Dubya is planning even MORE damage...

Hey, look! The Pentagon's preparing us to prove that Iran's the bad guy! (But the CIA says China is 'not necessarily' our enemy. How big of them.)

Does Iran have some very big weapons of mass destruction? Why, yes, they do. We were selling weapons to them twenty years ago. It was called Iran-Contra, remember? Even more recently, Iran's gotten weapons from North Korea via our good buddy, General Musharraf.


Do you realize that the only country with atomic capability on this planet that is our friend right now is France? (So Sarkozy says....ask a Parisian what they think of U.S. policies.) And, um. Is it really about atomic capability anymore when a coupla box cutters are enough to start two wars?


Can we hold the election early before Dubya declares world war?

On an unrelated note?, I hear Hawaii is trying to secede.

I live in the best state in the Union

Quiet spring day hike:



















...and after my glorious morning hike (4 miles), I puttered around Golden. Then I came home, and foolishly looked at email. Three work-related emails were there and each one irritated the hell out of me. I'll go post about it over on Sinus when the stream of expletives running in my head slow down to a dull roar.

I miss aspects of contract work. One of them was that you don't care about workplace politics, because it isn't your workplace and in X number of months, you'll be gone.

I am not going to allow this to ruin the next 48 hours until I have to be back at the hospital. I'm sitting on my patio, drinking tea. I am going to dink around on my computer awhile, and then I'm going to make more art. I will probably stay up doing so until 03 or so. Because I can.

And you know what? When I put it that way, it reminds me that I actually do love my life.

Enjoy the pictures of my beautiful state. Spring in Colorado, when you walk over the snowfields in a t-shirt. Love. It.

I am working.

I put this here not because it doesn't suck, but blogging helps me to keep motivated to work. My house smells of turpentine and it's fscking fabulous.



And this is ready to quilt:



My dioxazine purple tube and manganese violet are dried up. Dammit.

The Inquisition, let's begin, the Inquisition, look out, sin...

Highlights from a March 8 cnn.com article:

The mastermind running our country vetoed a bill last month that would prohibit the CIA from performing 19 interrogation techniques on prisoners.

"Among the techniques the field manual prohibits are hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes, stripping them naked, forcing them to perform or mimic sexual acts, or beating, electrocuting, burning or otherwise physically hurting them.

They may not be subjected to hypothermia or mock executions. It does not allow food, water and medical treatment to be withheld. Dogs may not be used in any aspect of interrogation.

But waterboarding is the most high-profile and controversial of the interrogation methods in question.

It involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to simulate and create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition and is condemned by nations around the world and human rights organizations as torture."

That means that George W. Bush thinks it's okay to strip another human being nake, sexually abuse them, electroshock them, pour water over their faces, starve them and in general create the worst cases of post-traumatic stress disorder imaginable.



Where did my country GO?

Another day in paradise.

I posted over on Sinus.

I actually like my job....it's just that this was the week of the full moon, and the weather's getting warm. I read some ER nurse blogs and apparently the onset of warm weather makes people want to stab other people. In our non-trauma unit, it makes people have massive heart attacks and we are full to the rafters with ETOH withdraw. They're hangin from the ceiling, throwin down banana peels.

p.s. Curious the people that thought that post meant that I'm against alcohol. I think pancreatitis is a bad, mmm'kay? Not believing that one can be an alcoholic by imbibing beer alone is just silly... But geezus. After a week like I've had, I went straight to the bar for breakfast and a cocktail. Moderation, people. The ones that can't do moderation have two choices: quit drinkin or end up one of my patients.

Recent creative stuff

Present for Mom & Dad @ Xmas:



Not finished, but ready for the quilting needle, done with scraps from the other one similar to it (bout 2/3 of the size):

Sick days, books

This photo has nothing to do with this post. --Ed

Gotta say, I love some parts of being sick. Not the feeling like crap part of it, or the loss of many quality hours of my life I won't get back or the bizarro dreams under the influence of over the counter medication (involving hand-sized wooden puzzle piecess, people with huge bat-like wings and fangs and a large, red, noisy timer). I don't remember the first two days of my sick days. I know I was here...?

But I get to read books just because I love books. Not because I have "some time" here or there. I get to just read them. Whatever I want. I got a whole house full of em. I dutifully finished...okay. I dutifully skimmed the second Norah Roberts: The Pride of Jared MacKade. At the end of the book, I have no idea what he was so proud of, nor what Suzannah Morningstar, the fiery single mom with A Past (must've skimmed past what the past was) was so proud of. Except they had the same boring sex as the last book, and now they're happily ever.

I read the whole New York Times on Friday. The WHOLE THING. It was FABULOUS.

I read the Sisters Grimm, book 1, a young adult series of fairy tale detectives living with their grandmother. Very good. I started Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, which is THE end-all be-all environmentalist word on water rights in the American West. I can see why. It's not only thorough and well-researched, it's got a whipsmart humor about it, too. Not in the ha-ha funny sense, but the....you know what? John Wesley Powell WAS kinda funny-lookin sense. I'm getting a little pissed, and thinkin we should bomb Phoenix. All those cities cramming with boomers who want water fountains and green lawns in the saguaro deserts? Fsck em. Not to say Denver is better, it is not. Probably we should bomb Denver, too. In Denver, water-sucking evilness like certain golf courses put signs up to say, "We use well water." And this is supposed to be okay. I'm learning that this is not okay, either.

Reisner quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: "To clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent which is his domain, the American requires the daily support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in America, and, provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public security, it is held in honor."

Just found that interesting because the words were written in the 1820s.

**************

I'm napping, too. Oh. I washed the cats. That was my productive task yesterday. They are poofy and smell good today. A little annoyed, but they'll get over it.

Tomorrow I have to go back to work, and I'm well enough. I am going to be glad of this last day of rest (I wasn't scheduled to work today anyway). Isn't it sad when you wish your sick days weren't over?

A few days in Moab

Hi. I'm home, sick as a dog with a cold or mild flu-y something. I intend to grow a taproot into my purple couch, with ice water, tylenol and orange juice blended with vanilla yogurt all in reach. And a large stack of Blockbuster movies.

In the meantime, here are some pictures. Adisa, Kristina, Miko the dog and I went to Utah. Kristina had the flu, so she was in the hotel most of the time. Adisa and I (and Miko) hiked Negro Bill's Canyon on Monday (yes, it's called that). Then we did Hunter Canyon and some 4x4 bumbling around in the backcountry around there, which is the area underneath where people drive up and snap photos from Dead Horse Point.

We arrived Sunday and went to Island in the Sky. Kristina is from Germany, and so I went for the ridiculously fabulous view first:





And Arches is a necessary thing for all first time visitors to the high desert of the American west to see, so we did. I have a million photos of Arches itself, and so I didn't take make new ones. I'll post the handful that I did do later in the week. I was just more interested in places deeper in the desert I hadn't seen yet. It was a windy evening. This is us:



These are a jumble from the two hikes Adi, Miko and I did Monday and Tuesday. More photos with commentary when I'm back on my feet.

Great, great days. Tons of fun.















I must report that Moab now has a Starbucks. And we stopped to get some before we started our hike, creating these unnatural images:



(YES, we packed them out, YES we apologized to the few hikers we met along Negro Bill's Canyon trail (there were no hikers nor SBUX along Hunter Canyon)...and we felt the shame of our addiction.)



I shoulda been shot. Really.


....Right now, I'm ill and just want to watch Chinese movies and make myself keep drinking fluids. I have new and gorgeous canyon country photos that I will share soon.