article is making the rounds of Twitter and the conservative blogs, and there certainly is a lot to say about it. Women who dropped out of the work force to raise their children are appalled because while they were watching the children, they were also expected to do things like sweep!!! and they are bitter because they cannot simply move back into their half-a-million dollar earning jobs once they re-enter the work force. One of Ace's cobloggers Monty makes an excellent case for how selfish the woman in this article are, and how little they understand of how the world actually works. The contribution I have time to add to this at the moment is personal, but well worth saying.

Yes, there can be sacrifices in staying at home with the kids, and not just from the financial perspective. But Mr. BTEG has made plenty of sacrifices in our marriage to fulfill his role as breadwinner that maybe those wealthy shrews at the NY Times can't appreciate. For one, there was the time when he took a job waiting tables during the eight months time when he couldn't find a job in his field. He was working 60-80 hours a week, and mostly seeing our daughters when I brought them into the restaurant to see their father/eat a meal that his manager often comped for us. After that, he took a job where he was away for a good bit teaching the client about the product for a week at a time. Mostly difficult of all might be when he took a job as a consultant in Chicago, and he was mostly away from home for seven months in all. He missed his family, but he did what he had to do to support us. That's the kind of stuff that gets ignored by these whiners. Then again, this article seems to be only for the elite anyway, not for those families where sacrifice is seen as a matter of course.

Now I'm Just Sick

One of my favorite sites, Ravelry, started for the knitting and crochet community, is honestly very good about frowning on politics in unrelated forums, but of course some people just can't keep their mouths shut, and so it has popped up yet again. A saw something B had posted in response to a Krugman NY Times article, and instead of PM'ing B, just had to post a comment in an unrelated forum and thread on Ravelry telling B how wonderful she is. I'm so sick of politics EVERYWHERE! And in my experience, it's always liberals who bring it up. They just can't keep their freakin' mouth shut about politics anywhere. American Girl doll boards, knitting forums, it doesn't matter. B has already had at least one comment moderated elsewhere for dragging in politics, but I guess A and B figure everyone at that forum believes the same as they do, so it's fine to talk about it. Again, this isn't Ravelry's fault, but then again they have over three million users, so if I'm not using the forums, it won't really matter in the big scheme of things.

She Believes That Children Aren't the Future

NakedDC gives yet another example of women who proclaim how wonderful it is not to have children. And in this day and age, you certainly do have control over whether or not you are punished with a child. Just don't turn around and expect my daughters to pay for your Medicare and Social Security. After all, with all that extra money you saved by not burdening yourself with offspring, you had plenty to put away for your future, right?

I Don't Get This

I'm not going to post the picture here, but if you don't want to go look, or if for some reason you're here past the lifetime of this picture on etsy, it's a pattern for an applique cross, with a large circle in the middle For. Your. Monogram. That's right, take a cross and slap your initials right in the middle. That INRI stuff, that's so old and busted. The new hotness is to put yourself in the middle of the cross. Honestly, I'm not sure where the creator of this applique was going with this one.