Family

NRA Country

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

NRA Country. The NRA and country music joining together.

I really don’t care for country music. There’s some good stuff for sure, but on the whole it’s not my cup of tea.

But I did like this from the website:

Chores aren’t subject to negotiation. The fish don’t bite at noon. Never talk back to mom before dinner. Keep your friends and keep your word. Know what’s worth fighting for. Be proud of where you’re from. And, in life and in the field, always shoot straight.

I’d modify that to say “never talk back to mom” period. I guess it’s fine as-is tho, since once you finish with today’s dinner, it will officially start the period before tomorrow’s dinner. 🙂

It’s a good day

/ hsoi

So far, it’s a good day.

It’s the Labor Day weekend. It’s been productive for me, despite my overriding desire to be lazy all weekend long.

I just came in from a workout. I’m so happy with where my martial arts work is going. The Kali, JKD, Silat, Muay Thai, and boxing stuff… it all blends so well with my defensive handgun work. I don’t expect a self-defense situation to be a pure gunfight or a pure empty-hand situation. It always could be, but chances are it won’t. It’s wonderful to have many options at your disposal, and for these things to blend well into making your own system. I don’t regret my Kuk Sool training at all, but some of those aspects don’t really lend towards my current goals. But I envison later in life that I’ll find myself studying different martial arts again just for the sake of studying some art; for instance, Baguazhang holds appeal to me due to its Taoist underpinnings.

But for now, I’m riding a high of everything coming together so well. Serendipity. 🙂

Hopefully later this morning the family will take a trip to the best Korean grocery store in town and pick up some things. Need my kimchi fix. They also have a little diner in the store, which should make for a good lunch. Not sure what I’ll have yet, but if nothing else my default of a bibimbap would be just fine.

Then home, relax, have a beer, and just enjoy the rest of the day basking in the joy of my family.

It will be an even better day. 🙂

I can has Nebraska carry now?

/ hsoi

Via Joe Huffman and the NRA’s news releases I find this welcome bit of news.

When Nebraska’s concealed handgun law went into effect back in 2006, there was no reciprocity. A lot of states, such as Texas, would recognize Nebraska’s permit, but Nebraska recognized no one elses. But now that LB 430 passed and just went into effect, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office just published a list of the states whose permits they will recognize.

Nebraska will now recognize Right-to-Carry permits from the following states:Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota (class one permit), Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming

In addition, permit holders from the following states will be able to carry in Nebraska, provided the permit holder is 21 or older: California, Iowa, Maine, Montana, North Dakota (class two permit), and Texas

The following states do not meet the standards required by Nebraska’s concealed handgun permit statute and are not valid in Nebraska: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington

Illinois and Wisconsin do not permit concealed handguns by law-abiding citizens.

In my case, so long as the permit holder is over the age of 21 (which I am), my permit will be honored in Nebraska.

Awesome.

Relevant to me since I have family there.

Small incident

/ hsoi

Had a small incident tonight.

I’m chillin’ with Daughter in the house when Oldest rushes into the room and says, “Mom needs you, now.” Urgency there, I get up and go. Wife briefs me. There’s some dude hanging around the street-light a couple houses down. Gave Oldest the willies, and it was certainly odd behavior. Strange person, why would they just be hanging out at the street-light?

I head outside to check on things. I’m able to do a few things in the yard to look busy and otherwise occupied, but watching what the dude is up to. Then I see good neighbor across the street, who has a similar penchant for paying attention to the neighborhood goings on. I head over and we talk, as he too noticed the dude.

As we watched, dude’s behavior wasn’t too suspicious. Perhaps just waiting for someone to pick him up. But then it dragged on. We were standing outside talking about life, family, work, hunting, playing in band back in grade school, whatever topics. But dude was still there… hour went by, still there. It went from a concern, to probably nothing but we’ll keep an eye, to “this is just getting weird.” Why just standing there, doing nothing, for about an hour? Gave the police a call to have them drive by. I don’t know exactly how long it took them to show up, but I know I checked the clock and 15 minutes went by and it was some time after that before APD rolled onto the scene. Two cruisers showed up, they spoke with dude, eventually some people from a nearby house come out and there’s interactions with the police and discussions. Back and forth for a bit, APD seemed eventually satisfied and left. People from house brought a phone out to dude, and eventually he leaves in a car with someone (they had pulled up prior to APD arriving).

While the men were outside minding things, the women of the neighborhood were on the phone alerting all other neighbors. People were watching out their windows, noting things, taking descriptions, pictures, whatever. If something was going to happen, we were going to be prepared. 🙂 Plus, as everyone connected, it was evident that others had noticed dude too and had similar concerned feelings about the matter.

No idea what was going on, but it was still all very strange. We’re attempting to contact APD to find out the story.

Lessons learned:

  • Don’t blow off gut feelings. If something feels wrong, act on it.
  • You don’t know when ugly will strike, so always be prepared. I have all my everyday gear on me (including my flashlight), every day all the time. Wife needed me now, I was able to go and was ready (well, didn’t have my phone on me… still trying to work out a good “gotta keep it charged but need to keep it on me” strategy). I didn’t have to take time to get all my stuff together, I was ready and could act immediately.
  • Ensure all your neighbors know each other and have each others contact information. You don’t have to be friends, but you are neighbors. Even if you might not like your neighbor, there may come a time where there’s a bigger evil that will require you to come together.
  • If you’ve got a team, ensure you’ve got a plan. My wife and I? Team. Kids can be involved too. Then have plans, and ensure people know their parts; practice. Wife knows one of her primary roles is communication: she calls proper people, gathers information. I didn’t have to walk out the door and tell her to do any of this; she knows her role, I know mine. Kids even do to, for instance, they know that yeah sometimes in life you might be able to argue with Mom & Dad, but when something serious is going on you must obey… and they know that.
  • Don’t count on a fast police response. I’m not surprised they didn’t come blaring in with sirens within 2 minutes, and I expect if they had to get two cruisers/officers and coordinate a bit that that would require a little more time too. I wish they were a little faster in their response but in the end it was acceptable response time. Still, it was quite a long time for the response…. you can only count on the police for so much, and your immediate safety isn’t necessarily part of that equation.
  • If you believe in self-defense, your training shouldn’t be in only physical skills such as punching or shooting. You need to know street smarts, mental skills, and other such things. That will take you further.

I believe the world is a generally safe place. I believe the world is filled with good people. But evil can come in any form to any place at any time. Nothing is immune. If you don’t want evil to harm you and your loved ones, it’s good to be prepared to deal with it when (not if) it comes your way.

Subtle bias

/ hsoi

I am at the teacher supply store (yea iPhone!) waiting on Wife to finish shopping for some teaching supplies. While waiting I wander around looking at the teaching aids and workbooks. I happen upon the book section on social studies and government. Oh cool! A workbook on the US Constitution. I flip through it. There is a section on the second amendment. It has a brief discussion of the “controversy” of 2A. Then the question section:

On the lines below, describe one argument for and one argument against gun control.

Why not for or against the right to bear arms? for or against the right to defense? for or against the abridgement of a fundamental right?

Subtle bias?

Some thoughts on socialization

/ hsoi

Heather, the Swiss Army Wife, points out an interesting article in Psychology Today magazine.

Here’s a direct link to the article.

The article is about how, at least here in the United States, we’ve built a cultural and social structure that created this thing known as the teenager. A state where they have a lot of freedoms and abilities, but yet they don’t. Where mentally and physically they are capable of many things, yet we’ve put massive restrictions and burdens upon them. As a result, we’ve created a lot of the “teenager vs. parent” conflicts and generalized teenager angst. It’s an interesting read.

One reason Wife and I choose to homeschool is because of the breadth of people our children are exposed to. Our kids are not locked in school rooms with 25-35 other kids about their same age and development level, day in and day out for the majority of their young lives. In fact, much of the time you go through each grade in school surrounded by the same people. Then many of them are involved in after-school activities, and often those involve the exact same people the kids see during the day with perhaps some specific variance but still generally divided by age/grade. So it’s really just this small slice of folks that the kid interacts with, all around the same age and development. It’s the blind leading the blind with sometimes far too often the only external guideance coming from less desirable sources like TV, movies, and other bits of popular culture. Granted you can expose children to folks of other ages and development levels, but “with our busy lives these days” that doesn’t often happen.

Homeschooling tends to lend itself to children being exposed to a cross-section of people of all ages. My children attend Daily Mass, which is mostly attended by elderly. When doing things in their 4-H program, they’re working with kids from ages 8 to 18. Even just in daily schooling the 3 kiddos are with each other, all of their different ages and development stages. There’s much to be learned from this, especially exposing kids to older folks (role models) and allowing your kids to sometimes be the older folks (role models). From the article:

Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become. When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world, which is not the world of Britney Spears, they have no idea what’s going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out.

This isn’t to say that homeschooling is the only way to get kids exposed to the right people, but it does show what homeschooling can offer, especially when the biggest concern folks have about homeschooling is “socialization”. Regardless of how your children are socialized on a daily basis (homeschooling, private school, public school, etc.), don’t worry so much if they are being socialized; if the children interact with other humans on a regular basis, they’re being socialized… even us homeschoolers let our children out of the dungeon once in a while. 🙂 Instead, concern yourself more with the quality of the socialization they are getting.

I guess I was lucky

/ hsoi

Back from our shopping day. I guess the gods were smiling upon us.

First stop was JC Penny’s. They’ve come a long ways and overhauled their image and merchandise. We actually managed to knock out most of our shopping there, racking up a hefty bill. When we got to the car I took a moment to look at the receipt to see how much we didn’t spend (note: not “save” because this isn’t saving, it’s just not spending as much) and I noted that we were charged tax! I knew we’d have tax on a few little things, but I checked the math and we were charged tax on everything! That’s not right. I went back in and pointed it out. Seems they had some problems with a bunch of registers charging tax. They thought the register I checked out on was working, but apparently not. In comes the manager. The only way to fix it was to totally void the transaction and start over. So, on the faulty register she voided it all out, then we had to haul all our stuff to a register in the back of the store at the exchange/returns counter and have everything rung up all over again. Yeah, a pain… but, no big deal.

You see, here we go again with the InSights ABC’s: Always Be Cool. Smile on my face, taking it easy, no big deal. And it really wasn’t a big deal. Sure it was a bit of an inconvenience, but the manager kept apologizing and I just looked at her and said “Hey, shit happens… no big deal.” and smiled and relaxed. I could have pitched a fit, but what good would that have done? Frankly, I was in a great mood, I had no desire to complain, so ABC was just natural. Just be cool. And what did I get for being cool? Well you see, there was a coupon in their sales flyer: spend $50 and get $10 off, or spend $75 and get $15 off. That should apply to the whole transaction. Well, for whatever reason (I can only assume good customer service, and because I was so understanding and cool about the problem), the manager opted to ring up the whole of my purchase in $75 increments and give me the discount each time. 🙂 Score! That’s not a normal thing and not how things are to be done, plus it’s a lot of little transactions, but hey… Always Be Cool. It pays off.

In the end, I we didn’t spend about $120 due to the lack of sales tax and then the nice manager. That was well worth it… both shopping today and well, being cool. 🙂

Went to a couple more stores.

Let’s just say Burlington Coat Factory aims for a different demographic. The sort of clothing they sell… nothing really there for my kids in terms of style.

Old Navy still has a store. I thought they were closing up and Levi’s was eliminating them for Gap stores or some such. But we went there and were able to round a few things out.

In terms of how much we truly didn’t spend, that’s hard to gauge. The original JCP receipt said we saved a few hundred bucks. My guess is that’s totalling the actual sticker prices vs. the price we paid. There was a lot of sales, 30% off, buy one get one free, buy one get one 50% off, clearance discounts (about 75% off original price). So yeah, I feel we did OK on things. But if I walked into the store during an off day, I’m not sure they’d still be selling any of that stuff for sticker price. So how much we really didn’t spend I don’t know, but the sales are aggressive this weekend and compared to what else I’ve seen I think we fared OK. Frankly in total we spent a little less than we normally do for kid clothes shopping, but I know we came home with more clothes for them and even Wife and I picked up a few things for ourselves. Plus then the flat out non-spending on the sales tax, the bonus discounts and such…all in all I think in the end we did alright.

And to boot? Had to run a little errand when I got home. Walking back past the grocery store I poked my head into the entrance just to try to buy a Coke from the vending machine. The Coke guy was filling up the machine and I asked if I could get one while he was filling it. He handed me a bottle. I asked how much I owed, he said “nothing… it’s cool.” Really? Yup. Wow… that was nice.

Always Be Cool.

Today was a good day. 🙂

Wish me luck

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Texas has a “sales tax holiday weekend” designed to help with back-to-school shopping.

It’s this coming weekend, Friday through Sunday.

We’ve never bothered with this. The main reason is we don’t want to deal with the crowds and chaos. And unfortunately, we fear people are going to be petty, rude, and ugly because they all want the best deals for themselves. We’ve experienced this during “big shopping weekends” before,  and we just choose not to deal with it. Plus since we homeschool, we don’t always need to be on the same clock and schedule as the rest of the world.

However, we decided to give it a try this time around. The kids need clothes, we know every retailer in Texas will be stocked up and prepared for this event (I even got an email from Waco Harley-Davidson promoting this weekend), and there will be sales and lots of aggressive pricing and discounting and so on as retailers jockey to attract customers. Then the sales tax alleviation on select items. The kids need the clothing they need so buy it now or later, they still need it. If we buy it now, I expect we’ll be able to lower our total bill. By how much I don’t know yet, but I expect any reduction in the overall bill will be welcome. 🙂

Being the planner I am coupled with my desire to get in and get out as fast as possible, we’ve figured out all that the kids need. We know what pants, shoes, socks, skirts, shirts, underwear, and whatever else they may need. We figured out what sizes of everything to get to minimize the slow down that comes with fitting rooms. Plus we figured out quantities. I think that’s a key factor at keeping cost controlled… you know you need 5 shirts, you get 5 shirts instead of saying “gosh at this price, we can get 7 shirts” which then just jacks up the total bill. If last night before you saw the prices 5 shirts was enough, then today after seeing the prices 5 shirts is still enough.

And going with the fact we aren’t on the same clock as the rest of the world, the plan is to go at the time we feel will have the smallest crowds: first thing Friday morning. Most people will have to be working, most people aren’t morning people. So if we can be on the road at 8 AM and done by lunch, awesome.

The geek in me is also wondering if the iPhone will come into play. If I’ll be able to comparison shop, look up prices, product reviews, or any other sort of on-the-spot information gathering.

Finally, I suspect there will probably be a man with a gun wandering through all these crowds, through all these retail establishments, being around lots of children…. and I’ll betcha nothing will come of it. 😉

So, onwards we go. Hopefully tomorrow won’t suck. 🙂

Sometimes violence is the answer

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Matthew, over at Straight Forward in a Crooked World, has an entry titled “Failure to Comply.”

It’s a compelling read, and you’d do well to take a few minutes to read it, then a few minutes more to think about what he wrote.

There’s one thing he wrote that really caught my attention:

We are taught early on and reminded as adults constantly that violence is bad and that it never solves anything, and that no one wins in a fight. This is simply untrue. In fact it is horribly untrue. This is the result of political correctness infesting everything. It skews how we set and train our minds to win.

Violence does solve problems.

Reactive violence can and does routinely stop evil offensive violence. When you are left (regardless of your sex) on the ground and fighting to win to keep your life violence is the answer…and it is the only answer. And you should not apologize nor back peddle for that.

It made me think about my children and what I teach them.

When I started my parenting career, we opted to do the “no hitting” thing. There was no spanking, we taught Oldest not to hit, period. Basically, violence was completely frowned upon for any and every reason, in every context, every angle, you name it.

It didn’t take long before we abandoned that to a small part. Spanking came around. Why? Because you can’t reason with a 2 year old; they just don’t know enough about life to understand greater things. We didn’t and don’t beat our children, but all living things respond in a simple manner: seek pleasure, avoid pain. We saved a swat on the behind for those times when you really needed to enforce a negative consequence to some action. That is, spanking was not the general punishment; it was reserved for times when you needed to make a strong negative impression because there was no natural negative consequence of the action. For example, child runs into the street; that could warrant a swat on the behind because there’s no question there could be tragic consequences of that action — it must not happen again. However, the action itself has no natural negative consequence (apart from the undesirable of the child getting hit by a car), so you must impart a negative consequence so the child will not undertake that action again. The child must know that action leads to painful consequences so they will avoid partaking in actions that lead to pain. Political correctness compells me to say that we also are into positive reinforcement; frankly that garners a lot more compliance and a happier household. But sometimes, a spanking is the right and only answer. Heck, even my old college roommate just went through a little “my son got whacked” situation. He’s still of the “no spanking” camp, but there’s no question the little whack his son got straightened him up and made for a better long-term experience.

When I started getting serious about self-defense, martial arts study, firearms study, I realized that when our kids hit each other, to condemn them and lay down a rule of “no hitting, never” was not correct. Here I was studying all sorts of violent things because I know that sometimes violence is the answer, and now I’m telling my children never to use violence? That didn’t jive, and I had to correct myself.

I teach my children differently now. I teach my children that yes, sometimes violence is the answer, but you must know when that is. If your sibling took your toy or is being annoying, violence is not an appropriate response. If someone is attempting to harm you, abduct you, your sibling, your friends, your Mother… then yes, violence can be an answer. I do what I can to teach my children the proper contexts, to know how to respond in these contexts. I wish my children to live peaceful lives, and while I know the world has mostly good people, there are enough bad people out there that we have to take care and be prepared.

Some months back I posted about guns and church and reconciling Christian doctrine against violent activity. It doesn’t preach it, it doesn’t desire it, but even it acknowledges that sometimes yes, violence is the answer.

It’s not pretty to think about, and it’s far from politically correct. But where do you choose to live? In fantasy or reality?