Community Theatre

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

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.

ME: Do you remember when we did fun things on the weekends?

LAURA (standing on stepstool, painting around bedroom windows): No.

ME (crouched in bathtub, scraping out old caulk): Me neither.

Someday the weekends of hell will end.

Marriage, Marriage, Marriage

It's the week of Valentines day...a good time to talk about marriage. A few links of note...

John Scalzi explains why the concept of "covenant marriage" is stupid. He's referring to a law in Arkansas:

couples getting a covenant marriage agree to seek counseling before they wed and before they seek a divorce. A covenant marriage also requires a two-year wait before a divorce becomes final, except in cases of adultery, abuse or imprisonment for a felony.

Scalzi sums up his objection quite well here:

As a concept, it's pretty damn insulting. "Covenant Marriage" implicitly suggests that people won't stay married unless they subject themselves to onerous governmental restrictions on their personal freedoms; basically, it's the state telling you that it expects you to get a divorce at some point, unless it makes it too annoying for you to get a divorce to make it worth your while. The State of Arkansas is banking on sloth, apathy and state bureaucracy to keep a bunch of bad marriages together, as if bad marriages are really better than divorce.

You know, my parents have been married 40 years. I'm pretty sure that no-fault divorce has been legal in Illinois for many years, yet oddly enough,they have never taken advantage of that option.

Here is a good question that has been on my mind - exactly why is a high divorce rate bad? Before you freak out, stop and think - by the time it gets to the stage of divorce, the damage to the relationship is done. Requiring the individuals to stay in the marriage doesn't create a "successful marriage"; it creates a failed marriage that happens to still be intact. How is that a "success."

Creating successful marriages is a lot harder than disallowing divorce. It requires preventing the problems that cause the damage to the relationship in the first place. Marrying the right person is a good place to start. Pre-marital counseling is another good idea, but it hardly seems the place of the government to require that. Teaching people realistic expectations of long-term relationships would be another useful tactic.

Continuing on the marriage theme, there is this post from Jason at Positive Liberty regarding the idea of privatizing marriage. In this concept, there would essentially be civil unions for everyone and the"sacrament" of marriage would be left to religions. Jason does a good job pointing out both the advantages and disadvantages of this idea; I don't really have anything to add there.

Finally, a couple great posts from Daddy, Papa, and Me that absolutely made my day yesterday and gave me a best sense of hope I've had since the 2004 elections.

First, this post discusses the anniversary of his San Francisco marriage last year during the brief flurry of gay marriages (remember that?). I remember sitting here in the Chicago suburbs and looking at pictures of so many happy couples during those days and wishing that Laura and I could do the same. The lines wrapped around the block seemed the perfect illustration of the commitment and deep desire to marry on the part of the gay couples.

Anyway, Trey's post addresses the notion that "backlash" from those marriages fueled the 2004 election disaster.

Listening to him also, I realized and then did some searching on the net (and my own blog), the so-called 'backlash' against marriage equality didn't start after our 'marriage-in' winter of love here in San Francisco, no.. it started with [GW Bush's] state of the union address when he called for an anti-gay amendment, it started in the months before and during San Francisco's marriages when anti-gay forces had already started planning and pushing for anti-family amendments in those 13 states. They needed no San Francisan mayor to jump start their bigotry. They had already started, with [Bush] at their lead. Theirs wasn't a 'backlash', it was just an old-fashioned lashing

So, the question is, when you are getting a good lashing, do you bend over and let them beat you or do you stand up straight against them? Gavin Newsom, 4,000 families and couples and hundreds of city workers and volunteers decided to stand straight and not take a lashing. The hundreds of couples in many other states and then the thousands of couples in Massachusetts decided not to take the lashing

Then, continuing his theme of optimism, he describes in this post how the SF marriages had no effect on the election outcome. He brings up 7 excellent points to support this, and has promised to fill in with more details this week. I hope he does, as this is utterly refreshing after the gloom and doom of the past few months!

Happy ending for dog story and the power of the media

I was glad to see this story in this morning's Chicago Tribune (I think registration might be required, and the link will probably expire).

To quickly sum up: In yesterday's column, John Kass wrote about a Chicago lawyer who found a dog while in Florida. He brought the dog home to Chicago and refused to give it back to the family who owned it, which included a heartbroken 7 year old boy. I vividly recall how it felt when my family's dog escaped the backyard when I was a kid, and it wasn't much fun.

The family managed to get in touch with the man and tried to get the dog back. They resorted to calling the police. The lawyer refused. The family even tried contacting the firm where he worked. No luck. All in all, a depressing story to read first thing in the morning.

Well, apparently a great many people responded to yesterday's column. According to Kass's column today, readers called the man's law firm "in such numbers that you swamped the office phones and panicked the secretaries and apparently blew out the computer server with angry anti-lawyer e-mails."

The family got their dog back.

Pretty impressive. I hope the lawyer in question is feeling remose right now.

Tree Frog

I love this picture from Just Pictures. Have I mentioned before that Laura has a "thing" about frogs...causing us to collect them...











If Laura had a blog, she would probably want to call it frogblog. Since that name is already taken, it is probably a good thing that Laura has no desire to do this strange blogging thing.

In something utterly unrelated to frogs, the home improvement quest I mentioned last week is continuing...today we painted the laundry room, which gave me the opportunity to slide my washer and dryer back and forth across the floor. We were about halfway done in this picture:

Impressive Literary Criticism

Reading the commentary John Scalzi provides for "The Friends Went to Camp" (by Athena Scalzi) gave me flashbacks to classmates in college literature classes pulling symbolism from every minor detail of a story.

Absolutely hysterical.

This also made me think of the first story I remember writing, in first grade. We were actually given an assignment -- pretend to be a flower or a bird and write a story about it. I thought the idea of being a flower was pretty stupid when the other option was a bird. Birds can fly! I was baffled by my classmates who passed up the opportunity to fly and would rather be planted in the ground.

Anyway, I think my story was about two sentences and mostly talked about how great it was to fly. The teacher typed up all the stories into a packet and sent them home so that the parents could get a good laugh, too. I think my parents still have that packet somewhere...I should track that down one of these days and see how accurate my memory is. And maybe provide some literary commentary as well!

A Slight Reduction in the Zoo

Aside from various home improvements, we've spent the last couple weeks taking care of other people's dogs. Fortunately my parents picked up Nicky and Alex this evening. They (the dogs) were happy to go home. We still have Bandit, a border collie belonging to one of our friends.

Bandit hanging out with Nicky last week:


Bandit taking over the dog bed that is really too small for her, but who am I to argue:


She's here another week. Still, with Nicky and Alex gone, it is a bit less of a zoo.

Home Improvements

This past weekend was busy. We have a long list of things we've been wanting to do with the house for the last, oh, 4 years or so and we are finally making progress.

The room I use as my office has had bare windows for the last four years. We bought some simple curtain rods and valences about two or three years ago and didn't get around to installing them until this past weekend.

Before:


After:


In 2003, we hired someone to paint most of the downstairs...but for some strange reason we didn't have her also paint the powder room and laundry room. I think it was a combination of cheapness and indecision on color. So, finally, we decided to be bold and used some leftover brick red paint to make the room a bit more interesting.

It is really hard to photograph a tiny powder room, by the way -- especially an interior room with no natural light. I had to use the flash, which naturally reflected off the mirror and all the nice shiny silver surfaces.


We thought some artwork would dress it up a bit, so I took six photos -- three of the pets, three of Montana scenes -- and applied a "sepia" effect, then printed and framed them with these two silver frames.


You can't see the pictures very well in the photo, so here are the sepia photos themselves at Flickr. I didn't notice it when I selected the pictures, but in the left-hand frame, the top picture of the river and the bottom picture of the road work very well together - they curve away in the same direction.

Anyway, we're happy with the results. Painting a tiny powder room is not much fun - we were constantly in danger of stepping (or sitting) in the paint tray, as there was no safe place to set the damn thing. After seeing it all done, I just wish we'd done it years ago--it is such a nice change from the cheap white paint provided by the builder.

We have several other jobs waiting on our list of additional work to do--mostly painting:

• Paint the laundry room
• Paint almost all the rooms upstairs.
• Install a new light fixture in the dining room. We bought it on Saturday; the only question now is whether I can install it without electrocuting myself.
• Finish cleaning and rearranging the loft, which is the room I use as an office at home. I've been working on this one (on and off) since November. I still have piles of paper to sort and file / shred / recycle /whatever.
  

Why are we doing all this? Partly because we've been meaning to ever since buying the house. Also, we are considering selling this house sometime in the next year or so. Where would we move to? That is still a matter of debate, as is the entire question of whether we move at all. Getting all this painting done should work out either way, I think.

Hate Crime Laws

I've always had mixed feelings about the idea of "hate crime laws", but this post from Orcinus did a terrific job of decimating some of the common arguments used against them.

Thanks to Wulfgar for pointing it out.

Invited to the Feast, But Refusing to Go (A Parable by Sara)

Suppose there was to be a great, glorious feast in a fictional village. This feast would provide piles and piles of beautiful, delicious, nourishing food to almost everyone in the village.

Attendance at the feast was by invitation only. Certain types of people were invited, while other types were not allowed. Those who were not invited happen to comprise a very small minority representing about 5-10% of the population, depending on who you ask. According to the planned rules, anyone showing up at the door without an invitation would be turned away.

Because everyone in this village was hungry, a few of the Uninvited Minority went to see the feast organizers and pointed out the inequality and injustice of the situation. Some (although not all) of the organizers were quite sympathetic, but pointed to archaic village laws that prevented them from opening the feast to all. As a compromise, they offered the Uninvited leftover scraps from the feast. Accepting these was a bit degrading, but the Uninvited were hungry, so they agreed to this plan.

Now, among the Invited elite, there was one man who decided that even though he was hungry, he didn’t want to bother to go. Instead, he asked to be included in the scrap handout.

The Uninvited were generally a friendly bunch, but they were a bit put off by his request. “You can go if you want to, you know!” they pointed out. “We would if we could,” they said. They asked why he didn’t just go to the feast if he was hungry, but he had no good answer.

Some thought perhaps he was making a statement of solidarity with them, pointing out the injustice of the invitation-only feast. They praised him for this -- after all, that would be a great symbolic sacrafice on his part -- until he said, “no, it’s not that, I just don’t think I should have to go to the feast to reap the benefits of it. You don’t have to go, after all.”

Since many of the Uninvited desperately wanted to go, they found his stance quite baffling and a little bit offensive. Finally, they suggested that if he wanted to extend the scrap handout to include the Invited elite as well as the Uninvited, perhaps he should take his case directly to the feast organizers himself, just as they did. Perhaps he could make a good case for why he should receive the scraps by refusing to attend.

This was too much work, so the man chose to do nothing. He did not go to the feast and he did not receive the scraps. He sat at home hungry and has spent hours since complaining about the injustice of it all.

---

The above story illustrates my feelings towards heterosexual couples who complain that they are excluded from domestic partner benefit programs offered by some employers. You can get married. We would if we could. Why do you want our pathetic scraps when the entire feast is yours for the taking?

I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple days, after hearing this story on NPR the other day. The description:

“In Massachusetts, many private employers are phasing out their domestic partner benefits over the next few years, on the logic that since gays can now marry in Massachusetts, there is no need for benefits for unmarried partners -- gay or straight. Commentator Heather Dune Macadam says that if straight couples in Massachusetts want to share health insurance, they ought to get married instead of taking advantage of rights that gays have worked hard to earn.”

Now, I don’t have any sort of problem with employers who choose to cover both same and opposite-sex unmarried couples. This is actually quite common. I imagine in some companies, more heterosexual couples take advantage of the benefits than gay couples. My own company covers both types of couples. I admit I don’t really see the point, seeing as straight couples are free to get married, but if employers want to, then so be it.

I do have a problem with whining about employers that don’t choose to offer both. Why? Well, because it makes me think of the man in my little story up there. In most companies, domestic partner benefits didn’t just appear one day. Maybe in some cases the CEO of a company woke up one morning and decided to offer domestic partner benefits, but I would guess that this is pretty darn rare. In most cases, someone much further down the ladder – an ordinary employee – decided that his or her family deserved to be protected. That ordinary employee did the research, made the suggestion to management, answered questions, - that is, presented a business case to the “feast organizers” that handing out these scraps makes good business sense.

So, if you want your company to offer something like this, stand up and ask. Don’t sit around complaining that life is unfair. Make your case.

Regarding Massachusetts, I can understand why some of the employers are dropping the benefits and I don’t have a huge issue with this. Discovering that your family's health benefits are threatened a big deal and very scary, though, so I sure hope they’re giving employees enough time to get married and switch over. Also, I hope they have a backup plan in place just in case the state amends its constitution to ban same-sex marriage, thus invalidating thousands of marriages. If that happens, hopefully the companies can re-activate the domestic partner benefits for gay employees. Also, companies that are based in Massachusetts, but with offices and employees in other states need to remember that marriage isn’t an option for all of their employees.

A Sense of Relief

Got some good news today. My brother-in-law (Air Force) just returned from his deployment in Qatar. My sister told me last week that he might be coming back on Saturday, but she also said she wouldn't be positive about it until he was on the plane home.

Now, Qatar certainly isn't Iraq and my BIL is not really in a combat position -- to be honest, I don't actually know exactly what he does. He was only there a few months, not a year like many of the soldiers sent to Iraq. That didn't stop my family from worrying about him. The most concerning time was in November when he told my sister that he wouldn't be able to contact her for a few days because he had to go "somewhere" to "guard something." I still don't know exactly where he was or what he was guarding.

He got home this past Saturday. Their two kids (ages 6 and 4) have apparently been excited now for days. They finally started settling down today.

Anyway, I am thankful that he is back home with his family again.

Visiting Dogs

I haven't posted any pet pictures in a while, so it seems like a good time to fix that. My parents' dogs - two shih'tzus - are currently staying at my house while my parents relax in Florida. Nicky (boy) and Alex (girl) were from the same litter and have been together their whole lives.

They have never been left somewhere other than home before; my mom used to swap dog-sitting with her neighbor. The dogs would stay at their own house and the neighbor would stop by several times a day to look after them, let them in and out, etc.

Anyway, they are somewhat despondent about being here. The multi-colored blanket is from my mom's house - I think she brought it so that they would have something familiar to sleep on.


Cricket is used to being the center of attention. If you pet or hold Nicky or Alex, you can bet that Cricket will be itching to get into your lap as soon as possible. She's keeping a good eye on things from her perch here:


My dogs don't particularly like the outdoors, at least not in the winter. Bailey goes out, does his business and comes right back in. Cricket will lounge in the sun if it is at least 90 degrees, but she gets picky moods where she doesn't like the backyard. Nicky and Alex, on the other hand, are used to a big yard with squirrels and rabbits and fascinating scents. So they keep asking to go out and are continually disappointed with my postage-stamp back yard.

I think Nicky is saying "there's nothing to do here!"


So he comes in and tracks snow everywhere.


Ten minutes later, he, Alex, and Bailey all went out for about 30 seconds and decided to come back in. Bailey leads the way, as he hates to get his feet wet.


My mom did provide them with doggie coats (in matching contrasting colors), but they are less than enthusiastic about them.


Finally, the cat is spending all of her time upstairs in the loft, under the desk. When the dogs venture into the loft, she growls at them. Really, she has them intimidated to the point that they don't want to come upstairs at all, so she has nothing to worry about.


If you haven't done the math yet, I currently have five four-footed critters living in my house. Plus, one of our friends is going on vacation next week and will be dropping off her border collie on Monday or Tuesday. Five dogs and a cat. That should be fun!

A couple great posts

From the title, you might think this one is all about the weather, but it isn't. A very touching story about "the gays" taking flea's son...and then giving him back.

And a couple good ones here from Positive Liberty:

• The Soft Midsection - a very insightful look at the gay movement and the problem with focusing too much on the personal and the national and not enough on the "midsection" (i.e., the states).
  
• A good reply to another blogger regarding same-sex marriage.

One of the things I admire about Positive Liberty (aside from the quality of the writing) is the way Jason is so darn respectful and polite, even when addressing people who disagree with him. That is not something I am particularly good at, which is why I rarely jump into comment threads about contentious issues. Arguing with people opposed to same-sex marriage has a tendency to make me start foaming at the mouth and screaming, which really doesn't do much for the argument. Perhaps it is because the issue strikes so close to home; maybe it is because it all just seems so logical and obvious to me. Who knows.

Continuing to wrestle with ancient technology

My project to transfer files off my old Macintosh is far from complete. When I started this last Saturday, it looked like most of the files I wanted to keep would come over cleanly without too much trouble.

Then I discovered I was a little too clever in my software choices 10 years ago. For reasons I can't remember, I started using a word processor called WriteNow 3.0 in the very early 90's. I didn't chuck my copy of MS Word 4.0...I just used both. I have no idea why; I just know that the WriteNow files don't come into the Windows version of Word very cleanly. So I've had to add a few more steps to my overall process - open the WriteNow docs, save as RTF, then continue with the transfer.

Also, while still in college I bought a copy of a program called StorySpace. This allowed you to create "hypertext" documents - you know, docs that branch off to other areas with links. Like the web, but I believe this predated the web by a few years. It uses this concept of "writing spaces" which can contain any amount of text and can be linked to other spaces. I mostly used it as a sort of high-tech journal and for brainstorming. I would write these rambling journal entries, then create links off to new writing spaces to elaborate on particular ideas.

Anyway, a quick google showed that StorySpace is still around and has both Mac and Windows versions. It was never really intended for the uses I found for it; it was intended for writing actual literature in hypertext form, which is a kind of cool idea. Just for fun I downloaded the demo Windows version and found myself in a flashback to Windows 3.1 or so...the interface looks sooooo old and strange! As far as I can tell, it hasn't been updated in several years. Surprisingly (or maybe not), it opened up my old files just fine. I briefly considered buying/upgrading to the Windows version, but at $295 for fairly old technology, I don't think it's worth it. Perhaps the newer Mac version is a bit more up-to-date.

The coolest thing about StorySpace was the ability to drag the writing spaces around the screen and just draw links between them, then view the overall path in different ways.

Fortunately it does include an export option for dumping all the text out into plain text files...I will lose all my clever linking, but at least the text can be saved.

Job History, Patterns, Hypocrisy

This has been bugging me for a while. Sorry for the lengthy personal story here...although I think there is a useful lesson in all this somewhere.

There is currently some tension between my parents and my partner, Laura. This tension all came to a head a few years ago in a very unpleasant incident that I'm not going to get into here. Since then, things have smoothed over and are mostly ok, but every so often I get reminded of that tension. It happened again a few weeks ago in a conversation with my mother.

One of the problems is that Laura's job history before we met and in the first few years of our relationship was not as stable and steady as perhaps my parents may want. There have also been times during which I provided all of the support for our family. I have no problem with this, and I do find it puzzling that they do, considering my mother has never supported herself in her entire life, and my older sister is currently a stay-at-home mom, and they have never uttered a complaint about this. So it seems it is acceptable for a man to support a woman, but not OK for a woman to provide the support for another woman (or man, I imagine).

Anyway, my mom referred to a "pattern" in Laura's work history. In trying to be honest and fair, I look at the same history and I don't see a pattern - I see a normal life. She was working as a receptionist when we met - in a job obtained through a temporary agency. Perhaps I was unclear when I explained this to my parents - or maybe that fact got clouded over in the general haze and angst of my "coming out" that took place right around then. Temporary agencies = temporary jobs, so the fact that the assignment ended was annoying, but no great surprise.

This was followed by temporary position microfilming reports at an agribusiness company. Again, she was placed by a temporary agency in a job never meant to be permanent. She did leave that one on her own because the work was horribly boring and her boss was annoying. Laura got tired of being forced to listen to "sermons on cassette" and other religious broadcasts during work every day. But still, it was never intended to be permanent. There was a finite amount of work the company needed done - that's why they hired through a temporary agency.

This was followed by about 3 years at Starbucks. That hardly seems the stuff of terrible patterns to me. My parents' viewpoint is a bit skewed, I think, given that my dad just retired after 32 years at the same company. I don't know a single person my age who expects to be at the same company for 32 years -- not one -- so while his experience might have been great for him, it is hardly representative of what my life or my peers' lives will be like. It seems unfair to judge our modern job-hopping ways by a standard that is unattainable for most of us nowadays.

Laura voluntarily left Starbucks and did a short stint selling furniture -- mostly to earn significantly more money. This was not a particularly good fit and still didn't achieve her goal of getting out of retail work. At this point she realized (perhaps a bit late) that she'd never escape dead-end jobs without a college degree, so she went back to school and earned a Bachelor's degree. It was during that time that I provided all the support for the two of us. She considered continuing on with a masters and PHD in Archaeology with the goal of doing research and working as a college professor, but a four-week long field school digging in Alabama made her realize that an academic archeology career was not for her. Aside from the fact that the reality of archeology was much less interesting than the theory, it exacerbated severe tendonitis problems in her arms. It would be physically impossible for her to do the work on a regular basis.

When she made this decision, I found myself dreading telling my parents. Would they think poorly of her for changing her mind? Or would they manage to comprehend that the whole point of the field school was like an internship - try out a possible career and see if you like it before spending thousands of dollars and going deep into debt for graduate school?

She's worked a regular office job now for the last 2 years, and has hated it for about the last year and a half. Yet she has hung in there, partly because we liked the extra income, partly because the economy hasn't been conducive to job hunting right now, and partly because I couldn't stand the idea of telling my parents about another job change right now. In a few days she is leaving that job and I can't say that I'm sorry about it, even if it does cause some temporary financial hardship. It seems silly to be miserable for 8 hours a day when you have alternatives. (We also have some future plans I can't go into right now that make this latest change make good sense).

Yes, undeniably she has changed jobs and career paths numerous times. Is this a "pattern" that somehow suggests some sort of problem? To them, it is, although I am not sure what the "problem" suggested by this pattern is supposed to be. Flakiness? An unwillingness to stick with something? She's stuck with me for nearly nine years now, so clearly she is more than capable of the long haul. Since I understand the reasons and motivations behind every change, I don't see any sort of pattern or problem.

That is not to say that Laura has been some sort of unfortunate victim of circumstance. We've discussed her job history ad nauseam and she's done some significant soul-searching on this topic. The biggest common denominator among the short-term jobs that didn't work out has been poor choices - Laura tends to panic and grab the first job that comes along, regardless of whether or not it is a "good fit". That is the exact reason she ended up in her current position that she hates - it was the first offer she received after finishing her degree and the field school. It was a bad decision, but it wasn't motivated by laziness or lack of work ethic or a desire for constant change or any other negative trait - it was motivated purely by the fear of a crummy economy and the belief that any job is better than no job. I imagine that my parents criticism of her periods of joblessness probably helps foster the very fear that leads to poor choices like this!

Finally, there is just a hint of hypocrisy in all of this. When my father finished school back in the 60's, he bounced through three jobs in three different states (Connecticut, New Mexico, and Texas) before landing the job here in Illinois where he has stayed for those exalted 32 years. This was in about a 6-8 year timeframe, so it averaged to a couple years per job. Not only did he job-hop - he made his family move across the country each time! I was two when we moved to Illinois, so I missed out on most of these moves.

Of course, he has good reasons for this - they didn't like living out east, he was laid off from the job in New Mexico, he hated the Texas job and was terribly unhappy there, the Illinois job was a far better opportunity, etc. I have no reason to doubt these reasons and I'm not going assign negative attributes to my dad or talk about his "unstable pattern" because of this. I just wish my parents would grant Laura the same benefit of the doubt as she works towards figuring out her own career path.

Getting away from the pure personal story for a moment here, there is a lesson in all of this - it is very easy to look at a situation, jump to conclusions, and judge someone without having all the facts. I know I am as guilty of that as anyone else - you read an article or hear a story about some situation involving strangers and immediately condemn someone without necessarily knowing what really happened or the motivations of the people involved. Perhaps if I was on the outside looking at this situation, I might feel the same way my parents do and wonder about Laura's stability. By the same token, an outsider in 1973 looking at my dad's job history up to that point might have burst into laughter at the idea that he would stay in his new job for 32 years!

Rooting through my computing history

So I've just started a project that is going to take a little time.

Shortly after I finished college and got a real job (around 1993 if you're curious), I bought a new computer. It was time to upgrade from my aging Macintosh SE. I bought a brand new Mac LC III. The "large" color screen seemed utterly amazing. Plus it had a hard drive with 160 MB! Amazing! Well, really, it was amazing considering that my old mac that had carried me through college didn't even have a hard drive - just two floppy drives. And ONE MB of RAM. In 1987, that was one technologically advanced machine!!

But anyway, back to the LC III. This is the computer in question:



At the time, my job required the use of Windows machines, but I didn't entertain the idea of bringing work home, so the OS difference didn't really matter.

Several years later, different job, I wanted to be able to work from home occasionally so I bought a Compaq (not-so-fondly remembered as ComCrap). That computer was, in turn, replaced by a Dell laptop in 2002.

The Mac LC III has been sitting in the spare bedroom of my house ever since I moved here. Finally today I hauled it out, hooked it up and started the very slow job of transferring old files (mostly documents written in Microsoft Word 4.0) to the laptop. The only way I can think of to do this is very, very time-consuming:

1. Use Apple File Exchange on the mac to copy files to a Windows-compatible floppy.
2. Copy the files from the floppy to the laptop.
3. Erase files from floppy and go back to step 1.
4. Repeat until you go mad.

Like I said - this will take awhile. Fortunately, the files I've tried so far seem to work pretty well when opened in the current version of Word, although some of them have garbage characters at the top and no real formatting.

Eventually - once I get all the files moved over - I plan to archive them all to a CD-ROM.

At least it is somewhat amusing. Many of the files are old college papers. Many are also bits of fiction and journal entries I had forgotten all about. I freely admit that reading some of this stuff makes me cringe. Or sometimes laugh. It is probably silly to save it, but at the same time I hate the thought of it disappearing forever.

One last picture - my current laptop and the ancient mac side-by-side:

A very cool development

Just saw this article in the Missoulian - the daily paper of Missoula Montana: Missoulian: House to take up gay rights legislation.

There are a couple bills they are looking at. The one that leaped out at me is a measure that would create Vermont-style "civil unions"

The civil union bill would allow straight or gay couples to enter into a legal arrangement that would grant them all the same legal protections of marriage.

The interesting thing about this of course is that these civil unions would be created by the legislature, not by a court order - thus eliminating the complaint of "judicial activism" that conservatives like to throw around.

The other interesting thing here is that Montana voters just passed an amendment prohibiting gay marriage this past November. However, unlike many of the state amendments passed in 2004, this one very explicitly only bans marriage, not other possible arrangements. Here is the wording (courtesy of Marriage Equality: State by State, which does a great job of gathering this type of info):

"Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state"

Succinct and to the point. Very Montanan (so I'm told by the Montanan-in-exile in my household). Contrast this with say, the amendment passed right next door in North Dakota:

Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman. No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given
the same or substantially equivalent effect

Clearly, if Montana had wanted to draft an amendment that prevented the establishment of civil unions, they could have. They didn't. This gives me great hope for this new bill. Furthermore, although Montana was clearly considered a "red state" in the 2004 elections, it really isn't that simple.

Gosh, Marriage is Such an Awful Thing

Andrew Sullivan today pointed to this argument in favor of gay marriage from a self-described conservative.

The post itself is quite good and makes many points I've seen numerous times. Always a nice change to read a conservative blogger and NOT have my blood pressure shoot up.

But then I went and read the comments. A commenter named JimBob began insisting that marriage is about the government restricting your behavior, not about the benefits. He presents this example:

Sorry, but marriage is a restriction of rights. Anyone with half a brain can see it. Simple example. Man with good job marries a poor woman. He buys them a house, she leaves him a few months later and files for divorce. She claims half the house even though the husband paid for it with his money.

Now if the man had just invited the woman to move in and then she leaves a few months later, she has zero claim to anything.

This was followed by a demand that sodomites should shut up.

Is it just me, or is this a really strange way to "defend" marriage? This man is basically saying that there is nothing positive about marriage - it is just a nasty scheme that poor women can use to wrest property and money from men with good jobs. If marriage is such a crummy thing, why on earth does it require "defending".

This isn't the first time I've seen arguments like this that push the idea that the benefits of marriage really aren't that great, so gays don't need them or shouldn't want them. Sometimes they like to point out that many gay couples would be adversely affected by the marriage penalty taxes, for example.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a co-worker several years ago. He was newly married and had just been hit with the "marriage penalty" on his taxes. He said something to the effect that, other than the emotional side, he didn't really see any benefits to marriage. I pointed out that many of the benefits really only become noticeable when something bad happens - your spouse is in the hospital or dies, etc.

I often wonder if people advancing this sort of argument will find it backfiring on them as more heterosexuals believe them and decide that there is no point to legal marriage after all.

Of course, the truth is that marriage is not some nasty scheme for stealing property. This argument conveniently forgets that marriage is a package deal with both benefits and responsibilities. Those of us in favor of gay marriage understand this and are willing to accept both. I am willing to risk my partner "stealing" our house (bought with "my" money) if it means that I don't need to hire lawyers to ensure that we can visit each other in the hospital. It really is as simple as that.

Another goofy lawsuit

A man is suing Apple because songs bought from the iTunes music store can't be played on portable players other than the iPod.

The suit was filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court in San Jose. One antitrust expert called it a long shot, but Californian Thomas Slattery is hoping for unspecified damages for being "forced" to buy an iPod, one of the most successful electronics products in years.

The key to such a lawsuit would be convincing a court that a single product brand like iTunes is a market in itself separate from the rest of the online music market, according to Ernest Gellhorn, an antitrust law professor at George Mason University.

Um, OK. Forced to buy an iPod? Did someone hold a gun to his head and force him to buy the 99 cent songs in the first place?

And does Mr. Slattery know how to burn an audio CD, which enables you to play those songs on any number of portable players?

This is just plain silly. More here.