Terrorism 101

In light of the recent acts of terrorism against the Canadian Armed Forces by Iraqi sympathizers, some have suggested that we round up al such persons and ship them back to Iraq. While we're at that, we ought to do the same to Afghanis, Iranians, Africans, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Swedes, Portuguese, Italians, Czechs, and anyone else who wasn't born and raised here. When it was all said and done, the only ones living here would be pure Canadians. I'm sure Hitler sympathizers would approve.

There is an old saying, "Don't allow the terrorist to take you to Point A because then he will surely take you to Point B." The whole idea of terrorism is to make us afraid, afraid enough so that we will take action and if the action we take turns us into terrorists, then we find ourselves at Point B.

Make no mistake, the Enemy is not coming to our country. He is already here. He didn't have to sneak in either. We let him in and welcomed him with open arms. We sent him to school. We gave him a job. We allowed him to become one of us and he let us believe he actually was one of us. So, should we live in fear that one day he and all his fellows will rise up and murder us in our sleep? If we do, then we will have taken ourselves to Point B.

Let us not allow them to take us to Point A.  Be cautious and sometimes be afraid, but do not be so afraid that you take actions that make us like them.

My prayers are with the family of the young soldier who died protecting his country.

Also, I salute the sergeant at arms who performed justice in a way that I am sure the killer understood. An eye for an eye.

A Day in the Life of A Filing Clerk

I've been collecting music for most of my life. Currently I keep my music in digital format, to conserve space. I have almost 15,000 albums so space is a concern. I store them in folders on external hard drives.

On each drive are folders for each letter of the alphabet.

In these folders are sub-folders for each Artist. Those are alphabetically arranged whenever possible by Last Name, First Name.

In the Artist sub-folder is another sub-folder for each album. They are arranged chronologically.

And inside each Album folder, the files are listed numerically under a uniform file format name

01 - Song Title - Artist Name.
02 - Song Title - Artist Name.

etc etc.

I also have a spreadsheet database that lists them all.

Sound like a lot of work? It is. But when someone says "Do you have anything by so and so?" I can find out pretty quick. And when I do a compilation (for my own listening pleasure of course) of, for example, the blues albums I acquired this year....I can arrange the songs in a folder so that it plays the first song from each artist, then the second, the third, etc.

Some people collect stamps. I do this.

Dirty Laundry

I was just poking around my favorite social media site. You all know the one I'm talking about. A lot of drama there today. Who needs television when you have this site? Pass the popcorn please. I guess I don't get it. If I had an argument with my wife, I wouldn't post it on facebook and then get into a discussion about what a terrible person she was with people who didn't even know my wife. That stuff would be between my wife and I. If I thought someone was being an asshole, I wouldn't post that on facebook  because that's redundant. Everybody is an asshole sometimes. Even I, too, am less than perfect. And why make my amends list longer?  It's enough work at the length it already is without having to apologize to the asshole for telling everyone what an asshole he was and then apologizing to everyone I told because I dragged them into a conversation that was really none of their business to begin with. That's way too much apologizing for me.

In the tenth step of my program it talks to me about the practice of self-restraint. It says, "in order to practice self-restraint, I need an honest analysis of what's involved, a willingness to accept the blame if it's my fault and an equal willingness to forgive if it was their fault." Analyzing a situation honestly allows me to see if I was at fault. Not everything that happens is my fault, but sometimes it is. Sometimes I make mistakes. And if it was my fault, if he was an asshole because I was an asshole first, then I need to own that. If, on the other hand, it wasn't my fault and it was all him, then I need to forgive him for being an asshole. Then, I can get on with the rest of my day and you won't need to hear about it on facebook.

Know what I mean. Jellybean.

Perspective

Sometimes its all a matter of perspective. If you follow my posts on social media you might have noticed that lately I have become disenchanted with my job. Let's face it. It's a boring job. I got skills and they're being wasted. I could implement some organization here, some filing tricks there, change the way they do that, do away with that, etc etc etc. But I can't do that here. I get in trouble when I do their jobs for them. so I get disgruntled.

Don't get me wrong. Boring can be good. When I worked in the field of alcoholism, there was never a dull moment. It was exactly the opposite of this job. Everyone wanted me to do their job for them, even my boss.

Something in the middle of the road would be fine with me.

But that's a negative outlook. Let's try to think positive thoughts. Next week is pay week. I just took a week off. You'd think I'd be short on my pay. However, I have a week that I worked before my vacation. Plus I get 2 weeks vacation pay even though I only took a week off. So I worked 40 hours and I get 120 hours pay.

So that alters my perspective somewhat.