Obama IS an American.

So today I had a patron call in what was either panic or hopefulness and she asked me to explain to her what constitutes a "natural born citizen." Mind you we played twenty questions before her real question was revealed but in the end she was trying to verify that Senator Obama was indeed actually qualified to run for president. She had apparently been watching some expose television or listening to talk radio.

The truth is there are lawsuits trying to prove Obama is not eligible to be president. Mind you Senator McCain had some issues himself, being born in the Panama Canal Naval Hospital, but Obama's life is more complex than being born on foreign soil to U.S. Citizens. He has the distinction of having only 1 parent who was a U.S. Citizen, his mother who was 18 at the time of his birth. Normally that is all it takes. One U.S. parent and you are in. As long as that parent had spent at least 10 years in the U.S. and five of those years after the age of 16. Since his mother was 18 when he was born it was not enough to make him a natural born citizen IF he was born on foreign soil. For the record Senator Obama states he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Two years after it became a state. That should be he end of it. But there are other factors. His paternal grandmother has made claims he was born in Kenya, and was taken to Hawaii and issued a certificate.

He was a Kenyan citizen at birth because his father was Kenyan. That citizenship expired at age 21, because he did not swear an Oath of Allegiance to Kenya. And at the time dual citizenship was allowed with Kenya. But there are other factors that muddy the picture. He was adopted by his step-father in Indonesia and was issued an Indonesian passport. There was no-dual citizenship allowed between the US and Indonesia at that time, so the naysayers are claiming he actually dissolved his US citizenship, and when he came back he would have had to be "Naturalized" and take the oath to be a citizen again. They claim he never did.

All this is still in court, but for my part I find it ludicrous to suggest that with the media and the political digging going on today that we could ever believe a man could be this close to the White House without all this stuff being vetted is crazy. There will always be conspiracy theories. Even when Obama's campaign posted his birth certificate on his website, claims of forgery were immediately made. It will all come out in court eventually. My question is this. If a Harvard educated lawyer decided to run for president do you really think he'd try it if he couldn't win his case?

Saving fish from drowning...not just an Amy Tan novel

So today was another day when I thanked Steve Jobs for creating the ITouch, I am too cheap to get the IPhone but allowed my husband his grand gesture and accepted the ITouch. Today it saved many lives (of the fish variety!) I was working in the Nature Center at my children's school and was trying to do a basic fall cleanup. I went in and realized the nifty net we stretched over the pond to catch leaves had sunk in under all the weight and had also trapped many innocent fish. After pulling out the net and tossing a dozen or so fish back in I noticed the water was also pitch black. Very bad. So I was online in a flash thanks to the free Wi Fi in the building and getting great instructions on pond care. Restarting the pump and exposure to sunshine will do the trick.

So I have a trick for Halloween...

As I went visiting this weekend I saw that many of my friends were already carving pumpkins (too early people!)and already they we being eaten by squirrels. Allow me share with you a nice tip I learned a few years ago and I swear it works very well... Dish soap. You know like Joy or Sunlight. Squirt some of that on and rub the pumpkin down with the undiluted soap. No more squirrels (it won't hurt them), and it makes your pumpkins look shiny as well!

So today the layoffs hit home..

My apologies for delaying the last post, but I just found out that my husband got laid off from the job that pays all the bills and provides us with health coverage. While aware of the possibility it might happen, nothing quite describes the feeling when it actually does. So my next few blogs will probably be about how to cope with the financial and emotional aspects of unemployment.

So the first thing to do is investigate your Unemployment Insurance Benefits. In Illinois the website is http://www.ides.state.il.us/ . There you will enjoy trying to decipher the instructions on how to apply and get the benefits you have been paying for all these years. The trick is to be persistant and to do it immediately. They need time to process it and you will need these benefits to get you through the next step...job hunting. Chin up you have more support than you think!

So my faucet is leaking...

For the past several months we have had a problem with our kitchen faucet not working properly and the main problem is a faulty "diverter" which is stripped and lodged in too tight to remove. So in order to make it all work well I 'd have to basically remove the whole faucet, possibly having to buy a new one. (Shopping is fun, but times are tough you know.) I have let it be and ignored the dripping that occurs if you are not careful to push hard on the handles but someone I know tried to convince me I was wasting more money by not get it repaired. True? or false? I wondered.

So I sat down to figure it out. Where I live they charge me a whopping $4.09 for every thousand gallons of water. How much water was I wasting? Not as much as I first thought. I decided to count the drips and see. I counted 120 drips in a minute. After checking with a drip calculator online(they really have a calculator for everything now!) I found out I am wasting close to 4,200 gallons a year, or a little over $16.00. Not really a valid argument for fixing the sink but I will anyway because it seems like a green thing to do. And the drip is annoying too!

So I found this cat today...

This morning instead of getting the chance to sleep in late, as I was planning to do, I was informed by my husband we had a stray cat on our front porch. Now this is the same cat that many of my neighbors had expressed concerns over because it was so skinny and was always lurking around but couldn't be caught. Apparently it could be caught by my 10 year-old who managed to feed it and cage it in swift order. Of course it meant I had to do something with the much angry, and feral, beast. So off to the Oak Park Animal Care League, our local shelter which does the most humane work I have ever seen in an animal shelter, and I brought them a new resident. Not that they needed another cat! The interesting thing I learned from them today is that Calico Cats are pretty much always female. So I just had to know why.

The answer has to do with genetics. Every cat has 38 pairs of chromosomes; half of the pairs are from the mother, the other half is from the father. Within every chromosome there are thousands of different genes. Every female receives one X chromosome from her mother and one X chromosome from her father, while a male receives one X chromosome from his mother and one Y chromosome from his father. Within the X chromosome is a gene for coat color.In calicos and tortoiseshells, one X has the black gene; the other X has the orange gene. White coat color is associated with a completely separate gene. At conception, the kitten is a one-celled organism, which divides until there are millions of cells that make up the final kitten.

So there you go...