College Football!

Okay, so this isn't what I said I was going to post about but I MUST talk about this!

USC lost to Oregon State last night. Lowly Oregon State, which, before last night, was considered in the bottom half of Pac-10 teams.
Why was everybody so freaking in love with USC before last night? Do they not watch what is happening out there on the West Coast? The freaking Mountain West and the WAC have both been beating up on the "better" tier of teams from the Pac-10. And what has USC done so far this year? Let's see, they flattened a Virginia team that's not even favored to beat perennial doormat Duke tomorrow. Then they took ten days off and beat up on Ohio State at home in LA--that's The Ohio State University, the football program that has made an utter laughingstock of the BCS championship the last two seasons and barely held off Troy last week. We already know Ohio State is grotesquely overrated, they should never have been ranked 5th when they played USC, and they shouldn't be ranked 14th now. They aren't even the second best team in a weak Big Ten, and might not be third best. And why is any of this a surprise????

I still don't understand why everybody lost faith in Georgia after week 1, or why ESPN commentators were as recently as yesterday afternoon announcing that the national championship would be played between USC and a team from the Big 12. Where is the SEC love, people? I hate the SEC, but even I can admit that the SEC championship this year will almost assuredly be played between two teams both of which are better than whatever teams show up in the BCS Championship game from any other conference. If anything, BYU looks like a better pick for the BCS than USC, and they have since week 1. Just because USC plays in LA and the team's stars look good in photo spreads and Pete Carroll gives his local brand of kool-aid away free at pressers does not mean they are the top team in the country.

Thank you, Oregon State, for clarifying what was already clear and making plain what was already obvious.

/rant

Um... The House Comes With These... Things

Many older houses come with animals inside. Ours is absolutely infested with spiders. Not the bad kind of spiders, but kind of creepy all the same. They're getting better, though, now that we live here. A friend of ours bought an older home a few years ago and found a squirrel nest in the attic big enough to stable a pony in. We were spared that particular annoyance, thank goodness.

But our neighbors moved out a few days after we moved in, and they left some things behind. (They also stole some things, including the refrigerator, out of the house they were renting, and left the garage piled floor to ceiling with kitchen garbage. In bags, but still, piled floor to ceiling with garbage.) They left behind their indoor-outdoor cat, a white and orange tabby tomcat. He is going to the humane society soon to become a regular plain cat instead of a tom cat, because he is the only male cat in the area and we can't afford to spay a bunch of cats.

Because a bunch of cats is what we have. There is a mama cat (Mama Cita, for now), who is a standard brown tabby. And there are these things. Three tabby kittens, very similar in appearance, and shockingly similar to Tribble. We have been calling them Dasher, Vixen, and Blitzen (that's in order, left to right, in the photo below) for the last couple days, although last night I decided maybe we should give them names of minor characters from Star Trek series (to go along with Tribble).

They're very nice kittens. They stayed reasonably still for this photo, which Tribble generally doesn't do unless she's asleep. In the background you can see the tom cat, who I've been calling Creamsicle (the obvious choice) although Smittywife suggested Orange Pop, since he's the dad and all. (But he's fathered his last kittens.) I like both names. Perhaps I'll let the humane society choose when they receive him for surgery.

We're keeping them as outdoor-only cats, although they have become rather too comfortable at the house and like to sit in the windowsills and look in at us. I think we shall have to start giving them their food in the garage or something so they don't get so comfortable at the house. Creamsicle/Orange Pop sits on the porch and just stares. It's toughest for him, because I know he was used to coming inside before. The kittens and Mama Cita have only been outdoor cats. Once there's money coming in, I'll get them all spayed, but none of them have had any shots and they probably have some fleas, so it won't be cheap to take them in (the Humane Society will give them their shots and everything at $10 a shot; it's a lot cheaper than taking them to a vet, but considering that they're not even really our cats... four cats times $49/each to spay, times $10 per shot (2 shots per cat), I mean, I just want to prevent future kitten outbreaks, not spend $300 turning them into pets. Maybe there's a charity that will pay for this for us...). In any event, neutering Orange Pop should at least prevent future kitten outbreaks for a while; that is the hope.

Anyway. Just wanted to post that adorable picture. There will be house pictures galore coming soon!

Wow. A Whole Month.

So it's been 33 days since my last post. I can't say I didn't warn you, but then, even the warning was rather sunnier than this.
I have lots of updates I want to post. We have a new house, of course, and we've done SO MUCH work to it. I can't wait to start posting before and after pictures and show off what we've done. I need to organize (and download from the camera) a lot of those pictures. But I want to start with a nice short post every day, or at least four or five days a week. That seems like a fair goal. So this little post will have to stand for today. But soon, I promise you, there will be pictures. Many pictures. Yaay!

A period of wandering

Tribble appears to have been involved in precipitating the events that led to the ultimate demise of my laptop recently. I can't blame her much since it was such a piece of junk already, but in any event, posting has lagged recently at least in part because I don't have my computer right now. The no-computer problem will likely remain a problem for a couple of months at this point, barring unforeseen offers of well-compensated employment, but I will endeavor to make reasonable efforts to keep this space updated, or, barring that, to keep a record of things that should be posted on the blog because of general interest--things like photos of the work proceeding apace at the new house, for example, musings about the nature of moving, and information regarding the holy trinity of employment, continuing education, and the sale of a condo. Big news, in other words. The book reviews will have to wait and political coverage will probably be pretty limited, but the payoff will come in pictures of house renovation, which I think personally will be much more interesting.

If you are so inclined I would request your continued prayers and thoughts for us as regards the sale of this condo and the search for employment. We definitely need them.

Sticky

Did you know, it's hot in a house without air conditioning (or electricity of any sort) in the middle of the afternoon when it's 98 degrees outside? It is. In case you were wondering. I've been working on a few little projects, which I'm attempting to document with photography, but you'll have to wait to see them because Smittywife hasn't seen the projects yet, doesn't even know what they are (though she may suspect). So she gets to see them all first. Then I'll post. Rest assured I am staying busy, though not exactly in the way I expected when I came up here.

For no reason at all, I'm going to post a picture. It's a dam somewhere in the Western U.S. I flew over it a number of years ago on the way to Hawai'i.

Live on Location

This week, Smitty's World will be coming to you on location from Anderson, South Carolina. If I remember to post, that is. I'm getting some work done on the new house to make it move-in ready, so we can get up here soon and I can get a job. Yaay, job.

Speaking of jobs, today is a grim anniversary indeed for Americans. On this date in 1861, the United States government, in an effort to pay for the Civil War, first instituted an income tax. Boo! Hiss! The tax was to total 3% of all income over $600. My how inflation has changed us, huh; in 1861 $600 would buy you a quarter section in the Midwest, a house from the Sears catalog to put on it, and enough seed to plant your first crop of corn.

The tax was rescinded in 1872, although Congress passed and rescinded various income taxes several times before the Supreme Court, God bless them, determined that an income tax was unconstitutional in an 1895 case. This led to the wretched and unspeakable 16th Amendment, passed in 1913, authorizing Congress to levy a tax on incomes "from whatever source derived."

I've always wondered whether money launderers and other criminals who, of course, never report the proceeds of their crimes to the government, might not be prosecuted and punished for tax evasion in addition to whatever property crime they may have committed.

An August 3 Celebration

Let's see. About, oh, 516 years ago today, a fellow by the name of Cristoforo Colombu (or Christopher Columbus to us Anglophones) departed Portugal on his first voyage to what would turn out to be the Americas. Not that he was the first person to site the Americas, nor even the first European to do so, nor even did he realize he'd landed someplace that was not actually Asia. But he was indeed the first European to deliberately sail west from Europe with the goal of bumping into land and actually succeed at doing so, and he initiated modern trans-Atlantic travel. Think of it as an advance Columbus Day, and celebrate it however you would like. Why not look at some old maps for a while?

Um...

Hi there. Sorry about the loss of the daily updates for the last few days. Smittyworld has been undergoing a lot of deep thought and potential changes and things like that, and I don't always feel comfortable talking about financial and employment issues here, at least not right now. It's more a thing Smittywife and I talk about. And I don't have any other deep thoughts right now; the sort of life changes we're pondering have a way of pushing most other issues to the side. I'd get back on the daily celebrations, I really would, but I'm going to be heading to South Carolina next week and probably won't be posting every day anyway. I have a great one for the 14th of August, so I should write a few more. And if anything really exciting happens I promise I'll post about that.
Of course, the whole point of the daily celebrations, really, was to give me something to post while my emotional status was otherwise too occupied to warrant meaningful posts of any other sort. So I should really get back to them for the time being.
So... August 1st. Let's see. Well, this is the 8th month of the year. Halloween is starting to mingle with back-to-school in the stores, and the craft store we favor (Jo-Ann etc) is already chock-a-block with Christmas. I don't want to celebrate the too-early celebration of holidays, though.

But how about this. Today marks the anniversary of the opening of the very first Scout Camp, held the week of August 1, 1907, on Brownsea Island in England by Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell was a military scout for much of his career, and published some of the first books on Scouting as a profession, as well as Scouting for Boys, the book that started the youth Scouting movement. The camp that opened on August 1st is now recognized by all worldwide Scouting organizations (including the Boy Scouts of America, the organization that granted Smitty the rank of Eagle Scout) as the true beginning of the youth Scouting movement. That's worth celebrating; Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are great organizations, and both Smittys were a part of their respective Scouting group. We hope to have our kids involved in Scouting some day, too. When there are kids. Which won't be for a while.

Today is also the birthday of the Jeep; the first one rolled off production lines on August 1st, 1941. I think the best drink to celebrate the Jeep would be a Mudslide.

Celebrate 29July

Today in 1868 Secretary of State William H. Seward officially certified that the 14th Amendment was a part of the Constitution. The 14th is the equal protection amendment, guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty, and property to all citizens. It was passed as a response to the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South following the Civil War, and also to guarantee citizenship to former slaves. It's been through a lot and has been argued over bitterly, but because of this amendment no state can deny to certain of its citizens the rights enjoyed by others. That's cause for celebration.