Bush and the Bunker Buster

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator or RNEP is the newest idea President Bush has for the war on terror. He wants to spend $8.5 to research a nuclear "Bunker Buster" that
could be used to blow up underground command centers or storage centers for chemical and biological weapons. The Pentagon already has an animation showing how many millions of people would either be blown up along with it or suffer from the fallout.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has already determined that it wouldn't go far enough into the earth to hit the bunkers, could miss destroying the chemical and biological weapons and send them up into the atmosphere along with the fall-out.

I have never been a political person, sometimes to my embarrassment, and this blog was never intended for politics, but what's with Bush? He's scaring us by saying Iran and Korea have nuclear weapons, we spent years trying to convince the Russians and the rest of the world to give up building and testing them and now he wants to research this thing? Are we supposed to be the only country trustworthy enough and moral enough to handle nuclear arms?

That's a scary thought.

Back to the Drawing Board

Working on my website today. I found a pattern on Homestead that I really like, it's a faint map of the world used as the background. I wish I knew how to transfer text from my previous pages to the new design efficiently, but I don't. Cutting and pasting doesn't work. I'm stuck with retyping everything. I'll be changing a lot, but still, it's tedious and time consuming.

Homestead now has loads of stock photos available, thank goodness. I never had many graphics and my pages were visually boring. I found some great globe pictures that fit in nicely with my theme. It's revved up my enthusiasm! I won't even hazard a guess at how long it will take me to rewrite and republish, but I've started and that's the main thing. Back to work!

Opportunity Lost or Tragedy Averted?

I woke up this morning to pouring rain and thunder. Since I can't use an umbrella due to a disability, I cancelled Access Link, which would have taken me food shopping, and rescheduled for tomorrow.

An hour later, the sun came out.

I hate shopping on the week-end. It's crowded, hard to get a motorized cart, and waiting for a cab while my Hagen Daz melts does nothing for my disposition.

Whenever I'm annoyed and second-guessing, I think about a friend of my Dad's, a truck driver, who swerved on wet pavement to avoid a collision and flipped his truck. He was pinned underneath and his ankle was shattered. The doctors were amazed that he walked again and went back to driving for a living. Determination and faith paid off. He was a gutsy guy.

He taught me a good lesson. I remember him talking about that day and musing that if he'd left home a minute earlier or later he wouldn't have been in the path of the other vehicle and the accident might not have happened; a tragedy would have been averted, months of pain and therapy cancelled out in a wink.

But--

why do we always tend to think in terms of opportunity lost? The job we didn't get, the love of our life who got away, the lottery ticket a number shy of a million dollars. Always a bridesmaid we complain, never a bride.

What about tragedies averted? Does it take more imagination than we possess to envisage a brick that wasn't hurled through our windshield, a divorce lawyer we didn't have to pay because we got dumped, temptations and vices we avoided because we never became rich enough to afford them?

Something really strange happened right after I finished writing this piece. My neighbor's gutter, over-full due to the storm, crashed down onto their half finished back porch. Fortunately, the carpenter was out to lunch. How 'bout that?