Today is Easter, the holiest day of the year for Christians. Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. So of course the first thought on my mind when I woke this morning was “how about a new list”.

I started to make a list of the 10 most popular Lent misconceptions. I know, boring… So then I thought I’d try to get to the true meaning of Easter with my list. On the first Easter Mary Magdalene witnessed the miracle of Christ’s return after crucifixion. Today, many confused and misinformed Christians of, let’s say, decreased mental capacity, often see Jesus’ return sometimes daily. So how about…

A List of the top places Jesus apparently likes to make an appearance:

10.) Jesus on the Ceiling.

9.) Jesus on a Coconut.

8.) Jesus in Indian Food.

7.) Jesus at the Hospital.

6.) Jesus in a cloud.

5.) Jesus in a Frying Pan.

4.) Jesus in Chewing Gum.

3.) Jesus on Your Cat (“Cheesus” bonus).

2.) Jesus on the Bar-B-Q cover.

And the Number 1 Jesus sighting on our 2010 Easter List:
1.) Jesus in Your Dog’s Butt. Seriously, he’s everywhere.

Well there you have it. Maybe next time I’ll try a list of places Mary likes to make appearances, like in the hair I found stuck to my shower drain. Just take a look for yourself:

By the way, is it just me or does it seem like a disproportionate number of these sightings happen here in Texas? I think that must be what they mean when they say “God Bless Texas”.

Perhaps the only thing more pathetic than giving up on your new blog after only 5 short months, is crawling back after a 5 year hiatus to try and start over. Actually, I suppose one thing even more pathetic would be quitting on your short lived blog because you were so insanely pissed at the political climate you could no longer think straight.

Even though I know nobody reads this thing but me, I am still embarrassed at many things I said here back in 05’. I’m not embarrassed because I think I was wrong, not at all. In fact I still believe very strongly that former President Bush was a disastrous president for America, and I am still disgusted that America re-elected him for a second destructive term. My embarrassment however, is because this was supposed to be a blog about my family and our day to day lives – but instead I allowed it to morph into a place where I would regularly vent my anger at the Bush administration (far more often than I even mentioned anything to do with my family).

I’m going to try and keep my political rants to a minimum this time. Wish me luck.

A lot has happened since my last blog post in 2005. The biggest news story of 05 was, of course, Hurricane Katrina. This was probably the final straw that put me over the top concerning the Bush administration and ultimately led to me bailing on this blog altogether. Katrina was Bush F-up # 1,894,672 and I had decided to step back from my blog and take a break – that lasted 5 years. Anyway, I’m not gonna’ get into Katrina right now or else I will have to start taking blood pressure meds.

Other big news in 2005, Pope John Paul II died, John Roberts was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, agreed to take the bullet for his boss and was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Of course this national traitor was all but pardoned by Bush, er, must…keep…blood…pressure…in…check. On the plus side, in 2005 my family and I took our first ever Staycation, looooong before they became trendy with the global economic collapse three years later.

In 06’ another criminal in Bush’s cabinet was forced to resign, this time Donald Rumsfeld (I’m not doing as well as I had hoped, regarding staying on the topic of my family and daily life). 2006 was a bad year overall for Republicans as several Republican congressmen were brought down by scandals, including Mark Foley, who resigned over sexually explicit messages sent to underage boys, and Randy Cunningham, who pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors. House Majority Leader and Good Ol’ Texas Boy Tom Delay resigned after being indicted on campaign finance charges, and Ohio’s Bob Ney pleaded guilty in connection with the probe of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Plus, Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face while on a canned hunt. Then the Democrats all but swept the mid-term elections. Yea, you could say that 2006 was a bad year for the Red Team.

In family news, 2006 was an incredible year as I became a home-school parent. Home schooling a child is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, although my daughter is a great student which probably makes it a lot easier on me than it could be. You can expect to see many posts on this topic coming soon as it has become a huge part of my life.

In 2007 O.J. finally went to jail, Miss S.Carolina needed grammar lessons, the Vatican told us that good Catholics don’t use their cell phones while driving, and Brainspout was temporarily shut down for excessive bandwidth usage (which was very weird since, at that time, I hadn’t posted anything in over 2 years) because several other popular websites started linking to a couple of pictures on this site (THIS ONE and THIS ONE). Also, 2007 was the year when everyone in America started talking about something called a “housing bubble”. Hmmm, wonder what a housing bubble is? More to come…

In 2007 my daughters pet dachshund had to be put to sleep, which was a very difficult day for everyone. On a more positive note, Christmas morning of 2007 we surprised our kids with a trip to Disneyland. This would be the first of three Disney trips in less than 2 years. Does that mean we’re addicted? Probably.

In 2008 the era of Reaganomics finally came to an end as the World Economy went right down the crapper, President Bush popularized the term “Bail Out” by helping a few more friends before he left office, and then America elected, basically, “anybody but Bush”.

I’m not belittling the monumental event that was the 2008 Presidential Election. For the first time in our nation’s history an African-American was elected President of the United States – a truly historic moment. Barack Obama ran a masterful campaign with the messages of Hope and Change. Unfortunately, just like waiting on the cashier at McDonald’s, who is rendered helpless because she can’t find that little picture of a BigMac on her keyboard, a year later and I’m still Hoping for some Change.

I honestly believed that after the hell Bush put this country through, whoever won the Democratic nomination would win this election. John McCain made it all the easier by running a dishonest and inept campaign (very much like the Democrats usually do), finally sealing his fate by selecting an unknown, unqualified punch-line of a running mate from Alaska. Talk about a slam dunk for the Blue Team.

Ahhh, there I go again, DARNIT!

On the bright side, the US economic crash enabled me to buy a new car at 0% interest, so it all worked out in the end. Right?

In 2009 the economy continued to nose dive as hundreds of banks closed, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, and the appreciative, compassionate folks on Wall Street gave themselves multi-million dollar bonuses with taxpayer bail-out money. Iran held an election that seemed eerily similar to the 2000 election here in the United States, Michael Jackson died, Octomom proved some women will do anything for a little attention, Sully saved the day, and so many kids started dying from something called “Swine Flu” they actually shut down MayFest.

As for myself in 2009, full of hope that Obama would bail me out, I throw caution to the wind and buy a new house that is far too big and expensive for us. Not to worry, I voted for Obama so I’m sure my bail-out check will be here soon… All kidding aside, we actually did qualify for an $8,000 tax credit, which of course means I did the American thing and am now a proud owner of a big screen TV. I call it my Obama TV. Don’t look at me that way, buying that TV was good for our economy. Plus my hockey games look sooooo good on it.

Alright, it’s painfully obvious that I’m destined to fail in my comeback attempt to steer clear of political land mines, but I’m still gonna’ give it a shot. Also, I’ll try to add a few blog posts covering stuff I missed the last few years, and I promise to do my best to stay on track and focus on my day to day life and family while not mentioning anything to do with politics at all. =) Yea, right.

I don’t want to get too excited just yet, but I’m beginning to sense a turn in the tide. Can you feel it? Bush has had a few bad weeks in a row, and I’m loving it. Last month his lame duck plan to overhaul social security gets slammed back into his face, last week he gets protested by faculty and students alike during his commencement speech at a Christian college, recently more and more republicans are questioning the validity of Bush’s misleading statements that took this nation to war (I even heard conservative hack Sean Hannity say something slightly negative about Bush the other day), and now the U.S. House ignores the Bush veto threat and supports a new stem cell research bill. Bush will probably still veto the bill in order to keep up his charade of acting like he actually has morals, but this is a huge step in the right direction as far as the political stance the House has taken.

Can it be that republicans are figuring out that Bush is full of shit at the exact same time that many Christians come to the identical realization? I know, wishful thinking right? But I am feeling a bit better lately about America finally waking up from it’s collective comatose stupor. The tides may indeed be turning, can you feel it? My fingers are crossed…

It’s old news, originally published on Sunday, October 20, 2002, but I thought it appropriate to re-post after the Bush commencement speech protests at a Christian school this week. This is a very interesting read, to see what President Bush’s own Methodist church thinks of his war in Iraq.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that this story was originally linked to the Houston Chronicle website, in Bush’s own backyard. However, the story was strangely removed from the Houston newspapers site – nowhere to be found. I am posting the entire article here in case it “disappears” from other news sources.

The official Methodist Church view on the war in Iraq:

Iraq War ‘Unjustifiable’, says Bush’s Church Head

President George Bush’s own Methodist church has launched a scathing attack on his preparations for war against Iraq, saying they are ‘without any justification according to the teachings of Christ’. Jim Winkler, head of social policy for United Methodists, added that all attempts at a ‘dialogue’ between the President and his own church over the war had fallen on deaf ears at the White House.

His remarks came as the US continued its efforts to achieve agreement on a UN resolution that would open the way for a tough program of weapons inspections in Iraq. France is believed to be concerned that the current draft resolution might still act as a trigger for military intervention without a full Security Council debate if Iraq fails to comply.

Winkler is general secretary of the Board of Church and Society for the United Methodist church, which counts the President and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, among its members. The church represents eight to nine million regular churchgoers and is the third biggest in America.

The Methodist Church, he says, is not pacifist, but ‘rejects war as a usual means of national policy’. Methodist scriptural doctrine, he added, specifies ‘war as a last resort, primarily a defensive thing. And so far as I know, Saddam Hussein has not mobilized military forces along the borders of the United States, nor along his own border to invade a neighboring country, nor have any of these countries pleaded for our assistance, nor does he have weapons of mass destruction targeted at the United States’.

Winkler said his church was ‘keenly aware’ that it counted the President and his deputy among its members, and that he was therefore ‘frequently encouraged by others to be very careful about how I say things’.

President Bush – A Good Moral Christian Man

Thank God! Literally!

Finally, a group of Christians have actually come to their senses and started acting like, well, Christians. One of my biggest concerns regarding trends in the American political climate today is the large degree that evangelical thought has become influenced by the conservative movement. It’s good to see that there remain believers who are still Christians before they are “patriots”. I am a Christian however, in recent years I have been embarrassed, no, ashamed, of how so many American Christians have allowed themselves to be played and taken advantage of by evil politicians under the guise of religious conservatism. I like to believe that most true Christians are not as ignorant and simple-mined as the so-called Christians regularly on display in the media. The staff and faculty at Calvin College are apparently Christians who also hold education in high regard.

President Bush’s “handlers” carefully selected a nice Christian college for a nice photo-op of their stooge delivering a commencement speech to this years graduates. Ooops, it appears they did not do their homework as this college is choked full of Christians who think for themselves as opposed to conforming to the current conservative media brainwashing. Large anti-Bush ads that ran in the local Grand Rapids, Michigan newspaper by both faculty and students alike, protests outside the graduation event and buttons worn on graduates’ robes made it clear that many Christian students and faculty objected to Bush’s policies.

Many of the graduating students and one-third of the professors at the Calvin Evangelical Christian College are taking out a full-page ad in a local newspaper Saturday to protest President Bush’s commencement speech. “As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort,” the ad says. “We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq.” “No single political position should be identified with God’s will,” says the ad, which also chastises the president for actions that favor the wealthy of our society and burden the poor.

This story just plain feels good and helps replenish my faith. I just wish the real Christians, the moderate ones, would reclaim a hold on their image. I’m talking about tolerance, helping the poor, caring for each other, turning the other cheek Christians – like Christ wants Christians to be. Not regulating morality, shunning down the poor, starting wars and holding grudge Christians. Those are not true Christians.

My Christian beliefs tell me that Jesus came, made null and void the previous “contract” between God & Humanity and established some new ground rules. Now if you really believe in Jesus Christ, if you really consider yourself a Christian, you have to live by the rule of the New Testament, not the Old Testament. There is no more “eye for an eye” but rather “love and forgive each other as I love and forgave you “. If you are a Christian then you must follow what the Christ said. God doesn’t play with politics. “Render unto Caesar things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” doesn’t mean “war”, folks.

I hope, for the sake of this great country, our people wake up and realize this, soon…

I took off work early yesterday to attend 5:00 mass as it was Tori’s first communion ceremony. She was a little nervous but she did great and looked absolutely beautiful in her new white dress and vail, we were all very proud of her. I felt a bit nervous myself, like a fish out of water, as I do not normally attend church since I have worked weekends for over a decade. I consider myself a Christian however I am not Catholic and do not agree with some of the basic principles of Catholicism. My wife grew up attending a private Catholic school (but somehow seems to know less about Catholicism than I do) and I am happy that my children enjoy going to church with their mother.

I’ll go into more details later on as to why I am opposed to many of the Catholic church doctrines and practices (aren’t you proud of me for not mentioning the sick and twisted priests that take advantage of their position to molest young children? I am…) but for now I want to focus on Tori’s first communion and how thankful I am that she has such strong religious beliefs, especially for someone her age. One of the best moments of my day is when Tori says her prayers each evening, she often surprises and shocks me with her insight and thoughtfulness during prayer. BTW, in the picture below, Tori is holding her great grandmother Charlsie’s rosary, she was named after her great grandmother and is very proud to have her rosary for her first communion. CLICK HERE for a few more pictures from Tori’s first communion ceremony.

In what is clearly the biggest news story on the lips of most Americans on this day Terri Schiavo has died. Two weeks after her feeding tube was removed at her husbands request, and against the wishes of her parents, Mrs. Schaivo has finally passed.

I did a complete 180 degree turn on the Terri Schiavo issue from when I first heard of her situation. I used to work in a hospital where over the years I assisted in the care of many acute and chronically brain-injured patients who were kept alive by machines. When I say ‘machines’ I don’t mean feeding tubes, but ventilators, – or breathing tube. A ventilator physically fills the patients lungs with air and then removes it, thus keeping alive a patient incapable of breathing on their own. It is perhaps important to note that many patients on ventilators are also on feeding tubes, however I personally don’t believe that food and water are artificial means of life support, do you? Anyway, I originally thought that Terri Schiavo was on a ventilator, not that that would make any difference as to the legal or moral issue of putting a disabled person to death, but in my mind there is a tremendous difference between a person on a feeding tube and a person on a ventilator. I have seen with my own eyes that if you disconnect a person from a ventilator they can die within a few seconds. I discovered today that if you disconnect a person from a feeding tube they can take as long as two weeks to finally starve to death.

I do not want to suggest that there was no chance of recovery for Terri Schiavo, nor do I believe that she was a burden to her family, I’m simply stating my thoughts regarding this issue as it relates to me on my own personal level. In my opinion, I’d hate to know I was being kept alive by a machine, especially if there were no chance of a recovery and/or if I had become a burden on my family. However, as a parent of two beautiful children, I would hate to have no legal recourse but to sit by helplessly as my daughters slowly die – I’m sure any parent would feel the same.

I find it pathetically ironic that in America if someone did to a dog what the courts and public officials did to Terri Schiavo – that is, to deprive her of nourishment and intentionally starve her to the point of death, that person would be arrested, heavily fined, and perhaps even sentenced to a lengthy jail term. Apparently, it’s perfectly acceptable to starve a disabled women to death in the United States, but not a dog.

This case is choked full of irony. Like the fact that as a young woman Terri Shiavo starved herself of life preserving nutrition, which caused her to go into a coma and begin force feedings through a tube for the next 15 years. Or the fact that Mrs. Shiavo is Catholic, and on the same day that her life ends due to a feeding tube being removed the Pope of the Catholic church had a feeding tube inserted. Or the irony that the tearful demonstrators outside her hospice window are primarily the same people who voted against stem-cell research, which may one day help people in Mrs. Shiavo’s situation. Or the irony of our own President publicly siding with Mrs. Shiavo’s family, even though as governor of Texas he himself signed the law that allowed Texas hospitals to discontinue life support against the family’s wishes.

When little Sun Hudson was removed from life support and allowed to die in a Houston hospital on March 15th, less than 1 month ago, no one in his family supported that decision. But there were no special congressional meetings for him, no Fox News special coverage, no public outcry by our compassionate president or conservative talk-show hosts. He died quietly, a victim of a system signed into law in 1999 by then-governor George W. Bush that allows hospitals to choose profits over the patient’s rights (Now that I think about it, this may not be irony as much as status quo. Is it a shocker that Bush sided in favor of profit for a large corporation that owns several Texas hospitals over an average everyday citizen like you or I? Definitely status quo. And anybody not yet brainwashed by the Fox News right-wing media machine knows that Bush just ran an entire presidential election campaign based largely on lies and doublespeak to Christian voters like myself, who simply want to trust our nations leaders and think it not too much to expect them to be honest. Nothing new there. This is simply another example of that fact, and a nice juicy topic for a lengthy rant someday soon).

A new “culture of life” indeed…

Believe it or not, this isn’t a rare case, decisions to prolong life are made by families every day in hospitals everywhere. Perhaps the most important message we have learned today, aside from the fact that disabled American citizens apparently rank below dogs when it comes to political and financial considerations, and that our politicians will absolutely stoop to ANY level for political gain (I guess we already knew that one, huh?) is that a Living Will may be more important than many once thought. Perhaps that will be the legacy of Terri Schiavo, I would like to think she could be remembered for generating mass interest in Living Wills rather than for the horrible way her life ended.

I’d like to wish a very Happy Easter Sunday to one and all, (btw, is it just me or does it seem like Easter came very early this year? Isn’t it supposed to be in April? Anyway…) here’s hoping you have a wonderful day with family and friends. Please also take a moment during the day to reflect on the true meaning of Easter and why we, as Christians, celebrate this day. Why because we love to hunt for candy eggs and eat chocolate bunnies, of course. Duh!

I’m not posting today to discuss the contrasting subtleties of the hollow chocolate bunny as compared to the solid bunny, I have something far more important to tell you today.

Only You Have The Power to Save Toby!!!
It’s true! Here’s an excerpt from SaveToby.com:

Toby is the cutest little bunny on the planet. Unfortunately, he will DIE on June 30th, 2005 if you don’t help. I rescued him several months ago. I found him under my porch, soaking wet, injured from what appeared to be an attack from an alley cat. I took him in, thinking he had no chance to live from his injuries, but miraculously, he recovered. I have since spent several months nursing him to health. Toby is a fighter, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, on June 30th, 2005, Toby will die. I am going to eat him. I am going to take Toby to a butcher to have him slaughter this cute bunny. I will then prepare Toby for a midsummer feast. I have several recipes under consideration, which can be seen, with some pretty graphic images, under the recipe section.

I don’t want to eat Toby, he is my friend, and he has always been the most loving, adorable pet. However, God as my witness, I will devour this little guy unless I receive 50,000$ USD into my account from donations or purchase of merchandise. You can help this poor, helpless bunny’s cause by making donations through my verified PayPal account by clicking on any of the Donate buttons on this site, or by purchasing merchandise at the Savetoby.com online store.

That’s a picture of poor little Toby, look at those whiskers, and that tiny little nose. The website has several pictures of Toby, in one of them he’s trying to climb out of a cooking pot, it also has a on-line store and a list of potential recipes for Toby should the $50,000.00 target not be reached (I’ve never tasted rabbit, but I must admit the Moroccan Hare Tagine looks and sounds delicious). To date, SaveToby.com has collected only $19,762.15 in PayPal donations, (that figure does not include monies from a new book deal the webmaster has signed) and that figure has been stuck for several weeks. Sadly, PayPal may have stopped accepting donations for the site, thus ensuring Toby’s death. I doubt PETA planned on that. If Toby dies then I’m afraid the terrorists have already won, won’t you help?