the transfer is complete, and dawnne.com now redirects to synthaetica.com. those of you who subscribe to the feed, the feed has been tweaked to point to synthaetica’s feed. the proper feed uri is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Synthaetica though. it’s not a terribly big deals since i’ve pointed the original perpetual dawnne feed through, but you may want to change it someday.

whoo-hoo! this is nice to have done. i think it’ll help keep me saner from now on.

So, what I’ve got to do is import Synthaetic Synapse into here, then forward its domain to this one. Luckily, that’s still do-able because I had thoughtfully backed up synthaetica.com before running the import. The only tricky part is going to be the theme (I’m currently using a custom-made one by milo317 that was designed to complement ShadowMoon. I mean, I paid for it, you know? And not all that long ago, either. On the other hand, what I was really paying for was ShadowMoon and she kinda threw in the theme for Synthaetica for free, so what’s the difference.)

Anyway, that’ll probably take another day or so, because I’m once again in crunch mode photographically and work-wise. I was SO hoping to have this done last night. And moving Synthaetica here isn’t all that easy, as it entails the images and all that. However, I’m going to pull out of that gidgy system I use for the galleries currently on Synthaetica and use another little something I paid for and haven’t had time to deploy yet. Gee, golly, all sorts of changes happening. Man, I’m going to have some late nights!

as some of you know, i’ve been really, really busy lately, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. pretty much every morning, i wake up, look through my blogs, sigh deeply, and shuffle on to work because that was literally about all the time i had to spend on my blogs. all my online presences are suffering.

to make matters worse, i was recently appointed as South Dakota’s State Director of Referee Instruction for the USSF (US Soccer Federation), and this Saturday starts up a fairly heavy wedding schedule just as our fall soccer season begins. if my calendars are correct, I have 9 weddings between now and the end of October, and goodness knows how many games to referee. not to mention the fact i’m in the process of building a website for soccer referees in our state to streamline communications. never a dull moment, aye?

aye.

and with all this stuff going on, somewhat ironically, i increasingly feel the need to blog/vent/write/do something creative in some formative way on a reasonably semi-regular basis. the only real problem is, do i do such things here, on synthaetica.com, otherwhirled.com….where? do i do something one week on one, the next week on another, and continue this incredibly lame process of leaving my blogs untouched for extended periods of time?

no, ironically, there is another option. an ironic option, because it is to reverse what i did over a year ago, when i split my personalities into three separate blogs and created this conundrum to begin with.

so, over the next couple of nights, what I’m going to be doing is combining dawnne.com back into synthaetica.com. the way wordpress works is that the blog itself will only respond to one domain or the other, but the way DNS registries work is that i can force one domain to automatically push to the other, which is effectively the same as having one blog with multiple domain names (even though that’s not technically true). i will most likely simply import “perpetual dawnne” here into “synthaetic synapse” and create a category system to distinguish the wholly personal from the digitographic. so, be warned. at some point this week, those few of you who have remained kind and patient enough to stay subscribed to my rss feeds, it will eventually break and you’ll have to subscribe yourself to “synthaetic synapse”.

i don’t know if i will then combine “synthaetic synapse” with “the otherwhirled”. it’s still a thought: i just don’t know if it would really have that much value for me. doing so would obviously decrease my maintenance time ~ even with Wordpress’s auto-update feature for plugins, doing it across multiple blogs is time-consuming, but combining the blogs at that level of thing, especially since synthaetic synapse currently has a custom template whose target focus is not necessarily the blog, may not really be a good idea. i dunno. we’ll see.

in the meantime, at least, i’m going to reduce at least a little bit of work and get these two combined. i mean, you guys don’t even know that we had Daughter the First here for a week or anything else that’s been going on cool in our lives. i am bad. very, very bad. i do think squishing these two blogs back together will be a good idea.

i may still not have any more time to post than i currently do, but at least i won’t be sitting here not managing to update as many blogs.

(cross-posted to perpetual dawnne)

as some of you know, i’ve been really, really busy lately, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. pretty much every morning, i wake up, look through my blogs, sigh deeply, and shuffle on to work because that was literally about all the time i had to spend on my blogs. all my online presences are suffering.

to make matters worse, i was recently appointed as South Dakota’s State Director of Referee Instruction for the USSF (US Soccer Federation), and this Saturday starts up a fairly heavy wedding schedule just as our fall soccer season begins. if my calendars are correct, I have 9 weddings between now and the end of October, and goodness knows how many games to referee. not to mention the fact i’m in the process of building a website for soccer referees in our state to streamline communications. never a dull moment, aye?

aye.

and with all this stuff going on, somewhat ironically, i increasingly feel the need to blog/vent/write/do something creative in some formative way on a reasonably semi-regular basis. the only real problem is, do i do such things here, on synthaetica.com, otherwhirled.com….where? do i do something one week on one, the next week on another, and continue this incredibly lame process of leaving my blogs untouched for extended periods of time?

no, ironically, there is another option. an ironic option, because it is to reverse what i did over a year ago, when i split my personalities into three separate blogs and created this conundrum to begin with.

so, over the next couple of nights, what I’m going to be doing is combining dawnne.com back into synthaetica.com. the way wordpress works is that the blog itself will only respond to one domain or the other, but the way DNS registries work is that i can force one domain to automatically push to the other, which is effectively the same as having one blog with multiple domain names (even though that’s not technically true). i will most likely simply import “perpetual dawnne” here into “synthaetic synapse” and create a category system to distinguish the wholly personal from the digitographic. so, be warned. at some point this week, those few of you who have remained kind and patient enough to stay subscribed to my rss feeds, it will eventually break and you’ll have to subscribe yourself to “synthaetic synapse”.

i don’t know if i will then combine “synthaetic synapse” with “the otherwhirled”. it’s still a thought: i just don’t know if it would really have that much value for me. doing so would obviously decrease my maintenance time ~ even with Wordpress’s auto-update feature for plugins, doing it across multiple blogs is time-consuming, but combining the blogs at that level of thing, especially since synthaetic synapse currently has a custom template whose target focus is not necessarily the blog, may not really be a good idea. i dunno. we’ll see.

in the meantime, at least, i’m going to reduce at least a little bit of work and get these two combined. i mean, you guys don’t even know that we had Daughter the First here for a week or anything else that’s been going on cool in our lives. i am bad. very, very bad. i do think squishing these two blogs back together will be a good idea.

i may still not have any more time to post than i currently do, but at least i won’t be sitting here not managing to update as many blogs.

(cross-posted to synthaetic synapse)

emphasis on “slowly”….

gah. my weird life. gimme some time.

~d~

what happened was that we….well, i have to back-track considerably, don’t i. bah.

okay, so, like we had an offer on this house in-town, contingent upon the sale of our current house. well, after several weeks, somebody else came along and put an offer on that house, and their offer apparently wasn’t contingent. not nice. so, the only way we could beat that was to make our offer non-contingent (we were pretty confident that the other offer wasn’t for more money than we had offered). the spouse unit and her wonderful credit found a way to remove contingency, and not only that, but provided that we would sell our current house by the end of May, we wouldn’t even have to pay two mortgages at the same time. and even better, with a bridge loan against our current house, we won’t actually even pay the down-payment on the new house until June.

yeah, her credit’s scarily awesome.

so, long story short (for this part of it, anyway), we removed the contingency, making ours the best offer, and we got the house. we’ve already hauled over what could be fit in the mini-van in several car-loads, and already have two of the bedrooms primed for color changes. with the snow having finally melted, we discovered that our house has a pond, which is kind of cool, and the kids have already made friends with some of the neighbor kids. we start the big move next weekend, but the focus this week is on getting some of the rooms repainted (really just the kids’ rooms and my office) before we move stuff in.

AND THEN, we finally got an offer on the current house early last week. a couple from Duluth came out with a family member (for the third time, no less!) and made an offer the following day. we were pretty skeptical at first, as their offer was for $20K below what we were asking. in fact, to a large degree, while we were happy to get an offer, the offer itself really pissed us off. well, as it happened, this other realtor had a client who wanted to see it again, so when she called, i let her know we had an offer on the house, but that we’d love to hear from her client. sure enough, the evening after she came by, we had a second offer. this one was a stronger offer, and cash.

now, when we got that first offer, we pissed off our realtor by not accepting it right away. and we hadn’t accepted it when the second offer came through. as soon as that second offer came through, though, our realtor was on the phone with the realtor with the first offer, and all of-the-sudden, they re-offer for the whole amount we were asking. yup. the whole amount. (and we found out later they were willing to go as far as $1,000 above our original asking price! i guess their first offer was purely speculative. i’m glad they got the house, since they obviously wanted it so much, just as we did when we first moved here. i like keeping the good karma flowing.)

so, another long story short, we close on this house on May 2. i’m still not thrilled with moving. i like the new place well enough, but i’m not happy at all about moving out of here. i guess the challenge for the rest of my career will be to be earning enough and saving enough so that we can move back out to a place like this when we retire. but in the meantime, all those questions are finally answered and our future is a bit more secure. thanks to the way things went with the sale of this house, we’ll make a tidy sum off the sale of this house, beef the kids’ college funds back up, have everything else paid off, and money to spare. i guess it’s a win-win all the way around. i just still don’t want to do this moving-painting-moving crap, but i guess i need to get over it!

because it’s 30 fecking degrees
where i am
and the damn wind
is blowing so hard
there’s snow stuck to the windows
on all four sides of the house
and you’d seriously be most welcome
to shovel the snow out of our driveway
for the thirtieth time this year

I don’t normally get all pissy about stupid photos, but three separate versions of this one are “most emailed”. And if I get another one of those damned emails, my friends, someone’s going to require a colonoscopy to to have it removed from their system.

photo credit: AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye

regular readers of this blog (all 3.1 of you per month*, on average, i believe) will likely recall that i’m usually nicer over here. sorry for the bursting of certain bubbles and all that, but today i have a rant. i haven’t exactly read everything that’s available though the Blogswarm Against Theocracy, but i’ve read a lot of it. and a lot of it pisses me off. of course, a lot of other things piss me off, too, and the read can decide whether or not that’s the product of a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, or having children, or this upcoming move, or what. regardless, i’m about to rant. Happy Easter.

WHAT REALLY GETS MY GOAT.

1. Atheists who position their arguments seemingly from the stance that Atheism is a religion. yeah, that’s right, i started with “us” first. why? because when we talk like we deserve the same recognition as organized religion, non-profit churches, and government-sanctioned endeavors to help those in need, we simply obviate how much we fail to understand about society and government. Atheism is not a religion. it’s bad enough that the fundamentalists keep trying to fit us in that box. let us not do so as well.
2. Christian fundamentalists who promote methods by which their special brand of intolerance can be inflicted on the general public. and by that i mean everything from anti-abortion legislation to protesting funerals of Iraq war veterans.
3. School systems which require, as a portion of the graded curriculum, the attendance of middle-school (junior high) children in abstinence-only education. this is, in fact, one of the most subtly nefarious blurring of that already-compromised line between Church and State.
4. Agnostics who spend 3/4 of whatever it is that they say or write in the communication of obtuse caveats in the vain hope that whatever eventually becomes the point of their message will not offend anyone. seriously, we understand that the point of agnosticism is largely to leave all options open so that with your last dying breath you can suddenly become Christian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever and thus be “saved”, no matter what. we don’t need to be told that you find every religious teaching to be beneficial and worthwhile and respectable and “neat” every time you open your mouth. jump into whatever pool it is you chose with both feet and get yourself wet. because right now all you’re doing is wandering aimlessly with a lukewarm drink in your hand and getting sunburned.
5. Intelligent Designers who fail to understand the inherent irony in that title, considering the fact that its ideals are largely spouted by some of the most willfully ignorant people in the world, for whom “intelligence” is but a dim, fading light at the end of a tunnel that they don’t even realize they’re standing in, and yet forcibly desire to inflict their petulant myopia on the world at large.
6. School systems and governments who cave in to the Intelligent Designers.
7. Fundamentalists who seek to destroy everything they cannot understand, including Art and people who “shockingly” have different perspectives and beliefs.
8. “News” people who have compromised any sense of common decency, let alone journalistic integrity, to “report” the “news” that they are fed from the Bush Administration and its Congressional sycophants.
9. The people of this community who now look at me askance and pretend as if i’m suddenly not trustworthy just because i’ve admitted, within their hearing, that i do not hold any particular belief in their god. there’s surprisingly fewer of them than i thought there would be, but seriously, your lips, my sphincter. enjoy.

what does all that have to do with the separation of Church and State? well, some of that is inherently obvious. the rest of it exists in our society as a by-product of the intolerance which naturally springs from a semi-religious governmental status quo. as i noted in this post (also here), the public’s view on politics is largely that politicians should show some form of allegiance to some form of religion. which, in light of the fact that what people want is the confidence that their leaders have a spiritual side, is quite ironic, because religion often has incredibly little to do with spirituality. but before i digress too much, let me point out that this is the same thing the public generally wants of itself as well. a person’s spiritual shortcomings, moral turpitude, lack of common decency—all can and will be overlooked provided they attend church regularly and at least pretend to drink the religious Kool-Aid.

which, of course, merely underscores the lack of common sense that exists on quite a large scale.

and it’s having to deal with that lack of common sense on a perpetual basis that really gets my goat.

* this number, by the way, is completely made up and full of shit, in case you were wondering. since it’s my blog, i steadfastly refuse to apologize for making up certain metrics relating to the blog itself, or to the numbers of individuals, in part or in whole, who give a flying shit about anything i write.

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Of those, it is integrity which bothers me in this seemingly continual struggle for religious domination of our government. For the desire for religious domination is promoted as Americanism when it is, in fact, one of the most extreme of un-American acts that can be perpetrated on the populace outside of mass murder. The lack of self-integrity that it constitutes is also troubling for me, because the individuals who promote the redefinition of America as a “Christian Nation” are those who set themselves as examples of good behavior to the rest of us. Setting aside the fact that dogmatic belief in biblical stories is a nefarious form of delusion (and self-delusion, to boot), they cherry-pick their own religious doctrine in the attempt to make their desires real.

I once considered running for a local political office. After two days of discussions with local Party officials, I was finally contacted by the State Democratic Party and told in no uncertain terms that they would not support me as long as I refused to attend church. In other words, unless I was willing to violate my sense of self-integrity, I wasn’t a solid enough candidate in their minds to support. I lacked the personal funds (and the time, to be honest), to aggressively compete against the individual who sponsored the anti-abortion legislation that was so controversial on the national circuit (South Dakota’s Proposition 6), and even though the state party abhorred both the policy and the man, they simply weren’t willing to fight him from the opposite religious extreme. And as an already-established dynamic member of my community, heaven forbid that I would have brought some logic, critical thinking, and personal insight to the matter (the personal insight being that I was adopted and had a child placed for adoption and was in contact with my daughter from a previous relationship, whom i didn’t get to raise).

While I found this personally offensive, the concept wasn’t hard to understand. Even a cursory view of politics today shows how intrinsically it is tied to religion. Political candidates take great pride, it seems, in opportunities to speak at churches, and are generally careful to show themselves as supposedly-honorable members of their religious communities. Beyond that, in many locations, voting is done at the local church, although I don’t protest this too much, for in many small communities, the local church also serves as the community center, and hosting elections there is a more than just a matter of convenience or even preference. And yet, as a self-proclaimed agnostic atheist (I don’t view atheism as a religion, in other words, nor do “practice” atheism dogmatically), one of the things that I wish candidates wouldn’t do is pander to this presumed need. There are, after all, over 30,000 separate Christian denominations in the world. Pandering to one offends another, and I think, shows a that a supposed leader is incapable to effectively lead, resorting instead to the appearance of conformance to a relative minority of the voting public.

If candidates approached this issue logically, I don’t think they’d stoop to the church-hosted photo-ops. To the critical-thinking crowd (many of whom, in certain terms, actually exist in the religious crowd, too), the demonstration of a limited world-view, a relatively intolerant mindset, and a dependency on rote superstition should be quite unattractive. As well, the explicit deference to a minority (and active, participating Christians ARE a minority in this country) should be no more acceptable to the logical mind than the undue influence by any other political lobby. And the critical-thinking crowd shouldn’t be afraid to ask pointed questions to their candidates. Why should we allow such candidates to lead us? Why must we invest our own forms of faith in the good behavior and ethical conduct of those who show, time and time again, the willingness to defer to delusional thinking? Should we ever have to define the “best” candidate in terms of the admirable qualities that they lack? In many ways, those are unfortunately rhetorical questions. The status quo, after all, is a difficult thing to circumvent, let alone redefine. But I fear that if we do not manage to do some day, that even under progressive or liberal control, we will find ourselves living in a Christian State, rife with intolerance and dedicated on converting the world. And when that day comes, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

And to bring this back to the title, the real problem with this is basically just visual. On the left side of the political aisle, you know these aren’t the types of people hell-bent on changing the Constitution to make this a Christian Nation, or even personally dedicated to “saving” all the people of the world. But as such, the very appearance of their deference to these ideals, the very appearance that they take the teachings of their religions seriously, creates a logical disconnect from which it is almost impossible for the likes of me to step aside. I respect and even admire their personal faith, but the mere appearance of a need to even make religion an issue in today’s world is simply silly to me. Even when I was a steadfast, devout conservative Christian (yes, I was, once upon a time), I still had many questions and problems voting for candidates whom I didn’t think I could trust to uphold our rights and protect our freedoms simply on the basis of our citizenship, which is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

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cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors under my other pseudonym, “commander other”. coming up next: Easter celebrations in the otherwhirled!