Allen November 28th, 2007
Some of the old photos I had available on my old site (acornsfromanokie.typepad.com) is now available on Flickr. In addition, I have some new photos as well from a recent trip to Washington DC.
Enjoy!
[Added: And now I can insert Flickr photo sets into the webpost.]
Photoset for the closing of the Oklahoma City Plant:
Photoset for a recent trip to Washington DC:
Allen November 28th, 2007
Well, I upgraded to the new WordPress and it seems to be giving me fits. Something to fix another day when it isn’t so late.
More backlogged posts and more guilt about not writing here more often.
<sigh>
Allen August 23rd, 2007
I have a subscription to audible.com and I highly recommend their ‘budget listener’ plan that lets you subscribe to 1 audio book per month. You have to dig for that subscription plan as they want to sell you some of their more expensive plans.
Some of the books I’ve listened to over the past few months include:
I am currently working on The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. The book is obviously embedded in the milieu in which it was written — 1917. Long before World War II, the book bows before the altar of Plato and his classic The Republic.
As a practical libertarian, the overt control of society by the “philosopher-king” as espoused by Plato now horrifies me. The sad thing is that such a society used to appeal to the idealist in me in my earlier years. Of course society should be ruled by those who have been trained in self-less sacrifice.
Years of experience has born forth the thought, “Underneath the mask of an idealist, you will often find…
Allen August 16th, 2007
I read, via dustbury.com, that now we can combine both “Hello Kitty” and post-modern consumerism. With this final step of a “Hello Kitty Platinum Visa“, one of the last prophesies of St. John has come to pass.
Rev 13:11 Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two [ears] like a [kitty], but he spoke like a dragon. 12 He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. 13 And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing [a credit card to spring forth] in full view of men. 14 Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. 15 He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. 16 He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark [in their wallet or purse], 17 so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Allen May 30th, 2007
Long time passing…
Actually, I’m still generating some acorns in my Moleskine, but haven’t been posting them. And why not?
Because when I’m not traveling to Owego, NY for my job, I’m tiling our house. Our whole house. I’m getting pretty good at it, but it sure does chew up my spare time. I’ll try to post some pictures sometime, but I’m either: (1) Tiling (2) Traveling (3) Crashing from (1) or (2).
Back to your regularly scheduled silence…
Allen February 16th, 2007
My wife, Missy, called me at work the other day. She was rather upset — she found a dead bird in the master bathroom floor. Apparently one of the dogs had found it outside and brought it in. I was at work and couldn’t easily leave. I told her to get a plastic bag, avert her eyes and pick it up and put it in the trash.
“There is no way I’m going to pick up a dead bird. I’ve locked the dogs and cats out of the bathroom and you can deal with it when you get home.”
“Oh, honey. I really don’t want some bird decomposing on our bathroom carpet. It’ll be easy. Just do it real quick and it will be over with.”
Dead silence on the other end of the line told me this was not going to be real quick and it was not going to be over with.
I sighed, “OK. I’ll pick it up when I get home. I just hope this isn’t some bird that died from the bird flu. Perhaps we need to take it to the wildlife service just to be sure.”
So the rest of the day passed rather uneventfully. In fact, I had forgotten about the bird until I pulled into the driveway and found the car missing. After letting the dogs out of the cage, I got a plastic bag from the pantry and headed in to the bathroom. The cats were quite interested in following me — small wonder.
I slipped in to the bathroom and, sure enough, there was the dead bird with its legs in the air. I spotted a gold band on one of the legs and thought, “Oh dear. This is some sort of bird that has been banded and is part of some scientific study. Wait a minute…”
“That’s a gold band — not silver. And it isn’t on its leg. It’s on its butt.”
I stooped down, picked up the bird and read the band — Made in China.
After I wiped the tears from my eyes, I had an idea. I moved the bird from our bathroom to our entryway and waited for my wife, Missy, and my daughter, Amy, to come home.
After about 20 minutes, the dogs started barking wildly and up the sidewalk came Missy and Amy. My wife called out, “Did you pick up the bird.”
“Yes, I did. But I think its important that you be able to deal with this. I’ve brought it out here for you to pick up,” I said as I pointed to the dead bird at my feet.
Dual shrieks greeted this suggestion and both women turned and started walking back down the sidewalk.
I started laughing and picked up the dead bird with my bare hand. Shrieeek! “It’s really OK. It won’t hurt you,” I called out.
Two shivers and a pleading request to just throw it away!
“No, really. It won’t hurt you!” Another thought lodged in my sick brain. “It’s really a nice bird. It’s kind of cute. I think it really wants to be our friend.” And with that, I turned the dead bird to face me and kissed it full on the lips — er, beak.
Shriiiieeeeek!
I thought I had freaked them out before, but now they were really going. By now, both women were at the end of the sidewalk and telling me to (1) throw the bird away, (2) wash my lips, (3) wash my hands and (4) wash my lips again.
I walked outside and pleaded with them to look at the pretty bird. I think they would like it. Amy retreated back to the car and Missy fetched up around the side of the house. I kissed the dead bird two or three more times to convince them that it wasn’t going to harm them, but they wouldn’t listen to me.
I finally got my daughter, Amy, to examine the “band” on the bird’s butt and her cries of distress turned to peals of laughter. I asked her, “Don’t you think the bird is cute?”
“Yes, it’s very nice.”
“Wouldn’t you like to kiss it?” as I held it up for her to kiss.
Kiss, kiss.
By now, Missy was sufficiently suspicious to examine the dead bird.
We were all in agreement that one of the cats had probably pounced on it and had found it harder to kill than it had previously suspected.
Allen January 26th, 2007
Again from Political Diary, we hear where Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra has made a documentary for HBO called A Friend of God.
Quoting from the article, we find out that the younger Pelosi thinks religion can be a positive influence in life:
A once-lapsed Catholic herself, Ms. Pelosi now wants her two-month-old son to get in the habit of going to church at a young age. “There’s a lot of secular television that provides bad role models. It is important to expose your kid to religion, any religion, otherwise they’ll become uncharged, and those are the ones who may later in life fall into more extreme religions,” she told ABC News.
I fully believe in the importance of religion as well…
Allen January 26th, 2007
C. S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors. He had a grasp of human nature that more people should read. The Narnia series is a wonderful read (even for adults) and the Screwtape Letters are a classic.
I just read in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary a great quote from CS:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Allen December 16th, 2006
After some amount of work, I’ve gotten close to having my new WordPress Website up and running. I’ve moved our family website over to AN Hosting and I can host a WordPress website for my weblog here as well.
This works out to be much cheaper than TypePad, so I’ve snarfed all my old postings from TypePad and moved them over here.
Some of the old posting formatting is kind of funky, with weird line breaks in them. I’ve cleaned up the posts that I’ve listed in my Seedlings page (see the tabs above) and I’ll clean up the others as time and desire permits.
In any case, I’ll be shutting down my old site after I’ve redirected what few readers I have over to this site.
While the country-bumpkin part of me hopes this will renew some effort into this weblog, I realize that I’m no longer in the “sweet-spot” when I was so active in weblogging in the past. My old job was shutting down and I could devote a large amount of time to surfing and writing posts.
My new job is quite hectic and most of my posts are developed first on my Moleskine and later transferred to this website. The development of ideas and the transition to this website doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but this is something I am getting used to.
Of course, this has lead to me being more of a thinker than a linker, but I was really wanting to go that way anyway.
Acorns From An Okie
Great acorns from tiny oaks grow. Or something like that..
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