Reading.

“Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”

Yummy, fat.

Homemade tortilla chips. 3/4" of Canola Oil warmed in a skillet on the stove plus cut up tortillas - they cook quick, and as I'd never done this before, I managed to burn the first few attempts, but overall, yummy.

On a limb.

Using the New York Times' fun little interactive map - This is how I'm calling the Election.


Thank you, please come again.

Two things.

Two things happened at work tonight that amused me. Many, many things happened that didn't amuse me. But we won't go there.

First - all my coworkers thought I was fired, earlier today. The schedule for next week was posted and I wasn't on it.

You wouldn't think that that, by itself, would indicate someone was fired... but that's sort of how people get fired at my work, they're just no longer on the schedule... (don't get me started on just how incredibly wrong that is...)

So I got to joke with our manager, who came in to listen to the band tonight, about how the morning bartender had called him at 11am, asking why I got fired... only to be told that I was going on vacation, and had made getting this next week off a condition of my being hired. And that I was, in no way, fired.

However, every other coworker who looked at the schedule had to be reassured, individually, that I was not fired.

One even gave me a hug. I thought it was ridiculously funny.

(Particularly because another girl got "written up" for something really stupid the other day, burst into tears in the middle of her shift, and has been going back and forth about whether she wants to quit or not... and I got written up for being a few minutes late yesterday, and all my coworkers thought I should be indignant, or distressed, or something, and I thought it was hilarious - cause like, I was three minutes late... like... really, ya gonna write me up for that? - and they don't really understand my attitude. Which is, that our manager is pretty ineffectual, and if he wants to have a power trip by writting me up he can go right ahead of do so, it doesn't effect me, because it's not about me, it's about him).

Second. On said schedule, there was a note, "Servers who work Friday Nights should start thinking of a Halloween Costume".

I always close Friday Nights.

I love costuming. Dressing up is totally my thing.

But not at work. You're kidding me right???

But no. So I was giving the kitchen a hard time about how they should have to dress up too, when one of the cooks suggested I go as a Librarian... we'll disregard that Librarian is a really non-descript and uninspiring character, and focus on the fact that my mind immediately went to Sarah Palin.

I think I'm going to work as Sarah Palin for Halloween.

(With a big, fat Obama button on the lapel of my Skirt-suit.)

Thank goodness -

Thomas Friedman starts to touch on what really strikes me as disgusting about Sarah Palin's rhetoric.


When I was previously working for the wife of a career military man, I could never understand her passionate hatred for any and all taxes... she didn't seem to realize that her entire adult life, from the age of 19 when she married him, her children's life, everything she had, was paid for my the American Taxpayer who paid her husband's salary.

She hated the whole tax structure, federal and state, income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and then employment taxes and business taxes when she tried to start her own business... she thought the federal government was the enemy and the state government not really worth thinking about... and again - I wondered if she ever realized how pathetic it was to hold such hatred from the overarching structure that supported her.

How can you have so much patriotic support for the military, to believe so strongly in the military's mission, it's absolute right to be out there, messing with the whole world, without believing in the absolute right of that same government that sends that military??? It's one thing to dislike policies, or practices, but to inherently distrust the government's right to exist at home, but believe in it's right to exist and exert it's influence overseas, is just hard to wrap my mind around.


However - Sarah Palin seems to be able to stride across that huge gulf of understanding and make it disappear - because, as she said, We need government to get out of the way of American success, while at the same time insisting that it exerts all possible oversight.

Goodluck.