Now the feuding is getting worse.
I offered to do the accounting, but was told it was more than just accounting (guess who never read the ledger).
And we are "hiring" an orphan...And guess whose idea it was? And who opposed it?
Oh well...after doing two loads of wash I am pooped.

Aside from bitching, I am reading Morgoth's Ring...
it shows the variations and other drafts of the Simarillion...
Ironically, much of it is a meditation on sin and death....
The elves don't die, but if their bodies are killed, they can get them back, and live on earth either as reborn or as ghosts, until the earth dies....
but they can get weary of life...early, they are vigorous and productive, but by the fourth age, they merely try to keep things in the blessed past...Lorien is beautiful, but a dream that dies with the ring...
the first death is Feanor's mother, who decides she is weary of living and so dies...
Post partum depression? as a result, the Valar have to decide if her husband can remarry...and eventually they do.
But to complicate things, he marries a Maia...so the second set of children are higher caste than Feanor...
Feanor, thru his hurt, is vulnerable to anger/rebellion encouraged by Melkor...ergo the whole plot on refusing to allow the simarils to be destroyed to restore the trees, and later the blood oath to revenge not only melkor by "anyone" who has a simaril (leading to the death of Thingol etc).
part of the discussions on all this is the valar and the elves trying to decide why men live such a short time and die...and I am working my way thru a new essay, i.e. unpublished, which discusses this...
The logic is that men lost it by their choice of Melkor, and the Valar withdrew, leaving middle earth flawed: Melkor essentially placed his "self" incarnated into the earth, so it is middle earth that is Melkor's "ring"...
The earth was formed by the songs of the valar, inspired by God...but then he put into them his own children...which enraged Melkor, who wished to destory what was not himself...so this explains the physical evils of earth...earthquakes and hurricanes...ironically, the only part of earth not contaminated by Melkror's song is the seas and water, which can be destructive only if his forces manipulate it.
So to hear the "song of the valar" or the song of God's loving creation, we can hear it in the sound of the waves, or the sound of streams and falling waters...
Because of the conflicts of the naive Valar, whose naiveness let him "repent" and live, but also he lives because they realize to destroy him means destroying the earth and killing men, melkor is allowed to live...
and men are placed on earth after the valar have essentially withdrawn from middle earth, and they fall before their descendents walk into the west and are met by elves and maiar and the few valar that still visit...
Men are sort of lost in all these conflicts, so their story is less known...but in the last essay, there is a discussion of short lived men and death...since men's redemption is outside the powers of the valar (partly due to their weakness in opposing evil let Melkor run middle earth, partly due to the fact that destroying Melkor would have destroyed middle earth) men are doomed...unless God himself enters into his creation.
Such entrances are rare, but the implication is that Christ's birth is this intervention...that gives man a chance for redemption and tells him of hope beyond death....

I am angry because I am angry because I am angry....
I have been trying to download accounting software for three days, and the files that I am downloading end up corrupted....and the downloads take three hours or more, so I am frustrated.
The story is that my stepson has decided to become a man by telling his wife to cut back on her business...to teach her he is the boss...
and he is criticizing her for not doing the books well...
which is stupid since she used to be an accountant.
Well, four months ago, when he was flat in bed (on his five month rest from life) I too was suspicious, and asked for the books and went over them myself, and was surprised that she was breaking even--the profit was not much, but was enough to cover the household staff, who work here part time and part time deliver the goods to the workers and back to the exporters in Manila...
The trouble is that I only have an old "quicken", which does not separate into enough files. They are using excel to do it, which means the reports are unclear (they can do reports, but you have to take their word for it).
Now, I used to run my own office, and once the accountant who overlooked the books said something was wrong, but couldn't figure it out...so I redid the books and found a nurse was embezzling money...(she took home the same paycheck, but increased her IRS payment, so got a couple thousand extra at the end of the year, and also double payed herself at the end of one month by asking for her paycheck one week early to go on vacation, and when she got back, payed herself the full check)...
Well, as a result I offered to do the accounting...and was told "ah, but you are now retired"...and when I asked for the Quickbooks software for my own computer, I was told: But it's only good for one computer, so it won't work" and then was told "I'll get you the disk"...waiting...waiting...
So I am attempting to get my own software...first program wouldn't load because of a windows error..so am trying another company...
at 3am, the computer center is not so busy, so hopefully it will download...last night, after three and a half hours, it was only halfway thru...at 33...right now it's downloading at 44...so should only take two hours...
ah, the pleasures of dial up...

Every time we find a "biologist" who supports the gay agenda by showing homosexual animals, we see traditional morality bashed in the press...(never mind that many of these "gay"relationships are merely males who can't get at the local females due to polygamy)...

But now the fact that many people are going to see "march of the penguins" is being bashed in the UK press by Andrew sullivan (no link) and this editorial...LINK

Ah, but what they don't bash is the "gardner" movie that bashes drug companies...or the latest in and out of bed comedies...wonder why?

The reason the "march" is a hit is interesting...it was advertised by word of mouth, and people went to see it.

Instead of the all too usual "watch the bloody water as the sharks attack the seals/penguins" specials on NG, it shows another side of nature: The fact that parents care for their children...

Traditional morality might indeed be ingrown...and the fact that an occassional male penguin has a boyfriend does not affect the dirty little secret: that life is not about doing your own thing, but about obeying the law of God in your heart...in sacrificing yourself so that your loved ones will live, and that there are things more important than sucess and money...

Imagine that.

I have been busy filling my main blogs with what people are actually doing to help those hit by the hurricane...
One can see that the reporters in the superdome were frustrated, but they all seemed to be more interested in generating heat (Where is bush...it's bush's fault) than in seeing who is helping who...or reporting about the bridges down, the hiways full of litter, the fact that the levee that burst was a brand new one (hmmm...no one wonders if it broke because it was made with cement from a friend of someone in the local government...)

I truly wonder if the press is so full of Bush haters that they don't care that they are worsening anti american sentiment in foreign countries...

And what is more frustrating is that after days and days of the same story, they then take a poll and voila, the poll mirrors what their spin has been...

I am blogging on laptop: Another brownout.
I emailed the Manila Bulletin...they have been printing Maureen Dowd's column as "news" in their foreign news section...
I wonder how these writers see how their anti Bush hatred leads to them hating America and gives people overseas the wrong idea of America? CNNI has similarly been pushing negative things about the hurricane, although not as much now that the cleanup is going on ...
My main blog has links to lots of small unimportant people helping others...you see, to find these stories you have to google the small town papers and tv stations name, and then every one has two or three stories of people helping.
Indians in Montana sending buffalo meat.
Baptist ladies from Oklahoma making sandwiches to those in Baton rouge.
Catholic and baptist youth groups taking down supplies.
People in Orlando going to Missisippi to help HOme depot open their stores so people can fix their flooded houses.
And in the next three months, you will see more such things.
When the 1997 floods hit North Dakota, in Red lake, not only did some of our high school kids help, but the joke was that many of our druggies/alcoholics sobered up to help...I know...because many drank because they had no meaning in life, and no job...and then they were needed...
Praise and thanks to all these nameless people...

I'm reading one of Pat Conroy's less famous novels.
Some of it is good, but the main character verbally abuses those around him; the character hates people, and then one is supposed to agree with him.
His hatred of his parents may or may not be right...but his hatred of his dead wife's parents is because they tried to get custody of his daughter.
Yet even in the novel, his daughter is the "parent" in many ways, and it is the maid and neighbors who are bringing her up (in Italy).
So unless there is something more, one wonders if the wife's parents might have been right in thinking he should not raise a child.
And there is the self righteous "we opposed Viet Nam" subplot.
This always annoys me, because those supporting the war are shown as dummies.
But the main reason is that, like all the yuppie biographies and novels, the war is assumed to be not merely a mistake, but evil.
Yet evil in reality is ignored. One MaiLai is deplored, correctly, but thousands of families of village headmen massacred don't count...nor is there any sympathy for those who suffered because the pristine peaceniks won...
The Catholic bishops and priests who were jailed don't count.
The 350 000 boat people don't count.
The Hmong, who are still being persecuted, don't count.
The thousands of ethnic Chinese who were ethinically cleansed (some becoming boat people, but many more who fled to China as refugees) don't count.
The hundreds of thousands placed in concentration camps, many of whom died of disease, don' t count.
And, of course, the one million Cambodians killed are blamed on Kissenger, not on those who actually killed them.
And those opposing it are therefore good (one character, who killed two people in war protests, is being hidden by the narrator...guess he doesn't care that a policeman was killed...)So we add to the list:
Working class people don't count. Especially if they are killed by politically correct people in politically correct anti government prostest.
This is compassion?
Finally, one other problem.
It is Freudian.
That absolutely dates it.
You see, all the characters, including a schizophrenic brother, are assumed to be depressed/schizophrenic because their parents screwed up, and therefore the main character is correct in blaming those parents.
However, in the last 20 years, most of Freud has been thrown out the window.
Say it after me:
It's neurochemistry, stupid.
If the guy's wife killed herself, maybe it was familial depression ( or more likely an unrecognized bipolar illness).
If the guy's father is alcoholic, maybe there is a familial depression.
Does parenting count? Of course it does.
Does environment count? Of course...
But one is reminded of Carol Burnett's reply to her daugher's accusation that she used drugs because she had such a bad environment.
Carol, who was raised in severe poverty by a grandmother since her mother was alcoholic, and who essentially raised her younger sister by herself, replied: YOU THINK YOU HAVE PROBLEMS?
Sorry, Pat, I know you are supposed to be great, but your character is an asshole projecting his own self hatred on all those around him...and by making him the narrator, it means your novel is merely a story, leaving out the real nuances of life.
And yes, I think the daughter would be better off with her grandparents.
I've treated too many adults who had to parent their own parents...

Well, we were off line for two weeks, so no posts.
I applied for my new passport...I had a temporary one due to a druggie stealing my purse.
Lolo is feeling better.
And right now Ruby is watching Barbie princess and the pauper (for the tenth time).
So not much new...