Good news on the pro-life front

Following an emotional debate, the South Dakota House has passed a bill saying that life begins at conception -- something that would outlaw abortions in the state.

Tuesday's vote in favor of House Bill 1191 wasn't even close. It passed 54-14.

Backers said the bill is intended to prod the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortions nationwide.

Thanks to Craigellachie for pointing this out.

Military trivia
Back before the Air Force was reorganized in the early 90s, there were three major commands: Military Air Command, Stratgeic Air Command, and Tactical Air Command. The Commander-in-Chief of each command was known, respectively, as CINC-MAC (pronounced "sink mack"), CINC-SAC ("sink sack"), and CINC-TAC ("sink tack").

Only the old fogeys use this term anymore, but military wives used to be called CINC-HOUSE.

:-D

I love spring!
It's fair, sunny, and 67 degrees outside, and I just hung a load of laundry on the clothesline for the first time this year.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

I haven't posted a quiz in ages
Found at Carmon's blog.


You are Shetland Wool.
You are a traditional sort who can sometimes be a
little on the harsh side. Though you look
delicate you are tough as nails and prone to
intricacies. Despite your acerbic ways you are
widely respected and even revered.


What kind of yarn are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

A little help, please
Toni wants to know how to say "blog" in Japanese.

I Married the Military
This post is dedicated to Samantha, who likes long blog posts! :-)

Mike and I were engaged in October of 1997 correction: 1987!, and in November he was transferred to Keesler Air Force Base, in Biloxi, MS. We had not yet set a date for our wedding, but since I was in college and had always wanted a fall wedding, I thought it would be good for me to finish the school year, then take the summer to finalize plans for a September wedding.

But we couldn't figure out if that would work. Mike was going to Keesler for cross-training, meaning he was changing from one career field in the military to another, and he would be at Keesler until the end of July, but he didn't know yet where he would be stationed after that. In any case, after he transferred to his permanent assignment he would begin his on-the-job training, and wouldn't be eligible for leave at any time in the foreseeable future.

Mike was going to have a two week long Christmas break, so he suggested we marry then, but the idea of planning a wedding while I was studying for final exams was daunting, and I really wanted a nice wedding. The next holiday Mike would have was President's Day, which was on February 15 that year, so we decided that we'd be married on the Saturday before, February 13, 1988. I know, I know, the day before Valentine's Day is a stupid day to get married, but we couldn't have a wedding at my church on Sunday, so there wasn't really another option.

The week before the wedding, Mike's instructor told him that he could take his weekly test on Thursday instead of Friday, so that he could leave Friday morning to make the six hour drive to Little Rock – Mike had been planning on leaving after class Friday afternoon and driving all night, missing the rehearsal of course, but hey, it's the actual wedding that's important!

The wedding was beautiful – in spite of the fact that we spent less money on our entire wedding than the average wedding gown sells for these days! We spent the wedding night at the historic Capital Hotel, stopped by my parents' house for lunch and to say goodbye on Sunday, then drove back to Mississippi. Monday was Mike's day off, and Tuesday he went back to class, leaving me in our cute little apartment to begin making it into a home.

Since we didn't have time (or money!) for a honeymoon, we promised ourselves that we'd take a honeymoon on our 10th anniversary.

Now, before I tell the next part of the story, I have to tell why Mike was cross-training in the first place. His first job in the military was as part of a maintenance crew on the Titan II missile silos in Arkansas, but as a result of the SALT II treaty, all the Titan IIs were dismantled and the silos destroyed. This job was finished in the spring of 1987, and everyone in Mike's squadron was given a special medal for having overseen the deactivation of an entire unit. Then Mike was told that he must either re-enlist and cross-train or get out – and was given 10 days to make the decision. He wishes now that he had gotten out and gone to college, but with so little time to make a decision, he chose to re-enlist and cross-train into air traffic control radar repair.

Now, fast-forward 10 years. The ATC radar career field has been merged with weather radar, and now Mike is doing NEXRAD weather radar repair, and he finds out that the military intends to contract out that entire career field – they want all but 400 airmen in the career field to either (can you guess?) cross-train or get out. Mike decides to cross-train, which means he has to re-enlist again. This time he chooses computer programming, so in the fall of 1997, he heads off to Keesler AFB, Biloxi, MS, for cross-training. Which is where he was on our 10th anniversary.

We never got the honeymoon.

We've decided to put it off until our 20th anniversary, being reasonably sure that he will not be cross-training into yet another career field! Hopefully he will have retired by then and our lives will have settled into the stability we've longed for.

In the meantime, tomorrow is our 16th anniversary. Mike usually takes leave for a week around the 13th of the month so we can do a big gardening project as a gift to each other. Well, really it's Mike's gift to me – I'm the one who loves big gardening projects but I need manpower to accomplish my purposes!

Unfortunately the Inspector General is coming in March, and it's very hard to get leave right now. Base commanders tend to start getting really flippy just before and IG, and denying leave is pretty standard.

Whenever I complain to Mike about these inconveniences and ask him to "talk to Someone about it," he, in his joking manner, reminds me that the Air Force's standard way of handling situations like this is to remind the airman that "the Air Force did not issue you a wife."

When some soldiers approached John the Baptist asking him "what shall we do?" his response was that they should be content with their wages.

I guess the corollary to this is that soldiers' wives must be content with their husbands' wages... and assignments, and every weird thing that comes with being a military wife.

Every once in a while, I am asked how the military affects my marriage. My answer is usually, "I don't really know." Since I've never been a civilian wife I don't really have anything to compare it with. By way of answering the question, I'll try to post the Adventures of a Military Wife on a semi-regular basis.

**I'm sorry the picture is such poor quality - we don't have a scanner, so I took a digital photo of a picture from our wedding album.

If I were a New Year's Resolution kind of person, and I'm sure by now you can tell I'm not, here are a few things I'd be resoluting:

Last year I learned The Lord's Prayer in Old English, which is especially handy to know when some person says he can't possibly be expected to understand the Authorized Version of the Bible because he doesn't speak "Old English." You should see their faces when you say, "Actually the KJV is modern English. Old English is like Faeder ure, thu the aert on heofenum; si thin nama gehalgod..." *wicked grin*

This year I thought it would be fun to learn it in Middle English - you know, Chaucer's English. And John Wycliff's.



The only problem with this is I've been unable to find to find an online recording of someone reciting it as I did for the Old English version. I've found a few Middle English resources so I'm trying to work out the pronunciation. Maybe I'll post a transliteration if I can figure out one that seems reasonable.

I've been interested in Pilates since Samantha posted about it a couple of months ago, and I recently found a Pilates for Beginners kit that has a beginners video, a neck cushion, and a huge rubber band for some of the excercises. The video is mostly breathing and posture excercises, which I've done until I'm, um, well, bored with the video (Anne Marie, don't tell Mom I said the B-word!), so I'd like to get either another video or a book, and do the excercises regularly.

Also on the health and fitness front, I really need to get back on the Protein Power diet. My grandmother was diabetic, and I've always had blood sugar trouble so I need to be really careful about carbohydrates. I did PP in 1999 after baby #5 was born and it made me feel great - more energetic than I'd felt in a decade - but then we had a baby and moved, and moved again and had another baby, and I haven't been as disciplined as I should be.

Finally, and this one I really am doing, I'm trying to read more to my younger kids. I read to my first four a lot but with added homeschooling and household responsibilities as our family grows, I have not made the effort I should have to read to my younger ones. In the mornings I'm reading the Chronicles of Narnia to them - we're on book 3 now, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (the discerning reader will notice that we used the original numbering, not the stupid modern numbering), and the kids love it. Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and Reepicheep have just left Deathwater Island and are headed out to open sea again. In the afternoons we're reading from E. Nesbit's The Complete Book of Dragons, a delightful collection of short stories about real old-fashioned dragonish dragons, not the perverse modern kind with hearts of gold. The kids and I are all enjoying it, especially my 3-year-old son whose specialty is killing monsters.

My son, a clog in the making
Okay, Summer says blogs are meant for bragging, so I'm going to indulge myself a little.

When we lived in Virginia, my then 10-year-old son played on the church's soccer team. A certificate of appreciation was given to every team member, and just two trophies were given - one to the most valuable player, and the Big One, the Philippians 3:14 award, to the best all-around player who also exhibited the most Christlike character. Both years he played, Stephen got The Big One. The certificates are long gone, but the trophies still occupy the place of honor in his room.

Tonight was our homeschool group's basketball banquet. Stephen was on the junior high team and this is the first year he has played basketball. Again certificates and trophies were given: every kid got a trophy, and some of the kids also got certificates of achievement. Stephen got the "Mr. Hustle" award - he was the smallest on his team and worked really hard to learn the game, scoring 10 points during each of the last two games of the season.

After we got home, Stephen hung his award certificate in his room. Then he removed the plastic cup and basketball from the trophy to give to his younger siblings to play with, and kept the trophy's marble base for himself.

I'm sure he's planning to make something worthwhile out of it. :-D

Deux Ego (how do you pronounce that, anyway? "Dyooz"? "Deuce"? "Dukes"? I never could figure out French!) is up and running again
If you haven't stopped by in a while, why don't you go give them a holler?

How do you feel about bones?
Yesterday we took our 14-year-old daughter to the orthodontist to see about getting braces.

Now, I always said we'd never do that for purely cosmetic purposes, so just to defend my pride here I have to say that she really does have a problem. Apparantly she suffered a mouth injury as an infant that caused her two front teeth to come in cattywhampus (if that's the word I want - one front tooth points forward and the other points backward).

Anyway, the funny thing was, as she was filling out one of the forms, she nudged me and said, "How do I answer that?"

The form said: How do you feel about your teeth?

After several minutes of giggling things like They feel smooth and hard, and It depends on what I'm eating, I told her, "Just pretend they asked you what you think about your teeth. Do you like them?"

She put down, "They feel fine. I just want them to be straight."

:-D