Apr 15, 2009 | General
Don’t quote me, but I believe this a tree of the green variety. Captain OCD tells me it is a larch. A certain kind of larch, but I dozed off in the telling so the most I can give you is that it is upright and twisty. I do know that it’s one of the few deciduous conifers, which explains the soft new needles making their 2009 debut.
This is a Japanese maple getting ready to show off. That’s a weepy larch in the background on the right. Yes, I know it is properly called “weeping,” but I’m staying with the y-suffix theme.
Apr 8, 2009 | General
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. Robert Frost
I am not a math whiz, and if my college major had been anything that required more than GUR-level math and science courses, I wouldn’t be able to brag about my college GPA. Let’s just say that I got a lot of help in my high school physics class, which was not difficult to come by, given that the ratio of girls to boys in the class was around 1.2 : 30, and the only reason I took the class is because the bastard high school chemistry teacher told me I’d never make it. Not that I’ve ever gotten a chance to brag about my college GPA: When was the last time someone asked you about your college GPA? Which reminds me:
A cousin went to a small, rural school, the kind where it’s not unusual to have fewer than a dozen class members. He’s always been a very big guy, and there was another very big guy in his class. Hence, their junior-high classmates often encouraged them to fight. Once in a while, because there’s not a lot happening on the prairie, they did. After one such episode my aunt got an invitation to the principal’s office, who told her and my cousin that he was not going to tolerate any more fighting. The consequence of one more fight would be that he’d withhold my cousin’s eighth-grade diploma. The eighth-grader cousin: “When was the last time anyone asked to see your eighth-grade diploma?” I believe that shows an intelligence and grasp of reality that can’t be taught.
I’m not a college snob and don’t believe that college is a good fit for everyone. My intelligent cousin takes care of himself and his business quite successfully without benefit of a college degree, and there are many people like him, just as there are many college graduates who are incompetent clowns. But I do believe that continuing past high school with some sort of formal education is beneficial for just about everyone, whether they use that education in a career or not. No education is ever wasted, even if you eschew the knowledge gained by earning a molecular biology degree to be a flagger on a construction crew because you’ve discovered that you like working outside and making impatient drivers smile despite themselves. Going to school exposes us to so much much more than formal education. Hearing points of view that differ from our own, meeting people from diverse backgrounds and realizing that there are more similarities than there are differences among people, and disagreeing vehemently with a roommate and realizing that the roommate is still a good person regardless of her stance on religion, which is completely opposite your own, are all valuable experiences that make us better people.
Our governor has suggested a substantial college-tuition hike. Headlines abound:
Gov. Chris Gregoire has asked lawmakers to let state universities increase tuition by up to 28 percent over the next two years . . . four-year universities would be authorized to raise tuition by up to 14 percent each year for the next two years. (SeattlePI.com)
University tuition could skyrocket 28 percent . . . Gov. Chris Gregoire on Tuesday proposed letting the state’s four-year schools hike tuition by 14 percent a year each of the next two years. (Spokesman-Review)
Gov. Chris Gregoire has asked lawmakers to let state universities increase tuition by up to 28 percent over the next two years . . . Under Gregoire’s current proposal, four-year universities would be authorized to raise tuition by up to 14 percent each year for the next two years. (KOMO News)
My lack of math-whizness aside, even I know that 14% for each of the next two years does not equal a 28% increase. It’s just under 30%. If your boss offers you a 14% raise each of the next two years and you sign a contract agreeing to a 28% total increase over what you’re making today (say, $50,000), you’ve been screwed out of $980. I should mention that The Seattle Times got the math right.
In light of this egregious display of ignorance (I’m ignoring the fact that everyone writing these stories most likely has a college degree, because the bigger problem is that too many of us don’t question such statements), we should be spending more money on getting people higher education, not erecting walls to keep them out. And we should do better about making sure potential students know of all the current options available to them. I am constantly amazed at the people who don’t know about financial aid. Community college students working two jobs and going to school who don’t know they qualify for grants, scholarships, and loans. High school seniors who want to go to college but know better than to ask their parents for help and so resign themselves to the hope of getting a full-time job in a grocery store instead of a part-time job and a college or vocational-school education.
C2 works in the psych department at her university. Because she was studying abroad until January, she missed out on all the beginning of the year announcements. The school seems to be making a concerted effort to get the word out about different forms of financial aid because she just heard that anyone who qualifies for work-study can qualify for food stamps. I know a lot about financial aid, and I had never heard that before, so I looked it up. Turns out it’s true, with some caveats. Go to the USDA for more information about the program. I can hardly stand to think about students who dropped out because they couldn’t afford school and food, when help was there all along. No one should ever assume that they or their children can’t afford college until investigating all the resources available. There are many valid reasons to not go to college, but lack of money shouldn’t be one of them
Mar 16, 2009 | Whinging
I didn’t actually smash the old clock radio, but put it on a shelf in another room because one never knows when one might need another $19 clock radio that one hates. The new clock radio sets itself, so Friday afternoon I took just a perfunctory trip through the owner’s manual to be sure I set the alarm time correctly. This one is much simpler, with the buttons placed in areas less likely to be mistakenly pressed, thus it is less likely to induce a series of temper tantrums at 4:00 AM. I pressed the button that indicates which days the alarm is set to go off, a handy feature, and it appeared that it was set for weekdays, a sensible option.
Saturday morning, a few minutes before 4:30, we were awakened to a loud beeping noise. Any number of devices in the house are capable of beeping (and anything capable of making any sort of electronic sound is necessarily within my purview), so it took a minute to figure out that it was the old alarm clock, with its cord wound around it, stuffed on a shelf in a different room, and that some idiot had obviously failed to remove the batteries, again. I never would have guessed sound could have traveled so effectively from a different room with a closed door. We both got up because Captain OCD didn’t know where I had put it and I’m not overly articulate at that hour of the morning after being woken suddenly and unexpectedly. Or after being woken in any manner at all, at any time. He finally found it and attempted, without his glasses, to figure out how to get the batteries out while I got back in bed. Finally, the beeping stopped and I hoped that I’d be able to get back to sleep.
A few minutes later Captain OCD came back in the bedroom and found me laughing, crawling over his side of the bed. The same idiot who had forgotten to take the batteries out of the old clock had misinterpreted the instructions she hadn’t read and the new alarm was set to go off all seven days of the week. At 4:30 AM.
Mar 13, 2009 | Whinging
It’s somewhere between 4:00 and 4:30 AM and Captain OCD gets up for the morning and turns off his alarm, which has not yet sounded. I have only just gotten to sleep, so that he remembers to turn off his alarm is much appreciated. Except that at 4:30 I hear a beeping sound. He’s not turned it off, just turned it from radio to alarm. After figuring out what is going on, I reach over to turn it off. But I have no idea how to operate that clock radio in the dark, and neither does he if the operation extends to anything other than pushing Off, and for that dark or light makes no difference because that’s all he knows how to do regardless. I think about grabbing the flashlight and my glasses to figure it out, but I’m distracted by my whimpering “Stop it!” and “Come on, you bastard!” and “Shut the fuck up!”
Should it ever come up, know that blindly pushing buttons and sliding switches and spinning dials is no way to silence a clock radio. The radio turns on. It won’t turn off. It turns off, but a red light is now visible on the face. That can only mean that the bastard has something planned for later. No matter what I push or slide, the light won’t go off. Then I see NAP on the other side of the face. While I’ve never in my life used the nap setting on a clock radio, I’m pretty sure it means it has plans for some point in the near future. I blindly do some more pushing and sliding and whimpering. The radio comes back on, with an obvious count-down on the face. Fifty-four minutes before it turns back off? The clock radio has two separate alarms. While whatever I’m pushing and sliding and spinning is alternating between Alarm 1 and Alarm 2, I’m unable to push or slide or spin to achieve no alarm.
I’ll just unplug it, even though that means reprogramming the stupid thing with owner’s manual in hand because it’s not my clock radio so I don’t know it well. I know you’re not supposed to unplug anything by yanking violently on the cord several feet away from the plug, but I do anyway. The radio is still on. Apparently I did, after all, snake the cord under and behind the bed to the outlet back there, an operation that took, as I’m beginning to recall, lying on my stomach with a flashlight between my teeth while trying to snake the cord around and behind the big, flat boxes of my stash of book-making and binding paper. I wonder if chewing through the cord will take long. I’m not about to repeat the snaking process in reverse, at 4:32 AM, so I yank until the clock radio goes dark and silent. I think about throwing it across the room, but worry about breaking the mirror (is that a sign that I’m growing up?), so I forcefully toss it aside. I’ll deal with resetting it later. I can’t complain about how complicated and unintuitive the controls are because I am constantly telling Captain OCD to quit whining about how everything is needlessly complicated and why can’t things have simple on and off buttons and if people were supposed to text all cell phones would have keyboards like typewriters (so he can text with two fingers). Meanwhile, he can program an irrigation clock in his sleep, the interface of which is a kludged-together mess of the cutting-edge technology of the early ’80s that involves turning dials while simultaneously flipping switches and moving pins in time with the cryptic instructions on the red LCD display.
Apparently I was doing more than whimpering because Captain OCD comes in and asks what is wrong. I mumble something, all of which is unintelligible but “fucking alarm clock.” I do remember managing to keep “your” out of it.
“Oh, I think I hit a button yesterday.”
I keep my remark that it would have been nice to have been told that yesterday, before this morning, after I’d finally gotten to sleep, to myself (again, am I growing up?). He goes back out to watch the Weather Channel so he’ll know what the weather is doing on Mt. Wilson, wherever the fuck that is, and to finish making his lunch. I try to go back to sleep. If I were the praying sort, I’d have prayed that he wouldn’t come in later to wake me up to tell me how much rain Mt. Wilson got yesterday.
I didn’t need a rain report for Mt. Wilson because the dark and silent clock started beeping. Of course I forgot about the bastard batteries.
Let’s hope Fred Meyer’s return policy covers small appliances that have been smashed by crybaby, sleep-deprived spouses.
Mar 6, 2009 | How to
Along with thanks for your purchase!, a bogus booking number, poor grammar, a .zip attachment, and the fact that you haven’t purchased any airline tickets, is this:
On board you will be provided:
– beverages;
– food;
– daily press.
You are guaranteed top-quality services and attention on the part of our benevolent personnel.
Food and drink on a plane? Would you be benevolent if your salary had been slashed and pension plundered? Busted!
Mar 4, 2009 | How to
For someone who loves gadgets, I’ve settled on a decidedly low-tech way of keeping all of my random notes together. Everything that comes out of my printer that is not used goes, upside down, into a cubbyhole to be used as scratch paper. I haven’t bought small notepads in years, so my desk was always littered with dozens of those pages with the address where to send the wedding present, recipes, URLs, notes from customer-service calls, guest lists, passwords, menus, FTP settings, grammar tips, and all manner of other ephemera scribbled on the backs of them. That stack of paper (consistently a couple of inches high) is great for shopping lists, taking measurements for projects so that I can bring the piece of paper from the kitchen outside downstairs to the saw (and forget the paper on the saw and so have to grab another one for the next measurement), and leaving notes on the door that say “Buy cat fud!” But they weren’t so great for keeping track of everything I was trying to keep track of.
Fascination with gadgets is in my blood and I am no stranger to electronic organizational gizmos. My dad created a searchable index for the contents of all of his Vette Vues magazines on his TRS-80. My uncle suggested he had too much time on his hands, while I thought it was an excellent use of his time. There is an old Palm Zire 71 sitting on my desk, now being used as an address book. I’m on my second Windows Mobile phone and have downloaded all kinds of note takers. I’ve created databases and Word files to act as repositories for all this information. I’ve investigated many and downloaded some productivity tools designed for declutterization. Devised filing systems to collect and organize all this stuff. Unless you use any of them, though, they are just more clutter. The road to clutter-overload hell is paved with just these sorts of good intentions to categorize all those scraps of information. The way out of that hell is to find a solution and stick to it, no matter how much you want to resist the simplicity and dead-treeness of it.
This is working for me:
Composition books. The saddle-sewn kind, not spiral bound or anything with pages that tear out easily. I’m on my second one and am astonished to see that my first one covers December 2005 to December 2007 (clearly, I haven’t been diligent about recording everything in these notebooks or I’d have gone through a lot of them by now). Nothing is organized beyond that it’s all in one place. I recently had to find all the information regarding passwords and access settings for several e-mail addresses (of course, I thought I’d recorded that in a file), and it took just a minute to look through one of these notebooks to find it all. All jumbled together on just these four pages are
- phone numbers and part numbers for some not stupid-expensive yet high-quality drawer slides (Gliderite, and we’ve been very happy with them) that I found recommended in the home forums on GardenWeb (by far the single-most useful site for whenever I do any home-improvement project or appliance purchase) when researching the kitchen project
- measurements for the proposed soapstone countertops (we ended up using slate) specs from a Tom’s Hardware System Builder article when I was researching building another computer (I bought one instead this time)
- info on Vista 64-bit vs. XP 64-bit
- dates, flight options, and other details for C2’s friend’s wedding in another state (all for naught because C2 didn’t get back from Chile in time, but I can tell you how much a flight from Seattle to Garden City cost last December)
- a list of Paul Newman’s movies because after he died I realized that I hadn’t actually seen more than a few of his movies, and that’s nearly unforgivable
- notes on adding extra brake-light sockets to my existing tail-light housings
There are so many better and more efficient ways to organize this kind of information, but unless you do the work necessary to keep up those systems, they’re useless. Besides holding information I may need to retrieve later, my composition books end up as journals. I can see that I was researching a new cell phone at the same time I was looking for oxygen and acetylene tanks for a Christmas gift at the same time I was looking for pork marsala recipes for dinner with friends. At night, I can use the light from the Zire’s screen to find the part number for my headlight clips in my composition book.
