I don't wear suits when I bicycle, usually.

[jackshoegazer]

It is the first weekend of the summer.

I say this no only because of the solstice which heralded the season, but also because it is the first weekend of the summer, which means Ethan has been gone all week and is here for the weekend. He grew one hundred inches and aged a thousand years this past week.

Not really, but it seems like that after a week of his absence.

Today, we rode our bikes uptown for my early morning doctor appointment (nothing important, just a refresher on the do's and do-not's of anticoagulant use), and then stopped by the pool to register the wee lad (not so wee anymore, as at the age of twelve, he's the height and weight I was at fourteen) for swim lessons. He's never been formally trained, but is decent enough I trust him not to drown. We registered him for the level three class which is fairly advanced but will definitely help out his technique.

I learned to swim in gym class in 7th grade. I swam before that but not "officially." I spent several years of my childhood swimming in ponds and rivers in southern Indiana, and jumping off of bridges here in Wisconsin. I never realized I wasn't technically "swimming" until gym when I learned I was doing it all wrong. I also learned how to make a floatation device from a pair of jeans.

Afterward, we went home for a salami and provolone sandwich for lunch. Ethan played Baldur's Gate II while I napped. Then we went back to the pool.

We swam and sunbathed for a few hours. I got burned despite my best intentions. Not too bad, but I do sort of glow.

For dinner, I made baked potatoes, salad, and lemon-pepper chicken tenderloins.

Jacquelyn was busy doing science all day. Apparently her summer labmate plays Puerto Rican Top 40 music all day. Now she's playing Civilization IV. Ethan's playing Assassin's Creed. I'm wasting away on LiveJournal while debating whether it's been long enough to have some ice cream and considering my weight-loss goals, whether I should at all.

Speaking of which, since I switched back to five days per week at work (two weeks ago) I've lost four pounds. Not surprising actually, since that means I'm bicycling a bare minimum of thirteen miles per day. More often than not, I ride quite a bit more.

Seriously people, do we need another Great Depression to make everyone realize that socialism is not a dirty word? Do we need our middle class to vanish below the dark and murky poverty line before we realize that it's only a free market for billionaires? How much more of this must we suffer through before words like "privatization" and "deregulation" make us run screaming for the hills? Down with corporatism and laisse-faire economics, up with democratic socialism!

Comments

[katachthonios.livejournal.com]

A) Congratulations on being a dad. And I mean "dad" in the truest sense: not a father -- 'cause that's as simple as getting drunk and pulling out late -- but dad. And a damn fine one at that. One that I may strive towards, in fact.


(this next part is a little... blue. children may want to leave the room)

B) Do these brainwashed fuckheads have the slightest awareness to what's going on in the world?! If deregulation of privatized industry is the way to go, then why is the economy in the shithole? Why did 49,000 people lose their jobs last month? "Oh, I can't afford groceries, and gas is astronomical, but Bill-O and Rush tell me things are great, so it must be those damned latte-sipping Marxist liberals that are making life hard for me!" To quote the late, great Bill Hicks (though he was referring to Reagan) "How far up your ass does this guy's dick have be, before you realize he's fucking you?"

Thanks to some slimeball tactics, the Right to Work initiative made it onto the ballot: they want to make paying union dues optional instead of mandatory. Oh, don't worry: the union will still have to cover your lazy ass should you get into trouble. This just means in a few years those godless leftist labor unions will all go bankrupt, and employers can return to treating workers as decently and civily as they ought.

I want to scream at these ignorant pigfuckers that if they don't like labor-unions, they can go back to working seventy-two hour work weeks at five an hour with no retirement plans.

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

I got burned despite my best intentions.

You do realize that sunscreen, not intentions, prevents sunburns? :P

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

I think your Elizabeth icon came from here: http://community.livejournal.com/grrliz_icons/127168.html#cutid1

[explodingalice.livejournal.com]

Amen to all of that, most especially quoting the man himself.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

A. Thank you. That means a lot to me.

B. Seriously.

[zhyndra.livejournal.com]

Amen to that!

[kotenok.livejournal.com]

Your dinner sounds tasty. How does a pair of jeans turn into a flotation device? That's cool!

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Tie the ends of the legs and get them totally wet then pull the open waist down into the water so the legs will with air, like how a glass will get air stuck in it if you plunge it into water mouth-down.

[teresalu.livejournal.com]

It's becoming way too hard to reject ice cream these days. I don't know if there are any places overe there that have shaved ice, but it would be a lighter alternative (just as tasty, though!).

[fortepiano.livejournal.com]

Puerto Rican Top 40? lol.

[explodingalice.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you have him home for the weekend. I just got mine back this evening and I feel so so much better. He does seem different, which surprised me.

I really wish we had a bikeable community here. I'd probably be killed trying to cycle to my office. I don't believe I'm even safe cycling to the train station I commute from. And that's just sad.

As for your last comment ... we have talked so much about these kinds of things in our house lately. Things just seem a little scarier every day, do they not?

[carrieaki.livejournal.com]

three cheers for socialism!

enjoy some ice cream once in a while! it's okay! life is for the simple pleasures :D

[seeitbloom.livejournal.com]

My education really sucked, so I didn't know too much about socialism growing up, but in a history class I once said that it didn't seem like too bad of a thing, and my teacher sounded like she thought I was insane and decided to spend the day telling us why it was so extremely bad.

My dreams had so many mentions of socialism last night. There was an old, very poor man who hadn't been all too educated but still seemed very intelligent and was basically crying out the same ideals that I had, but he didn't put any labels to it. Dreams are odd, of course, and he tried hitting me in the dream and saying that I was part of the problem and that he wanted money to be done away with entirely. I don't think he would have hit me in real life, naturally, because I agreed with him on just about everything. But dreams are strange, indeed.

I still can't claim to be very educated. In fact, I have to claim the opposite, if I want to stay honest. I'm rather ignorant. All the same, the idea I've gotten when hearing about/talking about/thinking about Socialism has never been anything horrible, and it really does seem ridiculous to me the way that things are done and how crappy everything is, has been, and continues to be.

People are predicting revolutions. And as I mentioned, my dreams are predicting them as well.