Me? Not Unique? Never

Took this fun little quiz and found out that my name isn't all that uncommon. Not too shocking considering my last name. There were only 62 people with my first name and my maiden name.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 2,218 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

We have made our flight reservations for CO and are officially heading there for Thanksgiving. Should be fun.

An elementary school in Massachusetts has banned tag for fear of being held liable if a kid gets hurt. Apparently, schools in Cheyenne, WY and Spokane, WA have also banned tag. WTF? It makes me cringe. I have no doubt that is difficult to let your child participate in activities where s/he might get hurt, but this is just part of being a kid: bumping into things/people, falling down, getting hurt. The same thing is happening with dodge ball: one school banned it because it was "exclusionary and dangerous." I can somewhat see dangerous, but exclusionary? Isn't everything in childhood exclusionary? How are kids supposed to learn to play with other kids when adults are always setting up all these stupid rules and restrictions. It's like those stupid soccer games where the parents don't keep score. Kids need to know they lost -they need to know they did not win and they were not the best and that this doesn't make them a bad person. Every season I watch American Idol in awe that the parents of the truly horrible people auditioning seemingly failed to tell them, "You can't sing!" Why are people so afraid to tell the truth? No wonder our politicians lie. Seems like our entire country just can't take it anymore.

Finally, D & I watched the gubernatorial debate last night. It was interesting. Since neither of us ever watch the local news and most news I read online and listen to on NPR is national, we didn't have much of an opinion formed on either candidate. TiVo also means I've not watched a single TV advertisement. What a blessing that is. Anyway, as I was watching, I was struck that the questions asked by the moderator panel of 3 were much better than the questions asked during a presidential debate. Also, the moderators actually insisted they get an answer to the questions. One candidate failed to answer the second part of a question and the moderator told him to answer it and forced him. That was great. Then, they had a part of the debate where viewers had emailed in questions and they asked about 5 questions emailed from the general public. I thought that was just terrific. Now for the not-so-terrific: the Democratic incumbent governor was not-too-bright. This might be the first time I have ever voted for a Republican. When asked a question about why he hadn't planned for what to do if he wasn't able to get the corporate kicker put into a rainy day fund for education, his answer was that you only make a plan B if you plan to not succeed. I about fell over. How can anyone who has ever done even a small project in a business environment think that contingency planning isn't extremely important? He also kept answering about how he'd appointed this committee to research this, and that panel to look into that. I'm all for finding out what is going on by doing due diligence, but many of those things don't require a bunch of studies. They just require someone saying, "This is the new law: no more gifts from lobbyists." Done. There were other things he said that made me uncomfortable with his ability to govern, but it's the lack of his ability to see that contingency planning is necessary even if you think you're going to win. I'd be a hypocrite to not believe that since this is one of the crucial mistakes that I believe Bush's administration made with the whole Iraq war. I was pretty frustrated after the debate because a lot of the answers from the Republican challenger indicated that he's all for giving tax breaks to the wealthy and the corporations. I don't get this. I'm all for being fiscally conservative. I understand why people don't want to raise taxes. But I don't get why Republicans are always so gung ho to give as much money back to the rich and corporations as possible when we have children in this country who don't get necessary medical care and nutrition. How can any person of wealth live their particular lifestyle and still be OK with that reality? Anyway, I'm going to have to do more research to see if I can live with Ron Saxton's social policies. I've never been in doubt as to whom I would vote for, so this is new territory for me.

One interesting thing, we Googled Ron Saxton last night while the debate was going on and clicked to the Wikipedia page on him. D is reading along and comes to this line:

"A fourth generation Oregonian, Saxton and his husband, Derrak, have one son, Andy. The Saxtons are of the Presbyterian"

D knew he was married (to a woman) so it stood out like a sore thumb. Anyone who would put something so blatantly false in a person's bio needs a good caning. It's just as wrong as removing political signs you disagree with from your neighbor's lawn.

Time to clean!

Edit: I emailed Ron Saxton's campaign to let the know of the Wikipedia inaccuracy. They replied very quickly to thank me. It'll be interesting to see how quickly it gets changed, if it does.