Army Post Road

     Are we really supposed to take the following letter-to-the-editor that appeared in Iowa City Press-Citizen today seriously?

Lawsuit still on in North Liberty

Here’s a reminder to the public of the timeline for Matt Bahl contesting the 2005 North Liberty election for mayor:

• Nov. 8, 2005: Dave Franker was elected (on a write in vote).

• Nov. 15, 2005: Tom Salm-requested recount affirmed the election outcome.

• Nov. 17, 2005: Matt Bahl filed lawsuit against Johnson County auditor.

• Jan. 6: Johnson County Contest Court affirmed the election outcome.

• Late Jan.: Bahl filed a lawsuit against Franker

• Late March: Franker’s motion to dismiss the whole thing was delayed when Bahl asked for further filings.

• May 5: Court date delayed when Johnson County had a shortage of judges.

• June: Bahl asked for another delay.

This is just a reminder to the public that this contest is still an unfortunate ongoing event.

Franker is doing a great job for North Liberty. Because of all the delays and filings, lawyer costs are elevating. The city does not pay for Franker’s lawyer fees. There is a fund you can send donations to: [address removed].

Cindy Kasper
North Liberty

     Is it really possible to take any Democratic whining and complaining about contested elections seriously? After the fiasco they lead the nation through in 2000 with the Florida presidential recount, do they have any credibility when it comes to sniveling about dragging out elections? They delayed the final determination of that national election until December of 2000 (when they’re typically known for certain late Election night) and caused it to, in reality, be decided by the Supreme Court (a responsibility it is wholly not equipped for) and now this woman wants to cry about the North Liberty mayoral election and beg for legal fund donations in the opinion section of the newspaper? Is all this for real? Ms. Kasper mentions the fact that Dave Franker won as a write-in candidate, but what about all the illegal campaigning he and his supporters did in the last weeks of the election cycle? Is this lady lamenting the fact that this issue is still alive almost two years later? What would she have to say to Robert Kennedy, Jr about his articles that are still appearing in Rolling Stone, nearly six years after the presidential election of 2006. How much disingenuity are we going to allow the Democrats when it comes to this stuff?

     Originally I was planning on going out to the country music beerfest today but at the moment I’ve suffering from a severe motivation deficiency that I’m not sure I’ll recover from early enough. That and I just don’t feel like drinking anymore beer, I had enough last night and last weekend and the weekend before that. Oy.
     I’ve been so behind in keeping up-to-date that we haven’t even talked about me changing jobs down here. I no longer work in our supply section. Now I work in the personnel section. Neat development, and not just because it’s a new job. I will say that it does get me out of having to go to Arkansas which couldn’t make me happier. Family plans to go to Kansas City for my birthday and see the White Sox play the Royals are back on. Heck yeah.
     I was down in Arkansas for a cumulative total of about a day earlier this week however and that wasn’t bad. The town adjoining Ft Chaffee, Ft Smith, AR to be specific, is much larger than I originally thought and the hotel we stayed at had some instructors for a dance camp nearby. The five of us could hardly keep our tongues in our faces. After we left Ft Chaffee the trip turned rather unpleasant and I won’t go into it here.
     It’s lunch time. I’ll conclude after I come back.

     Well it’s certainly been an interesting week. Since last we spoke, my parents and Keely came down to visit last Tuesday and Wednesday. That was really good because I hadn’t seen them in about a month and they finally got to come down and see Ft Riley and all that I’ve been prattling on about since I got here. Plus, I got to see my dog. It was pretty quite during the work week other than that, I had Thursday off so that’ll be two 4-day weeks in a row. Friday was when the world really got interesting. I got down to Aggieville without much of a plan because everyone else I’d talked to passed on coming out or went out of town. After being there for about 20-30 minutes I bumped into two guys from the Task Force who’d been shipped off to other posts around the country and decided to hang out with them to catch up and ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the weekend. We started off at one bar (Porter’s; nice place, even nicer lookin’ waitresses ) and then moved on to Rusty’s where we fairly fruitlessly expended a fair amount of time talking to random girls. After a while, I spotted a woman whom I’d met on one of the nights out with the 1SG who was a friend of his so I decided to talk to her for a while. That was pretty much a riot, she and I were laughin’ our asses off most of the time together. It was another one of those times where I was flirting with a woman that was definitely a few years older, which I find myself doing more and more often. Go figure. Looking back at high school until now, I don’t know where the balance falls towards either more older women or younger. I don’t think it really matters, but I digress.
     After that, we left to go find another bar but Jake, one of the guys I was with that night, got a call from a girl who was back at the bar we just left so we went back to meet her. When we got back there, we went up to the bar and he started talking to a girl who it appeared to me that he knew already but had just bumped into and I happened to know her, seperately from Jake, too. She was the waitress from Buffalo Wild that’d I’d spent quite a few hours flirting with and got to go out with me after work once so I was excited about what I still at that moment thought was just lucky happenstance for me to bump into her. Nope. Not in the cards. She was the girl we’d came back to the bar to meet and now, after this weekend, she and Jake are a thing. So much for that one, no chasing other soldier’s girlfriends for me. So we all spend the rest of the evening at the back bar at Rusty’s until bar close, intermingling between Cheri and her friends (Cheri is the BWW waitress), a girl or two Jake and I struck up conversations with, and Keri Ann, the 1SG’s friend. I hadn’t been drinking much at all throughout the evening so I’m having a pretty entertaining time talking to all the moderately-drunk to wasted people there at the bar and finally bar close arrives and yes!, we head to after-hours at some of Cheri’s coworkers’ house and Jake and I stayed until just about a quarter-til 4 that morning. Good stuff when I had to be somewhere at 9AM.
     To back up a tick, when we were at Rusty’s earlier in the evening I’d made a passing remark about having gone out the previous weekend with a guy and a girl from the Task Force and when I mentioned her both Jake and Ben (the other guy with us all weekend) decided that I need to call her and get her to come out (which was an appealling idea to me however it was already midnight and I didn’t particularly want to call and wake her up at the bar in a situation that requires the utmost finesse, not just funny college-age antics). Instead I sent her a text message from Ben wondering why she wasn’t out, no response came and I didn’t put much thought into it after that.
     And on to being somewhere at 9AM Saturday morning: we had the carwash fundraiser for our organization (read: fun) day tomorrow. I actually felt pretty good for only having got four hours of sleep. I did not, however, have enough brain power to be very conversant with the girl from the previous paragraph when she also was working at the car wash. My brain was mostly focused on hoping the sun would stay hidden behind the overcast clouds and I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a headache. I did ask her if she was going to go out (ostensibly in Aggieville) that night and she said she had a barbecue to go to so probably not. That’ll tie in more later.
     At noon on Saturday we called the car wash quits (an hour early, per the sergeant-major’s decision) after we equalled the total from the previous weekend. Jake, Ben, and Cheri were out on the lake already at that point so after an errand or two I met up with them (after a bit of difficulty finding exactly which boat dock where they wanted me to meet them). They all came out in their swimsuits but I didn’t think to do so so eventually when I felt like jumping in the water I had to empty my pockets in my shorts. Except I didn’t get every pocket. was wearing carpenter shorts and had my phone in my carpenter pocket, the only pocket I neglected to empty. My phone ended up taking about a 10 minute swim in Milford lake before I chucked it back in the boat. Yes, I will admit we’d been drinking since about the moment I got out there so that might have been part of why I didn’t get my pockets completely emptied.
     Sorry folks, my enthusiasm to stay up and keep sharing this story has run out. I’ll continue it in the subsequent post… tomorrow.
     Now I just have to resist the temptation to eat any of the cookies I made for tomorrow before tomorrow…

     I originally put the below picture up as my profile picture on Facebook and decided this morning that it was too awesome not to share with the entire world. Yes, it’s a picture of Ellie with nearly her entire head in a large B-Bops to-go bag. It just strikes me was one of the best ways to live when you can engorge a fastfood bag with your head and have everyone take pictures of it and call it awesome.

The authors of the Freakonomcs blog reprinted this truly horrific story about two families and the confusion about identities following a car accident. I can’t fathom what it would be like to be in either family’s shoes.