Meet the sisters

Andrew Joel meets his two sisters, Allissa and Melanie, for the first time. He'd heard a lot about them.

Be sure and watch it full screen!

Boy to the world

Andrew Joel Bixler

Born at 2:13 p.m. on February 22, 2012

to Joel and Stephanie

at Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory, North Carolina

Seven pounds nine ounces ~ twenty-one inches long

Everybody is fine and happy!

Baby steps

TG drove me up to North Carolina yesterday barely ahead of the snow.

I hoped all the way that my presence in the Tarheel State would convince the new baby to join us.

So far no good, but Stephanie is at the doctor's office this morning and one can only hope they are discussing options.

After all, her due date is today.

TG's heading back home for work in a little bit, but he had time to take Allissa and me for a walk in the lane.

Javier came along too.

There was bright sunshine but it was cold enough for crunchy snow dollops to remain atop the fence stiles.

Meanwhile, Melanie is at school where she ended up after a two-hour weather delay.

Back to the subject of babies.

If I see one, I shall inform you immediately.

SkyWatch Friday: Melted into air

Late-day light licks the turrets and towers of The Citadel

Charleston, South Carolina

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Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

~William Shakespeare~

From The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1

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Happy Weekend! Don't miss an opportunity to look up.

Chew this if you're able

I like the line in The Patriot where Benjamin Martin tells Reverend Oliver: “A dog is a fine meal.”

Of course he’s joking.

On January 30, 2012, the dietary police at West Hoke Elementary School in Raeford, North Carolina, took away a little girl’s lunch of a turkey and cheese sandwich, chips, a banana, and apple juice, deeming it not a fine enough meal.

The resident Nazi de cuisine then decreed the four-year-old had to eat three chicken nuggets instead.

And it was no joke.

Leave it to a public school cafeteria bureaucrat to exceed the USDA minimum daily requirement of stupidity before noon and without the benefit of two brain cells to rub together.

These are, after all, the same people who have labeled pizza a vegetable.

Tacking insult onto injury, West Hoke Elementary presented the child’s mother with a bill for $1.25 to cover the cost of the fine meal they fed her daughter in place of the one her mom intended her to have.

I have three words for that mother: Lawyer up, girl.

This news story pushed about nine-tenths of my buttons all at once.

First let me repeat what I often say: I would rather our four kids be illiterate than to have spent even one day as students in a public school.

I thank God they didn’t have to. It was a sacrifice we gladly made.

And one more nugget of wisdom: Liberalism equals mental illness.

In fact, as I opined at length to TG recently, the truth to a liberal is like sunshine to a vampire. If a liberal senses the nearness of even one faint ray of truth, he runs screaming in the opposite direction.

Truth is life and light, and as such it is the opposite of liberalism. Because it is based on lies, liberalism leads to darkness and death.

Conservatism tends to life because its basis is truth. You heard it here first and yes, you may quote me.

In case you haven’t put two and two together yet and come up with four, Obamacare has nothing whatsoever to do with your health.

It has everything to do with systematically removing your freedoms.

Because in an Obamacare world, it will be dictated to you what you can and cannot do, based on the lie that everything relates to your “health.”

Now for a spot of reminiscing.

When I was a kid, my family was a trifle challenged in the financial department.

Let's be explicit: We were poor and mostly itinerant.

While there was usually enough to eat, it wasn’t often of the “fine meal” variety.

Since we moved around a lot, in school I came under a good bit of scrutiny as the perpetual “new girl.”

It seemed that prying eyes were never more probing than at lunchtime, which I both looked forward to and dreaded.

I looked forward to lunchtime because I was almost always hungry. I dreaded it because sometimes the lunch I brought from home made me the object of jokes.

At one institution I attended for part of a year, my nickname the whole time was “Tin Foil Lunch.”

That’s because on one of the first days I went there, my lunch consisted of a baloney sandwich wrapped in an old piece of aluminum foil.

At our house we recycled long before it was de rigueur.

But at least the school officials allowed me to eat my tin foil lunch unmolested and without judgment as to either its suitability or the wisdom of my parents in providing it.

And as I recall, we still said the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of every school day.

Prayer in school had already been banned. The credit for that dubious victory goes to one Madalyn Murray O’Hair, an atheist who now wishes she could pray.

May she roast. But not in peace.

On other occasions, I remember being sent to school without a lunch because my mother hadn’t had the funds to stock up on supplies. “I’ll bring your lunch to school in time,” she’d promise.

It would be an anxious morning for me but sure enough, at some point before the lunch recess I’d look up from my desk and there would be my mom, handing a paper sack to my teacher and pointing toward me where I sat at the back of the room.

My desk was always in the back because generally by the time I showed up to matriculate in the school and join my classmates, all the good seats had been assigned.

But it was okay because I’m just as easily confused in the back of the room as in the front. Mostly what I remember about school anyway was constantly wondering what in the sam hill the teacher was talking about.

It's possible all my mother said was, "Just give this to the new girl." Everybody would have known that was me.

Still and all, I’d rather eat a baloney sandwich wrapped in a scrap of tin foil or delivered in the nick of time -– and be called names for it, while enveloped in a mental fog -- in a relatively free country, than dine on Kobe beef and arugula salad with fresh berries for dessert, all washed down with fairy nectar, in a country whose citizens do not enjoy even the most basic of personal liberties.

And so it begins with the gourmet gestapo legislating what’s in a lunchbox and ends with ... I’m not sure we want to know where it might end, but can we afford to dodge the issue?

Because what the liberal idealogues plan to cram down our throats is going to be far less palatable than the distasteful uphill fight we face in trying to stop them.

God Bless America.