Christmas Eve - a good time for feel good stories?

I woke up this morning to a warm, muggy Christmas Eve here in Miami. The headlines abound with feel good stories of soldiers coming home for the holidays and the impending rain that is due to fall by tonight. There's always going to be good and bad in a society on any given day. Christmas is no exception...

The Miami Herald today wrote about a Cuban Woman, apparently the wife of one of the 3 Cuban spies that just last week were traded back to Cuba. She wanted to get pregnant and the Cuban Government collaborated with the CIA to get her some of his sperm. Yes, you read that correctly: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article4834107.html The US GOVERNMENT helped a convicted spy get his sperm to his wife so she can get pregnant. This story is all about Christmas Cheer, right? We helped a thug, who was a convicted felon here in the US, get his wife pregnant. Where in the annals of US doctrine does that felon have rights that allow for that??

That is a disgusting story and I am not happy that an animal like that, who was directly responsible for giving information to the Cuban government, is able to procreate. It's just not right. OK Rant over.

I have tons of mixed emotions with the Cuba thing. Most of it is a passionate & emotional response to what happened 50+ years ago with my own family. I refuse to allow this generation of young adults to grow up and forget the stories that were told and lived my our forefathers. I will always tell our stories and continue to be a proud CUBAN-AMERICAN. My parents and grandparents fought to leave the oppressed country so that I would have a bright future. Everyone deserves a free future.
Merry Christmas to whoever is reading...

The Road to Married... The Big Day plus 77 days AND TANGENTS!!

The last statement on my last Blog piece was "I love the planning stage". Well, I do. I can talk about it, blog it, make lists and go on and on. Once the event is over, I'm like a person in deep mourning. I've abandoned the blog once more because I didn't know what to write about.

My friend Alina said I should write about anything. Write about the stupid people you encounter. Write about politics. Write about how much I like Rick Sanchez (no judgement, it's a secret crush). So I'm going to try just that to see if I can get some creativity flowing from my brain.

This mourning period has to pass. It's been 77 days since the wedding. A wedding and honeymoon, which is quite possible the most fun a couple can have if they truly belong together. Nelson and I had a grand trip and we made the most of every day. I have 2200 pictures to prove it, and not creative outlet to show for it. I tried Shutterfly and pic Monkey but I'm in a creative coma. I don't want to look backwards and create a photo album, I want to look forward and plan more trips. Psychotic, I know. 

So I'm going to try something new. I'm going to write and then create. I'll give myself a few hours daily to create and edit a few pictures at a time. I want to get through this. I'll get behind in the projects and then I'll never finish and never have a proper photo album. That's not fair to Nelsons. He should be able to see what the painstaking hours of photography at the top (and bottom) of Matador Beach looked like. What the hours of photography at the Partners Statue at a minuscule Disneyland Castle can look like....

Wow, this just took me on a major tangent... Blogger just auto-corrected my spelling of miniscule. Which led me to research miniscule vs minuscule: According to the website: english.stackexchange.com  The word was originally minuscule, borrowed from French. The minuscule spelling has always been the preferred spelling. However, miniscule is not as simple as a typo. According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary): Variant of MINUSCULE adj., probably arising partly from shift of stress from the second to the first syllable, and partly from association with MINIATURE adj., MINIMUM adj. 

So, there are two reasons that miniscule persists as a variant.

The first is the shift in stress. In English, unstressed vowels are often reduced to schwa, [ə], no matter what the fully stressed vowel would have been. Minuscule used to always be pronounced with stress on the second syllable (containing the "u"), and was therefore unambiguously an [u] sound. When minuscule began to get stress on the first syllable, it was no longer clear from hearing the word what the second vowel was. The second was the existence of semantically similar words that contained the spelling mini, such as miniature and minimum. The word mini is associated with small things.

Therefore, a person spelling the word minuscule, having no auditory cues to indicate the spelling "minu", and knowing other smallness words contain "mini", has every logical reason to think the spelling should be "miniscule". 

Furthermore, it should be noted that minuscule has its origin in lettering, as in writing letters of the alphabet. The "minus" in this case means less, not small, and it means lower-case letters. It is the opposite of majuscule. (This makes the most sense to me, since in Spanish, the capital letters are "majuscula" and the lowercase letters are "minuscula")

See what happened there.. a neat little tangent became something to write about. I still plan to finish the wedding and honeymoon photo albums. They are memories that deserve a story. 

I'll keep trying to remember to write. As I have more things to say or acquire more readers, I'm sure it will be easier. There will always be someone that says or reports something that make a story. Thanks for listening. Here are a few pictures of my events so you can see it truly was an amazing trip: