I’m impatient.  I wait for little, and even then I do it grudgingly.  I’ve tried to overcome it, especially over the last year and a half.  It’s hard to not be patient and still be a good parent to a young child, so I’ve had to learn to separate my time as Dad from my time as Mike.  I’ve done a good job, I’d say. but I have still have far to go.  Outside of being a parent, though, I’ve repeatedly failed in all attempts to develop some semblance of patience.

As I left work Monday, I sat in line behind someone waiting to pull out of the parking garage who was undoubtedly related to Job.  This person waited not for a large enough opening in traffic, but for a chasm.  As cars crept past, I kept thinking to myself how many times I could have pulled out.  Finally this person pulled away, and it was my turn.

I waited as two or three more cars drove past, and then pulled out quickly — only to be stopped immediately by a traffic light that was already yellow.  I growled audibly at my luck — Captain Waitforit cleared the light — as I pressed the brakes firmly, and the top page of a stack of papers Her Cuteness received in Sunday School the day before slid off the passenger seat, landing in an orientation that made it incredibly simple for me to read its message, in huge, block lettering.

“God helps me to be patient.”

So InvertedMind walked into a bar…you’d think he would have seen it.

Now that the ice has been broken with one of my famously bad jokes, I’d like to say hello to the four faithful people who have hounded me about getting something new posted.  You’ve done nothing to get me back to the keyboard any quicker, but I thank you for bugging me, nonetheless.  It’s good to know you care enough to check whether or not I’m still breathing.

Where has InvertedMind been?  Why, all over the place!  That’s precisely what has kept me from my appointed rounds.  Starting with Halloween, I drove roughly 6,000 miles in a two-month span, between various destinations in Pennsylvania, Delaware and here at home in N.C.  Combining that with nagging pain in my left knee that eventaully required an MRI, as well as the day-to-day things in life, exhausted me to new levels.  I had a creative itch, but no energy to scratch it.

Nothing has changed aside from the fact that I’m too opinionated to keep quiet any longer than I have.  And, with that, I present the Rdrs. Dgst. (the abbreviated version of the abbreviated version, get it?) tale of InvertedMind’s Last Two and a Half Months.

The Youngster Grows Up

Taking a ride at Boomer's Family Fun Center

Not long before I departed temporarily for non-verbal pastures, Her Cuteness started preschool.  You already knew that.  What you may not all know is that she is now almost entirely potty trained, knows her colors and can count to 10 (not just reciting the numbers, but actively counting).  She can carry on full conversations with you.  And, I swear, she’s learning new ways to be “Almost Three” every day.  But, she’s still so adorable that it makes other parents sick.  Some nights I just sit next to her bed for a few minutes and watch her sleep while I count my blessings.

The bad news here is that I didn’t do her do the day the picture to the right was taken.  I’m as inept as ever at styling hair.  I don’t have much practice; the only reason my hair doesn’t look like Ronald McDonald after electroshock therapy is because I keep it short and bully it into cooperating with me.  Every time I try to do her hair, the Emergency Broadcast System revs up, FEMA goes on standby and some moron in Washington starts rounding up federal relief money.  He must be digging in the couch cushions in the Senate lounge, because we don’t have any money left elsewhere.

Three Pigs Just Flew Past a Blue Moon

Contrary to popular belief, it DOES snow in the south.

It’s snowing in North Carolina.  And, yes, I just skipped two months.  Why?  Because it’s been a blur of driving and Christmas shopping.  Nothing of note happened between Halloween and New Year’s Eve with the exception of a nice visit from a northern friend in December, and a Christmas show and concert with one of my best friends.

But let’s get back to the original point, here.  There is snow…falling from the sky…in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Even though I had been told that this happens about two out of every three years here, I had no reason to believe it.  After all, aside from a two-week cold snap in December in 2007, last winter felt like fall just jumped right into spring without stopping to freeze for a few months.  We got, as I sarcastically called it here, “the dusting of the century.”

But this time, it’s real.  The snow is real, and so is the measurement: over five inches since midnight.  Sure, that’s considered shorts weather where I lived as a young child, but around here it was enough to shut down the state capitol before a flake landed.  It’s still coming down good, and should continue to do so for another hour or more.  We’ll be lucky to hit the freezing point today, and that’s fine by me.  Hopefully, I’ll be feeling well enough after Kaylee’s nap to take her outside for a little while to play in the back yard.

Innaugurating Our Next Hopeless Leader
Barack Obama has just been innaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.

You can like it, you can hate it.  Your opinion will do nothing to change mine.  And from where I stand, things don’t look good.  We’ve just sworn in one of the men principly responsible for the housing crisis we are currently in, along with cronies like Christopher Dodd and Nancy Pelosi.

Why do I finger them, specifically?  Because they are three of the biggest recipients of campaign funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two entities that essentially triggered the whole mess.  Funds are generally traded for favors, particularly when it comes to wealthy people.  A lot of people got rich off of Freddie and Fannie since Bill Clinton “encouraged” them to offer loans to people who weren’t even remotely worthy of said lending.  Those people then gave money to politicans who they assumed would be most likely to keep them rich.  While that doesn’t directly implicate them, this does: the Democratic party blocked no fewer than 15 different attempts by (now former) president George W. Bush to more tightly regulate the two orgainizations.

Now, as a result of that — and the banking mess that was created not by George W. Bush’s policies, but rather by Bill Clinton’s sweeping deregulation of the banking industry in 1999, with full support of his party — we find ourselves chest-deep in a pile of political manure that our incoming president has vowed to clean up.  Now, answer me this: if your plumber screwed up your plumbing to the point that it backed up and flooded your house with a neighborhood worth of excrement, wouldn’t you hire a new plumber to fix the problem?  Why, then, do we keep re-electing — and promoting, as is the case with Obama — the same people who created the mess in the first place?

That is why this post’s title includes “fall of civilization.”  We are no longer an intelligent, civilized nation; we are, instead, a population of lemmings, blindly following the same leaders ever closer to the cliff.  George W. Bush may have made a lot of mistakes in the last eight years — every president does — but his biggest attempts at preventing the current crisis were blatantly ignored.  He shoulders the blame, while the people actually responsible for it get off scott-free.

Does that sound to you like a nation smart enough to survive another decade?  It sure doesn’t sound good to me.

Oh, and in case you have been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, the Steelers are going to their seventh Super Bowl, and as seven-point favorites no less.  Party at my house on Super Bowl Sunday.  Details to follow.

Here’s a disclaimer right up front: I wouldn’t know patience if it slapped me on the butt and called me Sally.  I’m almost as willing to wait for something as I am to volunteer to run a half-marathon that rewards all participants with an acid bath at the finish line.  But, I’ve been learning a lot about being patient lately, and I’m going to tell you how I just tasted the very sweet fruits of my labor.

I have a nearly obnoxious thrifty side — I call it being frugal, but others call me cheap — that drives me to obsessively find the absolute best bang for my buck.  I consider it smart use of money, and right about now I’m laughing all the way to the bank’s Web site because being tight with my money means I’ve got a little something left right now while an awful lot of people who derided my tendency to spend little or nothing are awaiting their next paycheck with bated breath (I’m not knocking anyone here, I’m just sayin’…).  As of now, the combination of not wanting to part with my money and my essentially obsessive-compulsive habit of cataloging in my brain where to find the best prices suddenly looks less like a miserly desire to hoard cash and more like intelligent planning.

So, when news broke in my circle of friends that I was going to buy a touch-screen cell phone — and that I had no intentions of waiting until next year to do so — it seemed to a lot of people that I had finally snapped under the burdens of my daily responsibilities.

At this point, you are undoubtedly wondering how on God’s green Earth this fits under the category of “The Good Life on the Cheap” because there’s no such thing as a cheap, good cell phone that goes so far as to have a touch-sensitive screen.  Well, it’s less about the phone itself and more about how, sometimes, circumstances conspire to give you one heck of a deal — as long as you are 1) looking for signs that a deal is nearby, and 2) willing to wait for just the right time to jump on it.

Here’s the anatomy of the deal: Sometime in either July or August, I received notice from Verizon that I had been elevated to “VIP” status, which includes the opportunity to upgrade my phone once every calendar year instead of after 20 months while still receiving the same benefits, no activation fees on new phones, 25 percent savings on all accessories and other opportunities.  It’s less a true “VIP status” and more of a loyalty program, but it’s still packed with chances to save a lot of scratch.

Okay, that sounds like a good deal, but I didn’t need a new phone.  I was perfectly happy with the one I have.  But here is where things take a turn.

On Labor Day, I had things stolen out of my car — including both of my MP3 players, which were conveniently tucked inside my briefcase, which was inconveniently sitting on the passenger seat of my even more inconveniently unlocked car.  Trust me, this comes in to play in a few paragraphs.

On top of that, I have been considering buying a new digital camera that is more convenient to carry around than that bulky, six-year-old one that I got for Christmas in 2002 and the even-bulkier behemoth that I bought prior to my first (and only, until further notice that is not even on the horizon) wedding so I could save about $2,000 on a photographer.  There are an awful lot of moments I’d love to immortalize, but I’m not carrying either of those beasts with me wherever I go.

And, of course, I would be upgrading my phone in a year anyway.  I use my cell phone a lot, so for me it’s worth spending a little extra on a higher-quality unit than the ones you can get gratis (or pretty darn close to it) when you sign up for a new plan.  That’s why I was willing to break the $100 barrier on my current one.

So, one day while simply checking out the current offerings from Verizon during my lunch break for no reason other than boredom, I happened to take notice of the LG Dare.  It looked pretty slick, and somewhat iPhone-like.  Touch-screen gizmos always intrigue me, so I looked.  And it seemed pretty sweet, so I research further.  For the two-year contract price of $250 ($199 after rebate), you get a solid MP3 player and a 3.2 megapixel camera with options you can’t even find on a lot of true digi-cams, like adjustable ISO settings and face recognition.  And, for anyone counting, that’s a whole lot of megapixels for a camera phone.  It’s expandable up to eight gigabytes of memory via a microSD card slot, too.  So let’s do a little math:

• Zune replacement: $250
• Average low-profile digital camera: $150
• Cell phone comparable to what I have now: $150

I’d be looking at $550 to get everything I wanted within the next year.  Suddenly, $200 seems like one heck of a deal.  Throw in the cost of two eight-gigabyte microSD cards and it totals about $280.

But wait: it gets better.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but buying a cell phone online or by phone is almost always cheaper than going to the store and picking one up.  I recommend that you always go to the store, find the one you want, then go home and call customer service to make the purchase.  And you can even haggle with them a little bit if you feel it’s necessary, which could result in a waived activation fee or other savings.  A slice of bread would probably be more knowledgable about the current offerings of your cell company than the people manning the kiosk at the mall — and would offer more engaging conversation, to boot.

So I called this morning, and found out that, because of the accelerated upgrade period, I am not only eligible to get the phone for the two-year contract price of $200 (they don’t even bother with making you send in a rebate form if you purchase by phone), but I am also eligible for the $100 savings using the New Every Two early redemption offer.  Here’s where I showed a little impatience, though: rather than accept the standard (and free) two-day shipping, I opted to pay an additional $8.99 for overnight shipping.  That means I will receive my $410 phone/MP3 player/digital camera by the time I get home from work tomorrow, at a total cost to me of $109.98.  That’s a savings of $310 just on the offering I purchased, and when compared to what I would have spent buying all three items separately, I saved myself $440.  Knock off $80 for the microSD cards I’m going to pick up at Radio Shack tonight, and I still saved $360.  That’s a large chunk of my Christmas shopping right there.

And all because I patiently shopped around for the best possible options rather than impulsively buying when I wanted something.  Quite literally, it pays to take your time.

I’m going to put an end to any fears you may have while reading this: what you are about to hear (assuming you talk to yourself as you read) is going to sound a lot worse than it actually is.

Last week, Kaylee contracted an illness called Fifth Disease.  Now, here the point where you’re probably panicking: “did he say disease?!  Oh no!  The sky is falling!”  No, it’s just a virus.  And a weak one, at that.  It was named around 1880, and was given that moniker because it was the fifth common childhood “disease” on the list.  And, clearly, it wasn’t severe enough to actually be called something unique, like most of the other ailments on the list.

Fifth is caused by the Parvovirus B19 strain.  For anyone familiar with Parvo, you’re probably immediately thinking “dog.”  The difference between the Parvo that infects dogs and the one that infects humans is in that “B19″ part of the name.  So, no, Kaylee did not catch the Guatamalan Canine Flu.  What she caught is more closely related to measles or rubella, only far less so.  And it’s related to Hand, Foot & Mouth Disease, but only very indirectly.  To put to rest any fears you may have, let me put it this way: Parvo is to the other illnesses listed her as spitball is to ballistic missile.

Symptoms of Fifth are:

• Mild fever
• Sniffles
• A bright red rash on the cheeks, generally only present in children
• A splotchy rash over the rest of the body, similar in appearance to the illnesses listed above
• Joint pain, primarily present only in adults
• Itching on the rash, generally only in people older than 10

At this point, you’re wondering how she could have been exposed to a virus that causes an illness you’ve probably never heard of unless you are a parent and your kid has had it.  Well, chances are you’ve been exposed to it — by adulthood, 60 percent of us have been exposed to it, caught it and become immune.  It’s not exactly a rare virus.

She started showing the rash Friday (10/10), the day after her physical and a vaccination she still needed to be caught up on.  So, I figured it was a minor reaction to the vaccine, and just kept a close watch on it.  Aside from some redness, she had no problems — not even an itch.  Red cheeks and a few splotches on her arms, and that’s it.  But by Saturday it had spread over the entirety of her arms and was creeping across her back.  I had Nurse Neighbor come take a look, and we then proceeded to research.  A quick google of “red splotches on a toddler’s arms and cheeks” immediately brought me to Fifth/Parvo.  When I saw the symptoms, I remember that Kaylee had a runny nose most of the week, and that her temp had gone up ever so slightly Wednesday night — so slightly that I didn’t even bother checking to get the actual number.

I also remembered another symptom I had seen in her: Thursday night, after the physical, she was complaining about knee pain.  I figured it was from the injection, which was in her thigh — sore muscles from a shot.

Sunday, the rash got even worse, but she still wasn’t itching.  Now, the good part of all this is that, once the rash appears, the illness is no longer contagious.  Double-Plus-Good for me (any George Orwell readers remember where that came from?).  Of course, I figured there was no way on God’s Green Earth that she’d be allowed in school looking like that, even if I told them no one would catch it.  And, of course, I still was only basing the diagnosis off of things I found on the Interwebs.  So, a quick trip to the doctor Monday morning confirmed my diagnosis, and she was back to school, none the worse for wear.  All is well with her world.

But not mine.

Remember that “60 percent of adults are immune” comment?  Well, it would seem that I’m in the minority.

At first I thought it was just heat.  After all, I’d been in the office/studio/gameroom writing and recording a song.  That’s the hottest room in the house, especially with a computer, a printer and recording equipment running.  But, eventually, I came to the realization (after a closer look the next day revealed red splotches on my arms that continued to grow as the day progressed) that I, too, was pleading the Fifth.  Or, more correctly, Scratching the Fifth.  I’ve got the itch and the need to scratch it.  Everywhere.  Constantly.  It actually woke me up at least five times last night.

So, give me another three or four days before you call me or text me or even talk face-to-face with me about anything that may be annoying.  Because, given how annoyed I am at the moment with this itching, I may just have to give you a serious beat-down.

Through a somewhat unfortunate set of circumstances, Kaylee lost two sitters in a three-week span.  It had nothing to do with any behavioral issue, and I don’t feel either of them did anything wrong.  Well, not the first one, Saint-or-Sitter, at least; she gave me two weeks’ notice and a valid reason, as opposed to 18 hours’ notice and an incredibly pety excuse, but maybe that’s a post for another time.  Regardless, all is forgiven.

The whole situation turned out to be a blessing, though: Her Cuteness has started preschool.

As her father, and the man who has essentially been her sole unpaid care-giver for the last 14 months, I’m saddened.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled — utterly ecstatic — that she’s growing up.  I get to see the transformation every day, and I’m amazed by how she’s changed just in the last two months.  Of course, someone apparently keeps giving her Defiance Hormone Injections in her sleep.  Either that, or The Terrible Twos really are as maddening as people have led me to believe.

But she’s…growing up.  It’s a double-edged sword, because I’m excited about watching her learn and grow, but I’m also seeing my baby girl slip away, going through a transformation that will eventually culminate in her reaching adolescence and, for me, what I predict will be a rapid succession of at least 47 peptic ulcers.

And let me interject this: there is not enough caffeine in the world — especially not for someone with a tolerance to the stuff that would make an elephant addicted to heroin seem minor in comparison — to make up for an average of four to five hours of sleep per night.  Believe me, I’ve tried.  I’ve probably accounted for at least 30 percent of the gross domestic product of Colombia for the last year, if you exclude the drug trade.  And, with a resting heart rate of an already meager 48 thanks to six months of running nine to 15 miles per week, I might go into a coma if I stop drinking the stuff.

But, I digress.

Kaylee was excited to go to “school.”  She was a little apprehensive when we first got there, but by the time I was ready to head off to work, I almost had to pry her away from her new-found friends and toys long enough to get a hug and a kiss from her.  And, if they would have let her stay, she would have happily spent the night there after her first day.

I’d like to point out how proud I am of the fact that I haven’t held her back from any culinary experiences, in spite of my own picky food tastes (strange to hear that come from an accomplished cook, I know).  This is a girl who loves broccoli and lima beans.  So I wasn’t surprised to hear that she ate all her peas yesterday.  I was, however, shocked to find out that it caught her teachers off-guard.  It would seem to me that these people wouldn’t be shocked by any food preferences.  But, considering this is the south where collared greens and fried okra are considered delicacy instead of “lawn clippings” and “something that should never be put on a plate,” maybe I shouldn’t be all that surprised.

So, day one of preschool came and went.  She was excited to go again today, so that’s a win for me.  It’s affordable, everyone there is fantastic, and — most importantly — Kaylee is finally going to have a chance to broaden her horizons and make new friends.  Her social development should become a lot more rapid at this point.  I don’t know if that excites me, or if it scares me in ways spiders and rattlesnakes could only dream of.

I think it’s the latter.

A story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reinforcing a growing, frightening trend in school systems around the country: students are not allowed to completely and utterly fail.

The concept, according to the article, is to “give kids a chance” to recover when they’ve screwed up for an entire grading period, giving them a grade no lower than 50 percent on any quiz, test or exam.  That means that they never are lower than 50 percent away from perfection, even if they answered the question, “What is Sacajawea?” with “A bag full of jawea.”  (I wish I could claim ownership of that joke, because it’s flippin’ hilarious, but I can’t.)  While giving kids a second chance is a good idea in theory, it’s a horrible, horrible idea in real life.

Now, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to want to lynch me here, but I believe in letting a child fail.  One of the most important skills a person can learn to prepare themself for adulthood is the ability to cope with failure.  Outside of chemical imbalances, I would bet my life that the number one cause of depression in teens is their inability to understand that screwing up happens, and the only way to fix the problem is to try harder.

The best analogy here is the U.S. automakers.  They’ve royally screwed up their standing in the world auto market by producing inferior products on the premise of “status quo is good enough.”  What ultimately happened is they produced crap long enough to allow Japanese makers to surpass them in quality and take a near-stranglehold on U.S. auto sales.  Now, they carry such a stigma of crap that they’re struggling to regain market share in an economy that is refusing to buy the overweight, fuel-consuming vehicles that have been a trademark of U.S. design for decades, even when the cars are now as good or better than their foreign counterparts.

But, rather than letting the companies fail or allowing one of the major manufacturers to purchase another, the U.S. government is proposing ways to bail them out.  In other words, the people who are supposed to be looking out for the better good of the U.S. are recommending we simply scold the problem child of the economy who broke the neighbor’s window, and then pay to replace the window with no consequence to the one(s) who created their own problems to begin with.  The only message that sends is, “we can’t fail, no matter how hard we try.”  And, in doing so, the government is in no way giving the automakers a reason to fix the disease of failure.

It works the same way with kids: if you coddle them while they can still be coddled, they won’t have a clue as to how to fix their real failures when they are adults and will be held fully accountable for their actions.  Under the sudden stress of failure, a situation in which they never found themselves as a child, I’d wager most of them will crack.

So, by telling a kid they will receive half-credit for no effort, we are setting them up to expect that.  If a recent high-school graduate gets his first job after receiving his diploma at a school where zero equals half, do you think that kid is going to put in a full day’s hard work?  Probably not, because they’ve been taught that “good enough is good enough.”  But, in the real world, there are no free rides (except for some shady people under the current, poorly managed welfare system, but that’s a different issue altogether).  Great gets you a promotion, good enough gets you a paycheck until someone better than you comes along, and expecting a second chance lands you in the unemployment line.  That’s how the real world works, and school is supposed to prepare us to handle the everyday challenges we will face in life.  This does exactly the opposite, and contributes to the sense of entitlement so many people have in the world today.

News flash: nobody owes you anything.  I don’t care if you are black or Native American looking for reparations.  I don’t care if you are earning an adequate wage with a merely adequate effort.  No one owes you a dime for what happened to your ancestors, and no one owes you a pat on the back for simply doing your job.  Heck, no one even owes you a promotion for going above and beyond; this is a free-enterprise economy, and if you don’t like your situation, you are responsible for making it better.  Not your boss, not your neighbor and certainly not Uncle Sam.  And in order to be prepared to improve your life, you need to be challenged in school, not pampered.

There’s another downside to this mountain-like issue, too: by flattening out failure, you are cheapening success.  If it isn’t as hard to succeed, people won’t give it the extra effort.  And, thanks to decades of caving to minority factions of the population who think giving a kid an F is harmful to his or her “fragile” ego and to those who believe that spanking lowers self esteem, we’ve spiraled rapidly into nearly unfightable crime and standings in math, science and language that are so low in the developed, modern world that it’s a wonder we’re still even considered a world power.  By attempting to bring up the average through artificial means, we’ve dumbed down the top end of the supply of intelligence.

Bottom line: the failures of those at the bottom end — and I say this with heartfelt apologies (but no remorse) even about the ones who give it an honest effort but still struggle — should not carry a bill that is paid for by those at the top end.  Those who excel should not be hindered by those who don’t.  Period.

I hate English.

Anyone who knows me can see the absurdity in that statement.  After all, Inverted Mind majored in English.  Heck, I’ve been a published writer for years, in subjects ranging from computer games to software development articles to sports to…well…me.  I wrote for a newspaper.  I was editor-in-chief of a small, Web-based marketing publication.  Had I not chosen to go down the software engineering path instead, I would be a professional writer today.

But let’s face it: our language is absurd.  Sure, the grammatical constructs make the most sense of any language on earth.  Of course, the relaxed standards to which we adhere in this nation today have all but eliminated poetry that would be considered among history’s finest.  But screw poetry.  While I consider myself to be well-versed (pun intended) in the intricacies of poetry, it’s linguistic fluff.  I’m talking about the way we allow words to be spelled in America.  That’s where my beef with the language lies.

What got me thinking about this was a post on a sports site I frequent, pointing out how many wild variations there are in the names of athletes.  I give you my response — verbatim, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, Lorem Ipsum and a whole bunch of other Latin words:

Aaron Rodgers is 0-2 in the Phonetic Names competition: a double-A and a superfluous D.

That said, American English is so hard because we’ve mashed together various combinations of Olde English, New(e?) English, Spanish, French, German and, of course, Latin. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U (as in “vacuum”) and Z can be doubled but make the same sound as they would all by their lonesome; C, G and J can be hard or soft, and it’s not a medical condition; H makes other letters do weird things (CH, GH, PH, RH, SH, TH, WH, ZH); C, K, CK, KK, Q and QU can all sound the same — sometimes; and don’t get me started on dangling participles. And that’s not what you think it is, you perverts.

Welcome to the melting pot, where we can’t decide on a national language, our PRIMARY language is harder to learn than pi to 500 decimal places, and we all taste like chicken.

This is Mike from The Steel Tradition, signing off.

(I majored in English; sue me.)

This has actually led me to create a new category on this site that I’m going to call So To Speak in which I will discuss the insanities and inanities of the English language.  Seriously, I could write a book on this.  But I won’t, because it’s been done, and conforming isn’t exactly my style.  I value my individuality, just like the other six billion people on the planet.

Wait…that doesn’t sound right…

I’ve been absent, but with reason: the football season is here, and The Steel Tradition has taken the vast majority of my free time for the last week or so.  But, this was too important to wait on.  No further introduction, just watch.

I should be in bed, but I’ve had this running through my head this evening.

Rewind to last Wednesday: I was about to head out to dinner for my neighbor’s birthday.  I get in the car — I had just been driving it all of three minutes before — turn the key, and all I get is a repeated electric “click.”

Uh-oh.

I figured the starter got killed.  It had been pouring rain earlier, so I thought I had, in some freak incident, managed to short it out and fry it.  A few helpful neighbors tried to jump it, but I knew it wouldn’t work.  A friend even offered to use her AAA membership to get me a free tow (she was going to dinner with me, so technically she was in the car and we were completely within the rules).  Eventually I had it towed at my own expense since my insurance covers it.

It turns out it was just some corrosion on one of the electical connections to the starter.  $95 for labor and $65 for a tow, and I was good to go.

Fast forward to Monday night.  I left my briefcase in my car over the weekend.  I’ve had a habit of doing that, and I usually lock the car up even though i live in a ridiculously safe neighborhood.  I had gotten into the car late in the evening, and apparently failed to lock it up.

This morning, I opened my driver’s side door to find the glove box and the dashboard storage wide open.  And the briefcase?  Gone.  No big deal, it’s a $20 Wal-Mart special.  What stung was the fact that my Zune and my Sansa were both in it.  For those counting, that’s $250 worth of electronics on top of $160 for car repairs.

I could have been upset.  At first I was, but I knew it was my own fault.  But as I steamed my way to work after filing a police report, I started to gain some perspective on the situation.  I have a home.  My car runs.  I don’t live paycheck to paycheck.  I’ve got an awesome job and the best friends in the world, hands down.  And, above all else, I have a child who is my entire world.  She’s safe and I’m safe.  When it all comes down to it, nothing that actually matters has changed; God doesn’t care about my electronic toys.

It got me thinking deeper, though.  I came to a realization tonight, which ultimately is the reason I’m not already off dreaming about something random.

Think about this for a while: if I wake up tomorrow, I’ve been given the gift of another day filled with untold adventures and lessons from God.  If I don’t wake up in the morning, I finally get to meet my Savior face to face.

Bottom line: if every day is a gift from God, then there is no such thing as a bad day.

The Audacity of Hope?  More like Hopeless Audacity.

The two primary non-bashing talking points of the Obama campaign have been “change” and “youth.”  Barack Obama is 47 years old, and has used his age as a weapon to attack the McCain campaign.  Then he picked a 66-year-old senator as his running mate — a guy who is just six years younger than John McCain.  Youth?  Out the window.

Then the Obama campaign — and his “independent” supporters, the so-called unbiased media — had the audacity (you like how I worked that in, don’t you?) to rip into McCain’s vice-presidential selection of 44-year-old Sarah Palin, saying she was too young and inexperienced.  Well, age can’t be a problem, since the three-year difference between them would be, in statistical terms, inconsequential.  And to attack her experience?  Okay, so she hasn’t been in politics as long.  But she governed first over a town, then over a state.  What have you governed over, Mr. Obama?  A campaign?  Being a senator is hardly governing; in fact, you have no constituents, you merely have a region within a state whom you represent.  You have no power, no authority, beyond your meager vote in the senate.  And, when senate decisions are split almost entirely down party lines, your vote doesn’t mean crap.

Palin, on the other hand, has had to oversea an entire state, and to bear the brunt of any bad press that may befall the Alaskan government.  See, the beauty of being a senator or a representative is that you don’t have to be the face of a failure; you vote, move merrily on your way, and then blame the other party if things don’t go your way.  But, as a governor, Palin became the face of a state — a state that is no less than an equal to any other state, regardless of how many people reside there.  She put herself in harm’s way; she doesn’t have an army of fellow party members to laugh or cry with.

Okay, so the youth-and-experience is a pile of bull excrement.  What about change?  John McCain has 26 years of experience as a politician.  The Obama camp has attacked this fact, stating that their candidate hasn’t been in Washington very long, and hasn’t been in town long enough to have become a true politician.  Well, Mr. Obama, your votes are entirely along Democratic party lines.  Where, Barack, is the change?

Not convinced yet?  Okay, I’ve got more.  This man touting the fact that he hasn’t spent much time in Washington went ahead and picked a 36-year political veteran as his running mate.  And Joe Biden has made a career of toeing the party line, too.  Did great things for Delaware?  I lived there.  The state has been on the verge of bankruptcy for about two decades, if not longer.  And don’t get me started on the bunch of whack-jobs who have run the state for the last 12 years.  A foreign policy expert?  The same guy whose cries to bring the troops home only grew louder as the surge in Iraq began to show true dividends?  Don’t forget, Iraq was one of the main talking points during the primaries.  But things on the ground have stabilized — a sign that current strategy is becoming more and more successful — and the topic has suddenly falledn off the political radar.

Palin, on the other hand, has made a history (albeit a very short one) of standing up against traditional government beaurocracy.  Party lines be damned, she’s done what is best for her state.  She’s a maverick in the same mold as her partner in this election, but maintains her conservativism.  She is exactly what the Republican party needed to win in November.  The other party now knows that.

And now they have to find a whole different platform on which to stand.