A Slower Pace

I found out recently that I will be going back to CA for a business trip. While my wife has been back there a few times (alone and with the kids), I have not been back there since our vacation back in April. And while there we spent most our time as tourists — I did not get a lot of opportunity to mirror my past life there going to work, seeing acquaintances and friends and generally moving around in familiar territory. So this trip will be very weird for me. And with no immediate relatives in the area (my folks left a few months ago and my sister and her family vacated a couple months before us) it won’t be the anchor it once was. It ceased being “home” quite a while ago but going there, seeing the many familiar surroundings and paralleling many of the habits that were once my every day life (drives to work, meals at favorite places, etc) will be very surreal.

While planning this short business trip, I sometimes throw my mind back to the original decision formula of what made us leave. I play that arithmetic decision making through again, reprocessing as a double check to see if I’ve done the right thing for my family. What have we gained? What have we lost? I am not second guessing our move decision at all. I am merely using it as an anchor to ensure that we haven’t strayed from our path. Sometimes in our everyday course of life, we get distracted by the petty details and temporary wants. We need to remain focused on the long term goals that provide a deeper satisfaction for each of us.

I can tell you that I’d be lieing if I said that I wasn’t envious of the 80F degree day a friend said they had in CA. I told him he sucked.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Damn it’s cold outside! Just yesterday, we had severe winds blowing 72 degree air around as a line of super cells bared down on the area spawning over 30 tornadoes in a 5 state area. Very unusual for November. Now that the cold front has moved through we see 22F degrees at night. Brrrr! This is the part of the year I was not looking forward to.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

I stated in an earlier post that Saturday opened up the hunting season here. Well, today I almost got my first turkey. It flew in from my left and directly into my sights. I only had a split second opportunity to get a bead on it. I don’t know what spooked it to retake flight and escape to my right. It might have been for the fact that there was this speeding white mass of a truck headed right for it. Or maybe it was the radio that was blaring one of the many local country radio stations. Either way, it decided that landing on the road right in front of me as I sped towards in my truck it wasn’t in its best interest and took off to be someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner. At first I thought it was one of the more agile buzzards headed towards me but the larger body and shape gave way to a female hen. I thought it was a nice way to start the morning.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Winter symbolizes death and with its impending arrival, you can see that all around. First off, all the colors of the trees I was marveling about a week or two ago are all gone. There might be one or two stragglers with some brown leaves still attached, but most deciduous trees are mere skeletons.

Today was also the day I tilled under the garden. With several frosts under out belt, the tomato plants had long died and dried up; rotten fruit hanging from it’s once lush vines now decayed to brown, crisp veins. The peppers had some dried remains still on the brown bushes. And there were a few spoiled watermelon that never matured to full glory but rather decayed on the withering vine. None of this was a match for the motorized tiller that indiscriminately tore at the ground and remaining garden vegetation and tossed it violently. Soon enough, it was a bare plot of brown earth ready for the cold winter ahead.

And finally, today was opening day for rifle deer hunting. On our way out this morning, we came across two spooked deer on the road. They were very skittish as if they knew there were camouflaged figures after them. Between them and the more frequent gunshots in the distance, it would be hard to miss opening day.

All these indicators of death are just parts of the cycle as a whole. I am thankful for my faith that gives me hope beyond just a mere cycle of nature. While God put in place these cycles, He also sacrificed His Son so that we may transcend death — what is, for most people, the end of a cycle.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Back at the end of June, I wrote about the judicial branch’s lame decision on property rights (covered here — http://www.aslowerpace.net/?p=1715). That was indeed a sad day. However, today we have an opportunity to do a little something about it. I am on the “Lost Liberty Hotel’s” — http://www.freestarmedia.com/index.html — email newsletter list and was just informed that debate on the Private Property Rights Protection Act (H.R. 4128) is going on right now (CSPAN if you care) in Congress.

Now I’ve never called my congressman. I’ve written a few emails but never actually called or written a real letter. Well, the combination of me being pissed off enough over the possibility of my private property being more easily confiscated along with the ease of contacting my congressman — look up yours here — http://www.house.gov/ — prompted me to make my first call to a politician. And if you believe in securing your hard earned property, I encourage you to take the 2 minutes (literally) and pick up the phone to make a difference.

If you would like the “Lost Libery Hotel” email I received, drop me a note and I’ll forward it on to you.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Here’s a cellphone conversation I had with my wife on my way home tonight.

Me – “Hey, turn on the TV. Something’s going on with OJ.”

Wifey – “Huh?”

Me – “I was trying to be funny. Remember during the OJ chase when all those helicopters were hovering above the freeway? Well, I see some over the 64. OJ did something again.”

coming back after turning on the TV —

Wifey – “We live in Kentucky, remember? It’s not OJ. It’s pigs on the freeway.”

Me – “That’s pretty damn funny.”

Turns out a truck overturned and there were pigs running around the freeway and center median. It must of been quite a sight.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

So the french are having a little trouble, are they? What are we going on?…..13 nights of fire and mayhem you say. Maybe the french will just have to get tough and ground all the mischief youth. That should put them all in their place. Because the french know better. They are enlightened and…..french. Reminds me of some of the liberals in this country.

This predicament they are in has been years in the making. And the french acquiescing to radical people who do not WANT to be integrated into their secular society shows the absurdity of their viewpoint. The ongoing riots are just icing on the cake. I’m sure the lesson won’t be learned though. It’s tough to learn when you already know it all.

After reading that above paragraph, I was almost tempted to do a “search and replace” with french=liberal. It would still make sense.

On a final note, all of this was predicted over 20 years ago by the great hair metal band, Dokken in their song “Paris Is Burning”. Hence the post title.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Well, if you haven’t checked the news lately, there was some terrible weather in our area early this morning. That weather spawned some very unusual autumn tornadoes that destroyed several neighborhoods and at last toll took 22 lives. It is very sad and the devastation is unimaginable. Quite a few of these people didn’t even have any warning. I believe part of it is that we were “out” of tornado season which usually is April through June. Personally, I’m surprised the enviro-nazis haven’t jumped on this freak of nature and blamed it on global warming. The bottom line is stuff happens and all we can do is prepare, plan and pick up the pieces. And to think that when my NOAA weather radio alarm kept going off for a total of 5 times from 2am to 7:30a and I had to wake the family, I was a little perturbed because of lack of sleep. That takes me back to one of my mottoes — “Things can always be worse.”

Please keep those tornado victims in your thoughts and prayers.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Here’s something that didn’t make our liberal US media.

Beheaded Indonesia schoolgirls — Google search — http://www.google.com/search?hs=iSF&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=beheaded+Indonesia+schoolgirls&btnG=Search

As well as here — http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,173913,00.html

As of 10pm Eastern Saturday night, Fox News and online news Yahoo were the only ones to pick up the story. ABC also did, but it was their Australian affiliate. Quite a few others did but their were either foreign or not mainstream.

Here’s the whole article

FOX News CountryWatch: Indonesia
JAKARTA, Indonesia – Unidentified assailants attacked a group of high school girls on Saturday in Indonesia’s tense province of Central Sulawesi, (search) beheading three and seriously wounding a fourth, police said.

The students from a private Christian high school were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota (search) subdistrict on their way to class, police Maj. Riky Naldo said. The rural area is close to the provincial capital of Poso, about 1,000 miles northeast of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

He said the heads of the three dead girls were found several miles from their bodies.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation. But Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province on Sulawesi island was the scene of a bloody sectarian war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1,000 people from both communities.

At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.

A government-mediated truce ended the conflict in early 2002 but since then, there have been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations targeting Christians. A market attack in the predominantly Christian town of Poso killed 22 people in May.

Christian leaders have repeatedly criticized the authorities in Jakarta for allegedly not doing enough to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

The Christian-Muslim conflict in Sulawesi was an extension of a wider sectarian war in nearby Maluku archipelago in which up to 9,000 people died between 1999 and 2002.

Soon after it erupted in 1999, the Maluku conflict intensified with the arrival of volunteers belonging to Laskar Jihad (search), a newly created militia from Indonesia’s main island of Java that was supported by hardline elements in the security forces.

Analysts and diplomats accused senior army commanders of funding and training the militia, which was hurriedly disbanded following the terrorist attacks on the tourist island of Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people including 88 foreigners. Some former militiamen are believed to have moved to Poso.

Seems the liberal media is so quick to point out how the West is so intolerant of Muslim beliefs and customs. However, when the tables are turned, the story is ignored. Anyway, it’s very interesting especially with this heavily advertised special on the History Channel tomorrow night — http://www.thehistorychannel.com/crusades/

One question…..nah, I think I’ll save it for another post.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net

Well, it’s early November and go figure…..we hit about 70F today with an expected 75F tomorrow. It almost feels like CA during the winter. We had a cold snap there for a while but things have temporarily warmed back up. The kids were outside for PE today playing basketball and riding my new mountain bike that they now call theirs. My oldest daughter even took it down by the front creek where I cut some new trails through the trees. Speaking of which, I took the bike out last night out back right at about dusk time. I was on the grass speeding down a small incline towards a trail through the trees so I wasn’t making much noise. But as soon as I hit the trail, the bike tires began crunching all the leaves on the ground. I came to a stop soon after to just admire the quiet like I usually do. However, I had startled all the wildlife down there. I heard about 4 or 5 deer scampering away, their white tails surrendering their retreating positions through the trees. A couple of squirrels darted up a tree and a raccoon hurdled the dry creek bed to safety. All I heard were crunching of leaves as the animals departed. I thought that was interesting in that I thought wild animals tended to be more alert than that.

…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net