So, that V.P. debate was interesting. Of course many of the statements made by both candidates were stretches of the truth or altogether false. That is so frustrating. As I was checking up on all the facts I came across this gem:

Who Caused The Economic Crisis?
So who is to blame? There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn’t fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn’t do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of “layered irresponsibility … with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role.” Here’s a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. There are multiple factors that caused this problem, and one swift $700 billion move from the government is not going to solve it. Everyone, and I mean everyone needs to be committed to turning this thing around. I’m not an economist so I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some insight as far as what we hardworking Americans must do to insulate ourselves from this sort of crisis: Stop borrowing money. Live on less than you make. Save for the emergencies. Save for the future. Forget about the Jones’ - they’re broke.

My sister just bought a house. A small one. Small by anyone’s standards, really. We thought she was nuts at first, but you know what? I’m a little envious! The layout of the house is great and has all the space she needs for her family of four. No more, no less. There are huge advantages to this, number one being that the cost is well below their means and will leave breathing room in the budget. Breathing room is an absolute must. The other advantage, the one that makes me so envious, is that her small space forces her to keep only the things she needs and say no to the rest. She has a built in defense against clutter!

It doesn’t matter what other people think. People may say my sister’s house is too small, or that mine is the junkiest on the block, but we don’t care! We can sleep at night not worrying how we’re going to pay next month’s mortgages. And more importantly, we are surrounded by family and friends who love us no matter what our houses look like.

Thanks to my employer, Mike and I had the opportunity to attend the MSU football game today, as well as a stupendous tailgate party. I had volunteered to bring coffee to the tailgate, and I successfully did, but not without sacrifice. We were driving to my coworker’s house to pick her up for the tailgate and we came very close to missing the turn onto her street. Mike slammed on the brakes just in time to make the turn, in the process causing the two carafes of piping hot coffee that were safely nestled around my feet to tip over. Onto my feet. Piping hot coffee - I do not know what piping means, just know it was VERY HOT - spilled through my shoe, through my socks, and onto my toes. In nanoseconds.

I wish you could have been there. It was truly an experience I will not soon forget. Not quite Saturday Night Live material, but hilarious nonetheless. Here is how it went:

As I was coping with the seething pain of the hot coffee on my flesh, I had just enough mental capacity left to know that I must remove the shoe, then sock, now no now oh dear God the pain the relentless pain. Shoot. Hot. Oh. Hot. Shoot. Make it stop. Get the shoe off, Mindy. Haaah, eeeeh, oooh. Shoot. Oh, this is her house. That’s crazy, you stopped at the right house.. oh shoot… haaah… can you go knock on the door? Ohma, ohma. Gaaaa… haaa.

Yeah. That’s pretty close to how it went. Replace the shoots with the real four letter word and that’s about verbatim. And I totally have the blisters to prove that I am not kidding about the hotness of this coffee.

Thankfully, the coffee incident was the worst of the day. The rest of the day was fantastic. It was a beautiful day for a football game. We had delicious food, good people, perhaps a little bit of beer, and MSU beat Iowa 16 to 13! All in all the day was pretty stinkin’ cool. Mike ended up snagging a security gig to fill in for a friend so he didn’t watch the game from the stands with me and my coworkers. No, he watched it from behind the goal post. Here was his view of the game, followed by mine.

Mike’s View:

My View:

Yes, his view was better for watching the game, but my view was the best for watching the marching band at halftime. So there!

Mike also got a few shots of some MSU football people that he would want me to post (he’s seriously loving these football gigs).

Javon Ringer:

Mark Dantonio:

Ringer is one of the players and Dantonio is the head coach. Mike says they’re kind of a big deal. I don’t know. Football is clearly not my sport. I’m just in it for the food!

Just a little internet fun…

Get Your Cyborg Name

So I’m watching the V.P. debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. I just have one beef with the first part about taxes and the rest of the debate I’m sort of lost on.

Biden defines “fairness” as increasing taxes for those earning $250k or more and giving tax breaks to the middle class. So the more money you earn, the higher rate you’re taxed at. How is that fair? Sounds to me like a penalty for being successful. He said that the “super wealthy” don’t deserve tax breaks. Really? Do you know these people personally? I’m certainly not one of those people, but I don’t really care for that logic. You say fairness, I say unfair redistribution of wealth.

I do like what Palin says about personal responsibility and living within your means, but it really creeps me out every time she looks directly at the camera.

I hate presidential elections. I don’t want to vote for either candidate. It’s a matter of picking who you like the least and then voting for the other one. Crappy.

“I paid $3.55 a gallon for gas on Saturday. That’s a good price!”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad gas prices have gone down some. It makes me very happy. I just never thought I would ever be excited about $3.55 per gallon. I won’t even pay that much for milk, and milk is awesome. Gas just gets me to work and back, but milk does a body good.

So I finally got what I’ve always wanted: My cell phone’s ringtone is… drum roll please… the theme to Rocky! No kidding, I think I’ve wanted this since I was a little girl. Yup, back when all we had were rotary dial phones, I totally came up with the idea of having a song play instead of that annoying ringing noise. No, really!

It’s kind of an appropriate ringtone, because usually when someone calls me my phone is at the other end of the house and I have to run to answer it. So as I’m hearing the song I’m running and I’m totally picturing Rocky running up those steps in Philly. It’s fantastic.

I keep forgetting what I wanted to blog about.

Maybe it was the thing about me finally discovering the cause for my acne breakouts that come around about oh, every 28 days or so. Can you guess? Can ya?

Or was it about my new spiffy phone with which I can now text people messages even though it would be much faster to just call?

Or maybe it was about the 7 pounds I lost and that I had to buy new pants cuz the old ones are falling off. See, I had to do some creative pleating:

No, I think I was going to blog about how I went to church yesterday, finally, and I was really glad I did. Luke did not have a mental breakdown from lack of morning nap, and it was fantastic to see some people I hadn’t seen in a really long time. I love my church.

I could blog about how much fun I’ve been having with my one and only 16 month old son but I’m too busy having fun with my 16 month old son! He’s turning into quite the ham. Would you expect any different from Griddle Bandits offspring? Okay, I have to go, I’m missing out on all the fun…

Oh yeah, Mike got a ticket. He was booming the bass in his truck a little too loudly. He’s kicking himself for it, because he knows he was in the wrong. He’s not arguing the ticket, but with the threat of jail, he’s decided to put the stereo up for sale. Yeah, see, a noise violation like that is a misdemeanor, and the cop said if he gets caught again they’ll put him in jail. Seriously? Jail? I understand why a DUI is a misdemeanor with jail time for repeat offenders, but a loud stereo? It seems a bit overkill if you ask me.

This boy, my boy, is OBSESSED with shoes. And that’s all he’s been talking about for the past week. The only words he utters lately are shoes and socks, socks and shoes. He has a shoe in particular, the one pictured below, that he has declared his BFF. He points to the shoe, he carries the shoe around the house, he brings the shoe to dinner. I even caught him holding his shoe like a blankie while sucking his thumb. He dreams about the shoe at night and he wakes up talking about the shoe. He even went to bed tonight wearing the shoe.

“Seriously, Mom. I don’t know why you insist on keeping all these toys around. All I need is a cardboard box and a shoe and I’m happy.”

There’s a story floating around about Mike’s and my first Valentine’s Day, where I marinated steaks with oil and seasoning for broiling and then managed to fill the entire one bedroom apartment with smoke. Something was dripping I guess and the oven was not happy about it. The steaks turned out great but we had to eat them out on the abnormally wide window sills, so as not to suffocate while chewing.

Well, tonight we had an exciting dinner experience that took me back to that day. We were cooking some awesome pepper bacon in the oven (bakin’ bacon, if you will) and one of the pans we used did not have sides to it. So the grease from the bacon drizzled off and down into the oven. Like our first oven, this one didn’t like that sort of thing either. Our kitchen quickly filled with smoke. Luke was in his highchair, already partaking in his meal. Having some concern for his son, Mike had to think fast. In a moment of brilliance, he wheeled his son (still in the highchair) out the side door, down the step, and into the backyard. Then he brought his BLT sammiches outside, stood next to the grill, and happily ate them. I stood at the door, breathed in the fresh air through the screen, and ate my sammiches happily. It was the weirdest family dinner ever.