Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

I’ve been buried in classes and haven’t been doing much of anything other than school related stuff as of late, so not much to post. Here’s my round up of the last few weeks:

I just received an email from a friend with this link rating Bank of America as the worst bank in America. In case you don’t recall, I predicted this several months ago when they took my money and days of my life away, all because they screwed up multiple times! I knew I wasn’t alone in cursing Bank of America.

Peas, wonderful peas… We have a garden! I don’t think I mentioned on here that back in February we planted snow peas, tomatoes, and cucumbers. The snow peas grew like pubescent teenagers, so we’ve spent the last couple of weeks harvesting snow peas for salads and Chinese dishes. Unfortunately they are starting to die (we think it’s the heat – yes, it’s already 80 degrees here daily), so they may be a short-lived crop, but we’ll replace them with something else. We also have zucchini, watermelon, and basil growing too. We’re hoping to have quite the little harvest this summer.

Finally, in case you haven’t heard, the presidential hopefuls (Obama, Clinton, and McCain) turned down a chance to debate science and instead opted to “debate” faith (read: see who can claim to have the most faith). What a sad day for America… Judge a candidate not for the faith she wears on her sleeve but for the prowess of her intellect and her grasp of the issues facing the world. Alas, no, it’s not to be. America is more interested in a divine pissing match than real issues… :(

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Now playing: Gheorghe Zamfir – Stranger On The Shore
via FoxyTunes

Hurry, before you do anything else, write down the number you see below:

click here to learn more


Okay, now go check out this article from the St. Petersburg Times on the War in Iraq and the costs – both financially and in human lives. When you’re done reading that article, come back to this page, check out the cost clock again, and write down the number. Now do me a favor and post both numbers in the comments. I just thought this would be a good way to see the cost of war… :(

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Now playing: Collapsis – Stumble
via FoxyTunes

I have two more posts on my trip to Princeton and Hartford, but I have to interrupt the narrative with a couple of political news items.

First, whether you’re a fan of John McCain or not, you need to know that he has recently come out in favor of the completely nonsensical position that thimerosal, an additive in a few child vaccines, causes autism. There is, to date, NO evidence that this is true! In fact, there is gobs of evidence that it is not only not true but completely absurd! If you’re looking for a reason to not vote for John McCain, how about: He ignores scientific evidence when it is staring him in the face.

Second, if you happen to live in Florida (or even if you don’t), you may be interested in this editorial in the St. Petersburg Times about attempts to tear down the wall between church/state to start handing out taxpayer money to religions. I spent 20 minutes emailing all of the members of the Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, encouraging them to not go down that road. I don’t have a problem with people being religious and with most religions, but I do have a problem with my money paying for their religions (which it already does enough of considering religions aren’t taxed). They are voting on these issues Thursday, so, if you are going to email them, do it soon!

And now I’ll step down from my soapbox…

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Now playing: 10,000 Maniacs – To Sir With Love
via FoxyTunes

I just finished my morning class on Friday and was responding to email when I heard that John McCain was visiting the university at noon. I called Debi, who doesn’t have classes on Fridays, and asked her if she wanted to see him. Regular readers will know we don’t generally lean Republican, but we are always willing to listen to ideas, even if they are coming from someone we don’t generally agree with.

So, we headed to the room (in my building) where the meeting was supposed to be. When we arrived we were told it was an “invitation only” event. I’m not sure why politicians do that, but we were a little annoyed. We kind of pushed to see if there was anyway we could get in but all they would offer was, “Well, if you wait, there may be a little room in the back and we can sneak you in.” I had class at 1:00 so I couldn’t wait forever, but after about 30 minutes of waiting for Senator McCain to arrive, one of the campaign people tapped us on the shoulder and asked if we wanted to go into the meeting. I had to say no because I had a class, but Debi went in.

She stood through the meeting at the back. It was mostly filled up with military brass (in civilian clothes) and McCain’s speech was mostly pro-military, pro-war. We don’t often think about the strong military influence in Tampa, but there is a huge air force base in Tampa (MacDill), so military issues are popular.

Debi thought he seemed nice enough and he was actually able to respond intelligently to questions without resorting to guttural monkey speech (like our current monkey-in-chief), but she wasn’t sold on his positions. After a little more research she realized that McCain has pledged to overturn Roe v Wade without exceptions. As a genetic counselor, that is an untenable position. If Senator McCain had ever sat down with someone who has a child with a very serious genetic condition that guarantees the child will die, he might just change his mind. But, of course, he has to speak to the evangelicals who will help him get the nomination from the Republican party.

Anyway, it was a good chance to see a candidate, even though it’s not a candidate we would consider voting for in the actual election.

Saturday we walked past the Gasparilla festivities here in Tampa. We were thinking of going to one of the parades, but once we got there we realized it wasn’t really our scene. Everyone there had a cooler of beer on one shoulder and a beer in their free hand. It seems like an excuse to basically get drunk and stay drunk all weekend. That’s not really our sense of fun.

Instead, I came home and began the tedious process of extricating our chimney from our wall… Okay, that sounds funny, but long story short, when the last person to do a major remodeling on our house was working on it, apparently they figured it would be cheaper to just leave our chimney in the wall then remove it for closet space. So, they cut off the top, roofed over it, then sheetrocked it in. As uber-cheapos, I figured I could use the bricks from the chimney for a garden. So, I chiseled the top 6 rows or so off on Saturday, cleaned them up, then used some of our compost to build a small garden. We figure we’ll add to it slowly as we extricate more bricks and get more compost. For now, we just planted peas and cucumbers. We’re supposed to be able to harvest in a couple of months. I’ll let you know how it goes.

A friend sent me a link to this quiz to get a sense of how you measure up to the current candidates for President: http://glassbooth.org/

I’ll tell you who most closely matches my views if you tell me who most closely matches yours.