. . . that I have to spend days trying to satisfy Big Brother’s intrusive questions into my personal life, where I work, how much I am paid, what I spend my money on, whether I am married or not, how many others depend upon me for financial support, where I bank, which charities I support and how much do I give, how I choose to invest, where I choose to invest, whether I am attempting to start a small business, and so on.

And if I calculate incorrectly, I can be subjected to the further indignity of an even more intrusive audit, fined and even imprisoned.

Yes, I am doing my taxes. How dare “they” ask these questions. What business is it of anyone but me and mine? How did we get here?

When our elected servants die, may they appear before the Founding Fathers who sit in judgement as to their fate.

Hmmm . . . maybe I should start a new religion. I’m pretty sure there’s a tax break for that.

So there I am, waiting for the Bartlett GOP meeting to start and talking to a woman I had just met.

No one told me it was the featured speaker, Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Janice Holder.

What’s fun about going to political events is that you never know who you’ll be sitting next to.

But she wouldn’t give me a hint about whether a Tennessee income tax was unconstitutional or not. Bummer.

Now I realize that people put up with this kind of crap all the time, but those people are generally damn Yankees that choose to live where it is so cold that penguins scrounge for fire wood.

Me? I’m a transplanted Texan. I wear flannel shirts in August under my sports jacket. I’m just not made for cold. I don’t reckon it’s natural. Man is made to sweat, not shiver.

Tuesday morning I opened my eyes and thought to myself, “It’s the middle of February. That cold stuff should be gone and I won’t have to see it again until next year.”

Then I got up, looked out the window and saw snow flurries. I swear I heard God laughing.

This morning I woke up to sixteen degrees and the lake looks like this:

Yeah, that’s ice. On a lake. In Memphis. Way below the Mason-Dixon line.

This just ain’t right.

Global warming my ass.

We’re kinda new to the fundraising scene, so for any neophytes out there let me give a word of warning.

At an event like a Lincoln Day Dinner, there’s always a silent auction which has all kinds of stuff donated to help raise money for the party. Tonight there was everything from gift certificates for Chick-fil-A to crystal bowls with pewter elephant heads for feet (if you can picture that).

I figured I’d get things going by putting some starter bids on a few items. After all, there were 650+ rich Republicans in the room and surely someone would put down a Jackson for a $40 bottle of wine!

Uh, maybe not. We walked out with an armful of stuff and a much lighter wallet. But the wine alone was worth more than we spent, so we did good . . . right?

Jeesh, when we bid I hoped that we would walk out with one item. Instead we took home five, losing only one item (I found the guy paying for it — a bottle of wine from Spain — and thanked him for outbidding me).

Now why don’t my bids at the NRA banquet win? I’d love to bring home a $200 gun for forty bucks. But noooooo, on really cool stuff like guns I get outbid!

AlphaWife and I went to the 32nd annual Shelby County Lincoln Day Gala, and a gala it was. We heard Congressman Marsha Blackburn speak; once again she proved why she is one of the fastest rising stars in the Republican Party today.

But JC Watts, Jr. was the featured speaker, and he was the star tonight. Some presidential candidate should fill out his ticket with this man; eloquent, grounded, true Republican values.

It was an honor to shake this man’s hand.

If you are driving to work and realize that your car is hydroplaning, and then this thought almost idly floats across your consciousness:

Ya know, I should probably open my eyes right about now.

then you are probably still too sick to be driving.

Not that that happened to me. I’m just saying.

Me: I’m going to see JC Watts next February. Can’t wait. I got the email notification and went out that day to buy the tickets.

AlphaFriend: Uh . . . yeah . . . I’ve got tickets to My Little Pony, World’s Biggest Tea Party. Live! Did I mention “Live”?

Talk about living in different worlds.

I guess the person maintaining the Christmas list didn’t check to see that I didn’t give any money to the Republican party this year.

So I’m sitting at home, taking a vacation day to catch up on chores before Thanksgiving (like paying bills) and as I’m shredding four boxes of checks because they have our old address on them, it occurs to me that I need to order some decent ones before too much longer.

Well, first it occurs to me how great my Ativa X1800 shredder is (as it chews through a book of duplicate checks that I rip into just three sets to feed in), but I’ve blogged about my shredder before.

I loved my old checks — they even had my website and tagline on them:

But after the GOP Senate ruled like Democrats for six years instead of like their conservative colleagues in the House, I refuse to get something that labels me “Republican” again.

The site I use doesn’t have any Neolibertarian checks (imagine my surprise), but they have something very close:

I can’t think of anything more Libertarian, neo or otherwise, than the words and images of our founding fathers.

But then I came across these, and I must admit, it’s just kind of hard for the chauvinist in me to resist:

As I’m standing in the bathroom this morning with a razor in one hand and an open toothpaste tube in the other, trying to figure out where to put the toothpaste, I realized that even though they don’t know it there is someone out there lying on an operating table who should be really happy that I’m not a heart surgeon. (It has been my experience that most surgeries seem to take place at obscene hours of the morning.)

As I was leaving the bathroom I took a glance at the atomic wall clock and realized that I really should take the time to set the clock on my nightstand for standard (not daylight savings) time. (I didn’t.) It was far too early to get up and go to work.

As I’m parked on the street waiting for the doors to open at 6 am, I discover that I can get email fairly easy if I hold my laptop up above the dashboard. It seems to boost the wireless connection.

Finally, I discover that listening to Rammstein at full volume in the comfort of my car is a fine way to start work in the morning.