This is a site to save info that I want to savor and to just dink around with.
"[a]ny man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." (Well, maybe 35; certainly 70.) So do the math and you'll guess my politics."( I am over 70!)
(Click on any picture to enlarge and make clearer, TRY THAT ON THE PICTURE OF THE BACK OF MY HEAD TO SEE MY TATTOO!)
Marriage isn’t hard like a marathon, where you run and you train and you run some more. It’s not about solo endurance. It’s not about two people working tirelessly to accomplish a goal, it’s not about training for and accomplishing what I want.
Marriage can very much be about growth and change and getting through the difficulties. But it can also be about enduring the same difficulties year after year with zero change. It can be about love and happiness. But it can also be about tolerance and frustration.
Marriage is like being in a canoe with my spouse. I can paddle my little booty off (ok, lets not kid ourselves, my booty isn’t little) but if my spouse isn’t paddling just as hard in the exact same direction, all that I will accomplish is paddling us in circles. My spouse and I have to decide what we can and will do TOGETHER. Let that little nugget sink in.
I can’t go anywhere in marriage without him. I’m stuck in this blasted canoe. If I ask him to just rest, I’ll direct our boat, I will tire quickly and likely become resentful. If I try to convince him to paddle with me, then maybe he will, but maybe he won’t. Maybe he doesn’t want to go that fast, maybe his arms are tired, maybe he doesn’t know how to paddle.
When I entered this marriage I thought it was about two people coming together and running the marathon of life together. Each separate, but each equally dedicated, each pushing and us finishing together. But somehow I ended up in a canoe with someone that doesn’t canoe the way I do. Our goal may be the same, but our way of getting there is so incredibly different. I’m a fast paddler, I want to push and grow and move through life quickly. I am constantly looking around to see what I can do to make things better, should this ice-chest be right here? What if we moved it over there, would we move faster?? I’m a fixer, a doer, a grower, all at very fast paces. I’m constantly evaluating and reevaluating things to optimize. My partner is not so. He just wants to let the water carry us, he wants to paddle when it’s necessary, and conserve his energy. He is patient and slow moving, deliberate in his decisions, often taking much longer than I’m comfortable with.
My biggest surprise in marriage has been that just because I think something is right, essential, necessary, and the way things need to be, doesn’t mean that’s the way we paddle our canoe.
Crossing the Street, Riding a Bicycle, Kills More Americans than Rifles Do
Scott Olson/Getty
3:40
The left’s relentless push to ban commonly-owned semiautomatic rifles under the guise of safety overlooks the fact that Americans face numerous things that cause exponentially more death than rifles on a daily basis.
Consider Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics from 2017, the most recent year of complete data. The total number of firearm-related deaths was 39,773. Roughly two-thirds of that figure, 23,854, were firearm-related suicides, with the remaining 15,919 being a combination of the approximately 500 accidental gun deaths that occur annually coupled with just over 15,000 firearm-related homicides.
If we break down the firearm-related homicides via FBI crime statistics, we see that handguns were far and away the common firearm for murder. The FBI reported 7,032 murders with a handgun verses 403 murders with a rifle, and 264 with a shotgun, in cases where the firearm was identifiable.
If we take the 403 rifle murders a year and divide by 365 it comes out to 1.1, which means 1.1 Americans die in a rifle-related murder each day. We must not overlook the fact that the 403 murders with a rifle are murders with rifles of all kinds, i.e., bolt action, lever action, breech action, pump, and semiautomatic. If we narrowed the category to only include AR-15s, AK-47s, or similar semiautomatics, the number of Americans killed daily would be even lower than 1.1.
Now, with the aid of charts released by the CDC, as well as CDC special reports, studies by schools such as Johns Hopkins University, crime statistics from the FBI, and coverage from Breitbart News, consider 10 other causes of death that literally eclipse the number of daily deaths involving a rifle:
For those who argue that rifle deaths ought to be compared to deaths by other voluntary activities, rather than disease, consider the following six examples:
