2011 was an… interesting year. This has been my first year since becoming unemployed from a full-time permanent job that I’ve not worked or earned any money at all. None. I’ve gotten a few interviews but nothing that’s actually progressed all the up to a pay check. I’ve also received no freelance work. Fortunately DeAnna is still gainfully employed and her job alone can cover the majority of our expenses. I know I can’t expect to receive unemployment benefits forever, and they are really dwindling now, but the supplemental income is helping to make ends meet. Seeing as how I can expect them to run out sometime in February I’m going to expand my job search to part-time and minimum wage positions, as any wage is better than no wage.

Back in October I receive a new smartphone for my birthday. It’s a Samsung T-499, which is kinda low-end, but function and does all those things I want a smartphone to do. I’m actually quite impressed with it. Even without installing any apps it was capable of just about everything I was looking for in a phone. A few apps later and it can now do things I never expected a phone to do (such as roll dice and look up rules for RPGs). I’m gonna have to get DeAnna one of these for her birthday, provided we have the income to afford the extra $35/month T-Mobile wants for 3G service.

Our cat Ember is now over a year old and has spent a full year with us. She is still so tiny. Here is a (blurry) photo of her:

We lost Jared this year. He was old, but not ancient, but very sick. I’ve had Jared since he was a kitten. I adopted him from the Humane Society, almost by accident. I had given a friend a ride so she could adopt a cat of her own, and I had asked to see a black kitten only a month or so old while I was waiting. As it turned out, she could not adopt as her apartment management could not be contacted to confirm they allowed pets, but rather than leaving empty handed she paid for my adoption of the kitten, which I named Jared. That was so long ago. I miss you Jared.

With our loss of Jared, we’ve considered getting a new kitten to keep Ember company, though we wanted to wait until after the new year to look. I’m not sure what we’ll be looking for but as with Ember, I’m sure something will come up and just the right time and will be perfect.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my cousin Mark moved in. His job is going well, though I’m not sure if it’s paying him enough to give him any independence. This coming year I’m hoping he’ll look into getting financial aid and get into school for something better. Any amount of independence won’t happen until after college, but he’ll be working in that direction and will be expanding his network of people he knows here in Phoenix. I’m worried he doesn’t get out enough, but who am I to talk?

Another one of our friends moved up to Seattle just prior to Thanksgiving. It seems that’s really the place to go, as we now know more people living up there than we do locally. Kinda weird since a long time ago DeAnna and I had decided if we were going to move anywhere but here, it’d be to Seattle. It’s comforting to know what once we make the move we’ll already know so many people there.

In the gaming world, my MMO of choice, City of Heroes, went free to play. This thrills me to no end. There are still plenty of perks to having a paid subscription, but it’s good to know if I can’t make the subscription payment for a month or two I can still play. My other MMO of choice (Lord of the Rings Online) went free to play last year, and I’m loving that as well. My new D&D campaign is going surprisingly well, though I’m still aching to actually play something rather than be the GM all the time. One of my players has offered to run, and is interested in taking over as GM for my campaign. I’ve never handed over the reins of my own campaign world before, so I’m a little scared and a lot excited over the idea. Best of all I’ll have a chance to play. I just hope I don’t try to back-seat GM or criticize too much.

Christmas has come and gone, and despite not having a lot of money to go around we managed to get gifts for everyone. Mom was thrilled to get Cowboys & Aliens, and we got Jacob a remote control helicopter (which I immediately broke after opening, but I’ll get him a new one come payday). We got mark an iTunes gift card for use with his iPhone and a 6-pack of Lucky Buddha beer (the bottles are shaped like a Buddha and the beer tastes great!). We did a gift exchange with our D&D group as well, which was awesome. I got Bruno, who is new to the game and who I don’t know that well, a 6-pack of Lucky Buddha beer. DeAnna got Marianne a set of spooky shot glasses. Rob made us an ornament made of copper wire which bears our name (we might keep this up year ’round). Shane got me a t-shirt (Sarcasm: the body’s natural defense against stupid) which actually fits. I’m of a large size and impossible to buy clothing for, and this is the first time anyone has bought me a piece of clothing that fit since I was 12. (Not entirely true, but I’m not counting the t-shirt gifts from my friend who already knew my size because he was the same).

Christmas Eve DeAnna and I took a drive around the neighborhood to take a look at all the decorations once more. Right around midnight some had decorated an entire neighborhood with luminaries. It was incredible! Many of them were still lit and they made the night more magical. I have no idea who was responsible for it, but I thank them for such a grand effort, despite the lateness of the hour it did not go unappreciated.

Well, it’s now the new year, and it’s time to pack up our decorations, and hopefully pack up a few things for a potential move in a few years. Provided the world doesn’t come to an end before then of course.

One such reaction I keep seeing, over and over again, is the suggestion the whole of congress should take a massive pay cut. The reason for this is that it should, somehow, enable government to simultaneously not raise taxes while continuing to fund programs such as Social Security. In fact, I’ve seem some suggest that a pay cut to members of Congress would make up the difference of savings that would be made if we cut the pay of our military personnel.

I’m a little confused about this. How many members of Congress to these people think we have? How much do these people think they’re getting paid? Let’s look at some numbers. There are currently some 535 members of Congress. A rough estimate of their annual pay is $100 million. Wow, sounds like a lot, right? Well, how many military personal are there? Currently, about 1.5 million (active duty). That works out to something like an extra $60 per year, per soldier. Wow. And that’s not taking into account the 1.5 million in reserve duty. Does it still sound like a lot of money? Look at it this way, if we upped and gave every member of our military (active and reserve) a pay cut of $30 a year (would anyone even notice?), we could buy a back up Congress. That’s how little we pay our government. We can practically buy another one with the spare change we find in couches.

So where could we get some more money? I vote taxes. I love taxes. I always pay my taxes. Taxes are awesome! Taxes pay for the police to protect me (debatable, but maybe if we paid them more), for the fire department to rescue me, for the state to educate me (again, debatable, but again, maybe if we paid them more). Taxes bring us parks and stadiums and public works and roads and the fix the city should something really, really bad happen). Hell, if we all paid more taxes, think of all the other cool stuff we could get! Health care, public transportation, housing.

Sure, sounds like socialism, but I like economic competition. I propose we all pay so much in taxes that everything we need is provided for us. Food, clothing, shelter, medical care and the ability to get to point A to point B if you don’t mind standing in line first. Then, anything you get paid from having a job (that’s left after paying taxes) can be spent on upgrades. Want a better house, or better food? Get a better job! Simple and fair and still (kinda) capitalism. The difference is the the have-nots still have something. Of course we’d have to make poverty illegal to make sure everyone works. If you don’t get a job, the government will lock you up in a prison/factory. This would rid us of illegal immigrants stealing the jobs we won’t do anyway because prison labor will be cheaper.

So no more talk about saving money by not paying our government! Or something… I may have missed my own point somewhere.

The full article can be found here: (http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/27/zacharias.kid.book/)

The general gist of the article seems to be along the lines of demonstrating the book isn’t funny because in the real world there are neglected children and parents use the word “fuck” a lot. I’m sure I’m not giving the author (Karen Spears Zacharias, author of “The Shelter of Mockingbirds: The Murder of 3-Year-Old Karly Sheehan.”) proper credit, but at least I’m presenting her writing for what it is.

Zacharias, in my humble opinion, doesn’t seem to understand the point of humor, and may not have a properly developed sense of what is funny. She quotes an expert on child development (Dr. David Arredondo, founder of The Children’s Program in the San Francisco metropolitan area) as saying “Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos.” You know something? I can’t imagine it.

Can you imagine anything you’d reasonably expect or desire a Jew, black person, Muslim or Latino to do because they were Jewish, black, Muslim or Latino? Well, can you imagine it without being racist? I can’t. How is expecting your child to go to sleep, and being frustrated he won’t, akin to racism?

Zacharias goes on to say Mansbach’s book “accurately portrays the hostile environment in which too many children grow up.” What? Show me such an environment. The problem here is there is no such environment to be founds within reality. An episode of The Family Guy more accurately portrays an environment (hostile or otherwise) in which children grow up.

Okay, so “far too many” parents say “fuck” and “bullshit” and other such obscenities. I’d question that. I’ve looked into this and I have not found a single American family that did not use such language. Sure, there are some that don’t use those words specifically, but they have words which mean the same thing and they use them.

I’d agree the book “Go the Fuck to Sleep” is not intended for children and it would be bad parenting to use as an actual bedtime story. Not because of the “message” it may send, but because as a society we have deemed the language used without to be inappropriate. But is it demeaning to children? Not at all.

I do think Zacharias sums up her article quite well by implying parents should be more like the parents in “all those beautifully illustrated storybooks.” Sure thing, let’s all get right on that. I’m sure we’ll all be ideal parents by modeling our behavior after the parents of Rapunzel and Cinderella.

And we lived happily ever after.

My cousin, Mark, moved up from Yuma. We’re giving him a play to crash while he looks for work and then saves up enough cash to get his own place. I haven’t seen Mark in… maybe 10ish years. Maybe more like 15. My only solid memories of him are from our grandparents house at Christmas, which was nearly 20 years ago. Funny thing is it turns out that’s his most solid memory of me too. I’m sure having the whole week on film (and recently put on a DVD) has nothing to do with it. Upon getting to know him, I’ve found Mark to be a great guy… meaning he’s an introverted gamer like the rest of us. He’s also motivated and hard working, or at least I get that impression as he got a job within a week of moving in and has already secured his own transportation to and from work.

After Mark had time to settle in (more or less), in came the visiting relatives. Aunt Jill (Marks’ mother) and my godmother, Sherry, came to visit for a few days. Well, Sherry for a few days, with Jill coming up for a few hours. I never really got to know Sherry. She’s my godmother, which in my family means Mom really liked her around the time I was born. Seems she really likes her now too, and the two had a blast playing Scrabble and other games old people play and I’m no good at.

Father’s Day came and went, though Jacob had to be reminded it was here. He’s me son and I love him, but I have to wonder sometimes.

The car’s front brakes went out, but fortunately a friend of ours was kind enough to assist in fixing them (thanks Shane!). Unfortunately when the back brakes went out a week later, we would find our friend missing some necessary tools. I’m not sure what we’re gonna do on such short notice, but hopefully they’ll last long enough to figure out how much it will cost to get them professionally done.

I washed DeAnna’s phone with the laundry. Turns out cell phones don’t take well to water… Who knew? The good news was that one of our phones was due for one of those free upgrades T-Mobile offers its customers periodically. The bad news was T-Mobile changed it’s policy a few months ago and there is no such offer anymore. The best they could due was sell us their cheapest phone for around $60. That sent us into a spin of frustrating, leading to checking out the options for changing carriers, which also lead to us finding out T-Mobile wanted to charge us up to $200 per line to break our contract. That wasn’t going to happen, so we started to look for used phones on Craigslist and eBay. As it turns out, the friend of ours that can fix front brakes had some trouble with his old phone (from T-Mobile) and was happy enough to pass it along to us. Now we’re back to three working phones, with one of them being a smartphone!

Oh yeah, and NY passed it’s Okay to be Gay thing. I’m pretty sure it’s not called that, but apparently it’s now not illegal for a dude to marry a dude there. According to the fine print it also looks like it might not be legal yet either, but it’s a step in the right (or left) direction. In either case, I’m putting up a happy rainbow desktop image on my new phone to celebrate gayness. I suppose I should find an Adam Lambert ring tone or something too…

From Wisecrack Zodiac

If you want it, take it… on the toilet.

Humor is best weapon against sarcasm. Laugh at it… on the toilet.

NOTE: I recolored DeAnna’s tie per her request. The tux rental place suggested we both wear red so as to 1) match, and 2) have the ties show up better at a dimly lit party. As the only purple he had was kind of dark, we agreed.