Team Ireland wins...again!!!

I'm not one to gloat but I feel it is my duty to report (fair and balanced) the score of the latest round of spades between Team Polican and Team Ireland. The Irish emerged victorious with a score of 506 to 446. Team Polican fought until the end but came up short yet again.

On another topic, we bought our tickets and leave at 7am Tuesday morning. We'll see you all in Dublin!

We're Off!

Today in the mail I received my Green Card. Now that we are legal to enter we will be leaving some time next week. I guess that means I have to go back to work and end my extended vacation! Oh well, all good things must end. As a wise woman I know likes to say, "Praise The Lord!"

Mighty Leopard Cat

We are spending our second day with my Mom since we've moved out of our house. The cats have been kept separate for the most part with short introductions. The latest was between Indi and Remington (medium sized boy cat). Indi sat up to give him a sniff and was promptly hissed at. She didn't take it too well and chased him over then under the bed and right out of the room. Her wild streak must have scared him! I think she'll handle herself alright, hopefully the sheepish Sharptooth will handle not being the center of attention.

Oh, and as a side note....my permit was just approved! We're leaving next week!!

Yeah, that'll fix it.

What is going on in Deutschland? Extremism seems to be the way of the land. In a country where marijuana and prostitution are as legal as driving a car and clearly more accessible than a fire-arm, we see the same scope represented in the political and religious views of it's leaders. Anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders has recently called for the Koran to be banned calling it a "fascist book," and the leader for the "committee of former Muslims" has just been attacked fueling already tense relations within the country. How do you solve such ill-relations?? Bishop Tiny Muskens thinks a resolution would be accomplished if people of all faiths called God "Allah." The statement received quick praise from the country's Muslim community, however, 92% of those surveyed disagree with the Bishop. Well, what do you expect from a guy named Tiny?

Y2K - Global Warming Connection

The DailyTech reports on how the Y2K hoax may have actually been more real than global warming. You can read the full story, but a brief synopsis is that while inspecting NASA's climate graphs, Steve McIntyre noticed a strange jump in the climate graphs centering around January of 2000. NASA would not provide him with the algorithm used to generate the graphs which was created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen who became headliners when they accused the Bush administration of censoring there dire predictions. NASA has since released an updated version which shows that the hottest year on record was actually 1934 (not 1998) and that 5 of the 10 hottest years were pre-WWII. It turned out that a Y2K bug had corrupted the handling of their raw data. It seems that Y2K not only lead to pre-2000 panic over airplanes falling from the sky, banks losing all of their account information and economic destruction but can also be blamed for the current hysteria surrounding global warming.