If anyone sees a pair of black fingerless fleece gloves, please let me know: I have lost them and really want them back. They're from EMS, but they don't seem to sell them any more. I have inadequate replacements from REI, but I'd love my fleece ones back.
Haven't done this for a while, so here we go. It's been a hell of a month.
Bill Bennett, moralist, former education secretary, Reagan's chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, former drug czar (some news sources call it something else, which I find entertaining--something less authoritarian like "Director of National Drug Policy", lest we think of the thousands of nonviolent drug offenders spending decades in prison while murderers and rapists get three to ten with good behavior)--well, he turns out to be...a heavy gambler. A really. really. heavy gambler. Like, a "lost eight million dollars in the past decade" kind of heavy gambler. America's most famous moral preacher has lost more money in casinos than I can reasonably expect to earn in my lifetime.
Moby went and found the original proclamation for Mother's Day. Looks like maybe it didn't quite start out as what it is now...
In Texas, legislative Democrats disappeared to avoid voting on a GOP redistricting proposal which would leave the Democrats with even less power. And now we know what the Office of Homeland Security is really useful for.
I have no words for this.
And lastly, there is a powerful and secret Jesus cabal working to gain power in the world. I swear. You know it's true if you think about it for just a minute. I can't make this shit up.
There's something inherently very wrong with a bright aquamarinr Chevy Blazer with a foot-high Bon Jovi sticker in the rear window. I can't imagine seeing that outside of California.
For sheer persistent irritation, this past week and a half ranks well with any other period in my life, I think. At work we switched to a new development environment last week. Or rather, we tried. It was more than a little bit of a mess, and something that might have been a couple days took a week. We keep all our work in a version control system, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe in our case, which essentially stores the differences between files over time, so if we want to pull up a file as it was at 3:13pm on March 22nd, we can. Jerry is still used to working alone as an engineer, I think, and being otherwise surrounded by non-technical people: SourceSafe required some configuration changes to make the switch to the new environment, but rather than talking to me about it, he started making the changes sort of piecemeal, and removing my access to stuff he needed me not to change.
This is what we refer to as "a technological solution for a social problem", and it never works in any context, and it didn't work here. So I'm trying to get him to talk to me about shit like this, and in turn I'm trying to be receptive and open to listening, instead of going with my feeling-of-the-moment that I have lots of work to do and I don't really care what he does--because I may not care right then but I'll sure as hell care when he goes and does something I have drastic and valid objections to--I can stay and listen and talk. This is a running theme these days.
Did you know that two people in a loving relationship can be completely, brutally honest with each other, and if something seems to go wrong, they can just sit and talk about it? And they don't have to yell or scream or blame or anything? They can just say what they feel and figure out where those feelings are coming from? I thought this sort of thing was mythical.
The other primary irritation is that it keeps making more and more sense for me to move to the Peninsula. And I wish it'd stop, because I loathe the Peninsula. It's suburban and mediocre and dull and sprawled and it is fucking impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in the evening, and barely any better during the day (for those of us who don't consider Starbucks to be good, and who like Peet's but would really rather avoid chains and support local businesses just on principle). On the other hand, the Peninsula currently houses my relationship, my job, and an aikido dojo I'd be pretty happy training at, which all makes for a rather tenuous hold on the East Bay. The fact that I get all bitter and annoyed at the thought of leaving Houseness and Aikido of Berkeley means it's not time to do it yet, but that's the direction things seem to be going. I doubt I'll ever be able to find work in the East Bay, and damn, but I'm just sick of 40-80 minute commutes.
None of it's very important, of course. If I relax my face I can be myself and see that more clearly.