18 December 2006, one week to go to Christmas

I don't know when the Twelve Days of Christmas start and end, but I'm afraid the damn firecrackers are going to last until at least the first of the year.  It's 8 a.m. and one of the charming little neighborhood boys has already fired off one, driving Poco into Trinket's cave underneath my computer.  (My computer corner section consists essentially of a 4'x4' box with the front corner chopped off diagonally, providing a kneehole as well as a place to put my CPU and various other items.  For the dogs it represents the safest and darkest cave in the place, especially when guarded by me sitting at my keyboard and protecting them from harm.)

A balmy day, married by the fact that Tony's day-care lady is closed three days this week.  We definitely need to go to Ciudad Quesada today, so Lis gets baby-sitting chores added to her agenda.  She is getting good pre-housewife-and-mother training.

She is also becoming a rich young woman this month, assuming she isn't spending it all.  Every Costa Rican gets a "13th month" pay in early December, plus Lis decided to work during the last two weeks which would otherwise be vacation, for which she is earning double.  And the other day, when we went to SJ and then were gone so long because we broke down on the road, I paid her double for the extra hours, money she hadn't been planning on, but she worked from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. that day without complaint. 

She is worth every penny of it!  We live in fear of the day she finds a guy who wants to marry her and start their own family...especially if he wants to move away from the area!

evening

Ordeal survived, Tony's presents are purchased and wrapped.  I love Costa Ricans, the guard at the entrance of the store took time out to help me wrap one of the boxes.  If you use the store wrapping paper with their tasteful logo then it's free, and they'll either help or do it, and the paper is attractive enough at that price, what kid notices the paper, anyhow?  (Christmas and birthday wrapping paper is sold in sheets here, not in rolls.)  I'm always touched by how helpful these people are. 

Then we stopped for lunch on the edge of the city and I parked a little too close to the corner.  Carol pointed out the curb was a faded yellow but so was the rest of that side of the street and several cars were parked ahead of me.  Just as we were finishing up a lady came over to me and asked if that was my car...and there was the cop with a tow-truck arriving on the scene.  I dashed out, accepted the ticket from a very polite traffic cop, who told me to pull ahead (the other cars having moved by now, we were having a late lunch) so I did.  I asked him if I was okay now and he said yes.  I pointed out that the curb was still yellow, or at least had been at one time since the Jurassic, and he smiled and shrugged.  You have to be 30 meters from the corner, he said.  Oh, well, that costs me $9.60 plus the points I lose in marital debates, which is somewhat more costly.  I think I can either go to the bank and pay it or it gets added to my annual marchamo, essentially the auto license, which is also due before the end of the year.

December is not my finest month, but it will be different this year, with Tony.  It will be his first real Christmas tree with a family and presents, he has no real idea what is coming about.

This is a really strange feeling, you know, because it's not really like I'm a grandparent with a grandson.  I'm legally Tony's father and he calls me Papá about a million times a day, which gets me an occasional odd look when we're out in public.  It's not like starting over, either, you can't go back again, but the biggest difference is that I am at home all day now...no job and no commute hours.  And I FEEL like his father, strangely enough, because for one thing Tony has never indicated in any way that he regards me as anything else.

Sometimes you DO get a second chance to do better...

Readers who are thinking of moving to a tropical paradise, be warned that Costa Rica isn't it.  There are a lot of things wrong with Costa Rica, and if I had some time I'd think of a few of them, but for the rest of the time it's pretty hard to beat.  You can find just about any climate you want here except for really cold, no ice-skating (even in rinks, as far as I know, but there's a good idea if you are looking for an angle) or skiing.  Some times of the year in San Jose and at higher elevations it is much too cold for me to be comfortable, but people from Berkeley or Seattle might like it.  Down on the southwest Pacific coast they grow cactus; the northeast Caribbean is jungle you wouldn't last in very long.  Everything else is in between.

The people are wonderful...helpful, kind, polite, friendly.  The way people ought to be.  I try to emulate them.  Today, on our way to Ciudad Quesada, we passed a young couple hitch-hiking while waiting for a bus to come along.  We passed them and I looked at Carol and said I feel bad about that, she agreed, so we turned around and went back for them. 

When I was a young Marine, between the ages of 19 and 20, before I bought my first car, I hitch-hiked every weekend I could get liberty from Camp Pendleton to Santa Monica.  One year I hitch-hiked from Camp Pendleton to Bryce Canyon, Utah, in order to meet my folks and go deer hunting with my Dad.  True, I got one prearranged ride with a fellow Marine most of the way into southern Utah, but in those far-off times you didn't worry all that much about hitching a ride.  Yes, there was some amount of danger attached, and women didn't generally do it alone, but in general it wasn't a problem.  And that's about like how it is now here in rural Costa Rica. 

Life isn't perfect, but it isn't all bad, either.  The glass is definitely half-full!

Just For Parents Section:

Tony's "big" present is a sturdy plastic playhouse.  One of the things he dearly loves to do is drag cardboard cartons around and drape his blanket over them, making his own casa.  I've thought about building him one out in the garden lot, but I see nothing but problems there...wood rots if on the ground, snakes and critters live underneath it if you give them a protected spot, and I'm not yet ready to build him a little "tree" house, although maybe next year...  This house is about 3'x4' and high enough for him to stand up inside, it has a small table and shutters that open, and we'll set it up inside the house, back in Dad's bedroom.

It has a sturdy plastic floor and it can be moved around easily, so perhaps one day we'll move it outside, but I suspect this will be the place that from now on he wants to eat his meals and watch his television, viewing it out of his windows.

Like parents everywhere, we can hardly wait to set up Tony's present!

Later maybe I'll build him an elevated playhouse outdoors.  I have some lengths of metal rafters left, enough to sink four into concrete caissons and elevate the floor six feet off of the ground, then build him a small playhouse he can reach by rope ladder or whatever.  Perhaps that will be part of next year's garden lot project. 

You know what?  I'm more excited about Christmas now than I have been in years and years!  On Christmas Eve we will convince Carol she should get out her keyboard and play Christmas carols while we all sing along.  Tony loves to sing, it should be interesting. 

And, of course, the annual replay of It's A Wonderful Life...which this year will be more true than ever.

Well, fun and games before bedtime, this from John Fund in OpinionJournal:

Left unspoken is the big reason why so many Democrats are swooning over the newcomer. It's the nagging belief that the country isn't ready to elect Hillary Clinton. "If she is the nominee, voters will be asked to select another Clinton, after having had a Bush in the White House, proceeded by a Clinton, proceeded by the first President Bush," one Democratic consultant observes. "Against her, most Republicans would look like a fresh face and with less baggage."

If you think that is a bad situation, consider if you were Jeb Bush, apparently an extremely capable governor, wanting to follow Hillary's term!  Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton-Bush?  Never sell.

The fact that he originally opposed the war in Iraq would help him with primary voters, but it's unclear how many Democrats want to plump for someone who, according to National Journal, has a more liberal voting record than Hillary Clinton. Last year Mr. Obama had a perfect 100% voting record from both the Americans for Democratic Action and the AFL-CIO.

His record as a state legislator is even more liberal.

I didn't know you could really exceed 100%.

In addition to all the consultants who are urging him to run, Mr. Obama has other advisers who are telling him that at age 45 he can afford to wait. He also could easily find himself on the top of her list of potential running mates. "A Clinton-Obama ticket would be the most powerful turnout machine you can imagine for the Democratic base in 2008," one Democratic congressman who knows both of them told me. "He might be better positioned to be president if he first ran for vice president. If Hillary won, he would be the heir apparent. If she lost, no one would blame him for that."

Actually, as a conservative more-or-less Republican type, this makes so much sense for them that it really worries me.  Even better for them, Obama right now can accept second banana position without any loss of stature for the future.  Whereas, for instance, the Republicans' two leading candidates, McCain and Giuliani, cannot afford to accept the role of vice president or even acknowledge any inkling that they might.

Obama could easily stand up and actually tell the truth, an astonishing thing to imagine.  He could acknowledge that many people want him to run for president but he doesn't think he is ready yet...who can argue with either point?  He can say that he wants to serve 8 years under President Hillary and then run for president, at which time, at age 53, he WILL be ready.

It makes so much sense that I figure the Democrats will screw it up.

A McCain/Rice match-up would be, to say the least, interesting.

This is simply astonishing!  If you ever wondered why the Iraqis didn't greet us with flowers (they did, and al=Jazeera reported it, but the MSM paid little attention) and if you wonder why the US is not still getting complete cooperation from Iraqis, consider just this finishing paragraph by Jed Babbin in American Spectator while writing on a slightly different point:

The president has only a brief time left in which he can accomplish anything and put us on the right path through 2008. Making one speech now to set the context and making another in January -- perhaps making it the central theme in his State of the Union address -- to announce the changes for Iraq are the way to regain the leverage he has lost. George Bush's won't get as many last chances as Saddam did. If we don't get this right -- right now -- Saddam may even get one more.

Exactly right!  Perfectly put!  Iraqis have seen Saddam recover from hopeless positions like this before, and every time he has he has slaughtered those who dared raise their heads against him. 

I doubt if there's a person in Iraq today who thinks there is absolutely no chance that Saddam will ever return to power.  In fact, I wish somebody would ask that question in a nation-wide poll, the answer might explain to a lot of the ignorant exactly why those people are behaving the way they are today.

They may never have watched The Shining, or Johnny Carson, but they know too well what the warning "heeeeeeee's back!" means.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Iraq cannot truly begin recovery until after Saddam has been executed.  His supporters who warn you about the power he would gain as a martyr don't appreciate the power he now has while still alive. 

I like Jay Nordlinger's column and actually blogito is based a lot on that style...either that or he stole it from me, I can't be sure, although he pre-dates me by a large number of years.  Anyhow, this item:

You can find conservatives who are sniffy about Safire, because he wasn’t “perfect” — that is, did not conform to some conservative ideal. (What is that ideal, by the way? You will never get agreement.) He was pro-abortion, and he was a “privacy” nut. Also, he voted for Clinton in 1992. But no one’s perfect, and Safire was, and is, damn good.

I'll never be a Safire, but I also voted for Clinton in 1992, although for reasons it will take longer to explain here than the interest I have tonight in doing so.  I have some friends who complain bitterly about me being a Bush apologist, and a conservative Republican, but I enjoy reminding them that I have probably voted for more Democrat presidential candidates than they have.  Counting state and local races, I know that I have.  And I've never been a member of any political party.

I had to laugh at this piece from NRO's Jack Dunphy, too:

That a decision from the Ninth Circuit should be so resoundingly rejected by the Supreme Court is hardly news. What is surprising, if not staggering, about last Monday’s decision is that it was applauded by the editorialists at the Los Angeles Times. “This page, which strongly opposes capital punishment,” wrote the Times on Tuesday, “is nevertheless glad to see the 9th Circuit's wrist slapped for improperly applying the law as it is written.”

Perhaps the editorial writer was unaware that capital punishment was not at issue in the Musladin case...

Perhaps, indeed.  Their intellect is on a par with the Ninth Circuit's.

How I love Mark Steyn!  But I worry that maybe he buried his central point, so I want to single it out for you.  This comes from his piece about Christmas trees in the Seattle airport:

This isn't about religion. Jesus is doing just fine in the United States. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized American Christianity unique in the Western world. What the rabbi in Seattle and the cops in Riverside are doing is colluding in an assault on something more basic: They're denying the possibility of any common culture. America is not a stamp collection with one of each. It's an overwhelmingly Christian country with freedom of religion for those who aren't.

Very excellent point to make.  America was created by people who believed in a Christian God, that's a fact of life whether you like it or not today.  The "freedom of religion" thing was created for others.  It's high time the others realized that.  We also believe in minority 'rights' but we do not believe in minority rules. 

Respecting the rights of a minority means you don't kill them or even throw them into prison, but it does NOT mean that you let them take over and tell the majority what they can and cannot do.

We need to tell the atheists that we do not care whether or not they include "under God" in the pledge or simply exhale at that point, but they don't have the right to tell the rest of us we cannot say the words if that's how we feel.  Say what you feel, don't say what you don't feel, but give up on this idea of telling the rest of the people what to do. 

(Atheists are going to hell, of course, but there's not a hell of a lot we can do about that.  What's that, you say?  We can convert them?  Oh, yeah, sure...but then they wouldn't be atheists, would they?  So maybe they wouldn't go to hell, but the atheists still would...)

Researching the Seattle article I stumbled across this item about Bing Crosby:

He died (of a heart attack) in 1977 on a golf course in Spain, having just completed the 18th hole.  Walking off the eighteenth green of the La Moraleja Golf Club, in a suburb of Madrid, Bing Crosby said, 'That was a great game of golf, fellas,' and then took a few steps and was gone.

What a way to go.  One of my best friends, Paul Giurlani, died in his own restaurant while mixing drinks for the Rotary meeting I was about to attend.  I was sitting at his bar when he fell, and I rushed across to the meeting room even before the paramedics arrived.  He was mixing drinks for his customers at the time, holding his own in his hand, they say, when suddenly he dropped straight to the floor, dead.

I was talking with some other people at the bar at the time, otherwise I would have been over there with him, something I have always regretted, not being there to hold his hand.  After Paul died, and with Carney already gone, it became much easier for me to leave Jackson for Costa Rica, two of my most important ties had already been cut.

Paul had told me on many previous occasions that that was the way he wanted to go, serving his customers while having a good time himself.  He was the ultimate bartender!  When I write my book, he will have a central role, just like he did in my life.

Having death happen suddenly like this was a shock to friends and family, of course, but at least we were all there at the time to console one another and Paul got to go out the way that he wanted.  He was a happy man at the moment that he died, and it was quick and painless.  We should all be so lucky.

Did I Really Say That? Department

I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. I worked in this region...we should harbor no illusions. This withdrawal will not be pretty. People will die. But fewer will die than if we stay. There are no guarantees that our departure will end the civil war, but it is sure to continue so long as we stay. The Iraqis might, or might not, resolve their political crisis. It is up to them. They distrust and fear one another, and this makes it very tough. But they share one goal – they don’t want to destroy their own country. To save it, they need to stop killing each other and start compromising. And we need to get out of the way.

The Iraqi civil war is going on because we are there, they are not compromising because we are present?  Fewer people will die if we walk out and cut them loose instead of working our asses off trying to hold them down?  What planet is he from?

Others, more pragmatic but also much more realistic, argue that we should get out of the way and let them fight to the death until they determine an eventual winner.  They're going to kill a lot of people that way, to be sure, but at least at the end they'll have a military winner, no more of this political process bullshit.

I advise you not to read the following:

A short time ago, Fred Kagan wrote in the pages of the Weekly Standard:

Advocates of withdrawal, either gradual or complete, rarely consider in any detail what that action would look like. It is worth painting a few mental images. First, U.S. troops would pull back to their forward operating bases, ending patrols in Iraq's towns and cities. In places like Ramadi, this would mean abandoning the city completely, since the coalition forces there cannot be secure without continual raids and other combat operations. American units in towns like Tal Afar, where a precarious peace still holds more than a year after the last major clear-and-hold operation, would also pull out, abandoning the Iraqis, who put their faith in us, to fend for themselves. Before long, the only American troops in Iraq outside of the FOBs would be the small teams embedded in Iraqi units. The enemy would then return and brutalize the decent Iraqis who pressed for reconciliation and peace, as has occurred following previous coalition withdrawals from cleared areas.

The pullback of U.S. forces to their bases will not reduce the sectarian conflict, which their presence did not generate. It will increase it. Death squads on both sides will become more active. Large-scale ethnic and sectarian cleansing will begin as each side attempts to establish homogeneous enclaves where there are now mixed communities. Atrocities will mount, as they always do in ethnic cleansing operations. Iraqis who have cooperated with the Americans will be targeted by radicals on both sides. Some of them will try to flee with the American units. American troops will watch helplessly as death squads execute women and children. Pictures of this will play constantly on Al Jazeera. Prominent "collaborators," with whom our soldiers and leaders worked, will be publicly executed. Crowds of refugees could overwhelm not merely Iraq's neighbors but also the FOBs themselves. Soldiers will have to hold off fearful, tearful, and dangerous mobs. Again, endless photographs and video footage of all this will play constantly. Before long, it will probably prove necessary to remove the embedded U.S. troops from the Iraqi military units. The situation will become too dangerous; the Iraqis will increasingly resent the restraint the embeds place on their actions; and the U.S. military will become fearful of being implicated in death-squad activity. It is a matter of chance whether the embedded troops are pulled before any are kidnapped or taken prisoner by Iraqi military units turning bad or being infiltrated by radicals.

What will be the effect of all this on American soldiers? The result could be worse than what we suffered in Vietnam. There will be no "decent interval" here during which we withdraw in reasonably good order--the withdrawal itself is likely to occur in the midst of rising violence. Instead of pictures of Americans on the embassy roof in Saigon, we will see images of Iraqi death squads at work with U.S. troops staying on their bases nearby. And let us not forget that in the world of Al Jazeera, we will be accused of encouraging those death squads. The overall result will be searing and scarring. The damage to the morale of the military could be far greater than what will result from burdening soldiers with longer or more frequent tours of duty in a stepped-up effort to achieve victory. Those who are concerned about the well-being of the Army should fear defeat of this type more than anything.

Not really the best reading for the Christmas holiday "think no evil" season.

A week before Christmas I find myself suddenly not waiting for it to hurry up and get over with as much as am I am waiting for it to hurry up and get here.  I want to see Tony's face when he opens his presents that morning...assuming we can convince him to get us up first.  He's an independent little boy, much more likely to open them and then bring them upstairs to show to us afterwards.

When Tony asks you for help it is a con job...on the occasions that he does he's looking for attention and sympathy, the last thing this kid thinks he really needs is help, at least most of the time.  If he figures that he can do it alone, he will.  I can't complain, I'm a lot that way myself.

I'm trying to decide what to do with his indoor playhouse...set it up the night before and let him discover it the next morning, or bring it in unassembled later that morning and let him help me put it together.  I'm leaning towards the latter, because he is a really, really good helper.  I was pressure-washing the garden area the other day, blowing out the leaves, when he appeared with a rake and plunged right in.  This kid likes to be part of the action.

I think he will have more fun if we bring in the package and assemble the parts together.  Carol worries that way he won't think Santa did it, but I don't believe he even understands that fable, anyhow.  Saint Nick drives a sleigh and lands on snow, after all, driven by reindeer, and not a single person in Costa Rica has ever seen any of those things.  Chimney?  What's that?  Oh, yeah, the short thing on top of the stove, if you still have a wood-burning stove.  When I visited the back country in Nicaragua with my friends, the "chimney" ended at the top of the stove and the smoke collected under the roof until it could get out beneath the eaves.  Chimneys here don't penetrate through the roof.

It's simply a different culture because it's a different climate.

I think Tony will get to unwrap his packages "from Santa:" under the tree, then we will go out to the garage and bring in his playhouse package, after which we will put it together together.  He'll like that as much as anything.  Especially when I let him run the electric screwdriver, after showing him how.  He is a real treat to teach, very quick to catch on.

What Tony is enjoying now is a sense of family and a sense of ownership, a place where he feels secure and in control of at least a bit of his life.  The poor kid has been kicked like a football at the pleasure of incomprehensible adults for all of his life, as far as he can remember.  First he sleeps here, then he sleeps there, then he sleeps another place.  He has a Mama, then he doesn't; he has a Nana, then he doesn't; he has a Papa, then he doesn't.  We have some discipline problems, to be sure, but I'm so thankful that they are as limited and as normal as they are with a strong-minded little boy that I'm tempted to give them too little consideration, one of my failings, perhaps.

So here I am, all of a sudden, counting down the days to Christmas!  Hurry up and get here!