I have consolidated

I have decided to start from scratch and just create a whole new blog, which is here. Enjoy!

New and Improved

I've taken quite the break from this blog, as I've been mulling over in my head what I have wanted to do with it. I decided that the only place for truly personal stuff is in my private journal. So, instead of talking about all of that stuff, I thought I'd take a totally different approach. After all, what I'm writing has a potentially global audience.

From now on, I'm going to write about my impressions of the world around me. What I've seen on TV, what I've read, etc. So, sit back. Make some Jiffy-Pop, and enjoy. Don't feel bashful to write comments... it'll show me that someone is actually reading this blog.

French version

Blog overhaul

I have edited all of the "private" stuff out of my blog, because Aunt Beth was the first one in a year to tell me to be careful of what I write in here. So I thank her for that.

To all of you who had that opportunity and chose to talk to other people about it, and not to me, 1) I apologise for what I have written, and 2) Talk to me about it!!!

I have taken the links to my blogs out of my e-mail, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief.

I am going to have to think about what I can post in here. But until I do, enjoy the watered-down, Disnified version of my blog.

Have a nice day.

2005 In Review

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?
I actually got passed the “buzzed” stage and was actually a little drunk.

2. Did you keep your New Years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Resolutions are for suckaz.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My little cousin Lorelei was born two days before my birthday, which means she'll be one a week from Tuesday. Got to get her a card or something.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No, thankfully not.

5. What countries did you visit?
I kind of visited France and Switzerland by watching TV5 on cable.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?
$$$$$$MONEY$$$$$$$$, and an education

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Actually passing in a paper, even though the professor rejected it two weeks later.

8. What was your biggest failure?
Not filling out my application to be a substitute teacher.

9. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I’ve had a perpetual cold for about a year and a half now, maybe a should get that checked out…

10. What was the best thing you bought?
Harry Potter et le prince du sang-mêlé

11. Where did most of your money go?
My van.

12. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The possibility of working for the Paralympics

13. What song will always remind you of 2005?
That stupid Fitness Made Simple jingle. He’s not a fitness celebrity, people!!!!

14. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? About the same
ii. thinner or fatter? Fatter, then thinner, then fatter again.
iii. richer or poorer? poorer. Damn you, SSI!

15. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Going down to portland

16. What do you wish you'd done less of?
sleeping

17. How will you be spending Christmas?
At home then over the river and through the woods to Nana’s house. (I’m not kidding)

18. Did you fall in love in 2005?
Kinda

19. How many one-night stands?
I’ve never stood for a whole night in my life. My legs hurt just thinking about it.

20. What was the best book you read?
HP et le PdS-M (see #10)

21. What was your greatest musical (re)discovery?
Didn’t really have one.

22. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Wow that was a long time ago… I turned 26, and Mom made supper, and we had a champagne cake.

23. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Money, being closer to my friends, and being able to work and take classes at the Penobscot School without worrying about money.

24. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?
Whatever is on top of the pile. Just like always.

25. What kept you sane?
My LJ friends

26. Who was the best new person you met?
My pen pal Nadia

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005:
Only you can truly take care of yourself.

On the Home Stretch

My mother has been after me for quite sometime to just make a plan of what I have to do in order to finish my degree. And so, that is what I did. I gave myself until Thanksgiving to pass in all of the necessary papers. It looks like I can do that way before Thanksgiving. I'm looking at maybe the first week in November. After getting all of my papers in, the next thing is to get one of my professors to reverse the failing grade that she gave me three years ago so that I don't have to do an independent study, and can just write another paper and be done with this thing once and for all. That would be so nice. Then, I can finally put my BA in French on my résumé!

After that I can concentrate on the next step. Who knows what that is going to be. David, from the Paralympics finally e-mailed me back and said that he was going to call this week. I responded as soon as I got the e-mail, and he has yet to respond with a time. Which is okay, because I have to polish up my résumé (or my CV as the rest of the English-speaking world calls it) before I can even think about having gainful employment, emphasis on gainful. David said that there are numerous internship possibilities, but I did a little research on their website, and it said that they were not paid internships. Hey, if it doesn't work out, I know that it just was not meant to be.

I took my van to VIP in Belfast to get my van fixed from when I hit a deer awhile back, and I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone have have an oil change. I waited an hour and a half in their waiting room, watching FoxNews Channel of all things (the spawn of the devil that it is), and I got home, and it looks like they didn't do a single thing to it. The panel on the front of the van is still hanging down. Maybe I'll pay them a visit sometime tomorrow before I head out to Rockland. Give 'em a piece of my mind. I'm curious as to what they did for an hour and a half with my van. Such is life, I guess.

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Mind Your P's and Q's

My sister, Kate, thought she'd put her political science degree, and her natuaral activism, to use, and write an extremely eloquent and poignant editorial for the local Newspaper:

As the fourth anniversary of September 11 approaches I am struck by how little our government has done to be prepared for a disaster.

On September 11, 2001 as I sat in the front office of Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, in the middle of my last week as a staff assistant, one of my coworkers yelled to turn the TV on: a plane had just hit one of the Twin Towers. "Now, how dumb was that pilot," I thought, "it's not like those are hard to miss."

So we turned on the TV, and just like much of America were perplexed by what was going on. Then we all caught our breath as another plane came into the shot and very deliberately hit the other tower. There was a stunned silence. No one moved in the normally bustling congressional hallway. The phones stopped ringing, and we all just looked at each other. It couldn't be. This could not be happening. Not here. We had heard it was possible, but we never thought it would happen. Almost as suddenly as everything stopped it started again. The phone would not stop ringing, and the footsteps in the hall became very deliberate and almost panicked.

We were still trying to decide what to do. Stay or go. Our instincts told us that we were targets, but we didn't want to overreact. The phone rang, I picked it up and on the other end was the frantic voice of a coworker and friend who was sitting in traffic on I395, the main highway that brings workers into the city from Virginia and that goes right by the Pentagon. She screamed at me that she had just watched a plane hit the Pentagon.

"Wait a minute," I said, "are you sure?" She screamed again that she was sitting right by the Pentagon in traffic and had watched the plane smash into the large military fortress. There was fire and mayhem and she just kept screaming. I told her to take some good deep breaths and call her husband. I then had the task of informing the Congresswoman what I had just been told. My chief of staff told me to call the Capitol Police and see what information they had. None of us wanted to believe what our co-worker and friend had just seen.

I got on the phone and called the people who were charged with keeping all of Capitol Hill safe and secure, sure that they would be telling us to evacuate immediately. What I got was a woman who had no clue. "Have you heard that a plane hit the Pentagon?" I asked her.

Without putting her hand over the phone or putting me on hold I heard her yell into the room: "Anyone heard about a plane hitting the Pentagon?"

No response. When she finally got back on the phone she said, "Well maybe it was just a helicopter or a small plane."

"No," I responded, "my friend just called and she watched a passenger jet hit the Pentagon."

"Well," she said, "Just mind your p's and q's." And then hung up.

JUST A HELICOPTER? MIND MY P'S AND Q'S???? That was their great plan. I looked up and watched as all of my co-workers and I realized we needed to get the hell out of there. We came up with our evacuation plan very quickly, [and went into] one of the local bars. We sat there the whole day in shock as we watched the events unfold, not knowing what to do or if we were next.

Four years later, cut to New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the most unique cities on earth. An American city that had 3 days warning that a possible catastrophe was headed its way. The catastrophe that the city government, the state government, and the federal government all knew was not only possible, but probable. We all watched the mayor plead with his people to leave, knowing that hundreds of thousands of them had no way out because they were too poor to afford cars or any other means of transportation. And some were just typical New Orleans residents and were too stubborn to leave their city. Katrina made land fall, and almost immediately things started going wrong.

New Orleans is shaped like a bowl, so any amount of rainwater collects and they expect flooding. That's why many of the houses are on stilts a few feet off the ground. They also have pumps to help get the water out of the city as quickly as possible. The pumps were failing, and they weren't failing just anywhere. They were failing in the Ninth Ward, the poorest area of the city, parts of which have been described to me as almost like a third world country.

The storm passed and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because the widespread devastation seemed to be avoided. Except that the levees that keep the water from Lake Ponchartrain out of the city were only strong enough to hold up against a category 3 storm. Katrina was a category 5, which "luckily" weakened to a category 4 before it got to New Orleans. We all know the rest of the story and have seen the pictures on CNN, in the paper and on the internet.

As I watched all this unfold, the voice of the woman on the other end of the phone kept echoing in my ears. "Mind your p's and q's." For nearly 5 days after the catastrophe that's what I heard our government telling the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. "Mind your p's and q's," figure out how to handle this because we don't know what we're doing.

It didn't occur to us that the levee might break even though our own private engineering firm, The Army Corps of Engineers, has been telling us for years that the levee would only withstand a Category 3, but the area could easily be struck by a category 5. The government had in fact been cutting the New Orleans budget, in an effort to fight a war that is becoming more and more pointless everyday. And they struggled to provide basic necessities such as water, also due to a war that even some of the President's biggest supporters are quietly starting to question. Our money, our troops and our means are all in a country that overwhelmingly doesn't want us there, and our people are dying of starvation and dehydration while they wait as the most powerful government on earth, a government that is supposedly theirs, scrambled to figure out what to do.

Of course, this particular class and race of people is used to hearing, "mind your p's and q's" from "their" government. Who could help but notice the faces of the crowds at the Superdome and Convention Center? They were overwhelmingly black. These were the people who were stuck. Most of the white city was able to get out, because as in most cities in this country, they were the ones with the means. The mayor of the city was stuck, also. He knew he needed the federal government's help to save his city and the people in it. But he kept getting the response I got, but on a much larger and insidious scale: "Mind your p's and q's." Eventually we'll figure this out, but do the best you can until we do.

Days went by and we watched as the city just deteriorated into chaos. People became desperate to take care of themselves in anyway they could. And the media latched on. Words like "looting" and "gangs" became the norm. But we would also hear about families who were just trying to survive. Then we started to realize that the families who were "looting" and were in "gangs" were black, and those who were just trying to survive were white. I'm not saying that there weren't people who were stealing TV's and Nike sneakers, but those were a select few. Yet, that's what we were hearing about. Don't focus on the people who were trying to help their neighbors or what the federal government wasn't doing. Focus on the small number of people who were stealing TV's and Nike shoes. Oh, and lets not mention that this is the most blatant case of racism and classism this country has seen in decades. That doesn't exist here. After all, we are the greatest country on earth. If you have money and you have the right skin color, that is.

My hope for this is that tens of thousands of people didn't die in vain. My hope is that the apathetic in this country wake up. They are the ones that have allowed our government to become a 'Mind your p's and q's' government. They are the ones who are not holding their elected officials responsible for their actions. They are the ones who have allowed our country to be overrun by special interests, huge conglomerates and a media that is just as apathetic as they are.

We live in a scary time when we are heartbeats away from another draft, and our economy being outsourced all over the world. Yet nobody sees this because we all still think we are comfortable. Well, wake up. Watch the faces of the mothers, carrying their babies who are so lethargic because their little bodies don't have enough fluid, and tell me that we have the greatest government on earth. Watch our President spend millions of dollars to fly over the devastated Gulf Coast and then say, "Don't worry, I won't forget," and still not send aid for days, and tell me that we have a leader in the White House. Send your kids out into the workforce and watch them get minimum wage jobs, because all the good jobs are going oversees and tell me that they are comfortable. Keep minding your p's and q's, America, and just see where it gets us.

Wyatt Allen Horne

Six weeks ago, another new addition arrived on my mother's side of the family, and I just got to meet him yesterday. His name is Wyatt (as in Earp) Allen (after my grandfather) Horne. New life just never ceases to amaze me, and what is more amazing to me is that this newborn baby is going to be alive to see most of the 21st century, if we don't blow up planet Earth in the process, that is. He's going to see 15 or so presidents of the United States, and be able to hop on a space shuttle to visit his kid's new condo on the Moon. He's going to see things that people now have only dreamed of.

Right now, I do have to admit, he looks like he jumped out of an episode of the Simpsons. He's got wide eyes, no teeth, and even has a protruding upper lip. I told my Aunt Deb (Wyatt's grandmother) today that kids his age only come with a few settings: I'm sleepy; I'm hungy; I've just made a number in my pants; and I'm gassy. That's about it. Right now, he's mostly on one of the first two settings.

I would love to have a look into his brain. There are millions upon billions of connections being made. His little mind is taking everything in from the environment. His arms and feet are moving, paving the way towards rolling over and crawling. His ears are listening to every word we say, and the language centers of his brain are pieceing together the intricacies of the English language.

Wouldn't it be nice if they were babies, and then poof! they wake up one morning and are ready to go off to college? I wouldn't mind having kids if that happened.

Speaking of college, my cousin Garren (a.k.a. 'G-Spot,' and 'The Pope') left Belfast this afternoon to go off to college in Kansas. I can remember when my aunt Cathy was pregnant with him, and thinking to myself what a strange name Garren is. And then, when he was in his babbling phase, I would pretend to speak baby, and act like his interpreter. And then in my mind I see the video of one Christmas that my uncle videotaped of Garren by the stairs, obviously gift-wrapping a little homemade brown surprise for his parents. Now he's off to college, and the next chapter of his life. It hardly seems possible.

Had a pretty good time at Rollies this evening with most of the Horne cousins. It's weird, because I had a really good time with everybody, but I have a really hard time talking to them. Apart from the obvious, Neally and Sara are talking about the cute pants they bought at some store, and Colby and Jake talking about how many touchdown passes Peyton Manning threw last season, I'm just having a hard time connecting with people. Maybe it's that I have a lot on my mind right now, with my degree looming over my head, or maybe it's that I've had too sheltered a life, and haven't really had the chance of really living on my own (really), and being my own person. Or maybe I'm just simply the black sheep of that side of the family. Who knows.

It's just that lately I'm finding myself at parties, or social situations, and not really having a lot to add to conversations. And sometimes when I do have something to say, my statements kill whatever conversation I'm having quicker than Raid to a spider. (For all of you guys on the other side of the pond, Raid is a household insect [and arachnid] poison.) And I get people looking at me like, that's a strange thing to say, and then they sigh and walk away. But other times, I am the life of the party, and always know what to say, and could talk all night to anyone about anything. I think I may have just diagnosed my own bi-polar disorder. Oh well. If after finishing my degree, I'm still that way, I'll see the doctor about Lithium, but I think I'll wait on that awhile...

It might as well be 12:30, and I still have to print off some business cards for my mother, who is now experiencing an influx of real estate activity, so I will leave you guys with just one thought:

Spammers are evil people, who should save their product plugs for e-mail, and not the comment section of personal blogs. May Beelzebub himself scoop out your eyes with a dull plastic spoon and feed them to you, you naughty naughty spammers.

Okay, that's it!

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Thanks goes to my Uncle Blaine for sending me this photo.