The hot topic at Gosnell household

To further drive the point home, since some people missed it:

THIS IS A POSITIVE POST, FOR WHICH I AM THANKFUL OF THE OUTCOME

Apparently, the hot topic at girls night out this past Wednesday was about my family. Okay, maybe not just this past Wednesday, but certainly there have been discussions going on behind Noelle's and my back for a little while; but, yet, never brought to our attention.

Let me preface what I am going to say (which I will reiterate at the end of this post) that Noelle and I are VERY, VERY grateful for the service which has been rendered to us in the past couple of months and which will be rendered to us in the next couple of months. The Church is true and the people in our little part of Zion are absolutely wonderful.

It seems that Rachel has not been doing fine at the different places she has stayed, despite me being told that she was. All I've heard was that she played nicely and got along well. This must not be the case. The Bishop came and visited us today and let us know that he was approached separately by several of the sisters in the ward about their genuine concern for Rachel's welfare and development, and how she may not be getting the care she needs by house hopping during the week.

This was very frustrating to hear, not about the concern, but that the concern was not brought to our attention earlier and we were told all was well. This after a little fiasco last night at 10:00 PM with one party berating me stating, "How could I let Rachel go over to so-and-so's when she is sick." Then me calling so-and-so and verifying that they really couldn't watch Rachel with their current situation. The thing is, we thought the situation was taken care of since we had called earlier in the day and told it was fine.
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Let me be absolutely clear: We are not mad at either party. The situation was poor communication. I do wish we would have been told no the first time. We were ready to make other arrangements.

Let me also make something else clear that I learned over this experience: Service is not mandatory, please say No if you can't. If there is a problem, speak up... especially to us.
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Noelle and I really are humble people and do not hold grudges, do not get involved in pettiness, etc. Case-in-point, I don't care who was talking to the Bishop, they did the right thing. We know that we aren't perfect. We know that if there is a problem, and a friend approaches us, we are not going to hold that against them. We are not going to be petty and think a person is rotten or rude because they tell us "No, I can't help you." We understand it is a service and no one is obligated.

Reiteration time: We are very, very appreciative for all the help we have received and will receive. We are not mad at anyone... in fact, we are glad the topic has been brought to our attention now (and not after we lost all of our friends).

Please discuss with us if you have any issues with us. We can try and work it out. I love you all and hope to be able to return the service we have received to those in need in the future.

Pixar vs. Dreamworks

So, here's a good synopsis between the Pixar drawing board and the Dreamworks drawing board.



So true, so true.

Contractions

So, I just figured out that I can schedule when my posts should appear on the blog. This is good, because now, when I get in a blogging mood, I can post all my ideas and have them appear whenever later.

So this post is about contractions. I noticed something funny with my last post. I made a grammatically correct sentence using three words where the first two or the last two can be made a contraction. I chose the second two... I don't know why.

It isn't

But I suppose I could have just as easily typed:

It's not

or

It is not

but I didn't.

It got me thinking though, what if we combined the entire sentence!

It'sn't

What other three word combinations can be made to be one contraction? There are others, I just can't think of them at the moment.

anti-piracy / anti-theft devices that turn out to be anti-consumer

One of the things that really annoy me about common business practices with consumer items is how the business will make their product so that it can't be used normally without the consumer having to jump through a lot of hoops to use it. An example of which you may or may not be familiar would be regional encoded DVD movies.

Well I've run into one a couple of weeks ago, my car radio. Honda's stock radio/CD player has an anti-theft mechanism such that if it loses power (unplugged, the car's battery dies, whatever) it locks up and you have to get a 5 digit code to unlock. Well, here's the deal, my battery died a couple of weeks ago and now I've lost the radio. No music from a disc, radio, and no clock :(

It wouldn't be too bad if I knew how to get to the serial number on the radio, because that's all I need to give to the dealership and they'll tell me the code. Here's the thing about that. Thieves will already have a way to get that code too. And they'd get it faster. So how is this an anti-theft mechanism? It isn't! It's anti-consumer.

So, here I sit with an unusable radio in my car... but if a thief wants it, they can take it and fix it, heh.

Headline snafu

So, I headed over to FOXNews.com and read one of their articles (well just a few paragraphs). But I found the headline very amusing...



I'm not sure that the rise as more than unexpected. Perhaps the rise was unexpected or it was more than expected. Of course, they had it correct in the first sentence of the article (more than expected) and on the RSS headline. But it is funny to see the mistake in big blaring headline font.

Miss California's stance

Well, how about some good political news for once? Did you you hear about Miss California's stance (and not how she stands with her feet) on homosexual marriage? She's against it! Hallelujah! She stands up for what she believes despite the immense pressure she may have felt from the many openly homosexual people in that audience. This country needs more of her (and she got first runner-up.)

On a pessimistic note, I wonder when the prophet will tell the faithful to flee California because it's going to fall into the ocean? (I hope ya'll know I'm joking)

Rant on politics (again)

What?! A new post? It's only been 3.5 months, hehe. I didn't really want my next post to be yet another political rant, but a topic has been welling up in me, and perhaps I will put it down concisely and organized. Suffice to say, I do not like the current administration's direction. People were hoping for change... this is not the change they were hoping for.

Anyway, Noelle and I were watching The Incredibles this morning. Syndrome, the little kid who became the evil scientist, was "monologuing" and said this:

Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super ... no one will be.

Now, apply that to taxes.

[Put your favorite socialist liberal here]: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious riches, your oh-so-special wealth. I'll give them money. I'll give them the most spectacular riches the world has ever seen! And when I've given all your wealth away everyone can be rich. Everyone can be wealthy! And when everyone's wealthy ... no one will be.