Sara's Spot

Hiking to the "M" Trail

2006-04-08T22:24:00.001-06:00

View from the top III
Originally uploaded by SaraS.
Today I went for a short hike up the "M" trail here in Missoula. This picture is from the top (or at least near the top) -- although since the trail actually continues on past where the "M" itself, I guess it isn't really accurate to say this is the "top."

Anyhow, this is actuslly the second time I climbed to the M. The first time was back in August of 2001, way before we even had the idea of moving to Missoula. I was participating in the Montana AIDS Vaccine Ride, a fundraising bicycle ride from Missoula to Billings. We were in town for a few days before the ride actually started, so on one of the days, I hiked to the M with a few other riders.

Somewhere I have pictures...you know, the old fashioned printed kind you get from film! I should dig those up and scan a few.

Anyway, I noticed a huge difference this time. Last time I hiked to the M, it was after several months of training for the ride. I weighed considerably less and was in much better shape. That time, the hike was much, much easier than this time! I remember we even kept going up the trail after reaching the M!

I'm too lazy to post all the individual pictures here, but I did create a photoset of them on Flickr.

View from my office on a foggy, rainy day.

2006-04-08T22:16:00.000-06:00

View from my office on a foggy, rainy day.
Originally uploaded by SaraS.

Took this picture last week from my upstairs window.

Solitude 2.

2006-03-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

Now looking forward, where the trail or tracks from others ought to be.

Solitude.

2006-03-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

March 4, 2006.

Lolo Pass, on the border of Montana and Idaho. At the top of the ridge on the snowshoe trail.

Looking back.

in denver.

2006-02-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

waiting for my connection to chicago.

Busy Weekend

2006-02-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

Laura had to work Saturday, so I rented some cross-country skis from The Trailhead and went to the Lubrect Experimental Forest for a little skiing. Amazing how you get just a little bit outside of Missoula and there is plenty of snow! We haven't had any significant amount of snow on the ground here in Missoula in weeks.

I took a few pictures...

~~Tonight we're going to see the Marriage of Fiagro.~~ OK, so I wasn't paying attention when Laura said "Sunday." We are going NEXT sunday, NOT today.

Tomorrow morning I leave for a week back at the office in Illinois. I just finished squeezing a week's worth of clothes into a rolling carry-on. This time I'm flying United through Denver. Hopefully the plane out of Missoula will be a normal size one with normal-sized overhead compartments. In January, I took Delta, and I couldn't fit my bag in the overhead bin.

Exactly who is doing the shoving here?

2006-02-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

Let's say you have an open house type event in which you invite several people with the understanding that they might invite additional people to come along as well. So, people you perhaps have never met are going to be coming to your house. You are just fine with this.

Let's say they're doing this because you have an interesting collection of art about puppies or something. So all these folks are coming to look at your cute puppy pictures up on the walls.

All is going fine, until one person comes in, admires the art for a second, and then notices you standing next to your spouse with your arm around said spouse. Did I mention that both you and your spouse are of the same gender?

This person freaks out and says "what is this display of homosexuality doing here, at a party that was supposed to be about puppy art? Why is this topic shoved in my face everywhere I go?"

Remember, this is your own home, which this stranger entered completely voluntarily. There are no armed guards at the door preventing the stranger from simply turning around and walking out.

How would you react?

This all came about because of this odd circumstance. A posting I made with some cute bunny pictures was linked to by Cute Overload. This generated a ton of traffic to my blog. Someone who came to my blog via this link somehow managed to stumble onto one of my other posts discussing same-sex marriage. There were no links between the posts, so I've no idea how she got there, but she was apparently shocked and horrified. Her comment:

How does a post about Homosexuality make it's way into even a site about animals. Is there no end to having this subject introduced (shoved down our throats in "every" arena? If I missed some point (I didn't completely read the article) my apologies.

I'm afraid my response was not particularly polite, although I did make an effort.

So, here's the situation. You voluntarily go to a blog. You then purposely browse around to other postings on the blog. You see a mention of something you don't like, and all of a sudden, something is being shoved down your throat? How self-centered is that?

I think discussion and argument are fine things, and I would welcome both here. If BetteT's post disagreed with the substance of my post, if she had a counter-argument, anything like that, we might have had a discussion. It could have been a heated discussion, but still...it would have been a discussion. But her comment is not an argument or a disagreement. It is nothing more than whining about how she was exposed to a topic she doesn't like, and somehow this is just awful. Even though, again, she came here voluntarily and always had the freedom to leave if she didn't like what she found.

This reminds me of an argument I got into on another blog once, right when Brokeback Mountain came out. Someone complained about having homosexuality--and specifically gay sex--shoved down their throat (by who? they were vague on that point. "The media", I guess). I pointed out that, given the publicity, everyone who isn't living under a rock ought to know exactly what they will see in the movie, so if you don't want to see such things, then DON'T GO SEE IT. Why is this so hard?

I see this silly "shoved down my throat" thing so often that I've started looking around for these armed guards that force people to read books, go to movies, and keep their TV's tuned to content they don't want to see. I can't count the number of times I've found myself pissed off by a blog and decided to just stop visiting. Quitting reading National Review's The Corner had done wonders for my blood pressure. I'm still waiting for the armed guards to show up at my door and shove the National Review down my throat.

Here's the bottom line, and it is so breathtakingly obvious that I can't believe I am writing it here. If you read or watch something you don't like, you have three choices:

1. Stop reading it. Leave the web site. Close the book. Shut off the TV. Don't fork over your 9 bucks for the movie. Don't put the DVD in your player.

2. Read or watch the objectionable thing, then come up with a decent argument about why it is bad. Critique it. Argue against it. Write your own version the way you think it should be. Create your own blog and fill it with your own rants about how the world ought to be.

3. Whine about how this awful thing is being "shoved down your throat." Demand that it go away. Complain that you are being "forced" to see things you don't like.

I don't know, options 1 and 2 seem pretty reasonable. Option 3 sounds like the choice of a petulant child.

ok, this is nifty. I

2006-02-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

ok, this is nifty. I just discovered how to post from my phone!

Catching Up

2006-02-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

So, I've been very lazy about updating my blog since we moved to Montana. I probably would keep on being lazy, except for the sudden interest in the bunny post.

With so many people visiting my blog for bunny pictures, it just seems like I should say something profound. I may never have this many people reading my words again!

Since it has been a long day, here are a few brief thoughts, although they are probably not particularly profound.

Health Care

This story horrifies me. Will someone please explain how a doctor or nurse is harmed by providing treatment to a person who lives in a manner that the doctor or nurse disagrees with?

Displacement
Also from Daddy, Papa, and Me -

This post from early January talks about "internally displaced persons" -- basically gay and lesbian folks who moving from "unfriendly" states to "friendly" states as more and more states pass extremely nasty anti-gay laws and constitutional amendments. This topic is particularly odd for me because in one sense, we did the opposite. We moved from blue Illinois to red Montana. However, so far our Montana experiences have all been good. Missoula is in many ways far more liberal than the specific suburb we lived in before.

Movies
For example, a couple weeks ago we went to see Brokeback Mountain at The Wilma. The movie actually got out here in Montana much sooner than we expected. We went to see it after it had been here for a few weeks. We went on a Tuesday night, because there is a small discount on that night.

The theatre was PACKED. Absolutely packed. We went to the 7 PM show. When it got out, the lobby was already packed with people waiting for the 9:35 show. I was amazed.

As for the movie, I thought it was good. I've read the short story on which it was based, so I knew what to expect. When making a movie from a short story rather than a novel, it is pretty easy to stick to the story and get everything in!

I do think it is ironic that in a movie that had so many people up in arms about all the "explicit gay sex," the heterosexual sex scenes were way more numerous and explicit.

Books
Lately, I've been reading The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins. It goes through evolution backwards. That is, starting with today, he traces evolution back through all our common ancestors with other creatures.

Highly recommended -- he's got a great way of explaining things that make sense. I'm about halfway done at this point.

Who Knew Bunnies Would be so Popular?

2006-01-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

Well, this was unexpected. A site called Cute Overload linked to my post about the bunnies we had in the backyard last May.

And now I've had well over 2000 visits, way more than I've ever had in a day before. I mean, my normal average per day is about 10.

Apparently, people like pictures of bunnies.

I appreciate the traffic, and please, bunny-picture-people, have a look around. I have lots of cute pictures of my dogs and cat as well. Here is Cricket, the one who found the bunnies. This is Xena, who, like Cricket, would have been happy to eat them, but she is afraid to go outside. This post features both Cricket, Xena, and Bailey, my shih'tzu with bad allergies who itches all the time.

When you're done being overwhelmed by the cuteness, I'd like to clear up a few things. First, this all happened last May, so there's no point in telling me to stop bothering the bunnies. They are long gone.

Second, the mother bunny did not reject the babies. In fact, the post everyone is visiting points out that she visited the bunnies again AFTER the incident that is photographed.

Third, although we took lots of pictures, we really didn't handle them much. Maybe once or twice. Most of the time, I just carefully moved aside the grass and took pictures. Initially I used a pair of tongs to move the grass rather than my hands. Later, once they started moving around, I had to hunt around the yard to find their hiding spots.

Speaking of hiding spots, it was pretty obvious that the bunnies did not develop any trust of humans. Once they became more mobile, they hid whenever anyone came into the yard. Then, over a few days, they all disappeared.

We had a second set in late summer/early fall. I took a few more pictures, but never posted them. I don't think we touched that set at all. At one point, we didn't know that they were moving around yet and Cricket got to chase one across the yard. She (the rat-terrier mix) was terribly humiliated to be completely unable to catch a BABY rabbit. Those bunnies were fast!

Anyway, everyone who was worried that the bunnies were in danger -- you can relax. They're probably off doing whatever it is that rabbits do during the winter.

At the Airport

2006-01-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

I spent the last week back in Illinois, going into the office like a normal person. It was a little odd to actually have to drive somewhere every day to go to work, instead of just walking up the stairs!

It was good to see my co-workers of course, although I did miss Laura.

Anyway, I've discovered the biggest downside of this whole telecommuting thing...there aren't many flights in and out of Missoula, and all of them go through a hub before getting to Chicago. I can fly through Salt Lake City (Delta), Minneapolis (Northwest), or Denver (United). I think I could also take Alaska Air through Seattle, but that is just going backwards!

So, this was my first trip back. I took Delta. Monday morning was OK, though the flight was late getting out and I had to jog through the airport to make my connection.

Today I looked at my itinerary and realized I had about a THREE HOUR layover in Salt Lake City. Won't get home till 9 PM. Argh! Laura suggested trying to go standby on an earlier flight, which was a nice idea but impossible. There are no other flights out tonight.

So, I got bored enough that I ponied up a few bucks for wireless access here in SLC so that I could do a blog post. It's about 6 PM Mountain time now - we'll probably start boarding in an hour.

I really do love the whole live-in-Montana-and-work-from-home thing. Having to travel back like this and spend most of the day in an airport is a small price to pay. But still...maybe Northwest will have a better flight schedule...

Blog? What Blog? You Mean I Have a Blog?

2005-12-30T22:56:00.000-07:00

OK, so I've been lazy. I can't believe I haven't posted anything since November 26!

It is ironic when I think about starting this blog. Laura thought the whole thing was kinda weird. Then she created hers a few months later and has been so much better than me about staying updated!

Anyway, too much has happened since November for me to recount it in detail here. The summary:

Dec. 5: Went cross-country skiing in Pattee Canyon, I think maybe a week or so after the walk I described in my last post. It was a "demo day" with a local shop called The Trailhead, so I got to try out different skis for free.

Dec. 11: I couldn't convince Laura to try skiing with me, so instead we tried snowshoeing instead. We both had a great time. We initially went on rented snowshoes (again, from the Trailhead), and liked it so much we bought our own. Alas, we've been unable to go again since then. A few pictures here.

Dec. 14: Stayed out way too late the night before we were to have the walkthrough on the new house.

Dec. 15: Closed on the new house, but did not officially own it until about five days later. We did, however, start moving in the next day (Dec. 16). Apparently there were some issues holding up the actual funding of the loan and so forth. Went shopping and ordered a new dining room table, sofa, and end tables from the Ashley Furniture store here in Missoula.

Dec. 16: Rented a Uhaul and moved most of the big stuff from the rental to the new house. Also moved some little stuff, like the cable modem and router. To a house with no cable connection yet. This was the start of nearly a week without online access. At this point, I had a good excuse for not blogging!

Dec. 17: Mayflower delivered our stuff out of storage. Finally! Some of these boxes were packed LAST SPRING when we were decluttering the old house to go on the market.

Dec. 18-19: Unpacked, tried to organize my new office as usable as possible.

Dec. 20: Went to post office to get keys to the mailbox. Note to self: five days before Christmas is a terrible time to go to the post office for any reason.

Dec. 20: Went back to work (telecommuting)...with no internet access. No e-mail. Discovered that the post office keys didn't work either, so no snail mail. I've never felt so cut off from civilization in my life!

Dec. 20-22: Drank a lot of lattes at the nearby Barnes & Noble Cafe, using their wireless internet access.

Dec. 22: Bresnan finally got around to transferring our cable TV and internet to the new place. Got back online right around the time many of my co-workers back in Illinois were taking off for the holidays.

Dec. 23: Laura called the post office and was told they switch out the locks on Tuesdays and Fridays. Assumed I got the keys to late on Monday to get on the schedule. Someone from the post office came over and opened the box so we could get a week's worth of mail.

Dec. 24-25: Went to see the in-laws in Bozeman. Had a nice time, but Laura's mom was very obviously not feeling well. She stayed home from church on Christmas Eve, which I think might be a first.

Dec. 26: Went shopping and spent money received for Christmas. Also took Bailey to a new vet (conveniently within walking distance of the house!) to see if they could do anything for his miserable itching and nasty break-outs. They took skin samples to try and better diagnose the cause of the rashes, so now he has little stitches in a few spots. They also tested his thyroid, which is low, and gave him medication for that. Who knows, maybe it will help. The cortisone shot has helped as well.

Dec. 27: Discovered the mailbox keys still don't work.

Dec. 28: Called post office again and was told someone would fix it and leave NEW keys (we had the wrong kind) at the post office. So I went to the post office. They couldn't find the keys. The supervisor promised to fix it the next day and BRING me the keys.

Dec. 29: Finally got mailbox keys that work. Had much excitement in getting the snail mail.

Dec. 27-today: Worked, unpacked, worked, unpacked, etc. We had to get all the boxes cleared out of the dining room by tomorrow when our new dining room table arrives.

Wow. I can't believe that 2006 is just about here!

Winter Walk

2005-11-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

Went for a short walk up in the Pattee Canyon Recreation Area here in Missoula. I'm looking forward to doing some cross-country skiing up there, maybe in a few weeks. The trails didn't look groomed yet, although I did see a few skiers out. I haven't cross-country-skied since around 1999 and I'm delighted to be living in a place with so many cool places to go!

Anyway, a few pictures:

The start of the trail

Sign pointing out where the heck I am

A mountain visible through the trees

Baby trees!

From the parking lot

On my way back down

Still on my way down

Almost Forgot

2005-11-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

Apparently I've been doing this blog thing now for one year!

Well, a year and a day if you count my first post, which was all of one line. One year if you start counting from the first post that actually says something.

It's actually kind of amusing to read this post, where I described some of the topics I planned to write about. One of those topics was Montana, but I didn't really give any hints that I was planning on moving here. This move was in the planning stages at that point (we've been planning this since around April or March of 2004), but for a variety of reasons I couldn't really talk about it yet.

At any rate, it's been a year. Hard to believe!

Compare and Contrast

2005-11-23T17:56:00.000-07:00

View from my house last Thursday:

Approximately the same view today...it has been like this since Saturday.

It is a good thing I have pictures so I can remember what the sky looks like!

Official

2005-11-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

My Montana voter registration card came in the mail yesterday. I completely missed the most recent election since we were literally in the process of moving, but I'm all set now for the next one!

Slowly all the little things have been coming together to make my move more and more official. Last Friday we went in and picked up the new Montana license plates. Montana has a huge selection of specialty plates that cost a little extra and benefit various groups. I know Illinois had these, too, but I don't remember there being so many! We picked the plate for the Montana Wilderness Association. It looks like this:

The other plate in the running was this one:

It looks odd to see something other than Illinois plates on my little Civic!

Paint!

2005-11-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

Drove by the new house today. They've finally put the first coat of paint on the outside!

First, our half of the townhouse:

Then, the whole thing:

I suspect it will be a while before they get to the trim, since it has to dry enough for a second coat first.

I absolutely love the color! I will be glad when the exterior work is done -- at this time of year, weather could really delay finishing the house. The longer I live and work in this tiny rental house, the more anxious I am to move!

Winking dog!

2005-11-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

Winking dog!
Originally uploaded by SaraS.

I just thought this was too funny not to post. I've never seen Cricket wink before.

Tormenting the Pets

2005-11-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

Visited Petsmart today (hence the comment about horses in the previous post) and decided to solve the problem of the dogs shivering all the time:

First, Cricket:

Then, Bailey, who always seems to look crabby:

No, we didn't get a sweater for the cat. I don't think I want to try and put one on her!

Things that are Different

2005-11-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

There are the big, obvious differences since moving here of course -- particularly my view of mountains right out my window:

But then there are the little things that don't jump out quite so much, like these:

Radio ads for hunting supplies (ending with the tagline "The buck stops here." Groan).
Radio ads for car service places mention hunting ("get your rig ready for hunting season!").
Radio ads for ski stores.
Radio ads for horse supply stores.
Petsmart has a whole section for horse stuff.

I'm not in Chicago any longer!

Quick House Update

2005-11-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

No pictures, though. We drove over and took a look last night after work. The front walk has been poured and was apparently dry, because the plastic that had been covering it the previous day was gone. This was nice because we could get to the porch without walking through muck!

We peeked in the windows with a flashlight to see the new appliances. There is also a big stack of interior doors in the living room waiting to be installed.

The best part, though, was when we drove down the alley to see the back. The garage and back of the house have been painted! I've been very anxious about when this was going to get done given the cold and wet weather lately. Hopefully they'll get the rest of the house painted soon as well. I am very excited to see the "fireweed" paint color on the house for real. Laura picked out the colors back in September (with my input over the phone), and I have been looking forward to seeing them for real ever since. I love the fact that I'm getting a red house.

From what I could see with a flashlight, the color looked great. I'm looking forward to going out there again this weekend so that we can see the color in the daylight and get a few pictures.

Telecommuting, Day 1

2005-11-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

My first day in my home office went pretty well. I will be very glad when the new house is done, though. At the moment, my "office" is just a desk pushed up against the back wall of the living room:

Note that I had to expand some of my supplies onto the window sill and the pass-through to the kitchen. Also, this is extremely neat for me -- my desk is normally strewn with papers and files. I just don't have the room here to really sprawl out.

Since my office is in the living room, I discovered today a need for noise-canceling headphones to block out Laura's activities (particularly the TV). We made an emergency run to Best Buy after work today, so I should be set for tomorrow. They'll be handy when traveling on airplanes, too. At least that is what I'm telling myself to justify the expense. Laura is looking for a job (she applied for several today - go wish her good luck!) so presumably eventually she won't be around while I'm working, unless she ends up with a job with irregular hours or something.

The rental house does have a second room that used to be a porch before it was enclosed. I considered setting up my office there, but the house only had one cable connection, and we really didn't want to string a huge piece of cable across the whole house. Since we're renting, we can't exactly ask the cable company to install additional outlets, either. So, that extra room currently is our storage room with the bicycles and empty boxes.

At any rate, so far I'm liking this whole work-from-home thing. My high-speed Internet connection was solid all day and I had no trouble getting to stuff at the office. I didn't miss my one-hour-each-way commute at all, although I do have a whole pile of unheard audio books and podcasts on my iPod. I need to figure out exactly when I'm going to actually listen to those now that I don't have that drive!

In other news, it has been snowing ever since afternoon. Real snow, not rain! Laura is thrilled. I am not used to snow quite this early, but I'm kind of liking it (especially since I don't have to drive an hour to the office in it!).

Back to Work / Snow

2005-11-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

So, today will be my first day back at work since our move...telecommuting from my very small temporary house. I spent much of yesterday organizing my desk space so that I can actually function here. I'm hoping the new cable Internet doesn't go out at an inconvenient moment -- it was solid yesterday, but somewhat flaky Saturday morning.

Woke up this morning to a dusting of snow on the porch and some flakes coming down. You can't even see the mountains that are normally visible from the front porch.

Bailey didn't like his morning walk much. He has been pretty crabby ever since we moved.

In Missoula!

2005-11-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

We've been here, in Missoula now since Monday around noon. I don't yet have Internet access at the rental house, so I can only blog/surf from the hotel. Why are we staying in a hotel? Because our stuff has not yet arrived. We tried sleeping on cots the first night we were here, and it lasted all of thirty minutes. The animals find the cots comfy, though:

My welcome to Missoula was less than great, as it was raining when we got here. According the locals, it had been beautiful the day before. Go figure. Then we drove by the new house, and I panicked a bit because the siding was the wrong color, and not the cool red we expected. Apparently, it comes from the factory white and they paint it after it is up, which makes perfect sense. I was thrown off by the fact that the base white color is very similar to one of the trim colors we picked, so I worried that they had flip-flopped the colors somehow.

I was a little concerned Tuesday morning when we woke up to more cold, gray, rain. Laura said "I warned you that it is gray in the winter here," to which I responded, "yes, I thought by 'winter' you meant, like, January, not November!" Fortunately, it did clear up a bit. The last few days it has been drippy and rainy in the morning, and then a bit more clear in the afternoons. Possibly snow by the weekend. This morning it was obvious that it had snowed up in the mountains a bit -- you could see the line on Mount Sentinel where the snow stopped.

Overall things are going pretty well. We've been to Target just about every day since we got here. We're hoping that we won't need to go back at least for a few days now. It is pretty odd living in two places -- the Comfort Inn and the rental house. Waiting around for our stuff to arrive is making me very anxious, especially since I need to setup everything for telecommuting by this weekend so that I can start work on Monday. I was hoping to spend these last few days unpacking and organizing, not running errands and sitting around on camp chairs in an empty living room! It also doesn't really feel like we've moved when we're staying in the hotel -- it feels just like so many other vacations. I don't think the fact that we've really moved will sink in until we actually have our stuff at the rental house.

The new house is looking great and coming along fast. I'm really hoping we can close early in December and get settled well before Christmas. We did a walk through yesterday, which was nice for me since I never got a chance to see the inside of a unit like ours when we bought it.

A few pictures:
The tiled entry:

The back of the house from the detached garage:

Master Bedroom, with a view of the backyard and garage:

View from the room that will be my home office (I am SO looking forward to working here!):

And a few pictures from our drive:
Crossing the Mississippi from Wisconsin to Minnesota. I like the shadows of our bicycles on the roof of the car:

Cricket getting bored in South Dakota:

Arriving in Wyoming after the very long trek across South Dakota:

Arriving in Montana at last!

A view of the Tobacco Root Mountains on the final leg of the trip:

Climbing Homestake pass:

Crossing the divide!

Exhausted in Mitchell, South Dakota

2005-10-28T18:47:00.000-06:00

So, I haven't posted in a week, but I have a good excuse. By the end of the weekend, everything was mostly packed up. The movers came Tuesday afternoon and cleared out all our stuff. We kept the laptops, of course, but I only spent about 10 minutes in the house Tuesday night, loading the car-items up before driving to my parents' house so that we could stay in some place with a bed (not cots on the floor!)

Wednesday I was busy at work wrapping things up and making sure my laptop is all set up for effective telecommuting.

Thursday morning we closed. It took a long time because the title company had to wait on some other form the buyers needed to sign. We were all done except that, and had to sit around for about half an hour chatting until things finished up and I got the big check in my hands.

Then we opened a new bank account at a bank that has branches in Montana, ran a couple other errands, and spent the rest of the day vegging out at my parents house. The cat was somewhat traumatized by spending the day in a strange place -- my parents' sunroom, but she did seem to relax by evening.

This morning, Friday, we were up by five A.M. and on the road by 6:16 (yes, I noticed the exact time, but forgot to set the trip odometer). We gave the cat a tranquilizer. She fretted in her crate for a bit, then relaxed and dozed the rest of the way. The dogs all behaved well, but they have always been good travelers.

It is a very long drive from Batavia, IL to Mitchell, SD. And now I am exhausted. I have to say, though, this is the first time I've been in a hotel that has a notice informing you that if you leave your gun in the room out of a case, the housekeeping staff will not clean the area around it. And leave your dog in its crate, or the staff won't enter the room at all!

It appears to be pheasant season here. Several guests arriving at the same time as us did indeed have gun cases with them. I remember driving to Montana last November and being taken aback by the site of dead deer and elk in the backs of trucks on the road. I suppose this is something I will just get used to...

Home Stretch Weekend

2005-10-21T08:58:00.000-06:00

So we're getting down to the homestretch here on the packing and cleaning. The movers come Tuesday to haul our stuff off to Montana. The other day, I finally finished transferring really old files from my old Macintosh to my current computer. Afterward, I discovered how easy it is to disassemble a Macintosh LC III:

Today is our last trash day while still owning this house, so we wanted to get as much garbage out as possible. Laura overdid it yesterday while I was at work, hauling so much stuff that she is very sore today. I helped when I got home. We have to put a garbage sticker on each item. We went through about 25 stickers:

The dining table alone took quite a few -- six chairs, the two base parts, and the top. We had intended to donate it, but no one wanted it because the top needs refinishing.

Anyway, I took a vacation day since we're down to the homestretch...although everywhere I look I see so much stuff to be packed! How did we end up with all this stuff??

What Do You Need?

2005-10-15T15:56:00.000-06:00

I don't usually do these things, but this was pretty funny. From David at Better Living Thru Blogging, type your name and "needs" into google and see what comes up.

So, here's what I got:

1. Sara needs...a loving, playful home (hmm, playful?)

2. Sara needs to discover the experts in the area. (Experts in what? In what area? Why?)

3. Sara needs...you (that's rather vague)

4. Sara needs...your vote (I cannot imagine even wanting to run for office)

5. Sara needs to hand him one of those weapons (I don't have any weapons, unless you count pocket knives)

6. Sara needs...something more than the well-established love of her companion (I don't think Laura would like this one)

7. Sara needs...a caesarean section (I'm wondering what they would find in there. Does someone know something I don't?)

8. Sara needs...further surgery (More surgery? After the caesarean? OK, I am staying away from people with knives for a while!!)

9. Sara needs to quit whinin (I'll quit "whinin" when you learn how to spell!)

10. Sara needs to shut the hell up (Um, no. Sorry. I will NOT shut the hell up)

I did 10, but there were a few more down the list that I found funny:

Sara needs...insoles (well, my feet do tend to hurt a lot. I hate buying shoes)

Sara needs...sleep (always!)

And let's end with the most bizarre:
Sara needs...to mate with a comparable alien, not human, to keep her new perfect species alive (er, what?)

Taxes, Domestic Partners, Marriage

2005-10-10T20:23:00.000-06:00

Conservatives like to claim to be all in favor of tax breaks, except of course when those breaks might benefit gay couples. Likewise, they are all about getting government's nose out of private business, except for when private business wants to actually help out gay couples.

See, I'm currently in the process of enrolling in my medical benefits for next year, which is a great way to get a "nice" reminder that, while domestic partner benefits may be a lot better than nothing, they are not anywhere close to "marriage." I should probably point out that my company was acquired last year, so this is the first time I'm enrolling in the new company's plan.**

So, I go to add Laura as a dependent and I get a reminder that I need to provide additional documentation on our relationship. Funny, I strongly suspect that the married folks don't need to fax copies of their marriage certificate to someone two states away, but OK, whatever. We'll fill out the form and track down a notary public.

Then there is the tax issue. Most people don't think about the portion of their health benefits that the employer pays--they only worry about the amount taken out of each check. In our case, we need to worry about both.

First, the payroll deductions that cover MY part of the benefits are all nicely pre-tax, thus lowering my overall tax burden a smidge. The deductions for Laura's part, however, are not. They will be deducted post-tax. OK, it isn't a huge amount and it isn't as though it would put me in a different tax bracket, but still, it is a difference. I suspect this difference would become even greater if we were to throw a kid or two into the mix.

Then there is the matter of the premium that the company pays for our benefits. You know, the part that you never see, that you don't even think about. Can you even name the amount your company spends on your health benefits each paycheck? Anyway, for my part of that premium, all is fine and I can pretend it isn't there. But the amount my employer pays for Laura's benefits will be conveniently tacked on to my taxable income and reported to the IRS, so I get to pay taxes on it. How exciting. At the present moment, I have no clue how much this will amount to, but given the rising cost of healthcare I keep hearing about, I suspect it won't be a tiny amount. If my employer's share of the premium is equal to my share, it will be at least $1,500 for the year. I strongly suspect that my employer and I are not splitting the cost of the benefits 50/50, so it will probably be more than that.

And all the "small government conservatives" out there are perfectly happy with this arrangement. More taxes! From certain people, anyway.

Oh, and the part about the government's nose in private business? While poking around to figure out exactly what the DP benefit requirements are, I stumbled across a page indicating that DP benefits were not available in certain states due to state law. That is, the same insurance company that is perfectly happy to cover domestic partners in Illinois is forbidden by state law from providing those benefits to employees in, say, Virginia. There were four or five states on the list -- fortunately not including Montana where we will be living in less than a month. It did look like some of the plans could still be used in those states, but not others.

What do you want to bet that the people behind those particular state laws call themselves "small government conservatives" (also sometimes known as "republicans") when they're not busy passing legislation forbidding insurance companies from selling insurance to certain types of people?

**I should also point out that my complaint here is NOT with my company. I do appreciate the DP coverage and I'm glad it is there. My employer isn't trying to be unfair, they are just constrained by this:

The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that domestic partners cannot be considered spouses for tax purposes. Thus, employers are obligated to report the fair market value of the domestic partner coverage as income to the employee. The employee must pay income tax on that money.

Although I did not know until visiting the above FAQ that legislation was introduced to fix this inequitable situation in 2003. It appears to have been referred to the Ways and Means committee. I've no idea if it ever has hope of seeing the light of day. I do find it interesting that the vast majority of co-sponsors are Democrats. I thought Democrats were the ones who want to make us all pay more in taxes. They must have been confused to co-sponsor a bill that would reduce my taxes!

I am also amused / horrified / saddened by this description of the bill from a so-called "pro-family" site (emphasis mine):

Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act of 2003 attacks the institutions of marriage and family. Current federal law excludes the benefits of employer-provided health coverage for spouses and children from being included as taxable income. However, if those benefits are offered to someone other than a spouse or child, they are taxable. H. 935 seeks to provide special rights for homosexuals by amending the Internal Revenue Code to treat homosexual partners as married spouses so that an employee whose company is providing health insurance for a homosexual domestic partner is no longer taxed on the value of that insurance.

Did they really write that with a straight (ahem) face? They describe (correctly) the inequity in taxation, then state that removing that inequity is giving homosexuals special rights? They have a funny definition for "special." And I don't even want to think about how self-centered you must be to see a change in taxes that doesn't affect you as an "attack" on yourself.

No, I won't provide a link. Just google the full name of the bill ("Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act") and I'm sure you can find it.

Sometimes I Wish I Could Write Poetry

2005-10-10T19:29:00.000-06:00

But, since I can't, I'll just recommend this.

We Must Be a Stop on the Migratory Superhighway

2005-10-08T09:07:00.000-06:00

There was a bit of a ruckus in my neighborhood this morning.

This was the view out my back door. The roofs are my neighbors off our alley.

This was the view from my front porch of the houses across the way.

The pictures don't do it justice. Stepping outside was to step into a cacophony of noise. The birds were gathered on every single roof I can see from my house.

Ten minutes later, they were all gone. Not a single one left in the neighborhood.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love autumn? So much better than the hot, humid summer.

Does it Look Like Someone Might be Moving?

2005-10-05T20:30:00.000-06:00

A small sampling...

Boxes in family room...they are taking over...creating a wall between the living and family rooms

Breakables waiting to be packed

Boxes in the loft

Snow!

2005-10-02T10:43:00.000-06:00

Didn’t I just comment about getting used to winter in Montana?

Laura was talking to her parents this morning, and apparently it snowed in Bozeman last night. As I’ve now confirmed at bozeman-mt, thanks to the tip from Big Sky Blog.

I’ve been told by Laura that snow this early in the season usually melts with a day, but still.

My various friends and co-workers here in Chicagoland think I’m crazy for looking forward to living in a place where it snows in October. Although I would have preferred to move during the summer, I’m still looking forward to this. I have a couple pairs of old cross-country skis in the garage that haven’t been used in years. Once we move, I plan to get new boots, replace the bindings, and find some good cross-country trails in / near Missoula. According to this, it shouldn’t be hard to find a few good spots.

I’ve never done downhill, and Laura doesn’t like it, so I don’t expect to do much downhill skiing. We’re thinking of checking out something like this, though.

This site seems to be a pretty good starting spot for finding Montana weather. The web cams of the various mountain passes are cool, too.

Some Good News from Connecticut

2005-10-02T10:18:00.000-06:00

As reported by The Zero Boss. Civil unions were passed back in April and went into effect Oct. 1.

As the Zero Boss notes, the gripe that somehow gays are thwarting democracy won’t work this time, since this was passed by the elected legislature and was not compelled by the courts. Not that that will prevent the inevitable whining from the right, I’m sure.

Incidentally, I think creating something “separate” but “mostly equal” from marriage for gay couples is silly and somewhat wasteful – why not use the perfectly good laws we already have? But, from a purely practical standpoint, civil unions are better than nothing.

OK, Another Test

2005-10-01T13:41:00.000-06:00

Still trying to figure out if the Blogger for Word thing is worth bothering with. So, here is a post with a few pictures. A few weeks ago, we had another batch of bunnies show up in the yard (the link in this sentence should go to Laura’s blog).

Here’s Laura holding one of them:

And here is another hunkering down in the long grass:

We’ll see if this post shows up with links and pictures intact.

UPDATE: the links work. The pictures don't. Blogger for Word converts the brackets around the html to something else so they show up in the published post as code rather than as pictures. I had to manually fix them up in a text editor again. Maybe it is just a matter of using a special style or something in Word, but for the moment, it doesn't look particularly useful.

Seems like a good idea, but…

2005-10-01T13:33:00.000-06:00

So, Blogger now has this nifty “Blogger for Word” add-in thing. I installed it and tried to use it for my last post (the “Slacking Off”) one. It worked in the sense that it did publish my post. It completely failed in the sense that it mangled the HTML I had pasted in for the Flickr pictures. I finally copied the post in a text editor to repair it.

So, I’m trying it again with this post, with no pictures or links. Still, what is the point of using a tool that can’t handle pictures and links for blogging? Grrr.

Slacking Off?

2005-10-01T13:25:00.000-06:00

Think maybe it is time that I mowed the lawn?

I kept this up pretty well while the house was on the market, but now that we’ve got our offer and we’re just waiting to close, I’m finding it awful easy to slack off.

My gerbera plant has also seen better days:

Banned Books

2005-09-29T20:57:00.000-06:00

Got this from frogblog. A list of the top 100 most banned/challenged books. The idea is to highlight the ones you've read.

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel [only the first three]
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Good News in Michigan

2005-09-29T20:12:00.000-06:00

This has no impact on my life, seeing as I have no plans to live in Michigan, but it still made me happy to hear:

A judge in Michigan ruled on Tuesday that the state ban on same-sex marriage does not infringe on domestic partner rights.

If you're not familiar with what happened in Michigan, here's a quick recap. Last November, Michigan passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The specific text of the amendment was this:

To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as marriage or similar union for any purpose.

During the campaign for this amendment, the people proposing it insisted that they had no intention of taking away anyone's benefits. They were proved to be liars less than a month after the election when a state representative began pushing a resolution to block domestic partner benefits for state and city employees. I blogged about my outrage here.

At any rate, the good news is that the issue ended up in front of a judge, who ruled that the vague wording of the amendment did not bar domestic partnership benefits at all. From this article:

In the opinion, Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Joyce Draganchuk makes it clear that the constitutional amendment does not impact domestic partner benefits.

“Health care benefits are not among the statutory rights or benefits of marriage. An individual does not receive health care benefits for his or her spouse as a matter of legal right upon getting married,” wrote Judge Draganchuk. “Health care benefits for a spouse are benefits of employment, not benefits of marriage.”

Well, duh. Employers offer all sorts of benefits to their employees for all sorts of reasons. Some companies might offer DP benefits out of a sense of fairness, recognizing that gay employees also have families that matter to them, but that doesn't change the fact that the benefits are really just compensation, just like salary and any number of other "fringe" benefits. I recently learned that my employer will provide "pet insurance" next year. Does this mean they have somehow "elevated" my pets to the same level as children or spouses?

Waiting

2005-09-27T19:55:00.000-06:00

Laura has been complaining that I haven't posted much lately. So, here is a post.

We are waiting to find out if our buyer's financing is approved. This should happen by this Friday and all the parties involved (real estate agent, lawyer, etc.) tell me there is nothing to worry about. So naturally I am worried. I'll be glad when this is finalized.

Assuming all goes well, we will be heading to Montana at the end of October.

When we started planning this whole adventure, I had hoped to move during the summer so that I could enjoy nice weather before my first Montana winter. Alas, no such luck. Talk of snow in September? I have much to get used to.

House Notes (Both Old and New)

2005-09-13T19:23:00.000-06:00

Things are moving along on the house selling front. We're ticking off the various contingencies on our buyers' contract and counting down to our October close date. Everything is going well so far. The inspection only turned up a few minor issues that we need to fix. The appraisal has been done. I think the buyers are fairly close to having their financing officially approved.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will all work out and we'll be hitting the road to Montana by the end of October.

We have tentatively lined up a place to live until our new townhouse is completed, which should be in December or possibly early January if anything slips. This is still a little shaky, as it is actually a small house (one bedroom!) owned by our Montana realtor. The house is currently on the market and could sell between now and when we sign our lease. It will be interesting being renters again -- even for a short time -- and living in such a small home! Our new house will seem huge in comparison!

Speaking of the new house, it is progressing nicely. Laura flew out to Missoula yesterday to pick out all of our custom stuff -- paint colors, flooring, light fixtures, etc. Today she called me repeatedly with various questions and updates. She also took lots of pictures of the progress...apparently the house is fully framed and roofed already!

We decided on red for the siding and a light beige color for the trim. The paint they use is Sherwin-Williams, so I pulled up their nifty
"color visualizer" to see how the colors will look on an arts and crafts style home. If you're curious, the red is "fireweed" and the trim will be "antique white." Our house will also have a third accent color, which will be "camelback."

Flowering Herbs

2005-09-10T14:18:00.000-06:00

My basil and mint plants have both sprouted flowers. I'm hoping that pruning them back will help make them useful for a little while longer -- my mom has actually volunteered to take them in when we move (my parents have a nice sunroom which is great for wintering plants).

Anyway, the basil flowers are a pretty shade of purple:

The mint, on the other hand, is not particularly attractive:

For reference, some much earlier photos of the plants are here

Great Big Bugs

2005-09-09T19:31:00.000-06:00

A couple evenings ago, I leashed up the dogs for their evening walk. I stepped out on the porch, looked up, and saw this:

Cool! Well, I thought it was cool, but Laura doesn't like insects much, and she REALLY doesn't like huge insects like this. I just left it alone, since praying mantises eat other insects and pests (although according to this, "larger species have been known to prey on small lizards, frogs, birds and even rodents.")

The next morning, the praying mantis was gone and there were very few insects hanging around my porch. The next evening I checked again, and sure enough, the insect was back, this time creeping up the side of the porch:

I haven't seen it again this evening, so maybe it has decided to lurk around someone else's house. Laura finds it disturbing, but I think it is kinda cool!

Minor update - there are a bunch of cool praying mantis photos on flickr here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/prayingmantis/clusters/

Scooped Again!

2005-09-06T19:48:00.000-06:00

Once again, I have been scooped by Laura. In the event that you don't visit her blog (she gets more traffic than me, so chances are you do visit her blog!), here's the deal:

We sold our house.

That is, we got an offer, which we accepted. Obviously it isn't over till we close, but still, this is working out far better than I expected. We actually got TWO offers on the same day (yesterday). Since it was a dual-offer situation, both buyers offered more than the asking price. We are actually getting pretty much what I had hoped to get way back at the end of April when we first put the house on the market.

So apparently all my anxiety about owning two houses will go to waste. What a relief! Instead of owning two houses, we will be temporarily homeless!

The buyers we accepted said they would prefer an October close date, but were flexible and didn't want that to be a sticking point. As it happens, October works out fine for us -- more time to finish packing, and less time in temporary housing while we wait for the new house to be finished. Our Missoula real estate has a small house she will rent to us for the two months until the house is done in December.

At the moment, I still have trouble believing this has really happened. Months of showings with little interest, and then two on the same day! I will never understand the real estate business!

Back from Montana (a Little Late)

2005-09-04T13:12:00.000-06:00

One of the problems with living in a two-blogger-household is that it is very easy to just never get around to posting about certain topics. Sometimes I may start sketching out a post in my head, but long before I can get to it, Laura has already discussed it. A natural tendency towards laziness rears up, and the post I had been composing wanders off and ends up in that stack of "meant to do this" in some back corner of my brain. This happens quite a bit, especially since Laura currently has much more time on her hands for blogging than I do.

So I realized this morning that, other than my post yesterday about Katrina, the last time I posted was from a hotel room in Missoula, Montana! I've been back from that way-too-short trip now for a week and a half and I never posted about how it ended up, or all of our pictures!

If you do read Laura's blog, you probably already know most of this. We decided to go ahead and buy a townhome in a new neighborhood called Hellgate Meadows. The foundation for our lot already exists:

The house should be ready sometime in December, which means we really must sell our current house soon. We did get some good news last weekend -- we had two showings the same day, and one of the groups had our house on their "short list" of three. I am still holding out some hope that they will buy it. In the meantime, we're probably going to drop our price a bit more so that we can stay competitive with all the other houses in the neighborhood. Supposedly the real estate market tends to pick up after Labor day, so I have high hopes.

Back to the Montana trip. I was there just a few days -- arriving very late Saturday night (Aug. 20) and leaving in the afternoon on the following Tuesday (Aug. 23). In that time Laura showed me around several of the neighborhoods and houses she had rejected. We also visited the Hellgate Meadows place several times. I "tested" how it would be to walk over to the Barnes & Noble -- as noted here, walkability is an important consideration for me. I still mourn the loss of mature trees, but in my long list of "wants" and "needs" for the new house, the Hellgate Meadows townhome met more of them than most of the other places. So, we took a deep breath, went back to the real estate agent's office, and wrote up the offer.

A few pictures from the trip. Some of these were previously posted on Laura's blog:

This is an existing house similar to ours, although ours will be a different color (we haven't chosen the color yet):

These two pictures are from the alley behind the above house, showing what lies to the immediate south of our new neighborhood:

I hope the people who own that land hang on to it and resist the temptation to sell. I love the idea of all that open space so nearby! And no, the smell of the horses does not worry me in the least. It isn't as though there is a huge herd of cattle living there.

This one was taken from where the front porch of our new house will be:

There are some lots immediately across the street that will have houses, so this view won't stay quite like this. Hopefully it should still be pretty good from the second floor room looking in this direction. I plan to use that room as my home office.

I admit I am nervous about this. I would have felt better selling our house first, before committing to buying a new house, but it just wasn't practical. There aren't many lots left in this particular neighborhood, and apparently they are very popular. The green house shown above was built in 2003. The owners put it on the market and it sold in less than a week!

At any rate, we did try to just do a few vacation-like things during the way-too-short trip. We went for a short walk in Greenough Park where I took this shot:

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Parkside, which is right next to Bess Reed park and has great views of Mount Sentinel:

Finally, I made Laura pull into a parking lot so that I could get a shot of this -- apparently, despite the name, this is NOT a gay bar:

Reality Check

2005-09-03T08:46:00.000-06:00

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.
CNN Article

I am getting really tired of the constant refrain of "why didn't they leave" in reference to the victims of Katerina. John Scalzi has a couple great posts addressing this.

I don't have the personal experience to completely relate to the "Being Poor" post, although I suspect that Laura does. But still, I thought maybe I could play a little reality check game here...bear with me.

Back in late 1993/early 1994, I was a new college grad with a "professional" job with a now-defunct accounting firm in downtown Chicago. I had a somewhat overpriced studio apartment in a fairly posh neighborhood (Lincoln Park). My salary was not phenomenal, but it was enough to pay the bills and rent. I suspect my means were typical for people my age, in their early twenties, getting started at their first "real" jobs after years of school and summer work. I came from a comfortable, middle-class background.

I did not own a car. At the time, this seemed like a wonderful benefit of living and working downtown -- no car payments, no insurance payments, no need to even notice gas prices. I took the bus or the "L" to work. I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, poor.

I want to emphasize that I was exceedingly "responsible." I did not live off the government or my parents. I took care of myself.

Now, lets pretend that one day it was discovered that a great calamity was about to hit Chicago, and everyone started evacuating. What would I, a college-educated, middle-class, and far from poor single woman do?

I had no car, so driving away was not an option. I had just moved to the city so I didn't have any city friends to catch a ride with. My co-workers mostly lived in the suburbs and commuted to work via train, so they weren't available either.

Aha! Trains! I could take a train out of the city! Except, lets say that the Metra stations shut down due to the impending calamity, much as the Greyhound stations, trains, and airlines in New Orleans:

"Delta Air Lines' decision to end its regular passenger air service out of New Orleans just after midnight Saturday was based on assessing the safety of its planes, employees and passengers, the accessibility of the airport and the projected course of the weather....

...Other airlines considered the conditions operable longer. American flew its last plane out at 1 p.m. Sunday. And US Airways flew two-thirds of its schedule Sunday, with its last plane departing at 1:30 p.m...

...Other transportation modes also cleared out of New Orleans at least 24 hours before the hurricane hit...

...Amtrak had no choice; its tracks run through the city's levees. Once officials in Louisiana put the floodgates in place across the levees, said spokesman Marc Magliari, "we had no usable route in and out of the city."...

...And Greyhound, which ended service in New Orleans late Saturday, said safety was its priority. "We operate as long as it's safe," said spokesperson Anna Folmnsbee."

OK, now I'm here stranded in my fancy studio apartment, with no car or train transportation out of the city. City buses and Greyhound follow the same model as Metra and shut down. Now what do I do? Walk? I suppose I could call my parents, who live about an hour away in a suburb, but what are the odds of them being able to drive in here, pick me up, and drive back out in all the evacuation traffic on time? We could all end up stuck out on the road together when the calamity hits!

Not knowing exactly how bad the impending calamity might be -- after all, in this scenario Chicago has faced this sort of thing before and survived OK -- wouldn't it be somewhat reasonable to just hunker down and hope for the best, rather than endangering even more people in a last-ditch attempt to flee? And heck, maybe this calamity is coming when my parents are off in Wisconsin on vacation or something. Now what? Should I just start walking out of the city? And be caught by the calamity out in the open, unprotected?

Remember, in my little scenario, I already have more options and resources available than most of those folks trapped down in New Orleans. I have a little money in the bank, assuming I can get to an ATM of course. I am not quite living paycheck to paycheck, although it is close. I have family nearby that could, possibly, manage to help. I don't need to take care of any young children. I'm not elderly and frail. I'm in good health.

Even with all those advantages I would have had difficulty getting away in time.

Maybe all the judgmental morons criticizing the citizens of New Orleans should shut up for a bit and reflect on the blessings in their own lives.

Seem to Be Repeating Myself

2005-08-22T08:17:00.000-06:00

In Missoula, MT since late Saturday night. Yesterday we did quite a bit of picture taking. While browsing the pictures on the laptop this morning, I noticed something a little odd.

Here's one I took yesterday from a little lookout point on the Clark Fork river:

Here's one I took when we were here last November:

Even the angle is eerily the same. Apparently, I just like that shot.

I also did the same facing the other direction from the same spot. Again, yesterday:

And last November:

I need to get moving here so we can go get breakfast and decide whether to buy a not-yet-built house. Much more to come, later.

Defending Starbucks

2005-08-20T08:29:00.000-06:00

I've recently taken to listening to a couple podcasts. One of them is the Feast of Fools, a humorous (often hysterical) show by a Chicago gay couple.

Anyway, this episode brought up the topic of Starbucks (as in the coffee place). Apparently, the Concerned Women of America wants to boycott Starbucks because of a gay-positive quote from the author Armistad Maupin on the side of some of the coffee cups.

Anyway, this post isn't really about that part. The boycott is silly, and is unlikely to make a difference to Starbucks. In my mind, of course, that is a good thing.

During the conversation, one of them -- maybe Fausto, I'm not sure -- commented that this was funny because it now both the right and the left hate Starbucks -- the right because of this silly coffee cup issue, and the left because they are a huge, horrible corporation. Or something like that. I have heard this bit about the left "hating Starbucks" and frankly, I've never understood it.

If you don't like the taste of the coffee ("burnt" or just too strong), then fine, that is a valid reason to dislike Starbucks. All their coffee is dark roast, so you gotta like dark roast to like it. I admit I've become a coffee snob and I only like sufficiently strong coffee. I remember last November we drove out to Montana and drank hardly any coffee in the entire state of North Dakota. At all the places we stopped, it was so weak it tasted like brown-colored water. Fortunately, Montana has excellent coffee (and most of it is not Starbucks, incidentally)

But I don't understand why generally "progressive" people would dislike Starbucks. Full disclosure: Laura worked for Starbucks in Chicago (at various stores) for about 3-4 years as a low-level Barista. That's the person behind the counter who slings the coffee at you, then mops the floors and cleans the espresso machine during the slow times. She did become a supervisor for a short time before leaving, but lets be clear here -- she was not any sort of executive here.

Starbucks does all the things that I would think progressive people would like. They may be large, like Walmart, but their corporate philosophy and behavior are nothing like Walmart's:

Starbucks entry-level wages usually start well above minimum wage. No, they don't pay baristas huge salaries. But they do pay better wages than other comparable food service and retail jobs. I am taking Laura's word on this, as she worked at a number of retail jobs before Starbucks.

Health benefits. Starbucks provides full health benefits for part-time employees, not just full-time people. I believe this was the first job Laura ever had that paid health benefits. While she was working there, I left a Large Accounting Firm and went to a Small Software Company where we had benefits, but not as comprehensive as Laura's Starbucks benefits. Incidentally, Laura's pseudotumor episode happened while she worked there, and if it wasn't for those benefits, we'd probably still be in debt due to the hospital stays, MRIs, and spinal taps.

Domestic partner benefits. Starbucks has provided benefits to partners of gay employees for a very long time. Laura started working there in, I believe, 1996 and this benefit was fairly well-entrenched. I realize this has become much more common in recent years (thankfully!), but Starbucks was there early on. For a few years there, I was on Laura's dental insurance until my company got around to adding those benefits as well. My own cool, small software company didn't get around to adding domestic partner benefits until around 2001.

They support progressive causes. Hence, the gripes from the Concerned Women of America.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Starbucks does make an effort to treat the coffee farmers well and pay them fairly for their beans. Go take a look at the Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report. Incidentally, do all corporations produce such reports? I've never heard of such a thing.

Does Starbucks make a ton of money selling you overpriced coffee? Yes, they make a profit. But they could probably make much more profit if they shafted the coffee growers and paid employees minimum wage and reserved health benefits for the upper echelons of management. If anyone has any evidence of Starbucks doing such things, please let me know, because all the info I'm finding online suggests that Starbucks is operating exactly the way a progressive person would want them to.

Heck, if you don't believe what Starbucks says about themselves, then take a look at this list of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens, complied by Business Ethics. Yes, Starbucks is on it, and has been all five years the list has been in existence. Here is how Business Ethics explains what they're looking for in their list:

"While traditional measures of success focus on stockholder return, this list defines success more broadly. Using social ratings compiled by KLD Research & Analytics of Boston -- plus total return to shareholders -- our list ranks companies according to service to seven stakeholder groups: stockholders, community, minorities and women, employees, environment, non-U.S. stakeholders, and customers. Good corporate citizens serve all constituencies well. That’s the emerging definition of corporate success."

Sounds like a progressive's dream come true to me. Big business with a conscience!

Employee relations and coffee growers aside, the other big complaint against Starbucks is that they drive out more interesting local coffee shops. There is some truth to this, although again the complaint does not quite make sense.

When Walmart comes into a town, they can offer the same goods as local businesses at significantly lower prices. Hence, the local shops lose customers.

When Starbucks comes into a town, do they undercut existing businesses in the same way? Given that everyone complains about the high price of Starbucks coffee, I think the answer here is no. They don't necessarily charge less than the local coffee shops. Most likely they charge more. So how exactly do they drive out the local places?

The only answer I can find is that people start going to Starbucks anyway. And then they complain about it.

I recall a conversation with a co-worker a few years ago. She liked the Starbucks in Naperville because the baristas recognized her and remembered her preferences each day. When Laura worked at Starbucks, she worked in a very fast-paced store in downtown Chicago that was frequented by hyped-up stock traders and others on their way to high-pressure jobs. Many of these customers were regulars and Laura or one of the other employees would recognize the regulars and start making their drinks when they walked in the door. Sounds more like a friendly local place than the soulless, faceless, fast-food corporate hell critics like to describe!

Well, enough defense of Starbucks -- I need to get ready for my Missoula trip! I plan on drinking lots of great coffee while I'm there, most likely from local, downtown coffee shops.

Missoula, Montana II

2005-08-17T20:52:00.000-06:00

If you read Laura's blog, you may already know that she has fallen in love with a not-yet-built townhouse in Missoula.

So far, I like what I've read about the builder, the neighborhood, and the remaining houses available. The overall design of the neighborhood sounds much like my current one -- mixed use, a variety of different types of houses, pedestrian friendly, etc. The advantage is, unlike my current neighborhood, you could actually walk to places like Barnes and Noble (among others). Walking distance to a bookstore...now that is a huge plus!

Ever since we started planning this move I've been looking forward to drastically slashing my car use. Telecommuting is a huge part of that of course -- losing the 50 mile-round-trip drive five days a week is going to free up a fair amount of cash I currently pump into the Civic's gas tank. Being able to walk or bicycle for other errands would also be a huge help, especially since Laura might need to drive to work, leaving me stranded at home. It would be nice to be able to run out for a sandwich at lunch without needing a car.

On the other hand, I also really like the idea of a house with mature trees, which we certainly won't get for many, many years if we build new. Alas, the pros and cons.

Anyway, since I hesitate to buy something I haven't seen, we've planned a very short visit. Laura spent God-knows how much time on her parents' computer (dialup!) and the phone rearranging her flight and arranging a flight for me so that I can fly out there and take a look.

If we do go for it, our housing situation could get very strange in the next few months. If someone buys our house soon, we would end up homeless until the townhouse is done. We'd have to get a short-term rental, or move in with family members--now that is a frightening idea! On the other hand, we could continue to wait and wait for a buyer and end up owning both houses at once. The very thing I have been striving to avoid.

Missoula, Montana

2005-08-13T12:38:00.000-06:00

For anyone who doesn't know, Laura and I are planning in moving to Missoula, Montana just at soon as we manage to sell our house. I plan to continue working for my current company by telecommuting.

Laura is currently in Montana visiting her family. She spent Thursday and Friday in Missoula looking at houses with our realtor out there, trying to get a better idea of how much house you can get for the money in the various neighborhoods. She's going back again next week for another day or too. We're currently weighing some of our options -- new construction or existing? Which neighborhood? Etc. Laura is driving me a little nuts because she calls me and gushes about a house, then the next day calls and disses the same house. Make up your mind! I think part of the problem is that she doesn't want to get too attached to anything right now, since we don't know when our house is going to sell, so we don't know when we'll actually get to move. Many of the houses she's looking at now will probably be sold by the time we're ready to buy. I'm too chicken to put down an offer now and risk owning two homes!

Anyway, since I will eventually live in Montana (and I currently live with a Montanan in Exile), I regularly read the various Montana bloggers. Sharon at Watermark did this week's Rascal Fair, a roundup of Montana blog posts. Aside from a great list of posts, I discovered something else there -- a Flickr group devoted specifically to Missoula! There is also a Big Sky group for Montana pictures in general.

I may need join the Missoula group. I have a ton of Missoula pictures from our visit last November (a few of them are already on my flickr account, but not many...yet). And I definitely need to tell Laura about this. I think she'll enjoy looking at these pictures once she comes back, when she gets homesick for Montana and impatient for our move. I don't want to link to other people's pictures without their permission, so go to the group pool at Flickr to see them.

RIP Nicky

2005-08-13T11:46:00.000-06:00

This is a little overdue -- I haven't been in a blogging mood lately. Laura is off in Montana visiting her family and looking at houses in Missoula. I'm here working like normal and trying to keep the house ready for showings.

Anyway, on Monday, my parents' dog Nicky died. He was an adorable shih'tzu that they've got as a puppy, along with his litter mate Alex. At the time, my mom was reading various histories and decided to name the new puppies Nicholas and Alexandra. Nicky would have been 13 years old this October.

This is a picture of him I took last December, when we went to my parents' house to celebrate Christmas. He's in his favorite spot at the end of the sofa:

I suppose there is never really a "good time" for something like this, but it seems to me that the timing here was awful. Nicky had been having trouble with one foot for a while. They went to the vet and it was just an infection, so they started giving him antibiotics. Last week, my sister and her family came to visit, so the house was full of chaos for days. Neither Nicky or Alex are used to children, so they spent most of the time trying to stay out of the way.

Anyway, a few days into the visit my parents became very worried about Nicky and took him back to the vet. He had lost a significant amount of weight, too much to chalk it up to anxiety over the kids visiting (my theory). X-rays showed he had a tumor in his lungs and the bones in his foot were damaged due to bone cancer. It is unclear whether the cancer started in his lungs and spread to the bones or vice versa.

My parents tried to keep him comfortable and encourage him to eat. They mixed Ensure into water, but he would not drink it. Sometimes he seemed alert, but most of the time he was having trouble breathing. So, on Monday, the day after my sister's family left, they took him to the vet and had him put down.

Nicky's sister Alex still seems to be healthy, although she has started to mope. She's been with Nicky her whole life, so I'm sure his disappearance has affected her. This picture is from last Thanksgiving, the two of them together on the sofa:

This seems to be a bad year for dogs that I know. My good friend Jane lost her beautiful border collie Bandit in March. This is Bandit and Nicky together in my house. We dog-sat for Nicky, Alex, and Bandit last January/February.

They are all just really sweet, wonderful dogs. I have missed Bandit since she died; I know I'm going to miss Nicky as well.

Just Call Me Aunt Sara

2005-08-07T18:21:00.000-06:00

My sister's family came to visit this past week, and now I am exhausted. Her family includes two girls, ages 5 and 7. Well, technically they are 4 and 6, but their birthdays are at the end of August and early September, so it is close enough.

Anyhow, I am wiped out. I took off Wed-Friday to spend time with them. They were all staying at my parents' house, which is about 30 minutes from where I live.

On Wednesday we (me, Laura, my sister, and my mother) took them to downtown Chicago to the American Girl Place store. Laura wrote about that here (complete with links). It was a bit overwhelming. At the risk of caving into stereotypes, I really wasn't into dolls much as a kid, so I really didn't expect to enjoy this particular excursion. It was actually quite fun, much to my surprise. I suspect much of the fun came from watching the delight of my nieces. There was no doubt that they were having a great time, even though Grandma (my mom) made them dress in matching pink dresses and hats. Well, maybe they liked the pink dresses. I would post a picture (they were quite adorable), but I think my sister would not appreciate pictures of her kids circulating on the Internet.

I suspect the commuters on the Metra train did not really appreciate the very loud singing on the way there and back that day. To anyone who rode the 10:05 AM Metra Union Pacific West line train from Geneva to Chicago last Wednesday morning -- you have my apologies for the noise. Ditto for those on the 5:32 PM train from Chicago to Geneva.

We spent a little time with them on Thursday, then all day on Friday while my sister and her husband got a full kid-free day. We watched videos (I've think I've had enough Peter Rabbit for a while. My mom started decorating the house with Peter Rabbit stuff when the older girl was born, and she has had nearly seven years to collect the stuff. The kids decided to create a "made up" uncle called "Uncle Peter Rabbit." I think that demonstrates the overabundance of Beatrix Potter stuff in my parents' house).

Anyway, we also played outside, where the older girl was fascinated by bugs, particularly this one on a tree leaf:

She kept calling it a ladybug, and I kept correcting her. Then it changed color and she decided it had made a cocoon:

She would not believe me when I said it was still a bug. Finally she ran and got Grandpa and he managed to convince her that it was still just a bug. I think Laura is appalled by this fascination with insects.

After lunch we walked the girls to a nearby park. We stupidly forgot to bring water, so we couldn't stay very long before heading back. Cricket came along on the walk, and was so exhausted that she took over the kids' doll bed:

Hey, it was the perfect size! She was rather traumatized by the small people running around shouting "Cricky!" and wanting to pick her up, so she deserved a good nap:

Saturday the kids came to my house briefly so that they could see where "Aunt Sara" lives. I think they found my house dull, because unlike Grandma's, it does not have toys hidden in every corner. We all went back to Grandma's for dinner.

It was great to see the kids. They currently live on an Air Force base in Oklahoma (my brother-in-law is in the Air Force, but no, he does not fly planes). Before that they were in Okinawa, and before that they were in New Mexico. There is a good chance that they will be sent off somewhere again, possibly overseas, or maybe to Alaska. So there is no guarantee how often they get to visit.

Catching Up

2005-08-01T20:12:00.000-06:00

So much going on...so much NOT going on. I don't know. I see haven't posted since July 14. I have no excuses other than it is summer, I am feeling lazy, and I don't have a coterie of guest bloggers on hand to fill in for me. Anyway, a bunch of utterly unrelated thoughts...

We're still waiting for someone to buy the house. Laura decided to order a St. Joseph statue. Supposedly burying this upside down will help sell the house. I think this sounds bizarre, but who am I to argue? I am anxious to sell the house and get on with this move. It feels like we've had our lives on hold forever. Laura's place has many more posts about our impatience.

Several of the Montana Bloggers are protesting a Las Vegas businessman’s attempt to trademark the phrase “The Last, Best Place.” This is the phrase used as the title of William Kittredge's anthology about Montana. I think we own a copy of that book, actually. Anyway, to protest this, the bloggers are temporarily changing the titles of their blogs to "The Last, Best Place." It looks like Watermark has a pretty good list of participants so far.

This is a terrific post that nearly made me cry. I will only quote this tiny bit, because you really must read the whole thing:

At two years old, Christopher has the angry fuck-you attitude I still don't have, a willingness to suffer a broken nose from getting smacked with the back of a shovel if it means not losing face. I can't think of a single incident in my early childhood when I had that raw anger necessary to protect myself. Instead, I mistakenly believed if I was nice, and fair, and showed a willingness to get along, bullies would leave me alone. And if worst came to worst, I'd follow the popular advice of teachers and parents and just ignore them.

I have no idea why this advice is so popular. As adults, haven't they figured out that the joy of bullying is bullying itself? Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away. What makes it go away is that willingness to step up to the edge and jump, even if it means getting hurt.

During the month of July, John Scalzi took a break. He DID have a coterie of guest bloggers to fill in for them, and they were all very entertaining. Which reminds me, I've added mythago to my list of links over there on the right.

Finally, there is this post from Jason at Positive Liberty (which, incidentally, has recently become a group blog). I really don't have much to add. The pictures do a terrific job of rebutting the utterly nasty e-mail Jason is recounting. I've noticed that the "ex-gay" people tend to focus mostly on men, not women, so I've never been the target of this sort of thing. Jason did a terrific job. The post has lots of great comments, too.

Odd and Ends

2005-07-14T20:23:00.000-06:00

Some semi related items today...

First, John Scalzi's By the Way today points to a really cool picture from the Tour de France in the New York Times. I've no idea how long NYT links stay good -- hopefully it will work at least for a few days.

Second, although I still disagree with him, yesterday Eric Zorn posted an update on his Tour criticism. It is too bad that many of his detractors had to be all nasty in their replies. Fortunately, some people were a little more reasonable. Eric quotes one of his e-mails:

Bill Hannahs-- As you suggested, the Tour de France did once try sending the riders out according to their position, but it was difficult to manage and the modern stage race has evolved to be a very stable and fair playing field. Please, don't be offended when I tell you I don't think you really understand the underlying dynamics of the event.

I think your criticism is much to be blamed on the television coverage because television does not convey the wonder and awe of the event. Dismissing the Tour without seeing it in person is like dismissing Moby Dick because you didn't like the movie.

I would love to see the tour in person. This next part particularly resonated with me, given my comments regarding the team aspects the other day:

Cycling is a team sport. But unlike football or baseball, it is also an individual sport. In this respect it more closely reflects real life which is a fabric of loose alliances and individual efforts. Alliances are made and dissolved on the spot.

It is not uncommon for strange alliances to form in the middle of a race or for teammates to betray their comrades. To try and remove the team aspect of the sport would be harder than removing it from football, because not only are there teams that wear the same jersey, but there are alliances that form between teams and amongst individuals and it is fascinating to watch.

Finally, I have to make one last remark. At the end of Eric's latest entry, he says this

I watched the news reports Tuesday night of Lance Armstrong, with apparent nonchalance, let Alejandro Valverde pass him in the last meters of the day’s heat because Armstrong knew he’d already regained the right to wear the yellow jersey. Maybe that’s the way it should be. But maybe not.

Perhaps he looked nonchalant, but I'm not so sure of that. Go take a listen to Day 11 of the Sirius radio Lance Armstrong Reports podcast. It suggests that Lance was giving all he had and just couldn't manage to "lose those guys."

Finally, not really related to either of the above, Laura got about 500 hits yesterday because of a New York Times article about New Jersey bloggers. Yes, I thought it was odd too. The article makes a mention of the Rascal Fair, which is a blog carnival for Montana bloggers. Since Laura's blog has a rather unusual name, I think it caught the attention of the author. The funny thing is, of course, that at the moment Laura is a Montanan in exile here in the Midwest.

Looking at my own referral logs, most of my visitors over the last 2 days have been from Laura's site, so apparently I'm picking up some of those hits as well. Amazingly, Laura started her blog in April, I started mine last November, and she is rapidly catching up to me in number of hits.

Tour de France and Whine de Zorn

2005-07-12T19:57:00.000-06:00

In general, I like Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune. I usually enjoy his column, even when I don't agree with it.

But he lost me today with his gripe about the Tour de France, especially his apparent annoyance with the media coverage of it.

You just had to go and pick on the one sporting event that actually prompts me to look at Sports section before tossing it into the recycle bin each morning!

Harumph.

He stuck with his argument in a later update responding to his critics.

I mostly agree with Eric's critics on this one, although his responses were interesting. I do realize that the tour isn't going to grab everyone's attention and that's OK. I am somewhat...amused...by the notion that there is too much media coverage overwhelming poor Eric's delicate anti-tour ears. I mean really, Eric's own paper has been running one tour story in the Sports section each day.

Usually on page 9 or so.

I think the Tribune publishes more words about baseball in January than it has about the tour.

Yes, the Outdoor Life Network has gone on tour overdrive, but that is just one cable channel. I haven't seen a thing on network TV.

Eric's biggest complaint is that the race isn't structured as "one big race" but is instead "split up into a bunch of mini-races." Each stage has a winner, and fans "make a big deal" about who wins each stage, even though it is meaningless in the end.

Kind of the way that baseball playoffs are not one big game, but a series of games, and each individual game has a winner, and winning one game is "meaningless" since it doesn't necessarily mean your team will win the World Series. Right?

Eric wants each stage to start with physical time gaps, so if the leader is ten minutes ahead, that rider would get a ten minute head start. Which sounds to me like proposing that game 2 of the World Series begin with the same scores the teams had at the end of game 1.

Sorry for all the baseball analogies here, but really. I don't see the point of Eric's suggestion. He doesn't like the team aspect of it, which is exactly the reason that I enjoy it. The race is a unique combination of individual work and teamwork. Winning the tour requires both an incredible amount of individual ability and the support of a great team. The team leader must have the ability to inspire his teammates to forgo their own glory and work for him. As many have noted, Lance would not have won the tour six times in a row without a terrific team. He knows it; they know it. In today's stage, it was fascinating to watch Lance's former teammate Roberto Heras drop off the back as Lance and Team Discovery accelerated up the mountain. A few years ago, Heras was one of those team members up front, setting the pace for Lance. The man is obviously capable of riding at such a pace, so what happened? I believe one of the commentators made the point that riding the tour as a team leader is entirely different than riding it in support of a team leader.

At any rate, as of right now, the "keep the tour as it is" option on Eric's click poll is winning:

10.9% - Yes, jazz it up. Make it more like one long race. (38 responses)
69.9% - No, it's good the way it is. (244 responses)
19.2% - I don't care a fiddler's fig about the Tour de France (67 responses)

Of course, it is early in the race, so that doesn't mean anything and the final results could change.

More Garden Blogging

2005-07-10T11:47:00.000-06:00

Just trying to keep my flowers alive as temperatures stay high and rain continues to not fall. Here's the weather report from my backyard:

Anyway, my flowers and plants are doing quite well, though the lawn has turned a distinct shade of brown. Normally I wouldn't care about the brown lawn, but of course this year is different since the house is on the market. I've set up the sprinkler in the backyard and am hoping that the grass recovers. At least no one else's looks any better.

By the way, once we move, I really want one of these so that I don't have to waste so much water out of the tap or worry about watering restrictions.

Getting back to the gardening successes...here are some pictures I took just this morning:

The impatiens in baskets out front. This is a great improvement over 2 weeks ago - nice and bushy, plenty of blooms.

What can I say? I like flower close-ups. I particularly like the second one here since I prefer the bright orange flower color. These are actually not from the hanging baskets -- we ended up with a bunch of leftover impatiens after filling up the baskets, so there are two ordinary pots living on the front porch.

The basil has just shot up. I think we need to cook something that needs lots of basil soon to use up some of this.

So far I've harvested several leaves of mint for iced tea, but the plant is so bushy you can't even tell.

Survey

2005-07-08T20:50:00.000-06:00

Laura did it, so I'm doing it too.

Memories of London

2005-07-08T20:35:00.000-06:00

I can't even begin to think of what to say about the attacks. Many other bloggers are doing a far better job than I could. So far, the best post I've read is from Jason at Positive Liberty in which he discusses the absurdity of terrorism.

I can't quote from it because you really have to read the whole thing.

I have very little to add about the attacks, but this incident did prompt me to think about the week I visited London during my senior year of high school. I am finding it hard to remember. 1989 seems like a terribly long time ago, but 16 years is really not that long. Somewhere, probably buried in my parents' house someplace, are the prints from the six rolls of film I shot over there. Other details are fuzzy, but the six rolls of film are not. I am positive it was six. Strange how that detail is so solid and clear when the rest is a blur. Perhaps it is because the camera was new, a gift specifically desired for this trip, and I worried about taking that damn film through airport security on the way there and back. That camera held up pretty well -- I still have it, it still works just fine, and I only replaced it this past October because I wanted to go digital.

We crammed a great deal into one week. It was a trip with others from my English and World Literature class, led by our teacher and her husband who had been doing this for years and knew London as well as their own backyard. My mother was there as well, as one of the adult chaperones, mostly because she loved British history. At one point she was a member of the The Richard III Society. I shared my hotel room with one of my classmates.

I remember visiting St. Paul's Cathedral and climbing steps forever to the top. I remember Westminster Abbey. We had a terrific tour guide at one of those places, but now I can't remember which one. I think we went to several museums. We saw four plays. I don't remember the name of the first one, but the others were "Chess," "Starlight Express," and "Metropolis." I think I was the only one in our group who liked "Metropolis." I have the London cast recording of it loaded on my iPod and still listen to it occasionally. I never claimed to have normal taste in theatre.

We took the tube everywhere. It was the first time I had ever been on a subway. After college I lived in Chicago for a few years and took the Red Line to work everyday and riding a subway became a boring, everyday experience to be endured. In London it was all new and exciting, an experience to be relished. Somewhere I have a tea towel with a map of the London Underground on it. I'm amazed we were able to find our way through that maze of colorful lines and never once get lost. The Chicago CTA map is pathetic in comparison, with its few train lines all going into the Loop, nothing but buses everywhere else, and constant service cuts.

My mom discovered tea time in the hotel restaurant. We discovered pubs and fish and chips and some sort of sparkling lemonade that I still remember fondly. Once we ate in a Greek restaurant near the hotel and I remember an appetizer that looked like small fish, with the heads still on. We had continental breakfast delivered to the room every morning -- big, crusty rolls and hot tea. Or did I drink hot chocolate instead? I think that was before my caffeine addiction. I do remember giving the delivery person an excessively large tip the first day because I was in a hurry to make him leave before my classmate came out of the shower and flustered with the exchange rates and the unfamiliar heavy coins that seemed quite aptly named "pounds."

I wish I could remember more specifics. We saw the
crown jewels. We saw the changing of the guard, I think. We walked for what seemed like miles and we ate once at the Hard Rock Cafe, London. I have long since lost the T-shirt and it wouldn't fit now anyway. I mailed postcards to my high school boyfriend back home and the hardware store where I worked. I never imagined that sixteen years later I would love another woman and plan to move to Montana with her.

At the time, I thought I would remember the trip forever. I attempted to keep a travel journal but failed, writing only the first entry about the flight from O'Hare to Heathrow. I constantly worried about losing my passport, which has long since expired and not been renewed. We bought books. A group of my classmates wanted to go out to a club one night. I spent the evening with the only other two who weren't interested in an expensive cover charge and loud music and we browsed in bookstores. Alright, I don't remember what kind of store it was, just that we went there and I strongly suspected that at least one of my companions was gay. I remember their high school faces, but not their names.

I wish I could find all those pictures. Perhaps then I would be able to remember more.

Saturday Garden Blogging

2005-06-25T11:38:00.000-06:00

Two weeks ago we finally got around to buying some flowers and plants. In past years I usually did this in May, but I guess I was just somewhat lazy this year. Anyway, I drove down the street to The Growing Place (Aurora branch). It is actually within walking distance, but lugging home several plants and a big bag of potting soil would be rather difficult, so I drove. Laura stayed home to be ready to haul the dogs away in the event of a showing. So I had free reign at the gardening center, which is always fun. Laura doesn't really get into the gardening thing that much anyway.

I bought:

A full flat of impatiens for the two hanging baskets out front ("Accent Sunrise Mix," a mix of apricot, orange, salmon, and white flowers). We planted the extra ones in small pots for the front porch. I've always gotten good results with impatiens on the porch since they like the shade.

A gerbera daisy for a pot out back ("Festival Scarlet with Eye")

Two basil plants for a cedar box on the backyard picnic table ("Greek Columnar Basil"). We plan to use this one for cooking.

Two spearmint plants for a cedar box on the picnic table. We use these for cooking as well, although they probably get the most use in iced tea.

This is similar to the last few summers, with the notable exception of tomatoes, which I used to plant in pots. Since the house is currently on the market, we will probably not be here in August when tomatoes would be ready to harvest. I'm going to miss the homegrown tomatoes this year. I don't have an actual in-ground garden, so I would always plant them in pots, which actually works quite well.

We planted everything in the hottest part of a hot, humid weekend. Ugh.

Anyway, the plants have all done great the last couple weeks. I took pictures the day we planted everything and again today, just two weeks later. The herbs have grown quite a bit, despite the fact that we've snipped off a few leaves to use already.

The gerbera flower, close up:

The full plant:

The basil today:

The day we planted it:

The mint today:

The day we planted it:

Hanging basket today. I find it hard to get a good angle to photograph these:

The same basket the day we planted the flowers, looking a little scrawny:

This is the flower from a potentilla plant we have in a large pot. We've had this one since the first summer we lived here (2001). One year it looked pretty much dead, with just one branch still hanging in there. It then recovered and has been doing great ever since. Two weeks ago it was covered with these little yellow flowers.

Weather

2005-06-25T10:42:00.000-06:00

Well, I've been a blog slug lately. Haven't posted in weeks. I don't have any great excuses. Busy with work, busy waiting for the house to sell, busy wasting time watching television. I did go on a short business trip this week, which is somewhat unusual (the last time I traveled for work was eight years ago).

Laura posted today complaining about the summer weather we're having. Yesterday afternoon around 4 I checked the current weather at Weather.com:

In Oak Brook (where I work), it was 96 degrees and humid.

In Aurora (where I live), it was 95 degrees and humid. (yeah, that one degree makes a huge difference!)

In Missoula (where I will live...once we sell the house) it was 75 degrees.

And people ask me why I want to move to Montana!

Bunny Update

2005-06-06T19:54:00.000-06:00

Just a couple quick pictures from this evening. They are getting a bit camera-shy and skittish.

Fortunately, the zoom on the camera helped with this one.

This one didn't want me to get too close.

This morning I counted five...so three of the original eight have vanished. BUT last I looked this evening, there were six...so apparently one came back. Or I am just going crazy.

Laura has a whole series of pictures from the weekend, including one of my favorites:

Imposing One's Views

2005-06-02T20:09:00.000-06:00

In responding to this column, Andrew Sullivan succinctly expresses a view I've held for years that seems consistently lost on those so-called Christians trying to influence politics:

Secularism allows Christians, and any other religious faith, to affirm religious values, live exactly as they see fit, and avoid such moral outrages as abortion and gay civil unions in their own lives, if they so wish. All secularism does is say that as a political matter, there will be as much government neutrality as possible because the government should represent all citizens; that the Church and the state shall coexist, but independently of each other.

I will never understand those who wish to write the dictates of their religion into law. I just don't get it. To me, laws banning abortion or gay marriage are no different than laws forbidding the eating of pork because it is against certain religions. Your religion says "don't eat pork"? Then don't do so. That's your business and your dinner plate you're talking about. I don't have the right to come to your house and stuff pork sandwiches down your throat. But you have no right to turn around and tell me -- someone who doesn't share your faith -- that I can't legally eat pork.

Many Christians seem to have a victim complex whereby they believe they are being picked on if the government doesn't do special favors for them.

Even way back in the dark ages, when I went through my own fundamentalist Christian phase, I thought that some of the battles being fought were silly. For example, prayer in public schools. I never understood why Christian parents would want to grant schools this power over their children. It is all well and good when your own faith is in the majority, but what if you win, and then the demographics change? All of a sudden your community is majority Muslim and the teachers are leading your kids in prayers to Allah rather than reciting the Lord's Prayer. Does anyone believe that Christian parents would be fine with that for half a second? Then why expect Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and agnostic parents to be fine with starting the day by reciting "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

Both the column and Andrew's response mention abortion, which is an excellent example of how political opponents redefine words to mischaracterize their opponent's true position. Redefine "secular" to mean "anti-Christian." Redefine "pro-choice" to mean "pro-abortion." This is supremely dishonest. Once can be personally opposed to abortion while at the same time maintain that it should be legal. It is highly unlikely that I would ever choose to have abortion myself (setting aside the fact that pregnancy isn't something that is going to just happen to me under normal circumstances here). If, say, one of my young nieces came to me for advice about an unplanned pregnancy, I would probably emphasize other options if possible. Ditto for any of my female friends. To me, pro-choice means just that...choice. The choice the woman makes does not have to be abortion. It is completely consistent and pro-choice to choose one of the other options in this situation.

In other words, forcing an abortion on a woman is just as appalling as forcing her to carry the baby to term. Both are examples of "imposing ones views" on another person.

Runaway Bunnies

2005-06-02T19:52:00.000-06:00

We've been monitoring the bunnies in the backyard the last few days. I am guessing that they were very newly born when we found them last week. They appear to be growing up fast!

On May 28 it looks like their eyes are still closed:

Two days later, still closed. I like the way they line up facing opposite directions in this one:

Finally, yesterday evening we saw that their eyes had opened:

Which leads me to the title of this post...never mind the runaway bride, we have runaway bunnies! When we checked on them yesterday evening, I noticed that one seemed to be a bit more active than the others. He's the one on the far right side of the picture:

After a few seconds of hopping, he succeeded in jumping right after the nest and took off across the lawn! We tried to herd the bunny back to the nest, but that didn't work. Laura scooped him up and put him back the nest. He didn't like that much and tried to escape again. Covering the nest back up with the fur and grass, then gently holding it down for a second seemed to settle everyone down.

Before all the excitement, I did manage to get a pretty close look and I'm fairly convinced that there are six bunnies in the nest. I originally though there were only four, but I got a pretty good look at them this time. At one point, I could clearly see four on top, and two more buried below the others.

The saga continued today. At one point, Laura noticed what appeared to be a hole in the nest covering, suggesting that one of the bunnies was out and about. We are being very cautious about the dogs now -- I really don't want to have to pry a baby bunny out of Cricket's mouth!

This evening I decided to go check on them. I opened the back door without looking first and was startled to see the nest already exposed...and the mother bunny there with the babies! She took off immediately. I dashed for the camera and managed to get one shot, which did not turn out very good because the flash reflected against the screen door:

We watched for her to come back, but she didn't. I hope she got a chance to feed the babies at some point today. I normally peer out the door to check before opening.

Anyway, here is the final picture, about an hour or so after the mother bunny took off. Everyone seems pretty calm.

Award for the Most Creative Complaint About Same-Sex Marriage

2005-05-27T18:25:00.000-06:00

Award for the Most Creative Complaint About Same-Sex Marriage

Jesse at Pandagon effectively attacks a ridiculous article by someone named David R. Usher claiming that same-sex marriage is a feminist plot designed to snatch control of children away from men, while somehow forcing the men to pay for it.

I think this is my favorite quote from the article:

In terms of economics, same-sex marriage creates three unequal classes of marriages. Marriages by two women have six sources of income -- the incomes of two women, two sets of child support (with hidden alimony), and two sets of welfare entitlements. Heterosexual marriages only have two incomes. Marriages between two men are likely to be paying child support and hidden alimony.

Um, OK. Somehow I have been terribly cheated. My lesbian relationship has exactly ONE income -- mine. Granted, we have no children, so I guess we don't fit into his odd little world.

Some good friends of ours, however, do have two children they adopted. The biological fathers of those children do not pay any child support or "hidden alimony", seeing as they signed away their parental rights when the children were born. That couple also has ONE income, since one of the women stays home to take care of the kids.

At any rate, this one is so strange that it seems almost silly to respond to it. Jesse summed it up pretty well with this comment:

In a society where gay men were allowed to marry other men rather than duck into straight marriages in order to seem "normal", why would they be paying child support or "hidden" alimony? I hate to be the one to break this out, but when you don't stick your sperm rod into someone's baby hole, it's really hard to think of any outcome which would result in you paying child support. In much the same way, a lesbian who legally obtains donor sperm (which negates any right the donor has to a legal claim of parenthood for the child) cannot actually get child support or alimony from anyone.

Exactly. There are of course cases in which the sperm doner is some the couple knows and he might have some sort of parenting role, but in that case it is usually a mutually-agreed on arrangement.

Regarding the odd comments on welfare, Jesse also points out that this notion that heterosexual married families can't get welfare is also false. I don't have any direct experience in with the welfare issue myself. Somewhere around my house (probably packed up in a box in the garage) I have an old copy of A Legal Guide For Lesbian & Gay Couples. I recall reading a discussion of legal issues if you were living with a welfare recipient, and it made it pretty clear that the income of an "unrelated adult female" living in the house certainly could be considered when calculating welfare benefits. Women don't get welfare because they are women. They get welfare based on their income (or lack therof).

Furthermore, by his own definitions here, a heterosexual marriage could have extra income as well...if a divorced woman with children remarries, the father of her children is still going to be paying child support. So this hypothetical family will have three sources of income, plus possibly welfare as well.

Mr. Usher also makes this interesting observation:

Marriages involving two women have full parental rights and control of children by presumption of women’s sexual birth function. Heterosexual marriages also have full parental rights and control of children. Marriages involving two men are unlikely to have children. When they do, the men are unlikely to have any substantive parental rights, if any at all.

It is touching that Mr. Usher is so concerned about the legal protection for the children of gay male couples. Oddly enough, adoption laws exist to ensure that parents have parental rights for their children, and these laws can work just fine for all sorts of families, provided the religious right doesn't succeed in stripping them away.

Although I don't know for certain, I suspect Trey and his partner (see Daddy, Papa, and Me) both have legal rights to their adorable daughter Emma. If anything, same sex marriage would increase the legal protection of their family, not distract from it.

Like I said, I feel somewhat silly taking the time to respond to this one. Alas, I could not help myself.

This is too funny

2005-05-27T17:42:00.000-06:00

I work in the software industry (although I'm not a developer), so I can relate to this post from A Secular Franciscan Life.

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail Update

2005-05-27T12:50:00.000-06:00

The baby rabbits we found the other day appear to be doing well. Their mother must be coming into the yard to feed them when we're not looking. I did see a rabbit dashing across the alley the other evening. It looked like she came from the general vicinity of my back fence.

This picture isn't great, but you can see that they now have some fur.

One of the bunnies decided to pose for the camera here:

We have reached an understanding with Cricket. She is still allowed in the backyard when supervised. If she approaches the rabbit nest, we shoo her away from it. So far this seems to be working, although I don't think Cricket is very happy about it.

I am assuming that the mother rabbit won't be concerned about the scent of dogs in the backyard, seeing as that scent was all over the place before she decided to have her babies there in the first place.

Chicago Cubs

2005-05-27T12:34:00.000-06:00

Took a vacation day yesterday. Went to see the Chicago Cubs play (lose to) the Colorado Rockies. This was Laura's first visit to Wrigley Field.

I wrote up a nice post on this last night with lots of pictures. Then I didn't like the way the larger sized pictures messed up the layout of my blog, so I removed it. Then Laura went and posted on this today. So, I will just point you over to her blog for the pictures.

Here are a few pictures that Laura didn't include in her post.

It is not a Cubs game without fans dressed in blue paint.

The field from our seats.

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail!

2005-05-24T18:45:00.000-06:00

I worked from home today to handle transportation for Laura's doctor visit. So, I was sitting upstairs in my office, working away, when I heard Laura downstairs yelling at Cricket, "What are you digging at? Get in here!"

Then she called me to come downstairs.

We have a sliding glass door that goes out to the backyard. Just next to this is a small picnic table. "Look at where she was digging," Laura said.

There was a shallow hole in the ground under the table. I had actually noticed a while back and filled it in, but apparently...something...had dug it back up. And there was something moving around in there...small, gray, mostly buried under the dead grass and gray fur.

I used a stick to move aside the grass and discovered a nest of small mammals that we assume to be...BUNNIES!

(They're hard to see in the small version - click the picture for the full size one).

They looked way too big to be baby mice or rats. Laura called animal control and described the nest, and they confirmed that they are likely rabbits. They also noted that bunnies like to make their nests in "the dumbest places." I can't argue with that. You would think that a rabbit would notice the scent of dogs in the backyard and would realize that building a nest so close to potential predators is a bad idea. Under the bushes in the front yard would have been a better place.

I can't figure out when Mama Rabbit showed up and gave birth, though. I just mowed the lawn on Sunday morning, so it seems likely that I would have noticed them then. Last night I sent Cricket out into the backyard and she just stood around, very near the table, and never noticed anything. Perhaps they were born last night.

We have seen rabbits in the neighborhood, but I've never noticed one in my backyard before. Incidentally, we have a six-foot high wooden fence. There are a few small gaps by the gate, but they are too small for anything large to get through. Apparently pregnant rabbits can squeeze through a very small opening!

I couldn't really tell how many there are in the nest -- once we confirmed that they were NOT mice, I didn't want to disturb them any further. According to animal control, they should start moving around in a couple weeks and then they will leave. In the meantime, Cricket won't be spending much time in the backyard!

Here's another shot...the front one definitely has a bunny shape to it.

Happy Birthday!

2005-05-22T20:21:00.000-06:00

Today is Laura's birthday.

Her fears that God likes Chicago better than Montana seem to be unfounded. After a rather iffy beginning this morning, the weather cleared off and no thunderstorms developed. According to the realtor, we had great traffic for our open house. Lots of interest and positive comments. So, we shall see what happens. Anyone looking for a great house in Aurora, IL?

I think Laura had a good birthday, despite a bit too much of the in-laws yesterday. We went out for breakfast, dropped the dogs off at my parents' house, then went to a noon showing of Revenge of the Sith. It is a little odd going to a movie so soon after breakfast, but we managed to eat popcorn anyway. Enjoyed the movie. Now, of course, I'm wishing we had the original movies on DVDs. Our VCR doesn't work, and it doesn't matter anyway because all the videotapes are packed up. Oh well.

Then we had dinner with a good friend at a Mexican place (great guacamole and margaritas) and coffee back at home.

This is shaping up to be a very busy week. On Tuesday Laura is going to the doctor to see about the headache problem. On Thursday, I'm taking a vacation day and we're going to see the Cubs play the Rockies. In nearly 10 years in Chicago, Laura has never been to Wrigley field, so we had to squeeze in a game this year!

Then next weekend we're riding in Bike the Drive. We had planned to stay overnight downtown, but it looks like the dogsitter will fall through, so we'll be leaving the house at 4 AM instead. Hopefully next Sunday's weather will be good!

But If We Let Jim Visit Steve in the Hospital, Bob and Sue in the Next Town Will Have to Get Divorced!

2005-05-21T09:04:00.000-06:00

Jason at Positive Liberty recounts news from Maryland -- the governor is caving into pressure to veto a bill called the Medical Decision Making Act. This bill would grant some very limited rights to same-sex couples. From the Washington Post:

Modeled after laws in California, Hawaii and other states, the legislation would have granted nearly a dozen rights to unmarried partners who register with the state. Among those: the right to be treated as an immediate family member during hospital visits, to make health care decisions for incapacitated partners and to have private visits in nursing homes.

Jason points out how this affects him personally -- seeing as he lives in MD and his biological family does not recognize his relationship with his partner.

The most outrageous part of all this are these stories documenting several cases in which couples had all the "proper" paperwork (power of attorney, wills, etc.) and were still prevented from making medical decisions and visiting one another in the hospital.

I couldn't sleep last night after reading these stories. I am too full of anger. How dare total strangers interfere with private, legal contracts created between two people? What is the point of offering contacts such as power of attorney for health care if they can be ignored at the option of a stranger? If they have no teeth?

I have had numerous arguments with my republican parents over these issues. They claim to be on the socially liberal side and don't really have a problem with gay marriage, yet they keep electing people who do, so I can't quite figure that out. Whenever I get angry and point out abuses like this, I always hear the same story. "You can get legal documents. You can make a will. You can make sure that your wishes are respected."

Well, apparently not always.

In my opinion, any doctor, nurse, or other healthcare professional who pushes aside these types of documents should be sued for all they are worth and should lose their license to practice. It is not up to a doctor or nurse to decide who my family is. If I have documents specifying that Laura is to have decision-making power for me, then they had better honor it. I am waiting for all the "you-have-other-legal-options" people to speak up in support of this lawsuit, brought by a man who was prevented from visiting his dying partner, despite having power of attorney and other documents. The people insisting that these sorts of documents are sufficient should stand behind their word.

I am thankful that Laura and I did not encounter these problems when she ended up in the hospital a few years ago with the pseudotumor. Of course, she was conscious the entire time and it never got to the "family only" point.

Jason closes his post with this comment, which pretty much sums up my bitterness and anger at this sort of thing:

The most charitable thing I can say is that I do hope heterosexuals are getting some benefit from all of this, because gays and lesbians are clearly suffering. Equality Maryland documents some even more egregious cases of real-life refusal here. Many of them happened despite the individuals having taken legal steps like executing a will or a power of attorney, steps that we are told make marriage rights unnecessary or redundant. How any of this helps strengthen the heterosexual family is beyond me. Do episodes like these really give comfort or reassurance to faltering heterosexual relationships? I simply can't believe it

As I said in the title of my post, apparently straight people are so completely stupid as to believe that causing heartbreak to total strangers in hospitals will keep their own pathetic families intact. I have no respect for anyone who believes such things.

Amazing...

2005-05-14T14:29:00.000-06:00

Thanks to the existence of blogs, Laura has now rediscovered TWO friends from years ago. People she had completely lost track of.

Her explanation is here.

The most recent find, Jane wrote about it here, with more detail about their original friendship and why they lost touch. This was all long before I ever met Laura, so it is a rather interesting look into someone else's history.

Walking...

2005-05-14T14:16:00.000-06:00

Normally at this time of year we would be doing a bit more bicycling. Especially on a day like today, which has turned out beautiful in spite of the weather reports that called for rain.

But, since my house is for sale, we have certain limitations on what we do on the weekends. If someone wants to see the house, we need to be able to leash up the dogs and get them out of there so that they aren't in the way. So, even though we could bring Laura's cell phone on a ride, I'd worry that someone would call for a showing and we wouldn't be able to get back to gather up the dogs in time.

So, we've been taking the dogs on long walks on some of our favorite bike trails. A few weeks ago we went on the Fox River trail; today we walked on the Virgil Gilman trail. We drove over to a parking lot off Galena blvd to start and walked a ways past the Blackberry farm place shown on the map. The walk was just a little less than an hour.

Of course, since we took the precaution of bringing along the dogs and making the house look great for a showing...no one called. We're waiting to hear from our realtor about last week's showing and the one yesterday evening, which Laura wrote about here.

I took a bunch of pictures on our walk (of course), so here are a few highlights.

Starting point right off Galena blvd:

Close up of some flowers:

Bridge crossing a stream. I don't really like bicycling over this particular bridge because it does sway a bit, but walking isn't too bad.

View of a stream from the bridge

Flower closeups when Laura commandeered the camera

More flowers, photographed by Laura

Sundial. It appears to be nearly noon.

Headache Worries

2005-05-12T20:18:00.000-06:00

Laura has been having bad headaches the last few weeks. This always worries me. Nearly six years ago, a bad bout of headaches caused her to be diagnosed with pseudotumor cerebri, also known as Benign Intracranial Hypertension. Here's a succinct description from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS):

Pseudotumor cerebri literally means "false brain tumor." It is likely due to high pressure caused by the buildup or poor absorption of cerebrospinal fluid in the subarachnoid space surrounding the brain. The disorder is most common in women between the ages of 20 and 50. Symptoms of pseudotumor cerebri, which include headache, nausea, vomiting, and pulsating intracranial noises, closely mimic symptoms of brain tumors.

Read a little further down the page about the prognosis: "may cause progressive, permanent visual loss in some patients. In some cases, pseudotumor cerebri recurs." [emphasis mine]

The first time she had pseudotumor was quite eventful, with two emergency room visits and one 3-day hospital stay, an MRI, two spinal taps, and several months on a drug (Diamox) that made her hands, feet, and lips tingle and made carbonated beverages taste "metallic." It was late summer in 1999. My memory of the whole thing is pretty hazy. The word "tumor" is pretty scary, even with that odd "pseudo" positioned in front of it. There were other words tossed about, like papilloedema, which I think refers to the swelling of the optic nerve. Apparently she had a pretty good case of it the first day she went to the Rush-Presbreytarian St. Luke's Eye Center. I recall Laura being somewhat exacerbated by a parade of ophthalmology interns coming into her examining room to look at her eyes.

The spinal taps (technically lumbar punctures) were very painful. The purpose is to drain out the excess fluid, but in Laura's case, both taps caused "low pressure headaches" -- the opposite of the original problem. The first time was the worst, because they did the tap in the emergency room right away. That brought us back to the emergency room the next day -- the headache was so bad it caused nausea and she couldn't keep down even water, so she became dehydrated.

Mostly I remember sitting around the emergency room on an uncomfortable molded plastic chair. Then, later, sitting in her hospital room in a somewhat more comfortable chair. Then, frequent visits back to see the neural-ophthalmologist for checkups. They checked for vision loss and papilloedema. Eventually the condition pretty much went away. She cut back on the drugs. Her visits to the Eye Center became less and less frequent, until they dropped to just once a year.

But she's having these headaches again, so she's starting to worry. Pseudotumor can come back. The Eye Center didn't have any regular appointments until July, but they agreed to squeeze her in the week after next so that they can check for papilloedema and ease our minds. Of course, if it isn't a recurrence of pseudotumor, then what in the heck has caused three weeks worth of headaches?

Where I've Been

2005-05-10T19:59:00.000-06:00

This is a fun site - create a map showing states you've visited. Here's mine:

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

Of course, I have to make it more complicated than it needs to be. What does "visited" mean? Went there and stayed for more than a day? Just drove through? After giving this way to much thought, I defined "visited" as "stayed overnight in" for the above map.

There were also a few I don't really remember, so I left them out. I'm pretty sure my family took a vacation to Colorodo and it probably involved staying overnight in a few other states on the way, but I'm not positive. When I was much older, we took a driving trip to Texas, but I don't remember which states we stopped in on the way and on the way home.

If I redefine "visited" to just "drove through" or "sat around in an airport for a while between flights", then I look a little more well-travelled:

Hmm, this version makes it look like I have something against Kansas. Can't really explain that one, seeing as I've apparently never been there!

Thanks to An Offering of Myself to the World for the link.

Ten Random Thoughts About Selling My House

2005-05-10T19:23:00.000-06:00

1. It has been about 2 weeks since I put my house on the market. I am no longer startled by the sight of the For Sale sign in my front yard when driving home each night.

2. Within days of listing my house, I started receiving mail from real estate attorneys and moving companies. They must have some sort of auto-notify thing set up on the MLS.

3. Keeping things spotless every day is a pain. I am not a neat person. I used to think that maybe this process would teach us good habits that would continue in the new place. Maybe we would become neat freaks! Now I think the process will just make me messier when I can finally relax and not worry about strangers walking around my house.

4. Many of my favorite books are packed up in boxes in the garage, in our attempt to declutter before putting the house on the market. The good news is, it'll seem like getting a whole bunch of new books once we finally move and unpack. The bad news is, I miss my books!

5. Lots of people have stopped and picked up flyers from the little box out front. The people driving by in cars are more likely to be really potential buyers. The people on foot probably already live in the neighborhood. At any rate, it is really hard not to stare out the window at the people picking up the flyers!

6. Mother's Day is not a busy day in the real estate world. Dratted mothers! Distracting from the sale of my house!

7. I was never terribly concerned when other people's dogs pooped in my front yard. Now that I must keep it clean, I find it annoying! Pick up after your dogs, people! I pick up after mine!

8. It is rather creepy to think about total strangers walking around my house and making comments. I wish I could listen in on what they're saying! Perhaps I should enlist the neighbor kids to hang around the yard and spy on the potential buyers as they are leaving.

9. We are supposed to have our first open house this Sunday. I hope the weather is good, because we need to gather up the dogs and make ourselves scarce for the afternoon. We might go hiking in Starved Rock.

10. It has only been two weeks. I realize these things take time. That realization has not transformed me into a patient person. Sigh.

Don't miss this post

2005-05-07T19:00:00.000-06:00

From John Scalzi.

Well, of course, these people don't own Jesus. He died for the sins of the whole world. Nor do they have a corner on the understanding of his words or his work. The Jesus I know and whose words I have read and striven to understand would not sign off on a much of the agenda of those who now parade Him around like a fetish, and in doing so have created this other Jesus, a vacuous, empty vessel for an uncharitable worldview.

I feel almost guilty quoting anything from this because the full post is so good. Just go read the whole thing: What My Jesus Would Do.

Mother's Day, Garage Sales, and Strangers Tromping Through Your House

2005-05-07T18:49:00.000-06:00

My parents had a garage sale yesterday and today. Laura helped out yesterday (since she is currently unemployed). Today we both went over. My mom didn't sell much, but for some reason, we still had a nice time over there. Much of the afternoon was spent in helping them assemble this gazebo thing for the backyard. It was also entertaining to watch the dogs. Cricket did her part sitting in the garage guarding the stuff:

Bailey didn't like it much. He's not an outdoorsy dog and he really just wanted to go inside. He finally found a nice soft cushion, but drat! It was slippery!

I couldn't resist taking a couple shots of these neat stone foxes my mom has. The "ground cover" plants are taking over, so the foxes are just sort of peaking out:

Anyway, after we closed down the sale and finished the gazebo, we went out for an early dinner. That was my mother's day gift to my mom -- she doesn't really like going out to eat on the actual Mother's Day because it is too crowded.

I almost forgot the most important news. While we were sitting around in the garage, Laura's cell phone rang. It was the listing office -- someone wanted to see the house that afternoon! Our first showing since putting it on the market! I realize it is highly unlikely that the first person to look at it will buy it, but still...one can always hope! At any rate, even if they don't make an offer, we could at least perhaps get some feedback as to what they didn't like, which could be useful in prepping the house for future showings. Besides, it has been maddening sitting around waiting for someone to show an interest, so just having a showing was nice.

Of course, I spent much of the afternoon stewing about the showing, wondering how long the people stayed and what they thought. Maddening. This process is just maddening.

Since both the dogs are pictured above, I wouldn't want to leave out the cat. While sitting here in my office this evening, Xena came upstairs and jumped up on the window sill. She can only do that when the window is open due to her large butt. Convenient to have the camera handy:

Not a patient person

2005-05-03T19:37:00.000-06:00

So, sitting around waiting for your house to sell isn't much fun. We wait for the phone to ring telling us someone wants a showing. When (so far) the call is someone else, we're disappointed.

I think sellers do open houses just to feel like they're doing something.

Some of the thoughts racing through my brain since we put the house on the market last week: Did we set the price too high? Did we pick the right realtor -- what the heck is she doing to earn that commission we're gonna pay? Did we pick the wrong time to sell -- maybe we shoulda sold last year, or next year, or not at all, or...you get the idea.

I realize it has only been a week and I'm probably being rather silly. I know I should be patient. But still. It is not in my nature to be patient.

We actually have had a little activity. The For Sale sign has a little holder full of info fliers, and we went through a whole stack of them. Some were probably taken by nosy neighbors (I can't really criticize - I've done the same thing!), but I have hope for the ones taken by people driving by in cars. Especially the ones who then stopped down the street to see the models for our development -- my house should compete fairly well with the new ones on both availability, price, and location within the development.

Last night while eating dinner someone pulled up in a truck and grabbed a flier. A few minutes later they drove by again, very slowly. This gives me great hope that they were interested and just need to get around to calling the big phone number on the flier and scheduling a showing!

Someone from the realty office came by yesterday to take pictures for the virtual tour. I'm hoping that some good interior pictures available on the web will draw some people in as well. At the moment, the listing on our realtor's site has an exterior picture, but the realtor.com listing doesn't, so people searching online might not see the picture. Hopefully that will be fixed soon as well.

When I originally posted about the house being for sale, we weren't yet out there on the Internet. Well, now we are - you can see my house on Realtor.com. If you're looking for a house in the Chicago suburbs, I highly recommend mine! Please, come buy my house!!

Eight Years

2005-04-28T20:24:00.000-06:00

Today is my eighth anniversary of working at my current company. Sometimes it is hard to believe it has been eight years already; other times it is hard to remember what life was like BEFORE this job.

Anyway, I thought a little "then and now" might be fun in honor of the day...

(minor update...blogger didn't seem to like my table, so I eliminated it)

THEN: Laura and I had been together about one year.
NOW: We've been together 9 years and are working on year 10!

THEN: Laura and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the far north side of Chicago. See aerial shot. I can't recall the exact address number anymore. Ours was actually the courtyard building a little further west than the point shown on the google map. Scroll eastward to see how near we were to Lake Michigan! We were on the verge of moving since my commute to a job in the suburbs was inconvenient.
NOW: We live in a suburb about 60 miles west of Chicago, in a two bedroom house. Seeing as that house is now for sale, we are clearly on the verge of moving again.

THEN: My company had fewer than 20 people in it.
NOW: Well, we grew to about 116, then were acquired by a huge company at the end of last year. So instead of being one of 20, I am one of thousands.

THEN: I had just left my job at Arthur Andersen for this new position.
NOW: Well, Arthur Andersen has had a bit of trouble since then and doesn't really exist in the same form it used to.

THEN: We owned one dog, Bailey. He was not quite one year old. This picture is actually from a few years later...our photo album of puppy pictures has gone into hiding:

NOW: Our pet family grew to include Xena the cat and Cricket the terror...I mean rat terrier/chi mix:

THEN: My home computer was a Macintosh LC III with a 160 MB hard drive. I had never heard of high-speed Internet access. I think I used AOL.
NOW: My home computer is a laptop with a 40 gig hard drive and I am running out of room. I use DSL to connect to the Internet and can't imagine using dialup again. Or AOL, for that matter.

THEN: The Hawaii gay marriage case was in the news.
NOW: Everyone has forgotten about Hawaii. Massachusetts is in the news. I shouldn't say that everyone has forgotten about Hawaii -- many people (like my mother) are convinced that same-sex marriage is legal there. It isn't. The state amended their constitution to prevent it.

THEN: I had just recently bought a Dodge Dakota pickup truck, without paying much attention to minor things like gas mileage. Hey, I hadn't owned a car for four years at that point, so I never even looked at the price of gas!

NOW: I now drive a Honda Civic and grumble that the Toyota Prius was impossible to get last year when I traded in my truck. I rarely miss the truck, although I did need to invest in a roof rack to transport the bikes (yes, it does reduce the mileage a bit, but it isn't that bad).

THEN: I was not yet an aunt.
NOW: I now have two adorable nieces, ages 6 and 4.

THEN: I weighed [mumble].
NOW: I lost a bunch of weight while training and riding in an AIDS ride (in Montana!). After my riding dropped down to normal (rather than obsessed) levels, I gained it all back. So now it is pretty much where it was eight years ago.

THEN: I had really long hair.
NOW: I have short hair. I don't know why it took me so long to chop it off...life is so much easier now

I'm sure I could come up with more if I really tried...

For Sale

2005-04-25T17:00:00.000-06:00

So, today, my house officially went on the market. There is a big old sign in front, letting the whole world know that my castle could be theirs:

I took a vacation day today. We spent much of the weekend and all morning cleaning and organizing large volumes of stuff. This afternoon, some professionals came through and did an incredibly thorough cleaning. Tomorrow morning the carpets will be steam cleaned. Everything is in order.

I have mixed feelings about this. I love this house; this is the first house I've ever bought. Really, it is a great little house, and I'm not just saying that because I want someone to buy it. When I bought this house, most of the houses now in this neighborhood didn't exist. My house didn't exist either; it was just a patch of dirt:

Laura and I watched the house emerge out of nothing. I still have the notes I made back then on the progress as it was built. We visited the house as it grew -- sometimes driving out there twice a week to see it, in the evening after work.

The footings, sometime in September 2000:

The foundation, poured at the end of September 2000:

Walls, a roof, and a porch - actually resembling a real house here. I believe this was in October or so of 2000:

We picked almost everything out ourselves, and surprisingly our tastes are similar enough that we didn't even have to argue much over it. We chose the carpeting, the cabinets, the doors, the color of the siding and shutters, the placement of cable TV and electrical outlets. We said no to the wall dividing the living room and family room, preferring the more open floor plan. We said yes to the bay window and front porch -- a fairly costly upgrade. We agonized over whether we made the right decisions, both for our own happiness in the house and for the future "resale value" that we couldn't even imagine. It took about six months to build and during that time I worried about all sorts of things -- would interest rates skyrocket? Would the mortgage company change their mind? Would Bigelow Homes suddenly go under (highly unlikely, I know)? Would my job suddenly disappear?

I closed on the house January 11, 2001 -- two days before my 30th birthday. For some reason, it pleases me that I bought my first house while still technically in my twenties.

Now, four years later, that resale value that we couldn't really imagine matters. This is sooner than I originally planned back in 2000, but I think that moving now is the right decision for us. We haven't begun looking for our new house yet; I don't want to own two houses at once, so I intend to wait until I have a solid offer before making an offer on another house myself. I have a rough idea of where we will end up living, but that's all I can really say right now. We have, though, looked at countless houses online. We've talked to a realtor who will help us find the right house. We have a rough idea of our budget, but I don't want to fall into a trap of setting the asking price for my house based on what I need to buy the next one. That's the other reason I'm not rushing out and making offers right now.

I don't know how long this will take. We are hopeful it won't be too long. Keeping the house as spotless as it is right now will be a challenge for a couple of messy packrats!

I do know that it may be a little hard to say goodbye when the time comes.

I'm Not Catholic

2005-04-21T19:48:00.000-06:00

I'm not Catholic, so all this business about the new pope is A) pretty mysterious to me, and B) not something I particularly want to care about. Some folks are ruminating on his conservativeness. I'm sure many conservatives are delighted. More liberal-minded people are appalled.

The thing is, I don't really care that much about the rules that the Catholic church declares. Celibacy requirements for priests? No non-procreative sex? Insisting that men dominate women? If Catholics want to live their lives according to those rules, that's their business. I realize that many Catholics don't actually agree with those rules and push for change from within. Andrew Sullivan had an interesting post yesterday about the fact that the church can and does change. Interesting, yes, but something I come to as an absolute outsider. Not only am I not Catholic, I wasn't raised with any religion. More power to those pushing for change, but again, I'm not Catholic and it isn't really my business.

But the actions of the Pope and the Catholic church become my business when they start insisting that their rules should influence the Law for all Americans, Catholic or not. That's when I start getting, shall we way, twitchy. What do I mean here? Sodomy laws. Blocking gay marriage. Insisting that discrimination in employment and housing is somehow part of God's plan and the duty of all. Blocking access to birth control. Pushing lawmakers to interfere in personal right-to-die decisions. On and on. Dan Savage sums up some of the damage done to gays (including non-Catholic ones like me) by the Catholic church (you have to skip past the zombie business):

When the pope -- the dead one, the next one, the one after that -- says something stupid about homosexuality, straight Americans take it to heart. The church's efforts have helped defeat gay-rights bills, led to the omission of gays and lesbians from hate-crime statutes, and helped to pass anti-gay-marriage amendments. But when a pope says something stupid about heterosexuality, straight Americans go deaf. And this pope had plenty to say about heterosexual sex -- no contraceptives, no premarital sex, no blowjobs, no jerkin' off, no divorce, no remarriage, no artificial insemination, no blowjobs, no three-ways, no swinging, no blowjobs, no anal. Did I mention no blowjobs? John Paul II had a longer list of "no's" for straight people than he did for gay people. But when he tried to meddle in the private lives of straights, the same people who deferred to his delicate sensibilities where my rights were concerned suddenly blew the old asshole off. Gay blowjobs are expendable, it seems; straight ones are sacred.

I'm not saying that Catholics don't have a right to an opinion on these matters; I'm saying that they don't have a right to encode their particular beliefs into the law and force all of us to obey them. If you think it is morally wrong to, say, marry someone of the same-sex, then there is a very simple solution available to you -- don't.

I confess I have never understood the urge that religious people have to make those who don't share their faith follow the same rules. Is it just easier to do what you believe your god demands when everyone else does it too, so you never need to question it? Imagine, for a moment, the outcry if, in some red-state town, Hindu clerics pushed for legislation banning the sale and consumption of beef. No more burgers! The horror!

What purpose would be served by such a law? How could anyone possibly see such a law as a just use of state power? Yet sodomy laws did not fall away until June 26, 2003, and plenty of conservatives foamed at the mouth about it, insisting that policing of private sexual activity was a good use of state power. How is a sodomy law different than a law prohibiting the sale of items that violate dietary codes of a religion? I mean really, the very name we use for these laws comes right out of scripture!

Down by the River

2005-04-17T18:25:00.000-06:00

So, we didn't get a ride in this weekend. At the moment my road bike is in the shop for a tune up, so a ride would mean hauling out my mountain bike. Not a huge deal, except that at the moment it doesn't have clipless pedals. I've gotten rather spoiled by my clipless pedals (basically, pedals with cleats that lock your feet to the bike. It sounds scary at first, but once you're used to them, it is hard to go back to normal pedals. Mine are Shimano mountain bike pedals, similar to these).

So, instead we went for a walk on a small portion of the Fox River trail. As on any day with good weather -- particularly in early spring -- the trail had a fair amount of traffic. Most of the bicyclists passed us safely. I like the fact that I use these trails both as a pedestrian (with dogs!) and a cyclist; it gives a good sense of perspective. As a rider, I try to be considerate of the walkers, and as a walker, I try to be considerate of the bicyclists. That means pulling my dogs off to the side and out of the way when they pass. On really beautiful summer weekends, I do tend to avoid certain patches of this trail during the busiest time -- usually afternoon. Early morning is the best time if you want to ride fast and not endanger small children.

Anyway, I grew up along these trails and never bothered to take any pictures until today...

From the beginning of the trail at Les Arends park. Hard to see, but there are some stairs going down to the actual path:

I think this was looking to the North, but I'm not positive.

If the above picture was looking North, then this was looking South. Or maybe I have it all backwards.

Yes, there really is a river here.

Another shot of the river:

A close up of the little purple flowers along the side of the path -- something hard to see when on a bicycle!

Finally, some Canadian geese hanging out along the river. Behind me is a huge back yard for a giant house. I think I envy the people who live with the river in their backyard!

First Bike Ride of the Year

2005-04-16T19:47:00.000-06:00

I am really behind on bike blogging this week. Last weekend, we went on our first ride of the season. It felt great to get out on the bike, but I definitely felt the lack of pedaling over the last few months.

The ride was pretty short -- only about 12 miles. Even in good shape, neither of us are very fast. On this ride we averaged about 11 MPH. Considering the time since our last ride (last September) and the headwind on the way out, we were pretty happy with this.

We rode to Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve, which has a crushed limestone bike path looping through it. I find it amusing that it is called a "Forest Preserve" when there is no forest, just prairie. The path is a little bumpy on a road bike, but not bad.

The majority of the ride was actually on the road, between our house and the path. Somehow there seemed to be a lot less traffic on this road last fall when we did this route.

When we got home, Laura road up the alley while I took some pictures. She wanted a profile photo for her blog, Fat Girl on a Bicycle. I modified the pictures on the computer a bit. My vote was for this one, photoshopped to look like a pencil drawing:

Alas, she preferred the Sepia version you can see on her blog now.

Hanging Out in the Sun

2005-04-16T19:19:00.000-06:00

I actually took these last Sunday. Cricket likes to bask in the sun in our backyard.

The first few I took from inside the house, through the screen. This one turned out OK, but you can see the mesh of the screen door.

So, I went out in the sun for this one:

This is a pretty accurate representation of Cricket's demeanor when basking on a sunny day.

Incidentally, the weather today has been just as nice.

Happily Paying the Price For Your Bias

2005-04-14T18:52:00.000-06:00

This article describes a study showing that store clerks tend to be more rude to obese customers:

Investigators found that when women wore a prosthetic suit designed to make them look obese, they were treated more rudely, and received fewer smiles and less eye contact from sales clerks at a Houston, Texas, shopping mall than when they shopped without the fat suit.

Sales clerks -- almost three-quarters of whom were women -- also tended to end interactions with obese shoppers more quickly, and use a negative tone with them.

Laura writes about this from her own personal experiences shopping. Alas, a Blog addresses the idea that sales clerks are expressing "moral disapproval", since they became more friendly to customers who mentioned that they were dieting.

These are all interesting perspectives that you should definitely read, but one thing from the article just leapt out at me:

A survey of shoppers also showed that people who were obese said they experienced more discrimination from sales clerks, which caused them to spend less time in a store and less money while there. This shows that store owners have a financial, as well as ethical, incentive for addressing discrimination among their staff, King said.

(Emphasis mine)

Set aside, for a moment, the rightness or wrongness of treating people rudely because of your own bias. This is a prime example of how bias and discrimination has an economic cost that tends to get forgotten. Or, put another way, sometimes doing the right thing pays off more than doing the discriminatory thing. For me, this really brings home just how pervasive certain prejudices are. People cling to them even when it is costing them money. How whacked is that?

Now, maybe these clerks don't see the economic impact. If they're not paid on commission, then the economic result of their rudeness is a little less tangible. I also understand that working retail isn't always very fun and being polite to customers all day long can wear you down. But still.

This reminded me of something that Laura observed several years ago when working as a salesperson at a furniture store. She and her co-workers were paid on commission. One of the guys there was a self-professed racist...he actually admitted it. If, say, a Hispanic couple walked into the store looking for furniture, he would always show them the cheapest item in the store. He always assumed they couldn't afford anything better. He wasn't particularly friendly to them, either.

Laura, on the other hand, would actually treat all the customers equally. Many times, the Hispanic couple had just as much money to spend as anyone else. Treating all customers with respect netted her larger commissions.

When hearing stories like this, it is worthwhile to think about the implications beyond things like shopping. How does this dynamic operate in the workplace, for example? Oftentimes the argument against anti-discrimination laws for employers suggests that companies would never discriminate because it is against their own economic interest. Corporations always hire the most qualified people, right? Well, if individual humans sometimes let their personal prejudices cost them money, isn't it just as likely that companies -- which are of course made up of those individual people -- might do the same?

Something worth thinking about.

He, She, or It

2005-04-13T20:07:00.000-06:00

Over at the Whatever, John Scalzi takes on a few reader questions in today's post.

The whole thing is good, but being someone who writes technical manuals for a living, I was particularly amused by his commentary on "'He or she' or singular 'they'?" Here is what he says:

They. There are times when sexual differentation is grammatically relevant, but most of the time it really isn't, and there's not a single person who actually believes that the generic "him" isn't actually the work of some long-dead grammarian with a micropenis and a pathological fear of speaking to chicks. Screw Mr. Micropenis. Long live "they." Having said that, there are times I'll use "he or she" or will use "him" or "her" generically, because I want to. I'll also use it when I'm writing professionally, because it's not generally worth my time to piss off a copyeditor, whose job it is to preserve the long-dead Mr. Micropenis' editorial strictures because that's what their employer demands of them. I'll just use it on my own time and maybe as more people think as I do, the great publishing houses of the world will tell the unlamented Mr. Micropenis to take a hike.

Gotta love the bit about Mr. Micropenis!

At any rate, for some reason the singular "they" grates on my ears. In the documentation that I write, I usually use "he or she" if I need to. The thing is, it is pretty easy to work around this whole issue for the most part, at least in MOST technical writing.

First, in docs that address the user, do it in the second person: "To do some great, fabulous thing with this software, choose the OK button."

For some of the stuff I write, the "you" is someone like a system administrator. He or she (ha, there it is!) is the person doing the procedures, but also has "users" further down the line to which I must refer. So I have to say things like this: "To change properties for an individual user, select ABC and choose the OK button. He or she will see the change immediately."

I have two strategies that work around the awkward "he or she" in most cases:

Word examples as plural. Then, the "they" is actually grammatically correct.
Create a specific example using a gender-specific person's name, then use the appropriate pronouns. This works pretty well for me because I show lots of sample data in my docs, and many of those screen shots include names. So I have to come up with a variety of names anyway, and it isn't any trouble to choose some to use as examples. I have a few that I frequently use -- both male and female -- and the gender in a given example is pretty much random. Well, except for ONE scenario. Certain procedures are things that secretaries or administrative assistants do. For those examples, I always like to use male names if I can -- just to turn the stereotype on its head ("the secretary Roger can take care of his boss Lisa's needs by..."). I doubt anyone else has ever noticed, but it gives me a sense of satisfaction anyway.

If neither of these are feasible, I use "he or she" and live with it. Doesn't happen too often.

Incidentally, this issue pops up from time to time on a tech writing listserve I read. Just go to the Techwr-L archives and search for "he or she" or "s/he".

Sometimes, people posting on these discussions refer to the "gender neutral" method as being "politically correct." That attitude rather pisses me off. Acknowledging that the world -- and the set of people your writing is addressing -- contains both males and females is simply logical. Ask a five-year old boy to read a sentence with "he" in it and ask what kind of person he pictures. I am certain he will say "boy" or "man". Duh. (note this is an example of method number 2 - create an example with a specific person with a specific gender. Then you can safely say "he"! See how easy that is?)

Back in college, I recall a computer science textbook for one of my classes actually used "she" and "her" as so-called gender neutral terms throughout the entire book. The intro included a footnote explaining that after centuries of male dominance, the tender sensibilities of the readers should be able to handle reversing things in one textbook. Something to that effect, anyway. I recall being somewhat amused by this. It is amazing how quickly the "we can use just one pronoun to represent everyone" crowd changes their tune when the pronoun chosen for that job is "she"!

The People Who Actually Have to Live With These Policies

2005-04-13T19:17:00.000-06:00

I’m getting rather tired of posting about the contraceptive / pharmacy issue that I have been talking about lately. I wasn’t planning on talking about it again today, but then I found this story over at Pacific Views.

Natasha tells about what happened several years ago when she discovered that she had a large ovarian cyst, at the same time she discovered she was pregnant.

I was told that it required immediate how-fast-can-you-put-your-things-in-order-and-get-on-the-schedule surgery, and that I could bleed to death if it should burst for some reason. It was suspected that the condition was aggravated by scarring from a major abdominal surgery I had as a child.

(Emphasis mine)

Lets explain this real slow here. Her life was in danger. Clear enough?

Moving along, her health care service was Catholic, so an abortion was out of the question. Surgery couldn’t happen without one, either. Fortunately for her, she did miscarry naturally. She has quite a bit to say about the pain and seriousness involved in the surgery and recovery – making the very strong point that “female problems” can be a hell of a lot more serious and life-threatening than, say, mild monthly cramps that men seem to imagine.

Anyway, tying this in with my pharmacist posts. Six months after the surgery, the cysts started coming back. The treatment to fix it was – you guessed it – birth control:

Lucky me, I live in a state where pharmacists have to do their jobs or find another line of work. I was no longer married then, and after a lot of recent and bitter wrangling, I wouldn't have been up to the task of explaining to some ignorant busybody that I really needed my prescription. The surgery had ended up costing me an ovary, and I was petrified of losing the other one, or losing my job because of missing too much work for more inpatient treatment.

Her last few paragraphs basically sum up my feelings on this whole issue:

Because I'm a woman, a routine medical problem for which there was a widely known treatment could have become life-threatening. Because I'm a woman, the medication which prevented a relapse might now in some parts of this country be denied to me at the whim of a pharmacist who doesn't even know me. Because I'm a woman, there are people who think they should get a say in my private medical decisions. People who think they have a right to endanger my life because some medieval-minded lunatic needs to get the faithful worked into a lather.

I have two words for those people and their so-called 'conscience.' Take a wild guess what they are.

(Emphasis mine, again)

My comment here -- birth control is medically necessary, goddammit. And it is not up to that guy behind the counter at Walgreens to decide when it is necessary and when it isn’t. Period.

The link to Natasha’s story was via Amanda at Pandagon.

Getting Back to the Pharmacist Issue

2005-04-11T18:34:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to come back to the issue discussed in this post. In the comments, OneMan said this:

"My issue isn't really the drug, it's my fear that we are going to require medical professionals to be forced to turn off their own Moral judgments because the state says they will."

The way I read this, OneMan worries about pharmacists (and perhaps even doctors - more on that in a later post) being subjected to unwarranted government intrusion.

Perhaps we can find some common ground her, because my position on this comes from a very similar worry on the other side. I worry about patients being subjected to unwarranted intrusion into their health care by pharmacists.

It boils down to this question: how much power should a pharmacist - who did not go to medical school and is not a doctor - have over your health care? Pharmacists are trained (I assume) to understand drugs, side effects, and drug interactions. I'm sure this list is far from complete and I mean no disrespect to pharmacists, but I don't think they are necessarily qualified to diagnose medical problems. That's why they fill prescriptions, rather than write them.

By refusing to fill a prescription, a pharmacist is essentially usurping the role of the doctor. He is saying, in effect, that you don't really need that drug after all. His "diagnoses" is based entirely on his own opinion or whim, not any sort of objective criteria like a medical examination.

Frankly, as a patient, I would much prefer that doctors do the work of diagnosing my health issues, not the guy behind the counter at Walgreens.

Again, I remain fairly convinced that this sort of law would have been tossed out long ago if the drugs were something completely unconnected to sex, and even more so if they were drugs commonly used by men.

Lets take this to the logical extreme. A pharmacist we'll call "Bob" has a moral opposition to just about every imaginable drug. And so he spends his day behind the counter at Walgreens reading novels and turning away customers. Because he justifies this with proclamations that these drugs are immoral, Walgreens is prohibited from firing him.

Yes, that is a ridiculous scenario. But, what is the difference between believing that birth control is immoral and believing that anti-psychotic drugs used by schizophrenics are immoral? Answer: there is no difference. In both cases the pharmacist is relying on his own opinion and is using that opinion to overrule a doctor's recommended treatment.

If you believe that pharmacists have the right to use their own opinions of morality when choosing which prescriptions to fill, then you must allow that right to be applied to any drug, not just contraceptives. That is what I find terribly scary. This policy opens the door for strangers to meddle with my health care on very flimsy "morality" claims. Since a "personal moral judgment" is, well, personal, I cannot counter it with any objective claim. Any and every legal prescription drug is at risk under this kind of law.

For example, I have an uncle who is schizophrenic and the years he spent without medication are pretty much lost to him. Even with meds he is "not quite right," but at least he can function. His doctors monitor his condition and select the drugs that work for him. They are the ones who have examined him. It seems outrageous to me that some guy behind the counter at Walgreens should be allowed to overrule those doctors and deny my uncle his drugs just because their religious beliefs dictate that mental illness is a character flaw that can be cured by concentrating and praying real hard. They are entitled to those beliefs of course, and they can live their OWN lives in accordance with them. They just don't have the right to impose those beliefs on someone else.

Explain to me the difference between this scenario and the oral contraceptive scenario. Should the pharmacist be allowed to deny my uncle his drugs? If not, why is he allowed to deny a woman birth control? In some cases, both can be equally necessary for maintaining health (as I've mentioned many times before, birth control can be used for health issues that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy).

Here's another example - let's say the pharmacist believes that AIDS is God's punishment for immoral behavior. As I recall from the 80's, this used to be a very common belief (and probably still is in some quarters). So, the pharmacist refuses to fill prescriptions for AIDS drugs, under the argument that combating the disease is thwarting God's plans for punishment.

Do you really think this is a good idea to give pharmacists such power? To let them be the gatekeepers who decide who gets their health problems cured and who doesn’t?

The argument that one could always go to a different pharmacy, or come back later, only works so well, particularly in an emergency situation. Where I live, sure no problem - there are plenty of other places nearby. In, say, rural Montana you might be talking about a 2-hour drive to the next major town. And then you have this situation, in which the pharmacist refused to transfer the contraception prescription to another pharmacy.

Finally, there is an argument that surely a free-market, business-friendly, capitalist Republican ought to agree with - what about the rights of the pharmacy or store itself? Stephen Chapman addressed this one in this column in the Chicago Tribune.

“Walgreens or Osco might rather put customer needs above the preferences of employees. But that choice is off the table. Under the conscience law, employers involved in health care can't discriminate against employees who refuse to do something they find morally objectionable.”

If I own a pharmacy, why should I be forced to keep an employee who turns away and alienates PAYING customers? The current law allows exactly that. This is strange because other jobs do not offer such blanket protection of personal morality. If the company for which I work asked me to do something that was completely legal, yet immoral in my mind, I could certainly refuse, but it is unlikely that I would keep my job.

Chapman's compromise, which I could sorta live with, is to let the pharmacies choose what drugs they will carry and require their employees to dispense them. Pharmacists who object to birth control can find jobs at pharmacies with the same philosophy. This doesn't seem to be an undue hardship for them -- the rest of us have to find some way to reconcile our livelihood with our own ethical principles. A committed vegetarian is unlikely to get a job working at a butcher. If he did, then refused to sell meat to paying customers, I don't think his employment would last very long. I think telemarketers are a scourge, so you will never catch me working for one. It would be absolutely ridiculous for me to get a job at a telemarketer, then refuse to call people on the grounds that I think it is wrong.

I personally believe that most pharmacies would choose the keep-our-customers-happy option over the turn-away-customers-and-piss-them-off option. This system would work even better if the stores advertised their respective policies up front. Even though I don't use any sort of contraception, I would make an effort to shop only at contraception-friendly stores on principle. Furthermore, this advertising would make it easy to know where to go (and where not to go) in the event of an emergency.

This obviously wouldn't help someone living in the boondocks somewhere if the only pharmacy in town was run by a fundamentalist Christian, so it isn't perfect, but it would certainly be better than the current system in which your healthcare is determined by who happens to be working current shift at Walgreens.

I have to admit, though, I still do not understand how dispensing drugs to a stranger can possibly be an affront to anyone's moral values. That is, I can certainly understand that an anti-contraception person would turn down such drugs herself. In the case of a man, perhaps he would insist that his wife not take them. That would be a matter for an individual couple to decide on their own. But how does it infringe upon that pharmacists rights for someone else -- like myself -- to take those drugs?

In his comment, OneMan also asked whether doctors should be required to write these prescriptions. I have thoughts on that issue as well, but I think this post is already too long, so I will address that issue shortly in another post.

A Welcome Post (With a little relationship advice)...

2005-04-06T18:32:00.000-06:00

Please give a warm welcome to my lovely partner Laura's blog: Fat Girl on a Bicycle.

I admit I am a little jealous of the name she came up with. It is much more interesting than the very dull "Sara's Spot," which was the best I could come up with when blogger was sitting there asking me what I wanted to call my blog.

I like the way the name "Fat Girl on a Bicycle" invokes images that seem incongruous, while at the same time being completely true (What? Some people outside the narrow range of socially acceptable weight in our society are actually healthy people who exercise? You're kidding!). Laura does like to bicycle. Last year she rode 342 miles; the year before, 476. I intend to get photographic proof of her (and my) riding now that I finally have a digital camera. For more about why she started riding, see this post.

As for the "fat" part, well, she is certainly free to use that term. Being a Very Smart Spouse, I prefer to say that she is merely "larger sized," but I admit that "Larger Sized Girl on a Bike" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Speaking of being a Very Smart Spouse, I do believe that my ability to navigate certain dangerous waters has helped our marriage to last for these past nine years. Nine years -- wow, that seems amazing to me. I can't claim all the credit of course -- Laura makes it pretty easy to be smart. For example, she would never ask a trick question like "Do these pants make my butt look big" and expect anything other than an honest answer. That answer should be tactful ("hmm, I don't think that style is particularly flattering, maybe you should try these other ones instead"), but it should be honest. After all, it would not be very loving to let someone buy a pair of expensive, unflattering pants and walk around thinking they look great, would it?

Here's the promised relationship advice:

Answer questions honestly, but tactfully.
Don't ask a question if you don't really want the answer.

Getting back to Laura's new blog, although she lives here in the Midwest, she is, as she notes, a Montanan in exile. Here are some good links to illustrate why:

This is where we live: Aurora, IL.
This is where she wishes we lived: Missoula, MT.

The picture showing Aurora is situated to show our actual neighborhood. Zoom out a few times to see the rest of the Chicagoland area and scroll around. Endless suburbs that run from one into the next with no discernible line between them. Zoom out the Missoula picture and see the difference...towns far apart (if you can even see them in the picture). All those little "wrinkles" that represent mountains. It is a completely different world.

Some minor blogroll updates...

2005-04-03T20:25:00.000-06:00

Finally fixed the link to Alas, A Blog to point to the "new" location (which isn't that new anymore).

Removed MouseWords (since Amanda doesn't seem to be updating it anymore) and replaced it with her new home Pandagon.

Added Shrubville, which is an amusing single-issue blog mocking the comic strip "Prickly City" (a strip which unfortunately wastes space in the Chicago Tribune).

Added Sara Skates, a blog by another SaraS. Unlike me, she can skate. Last time I tried skating on ice it was not particularly pretty.

Added The Zero Boss just because it usually makes me laugh (and the kids are cute, though I have trouble keeping track of how many he has).

Added Mickey's Musings, home of Carnival of the Dogs.

Also updated the Montana blog list with Speedkill because I've been reading it for a while and didn't realize that it WASN'T on my list already.

Birds

2005-04-03T13:07:00.000-06:00

Hey, it is springtime. Seems a good time to talk about birds.

First, a shot of an ordinary bird up on my fence:

Then, this one. This bird is not in the greatest of condition any longer:

I found the skeleton under an old wooden box used for barbecue tools and supplies. I have no idea how it got there or how long it has been there. I think this shot turned out a little better -- I scooped it up with an old shovel:

Finally, back to living birds again. This picture is a few years old. A bird took to relaxing in my hanging basket on my front porch. I actually managed to get outside, on the porch, and up a step-stool to get this shot. The bird blends in a bit, so you have to look closely.

The weather today is just beautiful, but unfortunately other commitments got in the way of the Spring Forward ride we planned to do today. I hope we get out riding again soon!

The Dog With Blue Hair

2005-04-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

Cricket Wrapped in Blanket
Originally uploaded by SaraS.

Well, not really. Cricket likes crawling under this blanket, and I think the fringe looks like funny blue hair.

Here's another one. I think she decided to just take a nap.

Good to see this

2005-04-02T17:10:00.000-07:00

Gov. Rod Blagojevich does not agree that pharmacists have the right to refuse to fill prescriptions.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich approved an emergency rule Friday requiring pharmacies to fill birth control prescriptions quickly after a Chicago pharmacist refused to fill an order because of moral opposition to the drug

The rule apparently does allow a little room for the opposition:

Under the new rule, if a pharmacist does not fill the prescription because of a moral objection, another pharmacist must be available to fill it without delay.

Via Amanda at Pandagon.

I'm not terribly fond of our governor, but I think he's got this one right.

I don't understand the opposition to oral contraceptives. For one thing, we're talking about birth control here. You know, contraception. Preventing pregnancy before it starts is not equivalent to abortion in any way and in fact prevents abortion.

Furthermore, many women take these medications for reasons that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy -- they regulate the hormones and cycles. One woman I know suffered very unpleasant symptoms before she started taking the pills, and, according to her doctor, the level of hormone imbalance could lead to other health problems down the line. Could someone please explain to me exactly why protecting her health should be considered immoral?

Finally, I have to wonder if the people who are so eager to let the pharmacists overrule their doctors due to "ethical concerns" would still feel that way if drugs that they needed were also threatened.**

For example, suppose a pharmacist had a sincere, religious belief that mental illness is caused by the devil and can be cured with prayer. That has about as much grounding in science as believing that birth control is immoral. Would people support that pharmacist's "right" to turn away patients with prozac prescriptions? Should a pharmacist be allowed to turn away people who need pain medication? Cancer drugs? Viagra? I'm sure someone could come up with a moral opposition to just about any drug.

Somehow, if those were the drugs that pharmacists complained about, I doubt we'd be having this conversation. The drugstores, and the law, would simply tell them that they should find a new line of work and that would be the end of it.

**Obviously, there are times when a pharmacist should overrule your doctor -- i.e., if you have a potential drug interaction. That would be overruling for a medical purpose -- which is entirely different than overruling due to what is essentially nothing more than a personal opinion regarding morality.

Spring! Bicycling!

2005-03-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

The last three days, I've gone for short walks at lunchtime. My office is right near a park with bike/walking paths, so there are plenty of places for walking.

On Monday, I was wearing long sleeves and I started out with my leather jacket. It isn't an extremely heavy jacket since I removed the zip-out winter lining, but still...a few minutes into the walk I had to take it off and carry it.

Yesterday I left the jacket in my office and just went out in long sleeves. By the end of the walk, I was pushing the sleeves up to my elbows.

Today I went out in short sleeves and did not want to come back in at the end of my walk.

I don't know how much longer this great weather will last. By the time I left work to go home, it was storming, but still warm. So far the 5-day forecasts are looking like the weekend will be decent (50 degrees, partly sunny). We're planning to do our first bike ride of the season this Sunday - the Spring Forward ride. Since we've been slugs all winter, I expect we will do the shortest route (18 miles). My bike has been sadly neglected in the garage ever since last September. The previous year (2003), we kept riding until the end of October, but for some reason we had a bad cycling season last year. Other parts of life kept getting in the way.

I plan to spend a good part of Saturday getting ready - I need to put the rooftop rack back on the car and make sure the bikes are in decent enough condition. My mechanical skills are limited, but I can at least do some cleanup and drip chain lube in the right spots.

We have a lot going on this year, so we probably won't get as much riding in as I would like. My love for bicycling really kicked in back in 2001, when I rode in an AIDS ride in Montana (7 days, Missoula to Billings, very "hilly"). I badgered Laura into riding with me in the summer of 2003. She finally gave in to make me shut up, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that she liked it. By the end of the summer, we both had new road bikes.

We rode a total of 476 miles in 23 rides that summer and fall, which is why I say 2004 was a "bad cycling season" -- we only rode 16 times for a total of 342 miles. Yes, I do keep track of this!

So far we've planned on riding in three organized "invitational" rides this year:

the Spring Forward ride I mentioned above
The Silver Springs 60 (April 24). This one starts near where we live.
Bike the Drive (May 29) - we did this last year and it was awesome. They shut down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago for the morning and let bicycles take over. Four lanes of road (each way), full of nothing but bikes -- check out the pictures at that link! We're planning on staying downtown overnight so that we don't need to get up before dawn to get there in time. Now that I have a digital camera, hopefully I'll be able to get some good pictures.

Of course, we also plenty of riding on our own, especially on some of the bike paths around where we live. We're fond of the Virgil Gilman trail, which is not as well-known so it is much less crowded on weekends. The Fox River trail is beautiful, but you have to hit it early on weekends before it becomes overrun with other riders, walkers, joggers, and people with small children. It is also very long. I'm also found of the Great Western Trail.

I'm hoping we'll be able to squeeze some good rides in this spring and summer.

Speaking of bicycling, here's a cool article about a programmer who quit his office job to become a bike messenger (via Monkeys in My Pants).

Parents, Children, and Spouses - Who Wins?

2005-03-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been nearly two weeks since my last post. I haven't felt much like blogging lately, for all sorts of reasons. The Terry Schiavo drama has become wearying and still seems to be a major topic of discussion at lots of blogs. For some reason, this case has been bothering me greatly, and I couldn't figure out why. I don't think it has much to do with the issues in the case -- it is more about the identities of the combatants. Religious Right folks on one side; the rest of us on the other. Yes, I know that is simplistic, especially since Jesse Jackson has jumped into the fray. It just seems just like all the other fights that have been going on lately -- gay marriage, abortion, access to contraception, the level of government intrusion in people's lives, on and on and on.

However, one aspect of the Schiavo case has hit home in a more personal manner for some reason. I keep dwelling on this question -- how do parents learn to let go of their children? I know that good parents are always parents of course, but at some point surely they must relinquish control over how their children live their lives. At what point does the adult child's new family -- spouse, partner, whatever -- become just as important as the relationship with his or her parents?

I admit I have my own issues in this area that probably color my opinions. In the past year I made a decision my parents aren't particularly happy about, and that has led to numerous bad feelings (on both sides, I think) and arguments. I've also spent a great deal of time agonizing over why I still care about their approval.

Anyway, on Easter, Laura and I went to my parents house for dinner. My mom was listening to some AM talk radio station, because that is what she does. Politically, she is hard to categorize. She claims to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. She has been a Republican since the Kennedy era or so, she loves George Bush (all the Bushes, really -- yes, I find it odd) and she despises Bill Clinton.

Yet at the same time, she has been an atheist since long before I was born. She has a serious dislike of organized religion. Back in high school when I had my own evangelical Christian phase (I really must write about that sometimes) our biggest arguments centered around religion. I remember being driven to fury over her contempt for religious faith. She is unashamedly pro-choice (and tells with great pride about writing a letter about it to the first George Bush).

So, based on all that, what side would you expect her to embrace in the Terry Schiavo drama? If you guessed the parents who are motivated by Catholic faith and supported by their anti-abortion "friends", you would be right. Somehow, I knew that's where she would land even before we drove over there on Sunday, even if it does seem counter-intuitive given her political positions.

She comes down on this side based on the fact that she is a mother, and, as she said, would not want her child's fate to be decided by "some guy." Never mind that the "guy" in question was chosen as a husband by Terri.

The talk radio program on Sunday for some reason set me off and we started our visit with a bit of an argument. I freely admit that I overreacted and got a little too angry, especially considering that I don't have particularly strong feelings on the case (at least, I didn't think I did). We then veered off to other issues regarding Republicans, gay marriage, and so on before things settled down and we went on to talk about less contentious things. The rest of the visit was pleasant, but here it is two days later and I am dwelling on a few offhand comments that I wish I had addressed during our conversation.

On the one hand, my mother likes to point out how lucky I am that I have a supportive family and that I don't have to worry about my relationship with Laura being mistreated in the event that something bad happened to either of us. On the other, she talks about how she would not want decisions regarding her children to be made by someone else (that "some guy" comment again). As you might imagine, this makes me worry that if I were incapacitated, she would try to take control and cut Laura off as a decision maker. Yes, I know, we can and should see a lawyer and draw up the paperwork to prevent that. I currently have just one obstacle in the way of doing so, but hopefully we can clear that up in the next few months and take care of it.

One unique aspect of marriage is the fact your husband or wife is a person you choose (setting aside arranged marriage for a minute of course). You can't choose your parents or your siblings or your cousins -- but you can choose your spouse and make that person your closest legal relative. That is one of the reasons I find gay marriage so compelling -- it grants a level of "relatedness" that can't really be duplicated with any amount of paperwork or lawyers fees.

Since a spouse is chosen -- unlike all those other relatives -- it makes perfect sense to me that the spousal relationship would take priority over others, even parents and siblings. My sister is an evangelical Christian (unlike me, she did not leave that phase). She chose for her husband a man who shares her faith. If she became incapacitated, it would be obscene to push her husband out of the way and let my parents make the decisions. Her chosen husband shares her worldview and is far more likely to make decisions with which my sister would agree -- as hard as that might be for my parents to accept.

Likewise, my parents have their own worldview that does not at all match that of my grandparents. For my entire life my grandparents have been appalled at my parents' lack of religious faith and they have tirelessly worked (unsuccessfully) to bring us back into the fold. Perhaps they too were unable to accept their child's choices. If something happened to my father, I don't think my mother would entertain the idea of her father-in-law stepping in to make decisions for more than a nanosecond. I can easily envision conflict between them. I can easily imagine my mother's ire at the idea of being usurped by a man with a wildly different worldview than hers or her husband's.

I don't have children and probably never will, so I suppose I can't really talk about how hard it must be for parents to let go of their children. I can only see it from my direction.

It is this aspect of the Schiavo case that keeps holding my attention...parents versus a child's spouse.

Incidentally, there are some good discussions of the Schiavo case going on at Alas, a Blog. Also some good posts over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. And Jason at Positive Liberty also makes the connection with gay marriage:

For the record, my wishes for the end of my own life are as follows: I trust my lifelong companion, my husband under the laws of Canada, Scott R. Starin, to make all medical decisions for me whatsoever. I do not trust anyone else with this capacity, no matter who they are.

I expect Scott's decisions to be followed down to the very last detail when I am incapacitated. I do not want my body to be kept alive artificially in a persistent vegetative state when there is no hope of recovery, and I trust Scott to make the determination of when and how my life will end if ever this state should befall me.

Now, if only a marriage allowed us to make such decisions--but apparently it doesn't anymore.

Fiction

2005-03-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

Back in college, I wrote quite a bit short fiction, which is not terribly remarkable considering that I was majoring in creative writing after all (University of Illinois liked to call it "Rhetoric", but it was essentially an English degree with more classes in writing. I took all the non-fiction and fiction classes they offered at the time). By the time I graduated, I was getting tired of my own stories. I think the quality of the ones from my last class was a definite slip backwards from my earlier work. I don't know why this happened, but there it is. Maybe I was just burnt out.

So, I decided to take some time off from writing fiction. I gave myself a year -- I decided I wouldn't worry about writing any complete stories for an entire year. Instead, I would perhaps revise my existing ones, send them out to magazines, and do lots of "practice writing" to generate good ideas for once that year was up (if you want to know what I mean by practice writing, see here).

Well, you can probably guess what happened. I collected a handful of rejection slips for my stories (I still have them in my file cabinet). I filled several notebooks with lots of rambling. The year ended. And another, and another. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that twelve years passed and I did not complete a single short story.

I have lots of good reasons for this, of course. I was a bit surprised when I started my first job out of college and discovered to my dismay that I liked it. It was supposed to be just the soulless day job, taken to support my brilliant fiction! It wasn't supposed to turn into something I liked, or something that would slowly expand to take up more and more of my free time. 40-hour weeks turned into 50, then 60, then 70. One pay period I logged 93 hours of overtime. That is 93 hours on top of the normal 80-hour, two-week long pay period. You do the math on that. Ah, yes, the days when I was paid for my overtime...

I didn't exactly do nothing during all this time. Like I said, I got a few rejection slips. I made several false starts, both for short stories and for an epic novel I had in mind. These didn't go very far. One story was published, in a small literary magazine called Oyez Review. It was actually a bit of a surprise - they apparently neglected to inform me that they had accepted the story. I had completely forgotten about submitting it, and one day I opened my mail to find two contributor copies of a magazine I didn't recognize...with my story in it. Full of typos that I didn't create, I might add. I was a little annoyed by the whole thing, but still happy to have published.

Anyway, somewhere in there I met Laura, moved a few times, and changed jobs. I tried to get back into fiction writing a few times, but I think the biggest barrier was my own inability to accept my tastes. I wanted to write "literary" fiction because that's what was expected back in college, but at the same time, I didn't like most literary fiction that I read. Why would I want to write stories that I wouldn't want to read?

A few months ago I started digging through files on my old Macintosh and ran across some of those false starts and ramblings. Maybe that's what prompted it. Maybe it was all the first novel exuberance over at John Scalzi's site (see here, here, here, and here). I found myself remembering my "promise" when I finished college and wondering what happened to the last twelve years.

So, the whole point of this long, rambling story...I took one of those old ideas that never went anywhere, started over from a completely different direction, and actually finished a story. I rewrote it a week later, then wrote a third draft with a few minor tweaks. Last night I submitted it to a science fiction magazine. I should note that when I submitted stories twelve years ago, this e-mail submission thing was unheard of.

It will probably be rejected. I fully expect it to be rejected, not because I think it is awful, but because the odds are against me. But you know, I always liked writing fiction. I think I've missed it over these years without really realizing just how much.

We'll see what happens. I'm doing my best to stop thinking about it and start working on a new story, but I have to admit I'm not doing terribly well at that.

Enchiladas!

2005-03-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

I don't cook all that often, but every so often I like to make a huge batch of homemade enchiladas. If at all possible, I avoided canned enchilada sauce. It is much more fun to make my own, starting from those dried chili peppers. I didn't think of photographing this process until the peppers were no longer dried. Here's a photo of a chili ristra from Flickr:

Ristra
Originally uploaded by Tandika.

The thing I like about this is that they don't even look edible in this state, but the end result is delicious.

So, we started with sixteen dried peppers of various kinds -- Pasilla, New Mexico, and Guajillo. It was a pretty much random mix based on what was available at the grocery store. The first time I made this sauce must have been about eight or nine years ago and I actually had a chile ristra like the one shown above that my parents brought back from New Mexico. But, I digresss.

The peppers soaked in boiling water overnight. By morning, they didn't look all that dried anymore:

I took off the stems, removed the seeds and veins from the inside, then blended the peppers with garlic and some of the water they had soaked in. Then, I forced it all through a strainer.

Next, I browned a little flour in oil, stirred in the puree, added various other spices and cooked it till it looked like sauce.

Meanwhile, Laura chopped and sauted the onions and got out the pre-shredded cheese (have to allow for some laziness here). Then it was just a matter of dunking each tortilla in the sauce, filling it with cheese, onions, and chopped black olives, and lining them up in a pan.

As you might imagine, this gets a little messy.

Bake until the cheese melts, then sprinkle a bit more cheese on top.

We had them for a late lunch. We'll probably bring some by my parents this evening as well.

I Don't Have a Brother

2005-03-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

I don't have any brothers. My parents chose to consider their family complete after two daughters. I am the youngest.

I believe my grandfather was a bit upset by this, as my sister and I were insufficient to carry on the family name. My grandfather had two sons and a daughter. His daughter had six children-- including two boys--but of course they didn't have the same name as him, so they didn't technically "count."

All of that is a bit incidental. The point I'm trying to make here is that my immediate family (nuclear family, if you prefer) completely lacks a person who could be considered "my brother." Yet despite this, even as a child, I knew the meaning of the word "brother." I'm sure this all seems very obvious and most folks are scratching their heads and saying, "duh." Ordinarily I would agree with you, but it seems that some people have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea that not all families must be the same in order to preserve the meaning of words.

In this post, David Frum worries that the terms "mother" and "father" will be stricken from the language as a result of same-sex marriage. He refers to a statement he made to Andrew Sullivan once:

Andrew, three years after we permit gay marriage, it will be illegal for schools to send home printed forms with one blank for the mother's name and one blank for the father's.

Hmm. I went to school in the 80's, and I seem to recall that most school forms had ONE blank labeled "Parent/Guardian". Most things didn't require TWO signatures, and even back then not all children had mothers and fathers. Apparently some didn't even have parents, they just had "guardians." I guess in Frum's alternative world, the foster kids shouldn't get to go to the zoo field trip since they don't have anyone who could legally sign the Mother and Father lines on the permission slip.

At any rate, the argument that same-sex marriage will bring about the end of civilization by forbidding us to speak or think certain words is, frankly, silly. I do not have a husband. Most of my female co-workers do have husbands. By some strange trick of the brain, I am able to comprehend what husband means. The definition of the word is not changed by the fact that my family does not include one, just as no one would state that the word "brothers" must be tossed away because some families don't have any.

As for legal and government forms, there are so many easy ways around this "problem" that for folks on the right to obsess about words is beyond silly. Marriage certificates can have two slots: "Bride/Groom" and "Bride/Groom". Circle the appropriate term for each party to the marriage. School forms should be neutral where possible, but there is nothing unwholesome about the word "parent". Filling your name in next to the word "parent" does not mean that Junior has to stop calling you Mommy.

The end of Frum's post contains the most revealing comment of all:

And one effect of this revolution - and for many proponents, one of the revolution's aims - is to make forever unthinkable the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband's duties to his wife - while equally binding and equally supreme - are not the same as a wife's duties to her husband.

Ah, the real objection. We all have gender roles, and same-sex marriage nicely highlights that not everyone is willing to live within them. Alas, Frum does not elaborate on exactly what those roles might be. What are a wife's duties? What are a husband's duties?

Andrew Sullivan takes on that argument here:

But the gender role argument against equal marriage rights has always been to my mind the most coherent of those on offer. If you believe that women should be subservient to men in marriage - and men should take proportionate responsibility to take care of and lead their wives - then indeed the idea of complete equality and interchangeability in the marriage compact is threatening. So let David and the right make that argument: we want to keep traditional gender roles in civil marriage and letting gays marry hurts that effort. Let them spell out a wife's duties and a husband's responsibilities. And let them make that case openly to the public. Support for same-sex marriage - especially among women - will soar. Because they will see it for what it is: a big advance for the civil equality of women.

A very good point, I think.

Community Theatre

2005-02-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to see a play at the Albright Theatre in Batavia - Five Women Wearing the Same Dress. One of my former co-workers was performing in the play, so we went with a small group from the office.

The Albright Theatre is a little odd in that it is in the third floor of the Batavia city building. You have to take the elevator because the stairs only go to the second floor. The second floor has doors with signs like "Police Investigations", which is a little strange when you're going to a play!

If you live near Batavia, I highly recommend the play, provided you can handle a little smoking on stage and "adult" language.

Taking a Break from Home Improvements

2005-02-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

The last several weekends have been filled with home improvements -- mostly painting. It started the last weekend in January with painting the powder room. The following week we painted the laundry room. The week after that we painted the master bathroom and two bedroom walls.

Bedroom walls in progress:

Cricket sulking...she did not like us spending weekends upstairs painting.

Somewhere in there (I don't remember which weekend) we installed a new light fixture in the dining room.

Then, last weekend we finished up the second color in the bedroom and the "dressing area".

I also spent two days scraping old caulk out of the tub and replacing it.

So, after the question I asked Laura last week, we decided to take a break this weekend. We still need to paint the extra bedroom and clean the garage, but instead we went to see the movie Finding Neverland, which was excellent.

Sara's Spot

Hiking to the "M" Trail

View from my office on a foggy, rainy day.

Solitude 2.

Solitude.

in denver.

Busy Weekend

Exactly who is doing the shoving here?

ok, this is nifty. I

Catching Up

Who Knew Bunnies Would be so Popular?

At the Airport

Blog? What Blog? You Mean I Have a Blog?

Winter Walk

Almost Forgot

Compare and Contrast

Official

Paint!

Winking dog!

Tormenting the Pets

Things that are Different

Quick House Update

Telecommuting, Day 1

Back to Work / Snow

In Missoula!

Exhausted in Mitchell, South Dakota

Home Stretch Weekend

What Do You Need?

Taxes, Domestic Partners, Marriage

Sometimes I Wish I Could Write Poetry

We Must Be a Stop on the Migratory Superhighway

Does it Look Like Someone Might be Moving?

Snow!

Some Good News from Connecticut

OK, Another Test

Seems like a good idea, but…

Slacking Off?

Banned Books

Good News in Michigan

Waiting

House Notes (Both Old and New)

Flowering Herbs

Recommended Reading

Great Big Bugs

Scooped Again!

Back from Montana (a Little Late)

Reality Check

Seem to Be Repeating Myself

Defending Starbucks

Missoula, Montana II

Missoula, Montana

RIP Nicky

Just Call Me Aunt Sara

Catching Up

Odd and Ends

Tour de France and Whine de Zorn

More Garden Blogging

Survey

Memories of London

Saturday Garden Blogging

Weather

Bunny Update

Imposing One's Views

Runaway Bunnies

Award for the Most Creative Complaint About Same-Sex Marriage

This is too funny

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail Update

Chicago Cubs

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail!

Happy Birthday!

But If We Let Jim Visit Steve in the Hospital, Bob and Sue in the Next Town Will Have to Get Divorced!

Amazing...

Walking...

Headache Worries

Where I've Been

Ten Random Thoughts About Selling My House

Don't miss this post

Mother's Day, Garage Sales, and Strangers Tromping Through Your House

Not a patient person

Eight Years