I’m frustrated.
I was on my way to the store to get breakfast things for the boys so I asked Beth if she wanted anything. She thought for a moment and said “Hash browns?” I told her that sounded yummy and I’d get some shredded potatoes along with the eggs, butter and milk for the small humans.
Of course I forgot the shredded potatoes.
When she reminded me of this, I was stunned and shamed. She protested when I told her I’d go back to the store and insisted that I wasn’t to do that.
No problem.
Once the kids were fed, I peeled three small potatoes, shredded them using the low-mileage Cuisinart, chopped up a fresh jalapeno, and threw it all on the griddle. They came out just fine. 🙂 Beth added some gravy, which I think should become a tradition everywhere.
So all this discussion has two goals: One: to show that when it comes to breakfasts, I keep my promises and Two: to ask the assembled masses how the hell do you get hash browns to crisp up like the do at the Waffle House? I can’t get ’em to crisp up no matter whose potatoes I use! The griddle’s nice and hot. I can’t figger it.
Anyone with any knowledge of how to do this, please discuss.
Thank you.
Today I deserve Kudos
I’m going to kill Nate.
I’m going to kill the little shit five year old.
We have a snack bucket, as I call it. It’s a large canvas container stored at ground level in which are all sorts of snack foods that they can munch on in between meals. (Nate especially since he’s a bit underweight.) Most of the time, they’ll ask “Dan, can I have something from the snack bucket?” If it’s not too close to meal time, then sure, no sweat. Sometimes if they’re really hungry, they can have their choice of two items as long as they eat it at the table.
Since they often wake up and get out of bed early, there’s usually no problem with them picking out something for themselves as a mini-breakfast to hold ’em over until a proper breakfast can be prepared for them. Anyway, they are usually pretty judicious about snacking from it and they don’t abuse the privilege.
Until today.
First thing this morning. No caffeine. No breakfast. I hadn’t even stretched and scratched my nuts before I opened the garbage can to toss out something I picked up coming down the stairs. Mixed in with the banana peels and coffee grounds, I found about 10-12 open, uneaten Kudos snack bars. Opened. Uneaten. Untouched by human hands. Not even licked. All of them in with the garbage. May as well have just thrown a five dollar bill in the trash.
One by one, I sorted through the wrappers both empty and full, trying not to get any of last night’s pork chop fat and baked potato with butter, bacon bits and sour cream on my fingers. The smell was enough to knock a buzzard off a manure wagon at fifty paces, but the more I counted, the less I could believe it. And the madder I got.
“Who opened all these snacks and didn’t eat them?” turning to ask sternly, the first words out of my mouth after the customary greeting of the day. “Nate? Did you do this?”
I suspected Nate because this is just his style. Nate’s misbehaviors are usually more creative than older brother Garrett’s. When something happens, Nate is the go-to guy for the guilt.
“Nate, Did you open all these and just throw them away?”
“Now Dan,” Nate starts to explain tilting his head slightly as if I’m too stupid to immediately understand. “Yes, because I was trying to find one of the M&M ones and it took me awhile to find it.”
At least he had a reason.
My blood pressure shot up past normal to patent pending. (If you’re not a nurse, next time you get your BP checked at the doc, look at the sphygmomanometer scale and this line will become instantly funny. And, hey, I just got to use the word “sphygmomanometer” casually in a sentence!)
I sat him firmly in his chair — I didn’t lose my temper, though I was VERY close. I put on my best Dad face and said “Nate, that’s about five bucks worth of food you threw in the trash. Do you understand that you’re not supposed to do that?”
“But Dan…”
“NO BUT’S!” I shouted, livid. “That’s unacceptable! You just lost free access to the snack bucket!”
So as of today, the snack bucket gets put out of reach.
Afterwards, I made both the perpetrator and the innocent bystander, i.e.: Nate and Garrett respectively, a breakfast of cheese omelets.
What a great guy, huh?
I’m such a good guy, I deserve a reward. I’d go have a tasty Kudos bar as a well-deserved reward for not killing Nate, but I can’t ’cause the little shit opened ’em all and put ’em in the garbage can!
Moore, Oklahoma
I’m still glued to the TV looking at the awful photos from Oklahoma. I’ve lived through, earthquakes, fires, more earthquakes, other tornadoes and always come out relatively unscathed. To see the level of destruction that nature has imposed across such a wide area is absolutely heartbreaking. I can’t imagine facing that sort of disaster.
I experienced the Northridge Earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994, and saw a lot of isolated destruction not unlike what’s happened in Moore, OK. But it was just that — isolated. The devastation in Moore is so wide-spread it is truly unimaginable. I really can’t wrap my head around what I’m seeing on TV.
I see the pictures of entire neighborhoods wiped out and try to imagine myself in the middle of all that. Who would you call? Who COULD you call? I’m a guy and we’re typically problem solvers and I can’t imagine how overwhelming it must be. I mean, I know I’d have to be seeking immediate shelter for me and my loved ones, but after that? Where do you start? I can’t imagine. Unbelievable.
2:55 am
Woke up a bit ago cause I was hungry. Got a small snack and I’m listening to the nearby freight trains doing their switching or whatever it is they do. Fostoria is still a big railroad town as I think I mentioned before. Even after all the years living elsewhere, hearing the trains at night is like a comfort to me. It’s how I know I’m home.
Even in Virginia. On those nights when the humidity seems oppressive, I can sometimes hear the trains there too. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, it brings me right back here to this town and this house.
Mom and Dad moved here in 1970 and lived here ever since. It saddens me to think about someone else living here someday and that I won’t have access to the comfort of moments like these anymore. But I guess I’ve been fortunate enough to have this available to me for the last forty plus years. I’ve always appreciated it when I’m here. I just know I’ll miss it someday. But not tonight.
Senior Leadership
In 2004, I was selected to attend the U.S. Army War College through their distance learning option. Right about the same time, I discovered that I had enough active duty time to retire from the Army about nine or ten years early, so a War College diploma became unnecessary from the professional and fiscal perspectives. So I withdrew from the course.
However, before I withdrew, I completed a little bit of the course material. The first sub course after I completed and passed the initial writing assignment was about senior leadership. While I’m a lousy student for the most part, I do occasionally pay attention and this time I paid attention.
The biggest thing I came away with was that senior leadership is more about building consensus and negotiating solutions than it is about the more familiar vision of military officers leading troops around the motor pool or into battle. During my six years assigned to the Pentagon, I found this to be accurate. As a colonel, I observed that organizations needed me to be a consensus builder and needed far less of the stereotypical motivational leadership than the units to which I’d been assigned in the past. The War College course material said that this is as it should be. And I agree.
Fast forward to today. If, as I believe, senior leadership is about consensus building and assuming we consider that those running the legislative and executive branches of government are to be considered the senior leaders of our Nation, then I contend that Washington is suffering a severe leadership deficit.
Severe.
This is not about Republican versus Democrat. This is not about left or right. If one examines the actions of the President and the leaders in both houses of Congress, it is clear to me that no one – not one individual is publicly engaging in any sort of leadership whatsoever nor is anyone in DC attempting to bill themselves as a true senior leader.
I could list quote after quote from either side of the aisle in Congress and from the White House supporting the observation that the blame game is well underway. But since you’re all my friends, I know that you’re well aware of current events and can draw your own conclusions from news reports. I believe that we can all agree that little if any consensus building is happening publicly. If it’s happening behind closed doors in smoke-filled halls of Congress, no one knows about it and frankly I’d be surprised if it were.
But back to the point: Our Nation needs leaders – real leaders who possess the necessary senior leadership skills and experience and the will to exercise them to the benefit of the Nation. We elect our President to LEAD the business of government not to observe the business of government. We elect our President to LEAD not to cajole and belittle legislators into specific behavior. We elect our Congressmen to represent our interests, negotiate among themselves and the Executive branch and come to consensus on viable solutions to fulfill our interests while maintaining the best interests of the entire Nation.
At this, they are all failing miserably.
There is no leadership in Washington because there exists no attempt to build consensus among those in the government who disagree.
I believe that the President, the single most visible face of the Nation and by definition the most senior leader in government has the DUTY to lead and build consensus in the National interest in spite of the political climate. I believe the President should be leading the Nation in the context of the United States as his top priority. The President isn’t the President of the Democratic Party, but the President of the United States.
I observe none of this and therefore conclude that in the context of senior leadership, the White House is leaderless.
As for Congress, I recognize and embrace that it is by nature a more partisan organization. I expect there to be discourse, disagreement and politics played among its members. But in the end, I expect the senior leaders in Congress to lead their respective parties while building consensus in the context of the Nations best interests.
Sadly, I observe none of that either. Therefore, I also conclude that in the context of senior leadership, Congress is leaderless.
Its been said by hundreds of other journalists, commentators and other observers that our government is the most divided, most partisan and least productive body in generations. I agree.
I do not believe, however, that this is a problem resulting from a clash of ideas that has no resolution. I do not believe that the Legislative and Executive branches of government are hopelessly deadlocked because there’s a great ideological gulf between them. I believe that it’s the lack of leadership skills and experience that makes resolution unlikely. I believe that no one has the will to find consensus and in fact, I believe that the senior leaders of our Nation think that consensus is a dirty word.
Our senior leaders aren’t leading. It’s that simple.
Another Facebook Rant
It’s time for a rant and my rants mean run-on sentences. Grammar police, you might want to look away.
I’m not going to single anyone out but yes, I’m going to bitch about something that some of you like to do that just completely pisses me off.
Yes, I see your status update, and I’m delighted that you have chosen to post something for an hour in support of some probably worthwhile cause, but I am not going to repost it. Failing to repost it is not meant to imply that I…
a.) Don’t care.
b.) Am a racist.
c.) Don’t support beating cancer. (Who LIKES cancer?)
d.) Am a Republican.
e.) Am a Democrat.
f.) Am a Libertarian.
g.) Am Gay.
h.) Am Straight.
i.) Am Asexual, Bisexual or Trisexual. (Figure that one out, wise guys!)
j.) Prefer Picard to Kirk.
k.) Prefer Kirk to Picard.
l.) Prefer TOS vs. TNG vs. DS9 vs. Voyager vs. Enterprise vs. J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek
m.) Approve of any combination of l.) above.
So don’t infer it.
I will support you to the extent that I’m able and to the extent that I give a shit, but the one way I will NOT is to repost anything and everything that looks like a good cause, because I’m just not interested in spending that much time administering my Facebook status and besides I’m just generally not that fucking interested in the first place.
Repost this as your status if you agree. If you don’t, you’re a jackass.
About Weapons
I never really planned on owning firearms. Frankly, I never gave it much thought. My father, who passed away a couple years ago, always had a small Ruger .22 pistol at the ready for dispatching marauding groundhogs from his garden to that great groundhog beyond. But to my knowledge, that’s all he ever used it for. When I was a little kid, he took me out in the woods and let me shoot it. My admittedly vague memories of the day are that he told me it was a hair trigger and then I popped off three rounds into a nearby tree and that was that.
At summer camp, I always took marksmanship classes, though for a couple of years, I got really excited about archery. Archery has a certain elegance about it that I still find appealing. I even had my own bow and a modest quiver of arrows from the Bear Archery Company and got to be pretty good for a kid of my limited age. But as most things do when you’re young, I lost interest after a couple of years and discovered some other hobby to pursue.
Fast forward to the Army. In my nearly 29-year career, I shot all sort of goodies from howitzers and machine guns to the Beretta 9mm, the standard issue for Army officers for the last half of my career. For nearly 270 days straight while deployed to Bosnia, I strapped my 9mm to my shoulder and walked around with live ammunition, occasionally loading the magazine into the weapon for trips off post. That was mandatory. So was clearing it three times a day on each trip to the chow hall. Safety first and all that.
I’ve never been shot at and I’ve never fired a weapon in self-defense even though I’ve spent time in places where such things routinely occurred. Let’s face it, rifle ranges are intended to work in one direction only, and if you find yourself on a two-way rifle range, you’re in a shootin’ war of some sort. I got lucky and never had to experience that.
So the upshot (pun intended) of all this is that I have fired and carried firearms for most of my adult life. Though even during the Los Angeles riots in the early ‘90’s, I’ve never been in a situation in which I needed to brandish my weapon for defense or for any other reason. But I understand weapons, know how to use them and have a healthy respect for the damage they can inflict when used for nefarious purposes.
After the massacre at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater a few months back, I found myself thinking about what I’d do if I found myself in such a situation. (We guys always do that! You know, like could I land a 747 if the pilots were all out of commission?) More importantly, I found myself thinking about what I would do to defend Nate or Garrett, the 5 and 7-year-old kidlings I often take to the movies. My first thought was that I’d hope I have the presence of mind and the courage to cover them with my body and protect them. But the more I thought about this, the more I thought that all I was doing was trying to prevent them from becoming victims not really defending them. As for me? Well, such an action would have no hint of defense in it for me. Instead, I would be instantaneously submitting myself to victimhood no matter the perceived nobility of purpose. And I didn’t like the sound of that.
It’s an academic discussion. I fully recognize that such a scenario is extremely unlikely to unfold in my presence making it all a fun exercise in mental gum chewing. But I still didn’t like the idea of immediately submitting myself to victimhood. It bugged me.
Then came the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. Just as the rest of our Nation did, I watched the news unfold as the information assaulted me from TV, radio and the Internet. I thought about what it would be like to have been in a position to stop the slaughter or at the very least to mitigate the carnage. But I would have been just as helpless as the principal at Sandy Hook, Dawn Hochsprung, who armed only with her passion to protect her students, courageously and nobly tried to subdue the vicious, crazy bastard and lost her life in the process. She didn’t stand a chance. She became a victim the moment that she took the first step toward the attacker.
I’m not going to make the argument about gun control from the facts in these words I’ve written. I’m not in a position to make decisions for you or for anyone else. Each of us has to decide what they can live with and what they can’t. When you stare at yourself in the mirror in the morning, we each have to live with whatever decisions we make. I’m not going to make decisions for anyone about what constitutes “having done enough” to protect the people they care about. But for me, I’ve come to the conclusion that submitting myself to victimhood in order to protect my family is not enough.
I’m trained and will continue to train. I have a healthy respect for firearms and what they can do. I also know that were I ever to draw a firearm in defense of life or property, I’m going for the head shot. There’s no such thing as “shoot to wound.” That protects the attacker and not the family. I’m not in the attacker protecting business.
So now I’m armed. Not all the time, of course, but I’m not going to publish openly under what conditions I will be. I don’t like the idea, but for me it’s not enough to hope that you’re not going to get hit by a random gunman’s bullet. Hope is no more of a defense than it is an economic strategy. My checkbook balance represents this harsh reality. My legally concealed handgun represents it too.
Our world has become a very different and very weird place since my dad took me out to shoot his .22 Ruger back in the early 60’s. The world has even changed since I left Los Angeles just ten years ago. It used to seem that you could stay safe by avoiding parts of town known for higher crime rates, but it seems as though it’s getting tougher and tougher to do that. It’s not enough for me to avoid bad areas and plan to sacrifice myself for the safety of my family.
It’s just not enough.
The Morning After the Night Before
To all my politically inclined Facebook friends:
Good morning! Either congratulations are in order or condolences. Either way, our Nation has chosen its leader without war, without bloodshed and without a change in the fundamental way our Nation is governed. Our system — the American system of government defined in the Constitution of the United States did its job and a peaceful selection of a leader by the masses has occurred.
Do not take this for granted.
There are many nations around the world in which a transition of any kind results in death, destruction and the suppression of rights. As I write this at 9:25 AM on the day after election day, my cable TV is still working, my Internet access is still blazingly fast (according to Comcast) and I can still search for and find opposing views on any issue my meager brain can conjure.
Do not take this for granted.
Yes, there ought to be election reform. Yes, there ought to be less pissing and moaning between candidates for any office. Yes, it would be lovely if the candidates focused on ideas for the Nation instead of on how to get elected. And yes, the governed need to feel as though their vote actually impacts the election; that they’re closer to their government than they are now. But I would not trade this system of government for any other system of government in the world.
I will not take this for granted.
I’ve listened to the sniping among my friends and colleagues. I’ve seen the anger over whose candidate is better, more qualified, more personable and more competent, and most of that has really turned me off to the political process. But I voted. I’ve had my say. And now it’s time for all of us who are far more alike than we are different to recognize that we are Americans FIRST. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Yellow, Purple, Chartreuse — frankly I’m not interested in your partisan rants. We are Americans, dammit, and we can and should come together and stay together regardless of who won last night. We are stronger, better, more productive and more compassionate when we concentrate on our similarities than our differences.
So today, instead of gloating or drinking heavily, look at that person on my Facebook page whose posts you hate to read ’cause it really gets on your nerves and think to yourself “We’re both Americans. I’ll bet that person likes ice cream just like I do.” Find the commonalities. Find the things that make us alike rather than the things that make us different. You’re all my friends for a reason: I’ve found something in each of you that is similar to something I find in myself. You all, my Facebook friends, have me in common. (And there’s no one more common than me!)
See if you can find what else you have in common with one another. You might just be surprised that you’re far more alike than you think.
And never take that for granted.
Dan