So I'm sitting at dinner with the boys when Jack



looks over and says to me, completely straight-faced:

I swear to you I never taught him to say it, and I don't think I've even ever mentioned the name to him before.

I'm not sure what to do with this.  I'm also not sure who this "Brock Obama" is, but he seems to have a pretty firm hold over the 2 1/2 year-old white male demographic. 

Happy voting.  Go Brock.

Could my Currently Reading crack my top ten?  Maybe, it's two of my favorite genres:  Father/Son and Post-apocalyptic.   Too bad xanga chose to label it "Oprah's Book Club" instead of "Pulitzer Prize Winner."  Oh well.  Oprah's a part of one of my apocalypse theories, anyway.



I like that guy with the mustache in the background.  He wishes his hair was as perfectly feathered as hers.

---

Good news:  We got our $300 back from those scammers.  We just kept calling any finally they just arbitrarily agreed to refund us the money.  I wonder if they looked at the record of how many time we'd called and decided enough was enough.  Whatever, I don't care.  As long as we don't have to pay that stupid money.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to react to this, as a Christian.  I know I'm called to forgive, but also to fight for justice.



So what do I do?  It feels different when it comes to forgiving a huge corporation.  Like, when I forgive someone in person who never asked for it, I'm thinking in the back of my mind:  "Well, they'll notice that and at least feel bad about what they did."  No chance of that happening with CareCredit Ltd. 

I like to think of myself as slow-to-anger, and easy to forgive or let things go.  When a lady ran a red light and hit me last summer in Tucson and I quickly realized that she would probably get deported and seperated from her car-load of kids if I called the cops, I let it go.  And my van's front bumper is still messed up over a year later.  People get mad at me about this:  "How is she going to learn to drive if she can just get away with that?"

I guess.  So where's the line?  I certainly can't let things like human sex trafficking go.  Or else we wouldn't have spent months last year combatting it.



I don't know.  Maybe when something happens to me, it's not such a big deal.  Is it like that for everyone?  Could that be why so many people have actually been more upset about the CareCredit thing on my behalf, and I was ready to let it go?  Lucky it worked out, I suppose.  But if it hadn't...I honestly would not have brought it to court or anything.  I'm still planning on calling my dentist and telling him to dump them.  But that's it.  If I keep going, it'll take over my life.

So am I a doormat?  Because it certainly feels like my life is a lot better when I let things go instead of letting them eat away at me.  I never want to be a jerk.  And I feel like holding on to hurts and grudges would make me one. 

Have a great weekend.  endblog.

Want more of what I would've blogged about this summer, but didn't?  If not, don't read on, I guess.

---

I'm almost done with the first draft (or something) of my book, and it's been a beast.  Super hard.  No idea if it'll ever sell, but I can't wait until I'm able to say I wrote one.  Not like I'd be throwing that around unless it sells, of course.  Right now it's just a stack of paper.



Anyway, what I was going to blog about was that when an author publishes a book, he or she should be required to list what books they read while they were writing it.  Because everything I've read since I started - it's influenced my own writing. 

I was going to write more about this, but instead, here's a short of what I remember, off the top of my head, reading (or re-reading) since I started writing.  I'm gonna spend exactly 5 minutes remembering.  Ready...go.


Gary Paulsen:  Hatchet and Brian's Winter



Madeline L'Engle:  A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door
Stephen King:  The Stand, On Writing, and The Dark Tower I - VII



David Sedaris:  Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You are Engulfed in Flames
Harper Lee:  To Kill a Mockingbird



Alice Sebold:  The Lovely Bones
John Irving:  The World According to Garp
J.K. Rowling:  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Orson Scott Card:  Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind



Lemony Snickett:  The End
E.L. Konigsburg:  From the Mixed Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler
Lois Lowry:  The Giver, The Messenger, and Gathering Blue



Meic Pearse:  Why the Rest Hates the West
Steve Martin:  The Pleasure of My Company

Whew.  I know there are more, but I'm not blogging about this, remember?  Oh wait, I'll go back and put pictures of books that had particular influence on mine...there we go.  And link you to my scathing review of Harry Potter 7...done.  Man, this not blogging about stuff isn't working very well, is it?

---

Let's try this:  over the summer I caught myself saying to Noah:

  :  Well, life just isn't fair sometimes.

Halfway through saying it, I realized how much I hate it when people say that.  Also, that it was one of the things I told myself I'd never say to my kids.



What about you?  Anything you promised yourself you'd never say to your kids?  You probably will.

---

Ok, I'm out to CO for the week...so don't think I've quit on you again.  When I return, back to normal blogging.  As if these past two entries haven't been normal blogging.

Peace in the Middle East.

Two sort-of-interesting things collide into what becomes one of the sickest experiences of my life.

1. Our neighbor's house burns down six months ago, and we never see them, or their kids who did the burning, or their pitbull who bit Jessica really hard on the arm while she was trying to deliver Easter baskets and the love of Jesus to them



again. They completely disappear, abandoning the home and everything inside and outside it.

2. Our garage starts kind of smelling bad.

It took us a while to connect these two things. All we knew was that the garage starting smelling worse and worse, until finally we couldn't park our car in there anymore. I must have checked through all our stuff in there a dozen times for rotting food or dead animals. Then it dawned on me. Our garage shares a wall with our neighbor's, and maybe, just maybe, something in there smelled bad.

It did.

Here's a short video of me and my friend Mike in the abandoned garage soon after discovering a fridge which had been without power for months in there. We opened it and looked inside, and discovered something that we think used to be a turkey. A six month old, rotted, bloated, leaking turkey. This is us getting rid of it and trying not to die.



Note that I do almost nothing but gag and wave that shovel around the whole time. Until the end, when I decide to hit the fridge over and over with it. What you don't see is me bravely going in there again later and spraying the entire place with Apple Cinnamon air freshener by Glade.



It smelled like Friggin' Reek and pie afterwards.

The good news is that our garage smells infinitely better today. I think we figured it out. Too bad I called the city a couple weeks ago and they had to send an environmental specialist out to tell me that yes, it smelled bad, and they were going to try to send a letter to someone about it. Which means they were going to do jack squat. The environmental specialist looked a little like George McFly, circa 1955.

: (sniff sniff) Ooo, yeah, that does smell, huh?

Sometimes you just have to take things into your own (or your friend's own) hands, you know?

endblog.

Uh oh.

Just when I thought the blog outlook couldn't look any bleaker (it's been a little too quiet on the Xanga Subscription front lately, don't you think?), this article comes out.  And, of course, it's accompanied by this picture:



Ooooo, creeeeeepy!

NEW YORK (AP) -- It's nothing to LOL about: Despite the best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.

Teens who use social-networking sites such as Facebook and Xanga have a greater tendency to use emoticons, a survey says.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Thursday, also found that teens who keep blogs or use social-networking sites such as Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace have a greater tendency to slip nonstandard elements into assignments.

And it continues, pretty predictably.  Blogs and Facebook and texting are destroying our youth and their ability to communicate properly, etc.  I'm just not sure what I think about that.  Maybe because I've had the opposite experience - my blog has made me a better writer, if only because I write so much more than I used to before I started it.



Sure, it's not the traditional pen-to-paper writing that all Hemingway wannabes aspire to, but it's writing, and it's improved a craft that I'd let fester for too long.  So there you go, AP.  The blog has been good to me. 

There are things I agree with, though:

1.  MySpace sucks.  But not because people use too many emoticons there.  It's because it is butt ugly.



I swear to you I picked a random MySpace page and that's the one I got.  So cluttered.  Yuck.

2.  Texting drives me crazy.  But not because of the abbreviations.  It's because of all the tap-tap-tapping I hear when I'm giving a talk. 



To me, it's worse than someone's phone actually ringing really loud while I'm speaking.  O.  M.  G.

3.  Emoticons should not appear in blogs.  Want to show me your just kidding?  Don't :) me.  Use words.  You have a lot of space.  And you're giving the blog a bad name.  A bad name, I tells ya!

Maybe all this is just to remind my how much I love blogging, and to motivate me to kick it up a notch again.  I need that once in a while, I guess.

endblogaboutblogging.