Roundup

I'm up early this morning. I didn't mean to be, but I am a very light sleeper in general. Plus, our upstairs neighbors have a hyperactive kid who gets up early and runs around. A kid or a Tennessee Walking Horse. That they train in the mornings by letting it prance around their apartment. And if it is a Tennessee Walking Horse, they apparently train it to walk as if gravity was messed up and that "walking" means stepping as if after each step you might be flung off the face of the earth so you better step really hard to make sure you stick. Then, from what I can tell from one floor below, they shoot marbles. Yes, the upstairs neighbors and the horse that lives in their apartment usually gallop around for an hour and then play marbles. Or maybe it's bowling. Hard to say for sure, but I am positive there is a horse.

I have been doing a lot of paperwork at work lately. It's important stuff as I see it...as in it helps Breakthrough apply for funding for housing units. This is a big deal. We submitted a letter of interest to the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness that could, if all goes according to plan, let us be awarded quite a high number of additional units in our permanent supportive housing program. That would be fantastic. We're at the very beginning stages of the process, so...I'm taking it as it comes.

I see that it's coming to light all the waterboarding the United States used to do under the Bush administration. I'm glad it's coming to light. I'm glad President Obama says he won't do that. I'm glad the Obama administration can go ahead and state definitively that waterboarding is a form of torture. I'm glad he's at least open to prosecuting the folks that gave that practice the stamp of approval under the Bush administration. It's chilling how casual those responsible defined what torture is and is not and how willing they were to stretch the limits of the definition of torture to the utmost, approving some awful stuff and then passing the buck when people started getting a hint of what was happening. I also see Dick Cheney has surfaced again in the media, one headline reading something like, 'Breaking from tradition, former vice president speaks out to defend his legacy.' Man, how do you defend that? Hubris on the level of Rod Blagojevich.

Speaking of the former gov...they won't let him go on a celebrity reality show in Costa Rica. "Nope, Ex-Gov, you can't go and eat bugs on TV to make some money. You have to stay in Chicago and participate in your legal defense." Well, I think that was a good decision on the judge's part. Rod says he wanted to go on the show as a means of providing for his family. Hey Rod, you extorted a lot of money...what happened to that? How much you end up getting for that senate seat? Not enough to take your kids out for family night at Pizza Hut though, eh? It doesn't matter Rod, because whether you went on that show or not, whether you make it through these cases or not, whether you end up in politics in some other state or whether you end up in jail...let me tell you what's going to happen when it comes to your kids, okay? Sometime in the not-so-distant future, but distant enough that your kids are on their own...they're going to have this moment, maybe walking to and from classes at college, maybe after getting off an important call with a client, maybe who knows what. But they're going to have this moment when they realize who their father is and it is going to make them sick to their stomachs and they'll be afraid suddenly that everybody is looking at them.

Welp, it sounds like they're done shooting marbles with a horse upstairs. Fine. That means it's breakfast time for me.