Breakfast lesson

This morning Little J and I were sitting at the breakfast table. I had just served her a waffle.

"Do you want half?" she said.

My initial reaction was shock. Here was my kid, voluntarily sharing something, and food at that. She usually eats everything in front of her and then asks for more. I had never heard her say anything like it.

"Sure," I said.

She takes her waffle and breaks it in two pieces. One consisting of two small waffle squares and the other being the rest of the waffle. She hands me the not quite bite size piece.

I have one of those parental moments. I am proud of her for wanting to share, but I am realizing we still need to work on proportions and fractions. I explain the next ten seconds trying to explain that halfs are equal in size, but she doesn't seem to be hearing me as she shovels waffle into her mouth. My last, most cynical thought of the exchange, is that maybe my kid is destined to be CEO in corporate America.

Who me?

So one of the things that irks me is that in the long run it doesn't really matter that the crazies are holding the American people hostage. What they will do is destroy the credit of the US government then run the for the election based on Obama's handling of the economy including jobs and including that this was the guy in charge when the US lost its credit rating. History gets revised faster than history actually happens.

Easy examples are Republicans continually getting credit for fiscal responsibility when everyone from Reagan to Junior continually blew the budget. Does anyone remember Junior engaged us in two unpaid for wars? And the tea party storyline seems to be that Freddie & Fannie some semi-public entities were responsible for the whole credit swap mess. AIG, Godman, and lax oversight had nothing to do with it.

The game plan seems to be to blow the whole thing up, then blame the reasonable people who are trying to govern and for some reason it seems to work.

C%MPR&M!$E

So here we are a couple days away from watching the US take an economic hammer to its own head. We don't know the full extent of the damage we will cause, maybe just a bruise, possibly just a concussion, potentially permanent brain damage, but in any case it's going to hurt. The left hand will blame the right hand, and the right hand will blame the left hand, but in the end, the whole body suffers.

There are still some idiots out there (some running from President) who can't do basic math and think in the end, no one will care that we can't meet some of our essential bills next week. For some reason there are too many of these idiots that simply can't do math. And it's just not possible to make these people any smarter in our given time frame. And another basic truth seems to be, these people are too stupid to ever admit they are wrong on anything. Compromise is a SAT word completely beyond their understanding.

So let's move beyond these people and see if the rational 2/3 of Congress has any chance.

We spend too much money. Understood. Given the economic environment created by Junior, this is understandable, but yes, we've got to worry about long term debt.

Entitlements need to be reformed. Again. Understood. I am of the opinion that entitlements is one of the fundamental parts of the social contract between the people and the government. It should not be stripped away, but there are some reasonable reforms necessary.

Taxes need to be revised. Cutting is not going to be enough. Taxes are not the job killers some claim. Some people are not paying their fair share. Again undestood.

If anyone spends 20 minutes studying up on these points, the deal should get done. Put politics aside. Compromise doesn't have to be a dirty word. Either that, or there are a lot more crazy people out there than I thought and we're all going to pay for it.

Life at 40

The other day Wifey noticed an early birthday present. She spotted the first four of five strands of white hair making an appearance on the top of my head. White hair? Can I blame this on the kids too?

Actually, turning 40 doesn't feel that traumatic. 30 felt like a milestone. I was no longer young. But 40 doesn't feel like I'm old yet. I'm just somewhere not old yet. And if this is what the middle of my life is going to be, I'm not going to complain.

Life is more complicated than I ever thought. There are an endless number of things to worry about. If I were a scale, I'd have about 50 different places to set weights each at a varying distance. Imagine trying to keep all that balanced. I never imagined life could be this difficult. But not that it isn't worth it. Just like work. I'm just here to try to figure out the best way to keep things moving.

So far, birthday week hasn't been bad. Wifey and I went to our first movie in a year or so. We saw Green Lantern which had some neat effects in 3D, but otherwise wasn't really worth it. We also caught a little of Neko Case at Stern Grove. And this afternoon, I'll be taking J to Santa Cruz to play.

This 40 thing really isn't so scary.