Broken

Yes, we don't think it is fair for us to be held hostages of Karen and Richard. Sometimes Karen is just a broken record. She gets stuck on one point and cannot get off it. Sometimes you have to remember that Karen is only 25% of the picture. Just because she is a few years older than I, that does not mean that she has a very good understanding of anything much. As we can see, she has not done very well for herself so far so there is not much reason for me to care that much about what Karen thinks anyway. I have other ideas than Karen would know anything about and she just would not able to understand.

Landowners

Yes, these wicked landowners ought to be ashamed of themselves. All kinds of filth spews from their mouths and then they pretend that it is all my fault. I am really tired of everything being my fault. It is all just an illusion, a lot of politicking, because really it is not my fault. I never had a chance to begin with, locked out from the start, so there never was any reason to try.

And who is the guilty party in James 5:1-6? I think it is you:

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you.

The oil companies want to harvest the oil eventually but the time is not yet so no big deal. It won't kill me if the oil does not pay off for another generation or two. Maybe some relatives of ours will enjoy it a couple of hundred years from now even if we are no longer in the land of the living to know what happened. There is no rush, plenty of oil left in the Mideast to keep my car on the road.

I do wish that I could have had children to leave my share to but no luck. Obviously no man in his right mind would want to marry a dog like me. Thus, I will have to leave mine to other relatives in the family because really it is a personal decision, not something to discuss with them.

In or Out

I do remember my cousin Karen telling me how jealous she was when Jack used to babysit us, meaning me and Karen and David and maybe René and Richard. Karen said that she was jealous of our bond, meaning Jack and David and me, that we were very close and Karen felt out of the loop, like she was an outsider. I really do not remember that. I actually remember very little of significance about Jack nor can I think of much to say about him. I do not think that I am "in" anything that I know of or that Karen is "out" either. I do not know what she is talking about. I mostly feel like an outsider myself. I suppose that we all feel like outsiders sometimes in life. No one is always "in" everything. There are times when we just do not know what other people are going through and even if we have our opinions about that we cannot really know everything.

Bricks: Ha ha ha!

Oh ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! LOL LOL LOL LOL!!!!

And what makes Cori Nipper think that I would ever think of coveting her namesake brick in the Yellow Brick Road?

Oh ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! LOL LOL LOL LOL!!!!

Maybe it is a good thing that my gpa did not qualify me for the "honors" society at my college. Thus my name is not sitting there alongside that of foul-mouthed Cori and a few others who have done nothing to clarify the confusion about the meaning of "honor" and everything to make it worse than ever.

Oh ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! LOL LOL LOL LOL!!!!

You cannot plant me in your penthouse. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!

You cannot really put me in the "Wizard of Oz" box. It just doesn't fit. We all know that Frank Baum was a completely cynical atheist. The beautifully written "Oz" book series, I read most of them because we had probably all of them at the MK school and whatever we had was probably read by at least some of us. The Patchwork Girl, etc. They are classic children's books. Still, we cannot take any of that stuff seriously. Not really. If you take it too seriously, you will end up imagining that the only miracles are the products of your own imagination, that you were only dreaming, that it was all just an illusion or sleight of hand by a clever magician, the suspension of disbelief required of theatergoers.

No, sometimes there really are miracles that cannot be rationalized or explained away. Sometimes God really can do amazing things if we have faith to believe. That is the problem sometimes with modern society and progress. We are so fascinated by our own accomplishments and skills that we forget about the author and the finisher of our faith. We forget that it all comes from God above. With God all things are possible, as the Bible says.

Land Rights

Yes, it is odd to hear all these talking heads on TV, all these nattering nabobs of negativity, telling me that I have to cooperate with the devil or die. And if I don't cooperate with the devil I will also die. So there is just no hope for me. I might as well be dead because the landowner has us surrounded on every side, as if we were his prisoners, as if drilling were our fault, as if the potential for environmental damage were an imminent reality. No, it is really not up to us. The oil companies, they are the ones who take surveys of the land. They are the ones who decide whether the prospects are good or not. They are the ones who will negotiate the lease of land for drilling if necessary. They are the ones who really should take care not to spill oil and if they do to compensate for damages. They are the ones who will seem a lot like the waterman who comes to our house to check the city water meter. We have to give the waterman access to the city water meter outside. Same thing sort of. And we also have to pay for the water. You don't have to pay for the oil, you just won't get the royalties. I also probably won't live long enough to see the royalties and it is not something to arrange my life around. I am not a multinational corporation who has diversified interests and income sources. I cannot afford to put my entire life on hold to wait for oil drilling when everyone says there is nothing there anyway. It is a sentimental thing to us, something about my grandfather's deal with the banks. We do not require landowners to prove themselves "good" people in order to do farming and ranching. The same should be true for us.

Passports and Vaccinations

Yes, it would be interesting to learn more about the passport snafu of 1916. Did the passports expire or were they seized in a crackdown on missionary activities by those atheistic U.S. diplomats so disdainful of the value of the missionary presence in China. Or maybe it was not like that. Maybe it was the clueless missonaries who did not have their paperwork in proper order and were so disrespectful to the U.S. diplomats when these discrepancies were pointed out in December of 1916 and remedied. So which was it? What exactly happened anyway? I suppose it is only coincidental that famous U.S. diplomat Samuel Sobokin was shot at while driving to Mongolia. Probably no connection there. So what did happen and who was involved? It would be interesting to know more about that.

Bea

Yes, one does logically wonder why stupid fat ugly matron Bea Mintle is still buzzing around up there in Central Florida as if she had anything intelligent to say about me. It is fortunate for the Mintles that missionaries cannot be fired. If it were not so, then Bea's stupid husband Harold would have been out of a job long long ago. No need for his "secretary," the fat ugly spinster Carol Long, to try and detract attention from Harold's shortcomings by trying to make points about me, her assistant for two years. For two long years I endured Carol's constant insults and condescension, dutifully shoveling the required paperwork — typing and transcribing and filing and photocopying and shredding and the like— and what did I get for all my hard work? Nothing much. It is not like I would ever be promoted by people who know me as a "kid" and cannot imagine me as anything else but a "kid." Carol tries to make much of the time when I was putting some things away in Harold's desk, Harold being absent from the office as usual, and Carol opened the door and "caught" me briefly sitting in Harold's chair. Carol made some bizarre comment about it being illegal for me to be sitting in the chair. I am not allowed to do that because it would look too presumptuous, as if I would want that job. Ha ha ha! It would not be so bad for her to say that once, but then for her comment to be circulate all over the planet as if I were still sitting there in Harold's chair gives much too much weight to the importance of Carol, who was later fired anyway for proposing her own promotion but that was after I left. Anyway, we never had much to do with the Mintles or, for that matter, anyone from Ecuador. We cannot explain how the Mintles turned out such pathetically "bad" drug addict sons. We cannot explain how Nathan met Carol Hultgren, who was a pathetically "bad" drug addict daughter. Truly they were soulmates, a match made in heaven is the traditional saying. We cannot explain why the Ecuador missionaries are so boastful of their work when we actually do not see much fruit of that. Maybe they were the problem. Who knows?