Here is an interesting first person account of Iraqi Out-Of Country Voting.

I love voting. I hope this election forms the basis of a democratic and peaceful tradition in Iraq. I hope it wasn’t propaganda.

That’s why I blog. I’m looking for my tribe.

That answer is so much more appealing to me than admitting that I am powerless over narcissism.

Earlier this year some friends gave birth to their very first child. The child is beautiful and healthy and the parents are adjusting well. When I saw them last Sunday, they showed off the baby and mentioned they were seeking a “new normal.”

I didn’t laugh or tease them about that concept. But inside of my head, I thought something like this.

“You’re looking for normal? Say goodbye to normal. Normal just took a holiday and left no forwarding address or itinerary. Normal didn’t say goodbye. Normal left in the middle of the night. I think I saw normal with your favorite pillow and your nicest suitcase. Normal, won’t be sending you a postcard. Normal won’t bother to call you collect on Mother’s Day. Normal is gone. Normal also ran up your phone bill before leaving. You’ll be more likely to find D.B. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa pulling espresso at your local Starbucks, than to find normal again. If normal were locked in a turkish prison and you were the only one who could get him out, you still wouldn’t get a call. The sooner you accept this and stop your denial and bargaining the sooner you can move on with your lives.”

Of course, I had the decency to not say anything like this.

The good news is that in twelve months they might have feelings like this posting by Heather B. Armstrong that will make you forget your flirtation with normal. The quote below, from the very last paragraph of Heather’s post, resonates with my experience of parenting.

Sometimes I get aggravated by the sheer amount of stuff I own.

I’ve been thinking about “stuff” lately as an old friend is moving this week and she has to pack and unpack it. When I move or even think about the effort involved in moving, I get aggravated thinking about all my stuff.

The same aggravation arises when I go camping and spend a few days existing with nothing more than what can fit in my pack or pockets, I am overcome by a desire to throw away everything I own when I get back home. All the stuff at home is weighed in my mind and registers as “too heavy”. I think “Why do I have all these spoons, each person in the family only needs one?” Needless to say, I don’t actually toss or burn everything, mostly because I am the only one in my household who really likes living out of a backpack.

On most days, I like my stuff right up until the point I have to maintain it, move it, feed it, care for it, and enslave myself to it.

So when I saw this, I was blown away. I can’t even imagine living like this. I own nothing compared to this person.

Even though I can now smugly congratulate myself for not being “that bad” this house scares the pants off me. It makes me want to toss some stuff prophylactically.

Nothing I said about stuff applies to “my precious“.

I finally got the iPod I’ve been dreaming of. I like to call it “the precious”. It’s phenomenal, with only a few nits. Syncing with multiple computers isn’t quite as simple as I would expect it to be. I also want to know why it is so difficult to delete music? It seems like an easy feature to implement.

Now that I’ve got an iPod, I’ve been checking out podcasts. Some of these “shows” are terrible beyond belief, others are quite good. Once I find some podcasts that are consistently good I’ll put some links up.