Hold it! What is steampunk? Probably one of the most exciting interests you’ve ever seen. I’m just a wannabe steampunk, to be honest, but I love to at least imagine my little 19th century world in my stories. Find out what steampunk is here. I think that steampunk is a bit of a strange word for it, so I prefer Re-Victorian or Retro-Victorian. Ah, well.

In my online travels in search for a beautiful watch, I found many steampunk pocket watches that were actually quite amazing and not very expensive. I also found goggles, clocks, lamps, and typewriters– and then I found it (or them, really). The most beautiful keyboards I have ever seen:

Makes you want to buy one, doesn’t it? Too bad these keyboards run around $1200-$1500 apiece. However, there are instructions to build your own, so I just may do that in a few years (unless I’m astonishingly rich, which, as we all know, I will be; I’ll just buy one anyway in that case). These keyboards and much, much more can be found at www.datamancer.net.

Oh. My. Heavens. I wish I was cool like this gentleman:

The Steampunk Lappy-- with wind-up gears and everything.

And last but not least– the true coup de grace– “The Computational Engine” case mod (yes, that’s a computer with a typewriter as a keyboard; and that little circle thing in the base? You got it– it’s a CD drive):

You or someone you know may work for Jordan School District. I can’t say that I’m sorry for anything I’m about to say. I know several people personally who work for Jordan School District. I’m not labeling every employee of the district incoherent. I will label the superintendent and part of the school board as not only incoherent but also prideful, greedy, and downright stupid. Barry Newbold and your nitwit cronies: you’re idiots. Idiots. Just how did you get instated as the supreme administrator over the security of the future of West Jordan– of part of the State of Utah– of part of the entire nation? Just how did half of you board members get voted in to literally help decide the fate of the knowledge, intelligence, happiness, and futures of the tens of thousands of children who comprise the Jordan School District? Do you even realize that we have entrusted you their twelve-year (thirteen including kindergarten) daily lives of these tens of thousands of impressionable and knowledge-needing students with the faith and confidence that you would decide correctly and wisely what to do with what is given to you? Or have you forgotten that you were a child once? Have you all been blinded by personal agendas and the pride that leads to the destruction of nations? What’s a quarter of a million dollars’ paycheck every year when the future becomes too dismal and unstable to even use it? Remember, you fools, that your job is to administer education, not to make enough money to pay off half- and multi-million dollar homes; not to have nights on the town on multiple business trips that are more grandeur than business; not to, on a whim of pride and vain ambition, direct the futures of our children, the livelihoods of our underappreciated educators, and the livelihoods of the hundreds of thousands who pay the taxes that run our collapsing educational institution.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A person I know went to a public meeting yesterday concerning how the district was going to fund itself (the said meeting didn’t end until 1:30 in the morning, by the way). The current proposal is to raise property taxes by 40%. This isn’t just another annoying raise of taxes. There are many citizens, if this proposal goes through, whose taxes will be raised by multiple thousands of dollars and who will not be able to pay said taxes, resulting in the ejection of them and their families out of their homes. These aren’t the ones who live in half- and multi-million dollar homes; those who can’t afford those homes have already lost them or are well on their way to getting what’s coming to them. These are people who are retired, who have paid-off homes and make enough to get by now, or who are only making enough money to live with the bare necessities and pay for their homes. The person I know who went to this meeting knows of dozens of children who attend our public schools who are literally homeless. I suppose that they don’t have to worry about losing homes they don’t have due to taxes they can’t pay. They live in cars or run-down shacks or dumpy trailer parks that cities try to shun and hide from the public eye.

The economy is tough. Education is taking an especially big hit, and especially in Utah. Education seems to be ignored by those who should be funding it more; it’s quite sad, really. The Canyons district splitting off from the Jordan District didn’t help matters, either. The people on the East Side (who now comprise the Canyons District) had many less students in the system than the West Side (many older couples and empty-nesters over there in the East– many wealthy ones, too), and so they were fed up with paying for the District’s public education and having more of their money go to the West Side than the East Side simply because, for this current generation, there are more children in the vastly expanding West Side. I’ve heard of some snobs from the East Side saying that they don’t want to pay for the West Side’s little “monsters” and that if we’re going to “keep on popping out children,” we should pay for them ourselves; some have also said that people should stop having “large families of more than two kids” and that people with large families and financial struggles shouldn’t get tax cuts because they’re the ones who are making everyone else pay more. The fact of the matter isn’t that the West Side has a rodent problem and that people with less or no children shouldn’t have to help pay for overall education in the area. The fact is that these are children and they deserve proper education; everyone should be happy to help pay reasonable taxes in order to fund the future, especially if they’re wealthy and can more easily than others afford it. At any rate, the East Side’s whining and eventual split from the West Side’s district didn’t help the Jordan School District one bit, and even the East Side is having problems with their new, unexperienced task force, and they will find that when these older people start kicking the bucket and young and growing families start moving in that they won’t be able to fund themselves. The West Side by that time may have switched shoes because we’ll be huge and raking in quite a lot of cash, I believe, and many of the households will be wealthier empty-nesters. Where will the East Side be then? Where the West Side once was. This whole split has simply upset a delicate balance, and I don’t think that the education system in these two districts will stop feeling the effects for decades, if not beyond a century (assuming that they still exist by then).

Back to the Jordan School District– who ought to be taking the blows like men and leading the district the best they can despite these seemingly unsurmountable odds. The District has frozen and/or reduced the salaries of the teachers and eliminated retirement even for veteran teachers who have taught for multiple decades. On the other hand, they haven’t reduced the pay stubs of the superintendent (who makes nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year) and around (so I read) 150 people who make over one hundred thousand dollars per year. There are also around 100-150 people (perhaps they are the same group) whose jobs with the District are no longer needed due to the split and the reduction in students and teachers that now belong to Canyons; they refuse to let these people, who are raking in checks of $100,000 per year or more (probably near $200K), go even if they were to find these people new and well-paying jobs. These people are skilled enough to find new good jobs even if they have to accept lower pay than before. Letting go teachers, janitors, and others who, the most of them, don’t make more than $40,000 per year, isn’t going to help matters as much.

As a side note about money issues, I’d also like to address the wasteful spending that goes on in the District. I used to work as a sweeper when I was younger, so I know how long schools leave their lights on, wasting electricity. I would stay after hours at my high school often until six to eight o’clock in the evening when I was only one of few people still there aside from the janitors, and yet lights were all on full blast. Some technology teachers keep computers running 24/7. Most of the hall lights usually don’t need to be on, and computers running when nobody is there is really quite stupid unless they’re servers or are rendering a project that takes longer than a school day. If the District made an initiative to turn off a large fraction of hall lights after regular school hours (unless there is something publicly big going on such as a concert or an official game when they would be needed), made sure that teachers turned off all of their classroom lights and computers upon leaving, and worked hard to make sure that anything that consumes power unnecessarily would be removed, I’m certain that the District as a whole could save itself several million dollars every year at the least.

Also, at the school where I used to work, I remember perhaps half of our custodial task force during summers would, when the head janitor went on vacation, sit around for one, two, three hours, and sometimes the entire work day talking and playing Halo, and then they would write down at the end of the day that they had worked the full hours; that was several hundred dollars stolen every day. Even during the school year, the head janitor often left after school before everyone was done working. I knew of at least two of the sweepers who, after he left (which was usually only an hour into the working schedule for us sweepers), would write down working three hours and then leave. This didn’t only happen at my school; I have talked to several current and former sweepers from around the district, and it seems prevalent in much of the teenage custodial fleet. This probably amounts to several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of stolen money from the District every year.

Besides these stupid money problems that seem so obvious to the public is that the superintendent and half of the school board refuse to listen to the public. They called the meeting because they were required to by law, not because they were going to listen to all of the good ideas that were brought up to avoid the tax increase. They already have their minds made up and are going to vote for this ridiculous 40% tax raise that will truly lose many people their homes and just send more students into poverty, causing them to have no interest in education because they are preoccupied with surviving.

After a bit of Google Research, I found a good blog called Utah’s Arch. The author also went to the district meeting, and he says it all pretty well in his latest post; he probably has a much better understanding of the situation than I do as he’s a home owner, married, and he probably has/had children.

Anyway, I’m a bit fuming about this entire thing. I only just graduated several months ago from West Jordan High School; I’m glad to be free of the District. I’ve run afoul of some of their policies several times through my years at WJHS, but I enjoyed every bit of it– **censored by order of the queen so as to protect myself from impossible, laughable, and imaginary arrest**, and more. Anything to gum up the district that has been royally fouling up my education the past decade. Ah. Joy.

By the way, I’m not prejudice against the East Side. I only find it very rude of the snobbish ones of the East Side who are wealthier than much of the West Side who complain about the West Side and who have caused additional trouble for everyone.

I have a proposal, Sir Newbold. I propose that you are forcefully ejected from your useless throne, Jordan School District is successfully, happily, and finally dissolved, and we all work together as a West Side community to build up a new district from the remains. This is just wishful thinking as that would definitely cost a chocolate chip load of money that doesn’t exist.

If the District keeps up the way it’s been heading for at least the past five years, I foresee the collapse of our education system. It’s not only a sad thing for the students who are and will be getting sub-par education, but it’s also sad for the thousands of teachers who slave away getting paid a tenth of what they deserve. More and more good teachers are taking their skills to higher-paying jobs, and we’ll be left with rabble teachers to raise up rabble students who will become a rabble population, and then where will Utah be? It’s not any one person’s fault, though we can certainly attribute a lot of blame to how bad the superintendent, his minions, and the board of education is running the District. I’m no expert, but I believe that Utah could definitely be giving more money towards public education as they are supposed to. We’d need a new administration who actually cares and knows what to do with this money, but destruction wouldn’t be eminent if we had enough money to run things better and if we didn’t have selfish nitwits running the scheme.

Anyway, to what Moroni had to say in the last chapter of Mormon, including verse numbers and linked footnotes courtesy of LDS.org:

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

Julie and I were merly planning to take a nice few hours under a shady tree in the West Jordan city park (AKA Veterans’ Memorial Park) and write in my story a while. This we did, sitting under a lovely old tree across the street from the West Jordan Library in a little grove where relatively few people wander. I took out my netbook, Julie snuggled in the grass, and we commenced. Aside from a little boy who was fluent in Spanish mock-barking at Julie, we sit for some time, undisturbed and happy.

Suddenly, as if a call from the heavens, we heard it. A train engine’s horn blowing. I turned to Julie, she to me, and we knew then what me must do. I slapped my netbook closed, stuffed it in my backpack, and Julie and I began running as quickly as our legs would take us towards the West Jordan Sugar Factory. We ran across the entire diagonal length of the park, behind the Gene Fullmer Grossness Center, and into the rodeo stadium parking lot as the gate was unlocked and it was quicker to cut through there (the fence separating the back of the Sugar Factory and the stadium parking lot has a section cut out of it).

Near the fence between the Sugar Factory and the parking lot, we saw piles of dirt and several small backhoes scattered about. Not having much time, we skirted past these strange apparitions, into the Sugar Factory grounds, and out the back gate that leads to the City Hall complex as well as an unfenced section of railroad track. The horn had stopped sounding, and we still didn’t see any train. Hoping beyond hope that a train was still coming, we walked all the way down nearly to Redwood Road. Still nothing. A kind, smoking construction worker said hello as he filled his truck with water from a fire hydrant while we meandered about this dirt road connecting the Sugar Factory and City Hall complexes with a depressed aura about us. Julie got a drink from the dripping fire hydrant tube after the unhealthy construction worker drove off to spray water on some dirt, and then we moped our way back to the Sugar Factory.

Once there, we walked past a backhoe taking chunks of asphault from the edge of the factory parking lot, past a sleeping construction worker in one of the dump trucks, and then into the back of the factory. We shouted into one of the holes in the back of the silos and listened to the reverberations (one of our favorite reasons to go to the Sugar Factory), played with a yellow golf ball we found, analyzed the short shadows of the silos at that time of day, investigated a garage door behind which sleeps the West Jordan Monster, and then went back out of the cut fence to the rodeo parking lot.

Upon going past the fence, we remembered the abandoned backhoes and piles of dirt, so we went closer this time to investigate. We found behind the piles of dirt about a hundred foot long ditch that had been dug, and inside were the remains of some old cement foundations for some ancient warehouse built for, I assume, the Sugar Factory back nearly a hundred years ago. We were so very intrigued by this that we trudged up and down the foundations and even into the ditch where the foundation was more than just a wall of sorts. There was a large cement block with a trap door in the top, and the door was missing. Inside of this cavity was a collapsing bunch of wood with a lot of dirt piled inside, so I’m not entirely sure just what it was. There were massive cables and rebars sticking out of the crumbling cement, and there were also some iron pipes and strange iron constructions sticking out of the foundations. In the piles of dirt, we found many broken and whole bricks, pieces of wood, and more curious iron pipes and works. One of the bricks we found had an incscription on it, so I took it home with me to add to my museological collection:

The only letter that seems to fit the broken off one is “D,” making the acronym “DFC.” I’ve done a little bit of research and have concluded that, from what I could find, the only probable connection to DFC is the DFC Ceramics company. DFC has been around for around one hundred and eighty years, and they seem to make ceramics for a wide variety of purposes– casting, melting, molding, baking. I wonder if they had something to do with the making of this brick. Architects always seem to mark their buildings in some way (West Jordan High School has a brick near the main entrance with the architect’s symbol inscribed in it), so I think that this brick is more likely the architect’s mark saying “I built this building. If you find that its remains in almost 100 years in an archeological dig, please give me credit and make me feel special even though I’m dead.” (Researching more, it appears that the Sugar Factory was built by F.M. Dyers & Company… if you rearrange the first letters of F, Dyers, and Company, you get DFC. Hm. Shrug.)

After exploring this most exhilarating archeological dig and then finding and exploring another one further north, Julie made it known unto me that she was very hot and thirsty, so I took her to the nearest puddle and let her have a long drink. We thereafter made a deal that we would go to our shady tree in the park and rest until she felt well enough to go home. After shaking to bind the contract, we commenced towards our tree.

Upon reaching the little shady grove, we were appalled to find two nearly middle-aged adults publicly displaying types of affection that we didn’t want to see. We were about to leave this abhorrent scene when Angel Moroni descended from the heavens and told us that we needed to be valiant and not let the fair city of West Jordan be overrun by hormonic demons such as these. After giving Julie a blessing for courage, Moroni ascended again and left us to the battle before us. Bracing our spirits, Julie and I sat under a nearby tree and made as many loud noises as we could without looking at the pair. Soon after this barrage of noise, our battle tactics proved successful! The two nearly middle-aged lovers stood up and walked off in a huff to their separate cars (if that doesn’t have “affair” written all over it, then I don’t know what does) and proceeded to drive away.

Our victory secured and West Jordan safe from the rabble once more, Julie and I went home. She slept for hours on the kitchen floor.

THE END

**Captain Moroni never descended and spoke to us; that is fiction. However, we did feel a heightening of courage that I attribute to my ancestors from Denmark and England and Julie’s ancestors from sheep farms in England rooting for us on the other side.

I said I wanted to write one post for every day in July so as to be a true NaBloPoMo person, but, as my loyal readers (if any) will be able to tell the passers-by, I have not been faithful in this particular quest. I concentrated on more important things and more important writings. Ah, well. Perhaps in a month or two I will make another attempt. In the meantime, I’ve some major goals to accomplish, and the time that they need to be completed is drawing nigh.

To fulfill the second section of the title:

If I didn’t advertise for IPF³ on my own blog, I’d be a hypocritical blasphemer with a sprinkle of heresy on the top. Sort of like what the politicians’ characteristics generally are. In this case, I must proclaim that Idiosyncratic Protectional Field³’s Swag Store has officially launched as has a temporary home at the IPF³ Launch Pad.

Yes, folks. That’s http://ipfcubedpad.wordpress.com.

The IPF³ website is still in the works. This is not the home of IPF³. It will be at its own .com address.

Yawn.

I wish the system administrator would get on top of things. I am really itching to build the website. Ideas floating around in heads too long can begin to make dents.

In what he posted, there was a quote. I will quote it below:

There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.

I had to re-read this because I wasn’t sure if I read it right the first time. When I realized that it was saying what I had thought it said, I nearly fell out of my old swivel chair. Now, there is a law in nature that applies to many things, especially in multiplicative stances: two negatives make a positive. This, however, does not apply to truth: two falsehoods do not make a truth, and the above quote is no exception… to the exception.  The “imaginary beings” in the quote were obviously meant to be God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and, by extension, angels, prophets, and disciples written about in the Holy Bible, and the entire Nephite and Lamanite populations in the Book of Mormon. There is undoubtable physical evidence that Jesus existed as the bible says, but the quote means to say that He was not the Son of God nor the Savior of our souls and the world.

Firstly, addressing these so-called “imaginary beings:” If my Heavenly Father and my dear brother, Jesus Christ, were imaginary, I would have known this a very long time ago and made sure to tell people about it; I work in the imagination every day, and I’ve not seen them there in all of my years here on this earth. They sometimes use the control panel of the imagination if I let them use it, but they do not dwell in imaginary places. I know this.

Secondly, addressing the falsehood that “there is not sufficient love and goodness in the world:” Love is boundless– boundless– especially when it comes from Jesus and God. Their love for the human race, as stupid as we are, is incomprehensible in magnitude and beyond the minds of men in encompassment. Even when we purposely go against Their commandments and teachings and we come under condemnation, They still love us as much as they did before we let ourselves act foolishly. The power of human love is more powerful than we may think it is. True, pure, unconditional love is impossible to destroy. (To quote Princess Bride, “…you cannot break [love], not with a thousand swords.”) True, pure, unconditional love drives men and women to do the most noble of acts that no other power or influence brings mankind to do. It was true, pure, and unconditional love that drove the Lord to perform the most noble act in history’s entirety, that being the Atonement in both sacrificial parts (to save us from sin and torment and to save us from death). Love is an echoic device in that giving it away rebounds it back; it is echoic, yes, except that, opposite from the echo heard in a canyon or a wide field between buildings, or in similitude of the reverberation of sound in a cathedral, love, when given in its pure form, does not diminish in quantity until it cannot be sensed: love, when given in its pure form, reverberates louder still. Heavenly Father is not imaginary, neither are His Son nor His Spirit, nor is the love that I feel from Them and the comfort through the Holy Ghost. I see God’s hand in all things. One need only look for it with hope.

I have and still do give my love to imaginary beings, however– Eedie and Roobix chiefest amongst these. Because of these imaginary beings, I know I am a better and happier person, and I am more capable of loving than I would have been without them. Even if the quote in question is put in the context of true imaginary beings, it is still false. Philosophers are sometimes blinded by their own blessing and ability to create new ideas– a blessing, I might add, that not only comes from God, but that, I believe, is more similar to the very nature and being of God than almost any other blessing. The blessing to create imaginary worlds and imaginary people and entire lifelines and the blessing to produce, from seemingly “nothing,” new ideas, trains of thought, and philosophies, all is a shadow of and testifies of God’s matchless power to create real things. We mimic Heavenly Father sometimes without even thinking about it; it is our spirits that long to become like him one day. This is something that the conscious and subconscious levels of neurological power can only bury and pretend don’t exist.

It is with full boldness of heart and mind that I profess and testify irrefutably that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are real beings, that Their love fills the world– no, the universe– with hope and charity and peace and rest, that there is more love and goodness in this world than can be used up (our problem is that many of us don’t use it or exercise it enough or at all). I feel and know these things beyond doubt, and I cannot and will not deny them for anything. Heavenly Father is my God, Jesus Christ is my Savior, the Holy Ghost is a Comforter, and all of Them are my friends. I write these truths and mean them with my whole heart, and I pray that Heavenly Father and His Son may, through the Spirit, touch the hearts of those who will not see, comfort those who are troubled, lift up those who are weak, confirm to those who doubt, and bring to light those who are in the darkness, if not through my words, through the words of another.

I seal these words in the name of our Savior, my dear friend, my Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen!

Whew! That felt glorious!