tfl: The Flatiron Life

Charley Wesley is a well that never runs dry of hymns full of theological meaning. Today, he reminds us how those on Earth and Heaven form a single body of the Church and we, still on Earth, need to be committed join those who have gone before.

Come, Let Us Join Our Friends Above

Come, let us join our friends above, who have obtained the prize,
And on the eagle wings of love to joys celestial rise.
Let saints on earth unite to sing with those to glory gone,
For all the servants of our King in earth and Heaven are one.

One family we dwell in Him, one church above, beneath,
Though now divided by the stream, the narrow stream of death;
One army of the living God, to His command we bow;
Part of His host have crossed the flood, and part are crossing now.

Ten thousand to their endless home this solemn moment fly,
And we are to the margin come, and we expect to die.
His militant embodied host, with wishful looks we stand,
And long to see that happy coast, and reach the heavenly land.

Our old companions in distress we haste again to see,
And eager long for our release, and full felicity:
Even now by faith we join our hands with those that went before;
And greet the blood besprinkled bands on the eternal shore.

Our spirits too shall quickly join, like theirs with glory crowned,
And shout to see our Captain’s sign, to hear His trumpet sound.
O that we now might grasp our Guide! O that the word were given!
Come, Lord of Hosts, the waves divide, and land us all in Heaven.

The bold stanza gave Jos and I a double take with “the blood besprinkled bands.”

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by joscelynn_gagnon.

Here’s Jonah watching Sesame Street in the whale costume I made him for Halloween. I’m pretty pleased with how the costume turned out considering I didn’t have a pattern. Over the course of the night, Jonah was twice mistaken for a dolphin, but other than that people generally “got it.” I never realized all of those years helping with costume maintenance at Lafayette Ballet Sweatshop were preparation for motherhood.

Halloween afternoon I took Jonah downtown to a party at Jacob’s office. During trick-or-treating time we enjoyed the beautiful, warm evening on our front steps, catching up with neighbors and passing out candy. This morning Jonah had a costume play date with a group of babies that I like to call “Cafe Au Lait.” I’ll try to post a picture of the festive young Wesleyans when we have them uploaded.

My minor prophet will be eleven months in two days. This fact astounds me. 2008 has been the fastest flying year of my life. Jonah can now stand unassisted and we’ve seen him let go and take a couple of steps. He also climbs steps easily, eats chopped and/or mashed table food, sleeps between 10 and 11 hours at a stretch every night (!!!), and contently watches almost all of Sesame Street with me.

This is a little boy we’re raising up. No doubt about it.

In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?

A Tomaw did something, I think.

Today the Federal Executive and Federal Legislature

President:
I don’t think it is going to come as any surprise that I am voting for Bob Barr.

Barr promotes a foreign policy I support: Don’t attack other people, unless they attack up. and Bring our agents and troops home, from everywhere.

Barr also promotes a domestic policy I support. This can best be summed up by noting he has talked about the Constitution while campaigning. This leads me to believe he thinks the Constitution has meaning and will nominate judges who will believe it has meaning also.

This is not to say I am not concerned with Barr. He was a strong member of the extreme right. However, I have found that once you start to see one thing in the light of liberty the light spreads fast. I have seen this time and again in friends and in myself.

Senate:
Illinois has one of “the top 10 best Senators.” These are the ads Dick Durbin is running. I don’t know how you come up with a metric to measure the overall performance of a Senator. From the searching I have done, Time magazine rated the Senators on political skill. This is not how i would rate them.

There are 5 candidates running for Senate. This is pretty healthy but there is no way Durbin is not winning. This allows me to only make sure the Libertarian is not a complete nut-job.

Larry A. Stafford does not appear to be a nut-job at all. Just a self-educated truck driver who is frustrated with the way the legislature has been operating. If anything, he might not be libertarian enough for my taste. From what I have read his ideas seem very conservative and not radical at all. He wants to responsibly cut taxes and reduce government in order to allow people to provide for themselves many of the things most politicians want you to look to Washington for. Oh, and he knows what the constitution is and believes it has a role in government.

HoR:
Rahm Emanuel is my Representative. He is the Democrat in charge of making sure Democrats are elected to congress. If he were to be unseated it would be quite a coup.

Here I have a choice between three statists. The Green in the race is the most extreme. He wants to drastically increase the role of government. Emanual wants to in crease the role in a way you would expect a Democrat to. The Republican in the race calls himself progressive and just wants some more government.

I am voting for the Republican, Tom Hanson. He is by far not ideal. From what I have read there is a strong desire for social engineering with the tax code, but in the big picture he leans toward the free market. His one crazy stance is immigration. He is willing to convert illegals into legals, but only if they are fluent users of English and pay a fee. No mention of the constitution.

On Thursday, I got a call from someone at National City on my cell phone asking if I would like to open a checking account. I thought that seemed very odd. I said no because I am not in the market for a checking account and I don’t give people right when they ask me for it, as a rule.

I think this might explain why I got this call. Turns out the FED is not the lender of last resort, I am.

We are also connected to this story in another way. Instead of making a down payment on our condo we have an 80/20 loan scheme. National City is the 20. I hope our new 2nd Mortgage overloads are as kind as the previous.

The following is only related because it is in the above referenced blog post:
I find the following interesting because of the cities.

In other banking news, the FDIC and Georgia Regulators shut down Alpha Bank & Trust of Alpharetta, Ga., on Friday. The FDIC struck a deal with Stearns Bank NA of St. Cloud, Minn., to assume Alpha Bank’s more than $340 million in insured deposits.

Remember, we were depositors in NetBank, located in Alpharetta, Ga. NetBank’s assets were bought by ING, located in St. Cloud, Minn. I did not know Alpharetta and St. Cloud were blossoming banking centers.

IMG_4368, originally uploaded by minnesotagrays.

This weekend’s cousin meet-up resulted in less viciousness and more cuddling. Jonah is in kind of a lovey dovey phase right now and this snuggle moment melted our hearts.

There are still 11 days until this long horrible saga is over and we can figure out who is running for President in 2012.

In the interim, I am going to figure out how I am voting and share it with you.

Today, 2 ballot questions:

First a state wide question:
The current Illinois Constitution was adopted in 1970. This constitution mandates that “the question of calling a convention be placed before the voters every 20 years.” The last convention was the one that adopted the current constitution.

I think Illinois has a lot of problems with its government. Here is a good case for a convention. I agree that gerrymandering should be eliminated, I support a simple algorithm for creating compact districts with the shortest perimeter lengths. I agree that ballots should be open, I find it frustrating the limits incumbents place on outsiders at the state and city levels.

I don’t think anything would address it in the convention. I have not found that Illinois politicians are staunch strict constructionists and limited by the current document, as that post points out,

There are those who are against a constitutional convention because they think the current constitution is fine. To show how the current constitution is not “good enough”, take a look at Article VIII Section 2 of the Illinois Constitution which requires that the budget for the state be balanced.

Yet, according to the Commercial Club of Chicago, a prominent business group, the State of Illinois is in about $106 billion worth of debt.

The real solution to Illinois problems is people starting to vote like they care and not letting the machines work. How do you make this binding in a constitution?

I might say give the convention a chance, but I think the likelihood is greater that measures would be taken I am opposed to: direct democracy in making initiative binding, term limits, mandatory funding for everything from education to health care. After all, the question does not address who will form the convention.

I am voting NO.

Second a county wide question:

Shall the Illinois Constitution be amended to establish a recall process for the office of Governor and other statewide elected officials?

As I indicated above, Illinois does not have binding initiatives. This is just a question like a poll. The background is that our Governor has a lower approval rating than the President or Congress.

In my opinion, people need to be held responsible for making poor decisions. This is true in all arenas, including the political arena. This is not the Governors first term, he was just as bad before and Judy Baar Topinka was a legitimate opponent who would have made a fine Governor.

While a case can be made for allowing the people to realize they made a mistake and remove the bad official, elections are not free events. They waste time and money, both public and private. They also play into the weakening of responsibility.

I am also voting NO on this question.

If I had to guess, the median reader of this blog is around 30 years old. That makes us a little young to answer this question, but I am going to ask anyway.

Was the media as tough on Pres Clinton as it is on Pres bush?

I am not asking this because I think the media is too hard on Bush, I find our media pretty weak all around.

I find this hard to answer, not just because I was a teenage-punk in the 90’s, but because everything in that question is moving.

I do find a general bias against conservatism in the media, but it is marginal not overwhelming. I think I used to find it stronger, but I used to be more of a Conservative. Now that I am more firmly libertarian I find the media to be strongly against anything that cannot be defined in the conservative/liberal or Dem/Rep dichotomies.

Also the media has changed. When Clinton was president there were some cable networks, stronger newspapers and magazines, and talk radio. Today, there is more cable news, weaker print, about the same talk radio, and a raising internet sector from all ideologies.

Why do I ask? I was reading something from 1993 where Clinton was confused about how the media had misinterpreted a campaign pledge he made. (Some tax cuts.) It struck me that, the Sen. Obama as the messiah theme has been picked up by the media and they are not being that tough on him. (When you are shooting yourself in the foot, you don’t need the media to attack you, Sen McCain.) He is going to be the next president and I think he might have a rather rude awakening one day when after 4 years of being the wunderkind, he is suddenly ‘leader of the free world’, there is no where to go but down, and thousands of journalists who what to help know you that way.

Even is the media does turn hard on Obama, it will probably not be as hard as I would like. The Daily Show will continue to be my primary TV new source.

Jonah Jacob Daniel Deward Earl Tomaw, originally uploaded by flatiron32.

Jonah finally met his grandpa on Sunday for this first time.

Dad was between loads on Sunday and call me to see if he could meet Jonah. We went out to the BNSF yard on the southwest side and took him to lunch.

t was a nice time and afterward Jos took this picture of the the Tomaw men together.

Dad had a lot to say about when I was Jonah’s age. Most of it funny.

There was one story that disturbed me a little. Dad noticed that Jonah breathes about as well as any Tomaw breathes in there natural state, in a word, poorly. I had already noticed this a while ago and taken to calling Jonah “Deward” when he starts breathing loudly. (This is what my Grandpa used to do and Grandma would yell, “Breathe Deward!”. Ah, memories.)

The disturbing part is that I had never learned that I had poor hearing before my tonsillectomy. I had been preparing myself to ask the doctors if there is anything to be done other than tonsillectomy if the breathing had ever comes to their attention. I would really rather not mutilate Jonah if I don’t have to, but I also don’t want him to go through life deaf AND breathless. You might say there is hope he has the glands of his mother, but Jos is also sans tonsils and adenoids with a deviated septum.

(Note: Deward is a real name and not something I am using to mask the identity of my grandfather who has been dead for ten years. Deward is pronounced “Dee-Word”.)