April 7, 2008 - A back to work Monday. I was energized this morning, waking up right with my alarm. Normally my alarm goes off at 7:30, but Ellie has alarms that go off at 7:20, 7:30, 7:35, 7:40...etc, until she stops pressing snooze. I don't snooze with my alarm, because hers keep waking me up. But today I jumped right out of bed, went to the kitchen, and put together a bowl of Total cereal and some orange juice. I made lunches for both Ellie and I, got dressed, and was at work about 10 minutes earlier than usual. Ellie and I went to my parents after work for dinner, marking our third day in a row of dinners at other peoples houses. Back at home, Ellie's mom came over to pick up the air gun that I borrowed from her ex-boyfriend Gregory, and then Anna came by to see the baby mockingbirds in our bush. I was hoping there would be time to get to the gym today, but it didn't seem to work out. I'll have to make sure to go tomorrow. There has been a lot of talk on the radio about the Iraq war recently. We hit a milestone on number of American soldier deaths, another "emergency" spending bill is coming up in congress, and it is an election year issue for the candidates. I've covered it on here, but I think there is plenty of room to continue discussing this. The way I see it, the United States is really good at deploying our military into other parts of the world. We go in, set up large bases with tons of resources, and then eventually, years later, realize that there is no exit strategy. From my vantage point, we have done this in Vietnam, Korea, now Iraq and Afghanistan, and I'll even go out on a limb and say the Cold War with the Soviet Union, although never escalating to actual combat, was a similar 'no exit strategy' battle. I see this as being a result of one of two things. Either our military and political leaders are so incompetent that they don't look back in history, see the failure to reach closure, and make the same mistakes previous generations did, or maybe there is some financial incentive for going to war. Maybe beating the war drum fills up politicians wallets, fills up their resumes, and gives them years of unabated, unrestricted profits from their investments in war related companies, their ties to political lobbyists, and pay from years of job security while we fight the war. I'm not buying it. If we are going to go around 'spreading democracy', we need to make sure that the people we are spreading it to get a positive experience right out of the starting gate. Prolonged occupations do not help spread democracy. It only leaves people thinking about the good times they had before the US stepped in and started shaking things up.