A note from Missy this afternoon... and oh my God...

Her photos....





look at the photos... sigh.. are we in the Ozarks??? hehe....

Her note:

Hi Stanley,

Craig took these the other day. I let the horses out around the house a lot, but this is the first time Pawnee ever got on the porch. It was almost a disaster but kind of a long story so I'll tell you at Clicks.....soon!

Marilyn says.... this is one great time for all who attend...

Susan Boyle

FAIRYTALE ENDING By MAUREEN CALLAHAN

April 18, 2009 -- By now at least 30 million people worldwide (roughly the same number who view the Oscars, or the Super Bowl) have watched an extraordinary clip from a popular UK show called "Britain's Got Talent." A dowdy, 47-year-old virgin named Susan Boyle takes the stage, wearing her low heels and her Sunday best. The crowd laughs at her, and Boyle - how devastating - laughs along. She says she wants to be a professional singer; people laugh harder and louder. They point. It's grammar school and the Roman coliseum combined. Simon Cowell - panelist and show creator - rolls his eyes. And then Susan Boyle sings.
In the past five days, Susan Boyle has been invited to appear on Oprah, interviewed on all three network morning shows and covered by news outlets all over the world - many of which have descended on her hamlet, where she lives alone with her cat, Pebbles. She is the favorite to win the competition and it's likely she'll sing for the Queen. Cowell will probably sign her to his record label.
But there is something disturbing about the collective rejection-embrace-elevation of Susan Boyle. There is the element of self-congratulation in the viral spread of this link around the Web, the idea that we, the secondary viewers, the judges of those who are judging, are far more evolved. There is the clip itself, suspiciously ready-made for online consumption: A 7-minute movie, slick and pithy in its perfect execution of the underdog narrative. (That something like "Rocky" took two hours to tell now seems antediluvian.) There is the classic David vs. Goliath subplot, the primal satisfaction of seeing the bully (Cowell) slain by such a seemingly inferior force. And there is the profound desire for this entire thing to be authentic, which in and of itself suggests that it probably isn't. Not since P.T. Barnum has there been a show business master of the trompe l'oeil like Simon Cowell.
This isn't to suggest that Boyle herself is a hoax (though she does seem a bit too comfortable on that stage, parrying with Cowell, to be a complete naif). But the notion that Cowell was unaware of Boyle's existence, let alone discordant looks and talent level, before she ever took the stage, is flatly ridiculous. And the song Boyle chose - if she, in fact, chose it - so seamlessly provides the meta-narrative that it's easy to miss how calculated it is. From "Les Misérables" ("the miserable," the way we are meant to perceive Boyle), she sings "I Dreamed a Dream." Boyle opens on the second stanza: "I dreamed a dream in time gone by/When hope was high/And life worth living." In "Les Misérables," it's sung by a lonely, unemployed character on the fringes - just like Boyle, who sang with the undignified descriptor "unemployed, 47" slung across the bottom of the screen.
In a week that saw a good chunk of the nation losing its mind for days over the presidential puppy (just how bad are things?), it seems cynical, churlish even, to speculate about the machinations behind this phenomenon. But it remains true that this clip, and Boyle's rendition, would not be so compelling without the contradictions: the beautiful voice possessed by this defiantly unglamorous woman, who can somehow fully inhabit and interpret a love song without ever having been in love.
Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is that not since Saturday has Susan Boyle been Susan Boyle. It's a permutation of the Heisenberg principle: That 30 million people have heard her, seen her, embraced her has already changed who she is. The shy churchgoer who said that her recently deceased mother encouraged her to "take the risk," who admitted in her audition that she has never been kissed, who has forever lived as something of an accidental outcast - she now seems too much of this world. "I've been for a meeting with Sony BMG, but I can't say much about it," she said this week. "It's early days." Susan Boyle is now one of us. And that is really a shame.

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ole dead tree in our "park".... standing like a rock....

Lilacs by our meter pole

Wheat looks like it was badly damaged by the late freeze, lots of white showing up now... and the cheat is really coming...

starting to look like a garden

even the squirrels are hungry today

FW:

FW:

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from Heather Ann

She takes after grandma m and her love for brownies

We just learned that Jackie "Jack" Hayes died. More later..

Patriotic Quilt Contest & Exhibits
Benefit Wounded Soldiers

 

 

For Immediate Release

 

Contact:  Jack Hayes, 405-341-8193, 2601 Portofino Pl, Edmond, Judy Howard, 405-751-3885, BuckboardQuilts@cox.net

 

Re:  Wounded Vietnam Veteran Honored with American Eagle Quilt on His Birthday

 

            Setting up a cannon to defend an airstrip, Edmond resident Jack Hayes turned around to return fire when North Vietnam Regulars burst out of the rubber trees twenty yards away shooting. A K47 bullet pierced Jack’s stomach and exited through his back. The Medvac airlifted him to the Saigon Field Hospital where they immediately honored Jack with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and V for valor, not expecting him to live.

 

            Only by God’s grace did Jack survive that injury that fractured his back along with the Agent Orange that poisoned his organs. Forty-one years later after undergoing thirty-five major abdominal operations to remove his stomach, appendix, pancreas, abdomen and gall bladder, Jack nonetheless radiates the joy of the Lord and praises him each morning for the blessing of life.

 

            For his birthday October 17th, Jack received a replica of a Civil War American eagle quilt top with olive branch in its beak that Kristen Chenoweth’s great-great-great grandmother Mary made for her soldier son Benjamin Franklin in 1862. Benjamin brought that eagle quilt top in a covered wagon in the Land Run of 1889 to homestead in Hinton Indian Territory where it was quilted.

 

 That Civil War eagle quilt now adorns the cover of Oklahoma Heritage Quilts book and is featured in Centennial Stitches—Oklahoma History in Quilts. A smaller version of the quilt is featured in Buckboard Quilt’s God Bless America Quilt exhibit that is touring the U.S. for three years with all profits from the $100 rental fees going to provide quilts for wounded soldiers like Jack. See patriotic quilt exhibit photos and rental information on www.HeavenlyPatchwork.com

 

 

“How do I love America? Let me quilt the ways” is the theme of Buckboard Quilts "God Bless America 22” Quilt Contest for children and adults. All quilts will tour the U.S.A. in several exhibits for three years to unify and support our great nation.

 

These pictorial quilts capture the essence of “America the Beautiful”, 
Stars and Stripes Forever" by paying tribute to our American Heroes, Troops, Presidents and depicting “Liberty and Justice for All,” or expressing flag-waving loyalty to our “One Nation Under God.”  

With your help, we can blanket the nation with patriotic fervor and love of God and Country in these troubled times.

 

All profits from the $100/week-end rental fee and possible publication of the quilts go to provide quilts for wounded soldiers— those most in need of the touch of love that quilts represent. See www.HeavenlyPatchwork.com/centennial  for photos, entry forms, rental contracts and updates. Reserve your exhibit today by emailing BuckboardQuilts@cox.net or calling Judy Howard at 405-751-3885.

 

Please mail each quilt to 12101 N. MacArthur, #137, Oklahoma City, OK 73162, preferably to arrive by March 26. Quilts will be accepted through December, 2008 for touring. , “cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land, God bless the U.S.A.”

      

Obama's Recipe For Change Not My Cup of Tea

by Ann Coulter (more by this author)

Posted 04/15/2009 ET
Updated 04/15/2009 ET

I had no idea how important this week's nationwide anti-tax tea parties were until hearing liberals denounce them with such ferocity. The New York Times' Paul Krugman wrote a column attacking the tea parties, apologizing for making fun of "crazy people." It's OK, Paul, you're allowed to do that for the same reason Jews can make fun of Jews.
    
On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name "tea parties" to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as "tea bagging." Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies "tea bagging."
    
Every host on Air America and every unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the left wing blogosphere has spent the last week making jokes about tea bagging, a practice they show a surprising degree of familiarity with.
    
Except no one is calling the tea parties "tea bagging" -- except Olbermann and Maddow. Republicans call them "tea parties."
    
But if the Republicans were calling them "tea-bagging parties," the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they're not called "tea-bagging parties." (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank's condo in Georgetown.)
    
You know what else would be hilarious? It would be hilarious if Hillary Clinton's name were "Ima Douche." Unfortunately, it's not. It was just a dream. Most people would wake up, realize it was just a dream and scrap the joke. Not MSNBC hosts.
    
The point of the tea parties is to note the fact that the Democrats' modus operandi is to lead voters to believe they are no more likely to raise taxes than Republicans, get elected and immediately raise taxes.
    
Apparently, the people who actually pay taxes consider this a bad idea.
    
Obama's biggest shortcoming is that he believes the things believed by all Democrats, which have had devastating consequences every time they are put into effect. Among these is the Democrats' admiration for raising taxes on the productive.
    
All Democrats for the last 30 years have tried to stimulate the economy by giving "tax cuts" to people who don't pay taxes. Evidently, offering to expand welfare payments isn't a big vote-getter.
    
Even Bush had a "stimulus" bill that sent government checks to lots of people last year. Guess what happened? It didn't stimulate the economy. Obama's stimulus bill is the mother of all pork bills for friends of O and of Congressional Democrats. ("O" stands for Obama, not Oprah, but there's probably a lot of overlap.) 
    
And all that government spending on the Democrats' constituents will be paid for by raising taxes on the productive.
    
Raise taxes and the productive will work less, adopt tax shelters, barter instead of sell, turn to an underground economy -- and the government will get less money.
    
The perfect bar bet with a liberal would be to wager that massive government deficits in the '80s were not caused by Reagan's tax cuts. If you casually mentioned that you thought Reagan's tax cuts brought in more revenue to the government -- which they did -- you could get odds in Hollywood and Manhattan. (This became a less attractive wager in New York this week after Gov. David Paterson announced his new plan to tax bar bets.)
    
The lie at the heart of liberals' mantra on taxes -- "tax increases only for the rich" -- is the ineluctable fact that unless taxes are raised across the board, the government won't get its money to fund layers and layers of useless government bureaucrats, none of whom can possibly be laid off.
    
How much would you have to raise taxes before any of Obama's constituents noticed? They don't pay taxes, they engage in "tax-reduction" strategies, they work for the government, or they're too rich to care. (Or they have off-shore tax shelters, like George Soros.)
    
California tried the Obama soak-the-productive "stimulus" plan years ago and was hailed as the perfect exemplar of Democratic governance.
    
In June 2002, the liberal American Prospect magazine called California a "laboratory" for Democratic policies, noting that "California is the only one of the nation's 10 largest states that is uniformly under Democratic control." 
    
They said this, mind you, as if it were a good thing. In California, the article proclaimed, "the next new deal is in tryouts." As they say in show biz: "Thanks, we'll call you. Next!"
    
In just a few years, Democrats had turned California into a state -- or as it's now known, a "job-free zone" -- with a $41 billion deficit, a credit rating that was slashed to junk-bond status and a middle class now located in Arizona.
    
Democrats governed California the way Democrats always govern. They bought the votes of government workers with taxpayer-funded jobs, salaries and benefits -- and then turned around and accused the productive class of "greed" for wanting not to have their taxes raised through the roof.
    
Having run out of things to tax, now the California legislature is considering a tax on taxes. Seriously. The only way out now for California is a tax on Botox and steroids. Sure, the governor will protest, but it is the best solution ...
    
California was, in fact, a laboratory of Democratic policies. The rabbit died, so now Obama is trying it on a national level.
    
That's what the tea parties are about.

Ann Coulter

tomatoes and peppers... needing some warmth...

green beans coming too....

corn on the rise....