green

It seems to me that certain Christian sects focus more strongly on sin and sinners and punishment than others. They ignore the more positive messages of compassion and joy which are also present in the Bible. This leads to self-righteousness and a bullying, intolerant attitude towards others. I also suspect that this constant emphasis on sin might also lead to a certain amount of self-loathing in many adherents. If this is true, and I suspect that it is, then it is kind of ironic for so many of us spend time in counselling trying to learn to like ourselves. Certainly people who are happy with themselves are more tolerant, more generous in their treatment of others. It is notable that some of the least tolerant statements have been publically made by fundamentalist Christians. (I know that we would encounter even more intolerant attitudes from fundamentalist Muslims. Life in the United States is infinitely easier than life in the Middle East. This is because there is the long and healthy tradition of the separation of church and state.) It seems odd to me that anyone can get worked up over the issue of civil marriage rights for same sex couples. If your version of God does exist, well then, these are folks who won't get into heaven. Why should that be any skin off your snout? It is their business, isn't it? At the very worst they will be down below where all us atheists are. I guess I will be seeing all my friends.:welldoneclap: As for this business of homosexuality being a lifestyle choice, that is crap! I have always had gay friends. They all knew that they were attracted to the 'wrong' sex long before they hit puberty. And I myself tried homosex once out of curiosity; it was the most boring sexual experience that I have ever had and taught me that I am irredeemably straight. The truth is that you are what you are. Loving people who want to form a union must be allowed that right.

Bubblebutt, I'm with you, girl. I am not fond of wildlife either. We don't get much of it where I live which is in the heart of a major city but my husband persists in dreaming about relocating to the country.:phanvan I have only recently conquered my fears enough to spend time with him up at his folk's cottage and we have been together for over 20 years. (I used to send him up on his own.) We do have cats, however, and sometimes in the winter the litter box gets kinda stinky; it can be a real hassle cleaning it outdoors in the winter when the weather is real nasty. I guess this might be considered a peeve of mine: that such lovely creatures can produce such stinkies.:cry lol

Kymcgill, your mother sounds like a toxic individual. Your story puts me in mind of a comment that a friend of my liked to say. He would say, 'you can choose your friends but your family is a curse sent to you from God.' DynamoMini, my parents dealt with my early puberty by shipping me off to boarding school. My brothers got to stay at home with the family. My mother also assumed that I would continue to grow until I was sixteen and being a thrifty woman bought all my school clothes way too large. Not only was I a menstruating giantess when I was in Grade 5, I also had the additional humiliation of swimming in these huge clothes which never did wear out. I was still wearing them when I got expelled from boarding school in my terminal year of high school for smoking marijuana. By then I had become, you see, an extremely bitter and rebellious kid. I think that it is wonderful that you make a point of welcoming other young girls into puberty with a celebratory rose. This is indeed a real kindness.

Up here in Canada we cannot get mortgage relief by applying this against our taxes but on the other hand any profit we might make when selling our principal property is clear profit. For those of us who happen to be living in the right place at the right time this can mean making a bunch o bucks. There are people who make money by buying run down houses, moving in, fixing them up, and then flipping them for a good profit. Because the profit is made on the principal dwelling the profit is exempt from tax. I have ridden the inflation train by buying houses and then trading up. Two of my homes have doubled in price, and one of them had come close to quadrupling. Now we are thinking of moving again. We will be trading up but we have no desire to engage in the hassles of home reno. I guess we are figuring that this will be the last one until it is time for us to be warehoused in nursing homes. We have been looking for a couple of years now but haven't found anything which would justify going through the aggravation and expense of moving. Green may well die in her current crib, eh.

I find it interesting that a number of my co-lapbanders also went through what I endured when I was a just a kiddy. I went through a horribly premature entry into maturity. I got my first period at the beginning of September exactly two months after I turned 10. I was already wearing a bra, size 32A, and I was plenty bitter about that. I was a tomboy and not too thrilled about growing up to be a grrl and to have this thrust upon me at such an early age was just plain creepy. To make matters even worse both my parents were small, slim, elegant brunettes and here I was, a great big lumbering blonde. I reached my full height when I was 11 years old. I was 5'6". I felt like Baby Huey. Ugh! I cannot say that I ever fully recovered from the horrors that my body presented to me when I was such a young kid. Remember that this all passed during the 1950s, eh. The betrayals of the body are always a torment for a young person, are they not?

Oy gewalt!!!!! Ugh, but that's nasty!

Mwahahaha! That is too funny.....:heh:

Yup, I'm inclined to agree. Especially with the observations concerning other people's kiddies. I never had any of my own because I am about as maternal as a snake but there are children whom I quite like. These would be the children whose parents have raised them to be polite and sensitive to others in addition to being intelligent and curious. Ducking out on the discipline thing because you love your children and you want to be their friend instead of being a parent is doing your children no favour in the long run. They grow up to be selfish maladusted egomaniacs and you, as a parent, never will get to retain best buddy status with your kiddies. This is only normal; children do require their emotional and intellectual privacy and should be growing up with and growing old with their own peers. I have lost a few friends due to their invasive parenting techniques. These would be those well-educated, affluent folks who start their families when they are close to 40 years old. They can do some pretty nasty stuff to their little over-indulged little treasures and then they insist on subjecting their mild mannered childless friends to these kidzillas. One of my friends, a woman who was deeply in denial about the behaviour of her daughter years after I found it evident that the kid was a brat, finally humped the horrid child off to a psychiatrist who was a specialist in ADD-type disorders. The expert interviewed the teen at some length, called in her mother and said, 'there's nothing wrong with your daughter. She is horribly spoiled is all and now she is probably too old for you to fix it.' I know this because the kidzilla's mum told me all about it. Of course I have seen lovely kids who are trapped in living situations which are intolerable because their guardians are doing a lousy job of it and that peeves me. In the case of my husband's nieces this is because their parents happen to be a pair of kidzillas who carelessly went on to have children of their own. Now the parents are snarled up in an interminable divorce brawl; the divorce has been going on for years.

Yep, I was torn between talking about the tax situation where I live or explaining why I am an atheist or talking about the fact that up here where I live same sex marriages are legal and the roof has fallen in yet! No one has been smote, eh.:faint:

We don't pay city taxes - just federal and provincial. The city gets the income from property taxes and that's it. And yep, there are a whole lot o threads goin' on.

Your Tina is starting to remind me of my mum, another Brit. My mum had a difficult time spending money on personal pleasures. This was in sharp contrast to her sister who spent her way through her share of their inheritance within a couple of decades and ended up on welfare. Of my two parents my father was more comfortable spending money; my mother became very chary of her money after my father died even though we kids were always after her to loosen up and enjoy herself a little more. In fact spending money was not enjoyable to my mother. When she died she left my brother and I quite a nice bunch of change. It was enough for me to take early retirement and it bought me this lapband and my now thinner body. I hope Tina gets back in time for her birthday and that you make her a terrifically happy woman on that day. I am sure you will.

My property taxes are just shy of 3 grand on a house valued at approximately $450,000. Property taxes can really vary for some reason on houses which cost about the same amount. We have been looking for a new house and I have disqualified a few because the taxes were over $4,000 - sometimes well over that figure!:phanvan We pay both provincial and federal sales taxes which together amount to 14%. Food is exempt from sales tax unless it comes in the form of a restaurant meal.:cry

Hi Missy4. As you can see from my earlier post, the main portion of our drug exports to the States consist of marijuana. We also manufacture ecstasy and it is possible that heroin is fed into States via Vancouver, a Pacific port city. Of course cocaine does not come down from the north. That's a southern import. Do you see many border infractions where you live?

Nope, I was including Americans, too.

TOM is right about drugs coming into the States from over the Canadian border. Up here we have grow-ops all over the place; it seems like there are busts going on daily. People rent apartments/houses and turn them into grow operations for marijuana. The end result is that these domiciles are no longer fit for human habitation because of the dangerous amount of mould which also grows in these humid conditions. Our previous government did try to decriminalize simple possession of pot but the American government put pressure on our government and so it dropped this initiative. Too bad! Why clog up the judicial system and waste money going after pot smokers? Why not save your ammo for the businessmen who work this illegal game? Anyhow, it appears that the quality of Canadian pot is superb. We ship it Stateside and we receive artillery in return. As you may or may not know, our gun laws are very tough and it is exceedingly difficult to buy 'em north of the border.

It is true about the standard of living in western continental Europe. I lived in France for 3 years in the early '80s. Europe has everything that we have and it is much easier to travel - something I love to do - when you are living over there. Moreover, every worker has a minimum of five weeks of paid holidays as well as medicare and generous maternity leave. Moreover, Europe is very beautiful, both the landscape and the cities. We, however, can justifiably pride ourselves on being less racist and less class conscious.

Hahahahaha! We Canucks are gonna bore y'all to death with our niceness and our polite ways. :heh: :heh: :heh: We will force you to watch the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Channel) and nuthin' but!:rolleyes It's gonna be nothin' but hockey, Canadian news, and bad Canadian sit-coms for your television viewing pleasure, eh.:success1: And then we're gonna restrict your food to donuts and poutine, the national nosh of Canada. :hungry: Yup, it's cholesterol time Canadian style. If the boredom doesn't kill ya the food will. :phanvan (We have our weapons, you know. They might be passive-aggressive weapons but they are ours. )

I just read about your dad, L8. Please accept my sympathy.

I tend to dress to the left and yet I am suspicious of knee-jerk politically correct attitudes. It is for this reason (and because they are well-written) that the only two newspapers to which I subscribe are either centre-right or very right wing. As for Fox, I don't like their news coverage because it is Ameri-centric and I am used to a more globally based approach. This is undoubtedly because I don't live in America and thus my expectations of reportage are different.

I have been finding the past few pages on this site to be most interesting reading and am reinforced in my conviction that democracy truly does live again thanks to the internet; it is here where we can meet in the virtual town square and trade opinions and experiences. My own parents came to Toronto, Canada after the Second World War. She was Scottish (with some French ancestors) but was born and raised in Bristol. Moreover, her father's side of the family were titled landed gentry and thus kind of lah di dah. She hooked up with my father, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust because he ran away from Poland in sufficiently good time to avoid the slaughter. The marriage was by British standards a mismatch and so they ended up in Canada, a British colony at the time. Nevertheless, the pair of them were treated as foreigners by the native Canadians even though Canada and Canadians were proud of their ties to the mother land and to the British Commonwealth. My mum and dad were always reminded by the locals that they didn't, you know, blend.... Canada was an exceedingly whitebread kinda joint in the late 40s and throughout the 50s. When my father decided that he would learn Russian (an easy thing for a Polish speaker to do) - and this was towards the end of the 1950s - he found himself under investigation by the RMCP (our national police). When my father first arrived in North America and went to visit his oldest surviving sibling, a sister who had left Poland for New York City during the 1930s, he found that she and her husband were unable to discuss socialism in public. These were the days of McCarthyism, you see. He wasn't prepared for this level of fear in the New World. I have a hunch that for people like myself, the well-educated children of people off the boat, a liberal approach is the only logical approach to take. You see, we, unlike you folks who have been camped out in peaceful Canada or the United States for generations, have heard the family stories and we know how easily passion can slip over into intolerance and intolerance is just the beginning of the slippery slope into such behaviours as hatred, racism, violence, totalitarianism, genocide, war. This is why the big cities in Canada, the ones which are overwhelmingly multi-cultural, tend to vote for a liberal ticket even though this is the party that protects the right to choose and which has given to Canada the distinction of being one of the first countries where same sex couples have the right to marry.

Bandiva: four pounds in three weeks is a healthy weight loss. Losing weight too quickly can stress out the body and can lead to an equally quick weight gain further down the road. In fact this seems to be why many diets fail: the weight comes off quickly without the body having a chance to adjust to a lower set-point and then when we ingest a few extra calories those are converted instantaneously into unwanted fat!! The end result is that your metabolism becomes even more efficient at turning anything you eat into personal lard. Remember that 4 lbs in 3 weeks is 8 lbs in 6 weeks and that they say that this biz of getting to your target weight the lapband way is a two-year project. IMHO you are doing very well, grrl!

I have bookmarked a site called Rapture Ready which I occasionally visit when I am in the mood. It makes for fascinating viewing.:rolleyes These folks believe that the rapture is imminent due to the events in the Middle East and so they really don't care about what happens to this planet; they themselves will be leaving it for another climate. As for us Canucks, TommyO, we should be very afraid.:think We have lots of fresh water and as our climate becomes more attractive to live in there will be great pressure from outsiders to take this property over.:success1: Remember that there are only 31 million of us to keep an eye on the joint.:faint: That ain't a helluva lot of people and Canadians are not known for their warlike personalities!:phanvan

Good Luck, Wheezy! May this be the magic fill!

They do appear to be just a bunch of greedy rich white guys who are misusing their Bible.

It is interesting to read that Tina is kinda anti-internet. When we first got our computers I became very annoyed with my mate because he spent vast amounts of his free time on the computer, either playing games or drifting around on the internet. And when he wasn't on the computer he was up at his parents' cottage doing chores. I was wildly jealous of his devotion to his parents and completely bugged by his devotion to the computer because it seemed that I myself and our household needs were getting the short end of the stick. I was only stopped from becoming a nasty, shrewish grrl because I knew that I was in fact very lucky to be with this man and that these frustrations were really kinda minor. Well, now the tables have turned! Now I am the computer addict and it is my poor mate who has to pry me away from my PC. And it is he who sometimes takes up the slack with respect to the household chores. And I have finally, after long years of living with my mate, acquired a taste for country life and, in particular, country chores! I will voluntarily allow myself to be separated from the city, the internet, and all the mod cons if I am allowed to do outdoor work when I land up in the land of lakes and woods. I am now an internet addict. I find the internet to be arguably the greatest cultural leap for mankind after the invention of the Guttenberg Press. Moreover, the internet is truly democratic; everyone who has access to the internet has a voice. Nothing is filtered here.