no, actually, i think we’re doing okay.

what happened was that we….well, i have to back-track considerably, don’t i. bah.

okay, so, like we had an offer on this house in-town, contingent upon the sale of our current house. well, after several weeks, somebody else came along and put an offer on that house, and their offer apparently wasn’t contingent. not nice. so, the only way we could beat that was to make our offer non-contingent (we were pretty confident that the other offer wasn’t for more money than we had offered). the spouse unit and her wonderful credit found a way to remove contingency, and not only that, but provided that we would sell our current house by the end of May, we wouldn’t even have to pay two mortgages at the same time. and even better, with a bridge loan against our current house, we won’t actually even pay the down-payment on the new house until June.

yeah, her credit’s scarily awesome.

so, long story short (for this part of it, anyway), we removed the contingency, making ours the best offer, and we got the house. we’ve already hauled over what could be fit in the mini-van in several car-loads, and already have two of the bedrooms primed for color changes. with the snow having finally melted, we discovered that our house has a pond, which is kind of cool, and the kids have already made friends with some of the neighbor kids. we start the big move next weekend, but the focus this week is on getting some of the rooms repainted (really just the kids’ rooms and my office) before we move stuff in.

AND THEN, we finally got an offer on the current house early last week. a couple from Duluth came out with a family member (for the third time, no less!) and made an offer the following day. we were pretty skeptical at first, as their offer was for $20K below what we were asking. in fact, to a large degree, while we were happy to get an offer, the offer itself really pissed us off. well, as it happened, this other realtor had a client who wanted to see it again, so when she called, i let her know we had an offer on the house, but that we’d love to hear from her client. sure enough, the evening after she came by, we had a second offer. this one was a stronger offer, and cash.

now, when we got that first offer, we pissed off our realtor by not accepting it right away. and we hadn’t accepted it when the second offer came through. as soon as that second offer came through, though, our realtor was on the phone with the realtor with the first offer, and all of-the-sudden, they re-offer for the whole amount we were asking. yup. the whole amount. (and we found out later they were willing to go as far as $1,000 above our original asking price! i guess their first offer was purely speculative. i’m glad they got the house, since they obviously wanted it so much, just as we did when we first moved here. i like keeping the good karma flowing.)

so, another long story short, we close on this house on May 2. i’m still not thrilled with moving. i like the new place well enough, but i’m not happy at all about moving out of here. i guess the challenge for the rest of my career will be to be earning enough and saving enough so that we can move back out to a place like this when we retire. but in the meantime, all those questions are finally answered and our future is a bit more secure. thanks to the way things went with the sale of this house, we’ll make a tidy sum off the sale of this house, beef the kids’ college funds back up, have everything else paid off, and money to spare. i guess it’s a win-win all the way around. i just still don’t want to do this moving-painting-moving crap, but i guess i need to get over it!

as you wake this golden morning
and slowly get out of bed
squinting at the light
that streams from your window
and stretch
and yawn
as you breathe in the ocean air
filling yourself
with the wonder
and the glory
and the beauty
of the world
reveling in the simple joy
of being alive
remember this
and hold it to your heart
that you may never forget
because i think of you
and i wonder how you are
and i wish you were with me
so that you could feel
what i feel
and know what i know
so that you
almost awakened
with sunshine filling your eyes
could see what i see
and experience some small portion
of my world

because it’s 30 fecking degrees
where i am
and the damn wind
is blowing so hard
there’s snow stuck to the windows
on all four sides of the house
and you’d seriously be most welcome
to shovel the snow out of our driveway
for the thirtieth time this year

“…the stupid little fucking dog isn’t praying. In fact, he’s doing the same damn thing religious people supposedly do each night before they go to bed: Begging for treats.”

I don’t normally get all pissy about stupid photos, but three separate versions of this one are “most emailed”. And if I get another one of those damned emails, my friends, someone’s going to require a colonoscopy to to have it removed from their system.

photo credit: AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye

…”goat”, of course, being a euphemism for “anything that pisses me off.”

regular readers of this blog (all 3.1 of you per month*, on average, i believe) will likely recall that i’m usually nicer over here. sorry for the bursting of certain bubbles and all that, but today i have a rant. i haven’t exactly read everything that’s available though the Blogswarm Against Theocracy, but i’ve read a lot of it. and a lot of it pisses me off. of course, a lot of other things piss me off, too, and the read can decide whether or not that’s the product of a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, or having children, or this upcoming move, or what. regardless, i’m about to rant. Happy Easter.

WHAT REALLY GETS MY GOAT.

1. Atheists who position their arguments seemingly from the stance that Atheism is a religion. yeah, that’s right, i started with “us” first. why? because when we talk like we deserve the same recognition as organized religion, non-profit churches, and government-sanctioned endeavors to help those in need, we simply obviate how much we fail to understand about society and government. Atheism is not a religion. it’s bad enough that the fundamentalists keep trying to fit us in that box. let us not do so as well.
2. Christian fundamentalists who promote methods by which their special brand of intolerance can be inflicted on the general public. and by that i mean everything from anti-abortion legislation to protesting funerals of Iraq war veterans.
3. School systems which require, as a portion of the graded curriculum, the attendance of middle-school (junior high) children in abstinence-only education. this is, in fact, one of the most subtly nefarious blurring of that already-compromised line between Church and State.
4. Agnostics who spend 3/4 of whatever it is that they say or write in the communication of obtuse caveats in the vain hope that whatever eventually becomes the point of their message will not offend anyone. seriously, we understand that the point of agnosticism is largely to leave all options open so that with your last dying breath you can suddenly become Christian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever and thus be “saved”, no matter what. we don’t need to be told that you find every religious teaching to be beneficial and worthwhile and respectable and “neat” every time you open your mouth. jump into whatever pool it is you chose with both feet and get yourself wet. because right now all you’re doing is wandering aimlessly with a lukewarm drink in your hand and getting sunburned.
5. Intelligent Designers who fail to understand the inherent irony in that title, considering the fact that its ideals are largely spouted by some of the most willfully ignorant people in the world, for whom “intelligence” is but a dim, fading light at the end of a tunnel that they don’t even realize they’re standing in, and yet forcibly desire to inflict their petulant myopia on the world at large.
6. School systems and governments who cave in to the Intelligent Designers.
7. Fundamentalists who seek to destroy everything they cannot understand, including Art and people who “shockingly” have different perspectives and beliefs.
8. “News” people who have compromised any sense of common decency, let alone journalistic integrity, to “report” the “news” that they are fed from the Bush Administration and its Congressional sycophants.
9. The people of this community who now look at me askance and pretend as if i’m suddenly not trustworthy just because i’ve admitted, within their hearing, that i do not hold any particular belief in their god. there’s surprisingly fewer of them than i thought there would be, but seriously, your lips, my sphincter. enjoy.

what does all that have to do with the separation of Church and State? well, some of that is inherently obvious. the rest of it exists in our society as a by-product of the intolerance which naturally springs from a semi-religious governmental status quo. as i noted in this post (also here), the public’s view on politics is largely that politicians should show some form of allegiance to some form of religion. which, in light of the fact that what people want is the confidence that their leaders have a spiritual side, is quite ironic, because religion often has incredibly little to do with spirituality. but before i digress too much, let me point out that this is the same thing the public generally wants of itself as well. a person’s spiritual shortcomings, moral turpitude, lack of common decency—all can and will be overlooked provided they attend church regularly and at least pretend to drink the religious Kool-Aid.

which, of course, merely underscores the lack of common sense that exists on quite a large scale.

and it’s having to deal with that lack of common sense on a perpetual basis that really gets my goat.

* this number, by the way, is completely made up and full of shit, in case you were wondering. since it’s my blog, i steadfastly refuse to apologize for making up certain metrics relating to the blog itself, or to the numbers of individuals, in part or in whole, who give a flying shit about anything i write.

---

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1. blog against theocracy
2. anti-theocracy
3. religious hegemony
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Look, this is a real simple thing. The country was founded by mostly-Christian individuals who were possessed of the foresight, maturity, and wherewithal to understand that the edicts of the religions and religious denominations had no place with an operable role in government. In fact, they made incredible sacrifices to distance themselves from their European church-states. In fact, they made great sacrifices, including their livelihoods, the lives of their family members, and in many cases their own lives, to ensure the separation of Church and State. The Mike Huckabees in the world that want to interject specifically religious dogma into the the Constitution have it exactly wrong, and every time they spout those desires, they prove that their eclectic version of America is not what America was founded to be, or has ever been. It’s not the America that our soldiers have fought and died to preserve. And it’s not an America that would have any hope of participating in a future in which the human race survives.

The Blogswarm Against Theocracy starts today and ends this Sunday. I will be attempting to have unique posts on these four blogs:

1. the otherwhirled
2. perpetual dawnne
3. synthaetica
4. mock, paper, scissors (thanks, Tengrain!)

{this opening post has been cross-posted to my three blogs as a way of saying “yes, i’m here, and no, i’m not going to let the bizarre mortgage triangle we currently living under adversely affect my ability to post this weekend!}

Subscribe to the Blogswarm’s official feed here:

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i had three posts in the works for the March 19 Blogswarm, and as it happened, i neglected to have them saved in the Wordpress database. thanks to some beta software on this computer, when i hybernated the computer because three realtors were bringing prospective buyers through our house yesterday (one of whom didn’t call first like he’s supposed to, no less), the system didn’t wake up. the resulting hard reboot lost me a bout two hours of blog-work. go figure. i ALWAYS save drafts, or draft in a text editor. but not yesterday (or night before last, for that matter). i think this whole selling-the-house-and-preparing-to-move shin-dig has me pretty scattered. never a dull freakin’ moment, anyway.

i feel compelled, though, to follow up with some notes on the day, because as inferred yesterday, the current Iraq war hits a bit close to home for me as a Gulf War veteran. not that i think my personal considerations on it are any more important or dynamic than those who have served or are serving in the current war, but that i had given my word to support the blogswarm endeavor, and failed to adequately do so. the chagrin-meter leans heavily to the right.

so naturally, when the realtors were done traipsing through the house and not giving us an offer immediately, and when the children were finally tucked into bed, and after i’d finished up some client work, i at least managed to get out and do some reading. one of the things that quickly struck me was that {insert almost any other blogger’s online identity or blog name here} writes better than me, and i’m not just talking about the presumably-appropriate use of capital letters. i still had a lot of what i’d written in my head, and i could have theoretically replicated my previous efforts, but after an hour or so of reading, i realized how redundant that would have been. great minds think alike after all, although putting myself in their company is probably a bit dishonest. so instead, on the off-chance that you might have missed some of these fine posts, allow me to serve you by including a brief synposis and link to their thoughts, witticisms and insights.

some notes from my overnight readings

the more you blog, the more you toot.

something like that, anyway.

Some unshaven simian has cursed me—i mean, tagged me—with the gratuitously insipid middle name meme.

TEH RULEZ, as copied from the accursed simian’s blog:

1. You have to post the rules before you give your answers.
2. You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don’t have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother’s maiden name).
3. At the end of your blog post, you need to tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. (Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged.)

it is potentially of note that the simian in question did not comply with rule #3, and i only happened to notice the tagging of me by virtue of my dutiful inspection of his RSS feed. i guess he’s busy with his campaign and all. pfft. whatever.

like the aforementioned simian, i don’t follow rules, because rules are for the mindless masses who fail to recognize that exercising one’s free will in support of the greater good is beneficial. besides, why try to start setting a good example for my children now? not to mention the fact that “Dawnne” is one of my middle names already, and both it and the other one are too short to be “fun”, at least not in my opinion.

so, for the purposes of this meme, my middle name is “POOPYHEAD”, chosen for both its appropriate attribution in my case, and of course for its inherent sense of maturity and acumen.

· P ~ Pr0n. one of my first contracts when i was just starting out in the self-employed world was to code a database-driven image-delivery system for a pornography website. the cheap bastards never made their final payment, but were i to re-activate a certain email address, i could see how much it was being used. last time i checked, the system was installed on over 15,000 websites! fame! fortune! o wait…. i would have told the bastards to go fuck themselves, but i figure doing what they do for a living, they probably do that enough anyway.
· O ~ Objectivity. i am, actually, fairly objective. i consider it one of my finer qualities. i don’t consider myself to be perfectly consistent in this category, but i’m fairly (pardon the pun) conscientious about it.
· O ~ Omnivore. this is the fault of the Spouse Unit (aka Mrs. Other). when we met, i largely consumed cheap beer and dead cows with the occasional chicken. now, i actually eat my vegetables and fruits, drink wine, and catch myself from time to time actually wanting a salad.
· P ~ Poopyhead. no explanation required, i’m sure. what, you expected more? sue me.
· Y ~ . fuck. i just HAD to pick a word with “Y” in it, didn’t i? ummm…. YouTube. there ya go. as in, i watch some shit on YouTube but since i’m too goddamned lazy to videotape anything, i never contribute.
· H ~ Hungry. i really suck at making sure i have a good breakfast each morning, and here it is nearly 1:00 p.m. and i still haven’t eaten.
· E ~ Entelligent. as exemplified by my awesome speling skillz, i am extremely entelligent and thoroughly dedicated to taking memes seriously.
· A ~ Asshole. as pretty much exemplified by every post on the otherwhirled. so, bite me.
· D ~ Dumbass. this is what i will, no doubt, continue to be until #1 Son is somewhere in his 20’s, after which i will suddenly and mysteriously become insightful.

YOU ARE HEREBY TAGGIFIED: don’t argue with me. just do it.

1. Adam H
2. DolciDeleria
3. Stringer
4. Sorghum Crow
5. black marks on wood pulp
6. Daughter The First
7. The Spouse Unit
8. Scott

crap. that’s enough already. i’m pretty sure the rest of you on the blogroll (which i still need to fix here and resynchronize with the otherwhirled) have already been tagged.