I've Got your Marriage Right Here.

My greatest fear is that Amber will leave me. Not voluntarily; I know her well enough and trust her and know she would never do that. That does not change the fact that something heinous could go down, healthwise. The only thing that I can think of that would make that worse is something like this.

Now, I managed to get away with fronting that I was James' sister when he missed his dismount, but that was luck; I did not expect them to believe me for a minute. I am not, in fact, sure that they did and maybe they decided it was ok since there weren't any medical decisions to be made (because, DUH, he was going to have surgery, like now), and further, if worse came to worse I would have bit the bullet and said fine, he's my husband, dammit, now talk to me.

(See what sacrifices I would make for you, O Keys.)

Last week, in the emergency room, the triage nurse did not bat an eye at the presence of either of them (James was along for comic relief). But stuff like the above linked just makes my entire insides go numb. What if, for example, I had been hit in the head and knocked out and there was an ambulance. How would Amber have been treated? Granted, we have not fully formalised ourselves.

However, years ago when my Aunt C and Uncle W were engaged, she, along with another aunt (N) who was not formalised were in a horrible wreck on the way to Kerrville for a bridal shower. We were mightily freaked out and my mom, my elder aunt, my grandmother, me and my sister hauled ass to get there. My mom's youngest brother (Ch), who at the time was the boyfriend of the latter wrecked aunt (N), had called us to tell us about it, and him his soon-to-be brother-in-law (W) were on the way up and we met them there.

The short of it is that since we were there my grandma could speak for C, her daughter, and I younger and don't remember much about the technicalities, but I do remember that Uncle Ch said that Aunt N was his wife.

No one asked for proof.

Now, were it me and Amber in that situation I would not be able to claim that at all.

My long-winded point is that there are those among us to say they love -me- and know that there is nothing wrong with -me- but that gays shouldn't be allowed to be married because of one or more of the following:

a) It is not God's plan
b) It's just wrong
c) Kids need a mother and a father (so, all widowed, divorced or otherwise single parents lose their kids?)
d) Gays are pedophiles
e) et cetera

To you, I now say this: YOU are WRONG.

Sarah in Chicago eloquently states why (specifically regarding the linked article):

To all the people that have qualms about us gaining marriage rights ... you are responsible here. Your bigotry contributes to this. There is no grey on this matter, no middle-road. Either you think gays and lesbians are equal to straights, or you don't.

You can't expect to merely 'disagree' on this matter and think we're going to somehow magically respect you for that. This is not a matter of merely agreeing to disagree on an issue; this is about you saying we don't deserve having full civil rights, and somehow we're supposed to respect that?

Emphasis mine. This is not a debate regarding the merits of radishes or whether or not MLB players get paid too much. This Is About People's Lives.

This is about -my- life. Think hard about how you would feel if the above happened to you. The situation is not different. If you cannot have the empathy to understand why this is important, then you may want to reconsider your definition of love. Denying someone the right to be with their loved one, whether your particular denomination thinks it is allowable or not, is not love. It is bigotry, and it is hate. So either reconcile with the fact that you are a bigot in this instance, or analyse your new information and change.

And know this: Wherever she goes, I will go. Wherever she lives, I will live. Where she dies, I will die, and there I will be buried. May God do this (death) and much worse to me if I let anything but death separate me from her.

And that damn well includes your bigoted laws.

But, it's not Welfare, so it's OK!

Ok, so when black people or Mexicans need a government bailout so they can eat or something, that's WELFARE, and that's BAD! BAD BAD! They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! They should not have made those mistakes!

But, when Wall Street banks need a government bailout, well, that's ok. Also, if you are an aspiring suburbanite who bought a house you can't afford, you can get a government bailout and that's ok too.

I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the latter class (Wall Street/pretentious dumbass) tends to be white. And Republican. Because for all the griping people do about their hard-earned money going to welfare: HEY! Two Hundred Million of your Hard Earned Dollars just went to some guys up in NYC who have more money right now than you will ever make in your entire life! We could have fed and clothed the poor population in the country for YEARS. YEARS!

Oh, right. They're black. Or wetba---- I mean Mexicans. And we don't like them, do they? They are LAZY! All of them! It's genetic.

Also, homosexuals are worse then Terrorists and are converting your two-year-olds.

War? What war? You mean the one we've been in for five years that we started? The one which has had 83974238 turning points? And on which we have spend more Hard Earned Dollars than I care to think about because my student loan interest is compounding by the nanosecond (also, we could have fed everyone in the country on steak for a few centuries)? Yes! That one!

Clearly caused by the homos.

An Image of Awesome.

I have learned how to image my computer.

For those not-quite-so-geeky as James and I, that means you save a "snapshot" of your computer's configuration to an external source so that if some crap goes down and your computer goes with it, you don't have to spend 94593485734967 years reinstalling and reconfiguring and getting everything back just right (another way to do this if you don't have a full image, but -have- backed up all of your programs and files is to use a registry backup, but this is more hardcore and thus more foolproof than that).

Why am I just now learning this? Well, what it is, is that I want to install Xubuntu on my laptop. Xubuntu is a distribution of Linux (and a derivative of the Ubuntu distribution), which is an open-source operating system (read: free). It also uses considerably fewer system resources than Windows, which makes it a great choice for older machines. While my computer, despite what Best Buy may say, is not old (I bought it October 2006), it will run cooler on Xubuntu because of its use of fewer resources and therefore will last longer. I am a fan.

Xubuntu is meant to be able to install itself without jacking up your Windows partition, but I would rather be safe about it, hence the imaging.

Most of the reason that I had avoided imaging previously was because of the prevailing idea that you have to use CDs or DVDs to do it. This is the equivalent to backing up your entire "My Documents" folder to floppies. In other words, lame. So, I decided to see if this Linux utility, System Rescue CD, could do it better.

Yes, it can. I have a 2.5 inch hard drive in an external case that I've used for several years to backup my laptops in their various incarnations. It has fallen out of use on account of I use the desktop to backup my laptop over our home network, so I checked over its contents, saw that it all was old, and reformatted it (which clears all data). I booted up my laptop from the System Rescue CD and then plugged in my external. Lo and behold, SysRes recognised the thing. Huzzah.

A note about this external: I bought a plain, naked hard drive and an aluminum box which has an IDE connector adapted to a USB port in one end. The whole thing was less than fifty bucks. Don't buy "external hard drives." You're getting taken for a ride. This affair connects via USB 2.0 to your computer and more or less acts like a USB Flash drive, only giant.

At any rate, instead of imaging my computer to a mountain of blank CDs, I am imaging it to another hard drive. It is going to take an hour and forty-five minutes because I am compressing the image; since this external is from a couple of laptops ago, it is only ("only") forty gigs and my current hard drive is ninety or something, so I had to have it compress in order to fit. Apparently it compresses -very- small because the process is now thirty-two percent done and the file size is just about 800 megs. That is to say, it has compressed 12.66 gigs into 800 megs. Nice.

I think that, knowing what I currently know, I am going to dig out my laptop before this and see if I can't stick Xubuntu on it. Details when I have them.