"America Spends a Lot on Defense"

In lieu of writing a post myself today, I'm just going to cut and paste one out of Matt Yglesias' blog from today. These are numbers that deserve more play:

Yesterday, congress appropriated a $680 billion for the Department of Defense in FY 2010. Chris Preble observes that, shockingly enough, this $680 billion isn’t even the whole bill:

The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

Preble says that this enormous expenditure “flows directly from our foreign policy.” But it’s worth also saying that our foreign policy flows from the vast scope of our defense spending. My biggest concern about the war in Afghanistan isn’t overblown feasibility concerns, but the failure to take seriously David Obey’s point that we should put this in some kind of cost-benefit framework. Arne Duncan doesn’t have a $700 billion per year budget to play with as he tries to help American kids learn. Jay Rockefeller doesn’t get to say “I could make this health plan really good by kicking the ten year cost up to $7 trillion.” People are starving in Ethiopia for want of a fraction of the DOD’s daily budget in food aid.

Tidbits

I might really be done with the writing project now. Today I actually worked on something else for an hour and a half. I have a feeling I'm going to be working on the leftover grunt work for awhile, but I'm not sure I care. My sense of fulfillment and reward has been so ground down that I'd do pretty much anything if it wasn't writing that document.

I was sick yesterday--I'm not sure with what--but the upshot seems to be that my neck and back are all messed up again. My next visit with Sunshine may come sooner rather than later.

We went in on Saturday and put a down payment on the new kitchen countertops. New sink, new faucet, Tom's planning to tile the wall for the backsplash. He started working on running the gas line for the new stove. We also decided to get a new dishwasher "while we're at it" (they have to drill holes for it in the countertop), but we haven't picked that out yet. Pretty exciting. But we have to clean out the kitchen before they do it, and cover everything or put plastic over it because of the dust. Sounds like a big mess. Also an opportunity to toss stuff that is in the cupboards that we never use, but I know we won't do it. You never know when you might want that.

On a lighter note

Since I was grumpy in the last post, I'll try to be more upbeat. (That was Thursday night, the end of my week; today is the first day of a three-day weekend!)

Several nice things have happened lately. Last week I took my car in to have the interior "detailed." Now it is all clean and shiny inside. No more dog nose prints on the windows. The seats and carpets are clean. There is no dust, no schmutz, no ground cereal in every crevice. Even the scratches on the dash from Tucker's toenails seem much less noticeable. It's like having a new car! Which is nice for a little Corolla that just rolled over 100,000 miles (in less than five years!).

The other thing was that my daughters and son-in-law gave me a gift certificate for my birthday for massages at a local spa. I went in for the first one on Sunday afternoon. The gift was well-timed because my back had really been hurting lately. I've only ever had a few massages, and they were all the Swedish style. I've never had any Shiatsu, except perhaps for a 10-minute chair massage. This place does "fusion" massage, which means they combine the two styles. I'm no massage expert, but I believe Shiatsu is the sort of massage where they find the little balls of muscle tension and work them slowly toward a bone, where they press on them while you ponder just how long you can tolerate whatever level of pain this is called. My masseuse's name was Sunshine. She was quiet, a little shy, but she has arms and fingers of steel. The room was toasty warm and dark, and they had a CD of ocean waves playing. The massage was great, especially after it was over. Sunshine says I should not be feeling "discomfort" during the massage, so I guess next time I'll have to have her back off a bit, but I thought this was one of those no-pain-no-gain instances. Want to get my money's worth and all that. I could go for another one right about now.

Update: I wrote the first part of this post yesterday at the beauty salon while getting a perm. Then I published it hastily last night before bed, tired and with an aching head. Thus I forgot to mention the outcome of the massage. My neck, shoulders, and back, which had been a mat of knots and taut muscles, was all relaxed and supple again. For the next couple days I was afraid to make any quick movements, or sit funny, or sleep for fear I would screw it all back up again. It still feels pretty good, but I'm going to be looking forward to my next one in a few weeks.

Cold and Mostly Gloomy

You're not supposed to talk about the weather, I know, but I can't help it. I really like to talk about the weather. We lived in California for three years, and it was very difficult for me because there is really no weather to talk about. Which doesn't mean I didn't try, because talking about the weather is what I do. Understanding Midwestern transplants humored me, which was nice. (Our church had co-pastors, a couple, and she told me she'd lived there for 10 years and so far, every year, the weather had been atypical. Whatever the weather was doing, it was not normal. We were there during a dry patch. Tom's older brother was there earlier, during a wet patch.)

Anyway, I just did a little online research, to help bolster my grumblings about our recent weather. On September 24th our high temperature was 80. It was 72 on September 27 (that *was* 19 days ago). Since then, we've hit 60 twice (we're supposed to be nearly 60 on Sunday--I can't wait!--but you can't get your hopes up, they announce these expected highs just to mess with you). It was 41 at 1am this morning, and I can't report on yesterday because I can't find it on the internet, but except for 1am this morning and maybe yesterday we haven't been over 40 since last Thursday.

I've put away my shorts and gotten out my turtlenecks, sweaters, leather coat, and scarves. Our leaves never turned colors, except for a few drought-stressed trees. (It may not have been a good color year anyway, since we had long stretches of cool, or dry, or rain all summer.) The ash trees dumped thick piles of green leaves on the ground just in time to get snowed on, and the other trees are still wearing their leaves. I don't think I've ever seen a winter where the leaves are still on the trees. It will be interesting to see how that plays out--if we wind up with a mix of leaves and snow on the ground, or if there is no snow and we just wind up outside raking in 38-degree November weather. (There's something to look forward to.)

So, between the rain, gloom, cold weather, and shortening days, and the fact that I am still winding up the dreaded writing project at work, it is really feeling like winter. We really might be almost done with the document though. I have certainly given up all caring. I wrote one more new section today and gave it to my boss to "improve," and honestly I don't care what he does to it. Not in the slightest. As long as I can point our last batch of unassigned requirements to it and call it a day, I'm happy. I'm going to make one last pass making sure that "hidden paragraphs" wound up hidden or not hidden appropriately, and I'm good. I cannot be persuaded to care about anything else.

Random Notes

There was frost on the ground this morning. First morning my hands were chilly on the morning dog walk (and if I had put them in the pockets of my leather jacket, which I got out for the first time this morning, I would have found some gloves). Yet somehow this morning, unlike Monday and Tuesday, I decided to man up and *not* wear a turtleneck. I've just changed into my jammies and warm fuzzy robe and slippers, and I feel much better now. (A little warm actually, but that's 50 for you.)

I got to work this morning to discover that I will be mapping requirements and doing rework on the document for at least the next week. I can't say it came as much of a surprise.

I may or may not have already mentioned that I am turning 50 next week. Major birthdays are a lot more annoying than minor birthdays. As a general rule one must decide what one wants for one's birthday, where one wants to go out to eat, etc., but on a major birthday you can't just get an ordinary gift or go to an ordinary dinner. I keep trying to reframe this: gee, what would I love to get but would normally never think of buying; where would I love to go but normally wouldn't. I should be viewing this as an opportunity. But mostly I have other stuff I want to be spending my October weekends on. It know it would be better for everyone, including me, if I would quit grumbling and appreciate the moment.

I have moved the "crafting" chair over to the table the laptop is on. I haven't done any crafting in quite some time now, although theoretically Christmas is coming and I have big plans. I'm not sure the furniture rearrangement is a good omen.

Back

Sheesh--I've been gone so long Blogger made me sign in. I was so excited this morning when I went to work: today was the deadline for peer review comments on a document I have been helping to write for the last couple months. I have been writing, getting comments, rewriting, formatting, fighting with a new document tool (Open Office), and generally hating life since the beginning of May.

Twitterer @badbanana had a tweet one day that made me laugh out loud: "I had to hunker down and do some serious writing today. Which is why I made a working flute out of a carrot." That has described my days pretty accurately. I considered buying some handcuffs to chain myself to my desk with. (Sorry, with which to chain myself to my desk.)

A week ago I worked over the weekend (and into Monday, because that's how these things wind up) to finish the last section and try to fix as many cross-references as possible. Then it got packaged up and sent out for the formal review, which was scheduled to end today. (Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of the reviewers are also authors, which means that commenting is going to be somewhat superficial. Although a lot of my comments weren't altogether superficial.)

My boss says he's going to do all the rework, which I really don't believe, and my other boss says he's got someone else creating the huge table at the end mapping all the requirements to sections of the document, which I don't think is attainable for one person in our time frame, but at least for this moment I am technically done with this document. (Until May when we have to update it again for our next release.)

I am now free to resume my life as an engineer. I feel sort of like someone getting out of the hospital after a long illness. Except of course we have a ridiculous deadline coming up just before Christmas, so there is no time to waste "getting back into it." Instead of feeling like celebrating at the end of the day, I was sort of numb. (OK, I had just finished spending over a week reviewing 300 pages of tech-speak, so that is probably understandable.)

Anyway--coming home at night after wrangling words all day did not leave me in much of a mood to get on the computer and write blog entries. This morning I had that feeling you get in the spring when the birds come back and start singing again (even if fall and 50-degree high temperatures did descend on Minnesota this week, and the s-word appeared in the forecast for northern Minnesota for the first time). So here's hoping I'll be making more frequent appearances.

A Spouse in the House

I'm assuming that every married person occasionally daydreams about what it would be like to be not married, and have all your time "to yourself" so to speak. Somehow you imagine you'd spend lots more time doing various things you feel you're not doing enough of normally.

I've had a chance to try that out this week (my husband is on a business trip), and, unsurprisingly I guess, it turns out that left to my own devices, I spend a lot of time surfing the internet and staying up way, way too late playing Spider Solitaire on the computer and doing crossword puzzles. (I say unsurprising because I already spend too much time doing these things. Now I'm just free to spend more time without any of that peer-pressure sort of guilt that occurs naturally because there's another person in the house who knows what you're doing.)

Last week my head was filled with ideas of all the things I could do during this time when I would be on my own. I could do whatever I want! I could spend hours on my own pet projects without worrying that I was neglecting our relationship! I have a list, of course, of things I wrote down that I would like to do (or that I ought to do). Too bad Spider Solitaire is not on the list, or I'd have something I could check off.

He had to get up ridiculously early on Tuesday to make it to a 7:30am flight, so I got up early, and got to work before 8:30. The plan was to get up early, now that my internal clock was all realigned (I did wake up at 5:45 the next morning, but didn't get up for another half hour), come home earlier, and try to "get some things done" in the evenings. I'm always searching for that singular event that will shake up the inexorable slouch toward later and later every day, and was pleased to have found one. I made it to work before 9:00 the second day, but I started logging in from home to do a little work each evening (so I could leave the office earlier!), and pretty soon I was up until 11:30 each night like usual and getting up late since I'd worked the night before.

Last night, a mere 60 hours from that early Tuesday wakeup, I turned the light out at 2am.

So, repentant now, I'm resolving to do better next week. So far today has been a washout--I finally decided maybe I'd go out and try to wash bugs off the front of the camper and it started raining. I'm sure there are other things on my list that don't require going outside, but hey, that was what I was all geared up for. Now I think, being Saturday and all, that the dogs and I will live large and go get some fast food drive thru for dinner, and I can rack my brain to try and remember what movies I've always wanted to see that he doesn't want to watch.

Tweet of the Day

Well, yesterday, actually. And it was from @badbanana (who else):

Obama is going to address the nation's schoolchildren? One good fart joke and the Democrats control Congress for 60 years.

Easily Amused

I had lunch today with some former co-workers I haven't seen in quite awhile, and as it turned out, two of them had plenty of hay-baling experience earlier in their lives. So I heard quite about about how hay is baled, moved, and stored. I wasn't taking notes, however, so I cannot write a very thorough review of what I learned--my apologies. I can say that some sort of spinning fork thing is how the circular hay bale gets started--the first bits get caught in that and then it builds up from there.

Meanwhile, my excitement for the weekend is that I ordered a home carpet cleaner. My sister-in-law has a Bissell that I have borrowed a couple times, and I've rented a Rug Doctor several times. We have new carpeting on the second floor of our house that is less than a year old, and the carpeting on the main floor is only about two years old. The new carpet is frieze, which apparently likes to be vacuumed more frequently than the dense pile we had before. I can promise myself I will begin vacuuming regularly, but that doesn't make it happen. So I also promised myself I would wash it several times a year, which gets a little expensive if you're renting a Rug Doctor each time.

Before we went on the Montana trip Tom noticed that one of his favorite web sites, NewEgg, had a Hoover for $149 (with free shipping) that had gotten pretty good reviews. After we got back from the trip, the NewEgg deal was still there, plus Amazon had the same unit at the same price. And thanks to my friend Sheila, who friended me on Amazon Prime, I was able to get it with 2-day free shipping from Amazon.

So it arrived this afternoon, and I commenced unpacking and assembling it. I was expecting an all afternoon experience, because several reviewers had commented that it required quite a bit of assembly and they wished it came a little more put together out of the box. Assembly turned out to be two bolts and one screw. (I decided that these folks should definitely avoid Ikea.)

My initial reaction is that it seems perhaps not quite as durably made as the Bissell, but I like the rotating brushes, and it comes apart quite nicely for cleaning. The Bissell has this ingenious scheme where there's a plastic membrane in the tank that allows the dirty water to refill the same tank the clean water is pulled from, but the Hoover has two separate tanks. (Reviewers who mentioned this difference seemed to prefer the two-tank arrangement. Obviously they are not engineers.)

I was a little worried that maybe the tanks were smaller, but I looked it up and they're both one gallon. I was surprised that I did our whole family room on one gallon of water--I didn't remember being able to do that. The machine handled very well and I was entirely satisfied at least on the first outing. The carpet looks much better, but I think I'm going to do it again on Sunday afternoon because the first "coat" took out tons of dirt. I'd also like to do the upstairs, but I might not get to that this weekend.

This is the beauty of owning your own. I don't have to do it this weekend. I can do it whenever I want! And I can do it more often this way. I kind of like cleaning the carpet, and it's not much fuss--these machines are really well designed so they're pretty easy to use. So I think it will really happen. Maybe I should hire out. I can clean carpets when I retire.

Hay!

Today we drove back across eastern Montana and western North Dakota to Jamestown. We're camped north of Jamestown at the reservoir campground. We drove for ten hours, got set up, and grilled a bison steak that we bought in Big Timber. It was great--so tender! A baked potato, some leftover carrots, a little salad and some cantaloupe--a great meal anywhere.

I'm convinced that one thing America does prodigously is grow hay. We must have passed thousands of bales of hay in the past week. If we were to do the trip again I would create a photo album of hay bale arrangements. Most of them are scattered out in the fields where they were baled. Often they are stacked in neat lines two or three tall. Today we even passed a couple balers at work, and a couple tractors moving bales. The landscape is absolutly covered with hay growing and hay bales. (We also passed grass along the sides of the road and in the off-ramp areas that had been baled.)

We did pass a lot of cows, and quite a few horses, and even some sheep who would be eating this hay, and I get that they eat it all year round. But we're talkin' really enormous quantities of hay.

Maybe if I drive around Minnesota I can find good hay bale sculptures to photograph. For a really thorough treatment I'd have to get someone to show me how the baler works to roll it up from the inside out.

Gallatin Forest Day Trips

We've taken side trips the last two days into the Gallatin National Forest. Yesterday's goal was to visit the Crazy Mountains, and today we went to the Natural Bridge and Falls on the Boulder River.

All up and down the Rocky Mountains, if you look on a map, there are named "ranges," and clumps of mountains named the X-and-Such Mountains. The Crazy Mountains are just north of Big Timber, they are a small cluster of mountains on their own, on the eastern edge of the Rockies. The tallest one, Crazy Peak, is over 11,000ft tall, which is pretty tall by Rockies standards. According to Wikipedia, the original Crow Indian name for the mountains was the Crazy Woman Mountains, and referred to a woman whose family was killed in the westward settlement movement, and she went insane and lived in the mountains.

The forest service has primitive campgrounds and hiking trails throughout the national forest areas. Montana seems to scoff at pavement, a lot of the rural roads are dirt or gravel roads. On the map it looked like one of these campgrounds was right up in the Crazies, and we wanted to get a closer look at them. So we hopped in the truck and started jolting across the countryside toward the mountains.


One of the things I find interesting about the countryside is that it is like a multi-level floor plan. One area is at one level, then there's a large step up and another large flat area is some twenty feet higher than the first.

This drive went through quite a bit of private land, with rustic old wooden cabins. There were a lot of beautiful horses. In one place we had to stop the truck to let a herd of them pass on the road. (At first I thought they wanted to come see if we had any treats for them, then we realized they just wanted to get by us.)


The road to the campground led us through a canyon into the Crazies, next to Crazy Peak's next door neighbor. We took pictures of wildflowers and pine trees and horses.



Today's trip took us south of Big Timber along the Boulder River to the Natural Bridge and Falls. This is an area where the water has worn an underground path through the rock. During the high water in the spring, the water goes over and down a high falls, but during lower water it goes under the rock and comes out below. There was a natural limestone bridge over the falls, but it collapsed in 1988. The falls area and the canyon around it was lovely.

I apologize for the drunken quality of these photos--I seem to have difficulty seeing whether things are level when I'm looking at the camera. The first photo is the rapids above the falls, before the water goes "underground." The second one is looking over the top of the high falls. The third one is opposite the falls. The high falls at the top are dry, and the water is coming out of the underground channel.

Day Trip to Yellowstone

We all climbed in the truck (Tom and I, mom and dad, and the two dogs--it was cozy) and took the great circle route from Big Timber to Red Lodge to the Yellowstone entrance by Cooke City, through the park, back out the North Entrance at Mammoth, up to Livingston and back to Big Timber.

Last night we discussed how long this would take and when we needed to get up. So we decided to aim for 7:30am, thinking it was going to take 12 hours. Major sacrifice by Tom and I to be ready to go anywhere at 7:30am, ameliorated slightly by the fact that we are still on Minnesota time which made it feel more like 8:30. But I decided that the only way I would be ready to go anywhere at that time would be to skip the whole shower-do-hair thing, so I can truly say I've been camping now having spent a day with no shower.

The initial question was the weather. We could not get any straight sort of weather prediction for the coming day. (Or, should I say, we got every sort of weather prediction for the coming day.) So we decided to get up, look at the sky, and see whether we would take the trip today or wait until Wednesday or Thursday. When I took the dogs out this morning at about 6:15 for the morning outlet the sky was completely clear. So we made the sandwiches, packed the water, and went. (The day turned out to be beautiful until late afternoon--pretty good I'd say.)

The first milestone was to be scones in Red Lodge. Red Lodge is a really cute town, and we spent quite a bit of time walking around it, but the place that made the scones was out of business. We found a bakery to buy apple turnovers and "schnecken" (I googled those, they go by about five different names) so all was not lost.

From Red Lodge to the Yellowstone entrance is a mountain pass road over the Beartooth Mountains. What a beautiful drive! Mountains, meadows covered in wildflowers, streams, rocks, winding climbing hairpin-turned roads. Here is a shot of us at a scenic overlook near the top.


To me this looked like a pretty big trip, so I was ready to just dip into Yellowstone on the north road, see Mammoth Hot Springs and head back out. But once we got into the park we wound up driving the upper loop--stopping at Tower Falls, taking the North Rim Road and looking down on the Lower Falls and Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, then wrapping around the loop back to Mammoth Hot Springs. Here's an obligatory shot of the canyon, which is so beautiful the photo is pretty much required. Also a shot of the four of us on the North Rim.


We had very good luck with wildlife. On the northern road after entering the park we saw several large herds of bison, including a rather flirtatious couple just off the roadside. On our way out we saw a gaggle of big-horned sheep just up the hillside from the road. There was at least one rumored bear that was just out of sight (there are always one or two of those).

I was pretty excited to go to Mammoth, because I have visited the park only once before, and we did not get up to Mammoth, and the pictures of it look so cool. Having been there I can confirm, it is really really cool. Alien and otherworldly. Water loaded with calcium and minerals gets squeezed out of the ground, heated by the underlying volcano magma, and the minerals harden as the water runs off, leaving these glacier-like rock formations. We have a number of great photos of this, but I'll show this one.


We ran into all sorts of road construction, of the sort where one direction holds up and waits while the traffic from the other side uses the one available lane. Except with the added twist that everybody gets to wait awhile while the men working work with no traffic at all. At one we sat for about 20 minutes, while the bikers ahead of us swatted mosquitos off their faces and necks and got basically eaten alive. (At one hold-up Tom got out of the truck to wander off taking wildflower pictures, at another in the town of Cooke City he ran into a drugstore for batteries.) So that ate up quite a bit of time, and in Livingston we spent about a half hour trying to get some pizza from the Pizza Hut, so all in all it was 13 hours door-to-door. But a day of simply stunning mountain scenery. Just beautiful.

Arriving at Big Timber

This morning we headed west out of Glendive across eastern Montana. What beautiful country! Interstate 94 follows the Yellowstone River all through this part of the state, along with the railroad. A lot of the area is undeveloped, although we did see some farmland and some horses. More huge fields, some beautiful expanses of golden wheat, and quite a few cornfields, irrigated and improbably bright green against the buff yellow of the surrounding hills. We saw a brightly painted red and white building touting their red angus beef, but unfortunately we did not see any of the cattle. We did pass a couple livestock yards, and numerous gargantuan grain storage facilities that were probably the size of several city blocks, but in the vast openness it's hard to appreciate their size. In one area, all the hilltops were dotted with pine trees. Some areas had considerable trees, and others were open prairie. Everything is so big it defies photography.

It seemed like we were climbing an elongated staircase going from Glendive to Billings, but it turns out that we climbed just as much from from Billings to Big Timber, and even further from Minneapolis to Glendive. We started out at 830 feet and are now at 4091. When we go home next weekend we'll be able to coast half the way!

We are camped along the Boulder River, which is pretty full and rushes by with a bit of a roar. I am looking forward to sleeping to the sound of it, and with "good sleeping weather"--temps maybe below 60! When we stopped for gas today in Billings it was 98, so I could go for some cool. Snuggling under the blankets, as opposed to being clammy and thinking "get 'em off me!" at four in the morning. Does make it a little more difficult to pry oneself out in the morning to let out the dogs, however.

Trek Across North Dakota

It's Sunday morning and we have left Glendive, Montana on our way to Big Timber. We had a nice day yesterday driving across North Dakota--much nicer than I expected. At first we were heading straight into a stiff northwest wind which meant bad gas mileage and stopping frequently. Since our daughter went to college in Moorhead, we've made the drive up 94 to Fargo many times and knew that that was not a particularly interesting trip. (Tom used to refuse to go up there just because of the four hours of boring drive there and back.)

Once we turned westward the wind was not right in our face, and as the day wore on it eventually died down. I was expecting North Dakota to be flat. Much of Minnesota is flat, except for the parts that are near rivers. North Dakota had what I would describe as rolling hills, although the hills had interesting "shape features". It looked as though it had been a huge desert once, with sand dunes and piles of sand heaped up to points, and then one day it all froze into rock.

Most of it was cultivated into enormous fields, with occasional batches of cows (including lots of cute baby cows). There was that huge sense of space you get out in the
countryside when there are not a lot of trees and you can see for miles and miles. The road wound around just enough that you didn't get that feeling of one long straight stretch of boredom you get in some parts of the country. Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to have the camera at hand, so I will have to try to capture some of it on the trip back. (Then I can get a shot of the exit sign for the town named Home on the Range.)

We stopped for gas in Dickinson, and just west of that you come to the "painted canyon", and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. There was a rest stop with a scenic overlook, and we saw just enough prior to that to know we needed to stop and see it. Here's a representative picture:


We were pretty tired puppies by the time we got things set up in Glendive. The campground there was quite nice, and we had a pull-through spot which makes it extra easy. Our spot was at the edge of the campground, looking out toward the sunset and more buttes. I was googling our directions to Big Timber this morning, and I have a feeling we'll have a beautiful drive today and wind up in a completely different kind of setting than we just left.

Amish Furniture

Here is a picture of the new table and chairs--they look lovely! And they arrived in a normal truck, with no horses. The whole family came up for a trip to the cities however, including a young son who was very frightened of dogs (my house with three excited pooches was not the best place to be visiting). They were vying to see who could bark/yell the loudest.

Cassius Spaniel

I've decided that Butterscotch floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. The floating is quite something--I wish I had a video! :-) She must have expended so much energy crying today that she is pretty quiet tonight. She and Tucker spent quite a bit of time catching toys, but otherwise pretty low key.

In other news, a dinette set we ordered from an Amish furniture maker over Memorial Day is arriving tomorrow morning. So I'm going to work from home in the morning, which makes life easier for dogs. (The Amish are networked. The family we talked to doesn't make tables and chairs, so some Amish from Indiana made them.) I'm assuming there won't be horses in the driveway--I guess we'll see! I'm not sure I want to know how long it takes horses to get here from Harmony. The bad news: I have to clean off the kitchen table.

Some Pictures

First, here is a raspberry-picking picture from Saturday--aww, how pastoral:

Next a couple pictures of our canine guest, Butterscotch, one with resident dogs included. It is very difficult to find B. sitting still enough for a picture, and even more difficult to get any of them together. Maybe better ones on Friday, stay posted.

The five of us went for a walk together tonight, and I'm not sure who was the most tired when we got home. I thought we would all be lying around panting, but Butterscotch didn't really wind down until after another hour of chasing the other two dogs around the family room. Right now everyone is chilling and thinking about bedtime.

Expecting Butterscotch

I apologize for the lack of blogging of late. Time has been short, and I've been spending the time I have vegetating. Work has been more draining than usual. This last weekend I actually managed to get some things done for a change--from picking raspberries and making jam to housecleaning. (The raspberry jam is really zingy this year. We went to a new farm to pick, and the plants seemed a little stressed--possibly from our lack of rain. Anyway it made for some really flavorful jam!) I also started up another blog for a group we're taking part in at church, so that may be siphoning off a little energy. (Although I'm hoping not to be the only contributor to that one. If I am, it will not be continuing long--I already have a blog!)

Tomorrow evening when I leave work I'm going to pick up Butterscotch, a five-month old Cocker spaniel. We are dog-sitting her until Friday evening, so that promises to bring all sorts of excitement to the household. We've added a tie-out to the back yard, we've purchased some rawhide chews so everyone gets to have one, and I've tried to reduce the number of things near the floor that look good to chew on. I expect Tucker to have a ball, but we'll see. (His neuroses have resurged lately, so I'm hoping this will help him out of his funk.) I will post some pictures!

In the meantime, we leave Saturday morning for a week in Big Timber, Montana, so there will be packing and so forth going on. I'm definitely ready for another break in the action. (A person could get used to this every-other-month vacation schedule.)

Senators On Parade

Oy--this is the kind of week I've had, I laughed uproariously when I read this. First I must say that I've actually listened to parts of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings this week, because MPR has been broadcasting them live, so they've been on during at least parts of my morning commutes. I have tremendous admiration (?) for people who listen to these things for the purpose of reporting on them, or live-blogging them, because really an hour is about all you can possibly stand, especially that first day when each senator is just flapping their gums about whatever and the nominee has to just sit there and smile and take it all in.

So, in that spirit, I will quote just a portion of Confirmation Hearings of Master Yoda, Day Two (if you enjoy this, go read the rest):

Senator Jeff Sessions: Master Yoda, I don't see how you can possibly judge impartially. First of all, you are clearly green and you talk funny. I just don't think you can be sympathetic to white people. Second, it's my understanding that you are actually an alien from the planet Degobah.

Yoda: In Degobah I have resided, but my actual birthplace no one knows.

Senator Jeff Sessions: Well, that's just the point. I mean, we don't even know where President Obama was born, much less you.

Yoda: Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.

In a similar vein, there is also Gail Collins' column in the NYTimes today.

Fun Links

This is a cop-out of a post, but I've got a couple videos to share.

The first one is a song. I'm not a big country music fan, but this recent video is from a band in Canada who had a guitar damaged by United Airlines baggage handlers and got nowhere trying to get the airline to take any responsibility, so they made a video. The song is quite good, the video is good, and I like the singer's voice. There are two more videos on the way, this is the first installment. I'm about ready to go buy one of their CDs.



I guess the next one is also a song. This is a really inventive video. They've got some sort of software to convert speech into "singing," but the stuff they added and the way they split-screened the various bits is really quite good. This is sort of a paean to partisanship, featuring Sarah Palin of course, and our favorite Michele Bachmann.



OK, one more, and it is not a song. It is an animated graph. I had to watch it a few times before I figured out what it was. It shows the life expectancy and average income of various countries over time. The size of the circles also shows their populations. The color of the circles is the continent the country belongs to (if you put your mouse on a bubble it shows the name of the country, but sometimes they bounce too quickly for you to read what they are). After you click this link, press the play button after it loads. (There's a second tab that shows country population over time on a world map.)

Last To Know

Assuming I ever have some time and some energy that overlap on the same day, I'm going to write a post about the joys of working for the government, which seems to be one of the safest places to be these days, even though that isn't saying too much. However, in lieu of that, today I'll just quote Joel Achenbach, who blogs and writes features for the Washington Post. You've no doubt been hearing that print journalism is going through some difficult times in terms of profitable business model. Here he was last week:

This is an exciting day at the Post because there are all these amazing structural changes in the editing and copy-flow process that I would explain in detail were I to have even the vaguest understanding of them.

There have been lots of meetings and memos. Entire departments have vanished. Where Financial used to be there's now a Taco Bell. Fact: They've told us that, in anticipation of a major architectural renovation of the newsroom, we should pack our belongings in boxes and take anything truly valuable to our homes. Um, sure. Like I believe that. Whatever happened to the decency of giving a worker a simple pink slip?

What's this all mean? I am the last to know. But probably the governing concept behind all these changes is "More Cowbell."

I love the bit about taking your valuables home and keeping your belongings packed in boxes. We had a little spate of people being "walked out the door" recently, and I always wonder--do you get to go to your office and get your stuff? Is it better not to have so much personal stuff in your cube that we'd be talking multiple boxes to get it all out? Do they have an adequate stash of boxes in the back, or would it be a good idea to keep a few in the trunk of your car? I've taken to trying to keep my pictures backed up onto CD so that I could walk away from my desktop without too much frustration, not that I'm expecting to contract a virus soon and have my computer investigated and be fired for doing something inappropriate with work files or anything.

(And if you don't know about "more cowbell," it was a Saturday Night Live skit with Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell. I'm not sure this video is the entire skit, but it's most of it.)

Dog Days of July

Just for my kids, who had to put up with me as they were growing up, I have to tell you that I hauled a couple neighbor kids on a long walk yesterday. There are two girls, Becca and Lauren, who live across the street. They are a year apart, both in elementary school. Becca (the oldest) has a real thing for dogs. She knows every dog around, and has made a point of doing as much as possible with them. (Their family finally got one of their own last year--Cosby, a huge white Labradoodle. Naturally our dogs, being anti-social canine delinquents, think Cosby is the Great White Evil. Sort of like Ms. Pafco down the street, the Great Red Menace who walks every day in winter in a large red hooded parka. Somewhere on our morning walk we are bound to encounter her formidable presence, so that my dogs can wake all the neighbors by barking like maniacs.)

The last couple days they've been coming around wanting to walk Scarlett, our poodle. (Scarlett is Becca's favorite of our two dogs, which is not surprising as Scarlett is people-friendly and Tucker prefers to bark and nip at people. Not that this deters Becca, she is a very confident and persistent girl. She has made friends with Tucker, and gamely tried to teach him tricks. But she's really fond of Scarlett, which may also be because Scarlett is more portable and likes to be picked up and held.)

So yesterday they rang the bell just as I happened to be leashing the dogs up for a walk. Becca has gone on walks with us before, but in the past, she was only allowed to walk around our block. One day, when I said the dogs and I were going to go on a longer walk than that, she talked me into going around the block twice. She is a very persuasive girl, and I'm confident that she will be running for office one day. Well yesterday I said we were going for a pretty long walk, but they asked their dad and he said they could come along.

Around the block is an under 15-minute walk. The walk we did is probably about a half hour. We went up to 118th and over to Davenport, and up to 119th and headed east. Eventually Lauren asked me just how far we were going to walk, and I said, "Well, we could take this next turn here and head back toward our houses, or we could keep going to London Dr. and around past your bus stop." Becca immediately said we should go on to London, but Lauren didn't say anything. I have a feeling she was ready to head back, but didn't want to say so. A little later she asked me how we could walk so far, and I told her we had worked up to it.

When we got back to the house I told their dad that I had worn at least one of them out. Lauren headed inside claiming that her feet hurt and she needed a big glass of ice water (I had suggested that as we came down the final stretch). Becca had insisted on carrying Scarlett the last part of the way, so Scarlett got off pretty easy all in all.

***

On an unrelated note, but pertinent to the 4th of July holiday, today in church we sang America the Beautiful, and I was struck by portions of a couple verses that are not exactly the sort of thing you hear nowadays when it comes to patriotic sentiments:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

(America have flaws? Heaven forfend--only the blame-America-first crowd says that! Self-control? Restrict our liberty with law?)

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!

The real heroes love mercy more than life, but you don't hear of too many folks stepping up to that bar these days. Be that as it may, it is still an occasion to remember those out there putting themselves in harm's way by serving in the military, and to be thankful for that service.

Morning Fail

I was trying to get myself out of bed this morning to walk the dogs and go to the gym when I remembered that Gold's cancelled my Friday morning step class for the summer. I did not succeed in getting up and going to the gym anyway.

I got up and had some breakfast and plunged into the black hole of the computer. (So many good YouTubes of Michael Jackson. At 11 he was already just amazing. It's difficult to think that his father's mistreatment may have been a part of why he was so good.) But fortunately I was on the laptop and untethered from the power cord, so after a couple hours the battery died. (The same thing happened last night, I am sorry to admit.). So the laptop is a good thing.

Finally at 10:30 the dogs and I made it outside for a walk, and it turned out that it was a glorious beautiful sunny day. I *ought* to have put a chaise lounge out in the backyard under a tree and spent the day just smiling and enjoying it. But I had a shower and got dressed and drove to work. Hopefully I will make good on my promise to spend some time at church doing data entry for the Dignity Center later this afternoon.

And Now Over to Joel

In lieu of writing a blog post myself tonight, I will just refer you to Joel Achenbach's lovely Summer Groove from last Tuesday. Please follow the link and enjoy.

In a small milestone of sorts my last post got a comment from someone I don't know. I have the blog set up to email me in the event that a comment is made, so, with some trepidation I opened the email to find out what this unknown person had to say. (It was a post about ducks and marshmallows--not, I thought, particularly controversial subject matter.) It turned out to be some sort of blogger spam encouraging me to make my blog pay and giving me a link to follow. He noted that he found my blog via a google request, and discovered that my blog was "popular"--both obvious fictions that pointed to spam boilerplate. Anyway, I expect to hit the big-time any moment now.

Dells, Ducks, and Marshmallows

One of the things about the new age of instant international information, it seems a little strange to just go on with your life when things like the unrest in Iran are happening. Andrew Sullivan's site has given over almost completely to being a twitter feed for Iranian demonstration information.

We had a day of vacation today in the Wisconsin Dells. The weather was absolutely perfect. (I can say that because during the hot sunny part of the afternoon I was napping in the camper.)

This morning we rode an Original Wisconsin Duck and saw at least one dell. (I had several ideas of what a dell might be, and all of them were nowhere close. Turns out to be a rock formation where a glacial lake emptied and the rushing water carved gorges into the soft sandstone. The dell is a space between sandstone walls or cliffs, and they have trees overgrowing them so that they are cool spaces where ferns and so forth grow.) The Ducks are amphibious vehicles developed for landing on beaches in WWII. Tom was amazed that they had so many still in service today. The controls for operating one looked pretty forbidding. But the dogs got to come along so that was a bonus.

We hung out at the campsite until after dinner (well, Tom went into town and found things to fix the front legs of the camper and the exhaust pipe for the truck), then we went and played Adventure Mini-Golf, walked into town for some fudge, and came back and had a campfire followed by roasted marshmallows. We achieved toasted marshmallow perfection tonight the likes of which I'm not sure when I've seen. Crunchy toasted on the outside but barely browned, a layer of hot melty marshmallow inside, and a nub of firm chewiness in the center. (Tom was going for brown and carmelized on the outside, and puffed up to twice their normal size.)

Hiking in the Smokies

We had such a fun and exciting day, and the evening is turning out to be just as exciting.

We started out leisurely this morning, getting up rather late and making French toast for breakfast. Then we decided to go back into the park and see more in the mountains. Elizabeth said she'd like to hike to a waterfall, and that she'd like to do a strenuous hike. (The hikes come in easy, moderate, and strenuous.)

Yesterday we drove halfway up Newfound Gap road to the Clingman's Dome trail. We parked at the end and took the paved trail up to the observation deck, which was marked "moderate". It was very steep, and although it was only half a mile it took us quite awhile to get up there and it was really tough going. We stopped to rest several times and the sweat was pouring off by the time we reached the top. (You get to the top of the paved trail, only to be met by a curlicue going farther up like a pedestrian overpass to the observation deck.) Fortunately it was so high up it was very cool and lovely up there.

So, today's trail was 2.7 miles of "strenuous" to Rainbow Falls, and I was thinking that the dogs and I might not make it all the way. But strenuous turned out to be not as bad as Clingman's Dome. It was steep, but not as steep, and it was not paved which is I think why they mark it more difficult. I actually preferred it because you walk more slowly when you have to pick out your steps.

(Technically, dogs are not allowed on the trails in the park, except for two which are right next to visitor centers. There is no explanation for why this is, although we think it is because of the bears. No need for trouble because your dog decided to pick a fight with a bear. We took the dogs up Clingman's Dome yesterday, and we did see other dogs. Today we decided to take the dogs along, and although we saw other dogs in the parking lot, we didn't see any other dogs on the trail. Fortunately we didn't see any bears either.)

Anyway, it was absolutely beautiful. Walked along a stream which tumbled down moss-covered boulders and fallen trees, amidst a beautiful forest with rhododendrons growing all around. This hike wound up taking us five hours to go up and back down again, although we stopped quite a bit to rest or to clamber on the rocks and play in the water. Took a long, long time to get to the falls, and not as long to get down but our "going down" muscles were just as tired at the bottom as our "going up" muscles were at the top. (This trail kept going for another three miles to the top of the third highest peak in the Appalachians, and we met a few people who had been all the way up. One guy with two smaller children had hiked up the day before, camped up there, and were on their way down with their packs on their backs.)

All the way down the kids were fantasizing about what they wanted to eat for dinner. We decided we would go back to the Old Mill restaurant, which we had eaten at on Monday night, because it was so good. For $16.99 to $18.99 you get fritters, corn chowder, salad, an enormous entree, mashed potatoes, green beans, dinner rolls, and dessert. On Monday I ordered a rainbow trout, expecting a reasonable sized meal, and instead got a mutant fish that (split in half) filled an entire plate. All the food is so good--the corn chowder a tasty concoction with red peppers and potatoes, the fritters are amazingly crunchy on the outside and soft and caky inside (with whipped maple butter). They specialize in southern cooked comfort food--ribs, meat loaf, chicken fried steak, pot roast, ham, etc., although they have a pretty well-rounded menu. The building is an old mill, which I gather is still actually operational. I wish I'd had my camera along to get some photos of it. (Well I had my camera along, but my batteries were dead.)

We put the dogs in the camper, and they flopped on the bed like dead things that weren't planning to move the whole time we were gone. As we pulled into the parking lot of the Old Mill, a storm was whipping up. This had happened the night before, but last night it blew a little bit and then ended. Tonight it kept blowing, and then started raining. We put our names in and went to the general store to shop while we waited for a table. In the store the radio was playing, talking about what counties had tornado warnings, and callers were reporting where there was hail and rain. When they called our name we dashed through the downpour to the restaurant, and when we sat down we could see the trees whipping around. I thought about the dogs back in the camper by themselves. We stuffed ourselves silly and enjoyed dinner, and the weather calmed down although it was raining pretty hard still when we left.

Driving home the traffic through Pigeon Forge was particularly nasty, and it turned out that the traffic light where we needed to turn off was closed, and traffic on our side routed over to the other side of the road, because two power poles were snapped in the middle and a roof of some building was puddled in front of a hotel at the corner. We got back to the campground, which had loose leaves and branches laying on the streets. Our campsites are on the edge of the campground, next to a little creek. The creek was quite a bit fuller than it had been, and for the next several hours we were moving the kids' tent, talking with other campers, watching the creek rise, and deciding whether to move to a different campsite or hope the water wouldn't rise too much more. The owner says that the water from the mountains takes several hours to get down here, and that they had our whole area under water a few years back when they had had hardly a drizzle here in town. We decided not to move, but we did unplug since our power outlet is only about a foot off the ground. I guess we'll see what's true in the morning.

We Have Found Summer

We are in Cincinnati today, and I just want to let all our friends back in Minnesota know that we have rediscovered summer here. It is hot. And muggy. And the wind is not blowing a gale, in fact it is barely blowing at all. We walked around Lake Winton and got sweaty. When we got back to the camper, we turned on the air conditioning--mostly for the dogs, because we went downtown and ate dinner at an outside table. Now it is evening and we are sitting outside at our campsite enjoying a lovely evening. To some these things sound normal, but so far they have not occurred yet this year in Minnesota.

Catching Up On This Week

Today we embarked on a 10-day camping trip to the Smokies via Cincinnati, and I have been very busy getting ready to go, so I haven't had time to write. But there were several really good items this week that I wanted to highlight, so I apologize for being a few days behind.

Nick Kristof had a great column on Thursday that you ought to go read. It has a story of an American woman who lives in Canada for a time an compares health care experiences there and here. In fact, she now feels she can't move back to the U.S. because of the health care she needs. I've read several pieces indicating that the insurance industry has gotten several Democratic senators to go along with effectively gutting the public option of the new health care reform legislation. It is vitally important that a viable public option is part of this program.

The other moving story I read was posted on Andrew Sullivan's web site (he reposted it from elsewhere). It is the story of a poor Iranian woman who (was) going out to join the demonstrations for Mr. Mousavi because she is able to dance and shout alongside wealthier boys who treat her respectfully as a peer because she is joining their demonstration. Her writing is so personal, it reads almost as a poem. She does not actually support Mr. Mousavi, she prefers Ahmadinejad, and does not even plan to vote. She fully expects on Saturday to return to being treated as an inferior.

I am anxiously awaiting stories of the transition to digital TV. I noticed an item a week or so ago about what things people are cutting back on during the recession, and cable TV was the thing that people were least likely to cut back on. (We are TV snobs. Or maybe TV cheapskates. We do have one, and we do watch quite a bit, but we do not have cable.) As many people shake their heads over the things that the American public does not seem to get excited about, I am thinking that not being able to get TV might be the thing that could lead to rioting in the streets.

Hammer Pants Dance

Very busy getting ready for big camping trip to Ohio/Tennessee/Wisconsin. Rainy and cold today, but we have to be excited about the rain because it is so unbelievably dry here. Back to the trip, trying to decide if I have enough clothes to last 10 days without doing laundry. Especially since when I'm camping, I seem to wear three outfits a day. Not sure why that is.

Anyway, friend Sheila posted this on her Facebook site and I have to share. Hopefully you've already seen some of these ads where they send a mob of trained dancers into train stations and airports to start dancing. (If you haven't, you need to. Some of the most fun and uplifting video you're likely to see. It's like what people say about musicals, that people don't just burst into highly choreographed song in the middle of real life. In these videos, it's as if they do. And the effect on the onlookers is quite something. It almost makes you think there should be non-profit groups all over that just do this everywhere. Life would be so much better, it really would be a public service.) Here's one of a group of guys doing Can't Touch This in Hammer pants at a trendy clothing store. Really funny.

Enjoy your Saturday!

[Tiny postscript: if you want a little more uplift, catch this column today by Bob Herbert in the New York Times about a wildly successful new school system in North Carolina with a lot of low income kids. Their first year of seniors are graduating, and 100% of them (48 kids) are all going to college, having been accepted by at least two colleges each.]

Stories we should all know

The I'm-sensing-a-theme-here theme for this weekend has been: there are stories that we need to share more, so that they become familiar--woven into the fabric of the culture. Things that we can't afford to have recede into the background. We all get very busy with the little mundane details of the day-to-day, which we know aren't very earth-shattering in the grand scheme of things but nevertheless they are the things in the forefront, so to speak, the immediate. Then you read about something important and think, OK, this needs to get a little more play.

There's a guy who writes for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Friday he responded to something someone else wrote about the flying fur surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. This person wrote that the nomination was exacerbating tensions between Latinos and African Americans, who he said "could be as violently distrustful of each other as blacks and whites were." Coates (who is African American) begged to differ, saying, essentially, that there is no comparison:

One must be clear about what constituted "violent" distrust "between" blacks and whites in the 20th century. It meant thousands of whites, in Atlanta, in 1906, assembling on the streets to randomly murder black people. In Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, it meant whites pillaging a Jewish businesses for arms, and then proceeding to the black side of town, attacking black business and black homes, and thousands of black people fleeing for their lives. It meant whites--across the nation--in 1910 assembling in mobs and murdering random black people (On the 4th of July!). The cause? Jack Johnson had the temerity to win the championship. It meant whites in East St. Louis, in 1918, perpetrating a pogrom against the city's black population, and killing over 100 black people because, "southern niggers need a lynching."

I have not known Latinos in the 20th Century to perpetrate a Red Summer. I have not known blacks to lynch Latino veterans, returning from war, in their uniforms. The fact is that there was no violent distrust between blacks and whites in the 20th century. Rather there was a one-sided war waged against black people by white terrorists, which government, in the best cases, failed to prevent, in many cases, stood idly by, and in the worst cases actually aided and abetted. I'm sorry but comparing that to whatever's happening between blacks and Latinos, is a slander against both those groups, and an amazingly naive take on the history of white America in regards to race.

(I googled Jack Johnson for us, he was a boxer.) I read this passage and kind of had my breath taken away. Yes, I know there was slavery. Yes, I know there were lynchings and marches and shootings and the four girls killed in their church. I listened to the NPR series on the civil rights era. I know that in addition to wingnuts in KKK costumes there were a lot of other people who were angry or scared or who just remained silent.

I think it was Coates' recitation of these very specific actions--places, dates, circumstances--we should all know this history. I did not know any of these incidents. These are just a few specifics of an ugly history that most of us are only very casually aware of. My reaction was that we all need to hear these things. There are other bits of our history that get repeated all the time, on anniversaries and when related events occur. These are not things that we should close the book on and look away from, these are things we cannot afford to forget. To forget them is to have the sort of silly dialogues that occur today about subjects such as the wisdom of affirmative action. (And affirmative action is by no means necessarily good, and it merits serious discussion, but it's silly to suggest that a Puerto Rican girl growing up in New York City with a single mother was somehow privileged.) We know the heros--Rosa Parks, Dr. King--(or do we?) but we need to know the other side as well.

Then I began reading email sent to Andrew Sullivan about women who had had late-term abortions. Stories prompted, of course, by the killing of Dr. Tiller. We hear "late-term abortion" and we mentally cluck our tongues. Irresponsible. Except that I didn't know any of the stories behind why women have late-term abortions--but because of Dr. Tiller's death I suspect that many of us will know some of these stories. They are heartbreaking. Here is one example:

At 17 weeks gestation our baby had been diagnosed with major heart defects requiring a minimum of three risky open-heart surgeries beginning at birth, and would later require a heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21.

A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we'd had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant. As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery.

He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.

Our priest came away from that experience feeling that this world-renowned children’s hospital was basically experimenting on babies. He saw their futile suffering and likened it to being crucified. The family he had gone there to support later told him that if they had only known what their baby would be forced to go through before dying, they would never have chosen surgery. Our priest told us that he believed we were not choosing our son’s death, only choosing the timing of his death in order to spare him a great deal of suffering. Something he said that brought us great comfort was “God knows what is in your hearts.” God knows our choice was based on mercy and compassion. Who would better understand our hearts than God, who made the choice for His own Son to die?

See this article for several stories, including one very frightening one at the end about a woman whose baby had died, and she had begun bleeding but was not in labor, and could not get a doctor or hospital to allow her to come in for treatment. Here is a roundup of some of the reader email stories on Andrew's blog today.

Finally, there have been a number of stories lately about the continuing travesty of sexual assault going on around the world. Nick Kristof of the New York Times is a frequent commenter, and he had a recent piece on the continuing suffering of women in Darfur in refugee camps. On the way home tonight, I heard a heartrending story on The World where they interviewed a number of these Darfuri women. I don't know the statistics, but the commonness of this crime and the fact that we accept it and are not walking, running, fundraising, and filling the Sunday morning talk show airwaves for it is completely unacceptable.

A facebook group went up today calling on bloggers to talk about this subject (it is called Silence Is the Enemy if you'd like to join). I reach about three people with this blog (and that's assuming they've read this very long post!), but I think the point is that we all need to do what we can.

For a good time...

... go read this post of Joel Achenbach's. The whole thing is quite entertaining, although subject-wise, it does wander just a bit.

Just to give you a few tastes:

Our precious immune system becomes a potentially lethal agent in the aging heart. Our brains are awash in chemicals telling us to eat more fatty foods, but these chemicals never anticipated the existence of a middle-aged body. The brilliant trick of cell division increasingly turns into a life-threatening hazard. ...

The only sure way to prolong life, the only proven way, is caloric restriction. Food is death. Also most beverages. Also oxygen. That's about one part in five of the Earth's atmosphere, and it will rip your cells from limb to limb. Sunshine is another killer. And water: A universal solvent.

OK those snippets sounded depressing, not funny. I guess you'd have to trust me and read the whole thing. It's actually about gardening. And this is the light-hearted post of the day, if I ever get around to writing the one I've been planning since Friday.

Funniest tweet of the day

From Glenn Greenwald: 'Great way to start the day: "Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman are off today." Almost better than coffee.'

You'd need to be familiar with Greenwald... Occasionally Dowd can be pretty funny, but she causes more trouble than she helps on balance. And I used to like Friedman a lot. I still like him most of the time, even though he went all neo-con about Iraq (and his recent torture apologia was horrendous). I have his book From Beirut to Jerusalem from years ago. I thought it was very illuminating when I first read it, and he still seems to have quite a bit of insight into the issues of the Middle East. But a lot of people don't seem to think much of him.

Greenwald himself is not an easy guy to read on a regular basis, but he is essential. He's one of those guys out there on the fringe keeping everyone else honest, at least to some degree. Sort of a Wellstone.

Canoeing picture

Here's a photo from our canoe yesterday.

Time to go home

Another beautiful morning today. As we've always noticed in the past, on the last day of the weekend (Sunday on a normal weekend, Monday on a holiday weekend such as this one), everyone gets up, has breakfast, packs up all their stuff and leaves. We can never quite understand this, it seems to cut your weekend short by a whole day. I guess I can understand where you might want to get home and do some laundry and mow the lawn, so you don't lose your entire weekend at home, but we've always felt like we would rather be away as long as possible and let the other stuff get crammed into the weekdays instead.

There is the matter of checkout time, however. I looked it up on our paperwork, and it turns out that it is noon. The staff is already tipping picnic tables up on top of fire pits getting ready to mow the grass. We decided we could pack up and drive down to Harmony to look for some Amish furniture stores (the one in Lanesboro seems to have closed).

It's kind of sad to watch the campground empty out. I took the dogs out for a bit of a leg stretch before we get in the car, and we took one last walk down to the river. The stretch of rocks and sandbar next to the campground had been packed with people fishing, kids grossing out over a dead fish, and labs retrieving their toy out of the river, as well as canoers in the water and bikers zipping past on the downhill trail on the other side. Today it was empty. Instead of seeming like a relief, more of a "'back to nature" kind of experience, it just seemed lonely and deserted. Scarlett walked into the water and took a drink, and I put my hand in. It feels just like the stuff that comes out of the tap at home, but hearing the sound of the water on the rocks and touching the cool wetness was like making a little connection with someone you've had the pleasure of visiting for a short while.

As we were walking back I saw the sight in this picture. Except you have to imagine an eagle gliding above the top of the cliiff. I thought, that really is Eagle Cliff Campground all in one picture. I came back with the camera but of course the eagle didn't make another appearance. This campground is situated on a large bend in the river, so the river wraps around three sides of it. The campground side of the river is low, but the other side is all tall cliffs. It is one of our favorite places to camp. Not only is the campground really nice, but there are so many things to do: visit downtown Lanesboro, bike, canoe, tube. We did everything but the tubing this trip (a little early yet for tubing).
Here's another picture of our camper, with some tents in the background which are right along the river. Everyone else had left, this area was packed with campers a few hours previously.

Camping Sunday

Got up this morning to a clear blue sky and sunshine. Yesterday it wasn't completely overcast, but it was cloudy, and it dripped rain periodically, sometimes when the sun was shining. Last night the skies cleared, and we're far enough away from light centers that we could see lots and lots of stars. It was so humid that a thick fog formed which mingled with the campfire smoke around the campground. With the camper light strings glowing through the eerie fog making strange shadows, it slightly resembled that camping scene out of Harry Potter, except no one conjured a Dark Mark.

Today has just been crystal, so after we had breakfast we signed up for a two-hour canoe trip. The river is very low, and he said the two-hour trips had been taking three and four hours, and the four-hour trip took you up to where the river was so shallow you had to do a lot of portaging. It was perfect for canoeing. The air was still a little cool so we didn't bake too much in the sun, and the water was also still cool. We had to pay attention and choose our spots all along the trip to avoid the shallows and the rocks. There were little baby rapids all down the way, nothing that ranked as adventurous, but still fun.

We saw schools of brown trout, spotted shadows over the rocks (they seemed to like the river bends with rocks and rapids). We saw a bald eagle, and an immature eagle of some unidentifiable type, and two Baltimore orioles fighting over a tree. We rode up the river with three large van-loads of people from our campground, and there were lots of other people out on the river from other outfitters, but it was still so lovely and peaceful. We looked up at the bikers on the bike trail, whereas yesterday we had looked down from our bikes to the canoers. We passed (or were passed by) some kayaks (these seem especially favored by preteen and teenage boys). They looked like fun but I'm not sure you could fit a dog in there with you.

Biking with dogs

Have you ever had an idea, and then wanted to try it out to see if it would work, but for one reason or another you can't quite do it? Today we tried something that I've had percolating in my thoughts for a couple years.

We got our dog Scarlett in the spring of 2000 (Scarlett is a miniature poodle). She was 10 or 12 weeks old, so by the time we went on our first camping trip of that season, she was only half grown. We had had a camper for a couple of years, and had taken to camping at places on bike trails and spending a good deal of our Saturday at least out on our bikes. So our first trip to Lanesboro that year, which is on the Root River bike trail, we had to figure out how to bring a dog along on a day of biking. We went to the bike store in town, and found a mesh basket. We put a towel in the basket and put Scarlett in the basket. It turned out that she felt that under extraordinary circumstances she ought to jump out of the basket. So Tom hit upon the idea, undoubtedly not approved by the SPCA, of threading a bungee cord through her collar and around the handlebars of the bike to cause her to stay, at least to some degree, attached to the bike. (Yes, there was one instance where she wound up dangling from the handlebars. Usually she'd just make to jump out and get tugged back in.)

As an aside, you know how you wind up giving your pet at least 12 names. Scarlett was already PupperDog, SweetieDog and CamperDog, now she also became known as BungeeDog.

The next summer she no longer fit in the basket, and that autumn we acquired a second dog, Tucker, who does not care for heights. I am quite certain that he would not like to be bungeed to a bike basket. He is also considerably more barrel-chested and denser than Scarlett (full grown he weighs more than she does, even though she's taller). When we biked, we would leave the dogs in the camper and bike for a couple hours and come back.

But I had this idea that we could get a bike trailer, the kind meant for small children, and trailer the dogs while we biked. I had seen other people doing it, usually with dogs a good deal larger than ours. I looked into the trailers, but they were rather expensive. It seemed like a lot spend on biking your dogs, especially if it didn't work out. Then Tom "rescued" one from the dumpster behind Goodwill one day. It sat in the garage for a couple seasons--occasionally I'd get it out and try to figure out how to make it work, but it became apparent that the trailer was in the dumpster for a reason. It was broken.

As I may have mentioned, we have a new camper. We managed to get a campsite at our favorite campground in Lanesboro for Memorial Day weekend, and I found myself thinking about the bike trailer again. It's pretty hilly on the Root River bike trail, and although I've never been in particularly good shape, I'm not in good shape now, and I'm a few years older than I was in 2001. I wasn't sure I could pull 35 pounds of dog and a trailer up a hill behind my bike. I'm usually doing well to get myself up hills. This is a problem with a lot of my ideas. They sound good on paper, but in the real world there are issues. (Earlier this year I thought it would be great to try biking to work one day, which is about 32 miles by car. Then I remembered wind.)

So we went into town this noon in the truck to get a bratwurst at Arv's, and we stopped at the bike store. They had a used bike trailer they were selling for $40, so we bought it. This afternoon we tried it out around the campground, with Tom pulling it and the two dogs inside. Things were going pretty well, one thing led to another, and we were out on the bike trail. The trailer is a nice light one, but even so I could tell that it was considerable work for Tom to pull it. I was wondering if the first bike trailer trip would be the last. We went from the campground to Lanesboro with one stop along the way, and about halfway back Tom stopped for a rest. So I said how about letting me try it? As it turned out, there weren't really any hills on the way back, so I was lucky there. We stopped in Whalan for some fabulous pie and made it home in one piece. I have to say, that when you're pulling a dog trailer downhill and into the wind, the wind hurts you a lot more than the downhill helps you. (What downhill?)

And how did the dogs do? Well, all right mostly, although Scarlett didn't like it much. She likes to be near me, touching me if possible but at least in sight. So she kept finding cracks and crevices where she could force her nose and head out to look back and see if I was there. (And possibly get out while she was at it.) But they stayed in and Scarlett only cried about it about a third of the time. (Tucker was mostly fine. I had a pillow in there, so he was happy. But the trailer bottom under him was only about an inch off the ground.)