Headline writer out sick this week

So tired, I am going to bed. Head hurts. (I blame Sheila. She had a headache today.) I have some stuff packed for tomorrow, but still have to round up all the dog stuff. Strollers, high chairs, play pens, that sort of thing. Presently it appears that the rain might hold off, but that story changes daily.

Got the cubicle all moved today. Still a little furniture rearrangement to do (there's a file cabinet sucking up 12 sq. ft. of valuable real estate that needs to go bye-bye). Wonder how many times I'm going to walk to the old one by mistake.

Do not know what I stepped in at work today. It is the Minnesota way to say as little as possible, especially in meetings involving any level of management--keep your head down and appear as wallpaper-like as possible. I cannot seem to get the hang of this. I had two program people in my cube late this afternoon, thanks to my inability to smile and nod. We'll have to see how that turns out.

I've rigged up the blog so that I ought to be able to post from my phone, so in theory I won't be AWOL until Tuesday. I'll be sure to post grainy cellphone photos of the new camper. (One of these days maybe we'll get a laptop.)

Midweek update

Got on the computer tonight for the first time all week, but brain is too fried to comment intelligently. (Played and won one game of Spider Solitaire! That's like two victories.)

Many things not crossed off the to-do list yet, mostly having to do with paperwork and cleaning bathrooms. (Somehow those two items never seem to make it off the bottom of the list.) However, I have managed to get a few things done, so I guess you have to relish the small accomplishments.

We are taking a four-day weekend to go pick up the new camper. Found a KOA today that has "kabins" that they permit dogs in, so we're staying there Friday night with the truck and the dogs. Not really looking forward to nine plus hours in a truck with two dogs on Friday, but I guess it beats being at work. I'm also not looking forward to finishing packing tomorrow night, especially when I have a meeting at church at 6:30 that will no doubt last at least an hour.

Interesting goings-on at work. First, we're all playing musical cubicles. Spending over a month doing a low-impact low-budget seating chart reshuffle (only a few people move each day). I move tomorrow. New cube pretty much like the old cube, except now our whole group will be in the same aisle, which is much better.

Second item is that I've achieved the holy grail of software, a spot on the design team. Except that I really don't like doing design. I much prefer to just execute (implement), and I even prefer tracking down problems to trying to plan what to do and how to do it. Or coming up with task lists and schedules. Or *shudder* sequence diagrams (don't ask).

In addition to being on the design team, I have a sort of mini-lead job, where I'm supposed to be responsible for one of the areas. This is not something I have much experience with, and definitely not something I have any good experience with! :-) It also means I'm supposed to get out of my cube and go interact with people--only very minor progress in that area so far. Maybe I should just make primo candy available in my cube and hope they come to me...

But it's all good no matter how it turns out. I wouldn't have felt that way about it not so long ago, but I've spent a long time playing it safe and you don't get anywhere interesting doing that. The best news is that we really don't have that long to get the design done, and then we'll be back to doing actual work.

My buddy Jon Carroll

[Yikes! Two posts in one day!]

Have to plug Jon Carroll. Began reading his column in the SFChronicle back when we lived there, and now I only check him out occasionally but he has two fine columns from this week.

First one is on the general subject of taxpayer outrage. Sample:

The American auto companies were run into the ground by idiots. (My 9-year-old car is a Honda made in Japan. It runs well; not a coincidence.) They wanted to make gigantic gas-guzzling dumbo-machines to appeal to the lost sense of virility in the American man - a lost sense of virility that may indeed have sprung from paying pointless 17 percent interest on his credit card debt - and they didn't care about gas mileage or global warming or even profits. Aren't corporations supposed to care about profits? Have I misunderstood the system?

His most recent column is actually on a subject I've been pondering for a blog post about poverty/homelessness (coming out of the Boxed In thing), it just fits right in. He suggests that instead of tackling the entire problem, each neighborhood could sign up to be responsible for one homeless person. Sample:

Of course, Carl may have issues. I assume some of the people camped outside the palaces in Rajasthan had issues too. But, you know, my brother-in-law has issues. (I don't actually have a brother-in-law; this is a hypothetical.) Human beings have issues. It's a matter of whom you choose to feel responsible for.

It's a good way to think about the fact that the problem is not insurmountable. I think it would be very interesting to visualize what would be different it it were tackled, and Jon's suggestion is just one brainstorm on the whiteboard. Apparently there was a commission formed by the MN legislature to go out on a statewide "listening tour" regarding the idea of ending homelessness. I think it would be fascinating to know what they heard. They have recently released their findings, I haven't spent any time perusing them yet, but there's a web page.

AHA Heart Walk

Walk went well--pretty breezy but there were peeks of sun and no rain, yay! Lots and lots of doggies. Wish ours could have been there without being deranged psycho dogs. Maybe if we tranquilized them, put them in a dog stroller, and claimed they were heart disease victims...

I thought I heard them say there were 30,000 people there. There were a *lot* of people, but I'm not sure 30,000 would have even fit. I don't see any stories on it yet, maybe tomorrow.

It was pretty funny--they had some bleacher seating where they were putting all the people from each participating company, to take photos. I think Boston Scientific had over 1400 people there--we filled up the bleachers and had lots of people sitting on the grass in front of the bleachers. I'm not sure how you'd ever pick anyone out of the photo. Especially since we were looking into the sun and squinting.

Cub Foods was one of the main sponsors, and they had a tent bulging with free food--carrots, apples, bananas, granola bars, and water. Really great, I was very impressed. (They had me at banana, I was overjoyed to see the bananas.)

Choir concert -- Mozart

Our choir is having a concert on May 17 (Sunday) at 4pm and I am looking forward to this one. The first piece is Giovani Gabrieli's In Ecclesiis, which is a three-chorus deal where we're going to have two choruses in opposing balconies and the third down in front. The instruments will also be split up with the three choruses.

Then we do the Mozart Grand Mass in C Minor, which has double chorus. The bits of it that've we've worked on so far sound like they're going to be quite something. Should be quite the deal, and it's free.

I have a nice poster pdf but I have no idea how to get it in here.

Box photo

This is getting a little crazy. I started the blog, then I got on Twitter, and now I've signed up for Facebook. It wasn't bad enough I was wasting hours I didn't have on Spider Solitaire (although I must admit, my solitaire playing has dropped off quite a bit now that I'm too busy maintaining all my profiles). When I have something to say, I won't know where to say it. I know one thing, I'm going to have to round up some photos.

Speaking of photos, I do have a couple photos to share of the Boxed In event from Friday. There is one of the "box village" (it was dark so the lighting is not too good), and one of me and my box. Freeway I-94 is just off to the left, and I can tell you, it is LOUD. Sirens, trucks, it's constant. Not exactly like camping (although I've been in campgrounds that were too close to freeways, too--just not in a box).

Hello from Tuesday

I apologize for the hiatus--it turns out that blogging is very time-consuming. (Who knew :-) I could make a long list of things I have not been able to make time for in my life, and it seems that I have just added "writing on the blog" to that list.

Anyway, here's a fascinating animated graph of job loss over the past two years, by county. You can see month-by-month data, or press the "play" button to see it movie-like. The last six months are pretty impressive, but not in a good way. (This was pretty fast when I played it at work, but pretty slow at home.)

Also, here is a darling music video made up of slices of shredded still frames. I liked it quite a lot (the music is pretty decent also). (It was Andrew's mental health break today.) The description says: "Every third frame of the footage was printed, shredded and shot three times blended with adjacent frames by different stripes configuration."

Favorite sentence of the day, from a strange book excerpt I found on Slate (yes, I see there are two sentences. The first one is just context.): "The first few months after the birth of the first baby are fairly blissful. Then the competing elements of the artificial constructions that we grandly call our "lives" become locked in mortal combat."

Items I can't resist mentioning: Best health care in the world, baby! (one of several such stories I've seen lately); Chrysler turns down $175M from the US and tries to get private funding instead, so they can pay the execs more handsomely; one word: Plastics. (Be safe, do *not* read the comments :-)

And finally, in case you missed it, Jon Stewart on the release of the torture memos. (Via Andrew, sorry, sometimes it's just easier.)

Stay tuned for a long and too-serious post about my weekend experience sleeping in the box.

Oy. Taxes. Easter. Tired. Last week was a bit of a blur.

Here's quite a clever little video: Beats of Boredom (from Andrew)

Friday night I will be sleeping outside in a box. I'm quite looking forward to it, although perhaps that is not exactly the correct sentiment. It is a fundraiser called Boxed In for the Dignity Center at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, and the idea is to raise awareness about homelessness (primarily the awareness of those of us sleeping in the boxes, I gather). Here's a couple links with little blurbs about it.

Marijuana follow-up

I haven't been following the MSM lately, so I don't know if this story is still blogosphere-only or if it is starting to catch on elsewhere. But I just read an item in Matt Yglesias' blog where he quotes Will Wilkinson coming out of the closet. Will Wilkinson is a really annoying right winger (a research fellow for the Cato Institute, which means that all his economic musings on Marketplace as I'm driving home get a big ol' razzberry from me), although right wingers have libertarian tendencies, so maybe my eyebrows ought to just relax from their current position up under my bangs.

Here's Wilkinson's piece in The Week, one of my favorite magazines. I must say that the photos accompanying these stories don't do much to add to the appeal.

Fun on Friday

I work this strange schedule. Monday through Thursday each week we work nine hours, then one Friday we work 8 hours, and the next Friday we have off. So, I have every other Friday off. Theoretically this gives you a day to make phone calls and appointments that need to be done during a weekday (except for things like your dentist and your veterinarian who also take Fridays off).

Sometimes I catch up on housecleaning that has fallen behind for the previous 13 days, and sometimes I do have appointments that I take care on my Friday off, but much of the time I really just goof off. I'm hard pressed to say what I really spend the time doing, and it is amazing how a day gets away from you and suddenly it is dinner time. I really like it when an off Friday comes along and I have no plans, nothing to do.

One thing I don't do much of on my off Fridays is shopping, because I am not a shopper. For me, you go shopping when you have a list of things you "need," and you make your stops and do your best to scratch things off your list. I am usually frustrated by the fact that I want something that seems fairly obvious and simple, and yet I can go to three different places and nobody has them right now. I also tend to buy things when I go shopping, which would make it a rather expensive pastime if I were to engage in it frequently. Going and looking at things and then not actually buying any of them seems like a recipe for frustration, unless you genuinely were not interested in anything, which would then seem like quite a waste of time.

I decided recently that perhaps it would be nice to have something new to wear for Easter. I have a two-piece light green suit (dress and coat) that I have been wearing every year for Easter now for about the last ten years. It is a lovely suit, except that the dress is above the knee, and as one reaches a certain age and one's thighs and rear end are showing the effects of too many Peeps over the years, one thinks that perhaps one is really getting too old to be wearing the style. Plus, it's been ten years.

So then one has to face the prospect of trying to go shopping for a nice, moderately dressy, spring-colored outfit. This is not quite as bad as going shopping for a bathing suit, but it's in the same league. So I decided I would not go to Kohl's and JCPenney (this is an entire blog post in itself), and I would not wander around the mall in futility, but rather I would go up to the new age shopping area and check out some real stores. (This is one of those pretend Main Street areas where you have to walk around in the cold instead of in the comfort of the mall.) Real stores with real price tags, where I would probably find lovely things and be unwilling to pay for them. I decided not to have any expectations--if I found something that would be great, but I was just going to enjoy the day and see what happened.

And all in all I did have a lovely day. I started off with the 8:30 Friday step aerobics class--my one visit to the gym every two weeks--after which I goofed off a little before getting ready to leave the house. I did have one appointment, a haircut. I told the stylist my plans, and she suggested I should try J Jill (which I had never heard of), which turned out to my favorite stop of the day. Then it was off to shop. Walking around is a little like seeing what another life would be like, because normally I would not be out shopping on a weekday, but there are plenty of other people doing it. It reminds me a little of a time I spent unemployed, when I got to live like a housewife--taking care of the house, doing the grocery shopping and cooking dinner, like living in a parallel universe.

The first few stops were a bust, but then my luck improved. One really nice thing about shopping in real stores, especially when there's a recession on and not too many shoppers, is that the employees come back to the dressing room to ask if they can get you a different size in anything. How sweet is that. I found several possibilities in Ann Taylor, which was having some sort of special on tops if you bought more than one. I thought I was checking the price tags before taking things to the dressing room, but discovered at the cash register that I had in fact selected two dressy shirts that were 40+ dollars (at least not as bad as the $89 blouse I tried on). There was a blue and white shirt that I eventually decided not to get that really pretty much demanded to be worn with white pants, even though I can't keep anything clean and white pants would be pretty much a complete head smack for me. But once I tried them on I liked them, and another Easterish green shirt went with them nicely. And a lovely plum-purple shirt that looked very nice in addition, because whatever the deal was it involved two shirts.

(I will throw in that twice today I resolved that I really need to start going to the gym more regularly. (I resolve this with some frequency, but so far it hasn't helped.) The first time was in my step class, as I was having trouble keeping up. The second time was having to look at myself in dressing room mirrors. Somehow the mirrors in my house are kinder. Perhaps just because I don't have to stand so close to them.)

So once I was done doing my patriotic duty to the country by spending money at Ann Taylor, I proceeded to J Jill where I found two more shirts and the absolutely most yummilicious pair of stretchy espresso tweedy pants you would never even imagine in your wildest dreams, all on sale. I'm wearing those this Sunday, oh yes. It was a good Friday.

Potheads dreaming of freedom

Wow, so many things to blog about, so little time. It has not been a good week for blog-writing. But it is always a good week for blog-reading :-) (I am pretty much hopelessly addicted. That happened during a several-month stretch on a project where there was just not much work to do. And once you're hooked, you just can't let go even when you get busy again. Thank goodness playing solitaire at work is a level of shame I just can't go to--not that I'm knocking anybody who plays the occasional game, I'm just saying I might never get anything done at all.)

I read blogs during the day when I'm supposed to be working, and I catch a little NPR on my way to and from work (depending on the time of day, I get some cross-section of the day's news). We don't subscribe to any newspapers, and I generally don't watch any TV news. I know that there are stories that get a lot of play in the blogosphere that essentially don't exist in what is called the mainstream media, and in fact, you could say they get a lot of play in some corner of the blogosphere. There are lots of blogospheric bombshells I never hear of or only hear in the far distance, and then there are those stories that get a lot of traction in the corners where I am reading.

So recently there was some attention being paid to the fact that Jim Webb introduced legislation to reform the prison system. This was seen as a pretty brave thing for anyone to do, not to mention a freshman Democrat who did not win his seat by much of a margin. And there was general amazement that there seems to be, at least initially, some bipartisan agreement that this is an idea whose time might have arrived, and perhaps really could be addressed. (I'm all for it, go Jim.)

There was also some attention paid to a question posed to President Obama at the first on-line news conference, a question that got asked by virtue of the fact that anyone could submit a question, and everyone could vote on which questions would be asked, and this was one of the top vote-getters. One could certainly argue that the on-line audience might not have quite the same demographics as the country at large, especially when it comes to people paying attention to questions to be asked at an on-line news conference. At any rate, the question was about legalization of marijuana, and the President sort of laughed off the question and said we should not legalize marijuana (or, more particularly, that we should not legalize it to help the economy). In some quarters, the tone of the President's answer disappointed some people, even if they were not surprised by the content of his answer.

Let me stop for a moment to say that I am a big fan of Andrew Sullivan. There are a number of blogs I look at fairly regularly, but Andrew is far and away my favorite. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, he blogs constantly. He puts up lots of small items all through the day, so you can check back over and over and usually find something new. Another major reason is that his blog entries cover a wide range of subjects. He does have certain issues he gets particularly exercised about and they take up a fair bit of real estate, but he puts up pictures he finds interesting, artwork, videos, links to odd things on the net that are funny--there's quite a variety. He's got a goodly number of running items--a whole slate of "awards" (he categorizes some of the quotes he puts up by comparing them to known personalities), the daily Mental Health Break, The View From Your Window by which we get little glimpses of places all around the world where readers are living, and lately The View From Your Recession which is stories people email in to him about how the recession is affecting them.

He also has a rather unusual point of view. He is politically conservative but broke with the Bush administration over how the war in Iraq was prosecuted and the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib/torture business, he's Catholic, gay, and HIV positive (and recently, married). He hails originally from England but has lived in the US for some time. He likes to blog about politics (whither the conservative movement, torture, Sarah Palin, etc), foreign policy, religion, gay issues, Catholicism, The Pet Shop Boys and 80's dance music generally, and the TV show South Park and its creators, among other things. It has also been pretty evident, given his libertarian leanings, that he is pretty tolerant of folks using pot.

(One other feature of Andrew's blog is that there are no comments. You can email him, and he and his staff read all his email, and he often posts emails from readers. But you can't go and read all the unadulterated input yourself.)

So Andrew had some post about the "war on drugs" and usage of marijuana, and maybe a couple of followups, and he has since been posting emails sent in to him by readers. (Several of the posts are accompanied by photos of strange botanical formations I would never recognize as having anything to do with pot, I feel very out-of-the-loop.) People are almost dying to "come out of the closet" about their pot use, although some have been more negative remarks about their experiences and why they stopped using or don't use. I guess I always knew that there are a lot of drug users in the U.S., but I never really thought about just how large a segment of the population we're talking about here.

So the week started out with statistics about the huge increase in our prison population, how incredibly biased it is towards minorities and the poor, and how much of it is the result of our drug laws and law enforcement policies. On one side there's this horrific impact on certain segments of the citzenry in terms of arrest, rap sheets, and prison, and on the other side, there's this large contingent of people who just want to relax at home with some weed and resent having to keep it from their employer, their kids, their wife, whatever. Here's a sample:

These reader emails really hit a chord with me. I too am a member of the closet. My husband and I often muse, while smoking pot, that the only thing we are doing wrong is breaking the law. If that is the only wrong you are committing it seems clear that it's not your behavior that needs to be re-evaluated, but the law itself. I have been slowly coming out of the pot closet over the past few years and it has been a nice surprise to see how many people give that knowing little smile and say, "me too".

You read these emails and wonder, how exactly do people get the stuff? Where do they go, who do they buy it from? How can you smoke your pot and read these stories of prisons with four times as many people in them as they're built for--do you feel any sense of responsibility for that at all? Does a person make any connection between their Friday night habit and people being killed in Mexico by gangs? Why are we taking one percentage of the population and persecuting them for selling drugs to an even larger percentage of the population that we completely leave alone? I know I'm sounding really judgmental, and that's not my intent--I just wonder at the detachment, the cognative dissonance--I find that pretty striking. Maybe I shouldn't, I suppose we all do it when you think of our relative wealth compared to poorer nations.