What Fresh Hell is This?

Taking on the priest

2010-03-03T12:27:00.003-07:00

1. Today I am flying to Ohio for a funeral for my friend's father. Her parents are Catholic, and yesterday my friend went with her mother to meet with the priest to make the arrangements for the funeral, where her mother asked to have a family friend give a eulogy. The priest said they didn't allow eulogies. My friend said it was very important to her mother to have a brief eulogy. The priest said it was against his rules, as eulogies can result in people telling off-color stories. She explained that the person giving the eulogy was a well respected member of a nearby parish. He still said no.

So my friend, who had flown in on short notice and was just about done with this priest and his rules for her father's funeral, got up out of her chair and put her face inches from his face, and said, "I insist we're having this eulogy."

Turns out they're having a eulogy, and the story is spreading in the local parish. It sounds like her mother is both appalled and proud of her for insisting on the eulogy, all up in the priest's face.

2. Talking with my sister today, I remembered a cross-country flight I took a couple of years ago. I was seated next to a 60ish black woman who had never flown in first class before, and possibly had never flown before at all. Her kids had bought her a ticket in first class to bring her to some family event. We spoke a bit as we were getting settled, and then I noticed that she was refusing the things that the flight attendants were offering.

On a hunch, I thought of a way of letting her know that everything that was offered in first class was free (soda, meals, snacks, alcohol, in-seat movies), and soon after that she was ordering Crown Royals. On rocks. I didn't know people drank Crown Royal straight up like that. She had brought with her many things to do, including knitting, reading, magazines, puzzles, and even some child's pants to hem, but in the end, she watched the movie and drank Crown Royals.

3. Associated Press reports, "An air traffic controller at New York's Kennedy Airport was suspended for allowing his young son to radio instructions to several pilots." These were planes that were on the ground, not in the air, but still. It is astounding that any air traffic controller thought that was a good idea.

And here I was annoyed when the cashier at the 7-Eleven let his young son ring up purchases.

Wrong about John Edwards, right about bathroom signs

2010-02-22T13:25:00.003-07:00

1. I just finished my first month of work at Fusion-io, and I could not be having a better time at my job.

2. A friend sent me an email yesterday and reminded me of an instant messaging session the two of us had in mid-2007. What an eye-opener it was. I loved reading how wrong I'd been:

Kelli: I love John Edwards.

Friend: He is fake. Also, a terrible person. It is all a charade.

Kelli: No, he is the real deal.

Friend: He probably cheats on his wife and is obsessed with fine Italian suits.

Kelli: You are a terrible judge of character. Obama is the fake one.

Amazing, yes? I was so deeply wrong about John Edwards, and I am not inclined to trust when I shouldn't. If anything, I have the opposite problem, of trusting too little. I am especially mistrustful of politicians.

3. On my first day of work, I found signs on the inside of the women's restrooms that admonished the women,"Come on ladies, clean up after yourselves." This is a high-rent professional building, not a fast food joint. In one restroom there was even a can of air freshener with another homemade but laminated sign that said something like, "Think of others! Use if necessary." I let some bossy woman's signs nag me for three days before I realized I didn't have to, and I threw the signs away. I have no idea if there are similar signs in the men's room.

That's not football

2009-12-19T22:05:00.002-07:00

1. I listened to the BBC tonight on the radio, and toward the end of the broadcast they got to "Sporting news." I thought, "Good. Maybe I'll hear who won the Tennessee vs. Stanford women's basketball game today." But they covered first cricket and then "football," by which they meant soccer. That was it. Not even the final from the Cowboys vs Saints game.

CatPaint

2009-12-18T16:02:00.006-07:00

1. The iPhone has an app called CatPaint. It allows you to take an existing photo and add cats to it. Here I have added a leaping kitty to a photo taken walking along a beach in Oregon. There are about 7 cats to choose from. I need this ported to the Blackberry, or I will change to an iPhone.

2. Excellent column by Gail Collins in the NY Times about why Joe Lieberman is blocking a public option when he was in favor of expanding Medicare availability until last week. Her conclusion, boiled down to a sentence, is that he "isn't actually all that smart."

3. My uncle Dave sent me a photo of his siblings as they were heading off to school. This would have been in the late 1930s. Notice that they're carrying actual pails for their lunch pails. I love these old photos.

Dithering

2009-11-21T20:39:00.003-07:00

1. I was reading today how Mr. Hasan, the murdering psychiatrist from the Ft. Hood massacre, is in constant pain, is incontinent, and is paralyzed from the chest down. The first thing that struck me is how lonely it must feel to him to know that no one cares about his suffering or wishes him well. Or at least, he probably imagines that no one cares, but there are some who will care, in spite of the terrible thing he did.

2. There are probably worse things than being trapped inside your body for 23 years, completely conscious but incapable of communicating in any way, but I can't think what they would be. I've heard that that man is now writing a book, and I'll read that book. I want to know what he did all those hours, all those years, in order to keep his mental life alive. Did he tell himself stories? Did he create fictional worlds where he could move and talk? Did he simply live from visit to visit from the hospital staff and his family?

3. And does this mean that everyone who has a loved one in a persistent vegetative state is now going to worry that their loved one is really alive inside, and aware, and trying to communicate? I have to believe that for every man like this one, there are hundreds of Terry Schiavos, who really are gone.

4. I listened to Sarah Palin being interviewed on Fox News last night. Her book is selling like crazy. She said one thing I agreed with (i.e., that more should have been made during the campaign of Mr. Obama's association with his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright), and then she said about a dozen things that made me speak unaffections at her on the TV. Like when she asserts that Mr. Obama is "dithering" about what to do in Afghanistan. She used that word at least four times.

5. Karl Rove came on after her, but I had to mute him, but then realized I could still see him smirking, so I changed channels.

6. I heard from an old friend today, and hearing from her made me feel so good. That's quite a gift.

I just washed my hands

2009-11-19T19:47:00.003-07:00

1. Today at work someone went out of his way to introduce himself to me in the hallway. He was a former colleague from a different company, though I didn't remember him. To be polite, I put out my hand to shake his hand after he introduced himself, and he refused, saying, "No. I just washed my hands," and he pulled his hands back far from me. It was one of the oddest social interactions I've ever seen at work.

2. Sarah Palin is coming to Utah to promote her book, which is probably a safe stop, as Utah is the reddest state in the nation, but she's appearing at a Costco. Authors at Costco?

Shockingly rude waitress

2009-11-15T16:48:00.002-07:00

1. A friend and I went to lunch today at Cafe Med on 33rd South. We walked into the restaurant and a waitress angrily walked to the counter, grabbed two menus, and barked at the other waiter, "These two are yours." By "these two" she meant us, though she didn't so much as look at us. Then she strode over to a table, expecting we would follow, slapped the menus down on the table, and, not waiting for an answer to her question about whether the table would do, walked angrily away.

We walked away, too, and out of the restaurant, surprised at such a spectacle as that. My friend said that someone walked out after us as if to say something, but didn't say anything because we just kept walking.

2. Then at lunch we discussed whether we believe in ghosts. I don't, at least not like in the movie where they haunt people or places. She does. But she's never seen one. It's surprising how many people believe in ghosts and disembodied souls when not one single person I know has ever seen one. I suppose it's rather like belief in God.

Paranormal Theatrics

2009-11-15T16:08:00.002-07:00

1. I just saw "Paranormal Activity." It was very Blair Witchian with its jumpy camera movement and bickering characters, both of which make me want to walk out of a theater, but it had a couple of spooky moments. If I were either Siskel or Ebert and voted with a thumb, I would give it a thumbs down for lack of character development, lack of any basis for the behavior of the characters, absolutely no chemistry between the leads, and my all time least favorite thing in movies: people behaving in ways that no one would in real life would behave.

(SPOILER) For example, your house is haunted by some malevolent being, and in the middle of the night, after finding footprints that lead to your bedroom, you find the entrance to your attic ajar, and so you grab a ladder and climb up into the attic? Please.

Hiccups, Part 2

2009-11-14T20:53:00.003-07:00

1. It got cold in Utah today. It's the time of year when I start worrying about animals who don't have a home. There is a cat who lives on my porch after the neighbors abandoned him (he doesn't like to come inside), and I just went out and checked his igloo and heating pad. It's toasty warm inside and he didn't come out to greet me, though he did purr when I reached in and petted him good night.

2. I have been visiting a teen psych ward the past few days. Some of the families who have children in those hospitals are so deeply troubled that it seems arbitrary which family member is a patient and which is a visitor. I wonder if they flip a coin to decide. Not all the families are so troubled, and are taking real steps to help each other, but some have clearly made the blame and damage and hospitalizations a routine thread of their family life. I don't know how they ever stop, or if they even want to.

3. My cat has hiccups again. I wonder if I could get him to drink through a straw while holding his nose.

Startling the cat

2009-11-13T15:59:00.006-07:00

1. I am thinking of startling my cat to cure his hiccups, but it doesn't always work on people and it probably won't work on the cat either. And I feel guilty startling a cat, because I can't explain that it was for getting rid of the hiccups. He's had them for about 15 minutes.

2. I'm not sure how much it's bothering him, since he is asleep.

3. I don't think people can sleep with hiccups.

4. OK, so startling him didn't cure the hiccups, possibly because it didn't startle him. He just opened his eyes and looked at me when I said boo.

Windy gull; not a new day in Utah

2009-11-11T18:43:00.004-07:00

1. Gulls are so common that I forget what completely amazing creatures they are, and how beautiful. This guy is walking on the shore at high tide in a windstorm. There were hundreds of them and they almost seemed like part of the landscape, and unremarkable. When I focus just on him, he's beautiful. He looks pensive.

2. The Mormon Church came out in favor of a nondiscrimination ordinance to protect gays in Salt Lake City. I could not be more surprised and pleased. Some people suggest that it's a new day in Utah, where the predominant religion is now answerable to the political might of the gay community. I think not. I think it's just a step that they could support, so they did, and I am happy for it. (At least one prospective city councilman fell on his sword opposing this ordinance, and then his church endorsed it. Ouch.)

Dreams

2009-11-11T18:15:00.004-07:00

1. A friend of mine said the most amazing thing about his deceased father today, and it's been on my mind all day. I won't repeat it because it seemed private, but it reminded me that the world, no matter how bleak it seems at times, has comfort and love hidden all around us in places we least expect.

2. German shepherd puppies are being born in real time at a friend's house. Last I checked, there were two puppies to go. I am going to have to go see those puppies.

Security

2009-11-04T06:30:00.001-07:00

1. My friend works for a online brokerage, and to log in to their VPN, she uses a 6-digit key that is generated randomly every few seconds and displayed on a fob that she carries. That's the tightest security I've ever seen. I'm pleased to say that I have an account at her company.

2. I may have endangered a marriage by getting the husband hooked on Farmville. If both people get hooked, there's less danger. I've spent many hours side by side, farming and admiring the other person's farm. It's a fine, relaxing spend of an evening hour.

Heated storage: Mystery solved

2009-10-19T17:53:00.004-06:00

1. I found out why people use heated storage units. Heat keeps relative humidity down. In humid climates, condensation will form when the temperature drops to the dew point, and all your stuff gets moldy. We don't have that problem in Utah, but all the places I saw in Oregon were heated.

2. The gull at right was getting his feathers messed up in the very high wind. He looks a little annoyed at not having his usual sleek body. Gulls are the easiest birds to photograph. They are large, slow-moving, not shy, and animated. And they're everywhere. And if there weren't so many of them, maybe we'd again see how beautiful they are, and how varied.

Heated storage units?

2009-10-17T07:02:00.007-06:00

1. There's a yarn store on the Oregon Coast Highway that we visit every time we come here. They have a cat named Gabriel who lives in the store. We always stop to visit Gabriel and get a picture of him.

2. Today there was a new dog there, too. He was called Dutch and he was much, much too large to be in a yarn shop. As soon as Shauna sat down, Dutch jumped on her and covered her entire head in dog spit.

3. We saw storage units up and down the coast advertising "heated storage units." I have been thinking for three days and I cannot imagine what someone would store in a heated storage unit.

4. There's a homeless man here in Florence who stands at busy street corners and holds a sign asking for money. While he holds his sign, crows pick through his fully loaded-down bike. I didn't think I should take a picture of that.

Yahoos move in across the street

2009-10-01T21:56:00.001-06:00

1. Here's a note on the bottle of some medicine I'm taking:

Before taking this medication, tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are allergic to it.

2. New neighbors just moved in across the street. We first heard them when 5-6 cars and big trucks pulled in across the street to unload them. I can't tell how many live there, but it appears to be quite a few, and the bad news is this: That's a giant speaker in the middle of them. I thought, "Oh, they must be musicians, and they have some sort of outdoor venue that they're taking that speaker to."

But no, they installed it in the trunk of the car they're standing next to, and when he starts the car, the windows shake in my house.

This will be trouble.

3. Shauna feeds eggs to the birds. It seems so wrong.

Thunder Hole

2009-08-23T19:27:00.002-06:00

1. NY Times headline:

Hurricane Wave Sweeps 20 to Sea in Maine

The Mail Carrier and I have been to this place--Thunder Hole in Acadia National Park. There's a platform from which you can watch the waves crash into a narrow inlet, and people were swept off of that platform today by a rogue wave from Hurricane Bill. (I liked it better when hurricanes had only female names.)

I was nervous standing there, thinking this very thing could happen, and the waves were not that high the day we were there. And that platform is closed at high tide. I wonder if these people jumped the gate to get out there, even when seas were running 12 ft high.

One doesn't want to get caught underestimating the human capacity for stupidity.

The purpose of siblings

2009-08-22T14:01:00.003-06:00

1. I'm reading Temple Grandin's "Animals Make Us Human." Grandin says animals are socialized by their parents and siblings. It turns out that one the most important role of siblings is to teach us to deal with frustration in socially acceptable ways. Siblings frustrate us from the very beginning: we compete for resources, we get in each other's way, we have to wait for each other.

Kittens and puppies who learn to eat while having their faces pushed out of the way by other kittens and puppies learn socially acceptable ways of being frustrated. Single kittens and puppies don't learn that, and end up being hypersensitive to frustration and unable to share well.

2. I just opened a package of thank-you cards. The package, "Includes Tips For Saying Thank You." The tips were created by "the writers of American Greetings." The writers suggest you mention the specific gift or act of kindness extended by the giver, and then say how much their thoughtfulness meant to you.

They even offer specific things you can say:

Your thoughtfulness shows in everything you do.
To thoughtful you...from thankful me.
How can I find the right words to thank you...
You always know the perfect thing to do to make me feel special.

American Greeting did not charge extra for this service. I intend to use these lines in my notes.

You know, maybe some people do need to be taught how to write a thank you note. I left a wedding reception once and was handed an envelope, completely generic, that thanked me for coming and for any present I might have brought.

3. My sign language self-study is coming along nicely. I can now say, whenever necessary, any of the following:

Let's go.
You are a bitch.
I went to a funeral.
Thank you for coming and for any gift you might have brought.

4. I was at a party last night and I heard a story that was so funny that every time I think of it I laugh out loud. I was brushing my teeth before bed last night and thought of it, and I sprayed toothpaste all over the mirror. There aren't enough stories like that.

5. Temple Grandin, cited above, is autistic. I would have assumed that anyone with autism would prefer not to be autistic, since it is so socially limiting. But she corrects this misapprehension:

If I could snap my fingers and become nonautistic I would not do so. Autism is part of who I am.

6. This is the same thing I've been reading about people who are deaf. Some in the deaf community feel very strongly about not wanting to be able to hear. Again, there's the idea of valuing what they are and what their community brings them. All the gay people I know say the same, in spite of the fact that some of them have been rejected by family and friends for being gay. I don't know anyone who would become straight if they could.

7. But not all groups of people want to be who they are. I've never heard an overweight person say, "If I could snap my fingers and be thin, I wouldn't do it. Being overweight is part of who I am." Likewise poor people, homely people, and short people.

Maybe the difference is that those groups don't create communities and cultures around who they are.

ASL this

2009-08-16T18:09:00.003-06:00

1. According to an ASL site that I am using to teach myself sign language, American Sign Language is the third most commonly used language in the U.S., after English and Spanish. This is very hard for me to believe, unless it includes such "signs" as the one that is sometimes used out the window of a car.

2. My ASL vocabulary has grown to about 150 signs, but I still cannot do the simplest sentences without looking up every word, but I can say the following:

- You are my girlfriend.
- My girlfriend is a vampire.
- My cat is a vampire.
- My bat is a vampire.

I like the sign for vampire. I can do other sentences, too. But if I had to sign my way out of trouble, I'd be in trouble.

3. I also took the liberty of learning several R-rated signs, which we practiced in the restaurant last night, hoping no deaf people were around us, or we would have been thrown out.

4. My bedroom seems to have ants. If I tell Shauna, she will want to kill them.

Demonizing

2009-08-14T17:58:00.004-06:00

1. I cannot believe that the plane/helicopter crash on the Hudson River happened because the air traffic controller was talking on his CELLPHONE to his girlfriend. Why are cellphones allowed in the towers? I feel like the whole world has gone crazy between cellphones and texting and healthcare.

2. Lynn installed a drink-holder on her scooter.
3. I ran this program again that analyzes my browsing history and decides if I'm more likely to be male or female (scroll part way down and click on "Start Analyzing My Browsing History," and then wait for it to finish and give you your results). As always, I'm much more likely to be male. In fact, the only woman I know who registers as being more likely to be female is my niece, and that because she hits the occasional Hollywood gossip site.

The site most likely to make me male? ameritrade.com.
The one most likely to make me female? eddiebauer.com.
Whatever. It makes no sense. The only site that is a straight-up even is youtube.com.

4. Facebook can be delightful because it lets you get in touch with people from your past. And it can be ghastly because it gets you in touch with people from your past. Sometimes there's a reason they're in your past. A few days ago I had a really unpleasant experience when I exchanged email on Facebook with a woman I used to know. I am still shaken from it. It left me with such a cold feeling inside. Tonight at dinner, out of the blue, I figured out why.

She has no capacity for seeing her own dark side or shadow or anything negative in herself.

That means she has to demonize things outside of her: the Mormon church is evil; polygamists are utterly evil child molesters; Utah is evil and the best thing you can do is to get away from it and never come back; patriarchy is evil and soul-destroying; Republicans are evil. And I was evil. Certain of my friends that she knows are treacherous and evil. It's not just that she believes differently or has a falling out with someone, and she can't see that some things are partly fine and partly bad (polygamy). She has even devoted her life to exposing evil in her "journalism."

I had the misfortune of being in a women's group with her in the late 80's, and the group tore apart in part because of this woman and her bottomless capacity to demonize, though that was not the only reason.

This woman is not unlike another person she demonizes: Gail Ruzicka. Ruzicka is a woman here in Utah who heads up some sort of anti-gay, anti-Democrat, anti-feminist, pro-gun, pro-"family," racist organization, where she and her followers are doing God's work, and the rest of us are evil.

When you look at the world this way, it doesn't matter which side you pick as being the good guys and the bad guys. It's just a way of looking at the world. And it makes me feel cold inside because I believe that people like this have the greatest tendency to do significant harm in the world.

Screw the Eagles

2009-08-13T22:05:00.002-06:00

1. A scourge on the house of the Philadelphia Eagles. May Vick run into defensive linemen who are dog lovers.

2. An excellent point by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post about those (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) who invoke the specter of Nazi Germany when talking about Obama's health care plan. He recalls the 1968 Democratic convention when Gore Vidal famously called his nemesis William Buckley a "crypto-Nazi."

Buckley replied (in addition to other choice words), "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

Buckley later apologized. He also explained: "Can such men understand the causes of anger in others? Understand the special reverence we need to feel for that which is hateful? I do not believe that anyone thought me a Nazi because Vidal called me one, but I do believe that everyone who heard him call me one without a sense of shock, without experiencing anger, thinks more tolerantly about Nazism than once he did, than even now he should."

3. I am no fan of Chris Matthews, but I am a fan of plain speaking and I love what he said to the guy who wore a holster and pistol to Mr. Obama's town hall meeting in New Hampshire. He simply said:

Why did you bring a god damn gun to a Presidential event?

Ride it

2009-08-13T01:31:00.004-06:00

1. The lovebirds like to get out of their cage and ride the ceiling fan, facing into the wind. Here they are again, perched on one of the blades as it whirs by, in a photo taken with my phone. They will do this for an hour. It is blurry because they are moving so fast.
2. If you were a kitten, this is all that any reasonable person would expect of you. So much more is expected now.
3. Apparently Rick "gay sex is like man-on-dog sex" Santorum is poised to run for the Republican nomination in 2012. He is emerges, phoenix-like, from the merciless beating he endured when he last ran for the Senate, and is going to run for an even higher office.

Here is the dream to which I bow and pray: Santorum vs Palin in the Republican primary.

Inbred and self-referential

2009-08-12T23:50:00.002-06:00

1. William Buckley is a horse's ass, but I love his writing. I would feel honored to be insulted by the man. But make no mistake, he is a horse's ass. But he approves the serial comma, for which I forgive him almost all the rest of his objectionable but well-stated opinions.

2. Re the serial comma, in "Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription: Notes and Asides from National Review," he writes in a memo to his National Review staff:

The other thing. A ukase. Un-negotiable. The only one I have issued in seventeen years. It goes: "John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges, and bananas." NOT: "John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges and bananas." I am told National Review's Style Book stipulates the omission of the second comma.

My comment: National Review's Style Book used to stipulate the omission of the second comma. National Review's Style Book, effective immediately, makes the omission of the second comma a capital offense.

3. Again on Sarah Palin: You don't want the government voting on whether to euthanize your child with Down's Syndrome. REALLY?

I've already commented on this already but it's bugging me too much to let it go. It's bugging me more than any other single thing I've heard in this whole absolute mess that is the national healthcare debate.

That is such a grossly irresponsible mischaracterization of what is being proposed that I hereby withdraw all my previous commentary which asserted that, while you are an underinformed and unprepared candidate who shoots defenseless animals from airplanes, you are hot. You're not. You're just underinformed and criminally irresponsible in your participation in the national healthcare conversation. And you shoot defenseless animals from airplanes.

Not hot.

4. Facebook has an option, under language, to choose UK English, US English, or Pirate English. I thought it would be funny to choose Pirate English, but instead it's just really annoying.

About --> Arrrbout
20 people liked this --> 20 scallywags be enjoyin' this
Aaron Weber --> Capt'n Aaron Weber
Friends --> Me Hearties

Ok, time to go back to US English.

5. Gail Collins on people carrying guns at the town meetings:

We are getting yet another series of reminders of the vast gun gap in this country. There is the part that thinks a room full of red-faced men and women screaming at one another is the worst place in the world to bring a firearm. And then there is the part that holds it is exactly the place where you need it most.

6. On the tweat Leaderboard, ErsatzMoe: "My watch was made in Switzerland. Maybe that's why it's six hours ahead and hoarding Nazi gold."

7. In my spare time I am teaching myself American Sign Language. I can say "I am happy," "My brother is a teacher," and "You are my grandmother." Plus other useful things. Tell me what you want said, and I'll say it in ASL. Then I'll have to figure out how to create an animated gif to show you.

8. Yesterday I posted that, for my birthday, I'd asked people to just get me a cocktail glass called an "old-fashioned glass," or "rocks glass," and to get whichever one they like best, but only one each, out of which people who drink responsibly can drink bourbon. Well, tonight someone was googling "old-fashioned glass" to try and find one for me, and up came a reference to my blog, talking about this very thing. And you thought the internet was a vast universe of information, when really it is inbred and self-referential navel-gazing.

9. My therapist taught me something really important on Tuesday. Something I would not have figured out on my own. That happens every once in awhile if you have a smart therapist and if you tell him or her the whole truth, neither of which happens very often. People actually lie to their therapists.

10. I do not know how to say "therapist" in ASL. Nor "inbred."

Old-fashioned glasses

2009-08-11T21:24:00.004-06:00

1. I read about an experiment where some guys tried putting all kinds of things in the US Mail to see if they would be delivered. For example, they mailed a hammer, unwrapped, with postage stuck on it and an address. It never arrived. And they sent a feather duster, similarly not packaged, and it did arrive. Then an unopened bottle of water, which they put in a neighborhood mailbox (the blue ones) for delivery. They watched as the mailman picked it up. He looked at it, peeled off the address and postage, and drank it as he went on his route.

2. Perhaps you have seen the YouTube video that is making the rounds. Hillary Clinton was speaking to an audience in the Congo, and a student asked what her husband's opinion on something was. She said she was the secretary of state, and was not going to be there giving her husband's opinions. A newscast in Australia said she "spat the dummy." I had to look that up. Apparently a dummy is a baby's pacifier.

3. She probably wishes she'd handled it differently. But you know, we all wish we'd handled things differently 25 times a month, but no one knows. I would not like all of my dummy spitting on YouTube.

4. The right solution to healthcare: Single Payer.

5. I had a major breakthrough in therapy today. Only I can't tell.

6. I had a job interview that is about six blocks from my house. I would like to get that job, and I would like them to pay me more than I'm asking, and I would like to LOVE the job and my boss and the people I work with.

7. I want that for my birthday, which is coming right up. I've asked everyone to give me a single thing. And old-fashioned glass, also called a rocks glass. It's what you drink bourbon out of, which I drink. I said I didn't want a set, just one from each person, one they liked to so it would remind me of them. I got my first one already since one family member is out of town on the 22nd. Here's the one I got from Dalton.

8. So anyone wishing to get me something should get me a single old-fashioned glass that you like. And I shall drink bourbon out of it, and invite you over for a bourbon as well.

9. "Frozen River" with Melissa Leo. She should have won the Oscar. Good movie. Watched it tonight.

Savage cats

2009-08-05T17:49:00.000-06:00

1. One of the cats got ahold one of the lovebirds (Sonny) this morning. Sonny is a yellow peach-faced lovebird.

It was horrible. She'd escaped out a side hatch on her cage that the lovebirds sometimes spend hours prying open, and Ace snagged her.

I was jolted awake by her screaming. I flew out of bed and grabbed Ace and pushed him away, and then Dexter shot after Sonny.

I shoved Dexter into the bathroom and slammed that door shut, and then there was Ted, getting ready to pounce on the flailing bird. I was yelling at the cats and chasing the bird, who was flapping all over the floor trying to get away, and I was trying to make sure the other bird wasn't getting out.

Riley (the very weird, nearly blind little chihuahua who is afraid of his own shadow and who runs out of the room if someone raises their voice on TV) was so scared that he was running in tight circles, not knowing what to do. I grabbed Ted and put him in the closet and slammed that door, and Sonny flew to the top of her cage. I thought she was safe and I was going to clear all the cats out of the room so I could get a good look at her, and she flew down to the floor again. Ace pounced on her and she screamed again. Riley the chihuahua ran in faster circles.

I grabbed Ace, pulled his arms open so he would drop Sonny, and then I saw Rex was also in the room and getting ready to jump in. I threw Ace out the bedroom door into the hall. I threw him harder than I meant to, since he hit the wall about waist high and slid down. I didn't have time to worry about that and slammed that door shut. I shouted a threat at Rex and put myself between him and Sonny, who was still flapping on the floor, and Riley the chihuahua bumped into my leg as he ran in circles. I thought it was a cat and I kicked back at him, which made him run under the bed so fast that he hit his head on the way under. Finally Sonny flew to the top of her cage again, I grabbed Rex and put him in the bathroom, and I scanned the room to make sure there were no cats anywhere.

Sonny was on top of her cage, breathing heavily, her feathers pointing in all different directions. The floor was covered with yellow feathers. I was able to get hold of her and do a quick examination, saw no blood, her legs looked OK, and I knew she could fly, so I put her in her cage and she went immediately to her bed.

I let Dexter out of the bathroom and he started eating yellow feathers off the carpet. I then went out in the hall to find Ace, who had hit the wall earlier, and I found him on the main floor. He seemed rattled and was covered in yellow feathers (quite striking against his black fur). He was unhurt, but he wanted into the basement.

Sonny now seems to be fine. She's shaken up, but when I let them out of their cage an hour later, she rode the fan. That's their favorite thing--riding the fan. I turn it on real slow and they hang on the front of the blade with their toes and ride face-first into the wind.

Sonny riding the fan after the cat attack:2. Did anyone else cry when reading about the American journalists in North Korea, who were thinking they were in for 12 years of hard labor, and then were called from their cells and into a meeting and walked in and saw Bill Clinton?

But I cannot imagine how loathsome it must have been to be deferential to Kim Jong-il, even for such an important cause.

3. Here's my final opinion about the Gates affair: I cannot believe Mr. Obama was so easily backed down from his comment that the police acted "stupidly" when they arrest Mr. Gates in his own home after they knew he was the owner. Mr. Obama is showing a worrisome tendency to back away from his convictions when pressed.

The police acted stupidly.

Nipple politics

2009-07-30T14:05:00.001-06:00

1. The kittens are constantly fighting for nipples. It's hard not to get involved when you see one kitten who consistently can't attach and no one will let her in. But getting involved in the kitten politics of negotiating for a spot is bad policy. Moving one kitten has a ripple effect through all the kittens, and all sorts of unintended consequences: infighting, domestic skirmishes, ethnic cleansing. Best to let these matters be handled by the locals.

2. The kittens latch on so hard that when the mama stands up, they hang for a minute and then start falling off, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk.

3. Last night one of the kittens had the hiccups. Bad. He was sleeping but hiccuping, hiccuping, hiccuping for the longest time. I decided to startle him and thus cure his hiccups, so I said, "BOO!" in a loud, startling voice, but he just kept hiccuping and didn't so much as stir, so I repeated it a few times. Then Shauna asked me what I was doing, and I said startling the kitten, and she told me that kittens are deaf when they're born, though no one else in the house is. No wonder kittens always have hiccups. How do you startle a creature who is both blind and deaf?

4. And I don't want anyone getting on me about startling kittens. It was for his own good.

5. I was driving to meet a friend for lunch the other day, and I saw a restaurant sign that said:

Great Sandwich
Chinese Food

I don't think of sandwiches when I think of Chinese food.

6. The mama can't decide if she's up to lying down and having everyone latch on. Or maybe I'm projecting.

7. I hadn't realized that there are still people out there (called "birthers") (who also don't think Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig) arguing that since Obama can't or won't prove that he was born in the United States, that we should remove him from office and elect someone who is American-born, which of course is a requirement in the Constitution. I heard this during the campaign, of course, but it's apparently gotten some legs. I love conspiracy theorists. I really do. It takes all kinds, and SOMEONE has to spend time worrying about stuff like that. That's what the web is for. I hope the rest of us can go back to health care.

Kittays

2009-07-29T18:09:00.000-06:00

Rats, blue dogs, rabbit ears

2009-07-29T02:37:00.005-06:00

1. It turns out that rats love to be tickled. Research at Washington State University showed that rats who were taught that they were going to be tickled would approach a researcher much more quickly than those who were only going to get a neck rub.

2. The police overreacted in the Gates matter. I don't know if it's about race or the arrogance of police, and I don't care. I'd like to get back to talking about health care. If those Blue Dog Democrats don't back down and get this legislation be passed, their names must be stricken from Democratic ballots for all time.

Are you listening, Blue Dogs? We'll remember your names.

3. Claudia gives rabbit ears to the mama cat after a few hours of labor. The mama is too tired to lift her head.

Getting a nipple

2009-07-28T21:38:00.002-06:00

1. There are now five kittens at my house. They weigh about 3 oz each. There are two calicos, two grays, and one black and white. Right now they are all attached to mama, and either sleeping or eating, I can't tell.

The black and white one has already proven to be a character, in that he did a full body tackle on his sister when she was heading for one of the nipples. Then he took it.

2. I'm guessing that human mamas are glad they don't have to eat the placentas of their babies. There are many reasons I never wanted to have children, but that would have gone straight to the top.

3. The babies are perfectly willing to gouge each other's eyes out for a nipple. Gotta love nature.

Labor begins!

2009-07-28T16:00:00.004-06:00

1. Babe is in labor! It started about 20 minutes ago. She is breathing very quickly and having contractions. The kittens inside are punching every which way trying to get out. I can feel their little fists and feet against my hand.

2. Here she is a few moments ago getting a sip of water. You can see she has no ground clearance.

3. Check out http://seamuscam.com for live updates. And yes, Claudia wins the kitten lottery.

Wacky Whoopi

2009-07-27T19:32:00.006-06:00

1. New York Times reports that people who text while driving at 23 times more likely to be in a car accident, and will take their eyes off the road for an average of about five seconds at a time.

It's easy to say this should be illegal, should have mandatory penalties, should be a felony, as is drunk driving. But is it so different than the girls I used to see who were putting on their make-up while driving? Or the men who shave while driving? Is it different than driving when you're exhausted or arguing with your spouse in the car or dealing with four kids under the age of six?

I used to text and drive, though it was almost exclusively at stop lights. The worst that happened in these cases is that someone would honk at me for taking too long to move.

One particularly chilling quote:

I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realize there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it.

2. If you don't really understand the hang up with Blue Dogs and Obama's health care reform, here's a pretty good, and pretty short, editorial. Paul Krugman. Great hair, eh?

3. Whoopi Goldberg thinks the moon landing is a hoax? I hadn't realized this was seriously still up for debate.

4. Still no kittens, but here is the mama kitty getting a kiss at the changing of the camera.

Our chemical selves

2009-07-26T18:24:00.000-06:00

1. So much of who we are is chemical or physical. Is there really anything else? Something goes awry in my brain and suddenly I'm not me anymore, but someone at the long far end of a tunnel from me. A loyal reader from Indiana (thank you) convinced me it wasn't a stroke. How many other things can go wrong with the brain. Last time this passed in a few days.

2. Ruby-crowned kinglet in the cemetery yesterday. This is a life lister for me. He's tiny, tiny, tiny, busy, and a pretty ordinary looking bird except for a red skullcap. He was with a female who was more yellowish.

3. Pretty soon there will be kittens at my house. S and D were over the other night. We talked about what we'd learned from our experiences in drinking (rum doesn't play well with others), our opinions of the Sotomayor hearings (the Republican senators made asses of themselves), and the importance of loyalty.

This mama cat does not look like she can get comfortable.

5. The blogspot spellchecker finally learned "Obama," but has not yet learned "Sotomayor." Maybe it's waiting to see if she's confirmed. Our senior Senator from Utah already announced he's voting no. He has a knack for being on the wrong side of history. I didn't bother reading why. I suspect he has no idea why, except that she makes him feel threatened.

Pregnant kitty

2009-07-25T15:02:00.003-06:00

1. Today I feel that I am not connected to myself. I feel like someone else, very far away from reality. I don't know what this is. It happened once before. I thought it was a stroke but it wasn't.

2. I also can't remember anything that happened this morning until about 11:00am. Any ideas?

3. There is a pregnant kitty tentatively named Babe at our house. Here is a webcam that I am trying to keep on her, though she moves around and she's not always on it. Once the kittens are born it will be more stable: http://seamuscam.com . I am hoping for few kittens. The world has enough kittens.

This kitty looks like she is wearing eyeliner. She looks Egyptian.

4. I am considering buying a business and running it with my brother.

5. I think "Gulf Coast Highway" is an amazing love song. I've driven the Gulf Coast Highway, and it is not very romantic, but it was an experience.

Charming

2009-07-22T16:59:00.005-06:00

1. A group of hummingbirds is called a "charm" or a "glimmer." I didn't know that, and if I saw several in my yard I might have simply said that I saw "a whole mess of hummingbirds." And apparently a group of owls is a parliament. Great word. If I were in charge of naming groups of things, a group of Utah legislators would be a "stench."

2. I just googled to see what a group of raccoons would be called, since I had six of them on my porch the other night, but it's boring. A "nursery." A group of raccoons should be a ... "chain gang."

3. We cannot figure out how we get cat hair in our dinner.

Hitting Gene

2009-07-16T12:07:00.003-06:00

1. I was remembering the other day that teachers used to hit kids in school. This was in Texas, where corporal punishment was well accepted and probably still is. There was one kid named Robert whom my 5th grade teacher just plain didn't like, and she would hit him for the smallest provocation. One time all he did was to sit back slightly on his chair, balancing on the back legs, just like ten thousand school kids do every day of the year. She would take him out of the room into a large closet area and we could hear her hitting him, and he'd come back in crying.

It was very upsetting at the time and used to make me feel like throwing up, but I don't recall that I ever questioned it, or told my parents, or did anything at all about it. Bad kids got hit at school by the teachers. That's just how it was. I wasn't a bad kid.

2. Once a very overweight kid named Gene got hit for eating a ham sandwich during class. I remember exactly what the sandwich looked like. It had two bites taken out of it when it was found. He dropped it on the floor when the teacher asked him about it, and sort of tried to push it away with his foot. The kids started yelling things at him and making fun of him, and the teacher did nothing to stop it. I was horrified and afraid for him. Then she took him back to the room and hit him. I had never really talked to him before that day, and I tried at recess to say something, and it was probably dumb, but he didn't look at me or reply, so I walked off.

3. Looking back, it's clear that she was one sadistic piece of work. It never really occurred to me until now. We were taught to mind our teachers, and all grownups, and she was both. I wonder if she's still alive. Doubtful. She was probably in her late 40s then. Mrs. Caldwell.

4. Here is a Lazuli Bunting taken from the window of our room at Deer Valley on the 4th of July weekend. We had such a nice time. The only downside was that I didn't wear sunscreen when we rode the chairlift, and I got on sunburn closer to dying of skin cancer.

5. Hearings on Supreme Court nominees are such a farce. Gail Collins had a good satire in the NY Times today. A clip:

CHAIRMAN LEAHY: We’re now going to start with the question period. I would like to begin by asking how it feels to have more federal court judicial experience than any nominee to the United States Supreme Court in nearly a hundred years.
JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: Thank you for that interesting question. What my 17-year record on two courts has taught me is the importance of keeping an open mind. And following precedent. And not answering any hypothetical questions about abortion or gun control.

6. Philip K. Howard, also in the Times:

The one useful conclusion is that Judge Sotomayor’s skill at parrying loaded questions demonstrates that she is as smart as her resume suggests.

7. Waiter, I'll have another glass of the cat-donnay.

Spider protocol

2009-07-10T15:16:00.002-06:00

1. Can we agree that proper spider protocol, when you see a huge spider on someone, is to knock the spider off and only THEN say, "oh my god, you had an enormous spider on you, and he is now scurrying away," vs. saying "oh my god, you HAVE an enormous spider on you, let me try to knock it off"?

2. I think we can all agree on that, can't we?

Clandestine calls

2009-07-05T17:02:00.003-06:00

1. Upscale hotels often have telephones next to the toilets. I don't understand this. Despite J's assertion otherwise, I can't imagine anyone doing business from a phone by the toilet. That's what cellphones are for. No one uses hotel phones for calls, do they? Too expensive. One uses hotel phones to order room service, have the valet bring the car out front, or to ask for turndown service.

2. I maintain that 99% of all calls made from those phones begin with the words, "Guess where I'm calling you from..."

3. The rest are to make clandestine calls to lovers other than the person one is sharing the room with.

4. Sara and Dalton over soon for drinks, maybe cards, maybe a puzzle, definitely gossip and political chat, with the conversation almost surely to include Sarah Palin's latest exploits. The Western Governor's Conference was recently held at the same resort we just spent the weekend at. Neither Palin nor Schwarzenegger attended, and apparently the governors said they were glad because those two were a distraction. Right. They are also the only reason anyone would care that the conference existed.

Adverbial atrocities

2009-06-25T19:58:00.003-06:00

1. I was behind a van today, some kind of catering truck or something, and there was a sign on the back that said, "Am I driving courteous? If not, call 324-3321." I wonder if they also welcome calls about adverbial atrocities.

2. Which reminds me of another sign I once saw. "Do you have a complaint or concern about your experience with the IRS? Call 1-800-AUDIT-ME."

3. OK, so a Republican governor from South Carolina ran off to Argentina for a long weekend to see his girlfriend, but his aides said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. He ditched his security detail, which is what tipped off reporters. I don't want to actually read this story, so please tell me if there's something I'm missing that is worth knowing.

Were the aides lying, or did they not know either? Please do not make me read this story.

All I know for sure is that his wife did NOT do the public confession with him, to which I say, "Go, girl." My very smart sister disagrees with me, but I think the perps have to do the humiliating confession by themselves. The wives can issue statements afterward saying, 1) I love my husband, 2) this is a very hard time for us but we'll get through it with God's help, and 3) please respect our privacy.

Shorter days ahead

2009-06-21T21:23:00.004-06:00

1. My sister supplied the cute animal picture. At right is Phoebe, from Seattle, who is helping to hold down a pair of Levi's. Not all cats are this useful.

2. I'm glad the sun has set on the longest day of the year. I don't like summer or long days, and I don't like it when I know the days are getting longer. From this moment on, the days will just keep getting shorter, sunsets earlier, nights longer.

It's not full dark here yet. The sky is still faintly lit over the Oquirrhs. Planes are lined up to land at the airport; I can see the by their lights. On busy nights I can see four lined up, flying north, stretched miles across the valley, and two more that are flying south to get ready to make the turn back north.

3. I believe I am setting a personal record for the most number of blog entries in a day.

To my point about precise language...

2009-06-21T14:49:00.005-06:00

The Mail Carrier just walked out of the bathroom and said, "Is this shirt too see-through-y? I don't even know how to spell that.

I suppose it's precise because I got the meaning, but "see-through-y" is not a word.

Plus which, is there such a thing as "too see-through-y"? I mean really.

Frozen blood in my fingers

2009-06-21T14:34:00.004-06:00

I have decided to try to use more precise language. I get the urge to use language well whenever I read good writing--writing that creates powerful images and feelings in me. The kind of writing where you know the writer took care with every sentence.

Modern spoken English comprises a too-high percentage of cliches and exaggerations for effect. For example, on the way home from shopping today, the Mail Carrier and I were having a battle of wills over the setting of the air conditioner in the car (I almost said "air conditioner wars," which is overstated, as we were not at war). She kept turning it up high, and I wanted it to be either low or off. I almost said, "I'm going to turn this off while I am still able to pump enough frozen blood through my veins to crack the ice off my fingers and move my hands to the switch," but instead I said, "It is uncomfortably cold with the air conditioner up so high. If you turn it up it again I'm going to wish you hadn't."

I also want to stop using the words "like" and "totally."

It is very hard to use precise, accurate language. Our language patterns are deeply embedded in our culture.

I feel that I have failed at creating a good blog entry if I don't include a photo of a cute animal, but I am out of time and have to get dressed. I'll find one later.

Wolf baby learns to howl

2009-06-21T10:38:00.000-06:00

This is not really that cute.

Forgot to say "when."

2009-06-21T10:32:00.003-06:00

1. Utah leads the nation in per capita swine flu deaths. I somehow missed all of this, mainly because I won't read local news. I didn't know anyone in Utah had died of the swine, but yes, 8 Utahns have succumbed.

Despite the fact that a few people have died of this disease, it is mostly regarded as being a fairly benign flu. I heard on David Letterman that people are now holding swine flu parties (true story) in order to lose weight for bikini season.

As of April, the flu hadn't even arrived in Utah. I think that was the last time I looked at local news.

2. A truly icky story hit the local paper yesterday as well. This is what I get for reading local news. A 43-year-old former teacher in Bountiful (suburb of Salt Lake City) was indicted for having sex with a 13-year-old male student. She turned herself in. But only after she found out that another teacher was having sex with the same student.

If the boy were 17 and the teacher were 23, I could see this happening. But there is a huge, impassable gulf between 13 and 17. I know 13-year-olds, and they are children. I once had a 13-year-old boy living in my house, and if a 43-year-old teacher had been having relations with him, I probably would have had to drive over to her house and pull her out onto her front lawn and ask, firmly, just what she was thinking.

When I'm in love, whenever we're apart I am imagining what she's doing, thinking, how her work is going. When you're with a boy in junior high, do you wonder if he's in gym class? Or asleep in the twin bed down the hall from his parents' bedroom? When you go out together, what do you do? Play video games? See the Transformers movie? Buy him a milkshake and burger?

Some psychiatrist at the University of Utah was quoted as saying the women were probably lonely, and yet they were popular teachers and well-liked by students. I can't find anything about whether they are married or had children of their own.

But let's agree that they were lonely and didn't get a lot of romantic attention. And let's say that a cute 13-year-old was paying attention to them, complimenting them, listening to them, making them feel good. I'll buy all of that. Love and affection can come in many forms. But then you take your clothes off for him? You just lost me.

3. Yesterday the Mail Carrier was out on her route, and a woman drove up in a car and said that she needed to get her mail handed to her because there was something in it she didn't want her husband to see. This was in the morning, and the woman gets her mail in the afternoon. That means she was driving all over Kearns, up and down the streets, looking for the Mail Carrier.

I spent the morning speculating what it could have been. A credit card bill? A letter from a boyfriend? An unemployment check that she didn't want him getting his hands on? Medical test results?

Whatever it was, the Mail Carrier didn't have it. Just a magazine and a couple of fliers. Apparently it is not at all uncommon on certain Saturdays for people to come find her early in the day to get their paychecks. Some are so regular that she pulls their checks in the morning so she doesn't have to look for them when the people arrive.

I have never heard of such a thing. I couldn't begin to guess where to find my mailman except in front of my house, and I can't imagine not waiting for the mail to arrive, rather than going out to get it. And IF by chance you have to go get your mail from your postman, do you tell her that it's because you don't want your husband to see it? Really? You give your postman that much information?

4. You've probably all heard the bizarre case of Elizabeth Becton, but just in case anyone hasn't, she's a secretary for a Congressman from Washington state, and she just had an email exchange made public that is pretty darn embarrassing. It's her job to schedule appointments for people to meet with the Congressman, and she got a request from someone who had the effrontery to call her "Liz," which is apparently something of a hot button issue for her.

It is worth the jump to the other page to read this. I promise.

5. From "A Prairie Home Companion" yesterday, private investigator Guy Noir says, "She wore that dress like she was poured into it and forgot to say 'when'."

Pesky pronouns

2009-06-15T23:06:00.002-06:00

1. J suggests that the thing that's troubling about Chastity Bono's sex change is that she lived for so many years as a lesbian, and that now she's coming out again, this time as a man. I think that's a really good insight, and may help explain why this change doesn't make sense to me, and makes me so uncomfortable. Which is Bono--a lesbian or a man? Because those two things are very far apart. That may not be intuitive to some people, since both lesbians and straight men are attracted to women, but it's not at all the same thing.

I went to Wikipedia to see when Bono first announced the gender transition, and was curious to see that the entry, which is clearly sympathetic, goes two paragraphs without ever using a pronoun. The writer keeps referring to "Bono" instead of he or she.

Chaz Sun Bono (born March 4, 1969) is an American LGBT rights advocate, writer, actor and musician. Bono is the only child of the American entertainers Sonny and Cher. Bono's birth name was Chastity after Cher's first feature film in 1969. Bono came out as lesbian in a 1995 interview in The Advocate. In June 2009, Bono's publicist confirmed that Bono was undergoing gender transition.

Bono is the child of Congressman Sonny Bono and Cher, well-known as pop duo Sonny & Cher who had a top-rated television variety show where the young child was often featured. Bono was initially named "Chastity Sun Bono" after the title of Cher's first feature film, in which Cher played a bisexual character created by Sonny. The film had its première shortly before Bono's birth in 1969. Although born and raised female, Bono began to identify as a trans man later in life.

It's very hard in English to talk about people without using gender-specific pronouns. Our gender identity is deeply embedded in our language. And it's confusing to talk about a woman using male pronouns. It would be odd to have written, "He came out as a lesbian in a 1995 interview with The Advocate.

2. I don't think Bernie Madoff's son's knew what their father was doing. I think his wife did.

3. James Wolcott with the best advice I've heard so far to Sarah Palin, who is trying very hard to turn David Letterman's jokes into more political limelight:

If I were Sarah Palin I'd get myself booked on Conan O'Brien's marionette show, giving his ratings a surefire jolt at Dave's expense, and then behave like Graciousness Itself, all smiles and tight-skirted sexpot dignity, not even deigning to mention Letterman by name. If Palin wants to be Madame Prez someday, she's got to get out of that comfort zone known as the Fox News ghetto anywho.

Storms

2009-06-14T14:21:00.005-06:00

1. I love thunderstorms, and the more violent, the better. I love thunder and lightning and driving rain and dark skies and wind that shakes the windows and blows through the trees. A violent thunderstorm is the perfect weather condition.

2. Yesterday it was raining so hard in Salt Lake that my windshield wipers could not clear the water off fast enough for me to see to drive. I finally got to the store and everyone inside was lined up at the windows watching the rain and wind. We were all bound together by the ferocity of the storm. Everyone pretends to love sunny days, but I think they secretly like a storm more. Storms are huge and make you feel small.

You know what ruins the bigness of storms, though? Flying over them and realizing it's clear blue sky above them, just a little ways up. There's probably a message there.

3. Last night the Mail Carrier stopped on the way home and bought a cake for her dinner. She took the plastic top off the cake to eat it, and when she looked back over, Rex had settled into it. I love that you can see his feet all squished up.

4. Today we went to the cemetery to see if the hawks were still around. The nest was empty, but I knew that the babies would not be far away. We sat for awhile and watched, and eventually two of the three returned to the tree, and one was eating someone it had caught.5. Pretty soon all three of the babies will have moved on to their own territories.

6. "Storms" is the name of a Nanci Griffith CD. As well as the name of this blog entry.

Jigsaw

2009-06-12T22:31:00.003-06:00

1. Tonight the Mail Carrier and I did one of the jigsaw puzzles that we love to do. Actually she likes really difficult puzzles with a thousand pieces that are all the same color and shape, but I like small puzzles (550 pieces) with colorful pieces and pictures of animals, preferably with stripes and spots that are easy to put together. I snag all the pieces for the fun animals first, and leave her the sky and grass. This is a nice thing to do together--just sit together and hand each other pieces.

2. Today someone came out to me. I was honored, as it was clearly not an easy thing to tell. Straight people, let me suggest something: You probably are not even aware of your straight privilege. It's huge. And your presumption of straightness in others.

3. The shoplifter from yesterday called the store today to say he had more to return. We snagged his caller ID on the phone and I called him and told him I knew his real name and his license plate and that I know he'd stolen from us, and why didn't he bring the money back before I called the police. He hung up. I called back. He didn't answer. Weanie. We called the police. He is a very stupid shoplifter. He must be desperate. I hope that if I ever get desperate for money I am at least a smart shoplifter who does honor to my profession.

4. Here is something I am not proud of: I am seriously weirded out by Chastity Bono's news. I don't get it and it just feels...wrong. Only that sounds like I mean in some sort of right/wrong sense, and that's not what I mean. Just that I have no idea what it even means to be in the wrong body, except insofar as I would be very much more comfortable in Marion Jones's body.

5. I believe "Jigsaw" was the name of a really lame Jeff Bridges/Glenn Close movie.

A hard laugh is gonna fall

2009-06-10T23:12:00.003-06:00

1. I'm surprised Mr. Obama doesn't come out against white supremacists shooting security guards in Holocaust museums. No rational person could be for it, and it costs him no political capital. Perfect Obama issue!

2. Sometimes the Mail Carrier and I laugh so hard that I can't pick her up to drop her off the bed. Other times I am able to drop her off the bed, but then I have to lie down so I can breathe. Laughing like that is damn good.

3. I am not getting an iPhone, and you would do RH for $80M, too.

4. According to Utah's Right to Know website, the top five causes of accidental death in Utah are, in order: drowning, fall, craniocerebral injuries, multiple blunt force injuries, and asphyxia.

I would have thought drowning and asphyxia were the same cause of death, different manner of death.

5. I read this in a book once and it is as true as anything in my professional experience: People don't leave their jobs--they leave their bosses.

6. One of the stories I am only following with 1% of my brain is the one about the beauty queen in California who apparently has had her assets augmented and doesn't like gays and isn't terribly encumbered by brains and has apparently be de-queened? I haven't heard why. It doesn't matter. I just know that something is happening that is vaguely like that, and it is getting a ton of press.

7. Another actual resume, and I can't tell if it's real:

I started in the Broadway Ice Cream Shop in the movie theater scoping ice cream and cashier. Then i want to the Usher Department were i learn to rip movie tickets and see if the movie is playing.

Shoplifters and dancing birds

2009-06-10T21:02:00.004-06:00

1. We had a shoplifter at work today. Only it's not enough that he stole from us, he had to rub our noses in it as well. He came in THREE separate times and did a "return" of an item for which he had no receipt. He had no receipt because he had just stolen the item. I approved the first one (from my office--I never saw him). THEN he came in two more times with more stuff that he"remembered" he had to return. Between three separate customer service people we accepted all of it. He should have just wheeled up one of our racks to the checkout stand and ask to "return" all of it--it would have saved us all time.

2. His story was that his "aunt" from "Grand Junction" had bought all the supplies for birthday presents, only the people didn't want the stuff. I know I always think of diabetic supplies for my friends on their birthdays. I won't even have to leave work to shop! I was puzzling later this afternoon about why his fake aunt had to be from Grand Junction, and it was because he was explaining why she couldn't come in on her own. He even faked phone calls to her right from the storefront to see if there was anything else she wanted returned.

3. After he left the store for the third time, I heard the whole story and went out front to try and stop him, only he was driving away. I scratched down his license plate and a friend ran the plate. We now have a name and are attempting to find if he has a criminal record. If anyone out there has a source for how to do this, let me know. As a reward we are offering an insulin supply pouch.

4. Here is another dancing bird that made me laugh.

My favorite move is at 1:22 left, where he moves his head left and right. I plan to use this the next time I am on the dance floor.

Anvils and Air

2009-06-07T19:13:00.005-06:00

1. I bought the MacBook Air. It is the world's thinnest laptop. You could drop it down the back of your pants and no one would know unless they spanked you. Try that with your ThinkPad.

That is an actual not-kidding side view of it. It is the same thickness as a Pepperidge Farms Milano cookie, which is what it reminds me of. I bought a cookie just to try it side by side, and sure enough, they're identical. Except you cannot boot the cookie. But you could drop it down the back of your pants and no one would be the wiser.

2. I have been playing chess on the Air this afternoon, and I can speak my moves as I play against the computer, which also speaks its moves. I can choose the voice it uses. "Kathleen Turner" is not one of the choices, or I would use it. I can make the computer play really, really fast so that it doesn't have time to think, and I can thereby beat it. If I let it think, it beats me every time.

3. The Mail Carrier is not interested in the Air that I bought her. She marveled at its exhilarating thinness and then picked up her 20-lb laptop and took it into the bathroom to surf the web as she put on her make-up.

4. My Windows laptop, which only yesterday was perfect for me, now feels like I am carrying around an anvil, and it is equally inelegant. I speak commands to it and it stares blankly back at me, waiting for me to step back into the 90's and input my commands through a keyboard.

5. I just started watching "Gods and Generals" simply because it was on when I turned on the TV, and as the opening credits rolled, I heard the most beautiful song I think I have heard in a decade. I googled to find that it is called "Going Home," and is sung by Mary Fahl. If I were the sort to have cried at a song that awakened such terrible longing in me, then you can guess what happened at that moment. I downloaded the MP3 from Amazon.com.

6. The movie is about the Civil War. It gave me the idea to google "Stonewall Jackson" and "Lake Titicaca." Twenty-seven hits. So many of you are better at this game than I am.

Vlad the Impaler

2009-06-06T11:54:00.000-06:00

1. Obama visits Buchenwald with Elie Wiesel. Nice, Mr. Obama--very understated. Coming out against the Nazis and Holocaust deniers is sort of like coming out against the Ebola virus.

2. When are you going to become the man I voted against in the Democratic primary?

3. I started playing the Google "try to google two words together that get no hits" game using proper names, and I am still having little luck. Would you believe that:

"Marlene Dietrich" "Pol Pot" = 9340 hits? WHAT?
"Angela Lansbury" "Tegucigalpa" = 415 hits
"Rexburg" "Vlad the Impaler" = 1690 hits
"Mary Tyler Moore" "Vlad the Impaler" = 4390 hits
Tooele "Vlad the Impaler" = 334 hits.

I give up. Tooele is a podunk city in Utah, and if there are websites that hit both it and Vlad the Impaler, then the Internet is too big.

4. Heading out to buy a netbook today for the Mail Carrier. She complains that her laptop is "too heavy." I am not making this up. This is how you know you're spoiled--you whine that your laptop is too heavy and so you get a netbook so you don't have to balance 8 pounds on your lap. Her laptop weighs less than most of our cats for hellsake.

5. Paula Poundstone is in town tonight, though I probably won't see her. But she is a testament to the fact that people forget the troubles you've had if you just keep moving forward. (See, you don't even remember what she did.) That's the secret of hard times, I think. Keep moving. Let time wash past you.

6. Not that I've had hard times.

Smitten Kitchen

2009-06-04T23:53:00.002-06:00

1. This website makes ME want to cook: http://smittenkitchen.com/ . Actually, it makes me want to urge each of you to go to this website, click on "Recipes," and invite me over for the classic grilled cheese and cream of tomato soup. Or a zillion other recipes. Macaroni and cheese.

2. Today I was at the vet and there was a cage full of striped grey kittens. There were four of them, all girls, and they were climbing the cage bars, sticking their arms through the cage at me, trying to pull me inside, tackling each other, turning over their food. I was lucky to make it out with no kittens.

3. I am trying to sell a guy at work on a cat. They lost their 21-year-old cat about a year ago. He said he can't have another cat because he wears dark clothes and their orange cat always made him look hairy. I so have a solution for that--dark cats! We have the technology!

4. Rumor has it that a case of swine flu was confirmed at the University of Utah yesterday.

What you know when you speed-read the news

2009-06-04T21:23:00.003-06:00

1. Since I started my new job I have stopped reading long-form news. Or even regular newspaper articles. I catch headlines and deduce the rest. I now know how 90% of America is informed of the news.

2. Keith Carradine was found hanging from a rope in a hotel room in Southeast Asia and it was an accident? How can that be an accident? What was he doing in Asia? Kung fu?

3. A plane crashed (Air France?) over the Atlantic somewhere flying from South America to Europe and they haven't found any bodies but they did find an oil slick which I saw a photo of, and now speed was a factor? SPEED? As in, it was flying as fast as a jet?

4. Obama went to Egypt to tell Muslims that we are not their enemy and not to worry so much about Israel? And how did this go over?

5. A doctor somewhere in the Midwest who performs abortions in the third trimester was shot to death by an anti-abortion activist. I think it was because of the abortions. I think the guy was caught, or maybe he shot himself too, which is something I'm always in favor of.

6. The CEO of some mortgage company (Wells Fargo? Countrywide?) was accused today of something by someone, possibly in the SEC. He probably did it.

Annuals

2009-06-03T21:31:00.002-06:00

1. Tonight the Mail Carrier's hands were too painful for her to work in the yard, so I planted about 57,000 annuals. This was a small fraction of the total number she has already planted. She was in charge of taking them out of their plastic holders and laying them on their sides where she wanted them, and I was in charge of working in the mulch, digging the little holes, and planting the flowers.

They seemed never to end. She had them laid out all over the flower beds like dead soldiers. I kept insisting it was getting too dark to see, but she kept laying down dead soldiers for me to plant. Her other job was to bring me American Honey on ice. The funny thing is, now that I've planted them, I care about them. I was just out there making sure that the sprinklers were reaching them all, but not too much.

Like I needed to be worrying about flowers? They're annuals. They're going to be dead by October. I refuse to get attached.

2. New Hampshire. Six down, forty-four to go. That whooshing sound you hear is the future coming. Only it's hard to hear from here. Utah and all the Gulf Coast states will threaten to secede from the Union before allowing gays their civil rights. Bummer for Utah to be so far away from its fellow secessionist states.

The game I prefer

2009-06-01T21:33:00.002-06:00

The google game I prefer to the one cited in my previous post is trying to type in two words that will produce no hits. I used to be able to do this much more easily than I can now. "sesquicentennial millipede" produces 470 hits. This is proof that everything is now searchable on the internets.

Tonight I can't find any two words that produce no hits.

"sesquicentennial meningioma" produces only 156 hits. This is the best I can do tonight.

Hawk babies in the wind

2009-06-01T20:44:00.003-06:00

1. A wind storm is kicking in, lightning and rain and everything, and I am worried about the hawk babies in their nest. One year the nest was destroyed in a wind storm. But the new plants will like the rain.

2. I would like someone to tell me in three sentences or less what's going on with GM because I don't want to read the long articles.

3. I'll fight you.

4. My future brother-in-law was in a bad bike accident last week, where he hit a pothole and went down hard and broke his pelvis. He had to drag himself out of the middle of a busy road, and no one stopped. The cars drove around him and kept going. No one stopped traffic. No one stopped to help him. They left him lying there for 45 minutes until my sister could get to him. Sometimes I almost lose faith in humanity. Who are these people who drove around him? This has been bothering me and preying on my mind.

5. From "Edge of American West" blog, this new Google game:

Newest mental toy:

Go to Google.
Type in the beginning of a common phrase (e.g., “how do I..”, “where are…”, “is barack…”)
Look at the drop-down list of suggested searches.
If appropriate, laugh riotously.

I tried this by typing "do you really," and was shocked by a couple of the suggest searches. I don't know if you'll see what I saw, but I find it hard to believe those are the most common searches that start with those words.

Great lines from resumes

2009-06-01T16:03:00.002-06:00

I have been reading many, many resumes, which has been interesting. My favorite line so far came from a resume where someone was applying for a retail storefront position, and she said that in her last position she was responsible for "Stalking Inventory." Tell me that doesn't give you a great visual.

After many million heartbeats

2009-05-20T21:47:00.003-06:00

1. With all due respect to the one I love, I am so glad American Idol is over.

2. This is a very cute cat video, but the funniest part is the last five seconds.

3. Am I the only one who wishes someone would waterboard Dick Cheney?

4. Only a thin yellow rope keeps passersby from the abyss--from the coldness of the grave. 5. Mail carriers have better insurance than I do. Better than you do, too, probably. Also better pensions. And better discounts with AT&T. But I would not want to be carrying mail in the hot summer sun. Life has its trade offs.

6. Two nights ago the Mail Carrier and I were discussing what life would be like if we didn't age, but instead lived for thousands of years instead of fewer than a hundred. If the only way people died was by illness or accident, and not illnesses incident to age, because we'd all stay 25. I doubt we would have evolved with any concept of lifetime marital commitments. Who can imagine staying with someone for thousands of years? Nor would we be thinking of retirement, because no 401k could support it. And who could stand working that long?

I'm guessing we might have a succession of entirely different lifetimes. Maybe in one I would be married for 30 years and teach high school. Then I'd go to school and become a doctor and do that for 50 years.

Tonight I heard from a friend I knew decades ago. I said to her that that time in my life seemed like a different lifetime, and it does. I have memories of it, but it's almost as if I'm an observer and not a participant of that past life.

After thousands of years you could have hundreds of lifetimes as we know them. If one were curious and loved to learn, one could eventually learn to do anything. If not, I can't imagine wanting to be alive that long.

7. Come back.

I'm growing feathers!

2009-05-17T13:55:00.000-06:00

There appear to be three babies in the nest, though there may only be two. The most active of the three kept standing and flapping his wings, getting ready for her first flight, which is still weeks away. You can plainly see the feathers starting to appear on the trailing edge of the wings.

Thawing the dead bird

2009-05-17T09:33:00.004-06:00

1. When the birds get mad at each other, they fight by biting each other's legs, which are the only exposed, unfeathered part of them. This seems like a bad policy because then they both end up with sore legs. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

2. Today is the day to bury the lovebird who died on the Mail Carrier's birthday in January. The ground was too frozen to bury him then, so he's been waiting patiently in our freezer for the thaw. Yesterday we discussed whether we were going to unwrap him and look at him before we buried him. One of us thought we definitely should, because hello, who ever gets to see a lovebird who has been frozen for four months, and the other thought it was a sick thing to even suggest. Deciding which of us took which position is an exercise left to the reader.

3. And then there's this.

Depressing towns

2009-05-14T22:43:00.003-06:00

1. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" my ass. If we don't face this down and own up to what we've done, putting everything out in the full light of day and atoning for it, we will reap the whirlwind. (That is a Biblical reference, for the heathens among you.) Mr. Obama--man up.

2. "The Business Insider" lists America's 11 Most Depressing Places. I was surprised by some of them, but one of them I've heard about from my nephew-in-law:

The lovely town of Kokomo, Indiana has an unemployment rate of 20%, and that's with the the local Delphi auto plant still operating.
As some locals say, if the Delphi plant closes down, Kokomo is likely to become a ghost town.

The most depressing place of all? Detroit. Not a surprise. But the mayor needs to learn how to sell his city a little better.

The average home price in Detroit is just $7,500 because no one wants to live there. The continuing catastrophe that is the US auto industry has reduced this onetime industrial behemoth to a nearly perfect picture of decrepitude.

Last year when the murder rate dropped in the city, the mayor joked that the reason was that "there is no one left to kill."

4. But you want to talk depressing? Baker, California. I was there for a couple of hours one summer day when my car broke down, and my abiding memory is inhuman heat, ugly stucco and cement buildings, and enormous spiders. (I would insert a photo of a spider here, but my sister does not like reading my blog and seeing photos of spiders.)

5. And I'll never forget some of the poverty I saw in the Ozarks. De. pressing.

6. I also find Las Vegas very depressing.

7. And almost the entire gulf coast of Mississippi. GOD--BILOXI. What a rathole. Trailers, military base, and casinos. Steph, tell 'em if I'm lying.

Abraham Lincoln

2009-05-14T19:40:00.004-06:00

1. Our two foster cats got adopted tonight. A couple came over to look at them, and the husband said they were both such great cats that he couldn't choose between them, so they're taking them both.

2. I hope they don't feed them to pythons.

3. Given the amount it costs to adopt, it would be an expensive way to feed pythons.

4. Abraham Lincoln said, "I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."

5. “The difference between the last administration and this one is the difference between night and dawn. But we’re looking for day,” - Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA).

6. Obama just keeps disappointing me. Auto bailouts, gays in the military, gay marriage, torture photos, truth commission, getting a dog instead of a cat.

7. My sister is hoping for postal amnesty for a couple of days while her not-sent-with-44-cent-stamp letters get delivered. The lowest postage I remember is eight cents. And it seems like ten cents lasted forever, but it was only about 18 months.

Philadelphia

2009-05-13T22:46:00.000-06:00

1. "Let's not tell our sad stories." Name that movie. Hint: It's one of the better lines from a movie whose really atrocious lines are frequently quoted by lovers. Another hint: It's not a good movie.

2. Found a website called Favrd that lists good tweats.

I can't have a cat, but future roommate says we can get a dog. I'm going to train it to treat us like scum. I'll make a cat out of you yet!

In an effort to combat growing viewer apathy, it will henceforth be called Missing-White-Girl Flu. (sween)

Love will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no love. (zeldman)

3. Can we speak about unspeakably bad movies for a moment? I have only six words to offer tonight: The Day the Earth Stood Still.

4. I'll be in Philadelphia in June. I've been to Philadelphia in June, and I wouldn't freely choose it for myself now. But boy, did I ever freely choose it then. There's no one left to remember it with me.

5. Some memories are just mental memories. You think about them and remember that a thing happened. Other memories are stored on a hundred levels and are recalled in smell, touch, time of day, light, shadow, emotion. Philadelphia is the latter kind for me.

Jacob's cat

2009-05-09T21:04:00.002-06:00

I just need to know which flight to put him on.

Barking at the moon

2009-05-09T14:30:00.001-06:00

1. Last night at 8:30pm, Claudia and I hiked into the foothills to take photos of the almost-full moon. We were about an hour early for moonrise, but the moon was worth the wait, and in the meantime we took pictures of the city, the dogs, each other, and finally even the moon.2. I have been reading over resumes for a customer service position. Reading resumes is a study of the human condition, to be sure. Here are random lines pulled from eight different resumes:

I play basketball when I can. I also do some art drawing when have free time.

I have worked with Excel, Microsoft Word, Power Point, etc. I find I am still willing to learn the other programs if needed.

I can do pretty much anything on a computer. I would also have to say I am a fast learner. I have had about 8 ears of my own experience on computers.

I am very interested in employment with your medical firm. Please refer to my resume and then write me at mustang_girlygirl@hotmail.com.

Objective: To obtain an interesting position with a growing company that will have me long term and hopefully see me making a career in the near future with the company.

Picked up and delivered bodies to the morgue and coroner’s office. This required self management.

I feel I am qualified because I lost my father to diabetes and now my child has it I am familiar with the terms and treatment. I am working at Applebees for four years and am probably next in line for store manager.

I have worked since high school two years ago over at Old Navy but am looking to better myself and go back to school. My father did the same.

3. Mail carriers across the country are collecting non-perishable food items today for their annual "Stamp Out Hunger" drive. This is sponsored by the Mail Carriers' Union, and rumor has it that at the West Valley post office today, 11 mail carriers called in "sick," all of whom were union reps.

If you're wondering how your mail carrier feels about the annual food drive, be assured that he or she hates it. The back of an actual mail truck today:I have received a number of phone calls today from the Mail Carrier, lamenting the fact that her truck will barely move because it is so weighed down by canned goods, and asking me if I want her to bring home some chili or peanut butter. She insists, "We won't have to shop for a month."

4. I just received a call from my niece. In the course of our conversation, she revealed to me the absolute nadir of her college drinking days, wherein she mixed vodka with diet root beer. I think it takes a lot of courage to admit a thing like that. I told her the secret was safe with me.

Oh. Oops.

5. We then shifted topics to resumes and job hunting, and she said, "Job hunting is even worse than dating, because at least with dating you can be drinking."

Head right on the pillow

2009-05-07T20:57:00.005-06:00

1. I went to a new dentist on Wednesday. I have looked for a female dentist in Salt Lake, and finally had my handyman refer one. She has a Muslim name, and I wondered how that would affect her business. She is located west of the freeway, which, no offense to my western-leaning readers, was a complete unknown to me until I met the Mail Carrier: the freeway divided Salt Lake from That Other Place.

So here's the deal. She clearly took over the practice of another dentist, because the name on the building is Hansen Dental. The building is old and a bit run down. The office is small and cramped and the furniture is old. The clientele in the lobby was poor, and were paying cash. The staff was friendly and the place was clean, but the equipment was old.

The x-ray machine was so old that the hinge was broken and I had to hold it in place as she shot the image.

So I am left wondering how much this all matters. Maybe she's a great dentist and is just getting her practice established with very little startup money. She went to dental school in Sudan and in the U.S., and it is probably wrong of me to assume that dental schools in the US are better.

2. From the Daily Dish:

It's the commander-in-chief's first persecution of a servicemember critical to national defense and intelligence. The man is Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and just returned from Iraq. Obama is firing him because he's openly gay. And he has no plans to change that policy, despite a clear campaign commitment.

3. I always said that Obama was no friend of gays. He talked a good line at times, but he could just as easily jump to the dark side when it was politically expedient.

4. Dog people should read this warm, squishy article about dogs. Normal people can safely skip it. A quote from it:

I recently spent two weeks in a hospital. As far as my dog understood, I had died. After a few days of checking around to make sure I was not, for example, hiding in the laundry hamper, Murphy accepted the tragedy of my passing and was stoically preparing to go on without me. By that I mean that through some timeless, mystical entwinement of grief, survival, social cognition and the sense of commonality of purpose that have united man and dog since the first Pleistocene hominid befriended and domesticated the first gray wolf -- after just four days, Murphy moved up and stole my spot in the bed. Head right on the pillow.

My point here is that -- and I say this before a potentially hostile audience -- we must always remember that dogs are, in the end, only dogs. To paraphrase the British writer Frank Skinner, never expect too much from an animal that is surprised by its own farts.

Techno squirrel and hawk mama

2009-05-04T07:35:00.004-06:00

1. From the Salt Lake Cemetery yesterday:

2. The mother hawk waits patiently in her next. I expect to see fuzzy white heads in another week. When the babies show up, I'll zoom in on the image, but for now I wanted to show how the tree looks against the mountains. You can just see the mama's head up in the middle of the nest.

Who is eating all the cat food?

2009-05-03T22:15:00.005-06:00

Caught on film--the reason there is never any catfood out for Sarge, who is the neighbor's cat that we sometimes feed.
I was shooting through glass, which is what makes it look like he's about to be beamed up.

Hello, Sheila

2009-05-03T08:54:00.004-06:00

1. I got a nice surprise in my email this morning. It was a note from a cousin (exactly which kind of cousin I will never be able to figure out--she is my grandmother's brother's daughter) whom I have not seen in more decades than I care to count. She apparently googled for information on my grandmother, who died last August. She found my blog entry about Grandma (http://kaframe.blogspot.com/2008/08/grandma-dave-barry-r-rated-wagers.html), and then left a comment there.

Sheila, if you are still reading, hello. I do not have a way to reach you outside of posting to you here, so here's my email address: kaframe (at) gmail (.) com. We've been talking about you all day in a family email thread, and we're hoping to include you.

2. Obama totally bowed to King Abdullah. He needs to just admit he did, say it was a mistake, and move on.Claudia does not think it's a big deal, but I do, and I'm no patriotic zealot or anything like that. It's just that I think the Saudis are corrupt, they treat women abominably, and the 9/11 terrorist were mostly Saudi. And I don't like to see American Presidents bowing to other heads of state.

3. Here's something that hurts a LOT that you probably don't even know hurts: dropping an ice cube on your toe. I am not kidding. I was doubled over in pain for about 10 seconds trying not to holler words I would later regret.

4. This morning the Mail Carrier woke up in a funk, and said she was feeling overwhelmed by things, and felt she didn't have time to do the things she really enjoys doing, like gardening and knitting (yes, someone really enjoys gardening and knitting). She said we spend half our time doing stuff for the animals.

So what did we do today?

We rescued Blue:

He is a two-year-old blue quaker parrot whose owner is being deployed to Iraq. If we are lucky, he'll be friends with our lonely parrot Wyatt, who has been friendless since his lovebird died in January.

Is that all we did today?

No, we also rescued Wes, a grey and white 2-year-old kitty and an as-yet-unnamed cheese cat who is going to go live with Jacob in SF. They were going to be euthanized at the end of the Super Adoption because they weren't adopted. It was the Mail Carrier's idea to get the kitties, as she couldn't bear to think of them being put down just because they ran out of time. So we'll be taking them to weekend adoptions at PetSmart. Well, except for Jacob's who will be flying to SFO.

Claudia is going to name the cheese cat. He's very sweet. When I lie down next to him he rubs up against my head so hard that he knocks my glasses off.

5. So I'm thinking that the Mail Carrier is going to be much less overwhelmed by animals, now that we've added three.

6. Looking back over old blog entries, I found this link that I really liked last time I posted it, which is a little app that scans the websites that you visit and tells you if you're more likely to be mail or female.

My results:
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 15%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 85%
Let me say that there are other indicators that I am far more likely to be female than male, but let's not go into those. My web browsing history suggests otherwise.

Some of the sites that suggest I'm more likely to be male:

fool.com
etrade.com
ameritrade.com (what is this--women don't invest?)
rei.com (or hike?)
nadaguides.com (or look up the price of used cars?)

The sites that suggest I might be a woman after all:

nordstom.com (men don't buy shoes?)
att.com (or look up their phone bills?)
eddiebauer.com (ok, so I did some shopping this month)
statefarm.com (and I had a car accident--men don't have car accidents?)

7. This just in from Boston, videos of the all-time worst runway accidents. And I don't mean runways at airports. Some of them look quite nasty, and are made moreso by the fact that no one helps these women stand up. David Letterman refers to the audience as "Euro-morons."

Another favorite photo

2009-04-30T18:43:00.001-06:00

This is one of Allison's favorite photos of Cris. Thanks for sending one along. I can see why you like it. He looks sleepy and sweet and he's looking at the camera with some affection.

Claudia would only send photos of her dogs, not her woman.

David Souter leaving the Supreme Court is a bad thing. The fact that Obama is so strong right now is good, and I believe he will be able to appoint a good liberal judge to balance out the ridiculous Antonin Scalia, and perhaps begin to atone for the court that intervened in a presidential election eight years ago and put in a president that nearly brought America to ruin.

I have to work today and I don't even mind.

Favorite photos of lovers

2009-04-28T23:22:00.003-06:00

1. I knew Specter was going to jump to the Dems. Aside from the fact that the Republican ship is going down and the rats are jumping, I've always sort of liked the guy. Welcome to the good side.

2. This is how I like the Mail Carrier best. Wearing her glasses (rare), reading, looking serious, looking beautiful.
You know how there's a look about your partner or lover you like best? Some thing they do, some expression, some way they catch the light and look great, well, this is my favorite look. This is how she looks when she reads the newspaper or a book or her mail or the knitting catalogs.

You know what would be interesting? A photo collection of people's favorite photos of their lovers, spouses, partners. I might just have to start that.

Anyone want to send on in and I'll post it? Claudia? Allison? Sara? JB? JD? SS? Steph? The guy from St George who keeps reading? Trout? Whomever is reading from Nuremberg? C'mon. Nancy? CR? RL? DD? The photos that make you think of love. No one would pick this one for me, but there it is. Ordinary. Day-in-the-life. Reading. But it captures a look I love so much.

Rachel's Getting Married

2009-04-28T22:35:00.002-06:00

1. The mail carrier and I watched "Rachel's Getting Married." I watched it because unlike all the members of my family, I like Anne Hathaway. But it might have been the worst movie I have ever seen. It was endless scenes from a wedding. All the singing and toasts and family stuff that is boring enough with weddings where you know everyone, and completely intolerable at weddings where you don't.

This was intermixed with Hathaway, the bad girl out of rehab for her sister's wedding, looking barely in control the entire time.

Debra Winger made an appearance as their mom, still looking as great at 50-something as she did at 20-something.

2. Lexie, let's take this outside, shall we?

Depressed pigs; women who drink and type

2009-04-27T22:34:00.004-06:00

1. I love this cat. He's been in a bunch of videos.

3. When pigs get swine flu they show signs of "pig depression," and do not want to socialize with other pigs. That's how I feel when I get sick, too.

4. My sister is getting married to her longtime beau. I'm very happy about this, and will be making a trip to Seattle in October to join in the festivities. Le chaim.

5. Joe Biden on 60 Minutes says: “Much of the ridicule of me is well deserved.” You have to like a man who can admit that. Most people can't manage a simple apology, no matter how badly they behave.

Sister Dottie Dixon; Marrying in Maine;

2009-04-26T11:49:00.004-06:00

1. Laurie Mecham is directing "The Passion of Sister Dottie Dixon" at the Rose Wagner theater beginning on May 1. May 1 is one day before my one year anniversary of meeting the Mail Carrier. I would not dream of missing any event associated even remotely with Laurie Mecham.

No one did "Kathy & Mo" better, including the original Kathy and Mo.

You look veh veh pretty tonight.

2. I love this painting by Edward Hicks. I love Noah's ark paintings, always with the animals, all coexisting peacefully. And the rain coming.3. Regarding how the U.S. has prosecuted waterboarding by other countries in the past:

After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning." Politifact went on to report, "A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps."

4. I wonder if one year is long enough to know someone before you can make a reasonably informed decision about marrying them. I'm coming up on one year since a mutual friend introduced me to the Mail Carrier at a Mexican restaurant on State Street. I had not agreed to a meeting before that, but I did that night, and the rest is history. It's been a very good year. One could do a lot worse than to love this woman I love.

5. Maine is deciding if gays can legally marry there, as once again New England leads the country in civil rights legislation. I think that if they decide yes, I predict that Maine is where we will get married. We both love it there.

Blue eyes

2009-04-25T23:40:00.005-06:00

1a. I just got a note from Dalton in Indiana and it made my weekend. Thanks for the hard work, the good news, and for being indispensable.

1b. My new office door, at right, before the glass was installed.

2. Claudia called me today and was wondering if two blue-eyed people can have a green-eyed child. I did some research today and the answer is: not likely. Possible, but not likely. And I found a great website that lets you plug in the eye colors of parents and grandparents to find out what color eyes are expected.

3. An interesting aside was that blue eyes have only been around for about 6,000 years. Apparently other eye colors are degrees of pigmentation of the basic brown, which is the eye color that everyone used to have, but blue eyes are a mutation, and the research I read said that all blue-eyed people on the planet are descendants from the same blue-eyed mutant grandparent. That is, a single common ancestor. Cool.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”.

4. Also cool was the discussion of why blue eyes was such a genetically popular mutation. Some mutations are genetically successful, meaning that they produce offspring that are more likely to reproduce, and some are unsuccessful. Blue eyes were genetic dynamite. One possibility is that blue eyes were so cool when they started 6,000 years ago, that flash of blue amid a sea of brown eyes, that everyone who had blue eyes "dated" like crazy and there were suddenly hundreds and then thousands of blue-eyed people.

5. I read today that David Duke, the former head of the KKK and all-around yucky guy, was detained in Prague. Why? Because in Prague it is illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened, which Duke has been doing for decades. So he was arrested and his lectures were canceled.

6. An excerpt from Dave Barry's "Mr. Language Person."

Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?

Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an “S” is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK’S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM’S.

7. You think your postman has it easy keeping track of all the times that you and your neighbors move? Check out this stack of pink cards. On each card is a yellow tab that lists the name of someone who has moved and their address. The mail carrier memorizes these. I didn't really believe it, so I pulled one out of the stack and read a name. The Mail Carrier replied with the address.

She is, of course, a good mail carrier, and not my mail carrier, who feels free to deliver mail to me from anyone who has ever lived in my house, no matter how long they've been gone.

But I have to say, he's been a good sport about delivering mail to my mailbox, which is currently lying on the ground, on account of my having no porch or deck anymore. It has been scraped off and hauled away.

Note to a Mailman

2009-04-23T07:13:00.002-06:00

The mailman is back at work after months off.

Here's a note she got.

Attn: Mail Carrier

My arms are very short and I can't reach deep into my mailbox. May I ask you to please leave my mail more towards the front? Thank you [smiley face inserted]

E**** R*****

Hawks: Redux

2009-04-19T21:48:00.004-06:00

1. The red-tailed hawks are back in their nest at the Salt Lake Cemetery. I follow them every year. Two years ago their nest got blown away in a wind storm after they'd been sitting on the eggs for 10 days or so. Then last year they didn't nest. I'm glad to see my old friends back. The parents work very hard at the nest. One stays with the nest and one is out hunting all the time. They take turns at each job.

It's early for the nesting.

2. From Cuteoverload. Throw pillows. 3. There was a freshly dug, open grave at the cemetery today. The funeral is probably tomorrow morning. It gave me an eerie feeling to see it there, freshly dug and awaiting the body.

2009 Subaru Outback

2009-04-18T07:54:00.004-06:00

I had to buy a new car. This took 15 minutes of research and looking at one car before I chose a 2009 Subaru Outback. Why that car? "Secure handling, excellent safety ratings." And I like Subarus. I was going to buy a hybrid, but they're on back order for months and I needed a car immediately. And they're not as safe. And things can happen suddenly that you don't expect.

I got an excellent price, but had the same fight I have had every time I have purchased a car in my lifetime. Before I said yes, I asked for the absolute final price of the car, including anything they were going to tack on except for tax and licensing. I always write this price down as though I am going to go elsewhere to compare prices. They give me a price. I say, "That's it? No dealer fees, no destination fees, no documentation fees, no salt-resistant undercoat that is "mandatory for the Salt Lake area," nothing else?" They always assure me that it's the final price.

Until it comes time to start signing, and then fees start appearing. In this case, a $400 "documentation fee," which I had already asked specifically about. I said no. He said it wasn't the price of the car, it was simply a mandatory fee that he had no control over, standard on all cars. I said I was going to leave if he didn't remove the fee, and he said he'd see what he could do. There were a couple of rounds of this, and I got up to leave, the Mail Carrier tried to coax me to sit down, the salesman brought out roses, free sleeping bags, and movie tickets, and I still wouldn't pay the fee.

Are there women who really fall for the roses? Oh, and he got down on one knee. I am not making this up.

He went back to renegotiate with his "boss," but I followed him back into the tinted-window room and said I wanted to talk to the guy I was dealing with. I saw through the tinted glass that the boss picked up a phone to pretend to be busy, which he wasn't, and I told him I wasn't paying the fee because I was told there were no additional fees of any kind. He caved.

I have a car. Hint to buyers: Cars are not selling. These guys are desperate.

Tick of the clock

2009-04-16T17:46:00.004-06:00

1. I am afraid to drive on the freeway. It feels like a death trap. The mail carrier is about to leave home to come pick me up from work, and I asked her to take State Street. She said no. That's because the freeway still feels safe to her. She doesn't know, except in her head, that everything safe about the freeway can change in one tick of the clock, and you'll never see it coming and can't defend yourself against it by being careful.

2. All night last night I made her wait on me by saying that my thumb hurt and "I almost died tonight." I pushed it reaaaaalllllly far, and it was funny. She let me get away with it the whole night, even when I was extending "cocktail hour" to about 1:15am to try and settle down.

3. I need to buy a new car.

4. Dalton said that he's glad he rides his bike instead of driving in traffic. I maintained that the statistics for bikes in traffic has got to be worse than for cars in traffic. The actual accidents will be less common, but the consequences for even a small accident are inclined to be devastating. I wonder where to find these statistics. I'll bet JB, a bike advocate/car hater, can cough them up in no time. (The biker at right is not Dalton, but it looks sort of half like him.)

My life didn't pass before my eyes

2009-04-16T00:44:00.002-06:00

Tonight on my way home from work I was in a car accident on I-15. It could have been terrible, but wasn't. I spun across six lanes of traffic at rush hour, and was hit by at least one truck before finally hitting the wall and stopping.

It always surprises me how loud freeway traffic is when you're outside your car. You have to shout to be heard in a face to face conversation, or speak directly into the other person's ear.

There are two things I remember vividly about the accident. First, the sensation that time ground down nearly to a halt. I moved so slowly through the whole thing that it seemed to last for a minute or more, when in fact it must have been just a couple of seconds. The slowing didn't give me any greater reaction time, because my reactions were as slow as everything else, but my thoughts stepped out of the action, as though I was observing slowly and from a long distance.

I was calm. I thought, "Is this how I'm going to die? Is it going to hurt? Do I want to die on the way home from work? I'm going to die on a Wednesday. I wonder if I am going to hit that wall. Is the car going to flip? If the car flips, will I be able to open the door? I can't stop it if it tilts any further."

I even thought, "My new insurance doesn't start for two more weeks. I'm about to get in an accident and I'm uninsured." As I spun I was struggling to right the car, to find a lane I could merge into, but my tire had already been bent under the car, so there was no hope of that.

The last thing I remember well is the face of the person who was coming right toward me in the fast lane. I thought, "He's going to broadside me on my side of the car. He's got to be going 70." He looked calm, too. I don't know how he missed me. It seemed like he was 10 ft away and moving at fast-lane speed.

I had a vivid sensation that other drivers were very annoyed at me for spinning across the lanes, especially the cars that hit me. In truth I'm sure that no one was annoyed. They were probably focused entirely on avoiding the black Subaru Forester that was careening out of control between the lanes.

I have just been reading theories about why time seems to slow down in a crisis. One theory is that memories are laid down with much more detail as all areas of the brain light up, looking for a solution. The more vivid the detail that is recorded, the longer it seems to have taken.

And in the middle of the accident, as the car was moving, I had one bright memory of my past. It was a single image, completely meaningless in the present context, and I have no idea why it was in my brain.

I came out of the accident with a car that is probably totaled and a hand that isn't broken. I thought it was, and spent hours in a badly overcrowded emergency room. There was another guy there whose lip was laid open from a car accident. I wondered if he was the other driver in my accident. He wasn't.

There was a teenage girl who was at the ER for something that wasn't visible, and her mother sat and stroked her hair almost the whole time. Her mother didn't have many teeth and spoke with a lisp. She said only a few things to us.

We're home now and the accident is starting to prey on my mind a bit.

I'm getting life insurance tomorrow. As though it ensures life.

The highway patrolman was rude.

Drama Queen in the Brain

2009-04-11T16:36:00.003-06:00

1. Imagine that an employee sends an instant message to another employee that he knows casually and says he is going to lure customers into the store and blow it up, killing them all and slightly injuring himself so that he is not a suspect and can collect insurance. He has sent other messages earlier saying that he's having a bad day.

Does one worry about this? Or does one assume it is a joke and forget it?

2. When I was first at Novell many years ago, there was a guy in the office next to mine who would erupt every day or two. He'd be alone in his office with the door closed, and I would suddenly hear him slamming the keyboard, throwing things off his desk, and saying the most violent, vile, icky things you can imagine. This could go on for maybe five minutes, and then the storm would pass as quickly as it started. When he emerged from his office later he would appear perfectly normal, chatting and talking as though nothing had happened.

I never said anything about it, but it would not have surprised me if he'd shown up for work one day and killed us all, as people sometimes do. He ended up moving away from Utah, which was surely a good move, but I still watch for his name whenever I hear about a murderous rampage in a workplace.

He would talk to me sometimes. He liked me better than he liked most people, because he felt that nearly everyone hated him and was out to get him. I don't know why he thought I wasn't. I would like to google him and find out where he is, but his name is far too common.

3. Interesting article about how our brains are not well suited to the kind of stress we encounter in modern life:

We're stuck with a mind that reacts to the mundane mundane worries of modern life - a falling stock market, a troubled marriage, taking the SAT - with a powerful set of primal chemicals that, once upon a time, were reserved for moments of "fight or flight". In other words, we treat everything like an existential threat, which is why a multiple choice exam can leave us panicky and breathless. The hypothalamus, it turns out, is an excitable drama queen, suffusing the bloodstream with adrenaline and cortisol whenever things get a little uncertain or unpleasant. The problem with this blunt reaction to stress - it's too often all or nothing - is that, as I've written numerous times, chronic stress is really bad for you. It causes chronic back pain, weakens the heart and kills brain cells. Unfortunately, the miserable economy seems to making things worse.

5. I love the image of the hypothalamus being a drama queen. It only has one response to "a grizzly bear is standing in front of you" and "your roof is leaking again and you're behind on a work assignment."

When States Will Allow Gay Marriage

2009-04-10T01:09:00.003-06:00

From "The Daily Dish," a map of when various states are predicted to lift the ban on gay marriage. They've got Utah going gay in about six years. When pigs fly, I say.

They've got the deep south going in about 15 years.

Can anyone believe that that many states (in black) will lift the ban this year? It seems too much to hope.

Sea Kittens

2009-04-09T21:53:00.003-06:00

1. Claudia left a comment for me and it was so exciting that I'm going to blog again.

2. I am loving being part of a small business. For years I've wanted to help run a small business. The thing I like about it is that everyone does everything. I'm VP of operations, but yesterday I did everything from planning future strategy to stuffing envelopes and getting a guy to come put in a door. And I love how easy it is to make changes to the organization. Even big changes. I've worked my entire career at bigger companies (and the Navy), and the bureaucracy can have a real deadening effect on innovation.

And I love the feeling that the work I do goes directly to the bottom line. I make a change that improves the workflow, and the company makes money immediately. It's very gratifying.

3. From "News of the Weird":

Alcohol Was Involved: A 19-year-old University of Colorado student required emergency assistance in March after spending all evening badgering fellow partygoers to hit him in the face. Finally, at 2 a.m., someone complied, resulting in a broken nose and massive bleeding.

4. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has launched a campaign to rebrand fish as "sea kittens" in an effort to make them seem lovable and therefore not eatable, and to make people change their minds about wanting to hook them through the mouth and drag them into a boat. It's interesting to check out the campaign. No idea if this sort of thing will catch on.

On a related front, Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column today in the NYTimes about the the growing movement that recognizes the necessity of treating farm animals humanely.

5. I hope everyone saw this wonderful photo in the Times when Vermont passed gay marriage legislation. These women have been waiting a long time.
.

Pressure to Marry

2009-04-04T21:44:00.003-06:00

1. From The Onion: Gay Couple Feels Pressured to Marry. Ha.

Same poem, different year

2009-04-04T19:32:00.003-06:00

Every year, in the spring, I either post or blog or email this poem. It is one of my all-time favorites, one of the poems of a lifetime, the lines and images flowing in and out of my head at odd times. I know that most of you readers won't read this, but you'll miss a treat. The last four lines conjure such an image for me.

Spring

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

You take the dog out

2009-04-04T10:14:00.003-06:00

1. There's a nice line from a column in the Times called, "Life Lessons from the Family Dog." The column is written by a man who is being treated for aggressive prostate cancer, and this week's column was about their dog. The line I liked was this one:

She’d jump up onto my sickbed last summer, nuzzle me and ask for her ears and pointy snout to be scratched. It made both of us happy as she sighed in satisfaction. And she was the subject of one of our favorite family jokes as I recuperated: “You take the dog out. I have cancer.”

2. Back to that story about the killings in New York. The Times wrote:

Armed with the two handguns and wearing a green jacket, the executioner came out of the rain through the glass front doors of the center, entering a reception area where he encountered two secretaries. He said nothing, but shot both.

I'm stuck on the use of the word "executioner." It seems silly and melodramatic to me in a serious news story. I would have chosen "gunman" or even "killer."

Beacon of civil rights

2009-04-04T08:08:00.003-06:00

1. New jobs don't leave enough time for blogging. I don't have time to even look at the news online anymore, or check my bank balance, or even see what my friends are doing on Facebook. But I did have time yesterday to see that ....

2. ...a miracle emerged out of the Midwest. Iowa. Iowa is suddenly a beacon of civil rights in an increasingly uncivil landscape. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa. Three down, 47 to go. Ames is not where I always imagined going to get married, but I have been there before. I was flying home from New York and my plane had to make an emergency landing when two of its engines failed.

Two. Out of four. We were greeted by a runway lined with emergency vehicles, lights flashing and spinning, but there were no pyrotechnics. Just a smooth, too-quiet landing. The airline "fixed" the problem by passing out mini-bottles for free and without limit as we waited in the airport for a new plane, so the eventual flight home was filled with blazingly drunk businessmen.

Why do people drink so much more when the liquor is free?

3. VP Joe Biden was apparently pressed for comment after the mass shooting in Binghamton, NY yesterday. I don't know why elected officials offer comments at times like this. It can only sound stupid and hollow and political. He proves my point:

The vice president said Americans must find a way to prevent the kind of bloodshed that erupted in Binghamton. “We’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this terrible, terrible violence,” Mr. Biden told a meeting in New York.

I, myself, have nothing to say about this crime. I don't think there is any sense to be made of it, though people will look for explanations. I remember more than a decade ago when an employee went into his place of business and shot a dozen people. The suits and hair on the network news were going on about how he felt slighted at work, passed over, angry at his boss. Is there anyone who hasn't at times felt slighted at work, passed over, and angry at his or her boss? That's all just noise. People don't shoot up workplaces because they're mad at their bosses. They change jobs or complain at the water cooler or die early, but they don't shoot up workplaces. (I changed jobs--the jury is still out on whether I will die early.)

People who don't shoot up workplaces probably can't peek into the minds of people who do. Something has gone awry in the mind, and in America there are automatic weapons at the ready when that something goes awry.

4. Garrison Keillor's brother died.

When your brother dies, your childhood fades, there being one less person to remember it with, and you are left disinherited, unarmed, semi-literate, an exile.

Seattle Peregrines and bag-headed kitties

2009-03-28T21:40:00.003-06:00

1. Here is a peregrine falcon that was perched outside my sister's 43rd-floor Seattle office. One reader insists it is a "Seattle Seahawk" and my niece that it is a "Hawkster Magoo."

2. I love, love, love this kitty video. At first I thought they were being a little mean to the cat, but keep watching. It might make you laugh.

3. I was remembering today the first time I heard the phrase, "World Wide Web." I was at work at Novell, hadn't been there too long, maybe a year, and one of my employees was talking about creating a place for shared content, and he told me about the world wide web, and how I could access it with a browser called Mozilla, and would start a page's address by typing "www." That must have been about 15 years ago.

I was also remembering that email was something that outside of a geekier world, no one used email except at work, and only within the company. I had to go to Novell's IT staff to find out how to send an email outside of Novell. I had to type, "inet:" at the beginning of the address.

Canadians under water

2009-03-27T00:03:00.003-06:00

1. The Red River is flooding in North Dakota, and is expected to reach levels two feel higher than the catastrophic floods a hundred years ago. Army engineers are putting in a second line of dikes, but there are houses between the first and second lines. I wonder if the flooding will end up in Winnipeg, where the Red River also passes. Winnipeg used to flood regularly until a floodway was built in the 60s. In 1950 there was a devastating flood that put many Canadians under water, not that this is a bad thing. The floodway is essentially a big ditch that is in some places nearly as wide as the river.

But the floodway was controversial when it was built. Canadians drank beer and argued on both sides of the issue. The opposition wanted to dredge the river and shore up the dikes, thus saving the land all along the river that was lost in the building of the floodway.

The floodway has saved Canadians from going under water at least 20 times since it was built.

2. Because the new business I'm in has a customer service center that I'm in charge of, I've started to notice customer service in the various companies I deal with. The all-time best is Amazon, whose reps are native English speakers, knowledgeable, courteous, and fast. Their manners are impeccable. They don't call me Kelli, they don't put me on hold and forget me, and they don't make idle chit chat. They just correct whatever problem I'm calling about, apologize for the problem, and I'm off.

Also excellent is Fidelity. My 401k is in shambles, but they're just so damn pleasant about it.

Also good is AT&T, though they have gone almost too far in asking me if I'm satisfied and if there's anything else they can do for me and that I can call back anytime if there's every anything else they can do for me.

Terrible? Delta. You can call three reps and get four different answers. They can be surly. Depending on what time of day you call, you can be diverted to non-native-English speakers who are often hard to understand and woefully undertrained.

XMission? Do not get me started or this blog will become R-rated.

Hummingbirds

2009-03-23T19:51:00.002-06:00

Hummingbirds consume between 3 and 8 calories a day.

The Laws of the Universe Change

2009-03-22T22:48:00.006-06:00

1. Tennessee just lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The worst they've ever done in the 35 years Pat Summitt has coached was the Sweet 16. You have never seen such an unhappy sea of orange t-shirts. I was going to have Sara and Dalton over next weekend to watch Tennessee in the regionals, but now we'll have to watch...Duke? I don't think so.

Utah is still playing, but tomorrow night they are playing the Turtle (Maryland), and shortly thereafter will be boarding their plane home.

2. Here are the rules of the universe as I knew them up until tonight:

Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Objects at rest tend to stay at rest.
Life can only come from life.
Tennessee does not lose in the first round.

3. So tomorrow I'm going to destroy some energy.

4. Jennifer leaves a comment in an earlier post saying that you can't pump your own gas in Oregon because they did not want to take jobs away from people, so people pump gas. I LOVE THAT. That is exactly how the world should work.

5. Whoopi Frame, RIP. Here she is last year in a pirate hat, and yesterday she died after a long life with my brother. She was a great cat.

Love this photo

2009-03-22T19:22:00.003-06:00

Joanne McCallie sees things differently than the referee.

Parallel universe

2009-03-22T10:34:00.002-06:00

1. I am starting a new career on Monday. An entirely new industry. I've wanted for years to get experience running a small business, and now I have a chance so I took it. I thought for a long time whether I wanted to stay in high tech or try something new, and I figured that life is short so I'd try something new. The question is whether the skills from my high tech life will transfer to a low tech small business. I'm thinking definitely yes. I am buzzing with energy about this new opportunity. And the fact that it all flowed together so quickly makes me believe it was meant to happen. That's if one believes that "meant to happen" even means anything, which presupposes that life has some purpose and higher direction. But that's a whole different bullet point. One that won't be covered here.

2. Last night we watched Marist play Virginia in the Women's NCAA first round games. You might remember that Marist is a little private school (4,000 students?) in upstate New York who went to the NCAA tournament for the first time two years ago. They were a small, scrawny, all-white team of girls who had no real business being in the tournament, but through some combination of luck and guts and chance that is classic March Madness, they made it all the way to the Sweet Sixteen. That's where they ran into Tennessee, the Orange Crush, after which they immediately got on the team bus and drove back to Poughkeepsie. But it was fun to watch them get that far.

Anyway, fast forward two years and here they are back in the tournament, still small, still all white, still out of place. Then a funny thing happened in the first half. Marist was running a play when suddenly and for no apparent reason one of their players turned and threw the ball directly to a very startled black female referee, who didn't know what else to do so just dropped the ball where she stood and called a turnover. It was wild.

Shauna deadpanned, "I'll bet that Marist player wanted to throw a basketball to a black woman just once in her career."

3. OK, so I just went out to Craigslist in order to see if the new company where I work has posted an open position that we're trying to fill, and I happened into the "Women Seeking Women" section just for kicks, and found it to be a strange parallel universe inhabited by lesbians I never imagined existed. Check out this listing.

Seeking submissive "sister" to serve my Master with me. Experience is a plus, but not necessary. Must be a very open minded pleaser who serves because it is who she is and not something she does. Must also be very romantic. We are seeking someone to hopefully serve 24/7 as I do. This is not for someone who just enjoys scenes, but someone who wants to please in every way all the time.

I don't even know what that means. I mean, other than the fact that we'd probably ALL like someone who wanted to please us in every way all the time. But I have a hunch that's not what she's talking about.

4. Here's another one I had to google to decipher:

I'd like someone 420 friendly (or someone who doesnt care that I am), someone who can enjoy a few drinks, and loves good food.

"420 friendly" means you smoke pot. Who knew.

Brazilian Wanderers

2009-03-19T11:02:00.010-06:00

1. Here are puppy jumps from last night's training.

She jumps left:

She jumps right:
2. By now, everyone has heard about the Brazilian Wandering Spider that was found in a shipment of bananas in a Tulsa Whole Foods store. "Wandering Spider" is about the creepiest name I can think of for a spider, except maybe, "Drop On You From Above Spider," because the last thing you want a spider doing is wandering. You want them encased in little cement boots at the bottom of lakes. In addition to being HUGE (this spider's leg span was 4-5"), the spider is apparently known for another behavior that is going to make Claudia's skin crawl:

Although rare, there have been instances of the spider depositing its nearly microscopic eggs in the ears and other orifices of human beings.

Birds and bonuses

2009-03-17T18:49:00.003-06:00

1. You can't pump your own gas in Oregon. I have never heard such a thing.

2. I am back at work in the past few days, and it feels like I entered the world of the living again. I loved my time home with the Mail Carrier, who is also off with an injury, but I hadn't realized what a loss I was feeling in terms of contributing something to a company's growth, and to people's jobs and well-being. It feels good to be back at it.

3. Most people take new chances with their careers in their 20s. I'm doing it in my 40s. I think this is typical of women. I want to start doing something I can feel an immediate, tangible impact on. I want to try new things. I feel reborn in a sense.

4. If you're a bonus-earning executive at AIG, don't you step up and say no to the bonus? Do you wait to be told by Congress? Does everyone have to tighten their belt but you?

5. I need to go birding. I miss birds.

6. Tennessee went #5 in the Berkeley NCAA women's basketball region. Pat Summitt has never gone so low in that tournament. And she's never failed to make the Sweet 16. This could be the year. She knew this was a building year, but my goodness. She made the comment in an interview the other night that today's kids don't have the drive and commitment of the kids in years past. Pat Summitt would inspire me to commitment just to avoid her wrath.

Earth to Coleman: You lost. Go get a new job.

2009-03-13T20:53:00.007-06:00

1. I have no idea what this sign at a turnout in Arches Nat'l Park means. Don't run faster than 15 mph? Don't drive that fast because there might be runners?
2. It's a remarkable park. Hoodoos in the foreground, the LaSals in the back. We tried to guess how many tarantulas were in the area we were looking at. It made us want to lock the car door. The following tarantula is for Claudia.3. It is 6" long. If it weren't a ghastly, horrific, terrifying spider, it might be pretty. That is its actual color. This kind of spider does not live in Utah.

4. I wonder if anyone has ever actually made this move. It is very athletic. If you look at the lines showing the movement of the arms and legs, you'll see that he is moving each set of arms and legs in the opposite direction. I am not sure that's what happens when you slip on the ice.
5. The Three Gossips.
6. The Four Gossips.
7. Somebody's foot was hurting and she couldn't get out of the car anymore. 8. The sheriff of Cook County, Illinois has refused to perform foreclosure evictions.

Until you’re physically out there, you can’t really get the magnitude of what you’re actually up to. It sounds like it’s an antiseptic process, and it’s anything but that. In the majority of the homes I was going into, there were always little kids around—I mean, really young kids, and we’re taking them and putting them out on the street. A lot of them were seniors, and a lot of them had issues with dementia. Once again—we’re taking them out to the street … Most of these neighborhoods are not good neighborhoods. Once [their belongings are] out on the street, we leave. While they’re off looking for transportation, the few things they own are being stolen.

9. Norm Coleman is hinting at calling for a re-vote for the US Senate spot that he lost to Al Franken in Minnesota. Earth to Coleman: You lost. Go get a new job.

Moab of a Friday morning

2009-03-13T10:48:00.003-06:00

1. We watched the UConn v Syracuse game on TV last night. For those of you who missed it, who surely must have been most of you, it went six overtimes until finally the right team won. (Those who know how I feel about UConn will know I was rooting for whomever they were playing, in this case Syracuse.) I have adopted the name Hasheem Thabeet as my own, just so I can hear people say it all day.

2. This photo was taken from the back patio of our room last night. The night sky was blue like that--just amazing. And there was a solitary bright star, and I made a wish on that star, and then I snapped this photo with one of the mail carrier's crutches as my tripod, and it made the star a snake. 3. We won't be doing a lot of hiking. The mail carrier wasn't going to let me post this photo because she was wearing her glasses down on her nose, but I photoshopped them out. 4. Here is the weirdest travel review I have ever read in my life. Of Arches. Just shoot the Japs??

This place is too popular! If you want to take some pictures semi-profesional, don't focus on the landscapes. Just shoot the Japs! Everywhere you go, you will see Japanese and German tourists. And after 2 hours under the hot sun you will wonder who won the war. Ehm, sorry WW II. I live close to the German border, and my hometown gets invaded every Saturday with thousands of Germans, but when I hike the desert, I only want to hear a cricket, rattlesnake, or even my wife. But here I only heard: "Mutti bleib stehen, ich mochte ein Foto machen!" Sorry, I don't speak German, so I won't quote them.

Name

2009-03-12T21:45:00.003-06:00

1. "Hasheem Thabeet" is the funnest name to say I have heard in a year.

$68,000

2009-03-10T18:23:00.004-06:00

1. I just read this quote on someone's website. It sums up what I think about people who think their families and friends and exes are all dysfunctional.

You can kiss your family and friends goodbye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world, but a world lives in you. --Frederick Buechner

We can't escape what our families are and what we are because we're one of them, nor who our partners are and what we chose in them. The more people demonize their families, the more I think that they're hiding from their own shadow.

2. It's official. I'm not going to the Women's Final Four. I put my tickets, which I bought a year ago at this time, up for sale on eBay last night. They sold in two hours. I've never been to a Final Four before, only to regionals, and I love them like crazy. But Tennessee isn't going to be in the Final Four this year, and the mail carrier will still not be walking, so I decided to pass. At right is the actual photograph that sold my tickets in two hours.

3. In a related note, Courtney Paris, star center for Oklahoma, has vowed to pay back her entire athletic scholarship if she does not carry Oklahoma to the national title this year. We're talking $68K. I suggest she start saving her lunch money because she's got a big check to write on April 8th. Paris is amazing, possibly the best in the game right now, but OU doesn't have the depth. They won't even make the Final Four. YHIHF.

Advice

2009-03-10T01:07:00.002-06:00

I got an email tonight in my spam folder that was titled, "Stun her with extreme intensity." This does not seem like a good thing, but since it probably comes from experts I will try it.

Freakish foot

2009-03-09T23:27:00.003-06:00

1. I hope JB is not still eating dinner. Icky scar, no? And freakishly swollen and misshapen foot and ankle.
2. When I was young I used to always get Tuesday and Friday mixed up, because they are both "passive" days. I told someone that once, a teacher, and she corrected me that I got Tuesday and Thursday mixed up. But she didn't know what she was talking about. Thursday is not at all passive. I have no idea what it means, but I wonder if anyone else understands it.

3. I have a friend who routinely erases people from her life if they do things she doesn't approve of. She has no long term friends, she's at odds with her family, and only one ex who is a friend. It's surprising how much this bothers me. How can someone be so careless with friendship? Like it comes along every day. She's in the perpetual present with her friends, and has no idea what it's like to see a friendship or romantic relationship through a hard time. But then, she seems to have suffered no ill effect from it. She seems to have no needs, never misses anyone, and maintains an unassailable self-righteousness. She recently wrote off a solid 7-year friendship. I don't get her. It makes me want to write her off, but that's hard for me to do.

4. Headline from The Onion: Son-Of-A-Bitch Mouse Solves Maze Researchers Spent Months Building