Little Miss and I had a great time at Wiscon. Even though she played her DS all through the first panel and then declared it "boring" without having listened to a single word of it. She spent most of her time in children's programming. Next year is the last year I'll take her with me if she's still not interested in going to any of the panels. I can justify spending $20 to let her be babysat in children's programming while I go to the con, but I'm not willing to spend $45 for the same after she turns 13. Not when I can leave her at home with ChiaPet for free! I figure $20 is a reasonable price to pay so that ChiaPet can have a day or two to himself though.

( Grammar )

( Creativity and the Day Job )

I went to a few more panels, but I have to stop here for the night. Coming soon: The first part of the Magical Realism panel and the second part of the Curious Boundaries of YA Fantasy panel, YA Villains, and Making Ends Meet.

Some time ago, someone on my flist posted a cool link. I think it was cakmpls but I'm not positive. It has something to do with making selected web sites accessible only during scheduled times of the day. I'd like to check this link out again if anybody know what I'm talking about and has the name or the link handy. I can't even remember what it's called so I can't Google it.

I have been livid to the point of speechlessness about this whole Texas fiasco with the FLDS kids. If you don't know already, I'm LDS; I'm not FLDS. I don't wear drab prairie dresses. I don't live in a "compound." I don't practice polygamy. I don't meekly defer to my husband at every turn. I'm not sure I do much of anything meekly for that matter. I'm LDS. My church does not believe in or practice polygamy. I'm tired of the same old boring Mormon jokes about polygamy. I've got a sense of humor about myself and my religion, but come up with some new material already, folks.

I dislike being called a "Mormon." For one reason, people use the term to lump together every "fundamentalist wack-o" splinter sect with the LDS church. For another reason, I'm no more a follower of Mormon than I am a Monsonite or a Hinklian. I believe in God and Jesus Christ and His teachings. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That fact that I believe in modern prophets does not change that I follow Christ's teachings and example. I'm on something of a tangent, but my point is that I'm not livid about the FLDS fiasco because I condone FLDS practices in any way.

I've been livid because the state had no right to remove all of those children from their homes. What Texas CPS did reeks of religious intolerance. They disrupted the lives of over four hundred children because their parents belong to an unpopular religion. They were not removed because of evidence of abuse in the cases of all 460 children. They were removed because of their parents' religious belief in polygamy. They were removed because their polygamist fathers might abuse them. This would be like closing down all Catholic schools because the priests might sexually abuse the young boys who attend them.

In this world of Political Correctness, there are certain classes of people who are still fair game for ridicule: Fat people and "Mormons" are two of those. Having been one (although I'm still clinically overweight, I don't see myself as "fat" anymore) and currently being the other, I'm beginning now to understand why people of color are often more sensitive to racism than I am. It's insidious. But you don't see it when you're not the target. When you're not the target, it's easy to brush it off as no big deal. Because it doesn't affect you.

This does affect you though. When the state can take children away from their parents because of their religious beliefs, it affects everyone. Because who's next? All "fundamentalist" religions aren't very popular right now. So which one is next? Baptists? Catholics? Or we could swing the other way and target Pagans next. After all, they're Godless heathens, right? If you take the religion out of the question completely, then let's go after the polyamorists and homosexuals. The only thing polyamorists do differently than polygamists is that they don't marry. And homosexuals might sexually abuse their children, so they shouldn't be allowed to adopt. Oh wait, some states don't allow homosexual couples to adopt. If you're angry about that, you should be angry about this too. Intolerance is intolerance.

A Texas appeals court has finally ruled that CPS had no right to remove those children. I doubt that the court touched the issue of religious intolerance. I doubt that CPS will be as quick to return the kids to their parents as they were to take them away in the first place. But this is at least a step in the right direction.

Via hkneale:



Now I need a boom-di-ah-da icon...

[Edited to add new boom-di-ah-da icon]

I've removed this entry for now. I apologize for the inconenience if you've followed a link here from elsewhere.

lakenlee is a dear friend of the family who's approaching dire straits at the moment. ChiaPet encouraged her to get an LJ and I helped her get started. Please drop by to hear her story and say hello. Even if you can't necessarily help, I'm sure she'd appreciate a friendly hello and supportive words. She's an internet newbie, so if you have any suggestions for where else to share her story, she'd probably appreciate the link too.

Stolen from one or two of msmemory's friends. I don't make New Year's resolutions, but thought this looked fun:

Please comment with something you think I should do or try to do in 2008. Big or small, silly or earth-changing.

I don't promise to try all of them, but I'd love to hear your suggestions.

I love Jeff Dunham and Peanut. It's a long clip, but I love it:

Jeff Dunham, Peanut & Jose FULL!

According to the US Children's Bureau and the Adoption and Foster Care Reporting and Analysis System , there are over a half million children in foster care. Every year, about three hundred thousand children become part of the foster care system, and over one hundred thousand children in foster care are waiting to be adopted. Over half of the children in foster care will go back to their first families, as the goal of foster care is not to break families apart but to keep them together. Although individuals invovled in the system may be misguided or make poor judgements, the overall goal is to reunify these families if possible.

Preliminary reports for 2005 show that out of the 287,000 children who left foster care that year, 65% were reunited with family -- either returned to their parents or primary caretakers (54%), or living with other relatives (11%). Only 18% were adopted, and nearly 25,000 children were emancipated either through legal action or aging out of the system. The report does not apparently track how many of these emancipated teenagers "reached the age of majority" and were cut lose without any family or support structure to fall back on. I've recently been told by our social worker that most of the children who age out of the system end up going back to the very parents who abused, neglected, and mistreated them as children.

This Friday, 12/21, at 8pm et/pt, CBS is airing the 9th annual A Home for the Holidays special. Please mark you calendars and tell your friends. This special highlights some of the children waiting for forever families right now and tells the stories of former foster children. This year's special will highlight the story of a young man who aged out of the foster care system without ever being adopted as well as former foster children who have found forever families. Each story is presented by celebrities who either have their own adoption experiences or are are involved with children's issues.

Please take the time to watch this show and tell your friends about it. Even if foster care isn't for you, right now, this is an important issue that needs more positive publicity. There is too much negative stereotyping about the children and families involved in foster care, and too many people aren't willing to even consider foster care or foster/adoption because of media-grabbing stories that sensationalize the worst aspects and don't present the truth about foster care and adoption.

This is what I want for Christmas. Whoever buys it for me will be my best friend for life.

Creative work, because it cannot be separated from our spirituality, inevitably connects us to that which is larger than us, and experiencing the sacred center of life can create a shift in perspective, can bring new insights and understandings that demand something of us.</p>

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer, What We Ache For

(Thanks to seph-ski for passing this along.)

Originally published at Kimberly Creative Services. You can comment here or there.

I need ideas for things to buy a ten year old girl for Christmas. Right now, she "borrows" a lot (if someone she knows likes something, she immediately says she likes it too) so I'd like to expose her to a wide range of crafts and interests so that she can find something that she likes. Any ideas, sugestions?

If the stories are right, Outside is a dangerous place. Ravens don’t feed you, animals don’t talk, and mortals may hate you if you’re wearing the wrong clothes. The worst thing is that there isn’t any magic except what you bring with you.</p>

- Delia Sherman, Changeling

Originally published at Kimberly Creative Services. Please leave any comments there.

Never let the truth interfere with a good story.

Neef’s Rules for Changelings</p>

- Delia Sherman, Changeling

Originally published at Kimberly Creative Services. Please leave any comments there.

Via kalquessa [here]:

According to the NPR News Blog, it has been proposed that December 8th should be Pretend You're a Time-Traveler Day.

Some of kalquessa's favorite suggestions for how to play the Time-Traveler angle:

- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say "In thirty years dial this number. You'll know what to do after that." Then slip away. [This one is my personal favorite!]

The Cheese Elf also suggests that December 8th would be an excellent day to at least blog like a time traveler. As she says, if you guys can handle virtual zombies, surely you can handle virtual time-travel.

For a chuckle, check this out:

http://community.livejournal.com/cranky_editors/540178.html

Although you might not get the jokes if you're not baron_elric, editrx, cakmpls, experimeditor, or msmemory (apologies if I missed anyone else who should get the jokes).



Also, I just found out about this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Copyediting-Proofreading-Dummies-Language-Literature/dp/0470121718

When the subject of my freelance work comes up, I often hear, "Oh, I love/my daughter loves/my boyfriend loves to read, how could I/she/he get into that?" If their eyes haven't glazed over after I've gone into detail about how proofreading/copyediting is 'just' reading, I usually suggest Peggy Smith's Mark My Words, Mary Stoughton's Substance and Style, and the Chicago Manual of Style. I've ordered a copy of the Dummies book for myself and may be adding it to my arsenal of suggested books for proofreader/copyeditor hopefuls.

Found this on friendsfriends on my lunch break. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land translated to LOLcat: LOLcat Wasteland

And if you missed it -- check out the "Who's on first?" link I posted recently. Trust me, it's not what you expect. experimeditor, you particularly need to watch this video.

We stumbled on this video while looking up the bit made famous by Abbot & Costello:



The video degrades horribly at the end, but the audio is still priceless.

Via forestcats

In books you always know the rules. Or at least that there were rules if you could learn them. That’s the difference between stories and real life […]

- Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania

Originally published at Kimberly Creative Services. Please leave any comments there.