Came home yesterday to the following.

1. Pipes no longer frozen. Yay!
2. Contractor who had thoughtfully put a ton of insulation in the interior walls temporarily so we’d be warm and the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Yay!
3. No more countertop or cabinets on 3/4 of the kitchen wall. Yay!
4. No cooktop. Hmm.
5. Microwave shorting out the outlet in the dining room. Oh dear.
6. Dust everywhere. YUK.
7. Progress. Yay! Yay! Yay! 

Friday the contractor chipped away the stucco on the back wall of the house, and boarded up the naked insides of the back wall for the weekend. We cleared out the cabinets on that wall and began the setup of our temporary kitchen, which will reside on a wheeled cart, and which consists of the two most important parts of our kitchen: the microwave, and the coffeemaker.

It was cold as balls in the kitchen all weekend, and today we woke up to 10-degree temperatures and frozen pipes in the kitchen. That’s not good. We also have to keep an eye on the furnace, because the thermostat is close enough to the kitchen that it’ll run the heat all day and run down the water level in the boiler.

I keep telling myself, this is just the start of the “fun.”

Best political cartoon I’ve seen in awhile.

Check it out. (Popup Image FYI)

Teething sucks my ass.
My eyes? They barely stay o-
Zzz zzz zzz zzz zzz.

Last night I completely lost my shit at Wolf Blitzer; it’s a pity he didn’t hear me. I’m still trying to figure out if I should even bother saying anything, since I’m sure on the whole CNN gives fuckall what I think.

In the middle of the election returns - a program, I might add, that featured a touch-screen demonstration of how to surf and read CNN’s website because they had nothing of actual meaning to say otherwise - came the news that there was a huge fucking tornado on the ground in Arkansas. A weatherman, justifiably hyperventilating, was put on screen while election return info scrolled the bottom of the screen. Mr. Weatherman, still having a conniption, tried to communicate that the storms were huge, bad, dangerous, and holy shit get in the basement NOW. Multiple tornadoes, many on the ground for more than 30 minutes, and some of them heading for major cities.

There was some footage of damage, and a large headline that said “CONFIRMED FATALITIES.” People had died from those storms within the last hour.

So the camera cuts back to Wolf and he starts wanking on about polling places in Tennessee and Arkansas. He starts asking the weather dude, “Were the polling places moved? Did people get to vote? Were they relocated?”

I of course took that opportunity to start using language I don’t use in front of my children (both were asleep). Holy fucking goddam mother of shit. Are you fucking kidding me? People are DEAD and Wolf is blathering about whether they got to vote? NO WOLF, THEY DIDN’T! KNOW WHY? If they’re not DEAD, their car is in a tree and their home has been destroyed.

What a fucking moron. At that point I lost my temper, could not have cared less about who won the primary in a state that hadn’t closed its polls yet, and went to bed.

And this morning I’m still really fucking pissed off. The top stories on CNN: the election results. NOT the fact that FORTY FOUR PEOPLE FUCKING DIED in a RATHER LARGE natural disaster. No, poll results. That don’t actually prove anything except that McCain is the likely nominee (we knew that!) and that Clinton and Obama are still in a dead heat (we knew that, too!).

I am so sick to fucking death of having CNN and other news outlets trying to decide what’s really important so they can force nonessential information down my throat. I can’t be the only one who thinks live announcements of an imminent deadly storm is a good bit MORE important than election results and predictions from polls that have either just closed or are still open. And I can’t be the only one disgusted that whether polling places were moved was more of a concern than whether students in a dorm that was decimated by a tornado were still alive at that moment.

Maybe I am the only one turned off by the news, but it doesn’t really change anything for me. I’ve always been revolted by the tunnel vision of the American television news media and the saturation coverage of events that reduces them to lukewarm meaningless blather. I’m still turned off, and thus I’m doing what I always did: turning off the channel and not watching it again.

Fuck you Wolf. And fuck you too, CNN. You suck. 

Watch this.

From the Good News Network

"Power is strength and the ability to see yourself through your own eyes and not through the eyes of another. It is being able to place a circle of power at your own feet and not take power from someone else’s circle.”

Lynn V. Andrews - author