Ethan - Almost 6 Months Old

Ethan is smiling a ton now. He has great control of his hands and can reach out and take something from me easily. He is babbling a lot and can mimic noises that I make back to me. He can flip himself over on the floor but hasn't quite gotten the hang of crawling yet. It seems like he learns something new everyday with the sounds that he makes and the movements he is doing. Now if his pacifier falls out sometimes he scoops it back into his mouth by himself, unless it gets turned around then he needs help.

Huffington Post

I've been banned from this website. I can no longer comment on the news of the day at this location. You may be asking "why?". What did I do to get banned? Did I use excessive profane language? No. Did I make obscene sexual references? No. Did I stalk or otherwise harass other members of the site? Absolutely not. So what then would cause my expulsion from this website? I disagreed with the popular consensus on almost every article. Thats it. Thats all I did. I was a member of HuffPo since 2005 and a true member of that community. Over time, I started to feel as though the liberals that gathered there were becomingly overly homogenous. Seemingly marching lockstep with one another to what they perceived as a liberal ideology that they seemed dedicated to pursuing with little rationale other than wanting to be a part of it, for its own sake, because right now its popular. I felt that few had any real understanding of the progressive movement and simply leaned towards whatever result they could come up with that they felt was the most liberal, with little thought to reality or how they made real progressives look in the process. I felt they had begun wielding Political Correctness as a weapon to bash and abuse anyone that they perceived as enemy, or not one of them. This isn't Animal Farm and its not Lord of the Flies. Most of them seemed little educated and many times unable to even communicate their sentiments adequately. So I decided to be a gadfly, and a Devil's Advocate, and to vehemently argue the opposite of every story, regardless if thats what I truly believed in my heart of hearts. If only to spur thought, to challenge some preconceived notions, and to knock the crowd out of lockstep so that they could see the shades of grey in every story.
Then, HuffPo censors started to get out of control. They were deleting mine and others posts simply because they were expressing an unpopular point-of-view. Thats no reason to censor. Censoring should be for those who would be obscene or racist. Not for other points of view no matter how stupid or offensive you find that point of view. I would write a long paragraph spelling out how I felt on a topic only to hit the "post" button and have it dissappear forever. That was my writing!! I spent time on it! So one day recently, this happened twice to me. So, in anger, I wrote a comment flush with cuss words and directed it directly to the censors, telling them that either they should accept other contrary points of view on HuffPo or that they should delete the 4 year old account of a loyal reader and commenter. To my suprise they chose the latter, and chose to have the commenters on HuffPo mainly comment only to say variations of the same sentiment to one another, back and forth, like robots. It makes little sense to me and seems more Orwellian than progressive or liberal. It's saddening. I fell out of the lockstep and got discharged.

HAHAHAHA!!

White people in audience NOT liking it!!

Obama So Far

So far Obama is shaping up to be everything I expected and more. Lets take a list of what he did in his first week. Ok, Citibank got bailed out to the tune of billions and then proceeded to go buy a new jet with some of the money and while we probably never would've heard about this before, or at least nothing would have been done. Barack straight called them out on it and told them not to buy the damn jet...AND THEY LISTENED TO HIM!! He is forging a new feeling of corporate responsibility amongst the most irresponsible fatcats in our society! -Next, he froze the salaries of all top White House staffers, which is mostly symbolic but since he is talking about us tightening our belts I'm glad he did this because it shows he stands in solidarity with us. - Also, he has set a timeline for closing Guantanamo, the U.S. torture chamber where we hold people who never get a right to trial and are assumed guilty. Unfortunately no plan is in place for what to do with them at the present and Obama has so far kept the right to rendition. I may have to do a whole seperate post on rendition because it brings a lot of questions up but all in all I think closing Guantanamo is a great step. - He has asked the Generals to submit a plan for military drawdown, which is basically a partial withdrawal from Iraq. - Another thing he has done was to sign an order banning gifts from lobbyists and banning anyone from working in an agency they had lobbied in previous years. This is just another step to limiting the potential for corrupt practices. - The list goes on. When Bush was in office he placed a ban on giving federal money to international groups that were performing abortions or providing information on how to get abortions, Barack has lifted that ban.

Barack gave his first interview to Al-Arabiya, an Arab network, and spoke of cooperation and understanding between our nation and the Arab world. I bet we don't see them burning effigies of Barack like we did with Bush. So anyway, thats Obama So Far. Let's hope it stays good.

Ethan - Hoodie

THE ETHAN "OBAMA STYLE" POSTER

THIS PIC MAKES IT LOOK LIKE HE HAS NO FINGERS. I ASSURE YOU HE DOES, LOL. THEY ALL IN HIS MOUTH I THINK!!

Story

At work, as we watched the dance between Obama and Michelle on Youtube again for some of our fellow employees that didn't see it on TV. One of my fellow employees commented about how Obama and Michelle seemed so right together and that the song was so romantic. Then she asked me if I'm even into romantic things, since I'm a guy. All I said was "yeah", but I was thinking that if anyone was to ever put together a book of the most romantic stories ever told, I give my full permission to use one about a man who was deeply in love with a woman, so much so, that after he lost her by being immature, he set about to change himself (because changing is what we do for people we love), and waited over a year for her love to return, seeing no one else, and thinking of her everyday. He knew in his heart that he would wait until the stars fell from the sky. He was sure that it was the right thing to do because he didn't doubt that his heart told him the truth. The story doesn't really need an ending because what he did is the ultimate romantic gesture all by itself and even though we wonder if the ending will be happy and that she comes back to him, the simple truth is, that part of the story hasn't been written yet.

Fav Youtubes continued...

AT LAST

Some of my favorite YouTubes...

To be continueD...

More Ethan Pics

A repost of love quotes

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love." - Sophocles

"Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed." - John Tarrant

"We love because it's the only true adventure." - Nikki Giovanni

"Love is friendship set on fire." - unknown

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong

"Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Maybe love is like luck. You have to go all the way to find it." - Robert Mitchum

"Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside." - Margaret Walker

"Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale... Love loves; this is its nature." - Howard Thurman

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"Where love is, no room is too small." - Talmud

"Loves makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." - Mark Twain

"Love is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day." - Nicholas Sparks

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." - Karen Sunde

"A love song is just a caress set to music." - Sigmund Romberg

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - Peter Ustinov

"Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever." - unknown

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." - Erich Fromm

"In the final analysis, love is the only reflection of man's worth." - Bill Wundram, Iowa Quad Cities Times

"Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Elizabeth Browning

Ethan John

Ethan Stylin' in his Winnie The Pooh Dress Shirt and Sweater Vest plus khakis.

The outfit looks really good on him!

Pacified!

His little foot, my big foot!

It's late...

...and I should be in bed. I'm not in bed because of extraneous circumstances only partly under my control. Isn't that life really? Only partly under our control at any given time. Tonight I realized a lot of things. Sometimes I think our subconscious holds things for us until we are ready for them to be revealed. I don't know that my subconscious has the best timing. Then again, I once thought a midget was manipulating a flashlight in a basement room, solely to mess with my mind. Given that alone, my insights are subject to the utmost scrutiny. Regardless "I have found it". Just as many an explorer, of inner or outer space may have said, to whoever it was standing next to him at the time. I have realized an innate (sp?) truth. There is such a thing as destiny. There is such a thing as struggle. There is indecision, and of course there is heartache. Such is life, and life is a test, I think we can all agree on that.
Timothy "speed" Levitch once said, "The world is an exam to see if we can rise into direct experience. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting."

And I remember. I remember everything. Life is happening to me now. It's hard to post these days. Because the content of the post often feels inane in the scope of things. When we are comfortable, it is easy to sink into complacency, but with tribulation we rise. Thats an original Horus quote. Put it on your refrigerator.

Ethan Smiling

^ I love this picture. He is smiling a lot now and even making some laughing sounds. He is like 23 inches long now roughly and I would guess around 13-15 pounds.



^ There's my boy. All smiles.



^ This is a stocking that my parents had made for him and had his name embroidered on it. I thought it was pretty cool.



^ I took this picture because his hair is thickest over his ears and around the bottom of his head and it reminded me of my dad who is bald and still sports the old school bald-guy ring of hair. I sent this to my dad with a message that explained how Ethan looks like him from behind. He was not amused. :)