You may congratulate me. My daughter is to be married.

With apologies to Reb' Tevye, who is here somewhat modulated.

Here's to their prosperity,
their good health and happiness,
and most important ...
To life, to life, la kayim,
La kayim, la kayim, to life,

Here's to the father I tried to be,
Here's to the bride-to-be,
A toast, la kayim, to life!

Life has a way of confusing us,
Blessing and bruising us,
God would like us to be joyful,
even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.
How much more can we be joyful,
when there's really something to be joyful for?

To life, to life, la kayim,
A toast, la kayim, to life!

When you go on an adventure you just never know what is going to come up. We were in Athens this weekend. BullDAWG town. The condo we stayed in was downtown and low and behold, the students were downtown partying all night just about. We were awakened both nights by loud groups of students in the wee hours. A look out the 8th floor window showed large groups of students on the streets at 3:30 am both mornings. There was a mardi gras festival going on at the bars. I'm sure it was interesting inside based on the staggering groups wending their way back to cars, and frat and sorority houses, laughing and screaming at the top of their lungs.

A really fun unexpected thing happened during the visit. Not only did I go to see my neice swim for UGA (she is a swimdawg!), but I got drafted during the finals to be a timer. Yes, I've done it many times before for my own children, but it was especially cool to be timing at an NCAA event! As it worked out I ended up timing in Kelley's lane. How's that for getting close to the action. It was fun. I was proud to be there as my NCAA athlete neice was competing.

It appears that I have locked up a top notch person for my assistant director position for next year. She has better credentials than me. That's what they say about being successful. Surround yourself with great people. How do you get to be a great conductor? Only conduct great choirs! Locking down someone so good, so early is a real coup. I feel like a baseball team that made the big off season trade for a slugger. Hey, look out! Here we come.
She'll be Dr. F, so we'll have Dr. F and Dr. G. Very Cool.

How does the preznit with his "you just can't be too careful, you know it's post 9/11" verbage, justify selling our ports to guys known to hang out with Osama?

He just says, "Oh don't be a racist. These are really good guys, pals of mine, and they'll do a heckuva job." (Michael Brown). "They've been thoroughly vetted." (Harriet Myers). "They are the best guys for the job."

Should we expect Sam Alito to be in charge of the ports next week?

The gang that couldn't shoot straight is a perfect name for this administration.

Great art is unexplainable. This afternoon Mrs. G and I have been at the High Museum taking in the Andrew Wyeth exhibit there. We did the headset walking tour. Andy, as they called him is weird enough to be a genius. I'm afraid I can't buy all the stuff they say about the "meaning" behind the art. It speaks pretty well for itself. Most of it was painting of inanimate stuff, but the portraits were moving. Particularly the portrait of Helga with her hair in braids. There was another of an empty room, with the window open, wind blowing a sheer that still hangs above the window. You could feel the wind.

As we walked out I went through some of the sculpture in the permanent collection. Marble that is alive. I looked at this young woman, seeing how beautiful she was, frozen in a marble moment from a hundred fifty years ago, her gown waving in a passing breeze, and I decided that great art is the opposite of war and terrorism. One is unspeakable beauty, the other unspeakable horror. They both take everything you have--one absolutely for the good of mankind, one absolutely to the detriment.

Why can't someone in the middle east be like Abraham. They all claim him as father. He and Lot came to a place to settle down and Abraham said, "Lot, where do you want to settle. Make a choice and I'll go the other way. Lot chose the best land. Abraham happily took what was left. In today's middle east, everyone wants everything. They make war instead of art.

The Republican party has done a video portraying the Democratic party as "the evil empire" and themselves as the band of rebels (luke skywalker, et al fighting against tax and spend liberals). How do they do it without laughing? Can they possibly be that clueless? The daily show has it right. You control both houses of congress, the courts, and the whitehouse. You are the evil empire! John Stewart says the democrats are the ewoks, but remember, they got the job done.

Getting a lot done on my week off. Trying to plan an alternative to All-State Chorus for next year. Something better perhaps. Made a proposal to UGA yesterday. Set up a picture day for my students in their uniforms. Working on details for this year's all-state (next week) and the Choral Workshop the next week. I think I have secured an assistant for next year. She is highly qualified, with a doctorate and experienced. How lucky can I get. People will think I have made a deal with the devil for sure. But no, it's just God rewarding me for a good life, I'm sure.

I drug a huge crepe myrtle over to the house via Ralph's truck. It had been dug out at the school. About 25 years old, it will be a great addition to the backyard if it will ever stop raining this week so I can plant it. I need a really big hole.

We are headed to the High Museum today to see Andrew Wyeth's work. I'll let you know how that is. It's only here for another week. We have tickets in NYC now for all of the following when we travel there in April: (eat your heart out) Chicago; Don Pasquale (@ the Met); Wicked; and the Odd Couple (with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick). Won't that be so cooool. I love the orange hybiscus blooming in the beach house and the eastern bluebird that visits the feeder. Yesterday we had the bluebird, goldfinches, and a cardinal all at once.

I'm looking for a new and better digital SLR with interchangeable lenses. Suggestions any one? Comments about the Canon 20D? Does someone love the color on theirs. How about response times between pushing the shutter and the actual capture. Fugi is too slow I hear, but the color great. Also I'm concerned about having a fantasticly accurate auto focus. For only 4000 I can get an EOS 1. Oh well. My Olympus E-10 is hit or miss on focus. Very annoying. And hey! I'm really good with a camera. There is something weird about this one.

Don't say something about the "liberal" media around me because I may haul off and punch you! I can't understand why some loser spending part of his Katrina money on a tatoo is news, over and over and over again. How much can a tatoo cost? And what do I care about what someone does with relief money we give them. Obviously not a very constructive choice by that person, but maybe "I survived Katrina" is just what they need. So lets imagine that that the offender spent $500 on their tatoo. And let's imagine that all the newspaper coverage combined was 1/2 page of coverage, and that all the TV mentions of the issue came to 10 minutes.

Now shift gears to Haliburton subsideraries in Iraq. 8.8 BILLION dollars is missing. So that should get even more press than the tatoo right. Actuatlly they are getting about the same, but the Iraq deal is a little bigger deal.

16,600,000 TIMES BIGGER. If we cover the tatoo at all, amusing anecdote that it is, how big would the paper have to be fairly cover the Haliburton debacle? To be the same as the tatto coverage, the newspaper would have to give 1000 PAGES OF COVERAGE A DAY FOR OVER 22 YEARS. The TV would have to cover the Haliburton scandal, 24 HOURS A DAY, FOR OVER 300 YEARS, to make the coverage equal.

You better not say "liberal" media where I can hear you.

Well Mrs. G went to Florida for three days. Last year she did that and I bought a house while she was gone. You'll be happy to know that I didn't try that again. But I have to say hats off to all those single people out there, because three days by myself has me stir crazy. I've scanned the internet, read the paper, exercised, watched a movie, yawn, and slept, but I've run out of things to do.

I love it when the Republican mouthpieces say that the Democrats think in a pre-911 world while they have graduated to post-911 thinking.

Pre-911 FEMA was a highly respected and highly funtioning national agency

Pre-911 DOW over 12,000

Pre-911 No declared war "for the rest of our lives" (They needed a fear to replace communism)

Pre-911 Gasoline as low as 74 cents a gallon during the Clinton administration (at the Texaco on N. Druid Hills Rd. as I recall).

Shouldn't the Vice President do his hunting legally? Why would people let him be an illegal hunter? Oh yeah right. Laws don't apply to this administration at any level. Shouldn't the Secret Service keep an eye on the guy and not let him shoot people?

Please folks, let's elect at least one branch of congress with a Democratic majority in the next election in order to put some reigns on this administration's horse.

Could Lynn Westmoreland be defeated in GA? It would seem impossible. The district is about 75% Republican. The new gerrymandering is responsible for incumbants who can't be defeated. What would government look like if districts were designed by non partisans? That would be fun.

Isn't it funny that Republican impeachment leader, Bob Barr, is saying publically that the Bush domestic spying program is clearly illegal? Would he be moving for impeachment if he were still in the house?

From the NY Times
Re: public education

A large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools. The study, by Christopher Lubianski and Sarah Theule Lubianski, of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, compared fourth- and and eighth-grade math scores of more than 340,000 students in 13,000 regular public, charter and private schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The 2003 test was given to 10 times more students than any previous test, giving researchers a trove of new data.

The researchers said they compared math scores, not reading ones, because math was considered a clearer measure of a school's overall effectiveness.

Chocolate in hot milk is way better than chocolate in hot water.

High ceilings keep you cool in summer and unfortunately, cool in winter. (Yes I'm running the ceiling fans upstairs, thank you very much, but ceiling fans make me a little jittery, do you know what I mean?)

We cast The Wizard of Oz. Not my pick for a show, but hey, it makes the musical director's job easy. The hardest thing about doing a musical is facing the fact that the drama class kids, who are pretty expressive on the whole, can't sing a lick. Oddly, you'd think the chorus kids couldn't act a lick, but while that is true for some of them, others are the best actors we saw. How did they get that way?

Dorothy: Ellen S. my superstar junior
Scarecrow: Grant S. junior (this pair starred together in the 8th grade in Music Man).
Tin Man: Karl S. senior (Who would think this was possible? He was such a quiet kid in 9th grade.)
Cowardly Lion: Mark E. junior. He just looks like a lion when you think about it.

The witch and wizard are non-singing roles and we gave them to drama kids.

Kids love being in plays. Why is that?

I like birds. We've had a flock of finches, perhaps a gaggle of gold finches on the feeder this morning. Who could count them. Sixty or a hundred. After a rest there in the yard they took off up into the sky. How do they find my feeder when they are winging their way northward? It totally blends in with the landscape, yet they spot it and know what it is.

Working on music for the choral workshop, coming up in a few weeks with guest conductors. Dr. Caldwell from GA Southern will be up to work with combined Chamber/Varsity Glee/Chorale in a 100 voice ensemble. They are doing: Faure/Movements from Requiem--Introit and Kyrie, Agnus Dei; Palestrina/Exsultate Deo (motet); Brahms/Von Ewiger Liebe, arr. by Alan Raines, and Moses Hogan/Ride On, King Jesus!

Dr. Alan Raines from GA State University will be leading Singers, in David Willcocks/Psalm 150; Imant Raminsh/Palsm 23; Alan Naplan/Schlof Main Kind; Dr. Raines unpublished arr. of Toujours by Gabriel Faure; and Z. Randall Stroope/Homeland.

You Are Getting Sleeeeepy...

Look into my eyes...

We are not financing tax cuts for billionaires by slashing education aid and programs for people who actually need them...

Vice President Dick Cheney did not authorize Libby to out a CIA agent....

President Bush is not Jack Abramoff's pal...

We didn't know about the flooding or the levees when we claimed no one could have anticipated what happened...

The trade deficit has not hit an all-time high...

Brownie did a heckuva job and is not blaming us....

CIA officials are not accusing us of cherry-picking information to falsely justify a war....

and 8.8 billion dollars did not disappear in Iraq.

When I click my fingers, you will believe all of this.

[okay, this was totally stolen from nyceducator.blogspot.com]

For the full report, take a look at downwithtryanny.blogspot.com

But I'll quote some of it here. That new budget from the preznit is really fat. Don't you wonder what is in there? I've heard on TV that it isn't real nice for the poor. But there were no details. Probably just the liberal media whining. You know those liberals, always whining. So here are some of the things included by the compassionate conservatives. We have to have these cuts to offset tax cuts for America's richest people. Oh yes and he is proposing the largest budget ever and the largest deficit. So much for small government and balanced budgets.

Medicaid patients will be forking over higher co-payments and deductibles. College loans will be more costly for students from working and middle class homes. Bye-bye federal aid for child support enforcement. And while you're at it, you ladies getting government assistance, you're just gonna have to work a little bit harder.

the programs singled out for elimination:
food for low-income seniors, assistance for disadvantaged students seeking to finish high school and go to college, preventive healthcare for "under-served populations"... Bush seeks to cut $105 billion out of Medicare, gut the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the National Institute of Health (particularly singling out programs dealing with cancer, blood diseases and heart and lung diseases for the Bush touch). His cuts to Federal education funding-- at every level-- are the biggest in the entire history of our country.

Remember the first responders-- firefighters, policemen, emergency medical services? Cuts across the board for all, from over 50% to 80%. You live in an area with a meth problem? You're on your own, suckers; the programs are eliminated.

he's also trying to cut the Army Corps of Engineers by over 11%-- you know, the men and women trying to fix the mess he made of New Orleans.

When it comes to medical care, veterans and their families are treated with the contempt with which the Bush family and their wealthy allies hold all people of modest means. Even enlisted men will suffer, grievously, in the healthcare arena from Bush's hatred of the non-rich as health care enrollment fees double and triple. So called "middle income" veterans ($27,000 to $40,000/year) are kicked out of the VA programs and prescription drugs double for all vets.

Cut taxes for the rich. Cut medicare. That's this year's budget.

Coverage of Iraq by the "liberal media" today in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution--Three inches in a single column on page A8, covering the 11 killed by roadside bombs and the 2 bulletriddled bodies that were found. Not to worry, they weren't American soldiers so they don't exist.

The paper is slammed viciously every day in op ed articles because they are a "liberal" paper.

Unfortunately the Republican scandals are deeper and involve more money than we have heard about up until now. Staggering numbers, corruption at the highest levels.

You may want to read this one.

www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/2/1/195344/1903

Who has the money?

Abramoff hasn't been just stealing a few million shekels from goofy millionaire Indians. He has another job.

It's not that they are stupid. They are not. But I'm a teacher and I can tell you, mostly, no matter what you are saying, people aren't listening. You've got to hum a pretty catchy tune to catch their attention these days because there is a lot vying for their ears.

I can't figure out why in the greatest country in the history of the planet, that universal health care shouldn't be a right. Can't we afford it? They have it in other countries. How come they can afford it? These countries don't seem bankrupt. Could we have universal health care so little kids could go to the doctor instead of coming to school too sick to learn, and still have some special treatment for rich people who pay something extra or have special insurance. That way they can have their elective surgery whenever they want and feel privileged. Isn't part of the problem with universal health care that rich people don't want to go to doctor's with poor patients? They want someone better than that.

I'll say it again. Why can't we have universal health care? How much would it cost? Let's put in all the money that people are currently paying for health care and then tax everyone, including the rich, one percent on everything they earn, stocks, dividends, salaries, bonuses. . .everything. Do you think we'd have enough money then? I'll bet we would.

Why the hue and cry to cut taxes for the rich again? I make pretty good money. But I'd pay more for universal health care.

Hey I'd pay more for government support of the arts. You don't ever hear about opera singers going postal and shooting people at the opera house.

I have a great crop of singers that are about to graduate. I try not to think about graduation until April. I start getting sad when I think about them leaving me. Some of them are blooming at just the right time. That happens. Seniors seem to develop a better grasp of the production than they had when they were younger. For the first time I have two outstanding boys going on to be music majors this year. They both will do very well. There are good girls too. Four should be going on to major in music, but only 2 are auditioning. A third is thinking about it. The fourth has heard the call of public policy. Well I get that. But singing is better in the long run.

A junior is setting the pace though. Never had anything like this kid. She understands vocal technique. She can do it without coaching. We work on music, not technique. She gives me chills.

It's a rainy night in Georgia.

It's difficult to understand our government these days. And the media. And the American people. We are a fast food society and our goverment failings are digested on the run and forgotten about.

Katrina was not mentioned in the state of the union address. Only 2000 of 85,000 refugees there have recieved requested trailers for long term temporary housing. The media didn't mention it wasn't mentioned until today. There was no mention of the number of casaulties in Iraq.

Ethics violations are out of the news. Negative savings among Americans didn't find its way into the speech.

The preznit is now stumping the country, defending record oil profits. They never had it so good. We never had it so bad. Something is wrong with that.

When is it that we'll be able to withdraw from Iraq? There seems no purpose there. There are no goals. Our soldiers remain to infuriate the locals and to serve as targets. Why aren't the preznit's kids over there, and memebers of congress, what about their children?

New polls show the preznit with a 39% approval rating. That's amazing to me. I guess the anti abortion movement is giving him thumbs up for Alito. But face it, he's killing most of us. His approval rating shouldn't be over 5% to my mind. My retirement accounts are barely back in the black after 5 years of his leadership. I had counted on them for a good retirement. Now they'll only be a supplement. Maybe they will pay my heat bill. And the preznit thinks social security should be that way for everyone, no sure bet but rather a risky investment. If things go bad well then the old folks can live in shacks until they die.

I loved this op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal today. It's from one of the 39% ers. It speaks for itself.

Democrats, media undercut safety

America is not safer today, but the reasons [sic] dramatically different from those stated in the AJC's flawed analysis ("Today, is America really safer?" Editorial, Feb.1)

From the day President Bush took office, Democrats have done everything they can to smear, malign and denigrate him. Instead of working together to fix the problems that led to Sept. 11, they are trying to make it harder for the government to eavesdrop on know al-Qaida operatives.

Rather than support our troops and build their morale, they have called for retreat. Now they portray the successes in Iraq and Afghanistan as failures, all in the quest to regain the power they lust for.

No, we aren't safer, and until Democrats and their enablers in the press realize that the end does not justify the means, we will never be.

PATRICK BELDEN
Atlanta

So then I'm to believe that the Democrats are the caustic partisan party?
The Democrats use the end justifies the means campaigning (think swift boats).
The Democrats don't support American forces abroad.
Working together means what? Has the preznit ever offered dialogue or compromise on any issue?
Retreat from a quagmire is bad?
Democrats LUST for power? (Well then Republicans LUST for money and for women--think oil profits, drug profits, Jack Abramoff, and Newt Gingrich's wives). Do you think Newt's current wife thinks he doesn't have a girlfried?