The Creation Museum

“The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals, great masterpieces brimming with pulsating colors and details, provide a backdrop for many of the settings.”

As a part of their fifth anniversary celebration the Creation Museum has opened a new high-tech exhibit designed to expose the scientific bankruptcy of the evolutionary interpretation of the famous so-called ape-woman “Lucy.”

A full 40% of Americans, when asked, say they don’t believe in evolution.  It’s not as if we need another good reason for the collapse and failure of American culture, but, we have one anyway.

Is it any wonder our government is as fucked up as it is?   Is it at all hard to understand why our schools rank so miserably when compared to schools in other “advanced” nations?

I had an opportunity to talk to a local High School science teacher yesterday.  She asked me if I knew how hard it was to teach biology WITHOUT mentioning evolution.  She informed me that, over time, you get good at it because if you don’t, and happen to engage a student in a public discussion on the “theory” of evolution, you are more than likely to be lectured by your principal, who him ,or, herself has just had their ass chewed out by an angry parent.  So, you teach half-assed biology and, it’s a given that none of the kids ever really catch on fire intellectually, or,  go on to do research, get advanced degrees, or contribute to the hard won encyclopedia of human knowledge.

I have lived in the South for 15 years now.  I love the weather, the ridiculously low taxes, the fact that my garden is already showing dozens of signs of spring.  I love the Blue Ridge Mountains right out my back door and the fact that this area is home to more native species of flowering tree and shrub than any other place in North America.   I,  loving plants and gardening as I do, actually thrilled when I learned that rhododendrons apparently evolved simultaneously in two places on planet earth… the Himalayas and the Blue ridge Mountains.  I can’t see for the life of me how that could have happened, but, it doesn’t stop me from spending hours and hours, every spring, strolling through ancient groves of flowering rhododendrons.  I love the fact that spring and fall are the longest seasons of the year and that native trout streams flow down from the mountains five minutes from my door.   In many ways it is almost a paradise of a place to live.  In two ways it is not.

Racism is found everywhere.

and…… It absolutely Stinks of Jesus!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Truth about Backpacks

Does anybody ever wonder why all American schools have lockers for every child, and yet, they are expected to carry all their books and belongings around on their backs, from class to class?  We never did that when we went to school.  The bell rang, and between classes we went to our lockers and dropped off what we no longer needed and picked up what was necessary for the next class.   That’s why we had lockers in the first place.

Since schools still have lockers I wondered why kids today don’t use them the way they used to.  In an attempt to find out I enquired of students I come in regular contact with why they carry their books around instead of retrieving them, as needed, from their lockers.  I got the same reply from them all.  “They don’t give us enough time to go to our lockers.”

This occurred to me as odd.  What’s a few minutes, in a school day full of time wasters, set aside so that our children don’t grow up bent over and looking like pack animals?  I caused me to wonder why, today, those few minutes can’t be found when, in the past, they were available.  Who made the decision to force children to carry everything on their backs?  Who decided there wasn’t enough time to use lockers any more?  After all, is there anything else that is built into every school with the full knowledge that there will be no time to use it?

Mrs. N. became suspicious and began to contemplate this situation in more detail.  A quick Google search revealed these facts…

• From a survey by the American Academy of Orthopedics: 71% of doctors feel backpacks are a clinical problem, 58% see patients with pain related to backpacks, and 52% think that this is a serious problem.
• 55% of students carry an overloaded backpack.
• 3,300 children aged 5-14 were treated in emergency rooms in 1997 for backpack related injuries according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
• An Auburn University study showed that 67% of children suffered muscle soreness, 51% back pain, 24% numbness and 15% shoulder pain.
• 65% of adolescents’ doctor visits are due to backpack injuries as reported by National Public Radio in October of 1998.

This caused Mrs. N…. (ALWAYS suspicious of authority figures), to become even more suspicious.  She began to ask herself questions.

With all the pain and expense these backpacks seem to cause, why don’t school authorities just add a few more minutes to the time kids have between class?  Those minutes existed in my school day, why can’t they now?  What is it they hope to accomplish by forcing our children to carry heavy loads on their backs?  

Then it hit me!  Like a bullet right between the eyes.

The bastards are preparing our children for the world they will grow up into.  The backpack, and the heavy load it represents are the education!  The books, tests and teachers are superfluous.  They are the things that no longer have a use.  This is the underlying reason nobody in authority seems to give a shit that our schools rank so poorly.  This is the reason teachers are paid such a miserable pittance.

In a future where only the Plutocrats can afford to send their children to college, and gasoline has become scarce and prohibitively expensive, an army of dumbed down heavy load carriers will be necessary to move all manner of freight goods from place to place.

Beasts of burden they will be, and that is exactly what the owners of America are busy training our children’s backs for today.  As usual, and exactly what my readers have come to expect, Mrs. N. sees right through the diabolical plans of those who lurk behind the scenery pulling all the strings.

Rest well my gentle readers.  Rest in the full knowledge that, on your behalf, Mrs. N. never will….

Droning-on…

droning  present participle of drone (Verb)

Verb Make a continuous low humming sound. Speak tediously in a dull monotonous tone: “while Jim droned on”.

Merriam-Webster adds this.

1.   a stingless male bee (as of the honeybee) that has the role of mating with the queen and does not gather nectar or pollen.

 2.  one that lives on the labors of others : parasite

3.  an unmanned aircraft or ship guided by remote control.

That ties it together… there’s the connection.  You see, I read this in the New York TIMES this morning and it got me thinking about where this all goes.  Well,… read this, and we’ll talk.

This month the Obama administration came under attack for the use of drones and the excessive casualties they inflict on civilians. Taking the criticism seriously, the administration has announced the development of a new array of “smart drones” that pinpoint strikes with brutal accuracy. 

Mrs. N can’t help her poor head from throbbing and expanding & contracting in a most unpleasant and frightening manner when she reads something like this before she has had her tea and has watered all her orchids on a sunny sunday morning.    (That’s the kind of sentence you can read, tediously, in a dull monotonous tone, and save your proper punctuation for another time.)  You would be droning.  There is another kind of droning.  It’s the kind “our” administration is working on so that they can pin-point blow your ass up.  Who ever you are, and where ever you are.  BOOM!  …You are dead!   (drones look like this)

It’s squeaking on the inside of Mrs. N’s head now, as if pressure was building, and it was beginning to leak someplace where it isn’t screwed down tight.  Mrs N. tried to concentrate on something pleasant, and looked out the window hoping the noise would pass.

Once the hissing stopped and the teeth were no longer moving around in my mouth it occurred to me that this changes everything.  It’s Science Fiction time!  Armies and Navies and most of the Air Forces in existence are obsolete.  Going to war is ridiculously “elective”… from now on.

Making the decision to look into the future isn’t an easy thing for Mrs. N. to do.  Oh, she CAN LOOK all right, but, it always leaves  her feeling disjointed in time for days on end after.  One little sniff of the blossom of The All-Seeing Orchid that grew out of a bit of crumbled timber, left over from the old garage.. and… away we go.  I saved the handful of rotted wood.  I took it before the clean-up crew from The Department of Energy scooped everything from the garage up, and shipped it to the Savanna Nuclear Disposal Site.  I crumbled it up and used it as a medium in an orchid pot.  I intended to plant it with a cutting, but, never did.  The All-Seeing Orchid grew out of it unannounced.  I leaned in and took a deep sniff……..

In the blink of an eye … It was the future and I was appropriately dressed in the same outfit that David Bowie wore as Ziggy Stardust.

In the future I witnessed nobody ever said anything about another country or a large corporation that wasn’t complimentary anymore.  If you pissed someone with access to capital off they blew your ass up with a drone.  It changed things dramatically.  It changed the meaning of Capitalism.  Capitalists were called “Button Men”, but, more about that later.

Nobody wanted to be a Dictator any more.  Nobody wanted to be President of anything of consequence.  The most dangerous thing a person could do was to become famous and easily recognized.  Minding your own business became a well respected virtue again. Because military spending was but a fraction of what it was in the “pre-drone” days there was lots of tax money left over to spend on elective health care and the arts.  Everybody you knew had face lifts, liposuction and magnificent artificial breasts.   Gardening and interpretive dance flourished.  There were no more State of the Union speeches.  Everybody knew what state we were in.  Presidents and Congress people were selected by lottery.  They served their time, or, they went to jail.  It was the only way to fill Washington DC with warm bodies.  Government was reduced to an absolute minimum.

All the members of government met once a week and decided who should get blown up.  Then they blew them up with drones.  No more war.  They just blew up all the people who were making trouble.  It didn’t take long for all the trouble makers to be blown up.  Then, hardly anybody made any trouble any more.  They don’t call politicians Senators, or Congressmen in the future.  They just call them Button Men.  If you were the leader of a country that was making trouble, or, just some stupid greedy person who annoyed enough people enough…  the Button Men just pressed the button and you got wacked.  BOOM!  A missile falls from the sky at a zillion miles an hour and blows your ass up.  THE END.

Kids in school had a hard time imagining what it was like before the Button Men ran the government.  When they learned that America almost went belly up because the stupid plutocratic son of a greedy plutocratic past President started a war on borrowed money they couldn’t believe it.  They could never be made to grasp the concept of killing millions of people when all you really wanted, or, needed to do was kill the stinker making the trouble.

Teenagers wore T-shirts with pictures of Saddam Hussein on them like they used to wear ones with pictures of Che Guevara and Pink Floyd.  Saddam went down in history, with Hitler & Osama bin Laden, as the 3 most expensive people in history to kill.  Kids couldn’t believe it when they learned how much money was spent.  They were convinced that their parents generation were the stupidest bastards that ever lived.  They never got tired of asking old people to….  Just THINK of what you could have done with that MONEY!

In the future they had taken [In God We Trust] off all the money and National Monuments and replaced it with the same phrase they stenciled on the sides of all the drone missiles.

..”The principal and, indeed, the ONLY thing that is wrong with the world is man.”..  [Jung]

The only thing that wasn’t changed at all in the future was kids thinking their parents generation were stupid bastards.

And, that their parents music really sucked.

SPANDEX (Communist Plot?)

The year 1959 was a turning point for the United States of America in more ways than one.

On February 3rd a chartered plane transporting musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper and pilot Roger Peterson goes down in foggy conditions near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing all 4 occupants on board. The tragedy is later termed “The Day the Music Died“.

On March 9th the Barbie doll debuts.  From that day onward the pattern was set and the plot to inculcate young American females with wholly unrealistic  expectations with regard to their bodies was launched.  It will later be referred to as “The Day the Normal Female Body Died”.

To the untrained eye neither of the occurrences listed above would seem at all related.  How could they be?  What could they possibly have to do with each other?  Well, if you are patient, Mrs. N. will fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle for you.  There are only three more pieces to go.  Pay attention.  Soon it will be clear to you that a diabolical plot to destroy America from within has been underway, right under our noses, since 1959… and the FBI, CIA and all the other so called “Guardians” of our democracy have been asleep at the switch all the while.  Here are 3 more pieces of information.

#1.  In september 1959 Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev meets Mao Zedong in Beijing.  The meeting takes place under unprecedented levels of secrecy at a heavily guarded underground chemical laboratory.

#2. Later that same month, at a meeting with journalists in the U.S., Khrushchev, for no apparent reason, repeated his famous Marxist thesis  “We will burry you”… except this time he added, quite enigmatically and under his breath… “In piano cases”.  At the time no one had any idea what this could have meant and it was widely considered to be a mistake in translation.  The matter was forgotten.  Forgotten that is until one more piece of 1959 trivia was added to the mix.  One more piece of information that transforms unrelated happenings into what historians will one day recognize as the most dastardly, diabolical and successful Communist plot to utterly destroy America, and the American way of life, ever conceived.

#3.   Hidden away within shouting distance of the home of Thomas Jefferson lies the sleepy little town of Waynesboro, Virginia.  Late in the year 1959 a delegation of Russian scientists made a supervised visit to a small laboratory in Waynesboro on what was termed… A peaceful scientific exchange mission.  Shortly there after a polyurethane–polyurea copolymer  was “supposedly” invented, by two chemists who were present at the meeting, and immediate production began at DuPont‘s Benger Laboratory, in Waynesboro, of a material that, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, would spell the eventual doom of America.

The name of that material was Spandex.  It is an anagram for the word “expands”.

This is what used to happen to Americans who ate too much… before Spandex.

This is what Americans who eat too much look like now, AFTER Spandex.

It is only when one puts the whole package together, as Mrs. N. has done for you, that one can fully see the brilliance of the Commie Bastards.  First they kill off Americas greatest musicians casting a shadow of depression over the entire culture.  Next they introduce a doll that will be responsible for generations of young women feeling depressed and miserable about their own bodies.  THEN, when no one is even the least suspicious they slowly and systematically take away the one thing that stops Americans from overeating.  The one thing that stops us from “over soothing” our communist induced depressions with food.  The only thing that prevents us from “over medicating” ourselves with pies, cakes, soda, potato chips, french fries and all the rest….  TIGHT CLOTHES!

Where once there were natural physical restraints to our all to human predispositions to overeat, when faced with unhappiness, NOW… there are none!  Spandex, and the stinking Commies have seen to that.  Our health care system is overloaded, and almost bankrupt, with citizens suffering from weight related diseases.  Diabetes, even in children, is reaching epidemic proportions.   Abnormal has, in America, become normal, and thanks to the Commies even going to the beach, or, shopping has become a profoundly demoralizing experience.   It took almost fifty years for the combined plotting of the Chinese and Soviet Communists to come to fruition and old Nikita never lived to see the results.

But, we should have known.  We should have been more suspicious when a series of supposedly “impromptu exchanges” (through interpreters) took place between then U.S. Vice President Richard (tricky Dick) Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow.   The date was July 24, 1959.

History remembers them, quite fittingly, and ironically, as….  The Kitchen Debates.

By the year 2010 approximately 80% of all the clothing sold in the United States contained Spandex, and the “open concept” of housing design had made the kitchen the primary room and center focus of American family living.  Our economy, health care system, educational system and infrastructure lie in ruins.

Woman burned alive for being ‘witch’

“A woman has been tortured and burned alive in Papua New Guinea after being accused of using sorcery to kill a young boy.   The woman, a mother aged 20 named as Kepari Leniata, was stripped, tied up and doused in petrol by the boy’s relatives in Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands, said the National newspaper.”

 

The US embassy in the capital, Port Moresby, condemned the killing as a “brutal murder” and stated, “There is no possible justification for this sort of violence”.

Really?

You shall not permit a sorceress to live.  [Exodus 22:18]

It is impossible to calculate accurately the total number of convicted witches who were burned at the stake or hanged in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, but few students begin guessing below the range of fifty to one hundred thousand, and some would double or triple that figure.  The reason for the persistence of the witchcraft idea and the burning of witches was that Christian authorities couldn’t let it die, without admitting that God’s word was wrong.

So nobody believes this baloney today… right?    Wrong!

I copied this from the catalogue of Liberty University.  It was on their “About” page under “What no other University can claim.”

…”An uncompromising doctrinal statement, based upon an inerrant Bible, a Christian worldview beginning with belief in biblical Creationism, an eschatological belief in the pre-millennial, pre-tribulational coming of Christ for all of His Church, dedication to world evangelization, an absolute repudiation of “political correctness,” a strong commitment to political conservatism, total rejection of socialism, and firm support for America’s economic system of free enterprise.”…

Now… was that a mouth full of Crazy-Ass Shit, or what?

Here is the really hilarious part.  This year Liberty University has received MORE money in Government Guaranteed Student Loans ($450,000,000) than any other “University” in the State of Virginia.  More than The University of Virginia and more than Virginia Tech, both Top 50 schools world wide.  Liberty University, unlike UVA & Tech, does not admit gay students or permit a “Democrat” Club on campus.  They are listed as a “Non-Competitive” school which is their way of saying that if your check can clear the bank…. You are in!  As a result they are making so much money they can’t  spend it fast enough.  All their “professors” are untenured, so, the slightest deviation from “The Bible” in their teaching puts the Kaybosh on their illustrious career at Liberty.

Bill Maher noted that Liberty teaches “creation science,” and the idea that earth was created 5,000 years ago. “This is a school you flunk out of when you get the answers right,”… Much as conservatives believe gay marriage cheapens their own vows, “I think a diploma from Liberty cheapens my diploma from a real school,” he continued.

That is a picture of the fat bastard that got Liberty off the Ground.  When decent white folks were forced by the Federal Government to send their children to the same schools with “Negroes” Jerry Falwell got into the Education business by opening up White Private Christian Academies.  He and his Clan have been raking in tax free money hand over fist ever since teaching bigotry to the sons & daughters of the bigoted.  All this went down in Lynchburg, Virginia.  It’s a VERY Christian town.  As a matter of fact it is such a Christian town that when the courts decided that “Negroes” should be permitted to swim in the community swimming pools along with decent white folks….. they filled the pools in with dirt.

Now, you are probably asking yourself…. Mrs. N…  what the hell does all this have to do with some poor woman getting burned as a witch, in Papua New Guinea?  Well, I’ll tell you….

People are people where ever you go in this world.  They all are subject to culture and there is no culture (to the best of my knowledge) that doesn’t have supernatural beliefs…. “Paranormal beliefs”… including ours.  So don’t go getting ideas in your head that those people in Papua New Guinea are that different, or, primitive compared to us.  There are NOT!

Any country that can support a Liberty University and have a guy who wears magic underpants get as close to being President as Mitt Romney did… Well, lets just say that we have far more reason to be embarrassed than we do to feel proud…..

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

Dunkin’ FUCKING Donuts

Isn’t it bad enough I have to live in a country full of gun toting fucking morons who are absolutely sure that the universe runs on magic?  Isn’t it enough for me to turn on the TV this morning and hear my President blathering on and on about how great it was for all the lying sociopaths that represent us in our nations capital to get together today and PRAY over breakfast for stuff to get better?

Oh no.  Now I have to read about food companies putting nanomaterials in my food!  And who is leading the pack in the race to clog us all up with worthless crap and send us to an early grave….?  Dunkin’ FUCKING Donuts.  I hate Dunkin’ Donuts.

[from the New York TIMES]  ..”Their small size allows nanoparticles to go places in the body where larger particles cannot and enter cells. They have been found in the blood stream after ingestion and inhalation, and while research on their health effects is limited, studies have shown them to have deleterious effects on mice and cells…  Last April, the Food and Drug Administration issued an unusually emphatic statement on nanomaterials, saying it did not have enough data to determine the safety of nanomaterials in food.”…

…”Dunkin’ Donuts Powdered Cake Donuts tested positive for the presence of titanium dioxide materials of less than 10 nanometers. Titanium dioxide is used to brighten white substances. The nano variety is under investigation by the E.P.A.”…

Isn’t that nice?  The bastards are not satisfied selling crappy donuts.  It’s not enough that they sell the same fucking donut, twisted and tortured into dozens of different shapes and colors, and try to pass them off as different “kinds” of donuts when they are clearly NOT.  Oh no.  Now the lying bastards are using nanomaterials…  Titanium dioxide… to make the sugar coated donuts “look” whiter.  LOOK WHITER!

The primary drawback, the only drawback I can think of actually, in being an atheist is how foolish you sound attempting to really cuss somebody out without making reference to anything religious, or biblical.  So, with the readers permission and indulgence I will, temporarily, assume the persona of a Good Christian…  and, like all the politicians who had breakfast together this morning, pretend that I am.

“Jesus fucking tap-dancing Christ!  What the fuck is the matter with these bastards?  May the Sons of bitches rot in Hell.  May their wives and children and everybody that they love choke to death on one of their crappy donuts right before their eyes.  May their homes be surrounded by angry mobs and may they be taken to the nearest Dunkin’ FUCKING Donut Shop and deep fried in the cheap-skate oil they use.. and then may they be rolled in artificially colored chemical bits & lightly dusted with TITANIUM DIOXIDE.  Then… let the rats have at them.”

(That’s better.  OK, I’m back to my heathen self.)

You know, I kind of have to blame myself for some of this outrageous behavior on the part of Dunkin’ FUCKING Donuts.  Years ago, when I first realized that there was really no such thing as Dunkin’ FUCKING Donuts, and that it was actually Dunkin’ FUCKING DONUT… I should have acted.  I should have kicked up some kind of a stink, firebombed a few locations, spread rumors that they hired lepers to form the donuts with unclean hands…  I should have done something to end this cavalcade of counterfeit confectionary… this bastion of bogus baked goods…  But, I didn’t.  Instead I stood mute as the bastards opened more and more locations and spread across the land like a malicious fungus.  REAL BAKERIES, operated by real people using real ingredients to produce real donuts, cakes, pies, turnovers, cookies, pastries, Napoleons, Baklava, Bear Claws, cannoli…. (the list goes on) WENT OUT OF BUSINESS… because they couldn’t compete with the advertising and predatory pricing of… you-know-who.

Now look where we are.  We are living in a country with a President who thinks “praying” will solve our problems and not a decent bakery for 100 miles around.   If that isn’t depressing enough… Dunkin’ FUCKING Donuts is doing their best to kill us by clogging up all of our precious internal filters.

Any more bad news today and I’ll hang myself.  I will you know.  I mean it.

 

 

Look at it this way.

Perhaps it’s all been nothing but bullshit?

Maybe bullshit is the very point of human beings and our reason for existence in the first place?

It’s quite an achievement if you think about it.  After 14 billion years of expansion, differentiation, combination and evolution the universe has succeeded in producing, pulling out of itself, something that can conceive of and believe anything to be true.  Anything at all.  It doesn’t matter how impossible, improbable, or, how crazy it is, humans will believe it.  They will live for it and die for it.  If we don’t have an answer to a question we bullshit one up with the ease that a fish swims and a bird takes wing.  If it can be said that our species has a foundation in anything, anything at all, it must be admitted that that foundation, that rock upon which we are built, is bullshit.   One person lies, the next person swears to it and we are “Off to the Races”.

It’s not so bad if you think about it.  It’s not like we lost a lottery or something. No more than any other thing, animate or inanimate, lost a race to be something other than it is.  Obviously the universe needs EVERYTHING, or, quite frankly, it wouldn’t be the Universe.  It wouldn’t, by definition, contain “All” that could be, leaving it short of what a Universe must be.  That, I think, is where we come in.  Bullshit generators… because, without bullshit generation the Universe would come up short.  It would lack dreams.  It would lack fantasy.  It would be a poorer place for our absence.  It wouldn’t BE all that it could be.

The question I have found myself puzzled with is the future of all this bullshit.  How does it end?  Do we continue to bullshit ourselves blindly into extinction, or, do we somehow evolve in a different direction that permits our survival?  On the one hand I don’t really care because I won’t be here, but, on the other hand, even for purely my own curiosity, it would be interesting to know.  Do we go the way of the giant dinosaurs, getting bigger and bigger (and bullshitting ourselves more and more), or, do we somehow undergo a metamorphosis of our very natures and evolve into some improbable kind of bird with wings of logic rather than feathers?  In short… can we leave the bullshitting behind and still remain anything resembling “Human”?

That’s the question.

I’m not optimistic.  I fear that the bullshit is already so deep on planet earth that none of us has much hope of escaping drowning in it.  It’s just way to deep!

I’m an American and America is the best country in the world because we say so.  God is on our side because our leaders say so.  Our form of government is better than any other because we say so.  Our Constitution is an example of the finest thinking and the highest virtue ever expressed by mankind… the pinnacle of the art and science of government.  Because of all these things we have the right (God given) to force all other governments, nations and peoples to do as we wish them to do.  [Make all the children and adults memorize this and repeat it over and over and over again…]

Our Constitution and Bill of Rights was written by men who owned slaves… So, they were ALL shameless Bullshitters.

To think that a government controlled by the “Will of the People” can ever work for long is obviously Bullshit because the secret of sanity can never be found in the combination of  idiocies.

So, what’s a person to do?  What are our choices?  Do we have choices?

I would appreciate the input, with regard to the above questions, of any interested party.

As for myself… a fish gotta swim and a bird gotta fly.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

 

 

Contrast

The interplay of opposites.  Something and nothing.  Observing the dance of black and white without foolishly becoming involved with the game of “White must win”.  

I wore a wool hat to bed last night.  I wore two long sleeve shirts, a wool sweater and a fleece jacket, two pair of pajama pants and a pair of sweat pants over them.  I also had on two pair of socks.  I slept like a baby except, I had my hands in my pockets and I don’t think babies have many pockets in their clothes.  What would be the point?

It was about 10 degrees last night here on the East shoulder of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It almost never gets that cold here.  Once again I am at war and last night was like the Battle of the Bulge.  AEP (Appalachian Electric Power), the coal burning bastards that sell me my electricity are still the largest air polluters America has to offer the world and I’m still hell bent of fucking with them.  I’m still determined to pay them as little as I can get away with.  Not because I don’t have the money, but, because I have the choice and having a choice is such a precious thing to me.

This is the second winter my bride and I have spent, well, cold.  We live in a lovely 85 year old brick Georgian house surrounded with mature english boxwoods with plaster and lath walls and no insulation.  It isn’t that we have no options, or, can’t turn up the thermostat.  With a flick of the finger we could be toasty and warm and sit around in our undies if we choose to.  We could gut the place and rebuild with state of the art insulation, or, blow insulation in the walls and it’s not that we couldn’t easily afford to do any of those options.  We simply choose to not to and as strange as it may sound… we enjoy it.

We set the thermostat on 59 or 60 degrees downstairs and don’t turn the heat on upstairs at all.  It was about 50 in our bedroom last night, perhaps cooler.  We both slept magnificently!  It’s absolutely amazing how well we sleep in the winter and how much more energy we seem to feel during the day as a result.  Instead of escaping the seasonal changes our home planet has to offer we embrace them, feel better for it, expend less energy, pollute less, save a pile of money and enjoy a few months of quiet and freedom from entertaining.   Absolutely nobody is fucking crazy enough to “drop in for a visit” at our house in the winter.   Not twice anyway.  As an extra added benefit, all the weight we gained stuffing ourselves with Christmas cookies, nuts, filet mignon (with Sauce Béarnaise), pie, shrimp cocktail, cake, puddings and all the other delicious things we consumed over the holidays simply melts away on its own.  No trips to the gym.  No diets or cutting back on eating.  The simple act of breathing in and out and having our metabolism warm the air is enough to burn those excess pounds away effortlessly, as we sleep.

We are saving a shitload of money on pet food because they all ran away.

When Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door and see us wearing coats and hats we tell them… “Oh, sorry, we were just going out.”  and they believe us!

We laugh like hell.

We have stopped worrying about guns and politics and what other people think of this or that.  We just cuddle a lot, under piles and piles of afghans, read books in the sunlight and think about spring.   A lot of tickling goes on.

My bride informs me that it has rocketed all the way up to 24.5 degrees outside, so, perhaps I should go outside and see if last nights winds did any damage.  They were pretty strong.