Emergency Preparations at QuiXand Ranch

In an effort to amuse myself in the middle of this freakish winter, as well as to distract myself from the very real possibility that we might lose power for an extended period of time, I sent the following email to several friends and acquaintances:

With more snow in the forecast and the looming possibility of power outages, I have begun some emergency preparations. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

• Since we are on well water, power outages mean no water either so:

o I’ve taken my weekly bath several days early. Just my luck the power will go out on Saturday afternoon right before bath time and I’m such a stickler about hygiene.
o I’ve purchased several plastic five-gallon buckets for toilet water. Last time I lost my axe in the pond and fell in while breaking the ice to get pond water. This time we’ll be smarter. We’re filling the plastic buckets with snow so that we can set them on the wood stove to melt.

• We have stocked both freezers to the gills with meat for people and dogs. (Bought good candles to put in the electric oven to roast the meat – surprising no one has mentioned that before.)

• Dug all my Chuck Norris comics out of the closet for entertainment. I don’t see so well in poor candle light so I have my portable propane torch on the nightstand for extra illumination. If that doesn’t work, I can hold it in my lap while I read. Don’t worry, I’ll open the windows, duh!

• Piled all the old Carpenter Ant infested wood that I stripped out of the deck last summer on the wood floor in the living room for firewood. Okay, it’s actually been there since I stripped it out.

• Filled the car with gas and backed it up to the window so that the exhaust can throw a little extra heat into the place. *Bonus: also got a siphon hose to get gas from the car for lighting the stove*

I can’t help but feel I’m forgetting something. Please let me know if any of you think of something I’ve missed.
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I'm so fortunate to have wonderful, caring friends willing to wrack their brains to help me complete my list. Oh, and some other jerks added some suggestions, promting this update:

Thanks to all of you who added your thoughtful suggestions. While the weather is greatly improved, I’ll be prepared now for the next round. I’ve added the following suggestions to my list:

• No candles in the oven. Bring the BBQ inside for that. If it doesn’t light right away, I can use the gas from the car. I’m rather embarrassed that I didn’t think of that myself. It will make a great indoor source of heat too!

• Seal all doors and windows with that extra heavy Homeland Security plastic sheeting to keep the heat from the car exhaust from escaping. Good thing I have friends to do my thinking for me!

• Stock up on Valium and tequila to cope with being cooped up with the kid (AKA Emy Bunny Army – whatever in the hell that means). The tequila can also serve as marinade for the meat if we run out of spices.

• Allow the dogs to poop in the living room and use the resultant methane gas for heat and cooking. Marinade meat in dog pee to counteract the poop taste.

Thanks again, though I must say, some of ya’ll are sicker than me!

Don't try to hide - you know who you are!

The Ultimate Chuck Norris Joke

President Elect Obama has promised a new way of doing business in Washington by working together in a spirit of bi-partisanship. I think that's a wonderful and productive policy and all indications are that he is very serious about fulfilling that promise. While I applaud and support the President-elect in this view, I am very pleased that I, as a private citizen, can be as blatantly liberal as I please.

I find it a bit amusing that the left has been critical that he is too close to the middle, while right-wing idiots like Chuck Norris are near apoplectic over his ‘refusal to govern from the center’. He is afraid that Obama will be too much like Clinton, who brought us eight years of relative peace, the greatest economic expansion in history and the first balanced budget in many years. God, that would be awful.

Of course, this is the same simpleton that challenges the President-elect to "protect American life" while supporting the useless war in Iraq and the thousands of dead Americans it has produced. Not to mention the countless other Bush Administration policies that have made the world more dangerous for Americans.

With typical right-wing arrogance that assumes only they understand the Constitution and the intentions of the founding fathers, he quotes Thomas Jefferson. “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government".

Of course, Jefferson was obviously talking about abortion, not things like the death penalty and treasonous Presidential acts like manufacturing evidence to start a religious oil war. How convenient that religion and the needs of the oil companies converged when they each owned equal shares of the Administration. 9/11 provided a perfect opportunity, proving that God must indeed have a plan.

Here we come to the heart of my problem with the right-wing. They simply leave no room for intelligent discourse and for thinking Americans to forward a rational agenda. Their religious agenda is dangerous, ignorant and self-fulfilling and as far as I can tell, very un-Christ-like. They are willing to kill anyone in the name of God, oil, justice, freedom, and damned near anything else and yet they are so very concerned about the unborn. The hypocrisy is astounding but if you try to disagree, they'll shout you down. If you try to exercise your freedom of speech discount you by accusing you of being unpatriotic and unappreciative of your freedoms. Explain that one to me.

As a Humanist and recovering Mormon, I had actually reached a point where I was losing my anger over how Mormonism steamrolled through my upbringing and the difficult personal struggle to find my own path. Then came Prop 8 and the Mormon Church’s shameful actions in ‘support of the family’. They violated their tax exempt status by becoming a political, as opposed to a religious organization, while forwarding a hateful and un-Christ-like agenda.

There is an old punch line that goes “Welcome to Utah. Please set your watch back 20 years.” The Mormon Church’s actions regarding Prop 8 easily set the fight against ignorance and intolerance back by 20 years.

Lest I appear to be picking on Mormons, I believe that all religions are dangerous. I mean ALL religions, of every type, from anywhere on the globe. From Muslims who are willing to kill and die in the name of Allah to Christians whose crusades promote hate, war and intolerance, and who believe that freedom of religion only pertains to them. Every religion, from every corner of the world, has dovetailing apocalyptic prophesies that they are determined to self-fulfill and it's reached a point where they are dangerously close to accomplishing that.

I can no longer remain silent in my views about religion and I can no longer remain tolerant of their intolerance. There is simply too much at stake. Between their fatalistic view that it’s all going to end soon so why bother concerning ourselves with Global Climate Change, overpopulation, and myriad other deadly problems, and their determination to fulfill world-ending prophesies, they are now threatening our very survival. God, I hate sounding like some alarmist Bircher extremist! See what they’ve done to me?

A good first step would be to tax the churches. Between the Mormons and Catholics alone we could practically wipe out the national debt, not to mention the TV preachers who are living high off the hog on their tax exempt scams. There is simply no good reason why these organizations should be allowed to take the money of their gullible followers without even contributing to the national coffers.

In these hard economic times, churches are just about the only enterprises still turning a profit. They need to contribute somehow to offset their promotion of an agenda bent our destruction. At the very least, make the Mormons give me back the tithing I was forced to pay when I was nine - with interest, of course.

This was a difficult conclusion for me reach because I know these organizations are made up of many, many good people; people that I believe to be misguided but certainly not evil. My own family, which is made up of mostly very staunch Mormons, are some of the best people I know. I only wish they could see the harm that religions are doing in the name of their particular deities. Even tough guy Norris is probably a decent guy, whom I might even befriend if the opportunity arose. It’s just that he’s wrong.

Religion = Ignorance. Pass it on.