Thoughts while procrastinating

I read that our administration has allowed the military to issue over 125,000 "moral waivers" to recruits. This means accepting recruits who have a criminal record.

Meanwhile, the military is dismissing over 700 soldiers a year who are found to be gay.

Thus, macho types and criminals have a slightly higher risk of dying young than gays. Does this mean that if we keep waging wars we will evolve a society that selects for law-abiding gays?

We can only hope.

Who's meddling in whose country?

Iran is meddling in the Iraq war, according to the Bush administration. What do we call it when we do the same thing in Iran?

Iran alleges U.S. aided in attack | Santa Rosa Press Democrat // News for California's North Bay and Redwood Empire

"Stratfor, a Texas-based security and intelligence analysis firm, said in a report Saturday that the attacks 'fall in line with U.S. efforts to supply and train Iran's ethnic minorities to destabilize the Iranian regime.' It said a 'covert intelligence war' between Iran and the United States is 'well under way.'"

What I want for my birthday

As a newly minted senior citizen, here's what I want for my birthday:

I want my whole family to get together in the presence of a tape recorder and maybe a video camera. I want them to bring their earliest memories of family and share them with the rest of us, either orally or in writing. I want us to talk about these memories and add more memories that we recovered as we listened to the other people's memories.

I will put the whole thing together in some sort of multimedia family history and share it with the rest of the family.

I want to do this now, while I still remember a portion of our early years. I've already forgotten so much!
Here we are squinting in the sun after church, circa 1958. I'm the one that looks like the town librarian, while my baby sister is the one perfecting her come-hither look.

I'm sitting by the fire on a beautiful rainy day, reviving a half-forgotten skill: knitting. Cleo rests on my arm, a feline vibrating machine. Steve is playing bass in the other room. I think of getting some hot chocolate, but I'm too lazy to get up. Anyway, it would disturb the cat.

There are worse settings in which to turn 60.

This morning I went down to Aqus Cafe for the "Action Circle." Apparently it wasn't an action type of day, since the only other person who showed up was John Crowley, the Cafe owner. But some friends drifted over with Canadian relatives in tow.

There are people who believe in the hidden synchronicity of everything, that certain things are foreordained or meant to be or proof of a cosmic design. Not me. I find a view of the universe as essentially without meaning much more profound.

Still, up pops this Canadian couple who are--I'm not kidding--knitting instructors, just when I had been accumulating some technical questions about the hat I was attempting to knit. (Using the knitting needles I picked up in McMinnville, Oregon, thanks to Howard Hughes, but that's another story.)

Anyway, these knitters from Ontario (Eugene and Ann Bourgeois) are possibly having a knitting workshop on Tuesday, to demonstrate their unique simplified Fair Isle knitting technique. They're also interesting in that their whole operation is local--the wool, the spinning, dyeing and knitting.

As an aside, Eugene told me a chilling--er, frightening--fact: Christmas 2006 was the first time in history that there was no snow all across Canada. So much for Canada as "the frozen north."