I'm back again

Mom and I just got back from Colorado. I think the total number of miles driven was 1064 or something. I think Macey might be getting tired of road tripping.
The weekend was absolutely wonderful--the Colorado cousins always make sure of that. We took forever saying goodbye, which is crazy because they're totally driving to Utah tomorrow and I might see them as early as Monday night. But that's where it's at, family that you don't want to say bye to.
Speaking of goodbye: ¡Suerte para Brock! You're totally an official missionary now! Set apart and everything. ¡Las minas extranjeras (chilenas) te van a encontrar riquito! ;)
I got to see Becky this weekend, too, as she'd recently returned from teaching in Spain (and traveling all over).

It was a great weekend, yo.

HAIR! HAIR! HAIR!

YEEOW.

You know what bugs me?

What bugs me big time is when people watch these trumped-up, half-truthed, doom-and-gloom videos about political candidates online and then believe them. These videos are of the same ilk as anti-Mormon filth, shunned by these same people with the statement, "If you want to know the truth, why don't you go to the source rather than someone on the outside who hates us?"
Arrrgghhhhh!

Seriously. No, seriously?
Any moment I see one of those videos about anyone, I get so ticked off. They are a great plague of our political atmosphere.


You know what negative political ads are meant to do? The main goal of a negative ad is to make someone not vote, not to make someone vote for your guy, but to make someone who was teetering just stay home. It's wrong and it's a sign of someone who can't win on truth, but would rather not lose on a lie. Wimp.
Arrrgghhhhh!



I'm done typing now, but it might take me a while to cool down.

Anybody remember this?

It should look familiar to all of you from the 1st Stake. Remember the slingshot at President Pope's cabin? We never got to do this:

Things to be wary of

Over the next few months, we're going to be bombarded with lots of words and phrases from the presidential candidates and the media. Here are a few things to really pay attention to:

1 The Budget: Big Government/Fiscal Conservative*
Neither party (or candidate, really) is for a small budget anymore. Both want all that money in Washington.
What you need to pay attention to is what each candidate says he wants to do with the money. The idea that Democrats spend more money than the GOP hasn't been true since, oh, Eisenhower. Hence, what we should all do before the election in the fall is look at what the candidates and parties want to do with the money. The whole budget thing is really just used to throw us off our game. Tricky politicians!

2 Flip Flop
These two F-words are going to be thrown around like hot potatoes this election season.
Truthfully, both McCain and Obama have changed views on things.
Ignore the Flip Flop. Just totally ignore it.
Smart people look at the current situation we're in and look for the best way to deal with it. What we need to do is listen to what the candidates have to say, see if that is what we think will be best for our country, or city or state, and then vote.

3 Obama is the most liberal senator.
He's not. First, that's rather hard to gauge. Second, I'm sure that Bernie Sanders, the Senate's socialist senator, would be really ticked off about not getting that billing.

4 McCain will not be a third Bush term.
He does have his own agenda. We'll notice more similarities between Bush and McCain, but they're both Republicans.

5 Obama is an elitist.
Since when was it a bad thing to be in the upper echelon of intelligence when you have one of the hardest jobs in the world? What people are trying to do with "elitist" is derrogatorily say, "Not one of you."
I want my president to be better than me.

6 McCain is a maverick.
On a couple of issues he stands away from the GOP, but he's usually at about an 88% voting record with the Republican party line, and it gets closer during election season.
McCain is smart. He has gotten the media and lots of people to believe in his maverickness. It's not really true. Now for you hard-line Republicans, this is good news. For you independents and dems...I dunno...



*The last time we had a bona fide Republican fiscal conservative in office was Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan wasn't a fiscal conservative, he spent, spent, spent. It was Nixon who was fiscally conservative in some ways, but he was very militarily active and he didn't change any Democratically driven social programs. George H.W. Bush continued Reagan policies and W. Bush has made Reagan's policies look so conservative. Clinton balanced the budget, yes, but he raised taxes on the more wealthy.

Something Rúbia pointed out to me tonight

I'd never noticed this before, but Professor Bateman looks a lot like Niles Crane.

1775 miles and my tough fingers

1775 is how many miles I drove from Thursday middayish to early Monday morning at 1:30am. I was really sorta punch drunk when I arrived.
But the weirdest thing that came of all of this is the callouses that my fingers developed. After having my hands on the wheel for so long, my fingers became tough. Here's a picture arrowing in on my weird callouses:


Seriously who gets callouses there? Not even when I was playing basketball or baseball at full tilt was I getting these types of callouses.


The last leg of the drive was somewhat taxing b/c I was so tired. I was awake and alright while I was driving. I was kept that way, far from dangerous fatigue by Emily asking me to conjugate verbs in Spanish, letting me explain the deep grammar of the Personal Infinitive and Future Subjunctive in Portuguese. She explained chemistry to me. I blathered on about the stars and planets.

Here's a map of what we did. If you zoom in on Mission Viejo, you'll see the exit we took to try and find a place to stop when we called Bepa to call for help. She totally saved our necks right there.

And here's a map of what we should have done.
It was a grand adventure. I love the internet and how it saved our necks that day.