Sugar

Vanilla & Chocolate Cupcakes with Cherry Vanilla Almond Pudding Filling

"Eric Carle Green" Frosting

The finished product, a very special cake for a Very Hungry Birthday Girl!

Happy Birthday, V!

Astrology

My favorite star gazer says Leos' thought processes as they relate to intrapersonal relationships and careers are in flux at the moment. In crisis even. And that things are getting turned inside out. Well played, cosmos, well played.

Blog Favoritism

By Best Weight Loss Blog

Help my favorite blog win an award from Fitness magazine.  And check out her amazing blog, Can You Stay For Dinner?.

DD Refresh

Nothing like visiting the old blog to learn it's been a haven for "anonymous" gibberish posts.  At least it would have been if it weren't for the ability to reject all that gibberish before it messes up my blogspace.  Time to dust off the old posts and add a new one.  It might be the only one for the next few months, or I may pick up and post more often.  I'm in favor of more posts.  There are great and terrible things happening out there, as usual.  Inside our four walls, our girls are growing so fast and are both coming up on birthdays (1 and 4!).  So much work and so much fun!  Bella is enjoying dance class and preschool.  Vera is refusing to get mobile and enjoys fussing at us to hold her and play with her 24/7.  But she is such a darling little cuddle bug, so we always give in.  Pictures later.

Still Won't Fly...

There are plenty of commercials on TV on travel destinations, airlines (oh boy, you're only going to charge me that much extra to take some clothes in a suitcase? how wonderful!), and sites like kayak.com and priceline.com. Hey, you wanna take your kids to Disney World, don't you?? (I do, actually.) It seems a cruel taunt considering that you have to spin the roulette wheel of bad touches and radiation before you're allowed to board your plane to your destination with your kids. What decent parent would ever proceed with a trip under these circumstances? You prove to me why our country isn't looking more like Nazi Germany every day.

Shocked: What is happening to my America?

For Tony and I, blogging takes a back seat to so many other things these days. But I've always seen blogging as a release from stress. So, when I don't blog for months, there's often more to it than that I'm just busy. In the past half year, the things foremost on my mind are also all over the news (at least the news we watch and read) and, unfortunately, they're of the more unpleasant variety, unpleasant enough that it becomes heavy and redundant to repost on on my rather light-hearted blog. But it's become overwhelming just how many jaw-dropping, ire-evoking, mentally and emotionally disturbing stories have surfaced this year and how their frequency is only increasing in pace. I feel like I'm watching the death of my nation and the decay of my freedoms every day. And at the top of the list are all the new abuses being put forth by the TSA under the guise of "protection". I've never seen anything more resemble the Nazi offenses in WWII movies than what they're doing now to men, women, the elderly & children. The videos and stories are of scared, paralyzed parents watching their children in distress and of modest, decent people leaving airports true victims of sexual assault. And the perpetrators are protected and revered by our government officials. They're allowed to mock, ridicule and commit crimes with their hands. Many have proven themselves bullies and predators and have not attempted to mask their enjoyment of their new power.

And I'm even more interested in what awful longterm consequences we can expect to surface from forced irradiation by body scanners.

Where are the doctors? psychiatrists? mental health professionals? These are our patients, our familes and friends. We have to stand up and be vocal. We are not sheep to be lead.

Stand up!

Boycott flying!

Read http://wewontfly.com/ and its blog posts and links, especially this one:

http://www.ourlittlechatterboxes.com/2010/11/tsa-sexual-assault.html

and

http://mytsahorrorstory.com/

and, if you're on facebook, join the "Boycott Flying" page!

Pooplet at 22.5 Months

~ Strawberry Pants Forever ~

Greater Pursuits

It's not hard to believe that it's been 8 months since my last blog post. In the layer cake of priorities that is my current life, there was barely enough room for facebook, which is at least somewhat related to real life activities and relationships. And anyway, it's really not easy for internship and anything else to coexist. And then, the same could be said for motherhood or marriage, I suppose. Then you add the time it takes to keep up with what's going on in this mixed-up world of ours and blogging really falls out of the top 10 spot it used to occupy.

This week was a staycation week. The 2nd week I've taken off since starting residency last July. It really took an entire week to feel rested again and get back to any semblance of normal family life in our house. And suddenly there are a few extra minutes to sit down and revitalize the blog. I wouldn't be so foolish as to declare that posts will be coming more frequently, but with 8 months of as yet unblogged photos and topics, there's no shortage of inspiration.

Getting Edumacated

I've recently been attempting to learn more about how our economy works and I have come across so many things that confuse and infuriate me about practices and policies that squander our country's wealth but are allowed to continue unchecked. Things that, if more were widely known about them, I think would confuse and infuriate everyone else who loves this country too. I used to believe that our country was kept relatively safe from corruption by a series of checks and balances. I am realizing that so many of these have already been eroded long ago, leaving us with a system devoid of reason, fairness or control.

I was excited to learn about a bill designed to target the source of some of these corrupt practices, the Federal Reserve. The same mysterious Federal Reserve that is mentioned daily in the news but that few Americans truly understand. I didn't. I was shocked to learn that the bank that runs our entire economy is not a government agency at all. It's run by private bankers who have no built-in incentive to make choices that are in the best interest of anyone but themselves. They may inflate and deflate our money at will. And they don't even have to allow anyone to audit their books.

Bill HR 1207 would open the Fed up for audit. As it stands now, many Fed meetings are secret and audit is not allowed. I shudder to think of the tumult that an audit would cause and the staunch resistance it would likely create on its way to implementation. But the thought of the status quo continuing for another 10, 20, 50 years is even worse. This isn't the first time such a bill was proposed. Unfortunately, 1993's version was brushed aside by Alan Greenspan, the Fed president, and denounced by President Clinton as dangerous to the stability of our economy.

Learn more about the Fed below and see all the representatives and senators who support the bill to audit the Fed here.

New Linky

The future of American liberty may depend on ordinary citizens joining with organized movements like Campaign for Liberty that have the power to make real changes in Washington. I hope folks will begin channeling any anger they're dealing with into a quest for education and a desire to support like-minded folks in the House and Senate.