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Father's day is tomorrow and the following sums up the father experience, at least for me, pretty well.
Father's daze ... The good news is that along with sex, New York and good cheesecake, having children is one of the few life experiences that truly lives up to the hype. I have known how to be miserable both with children and without. But I never knew what happiness truly was until I was a father. And it looks nothing like I thought it would. When I was in my 20s I thought that happiness looked like a big desk I could sit behind, ordering people around. I thought happiness was golden beaches, and exciting parties, and recreational drugs, and exotic travel and big salaries and gorgeous women. And I tried all these things - oh, how I tried them. But you can add them up and multiply them by their own power, and none of them achieve the simple intensity of the joy that is granted by pushing my daughters on the swings in the local park on a sunny day, or simply watching while they sleep. No clever piece of artifice - film, theatre, TV - can make me laugh half as much. No stunning piece of art can be so beautiful. No winning of a literary prize would make me so proud. Happiness, it turns out, like evil, is banal. What is wonderful about children is the same thing that is terrible about them. Things matter so much to them. They have the capacity to draw immense joy from, say, a cereal packet Tweenie - and generate extraordinary grief when it is trodden on. Children, emotionally, are like adults - only far, far more so. And what could be more terrifying and brilliant than that? thanks to wood s lot Zoe and I are putting on a party at my new place tomorrow (I'm not quite moved in. My computer isn't there yet.) My mom, Zoe's mom, along with assorted siblings, nieces and nephews will be there. A sort of saying hi to Jenny, who is here on leave from the Army in Germany, and goodbye to Jenny, Robby, and Robyn who all leave for Germany on the 25th. As well as Father's day, and a late birthday party for my mom, as well as an early birthday party for Zoe's mom. Katie will be up from Tacoma. She is in the fireworks business and this will be her last day off until after the 4th of July. So my kids, Jenny, Katie, and Robby, will be together for one last time before Jenny, Robby, and Robyn leave. Both grandkids will be there too: Robyn and Michael.
It's nice to have all the people you love in the same time and space once and a while.
Still catching up from my hard drive mishaps but a good TestingTesting was had by all. Tina Lear was our special guest and brought along some cast members fom "Cathy's Creek", a play she did the music for. More than a century of mining has left the West deeply scarred By Robert McClure and Andrew Schneider Electric-blue, purple and green, the water that drips from the walls and ceilings in the Richmond Mine near Redding, Calif., is so acidic that it once dissolved a steel shovel left overnight in a puddle. If unchecked, acidic water leaching from the old mine would carry a toxic brew of heavy metals into tributaries of the Sacramento River, which provides drinking water for 80,000 people in nearby Redding. Spills in the past have killed fish and plants for miles downstream. "It's the world's worst water," said Charles Alpers, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist. In fact, water at the old mine has been known to catch fire. A thousand times more destructive than battery acid, it has been declared the most acidic water ever found -- literally off the charts. The environment is so skewed inside the mine that scientists discovered a previously unseen life form, a microbe that lives in acid. Hard-working men took a fortune from the mine over the course of a century, hacking a warren of tunnels and shafts deep into Iron Mountain to extract iron, silver, gold, copper, zinc and pyrite until digging stopped in 1963. Since then, federal taxpayers have been stuck with a $85 million cleanup tab. The Richmond Mine is one of the scars left on the land because of the General Mining Law of 1872, which encourages miners to take precious metals from public land, paying only a token fee if they pay anything at all. Congress created the law as a way to encourage growth and economic development in the Old West, but the toll now being paid is staggering: Some 16,000 miles of streams polluted, countless lakes and reservoirs contaminated, tens of thousands of old mine openings disgorging acidic water that can kill fish and other creatures. Some of them spew an orange-red poison called "yellow boy." The number of fish, birds and other wildlife sickened or killed is incalculable. Nor has the damage stopped. And what are the odds that the bushies will help solve this problem? thanks to rebecca's pocket
Final Adjusted Total, Bush 2,915,426 --- Gore 2,915,928
thanks to rebecca's pocket
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