Category: random

Stop beating yourself up over old mistakes.
We may love the wrong person and cry about the wrong things, but no matter how things go wrong, one thing is for sure, mistakes help us find the person and things that are right for us.
We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past.
But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.
Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come.

While hanging out in the backyard, early Sunday morning, trying to catch a view of the comet named ‘Siding Spring,’ I recalled an event from July 1995. At the time Mary, Kyle and I were living in an apartment on Sutro Street in Reno.

During the evening of the third, I sat outside with my friend Gene and his three girls, Elyse, Renee and Lauren. The five of us lay back in the grass watching the sky.

We were looking for the U.S. and Russian space ships to zip through the darkened night. The two ships were docked together and visible for only a few minutes as they were traveling so fast that they were out of sight in no time.

It was such an amazing sight that wrote about the event in my private journal that night: “I am still in awe of the space program, knowing that man can leave the gravity of this Earth and go beyond the limits of what was once considered imagination…”

It’s those small bits-and-pieces of memory that make life worth living.

Sitting on my front porch, enjoying an autumn zephyr that felt more like a winter breeze, I got to thinking about what wisdom I could impart if we had no more time left.  Politics, civil liberty, historical essays, family stories and old photographs would no longer matter.

So what’s left?

Then that tiny voice, I often call my conscience, but is really the Holy Spirit we each have, whispered in my head. Despite the rushing of God’ breathe across the valley, I heard His message loud and clear: “Love and care for each other.”

For the past month I’ve played ‘cat and mouse,’ with a couple of real mice. That leaves me in the role of the cat.

Because I have dogs, I don’t use poison bait to kill the mice. In fact I prefer to live-trap them, then release them far away from the neighborhood, deep in the desert scrub.

Unfortunately, Mr. Mouse and his buddies are too smart for their own good, evading every live-trap I’d set to capture them with. So, I finally had to resort to a few good old-fashioned mouse traps.

The end of the first mouse came at around four in the morning when Mary woke me saying, “I jus’ heard the trap go off.”

She left for work shortly afterwards and that’s when I got up and disposed of the now broken dead mouse. All my other traps remained unsprung even though the bait of peanut butter I left on them was gone.

Since that morning, I’ve managed to get two more mice — and as counter-intuitive as it might sound — killing mice should be easy to do, but on the contrary, it upsets my tiny universe and leaves me out of sorts.

Realized I should take a picture of my neighbor, Tom’s tree in its full glory of fall coloring and before the wind and chill release the leaves for the year.

It will go bare before anyone knows it and will remain so until next Spring. It’s such a shame that we often take for granted the small but elegant views of our world.

Angry about being fire when he refused to stop trying to convert coworkers to Islam, Alton Nolen decided to return and cut off the head a former coworker and stabbing another former coworker at a Oklahoma business. Nolen is now charged with first degree murder and assault.

Authorities say Nolen converted to Islam and radicalized while in prison. However the FBI and the Department of Justice is treating this as a case of ‘workplace violence.’

Unfortunately, he wasn’t employed at the time so the idea this was ‘workplace violence,’ is absurd. This was an act of ‘terror,’ plain and simple.

Political correctness is going to get us all killed.

In an appearance on MSNBC, Florida Congressman Dennis Ross said banning flights from West Africa to the U.S. makes sense and said he plans to introduce a bill doing so once the House reconvenes in November. However a self-righteous journalist has to score points by being exact, arguing semantics.

“There are no direct flights that come to the United States from West Africa,” rebutted New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters on the same program.

Meanwhile, sick people from West Africa are still making their way to this country. Peters behavior reminds me of the old joke where two hunters stood around arguing about what sort of tracks they had found, meanwhile a speeding train comes along and kills them both.

But go ahead — ignore the ABC News report the says health officials in Senegal credit border controls in aiding that country in declaring itself Ebola free.  Senegal implemented border controls in August.

We could learn something from this — but our leaders are too pretentious to listen.

Please explain to me again jus’ how ‘conservative’ Nevada’s Governor Brian Sandoval is. Back when he was first elected I wrote that he is really a ‘progressive,’ pretending to be something he’s not.

Recently, as I drove along Mill Street, approaching Kietzke Lane in Reno, I saw a billboard for his re-election as governor. I couldn’t help but make the link in my head…

I’ll let you finish connecting the dots.

Oh, fuck me! I jus’ put Kay on an flight so she can meet her sister for a cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, then I hear this…

“A health care worker who may have handled a specimen from the Liberian man who died from Ebola in Dallas is on a cruise ship in the Caribbean,” reports USA Today. “Industry giant Carnival says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified it late Wednesday that a passenger on the Texas-based Carnival Magic was a lab supervisor at the Dallas hospital where Thomas Eric Duncan died from the disease earlier this month. Carnival says the unnamed woman has been placed in isolation on the ship and has shown no signs of illness.

Then I saw this from the NY Post:

“A passenger died on a Nigeria-to-JFK flight after a vomiting fit Thursday — and a top lawmaker said officials gave the corpse only a “cursory” exam before declaring that the victim did not have Ebola. Rep. Peter King said in a letter to Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection that the handling of the remains exposed serious flaws in airport preparedness for an Ebola outbreak. Between 70 and 100 passengers a day arrive at JFK from the Ebola epicenter countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, King noted, and they have access to public restrooms and mingle with other travelers before their first screening.”

And now President Barack Obama is naming Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and a trusted adviser at the Obama White House, as the point man on the U.S. government’s response to the Ebola crisis. What the hell does a political insider and lawyer know about controlling a possible pandemic?

I swear I’m about to go bat-shit crazy as I can’t figure out why this is happening to us – the U.S.

So often anymore, people get wrapped up in the politics of a subject that they miss the actual message and thereby the real threat of the matter as is the case with Ebola. It doesn’t matter if an infected person’s spittle when sneezed or coughed is considered ‘airborne,’ or not!

I don’t care if the CDC claims it is transmitted only by contact with bodily fluid, they’re arguing semantics and creating chaos with their double-speak.

What matters is the possibility of transmission. And because it is not know for certain if Ebola can be transmitted via ‘airborne transmission,’ it is best to err on the side of caution.

That means the message needs to be about is what sort of protective equipment healthcare workers are using and the training needed to use that equipment. The message should also help calm fear, but that’s not what is happening.

The message needs to be simple and I think the UK Guardian got it right: “The Ebola virus is transmitted in the bodily fluids of people who are seriously ill, who are likely to be vomiting, bleeding or have diarrhoea. Blood, faeces and vomit are the most infectious fluids, and in late stages of the disease even tiny amounts can carry high loads of virus.”

“But a nurse who got a patient’s blood on their hands could wash it off with soap and water without any ill-effects,” the report continues. “He or she would become ill only if they had a cut or abrasion on their hand or touched their mouth, eyes or nose, which would allow the virus to pass into their bodily fluids.”

They add, “It can take two to 21 days for symptoms to show, although usually it is five to seven days. Typically, the first signs are a fever involving a headache, joint and muscle pain, sore throat and severe muscle weakness.

“Many of those symptoms are similar to flu, so Ebola is not immediately obvious, though it should be suspected in anyone who has been in west Africa recently. After that come diarrhoea, vomiting, a rash and stomach pain,” says the Guardian.

See, simple!