"This is inconsistant with the way people sit in chairs."
Okay now for an explanation of why the offensive contact thing is a big deal - and why it isn't, supposedly. (I'm referencing the blog entry just before this one.)
Far from quibbling over a mere redundancy, I think it's pretty obvious to see why the inclusion of the phrase "unconsenting contact" would be concerning - in its broadest sense people could be suing for ANY normal day to day incidental contact. Now in practice the law has limitations to prevent people from abusing this phrase - for instance there is the theory of implied consent. The example the professor gave was, if you get on the NYC subway, even if you are wearing a T-shirt that says "Don't touch me!" and get on a bullhorn and say "I do not consent to be touched", the act of getting on the subway - an institution which you *know* by its nature is one where people are squashed together like sardines - you are giving your implied consent to be touched . . . at least in so far as is unavoidable on the subway. IN addition to implied consent there's this notion about it has to be in ways "outside those of accepted social usages." So you can't sue if someone taps you on the shoulder to get your attention because that's accepted social usage.
Despite these provisions built in to supposedly protect against abuse of the statute however, this guy sued three surgeons for battery and WON. What did the surgeons do? They performed a sucessful surgery on his mother. The guy had given his consent to the first two doctors to do the surgery, and then the third guy actually performed the surgery, so the guy got all three of them. What an asshole!!! I mean it was a freaking successful surgery, that he had consented to! His argument was that the third surgeon was "too insensitive" and that he wouldn't have consented. So it was an unconsenting touch. Man that ticked me off! Well okay not actually ticked me off, but that's like one of those causes I wanted to take up in class. It's just so wrong!
This is part of why I can't decide if I like my Torts class. The professor is a younger prof who's extremely amusing in the hypotheticals he uses in class (Jackie Chan figured into an assault example yesterday), and the subject matter is fairly straightforward, unlike freaking Constitutional law. But you have to read these cases where it seems like people are suing for really dumb things, or outrageous things, or what not - as the prof says you're really seeing people at their worst. But the rules are actually fairly straightforward to apply, if you can get past the fact the inclination to judge something based on your gut instinct of what *should* be right and wrong and instead of look at what the law says it's not too hard. Just annoying when you have to say "okay by the definitions we know hold of battery the surgeon did perform a battery for successfully fixing this problem for this old lady.
But a professor who regularly makes the whole class burst into laughter is worth it, I think, given the high stress nature of first semester first year of law school. I guess you have to have a sense of humor if you're going to practice torts!
As for the quote at the top, that was one of his one liners that had the whole class laughing - it was hilarious in context. The first case we studied in torts was this woman suing this 5 year old boy for pulling the chair out from under her while she was sitting. The boy tried to give some really complicated defense explaining how he hadn't actually been trying to make her fall down. The professor was good-naturedly poking fun at this really unbelievable story (because c'mon, who hasn't tried to pull a chair out from someone when they were 5 or 6 or 7?) and that line came up.
(The woman had fractured her hip from the fall, so there were damages, and eventually the court was forced to find against the boy and award damages, but the parents are generally not held liable in intentional tort cases like battery, so all the woman could do, as Prof. Wendel said, was garnish the kid's allowance. It was, he said, a really pointless suit to bring.)
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
I'm the "unconsenting touch" chick who lost her power cord.
So I have apparently ensured that at least 50% of the first year class knows me by name and face. Yesterday in Torts I drew attention to myself by pestering the professor about why the phrase "or unconsenting touch" was necessary to the definition of battery, since it seemed to me to be subsumed within the other key phrase, "offensive contact." (For a discussion of why I was making an issue of this,see below.) The pestering alone would only have gotten me face recognition. But it was right at the end of class, and after leaving the class I discovered I couldn't find my power cord to the laptop. When an extensive search failed to produce the power cord I shot off an email to the student list serve (thus sending out my name) - which reaches all the law students - saying basically "I lost my power cord - I was that girl pestering the prof about unconsenting touch in Torts - anybody accidentally pick mine up?" (Very possible since a lot of people have Dells that use that power cord. And btw the list serve gets used all the time for stuff like that so it's not a big deal.)
So this morning everyone was asking me "did you find your power cord?" And in fact when I went to the student activity fair this afternoon, this third year who happened to have given my group our tour of the lawschool doing orientation was like "oh did you find your power cord?" I was trying to figure out how she had managed to put my name with my face. Of course I do have my orientation nametag stuck to my bookbag, mostly to cover up the Dell sticker, but I don't think she was in a position to have seen that before she said that to me!
But yeah, so I'm the "unconsenting touch" chick who lost her power cord.
So I have apparently ensured that at least 50% of the first year class knows me by name and face. Yesterday in Torts I drew attention to myself by pestering the professor about why the phrase "or unconsenting touch" was necessary to the definition of battery, since it seemed to me to be subsumed within the other key phrase, "offensive contact." (For a discussion of why I was making an issue of this,see below.) The pestering alone would only have gotten me face recognition. But it was right at the end of class, and after leaving the class I discovered I couldn't find my power cord to the laptop. When an extensive search failed to produce the power cord I shot off an email to the student list serve (thus sending out my name) - which reaches all the law students - saying basically "I lost my power cord - I was that girl pestering the prof about unconsenting touch in Torts - anybody accidentally pick mine up?" (Very possible since a lot of people have Dells that use that power cord. And btw the list serve gets used all the time for stuff like that so it's not a big deal.)
So this morning everyone was asking me "did you find your power cord?" And in fact when I went to the student activity fair this afternoon, this third year who happened to have given my group our tour of the lawschool doing orientation was like "oh did you find your power cord?" I was trying to figure out how she had managed to put my name with my face. Of course I do have my orientation nametag stuck to my bookbag, mostly to cover up the Dell sticker, but I don't think she was in a position to have seen that before she said that to me!
But yeah, so I'm the "unconsenting touch" chick who lost her power cord.
"Learning law by the yard is hard, but by the inch it's a cinch."
*yes it's a groaner - but at least Summers is taking a stab at a sense of humor!
The whole presentment of materials in law school I find kind of frustrating. it seems to me that the whole thing would be easier if they would deal in a straightforward manner with telling us first what is clearly dileneated, and then later introducing us to all the complexities that happen in the gray or contested areas of law.
But no. Instead their explicit policy is to give us the borderline cases first, the ones where the application of the rule is murky and can be reasonably argued in completely opposing ways. The whole reasoning behind it is that they want us to think about all the issues lawyers and judges have to think about in these murky cases, they want us to argue with each other and the profs, struggle with it, and somehow in the process we'll develop the analytical skills, the types of reasoning processes that are specific to the legal realm.
The problem with this is that we don't even really know what the law is - we're expected to work it out from the case. That's also supposed to be part of the reasoning process. But how are you supposed to work out what the law is from a case that's admittedly pushing at the fringes of where the law is? If the law was stated to us clearly, and then they gave us a murky case, it might be possible to use our analytical skills to argue away at the murky case. Or, if the case was a clear illustration of an undoubtedly correct application of the law, then w/o being told what the law was we would stand a chance of working it out for ourselves from the cases.
But instead they throw us into this realm where we don't get anything, we have to make it all up as we go and hope it comes out the way they want. At the very least I can say that the profs don't expect us to necessarily come to the right conclusion . . . this is why we have no graded assignments but simply a final at the end of the semester. Asking us to try to come up with "right answers" right now would be ludicrous. We're supposed to trust that it will all make sense by the end of the semester.
And I believe it will, because after all they train lots of competent lawyers. But all the same, in my tired exhausted state, the structure kind of pisses me off. Granted, I'm at the end of a very bad haul . . . Tuesday and Wednesday my section has all four of our core classes, which amounts to 8-16 hours of prep for Tuesday and 8-16 hours of prep for Wednesday, plus full days of classes both those days. Tuesday especially sucks because I both have to be in class all day *and* have to do the maximum load of work . . . which means Wednesdays also suck, with only having the slightest mitigating factor of being able to say "well at least I've finished Tuesday!"
And this is repeated, week after week. And I'm in week one. So I feel like being grumpy. And don't even try to tell me "well what did you expect from law school". Yeah I signed on for this, I know - but that doesn't mean I signed a contract not to complain about it!! :-P
*yes it's a groaner - but at least Summers is taking a stab at a sense of humor!
The whole presentment of materials in law school I find kind of frustrating. it seems to me that the whole thing would be easier if they would deal in a straightforward manner with telling us first what is clearly dileneated, and then later introducing us to all the complexities that happen in the gray or contested areas of law.
But no. Instead their explicit policy is to give us the borderline cases first, the ones where the application of the rule is murky and can be reasonably argued in completely opposing ways. The whole reasoning behind it is that they want us to think about all the issues lawyers and judges have to think about in these murky cases, they want us to argue with each other and the profs, struggle with it, and somehow in the process we'll develop the analytical skills, the types of reasoning processes that are specific to the legal realm.
The problem with this is that we don't even really know what the law is - we're expected to work it out from the case. That's also supposed to be part of the reasoning process. But how are you supposed to work out what the law is from a case that's admittedly pushing at the fringes of where the law is? If the law was stated to us clearly, and then they gave us a murky case, it might be possible to use our analytical skills to argue away at the murky case. Or, if the case was a clear illustration of an undoubtedly correct application of the law, then w/o being told what the law was we would stand a chance of working it out for ourselves from the cases.
But instead they throw us into this realm where we don't get anything, we have to make it all up as we go and hope it comes out the way they want. At the very least I can say that the profs don't expect us to necessarily come to the right conclusion . . . this is why we have no graded assignments but simply a final at the end of the semester. Asking us to try to come up with "right answers" right now would be ludicrous. We're supposed to trust that it will all make sense by the end of the semester.
And I believe it will, because after all they train lots of competent lawyers. But all the same, in my tired exhausted state, the structure kind of pisses me off. Granted, I'm at the end of a very bad haul . . . Tuesday and Wednesday my section has all four of our core classes, which amounts to 8-16 hours of prep for Tuesday and 8-16 hours of prep for Wednesday, plus full days of classes both those days. Tuesday especially sucks because I both have to be in class all day *and* have to do the maximum load of work . . . which means Wednesdays also suck, with only having the slightest mitigating factor of being able to say "well at least I've finished Tuesday!"
And this is repeated, week after week. And I'm in week one. So I feel like being grumpy. And don't even try to tell me "well what did you expect from law school". Yeah I signed on for this, I know - but that doesn't mean I signed a contract not to complain about it!! :-P
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
!@#$:@L#K:LK:@L#K$:@L#$K
That's about as introspective as I get right now. Boy did I waste a lot of time today - and now I'm feeling slightly paniced because despite spending the better part of 8 hours on what boiled down to about 10 pages of substantive stuff out of a whole whopping 30 pages (sense the sarcasm) of reading assigned for tomorrow's 3 classes, I'm still wishing I had two more hours of time tonight - about another 30 - 45 minutes to make sure my Civil Procedure stuff is down pat, and the rest to finish up Constitutional law, which I didn't finish to my satisfaction this morning.
Of course it doesn't take that long just to read the stuff. Mostly I'm spending a lot of time writing the case brief as I go, which means for the moment outlining the issues at question, the holdings on those issues, and the rules of law. See, all this would be nice and straightforward if they said "here are the issues, here are the applicable rules of law, now see how this case demonstrates them and see if you understand why the court made the holding it did." Oh no. No that would be far too easy - or more to the point, that wouldn't allow us to develop the mental skills of reasoning they want us to develop. It's true that I probably understand all this more by having to work all this stuff out the hard way - it's actually acknowledged that the professors omit from the casebooks the parts of the decisions that explicitly summarize this stuff.
I'm hearing a big fat "I told you so" from Heather and Tom in my head. ;-)
But this afternoon I just managed to be non-productive in multiple ways, including being distracted by the Color Guard performing with the Big Red band in front of the campus store, and walking to the wrong copy store, and IMing people for a whopping 15 minutes. And tonight I allowed myself a full hour for dinner at the welcome BBQ - I had intended to only be there 15 minutes but I sat at a table with a couple former merchant marines and took the opportunity to ask them what the heck merchant marines were - a question I have honestly wondered for a long time. That resulted in a 45 minute conversation on the topic. It actually was both interesting and entertaining; the wife (the non-law student) was very animated in telling stories about crazy mariners.
But my self-preservation unit, i.e. GUILTY FEELINGS, has finally hit peak and I have to go back to work from my little break before I relax myself into a heart attack.
That's about as introspective as I get right now. Boy did I waste a lot of time today - and now I'm feeling slightly paniced because despite spending the better part of 8 hours on what boiled down to about 10 pages of substantive stuff out of a whole whopping 30 pages (sense the sarcasm) of reading assigned for tomorrow's 3 classes, I'm still wishing I had two more hours of time tonight - about another 30 - 45 minutes to make sure my Civil Procedure stuff is down pat, and the rest to finish up Constitutional law, which I didn't finish to my satisfaction this morning.
Of course it doesn't take that long just to read the stuff. Mostly I'm spending a lot of time writing the case brief as I go, which means for the moment outlining the issues at question, the holdings on those issues, and the rules of law. See, all this would be nice and straightforward if they said "here are the issues, here are the applicable rules of law, now see how this case demonstrates them and see if you understand why the court made the holding it did." Oh no. No that would be far too easy - or more to the point, that wouldn't allow us to develop the mental skills of reasoning they want us to develop. It's true that I probably understand all this more by having to work all this stuff out the hard way - it's actually acknowledged that the professors omit from the casebooks the parts of the decisions that explicitly summarize this stuff.
I'm hearing a big fat "I told you so" from Heather and Tom in my head. ;-)
But this afternoon I just managed to be non-productive in multiple ways, including being distracted by the Color Guard performing with the Big Red band in front of the campus store, and walking to the wrong copy store, and IMing people for a whopping 15 minutes. And tonight I allowed myself a full hour for dinner at the welcome BBQ - I had intended to only be there 15 minutes but I sat at a table with a couple former merchant marines and took the opportunity to ask them what the heck merchant marines were - a question I have honestly wondered for a long time. That resulted in a 45 minute conversation on the topic. It actually was both interesting and entertaining; the wife (the non-law student) was very animated in telling stories about crazy mariners.
But my self-preservation unit, i.e. GUILTY FEELINGS, has finally hit peak and I have to go back to work from my little break before I relax myself into a heart attack.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
"She thought it was just a phase, and then I got the scales of justice tatooed on my body."
Wow! You see what I mean about the zealotry of some of these people? That was a girl I met at the pizza event (at which I received no pizza having arrived 1/2 hour late) talking about how she'd wanted to be a lawyer since she was 10, and how her mother used to think she'd grow out of it. Yikes!
Then of course, there was the second-best quote of the night. I met this guy Yosef earlier in the day, and was struck by how much he reminded me of (Westbourne) Matt. At the end of the pizza event I ran into him again, and he and this guy Andy and I stood around talking. It became pretty clear once their jokes dipped into dillithium and warp speed references what kind of guys I was dealing with here - although I was already suspecting. ;-) I said, "you know there's a sci-fi club here I bet you guys would enjoy." and Andy replied "Actually, I would like to find some gamers." And being the helpful person that I am, I confessed that I did indeed know where he could find the gamers on campus. (Friday nights in Goldwin Smith.) To which Yosef said, "You know, when I first met you - and forgive me if this is sexist - but I thought you gave off an aura of a gaming groupie."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What have you done to me you crazy boys!!????!!! A gaming groupie!?
Okay, it's hilarious, I admit it. I definetly saw the humor in it. But all the same I had this real urge to go out and drink lots of beer to wipe off this apparent aura I have.
It's because I'm not wearing make-up, isn't it?? I knew I shouldn't have. But I accidentally left the make-up case in Rob's car (I think) and therefore didn't have it tonight.
But I'm getting up extra early to go to CVS in the morning before orientation stuff starts and get some. In fairness, they're taking pictures for the law school directory so I'd like to be done up a little, but also, I think I need to tweak my image a bit. ;-)
Wow! You see what I mean about the zealotry of some of these people? That was a girl I met at the pizza event (at which I received no pizza having arrived 1/2 hour late) talking about how she'd wanted to be a lawyer since she was 10, and how her mother used to think she'd grow out of it. Yikes!
Then of course, there was the second-best quote of the night. I met this guy Yosef earlier in the day, and was struck by how much he reminded me of (Westbourne) Matt. At the end of the pizza event I ran into him again, and he and this guy Andy and I stood around talking. It became pretty clear once their jokes dipped into dillithium and warp speed references what kind of guys I was dealing with here - although I was already suspecting. ;-) I said, "you know there's a sci-fi club here I bet you guys would enjoy." and Andy replied "Actually, I would like to find some gamers." And being the helpful person that I am, I confessed that I did indeed know where he could find the gamers on campus. (Friday nights in Goldwin Smith.) To which Yosef said, "You know, when I first met you - and forgive me if this is sexist - but I thought you gave off an aura of a gaming groupie."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What have you done to me you crazy boys!!????!!! A gaming groupie!?
Okay, it's hilarious, I admit it. I definetly saw the humor in it. But all the same I had this real urge to go out and drink lots of beer to wipe off this apparent aura I have.
It's because I'm not wearing make-up, isn't it?? I knew I shouldn't have. But I accidentally left the make-up case in Rob's car (I think) and therefore didn't have it tonight.
But I'm getting up extra early to go to CVS in the morning before orientation stuff starts and get some. In fairness, they're taking pictures for the law school directory so I'd like to be done up a little, but also, I think I need to tweak my image a bit. ;-)
I think trying to keep my living room straightened up is going to be my full-time job. Maybe it will be easier when I'm running around less, but as every day it seems like I bring something else into the house - today, BOOKS. Yeah . . . I'm beginng to suspect that $800 / year figure was complete bullshit. On the other hand, Some of these books may be books that I'll use next semester too; a couple of the courses are essentially full year, I believe.
But man are they HEAVY!!!! On the other hand I have some impressive leather bound (textbooks!) on my shelves with names like "Constitutional Law" and "Civil Procedure", so I can feel all cool. But even having bought the books, I'm not sure it's sunk in yet that I'm really going to be studying these subjects. I'm feeling incredibly blase about this whole law school thing. It reminds me of when I went to take the LSAT. Everyone was waiting on the lawn to be let into the testing building, and I remember overhearing snippets of very excited / tense / worked up conversations, and people bragging about how long they had studied, and I had studied for exactly one week. Not even hard core. Just a couple hours a day, you know? And I didn't care that much what score I got because I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to law school. And I scored in the 98th percentile.
I'm not suggesting that I'm going to be in the top of my law school class w/o working - or even the top WITH working. Certainly not - the LSAT tested general reasoning skills, whereas I have to know specific stuff for lawschool classes. Nor am I totally relaxed and all "cool dude, whatever". But law school is like anything and everything else I've ever done. It's a task, a challenge to be overcome, a step on the road. I am actually looking forward to the intellectual challenge, so please don't think I'm being negative here. And I don't think it's over-confidence, either. I can easily crash and burn, just like anyone else.
Maybe it's preparedness. Which is weird, because when I talk to other students I feel unprepared because I haven't memorized our course schedule for the first year or read up on the pros / cons of all the different supplements or studied the faculty yearbook to know my professors on sight. (Okay nobody has told me they did that - yet.) But I'm prepared to be challenged, tested, stretched, and stressed. (And I'm sure I'll be quite stretched and stressed.) It's happened before, it will probably happen again, and this is what I do: I meet challenges.
But man are they HEAVY!!!! On the other hand I have some impressive leather bound (textbooks!) on my shelves with names like "Constitutional Law" and "Civil Procedure", so I can feel all cool. But even having bought the books, I'm not sure it's sunk in yet that I'm really going to be studying these subjects. I'm feeling incredibly blase about this whole law school thing. It reminds me of when I went to take the LSAT. Everyone was waiting on the lawn to be let into the testing building, and I remember overhearing snippets of very excited / tense / worked up conversations, and people bragging about how long they had studied, and I had studied for exactly one week. Not even hard core. Just a couple hours a day, you know? And I didn't care that much what score I got because I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to law school. And I scored in the 98th percentile.
I'm not suggesting that I'm going to be in the top of my law school class w/o working - or even the top WITH working. Certainly not - the LSAT tested general reasoning skills, whereas I have to know specific stuff for lawschool classes. Nor am I totally relaxed and all "cool dude, whatever". But law school is like anything and everything else I've ever done. It's a task, a challenge to be overcome, a step on the road. I am actually looking forward to the intellectual challenge, so please don't think I'm being negative here. And I don't think it's over-confidence, either. I can easily crash and burn, just like anyone else.
Maybe it's preparedness. Which is weird, because when I talk to other students I feel unprepared because I haven't memorized our course schedule for the first year or read up on the pros / cons of all the different supplements or studied the faculty yearbook to know my professors on sight. (Okay nobody has told me they did that - yet.) But I'm prepared to be challenged, tested, stretched, and stressed. (And I'm sure I'll be quite stretched and stressed.) It's happened before, it will probably happen again, and this is what I do: I meet challenges.
Friday, August 19, 2005
"Okay, I'm definitely not living in Kansas."
Hmm, how typical, I've been in my apartment less than a week and already hosted my first social gathering. I invited three gals over to my place for sangrias and girls night, and it really was a blast! I know all three from different routes - old friend from undergrad, girlfriend of another friend, and the old highschool friend of one of my college housemates. But it turns out that all of them are in the same department in the Hum Ec school! They're all sort of doing different things; El is getting her masters in Fiber Science, Janine her masters in Apparel and Fashion Design, and Patti is working full time with one of the profs in the biomaterials lab. So although they had met each other they didn't really know each other.
I invited everyone over at 7, and expected that people would leave between 9 and 10 depending on how things went. Instead the party didn't break up until a quarter of midnight!! I had a new audience for expounding on cultural differences between the midwest and the northeast. :-D Janine is a Utica NY girl, so there was lots to fill her in on. ;-) I mean I didn't do it intentionally, but you know me, the conversation often goes there when I have the chance! And Patti, being from western Kansas, has far more extreme stories to tell than I do! She had us laughing pretty hard with her stories of rattlesnake bites (that sounds like a scary topic but actually it was funny) and mountain lions and coyotes and tarantulas and bull constrictors. After which Janine was like "Mountain lions? Okay, you just sealed the deal. Absolutely no way am I ever going to Kansas."
Of course in the beginning Patti and I managed to get on a joint soapbox about the Cornell ag professor who wrote that ethanol paper, and what a load of bunk it was. I eventually had to pull us back, because we were definitely feeding off each other. It's kind of fun to have another midwest farm gal around though! And Janine and El, both having a fashion history background, had their little time later in the evening when they really got going about the Met and it's fashion exhibits like Dangerous Liasons and the Chanel exhibit.
All in all it was a fun night - and actually it didn't really take that much cleaning up after!
It's a little early to tell, but I think the group may actually fit my sustainable quartet theory. See, it seems that in my life there have been a number of times when I've been part of a quartet of friends. The quartets form unintentionally, simply because a certain group of people have a mix of traits that taken in pairs don't necessarily form as strong of a bond, but which in the group of four really melds well. For instance, the quartet I'm thinking of in highschool: 3/4 of us were in band, 3/4 of us in choir, 3/4 of us religious, 3/4 of us super interested in dating, 3/4 of us in the top 10% of the class, and so on. The end result is a group who is close as a group out of common interests or persuasions, with subdivisions sometimes on personalities (we had two outgoing and debative and two noncombative, also two more worldy and two less worldy). And usually it seems like there are two people who maybe wouldn't be friends on their own, but who are sort of brought together by the other two and consequently become friends.
Hmm, how typical, I've been in my apartment less than a week and already hosted my first social gathering. I invited three gals over to my place for sangrias and girls night, and it really was a blast! I know all three from different routes - old friend from undergrad, girlfriend of another friend, and the old highschool friend of one of my college housemates. But it turns out that all of them are in the same department in the Hum Ec school! They're all sort of doing different things; El is getting her masters in Fiber Science, Janine her masters in Apparel and Fashion Design, and Patti is working full time with one of the profs in the biomaterials lab. So although they had met each other they didn't really know each other.
I invited everyone over at 7, and expected that people would leave between 9 and 10 depending on how things went. Instead the party didn't break up until a quarter of midnight!! I had a new audience for expounding on cultural differences between the midwest and the northeast. :-D Janine is a Utica NY girl, so there was lots to fill her in on. ;-) I mean I didn't do it intentionally, but you know me, the conversation often goes there when I have the chance! And Patti, being from western Kansas, has far more extreme stories to tell than I do! She had us laughing pretty hard with her stories of rattlesnake bites (that sounds like a scary topic but actually it was funny) and mountain lions and coyotes and tarantulas and bull constrictors. After which Janine was like "Mountain lions? Okay, you just sealed the deal. Absolutely no way am I ever going to Kansas."
Of course in the beginning Patti and I managed to get on a joint soapbox about the Cornell ag professor who wrote that ethanol paper, and what a load of bunk it was. I eventually had to pull us back, because we were definitely feeding off each other. It's kind of fun to have another midwest farm gal around though! And Janine and El, both having a fashion history background, had their little time later in the evening when they really got going about the Met and it's fashion exhibits like Dangerous Liasons and the Chanel exhibit.
All in all it was a fun night - and actually it didn't really take that much cleaning up after!
It's a little early to tell, but I think the group may actually fit my sustainable quartet theory. See, it seems that in my life there have been a number of times when I've been part of a quartet of friends. The quartets form unintentionally, simply because a certain group of people have a mix of traits that taken in pairs don't necessarily form as strong of a bond, but which in the group of four really melds well. For instance, the quartet I'm thinking of in highschool: 3/4 of us were in band, 3/4 of us in choir, 3/4 of us religious, 3/4 of us super interested in dating, 3/4 of us in the top 10% of the class, and so on. The end result is a group who is close as a group out of common interests or persuasions, with subdivisions sometimes on personalities (we had two outgoing and debative and two noncombative, also two more worldy and two less worldy). And usually it seems like there are two people who maybe wouldn't be friends on their own, but who are sort of brought together by the other two and consequently become friends.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Well I'm back in Ithaca!!! My boxes are all unloaded into my apartment. For those whom I haven't told, I have a one bedroom apartment conveniently located near a bus stop that can get me to campus quickly. And in addition, thanks to the protesters who objected to Cornell cutting down the redbud trees to make a parking lot, I get a free bus pass! Wheee!!! I was going to buy one anyway because I don't want to deal with driving to campus. It will take too long, as I found out this morning. I mean the undergrads don't even arrive for four more days, and already it's hard to find a non-pay parking spot in CT. The meters are of course open, but who wants to pay for the meters? Unfortunately I won't get the bus pass until the end of the week, so for now I have to deal w/ the traffic. Steal it's a nice change to be able to run up to the mall and so forth w/o having to deal with the buses.
It was quite a nice day yesterday. Rob got a hand truck at Lowe's (Ithaca now has Lowe's, Walmart, Chili's and Bed Bath and Beyond down on 13 - or rather Lansing does, WHEE!) which made getting the boxes into my apartment much easier. Because of the location of the apartment, our choices were either park on a VERY busy street to unload or park almost a block away. Rob took all the heavy boxes like a model boyfriend. :-D With the handtruck, of course.
Then we went out to dinner with Patti, and after the two of them left I went over and saw El's new house. El and I went to get bubble tea and walked all around campus for a couple hours talking. It was nice to reconnect, and a relaxing end to the evening. It wasn't actually the end though; I got home and went back to unpacking. About midnight I started trying to go to bed, but I kept thinking of one more thing that would be easy to put away so why don't I go ahead and do it, and consequently didn't get to bed until 1am.
And now I'm feeling guilty because I've spent this whole morning in CTB surfing the web for pleasure stuff, instead of reading the novel I'm supposed to finish by next Tuesday. So I better get down to business - like getting to the Verizon store and straightening out this whole "my headset jack doesn't work" thing, because I'm in NY now and I can't drive and hold the phone to talk. And in any case, in this part of the country I wouldn't want to try. Even driving a manual, I did okay in Missouri where it's fairly flat, broad, and straight. I could let go of the wheel in order to shift when necessary. That soooo does not work in Ithaca! But anyway, yeah, I need to go be useful.
It was quite a nice day yesterday. Rob got a hand truck at Lowe's (Ithaca now has Lowe's, Walmart, Chili's and Bed Bath and Beyond down on 13 - or rather Lansing does, WHEE!) which made getting the boxes into my apartment much easier. Because of the location of the apartment, our choices were either park on a VERY busy street to unload or park almost a block away. Rob took all the heavy boxes like a model boyfriend. :-D With the handtruck, of course.
Then we went out to dinner with Patti, and after the two of them left I went over and saw El's new house. El and I went to get bubble tea and walked all around campus for a couple hours talking. It was nice to reconnect, and a relaxing end to the evening. It wasn't actually the end though; I got home and went back to unpacking. About midnight I started trying to go to bed, but I kept thinking of one more thing that would be easy to put away so why don't I go ahead and do it, and consequently didn't get to bed until 1am.
And now I'm feeling guilty because I've spent this whole morning in CTB surfing the web for pleasure stuff, instead of reading the novel I'm supposed to finish by next Tuesday. So I better get down to business - like getting to the Verizon store and straightening out this whole "my headset jack doesn't work" thing, because I'm in NY now and I can't drive and hold the phone to talk. And in any case, in this part of the country I wouldn't want to try. Even driving a manual, I did okay in Missouri where it's fairly flat, broad, and straight. I could let go of the wheel in order to shift when necessary. That soooo does not work in Ithaca! But anyway, yeah, I need to go be useful.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Sometimes I think life on this farm is a bad joke.
My mother has been having quite a bad week of it. For starters, my parents rarely take time off during the summer to just go have fun, unless it's some sort of family trip. My uncle though brings his boat up to Thomas Hill Lake, just 15 miles north of Moberly, just about every weekend. So he convinced us to join them for the afternoon Saturday. We had a really fun two hours; I taught mom and dad how to play monkey in the middle with the football, and we took turns jetting around on the two wave runners. My dad was being playful, and they both were having a really good time. Two hours into it, my uncle says he'll take us out waterskiing. So Mom takes the first go at it, and on her second try manages to get up on the skis. But then we started turning, and she was outside the wake, and she had a rather nasty mishap and pulled her left leg so bad that she can't bend the leg w/o severe pain. The docs tell us it's just a strained muscle, so hopefully it will heal up in a few days to where she can function more normally, but it just bites that when they finally take some time to have fun, she gets hurt
Mom's accident meant I was playing hostess for the family gathering that last Sunday. It went off not too badly. Luckily Thad and my dad took over the cooking of the steaks. I had tried to get somebody to help me w/ them but nobody had, so in the end I just put them on the grill saying "okay they said it should be about 12 minutes so I think I should have the rest of dinner ready in 15 or less, so let's just get them started." Only I had the fire up too high so they were cooking too fast, but the guys saved them before they burned. I was kind of crabby though until dinner was all on the table.
Anyway, that was just an aside in the story of my mother's woes. So all through the week she was slowly getting better, and by Thursday limping but still getting around enough to feel up to helping Dad with the spray boom. They were trying to make some adjustments on it. (This would be the spray boom used to spray the soybeans for previously mentioned spider mites.) The short version of the story is a jack slipped and the arm of the spray boom came crashing down on her forearm, breaking both bones. The top bone was basically a clean snap, but the bottom bone was splintered, and one piece had slid under the other. So they had to perform surgery on her to set the bone, and she's going to be in a cast for a couple months.
And on top of all this, Mom's been wearing her glasses instead of contacts all summer because she's getting LASIK done in September. The RGP lenses (hard lenses) my family all wears actually reshape our eyeballs / hold the shape, so that when you take them out for even a couple days, our eyes begin to shift back to a different weakness. This makes it nearly impossible to keep an up-date to glasses prescription. We wear our contacts almost from the time we get up until the time we go to bed. But to do the LASIK they need to see her eyes at their natural shape, so she's been out of contacts the whole time I was home.
My mother has been having quite a bad week of it. For starters, my parents rarely take time off during the summer to just go have fun, unless it's some sort of family trip. My uncle though brings his boat up to Thomas Hill Lake, just 15 miles north of Moberly, just about every weekend. So he convinced us to join them for the afternoon Saturday. We had a really fun two hours; I taught mom and dad how to play monkey in the middle with the football, and we took turns jetting around on the two wave runners. My dad was being playful, and they both were having a really good time. Two hours into it, my uncle says he'll take us out waterskiing. So Mom takes the first go at it, and on her second try manages to get up on the skis. But then we started turning, and she was outside the wake, and she had a rather nasty mishap and pulled her left leg so bad that she can't bend the leg w/o severe pain. The docs tell us it's just a strained muscle, so hopefully it will heal up in a few days to where she can function more normally, but it just bites that when they finally take some time to have fun, she gets hurt
Mom's accident meant I was playing hostess for the family gathering that last Sunday. It went off not too badly. Luckily Thad and my dad took over the cooking of the steaks. I had tried to get somebody to help me w/ them but nobody had, so in the end I just put them on the grill saying "okay they said it should be about 12 minutes so I think I should have the rest of dinner ready in 15 or less, so let's just get them started." Only I had the fire up too high so they were cooking too fast, but the guys saved them before they burned. I was kind of crabby though until dinner was all on the table.
Anyway, that was just an aside in the story of my mother's woes. So all through the week she was slowly getting better, and by Thursday limping but still getting around enough to feel up to helping Dad with the spray boom. They were trying to make some adjustments on it. (This would be the spray boom used to spray the soybeans for previously mentioned spider mites.) The short version of the story is a jack slipped and the arm of the spray boom came crashing down on her forearm, breaking both bones. The top bone was basically a clean snap, but the bottom bone was splintered, and one piece had slid under the other. So they had to perform surgery on her to set the bone, and she's going to be in a cast for a couple months.
And on top of all this, Mom's been wearing her glasses instead of contacts all summer because she's getting LASIK done in September. The RGP lenses (hard lenses) my family all wears actually reshape our eyeballs / hold the shape, so that when you take them out for even a couple days, our eyes begin to shift back to a different weakness. This makes it nearly impossible to keep an up-date to glasses prescription. We wear our contacts almost from the time we get up until the time we go to bed. But to do the LASIK they need to see her eyes at their natural shape, so she's been out of contacts the whole time I was home.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Woe-be-gone Days
I've enjoyed my stay at home, but in some ways it's going to be a relief to leave. Actually just in one way. It's very hard to be here and see my parents so worried. Probably a lot of you haven't noticed, but it's a pretty bad drought year out here. Actually, the worst part is that I don't think it's as bad in Iowa and Illinois, because the rain's sort of been on this northeastern pushing pattern that clips the corner of Missouri but misses most of us. So it's not even like prices are likely to be all the great for our crops. But Missouri is scorching. Jefferson City, for instance, got a grand total of about 3/10 of an inch the ENTIRE month of July. All the car washes have been closed down completely, lawn watering banned, and so on. The farther north you go the better it gets (Jeff is ~70 miles south of us.) but nobody's gotten as much rain as they need. Here at the home farm we've gotten ~ 1 inch for the month of July - and no rain at all so far in August. And it's been hot, hot,hot, with the weather regularly over 90, and there was a 12 day stretch when it was well over 100 degrees every day.
The crop scout (a guy who goes and does spot testing to check up on the health of the plants) told Dad today that the spider mites he found last week have gotten 400% worse, and the soybeans will all be dead by next week if he doesn't spray them. That's a big expense; the kicker is that unless we get some rain the soybeans will be dead in two weeks anyway. We don't really have any choice though but to spray the beans and hope that we get some rain PDQ. The soybeans are the cash crop; normally we would have been harvesting wheat in July (winter wheat, planted in November) but they didn't get it planted last fall because of the weather.
There is some corn; at last check Dad said we still had managed about 2/3 of a crop of corn. That's good news, because we grind some of the corn into feed for our hogs, and the hogs are where the real money of the farm is. And a lot of the corn this year will go up to the ethanol plant that my parents have ownership stake in. The ethanol plant pays 7cents/bushel higher than market price on the corn that it's members bring in to fulfill their membership commitment. In addition my parents are getting a pretty sizable dividend check from the plant's profits for the year.
Which reminds me, I've actually been meaning to write a blog about ethanol; I went to the annual membership meeting with my parents for NEMO grain, the ethanol plant I just mentioned above. I found out a lot of interesting info about the industry. And then just a few days after that, my dad was ranting about a Cornell ag prof's report bashing ethanol. I read the report and tried to find some rebuttals, and I have some thoughts I want to share, but I have to have time to get it all typed out. So look for it coming up - hopefully before classes start!!
I've enjoyed my stay at home, but in some ways it's going to be a relief to leave. Actually just in one way. It's very hard to be here and see my parents so worried. Probably a lot of you haven't noticed, but it's a pretty bad drought year out here. Actually, the worst part is that I don't think it's as bad in Iowa and Illinois, because the rain's sort of been on this northeastern pushing pattern that clips the corner of Missouri but misses most of us. So it's not even like prices are likely to be all the great for our crops. But Missouri is scorching. Jefferson City, for instance, got a grand total of about 3/10 of an inch the ENTIRE month of July. All the car washes have been closed down completely, lawn watering banned, and so on. The farther north you go the better it gets (Jeff is ~70 miles south of us.) but nobody's gotten as much rain as they need. Here at the home farm we've gotten ~ 1 inch for the month of July - and no rain at all so far in August. And it's been hot, hot,hot, with the weather regularly over 90, and there was a 12 day stretch when it was well over 100 degrees every day.
The crop scout (a guy who goes and does spot testing to check up on the health of the plants) told Dad today that the spider mites he found last week have gotten 400% worse, and the soybeans will all be dead by next week if he doesn't spray them. That's a big expense; the kicker is that unless we get some rain the soybeans will be dead in two weeks anyway. We don't really have any choice though but to spray the beans and hope that we get some rain PDQ. The soybeans are the cash crop; normally we would have been harvesting wheat in July (winter wheat, planted in November) but they didn't get it planted last fall because of the weather.
There is some corn; at last check Dad said we still had managed about 2/3 of a crop of corn. That's good news, because we grind some of the corn into feed for our hogs, and the hogs are where the real money of the farm is. And a lot of the corn this year will go up to the ethanol plant that my parents have ownership stake in. The ethanol plant pays 7cents/bushel higher than market price on the corn that it's members bring in to fulfill their membership commitment. In addition my parents are getting a pretty sizable dividend check from the plant's profits for the year.
Which reminds me, I've actually been meaning to write a blog about ethanol; I went to the annual membership meeting with my parents for NEMO grain, the ethanol plant I just mentioned above. I found out a lot of interesting info about the industry. And then just a few days after that, my dad was ranting about a Cornell ag prof's report bashing ethanol. I read the report and tried to find some rebuttals, and I have some thoughts I want to share, but I have to have time to get it all typed out. So look for it coming up - hopefully before classes start!!
Saturday, August 06, 2005
"I don't wanna be Jessica Simpson, I wanna be Jessica Biel."
(If you want just the basic summary of my opinion of the movie Stealth, skip the detailed analysis following and go to the purple at the bottom. )
A friend and I went to the movies last night. We briefly considered Dukes of Hazzard, but opted out since it's only redeeming quality was Jessica Simpson. Obviously she's eye candy for Bruce, and he essentially said I might enjoy imagining myself as Jessica Simpson. So instead we went and saw Stealth, which I enjoyed very much. The initial reaction of a couple people who hadn't seen it was "oh I thought that was supposed to be really bad," but I don't know where that came from. If you're like movies like Top Gun - i.e. fighter plane action movies - then this is definitely a movie for you. It also had a cohesive plot that drew you into the story. I'm always a little reluctant to give my opinion on whether it was good / bad acting, but I will say that the interactions between the characters struck me as very real - specifically Jessica Beil and Josh Lucas. Granted I think Josh Lucas is hot hot hot so I have a bit of bias toward him, ;-) especially when he's playing a guy in uniform. >big grin<
But I didn't know anything at all about Jessica Beil before watching the movie, and I was impressed with her character. That's partly a tribute to the way they wrote the dialogue and partly to her acting. The movie wasn't exactly overly-original - basically all of the plot themes were familiar Hollwood lines, but they were played with just enough differences and put together in an interesting enough story that I found it entertaining. You've got the AI weapon that starts going off and threatening to create world war - only in this movie it's not simply that it goes haywire, it's that it evolves, and takes a lesson from Josh Lucas's character that he never intended for it to take. You've got the guy and girl that want to be together but have some major obstacles. Only they handled it a bit differently I think than normal, and really believably for a woman who's in the top ranks of the Navy's fighter pilots.
For instance, there's a scene where the three fighter pilots - Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and Josh Lucas - are in a dance club. They're obviously close platonic friends, and the two guys are hooking up with girls, and Josh is getting ready to leave to go have sex w/ his date. And he kind of looks across the room at Biel (it's already been somewhat hinted that there's some chemistry between them) and she mouths "Go. Have Fun." and gives him a little smile. The typical Hollwood reaction for her should have been something more insulted, like pretending not to see and the two of them missing the other looking at the other or something. But that typical Hollywood reaction wouldn't have struck me as very believable for a woman who's climbed in the elite ranks of the military. She wouldn't get to that point by kicking and screaming against the boys' club and being all girly; she'd get to that point accepting it as part of life and just continuing to do her own thing. The job these three pilots were doing obviously required them to really have strong relationships of trust with each other; you don't get that kind of chemistry when somebody is being all judgemental about the others. It's the reasons why the guys basketball team always seemed to be more cohesive than the girls' basketball team I played on - girls are just catty an awful lot of the time!
Anyway, I could go on and give more examples, but basically I just thought all the interactions between Beil and Lucas's characters were really believable and well done, and slightly out of the usual Hollywood mold. If nothing else, it's nice to see a strong female character who's power and feminism is more subtle. As much as I like my girls-kicking-butt, there's always an in your face quality to them that was not there in the character of Caroline Wade.
And on top of that, she delivered a great last line of the movie. At the end Josh Lucas gave this brief little speech that really was kind of corny, and then there was this pause, and then Jessica Biel just let out this zinger that basically was like "that was corny" but still resolved the whole issue of how they felt about each other.
So yeah, I thought Stealth was a very good movie - except for the lack of a kiss. But like the ending to Cowboy Beboy, as much as I wanted the ending to be slightly different, it totally was the right ending in the context they had set up. Still, for those of you who need happy endings, don't be afraid to go watch Stealth.
And something else I forgot to say, caught up as I was in the romance thread of the movie - Stealth was also a bit thought provoking. The romance thread was actually secondary to an exploration of the role of human morality in the context of war. (played against the AI which at least initially is amoral.) Again this was a theme that was done with some subtlety; although it was very apparent, it wasn't preachy at all. And it was easy to get caught up in the action of the movie and ignore the underlying ethical questions. In a way I think that's a more significant accomplishment - the movie works on two levels. You can enjoy it purely as an action film w/o feeling like you're being preached at, but if you're so inclined to give more thought to the ethical questions raised, there's certainly meat for discussion in the movie, since many of the conversations are part of this context. (Lucas and his CO discussing human vs. AI and consequences not being divorced from the action - which is exemplified on the next mission the Talons take; Beil making the point that the AI is neutral - it is moral in the hands of moral people - which is exemplified by the way the CO, who is not a moral guy, puts it to use. At the same time they don't completely villify the CO . . . another example of the deftness with which they handled the subject.)
So yeah, in summary, the action in Stealth was awesome fighter plane action, but the human interactions were handled with a subtlety that's pretty impressive for something that's aiming for the genre of typical Hollwood blockbuster rather than more intellectual / artsy. It also manages to provoke thought about what role human morality has in the context of war w/o being preachy. It also managed to effectively infuse humor into an otherwise pretty intense movie, making it a great balance. I definitely recommend seeing it.
(If you want just the basic summary of my opinion of the movie Stealth, skip the detailed analysis following and go to the purple at the bottom. )
A friend and I went to the movies last night. We briefly considered Dukes of Hazzard, but opted out since it's only redeeming quality was Jessica Simpson. Obviously she's eye candy for Bruce, and he essentially said I might enjoy imagining myself as Jessica Simpson. So instead we went and saw Stealth, which I enjoyed very much. The initial reaction of a couple people who hadn't seen it was "oh I thought that was supposed to be really bad," but I don't know where that came from. If you're like movies like Top Gun - i.e. fighter plane action movies - then this is definitely a movie for you. It also had a cohesive plot that drew you into the story. I'm always a little reluctant to give my opinion on whether it was good / bad acting, but I will say that the interactions between the characters struck me as very real - specifically Jessica Beil and Josh Lucas. Granted I think Josh Lucas is hot hot hot so I have a bit of bias toward him, ;-) especially when he's playing a guy in uniform. >big grin<
But I didn't know anything at all about Jessica Beil before watching the movie, and I was impressed with her character. That's partly a tribute to the way they wrote the dialogue and partly to her acting. The movie wasn't exactly overly-original - basically all of the plot themes were familiar Hollwood lines, but they were played with just enough differences and put together in an interesting enough story that I found it entertaining. You've got the AI weapon that starts going off and threatening to create world war - only in this movie it's not simply that it goes haywire, it's that it evolves, and takes a lesson from Josh Lucas's character that he never intended for it to take. You've got the guy and girl that want to be together but have some major obstacles. Only they handled it a bit differently I think than normal, and really believably for a woman who's in the top ranks of the Navy's fighter pilots.
For instance, there's a scene where the three fighter pilots - Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and Josh Lucas - are in a dance club. They're obviously close platonic friends, and the two guys are hooking up with girls, and Josh is getting ready to leave to go have sex w/ his date. And he kind of looks across the room at Biel (it's already been somewhat hinted that there's some chemistry between them) and she mouths "Go. Have Fun." and gives him a little smile. The typical Hollwood reaction for her should have been something more insulted, like pretending not to see and the two of them missing the other looking at the other or something. But that typical Hollywood reaction wouldn't have struck me as very believable for a woman who's climbed in the elite ranks of the military. She wouldn't get to that point by kicking and screaming against the boys' club and being all girly; she'd get to that point accepting it as part of life and just continuing to do her own thing. The job these three pilots were doing obviously required them to really have strong relationships of trust with each other; you don't get that kind of chemistry when somebody is being all judgemental about the others. It's the reasons why the guys basketball team always seemed to be more cohesive than the girls' basketball team I played on - girls are just catty an awful lot of the time!
Anyway, I could go on and give more examples, but basically I just thought all the interactions between Beil and Lucas's characters were really believable and well done, and slightly out of the usual Hollywood mold. If nothing else, it's nice to see a strong female character who's power and feminism is more subtle. As much as I like my girls-kicking-butt, there's always an in your face quality to them that was not there in the character of Caroline Wade.
And on top of that, she delivered a great last line of the movie. At the end Josh Lucas gave this brief little speech that really was kind of corny, and then there was this pause, and then Jessica Biel just let out this zinger that basically was like "that was corny" but still resolved the whole issue of how they felt about each other.
So yeah, I thought Stealth was a very good movie - except for the lack of a kiss. But like the ending to Cowboy Beboy, as much as I wanted the ending to be slightly different, it totally was the right ending in the context they had set up. Still, for those of you who need happy endings, don't be afraid to go watch Stealth.
And something else I forgot to say, caught up as I was in the romance thread of the movie - Stealth was also a bit thought provoking. The romance thread was actually secondary to an exploration of the role of human morality in the context of war. (played against the AI which at least initially is amoral.) Again this was a theme that was done with some subtlety; although it was very apparent, it wasn't preachy at all. And it was easy to get caught up in the action of the movie and ignore the underlying ethical questions. In a way I think that's a more significant accomplishment - the movie works on two levels. You can enjoy it purely as an action film w/o feeling like you're being preached at, but if you're so inclined to give more thought to the ethical questions raised, there's certainly meat for discussion in the movie, since many of the conversations are part of this context. (Lucas and his CO discussing human vs. AI and consequences not being divorced from the action - which is exemplified on the next mission the Talons take; Beil making the point that the AI is neutral - it is moral in the hands of moral people - which is exemplified by the way the CO, who is not a moral guy, puts it to use. At the same time they don't completely villify the CO . . . another example of the deftness with which they handled the subject.)
So yeah, in summary, the action in Stealth was awesome fighter plane action, but the human interactions were handled with a subtlety that's pretty impressive for something that's aiming for the genre of typical Hollwood blockbuster rather than more intellectual / artsy. It also manages to provoke thought about what role human morality has in the context of war w/o being preachy. It also managed to effectively infuse humor into an otherwise pretty intense movie, making it a great balance. I definitely recommend seeing it.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
On the right is my cute kitten Toffee, who's staying at the vet's tonight.Sadly, Mom just found our other cat Tally dead on the side of the road. She was a stray cat that showed up about two months ago. Really unusual looking - all white with this bushy brown tail that looked kind of like a fox tail. It reminded Mom of cattails - those tall brown fuzzy things that grow on the edges of ponds. I don't know what the scientific name for them is. For a couple weeks we were calling her "Tail" but it got changed to Tally, since "Tail" just didn't seem like a proper name for a cat.
In a way I suppose it's fate's way of making life a little easier on Mom and I. We already have one cat, Thumper, who comes and goes as she pleases. She's a big honking cat, and I don't mean fat the way house cats get. This is one tough farm cat; she's the cat equivalent of a body builder or something. She wanders off for days at a time, but still comes back to the house to see if she can scrounge up someone to pet her and to catch an easy meal from the cat bowl. Then Tally showed up. And about a month ago, another stray showed up - a long-haired calico kitten we named Toffee. (It was going to be coffee, because her fur reminded me of all the different kinds of coffee - mocha, black, w/ cream, sugar, and so on, but we decided Toffee was a bit better.)
Toffee was instantaneously my favorite, partly because she's a kitten, partly because she's a long haired calico which is unusual enough in and of itself, and partly because she's so friendly and affectionate. But Mom seemed to have gotten fairly attached to Tally. Unfortunately, we didn't get her to the vet in time to get her neutered, and she got pregnant. That's bad news.
When I was little we never worried about fixing the cats. Strays regularly show up at our house because we're the only place for a ways around that doesn't have dogs, and we have all these fun buildings to go running around in and catch rodents. But the cat population eventually got out of control - we had 20 cats at the peak. No exaggeratting. And Dad put his foot down and said we had to get rid of some of these cats. So each of us picked one cat that we wanted to keep, and the next day while we were at school, Mom and Dad went out and killed the rest of the cats. It's the single most horrific moment of my childhood, and I wasn't even there for it. But Mom made the mistake of telling me about it one time, when she was sort of upset about something herself - apparently when my Dad couldn't stomach shooting them anymore, my Mom had to finish them off with a club. *shudders*
So anyway, since then, we've always gotten the cats fixed, so the population stays in check. The old line died out a while ago when my cat Fame died; since then we've had a series of strays that have come and gone. Farm cats disappear a lot quicker then house cats. But there's never a shortage of strays to take in. So Tally and Toffee showed up and we took it in stride. We were talking about getting them neutered at the dinner table, and about the possibility that Tally might already be pregnant. Dad got kind of upset about the idea of paying $60 a pop to get the cats neutered. His annoyed comment to Mom was "Is it really that important to you to have those cats around?" There was kind of this awkward pause, and Mom said, "I guess it is." And then she said "I guess if Tally is pregnant we could put her down and just fix Toffee." And then she slowly started crying, and got up from the table.
I made an appointment the next day to take them in the following week, and said I'd pay to get Toffee fixed so it wasn't so expensive. (I know it doesn't sound like a lot to you guys maybe, but with the drought we're having this summer they're predicting a 40-60% crop failure across the board, and we're building this addition onto the house, and money is always tight anyway.) Unfortunately Tally was indeed pregnant.
I made the appointment a week and a half ago; it's been sort of an awkward subject since then because we weren't sure whether we were going to put Tally down or now. Tonight Mom went out to look for the cats to take them into the vet, and she couldn't find Tally. Eventually she discovered her on the side of the road - hit by a car. She was in the late stages of pregnancy; as swollen as she was she probably couldn't move very fast. Plus she's the same dusty white as the gravel road. So I guess that's why she got hit.
So that's that.
I'm actually not that hurt myself about Tally's death - I didn't want us to have to put her down, but I wasn't particularly attached to her myself, so I don't mind so much the car hit. If that sounds callous, just keep in mind the large numbers of cats that have come and gone in my life . . . it's not like Rob, who had the same cat for over 20 years. But I hate to see Mom that upset. When she got up from the dinner table that night we were discussing neutering them, she said "I'm just upset because I feel like my life is out of my control. I knew when she showed up, I knew if we were going to keep her I needed to get her fixed. But it's just . . . " and she gave a wordless gesture of frustration that said "we've been so busy I didn't get around to it" which is what happens a LOT around this place.
I guess it doesn't help that Guess, a cat we've had for several years, died earlier in the spring. Mom was always pretty fond of Guess too.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
“Rise cow, and live.”
“Pour me, pour me, pour me another shot of whiskey.”
I had my quasi-annual BBQ yesterday; I say quasi because while I try to have it every year I've missed a summer somewhere along the way. I hosted the first one in August of ’99 as a going away to college party for everyone. It was quite a success, and so I’ve repeated it almost every year since. At it’s high point there were probably 17 people or so in attendance; my acceptance list is usually almost 100% of the guest list, because I plan ahead and try to work it to when everyone can come. But this just seems to be a busy summer for people, and so it came together very last minute - like two days prior to the event itself. And we did it in the afternoon instead of the evening like normal. Between it being too last minute for some, and losing contact with others, and Brandy getting sick, there were only 7 of us (plus baby Benjamin) there Saturday. So compared to other BBQs it was pretty low key.
It was still fun though. In highschool I had two - three separate groups of friends with a few crossovers; I generally invited everybody to this BBQ. But this time I only invited 2/3 groups, and basically the ones that showed up were all of one group, so it was cool. Kara and Leo always keep us entertained; Leo is just a funny guy in general, and Kara is in vet school, which provides many excellent stories. She was telling us how it’s hard to make money as a large animal vet, because farmers tend not to call for the vet until the animal is practically dead, so you’re basically being asked to resurrect the cow. (Thus the quote.)
The day before the BBQ was also a fun one; I drove 2 hours down to the Gasconade County Fair to go see Trick Pony with my sister, brother-in-law, and some others. It was really a great concert. The band has a lot of energy and the songs from their new CD sound good; I want to buy it when it’s released in August. Unfortunately the crowd was pretty laid back and took awhile to get into the concert. They had set up a stage on the baseball field; everyone came early and lined up their folding chairs and then left them to go enjoy the fair. So a lot of the people that were in the middle and front were older people who just wanted to sit back and listen, instead of being active participants – you know, getting up, screaming when Ira makes the guitar do acrobatics or rides the base fiddle across the stage, singing the choruses, dancing, and yelping appreciatively at amusing lyrics. There were definitely groups of people doing that, but not enough to overwhelm the sit-back crowd. Andrea and I waited in line to get autographs though, and I impressed Ira by knowing that the cello – like instrument he was playing was a bass fiddle. That was thanks to my Dad, who suggested that might be what it was when I described it prior to the concert. He seemed impressed that they used a bass fiddle; it’s true not many groups do these days.
So yeah, that was the weekend.
Monday, July 25, 2005
So I had the three best consecutive bowling games of my life tonight. Scores of 124, 133, and 126 respectively. I might have been able to hit 150 on the last game except I wasted a strike by bowling a gutter and a 1 after it - my worst frame of the entire night. I know those are pretty pitiful scores for people who bowl even semi-seriously, but they're fantastic for me!!!! And I got to use my sparkly purple bowling ball with "CC" engraved on it . . . always a plus.
Then I saw Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and was definitely pleased. I like the earlier version too, but somehow it wasn't hard to avoid comparing them . . . the new one manages to put a different spin on the story w/o really changing the storyline. Just the focus on Charlie's family (and Wonka's) gives it an altogether different flavor. And it was amusing, as long as you are prepared to just take things as silly and laugh at them instead of going "this is weird." Johnny Depp is quickly becoming my favorite actor, as I was also pretty impressed with him in Pirates of the Caribbean and Finding Neverland. I've never seen much of his earlier work, although I knew who he was long before Pirates came out. I think those three movies really show what a good actor he is though because of how different he is in each of those parts.
That's it.
Then I saw Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and was definitely pleased. I like the earlier version too, but somehow it wasn't hard to avoid comparing them . . . the new one manages to put a different spin on the story w/o really changing the storyline. Just the focus on Charlie's family (and Wonka's) gives it an altogether different flavor. And it was amusing, as long as you are prepared to just take things as silly and laugh at them instead of going "this is weird." Johnny Depp is quickly becoming my favorite actor, as I was also pretty impressed with him in Pirates of the Caribbean and Finding Neverland. I've never seen much of his earlier work, although I knew who he was long before Pirates came out. I think those three movies really show what a good actor he is though because of how different he is in each of those parts.
That's it.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
"I forget you live on a farm, and then you go and say things like that."
That was a college friend's comment last week when I said I had to be out the door at 6:30am to load hogs for market. This is my "life on the farm" email, because a couple people have expressed difficulty envisioning me on the farm. ;-)
The hogs thing I've only once so far this trip home, although I'm sure I'll be in for it again next Tuesday. My mother just had some minor surgery and can't handle heavy things. The restriction is technically she can't lift anything over 20 pounds, and while you don't technically lift the hogs, they're pretty heavy when they come crashing into you, and they could be hitting her right where the stiches are, so we thought it best she not try. Too bad for my dad - Mom's hog loading skills are far more highly developed than my own. ;-) See you have to open the gate about six feet wide, because hogs are very skittish, and they want to give you and the gate a very wide berth. Unfortunately this means that you have to leave enough room for 3-4 big hogs to go through, and so sometimes 3-4 try to go through, but you only one 1 particular one to go, so you have to stop the other 3 w/o scaring off the one. It's a tough job my friends. Especially since you REEK when you are done. Hog smell is like no other bad smell - it CLINGS to EVERYTHING. I mean, when friends would come over and want to see the pigs because it was some novelty to them, I always cringed, because even 5 minutes in the damn hog barn and you smell.
But I didn't really mind all that much - I mean this is what I grew up with. It's like those of you who've stayed at my apartments, and lamented the lack of soap in the shower, causing me to explain that I usually just use the extra shampoo that squeezes out of my hair instead of soap. This is why. If I sit in an office for 8 hours, I am not really dirty. Dirty is when you get into the bathtub and the water changes colors. THAT'S when you need the soap. Dirty is actually having dirt (or sawdust, or sometimes unfortunately hog crap) on your skin.
Oh yeah, and speaking of people lifting things (see sentence #4), I'm very proud of myself because I managed to haul bundles of shingles today up on the roof. Dad put them in the loader bucket (a big huge metal carring scoop on the end of a small tractor; the bucket can be rasied and lowered by a hydrolic mechanism, for you city folk) and lifted them up to the roof of the house, which beats hauling them up the ladder. I couldn't have hauled them up the ladder, but I did managed to carry them from the bucket across the roof. (Incidentally, walking on an angle ALL DAY hurts your ankles, even in steel-toed work boots.) They were incredibly heavy though. So later I asked the roofer, "How heavy were those bundles?" and he responded "90 lbs." In seriousness. So I was very pleased with myself.
Which in case you're wondering, that's mostly what I've been doing - helping my Dad with the addition onto the house. We have a small house; since we tore out the basement it's only 1200 square feet of finished space. (The basement is now unfinished.) So they're building an addition of ~600 square feet. Dad hired me on as an extra hand to help with the work, so I've been scrambling around like a monkey, trying not to get burned, and, today, helping lay shings finally. It was freaking 100degrees on the ground and we're up on the roof with this black tar, laying shingles . . . uggg. In Jeans and work boots no less, which you need for protection. I had a really loose tank and sports bra though so that was good. Had to wear glasses instead of contacts though cuz too much loose crap rolling around.
And when I'm not doing that, I'm helping Mom with the garden. Her garden used to be 200 X 40 feet; it's now 200 X 20 feet, and half of that is the vegtable garden. We picked 11 gallons of beans the first week I was home, and then my 90 year old grandma and I snapped them into pieces (took ~4 hours for that part alone) and Mom canned them. When you can green beans you put them in glass jars in a pressure cooker with special canning leads which should theoretically make an airtight seal. Usually this works - I've eaten 20 year old food that's been preserved that long. (Grandma's pickle relish - she hasn't made it in years but we're still eating it.) Unfortunately, sometimes the seal doesn't quite get right, and those you have to eat as fast as you can. So we were eating green beans for every meal for over a week. Ugg.
Now the green beans have mostly given out, but the sweet corn is ready. Mom picked . . . *thinks* 4.5 bushels of corn today, which had to be shucked, cut off the cob, blanched, and then portioned out into quart bags for freezing in the deep freeze. She said that's about 1/3 of what's out there; the next round of ears will be ready over the weekend or by Monday.
And I was looking at the tomato plants - my most eagerly anticipated vegetable of the year because of my love of BLT's on Mom's homemade bread - and it looks like as soon as we finish the corn, it will be time for canning tomotos.
So yeah, my "vacation" is certainly not a vacation, but it's not so bad.
That was a college friend's comment last week when I said I had to be out the door at 6:30am to load hogs for market. This is my "life on the farm" email, because a couple people have expressed difficulty envisioning me on the farm. ;-)
The hogs thing I've only once so far this trip home, although I'm sure I'll be in for it again next Tuesday. My mother just had some minor surgery and can't handle heavy things. The restriction is technically she can't lift anything over 20 pounds, and while you don't technically lift the hogs, they're pretty heavy when they come crashing into you, and they could be hitting her right where the stiches are, so we thought it best she not try. Too bad for my dad - Mom's hog loading skills are far more highly developed than my own. ;-) See you have to open the gate about six feet wide, because hogs are very skittish, and they want to give you and the gate a very wide berth. Unfortunately this means that you have to leave enough room for 3-4 big hogs to go through, and so sometimes 3-4 try to go through, but you only one 1 particular one to go, so you have to stop the other 3 w/o scaring off the one. It's a tough job my friends. Especially since you REEK when you are done. Hog smell is like no other bad smell - it CLINGS to EVERYTHING. I mean, when friends would come over and want to see the pigs because it was some novelty to them, I always cringed, because even 5 minutes in the damn hog barn and you smell.
But I didn't really mind all that much - I mean this is what I grew up with. It's like those of you who've stayed at my apartments, and lamented the lack of soap in the shower, causing me to explain that I usually just use the extra shampoo that squeezes out of my hair instead of soap. This is why. If I sit in an office for 8 hours, I am not really dirty. Dirty is when you get into the bathtub and the water changes colors. THAT'S when you need the soap. Dirty is actually having dirt (or sawdust, or sometimes unfortunately hog crap) on your skin.
Oh yeah, and speaking of people lifting things (see sentence #4), I'm very proud of myself because I managed to haul bundles of shingles today up on the roof. Dad put them in the loader bucket (a big huge metal carring scoop on the end of a small tractor; the bucket can be rasied and lowered by a hydrolic mechanism, for you city folk) and lifted them up to the roof of the house, which beats hauling them up the ladder. I couldn't have hauled them up the ladder, but I did managed to carry them from the bucket across the roof. (Incidentally, walking on an angle ALL DAY hurts your ankles, even in steel-toed work boots.) They were incredibly heavy though. So later I asked the roofer, "How heavy were those bundles?" and he responded "90 lbs." In seriousness. So I was very pleased with myself.
Which in case you're wondering, that's mostly what I've been doing - helping my Dad with the addition onto the house. We have a small house; since we tore out the basement it's only 1200 square feet of finished space. (The basement is now unfinished.) So they're building an addition of ~600 square feet. Dad hired me on as an extra hand to help with the work, so I've been scrambling around like a monkey, trying not to get burned, and, today, helping lay shings finally. It was freaking 100degrees on the ground and we're up on the roof with this black tar, laying shingles . . . uggg. In Jeans and work boots no less, which you need for protection. I had a really loose tank and sports bra though so that was good. Had to wear glasses instead of contacts though cuz too much loose crap rolling around.
And when I'm not doing that, I'm helping Mom with the garden. Her garden used to be 200 X 40 feet; it's now 200 X 20 feet, and half of that is the vegtable garden. We picked 11 gallons of beans the first week I was home, and then my 90 year old grandma and I snapped them into pieces (took ~4 hours for that part alone) and Mom canned them. When you can green beans you put them in glass jars in a pressure cooker with special canning leads which should theoretically make an airtight seal. Usually this works - I've eaten 20 year old food that's been preserved that long. (Grandma's pickle relish - she hasn't made it in years but we're still eating it.) Unfortunately, sometimes the seal doesn't quite get right, and those you have to eat as fast as you can. So we were eating green beans for every meal for over a week. Ugg.
Now the green beans have mostly given out, but the sweet corn is ready. Mom picked . . . *thinks* 4.5 bushels of corn today, which had to be shucked, cut off the cob, blanched, and then portioned out into quart bags for freezing in the deep freeze. She said that's about 1/3 of what's out there; the next round of ears will be ready over the weekend or by Monday.
And I was looking at the tomato plants - my most eagerly anticipated vegetable of the year because of my love of BLT's on Mom's homemade bread - and it looks like as soon as we finish the corn, it will be time for canning tomotos.
So yeah, my "vacation" is certainly not a vacation, but it's not so bad.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
"I do that too."
I visited an old friend tonight - for those of you who remember my colorful introductions of all my MO friends, this is the Baptist minister's daughter. In highschool she was one of my closest friends, yet I wouldn't really have described us as very much alike. It is true that we both liked to debate, and we were both good students, and both in choir and French. So okay, there were some similarities. But only 1 of the 4 of those things is an actual personality marker. As a matter of fact, we enjoyed debating each other quite a bit because we often had very different perspectives on things.
Tonight, however, as we each discussed our boyfriends, lamented the inability of men to commit, discussed our future careers (she went straight into law school while I took a year off, so she's getting ready for her last year while I get ready for my first), and discussed our own foibles, we discovered that we really are very much a like. Funny, to be friends with someone for (*stops to calculate in head*) 9 years almost, and to just now realize how alike we are.
I'm not sure we always were this alike, is the thing. Where we found the most similarity was in talking about problems we have in relationships (how long do you wait around for a guy to decide he wants to marry you? Do you risk planning your life around someone who hasn't actually committed for certain? How do you handle planning a life together when both people are very attached to their homes - in two different and far apart states?) And in highschool our takes on dating were very different. I was like "just date around, have fun, even if you know you aren't going to marry this person - that's not the point at this time in life. You have to explore a little to figure out what you want." My friend on the other hand knew exactly what she wanted, and was going to put up w/ nothing short of what she wanted. So she didn't date. At all. In fact, this guy is her first boyfriend . . . and they're seriously talking about marraige. And hey, it worked out for her I guess - he is exactly what she wanted.
But it seems like time, and our life paths, have brought us back closer together. Our need for immediate resolution to arguments, for instance, is the same. And we apparently both have the very bad habit of taking a current action on the part of our boyfriend, projecting it into a future situation, and predicting that they will act in a way we don't like - and then essentially picking a fight about it. It sounds horrible when put that way, and as I said it is a very bad habit. But in our defense, we're both also committed by our religions to no divorce - once we marry, it's for good as far as we're concerned. So we're trying to head off problems before we get there, by trying to figure out how our partner will act in certain situations.
And we're both a bit "restless." She talked about how moving to VA for law school was just another move to her, because she's moved around quite a bit before that, both in state, and also she lived in reno for about six months. She said how she gets "itchy" sometimes to see new places. Her boyfriend on the other hand, has lived in one place his entire life and is extremely attached to that place andreally struggles with the idea of leaving it to be with her. She on the other hand, while as eager as I am to return to MO full time (because it really is a fantastic state that offers a great balance - this is why it's a swing state, because demographically and geographically its like a microcosm of the USA as a whole.), can certainly conceive of moving to be with him. Hmmmm, that sounds an awful like *my* life . . .
We hadn't kept in very close touch in the past few years, so I think we've both grown and changed a lot w/o the other really being around to see it. So it's a bit of a surprise to come back and see how much we are the same. Then again, maybe we were always very similar in the fundamentals and got distracted by the surface stuff which was more immediate.
It doesn't really change anything to have discovered this. But it's nice, all the same. Sort of a renewal of an old friendship, if you will.
I visited an old friend tonight - for those of you who remember my colorful introductions of all my MO friends, this is the Baptist minister's daughter. In highschool she was one of my closest friends, yet I wouldn't really have described us as very much alike. It is true that we both liked to debate, and we were both good students, and both in choir and French. So okay, there were some similarities. But only 1 of the 4 of those things is an actual personality marker. As a matter of fact, we enjoyed debating each other quite a bit because we often had very different perspectives on things.
Tonight, however, as we each discussed our boyfriends, lamented the inability of men to commit, discussed our future careers (she went straight into law school while I took a year off, so she's getting ready for her last year while I get ready for my first), and discussed our own foibles, we discovered that we really are very much a like. Funny, to be friends with someone for (*stops to calculate in head*) 9 years almost, and to just now realize how alike we are.
I'm not sure we always were this alike, is the thing. Where we found the most similarity was in talking about problems we have in relationships (how long do you wait around for a guy to decide he wants to marry you? Do you risk planning your life around someone who hasn't actually committed for certain? How do you handle planning a life together when both people are very attached to their homes - in two different and far apart states?) And in highschool our takes on dating were very different. I was like "just date around, have fun, even if you know you aren't going to marry this person - that's not the point at this time in life. You have to explore a little to figure out what you want." My friend on the other hand knew exactly what she wanted, and was going to put up w/ nothing short of what she wanted. So she didn't date. At all. In fact, this guy is her first boyfriend . . . and they're seriously talking about marraige. And hey, it worked out for her I guess - he is exactly what she wanted.
But it seems like time, and our life paths, have brought us back closer together. Our need for immediate resolution to arguments, for instance, is the same. And we apparently both have the very bad habit of taking a current action on the part of our boyfriend, projecting it into a future situation, and predicting that they will act in a way we don't like - and then essentially picking a fight about it. It sounds horrible when put that way, and as I said it is a very bad habit. But in our defense, we're both also committed by our religions to no divorce - once we marry, it's for good as far as we're concerned. So we're trying to head off problems before we get there, by trying to figure out how our partner will act in certain situations.
And we're both a bit "restless." She talked about how moving to VA for law school was just another move to her, because she's moved around quite a bit before that, both in state, and also she lived in reno for about six months. She said how she gets "itchy" sometimes to see new places. Her boyfriend on the other hand, has lived in one place his entire life and is extremely attached to that place andreally struggles with the idea of leaving it to be with her. She on the other hand, while as eager as I am to return to MO full time (because it really is a fantastic state that offers a great balance - this is why it's a swing state, because demographically and geographically its like a microcosm of the USA as a whole.), can certainly conceive of moving to be with him. Hmmmm, that sounds an awful like *my* life . . .
We hadn't kept in very close touch in the past few years, so I think we've both grown and changed a lot w/o the other really being around to see it. So it's a bit of a surprise to come back and see how much we are the same. Then again, maybe we were always very similar in the fundamentals and got distracted by the surface stuff which was more immediate.
It doesn't really change anything to have discovered this. But it's nice, all the same. Sort of a renewal of an old friendship, if you will.
Monday, July 04, 2005
"Dayton is actually a pretty big city. It spans 2 exits."
That's what the Waffle House waitress told me - in all seriousness - when I was asking her which side of Dayton I was on. Then again I was asking her at 11:15pm, so maybe she was tired. She was also new, apparently. And here's a quirk about Waffles Houses: they make grits the standard side dish for their omellettes; yet you can't get gravy on your hasbrowns. (And I suppose I'm going to have to clarify, since I have a bunch of yankees that read this blog, ^_~ , when I say gravy I'm talking about white, thick, creamy, sausage gravy, or country gravy, as in biscuits and gravy gravy.) I made a light comment about it to one of the servers, and she smiled and said "Yeah we have a lot of people ask that." I mean if they're southern enough to serve grits, then you'd think they'd serve biscuits and gravy. Ah well. Not in Ohio, apparently.
So the drive home was hot, and long, and my car was, as Tom described, comically packed full. I didn't make as good of progress the first day as I wanted to; I was hoping to make Philly to Indianapolis if 9 hours. No such like. So I got a Super 8 for the night, which was at least clean (although it took me a bit to locate the extra TP roll, which was *very* irksome, but in fairness it was in plain view - just on a rack a fair bit above my eyesight.) And they used a regular sheet instead of a fitted sheet on my bed, and the threadcount on the sheets must have been as low as it is possible to get, because they were a bit like sandpaper. But it did have Nick at Nite so I got to watch Fresh Prince of Bel Air reruns, and it had a pool which opened at 6:30am, so I got up at 9 and took a dip in the pool before showering, heading to Mass, and getting back on the road at noon. So not so bad.
The final days in NYC were quite pleasant; I went to see the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, a life-long dream (although Les Mis is my all-time favorite) and I had a pleasant final few days at work; one of the associates - he's actually a temp - gave Melissa and I hugs good-bye before he went on vacation and said he was going to miss us, which made us feel very good. It would have been wierd if John, the other male associate, had done that, but Oba never felt like our boss, just like a bud, so it was cool. And the two female associates took us out to lunch, which was enjoyable. And my housemate and I were both packing up Wednesday and Thursday, because she's moving in two weeks, so that was also amusing. Plus I got seven or eight bottles of nail polish from her. She had tons, but never wears it anymore, and was going to throw them away if I didn't want them. I rarely wear the stuff, but she had some excellent colors, so it was too much to resist.
And then visiting with Tom and Katie on Friday night, which was fun; Tom and I had a five hour conversation, waning into the wee hours of the morning. There's only one other person that I can have those type of conversations with, a friend from home, and I don't talk to her very often, so it was sort of balm to the mind for me.
And now I'm home, home home. And the car has been unloaded and the stuff crammed into my room for five weeks.
That's what the Waffle House waitress told me - in all seriousness - when I was asking her which side of Dayton I was on. Then again I was asking her at 11:15pm, so maybe she was tired. She was also new, apparently. And here's a quirk about Waffles Houses: they make grits the standard side dish for their omellettes; yet you can't get gravy on your hasbrowns. (And I suppose I'm going to have to clarify, since I have a bunch of yankees that read this blog, ^_~ , when I say gravy I'm talking about white, thick, creamy, sausage gravy, or country gravy, as in biscuits and gravy gravy.) I made a light comment about it to one of the servers, and she smiled and said "Yeah we have a lot of people ask that." I mean if they're southern enough to serve grits, then you'd think they'd serve biscuits and gravy. Ah well. Not in Ohio, apparently.
So the drive home was hot, and long, and my car was, as Tom described, comically packed full. I didn't make as good of progress the first day as I wanted to; I was hoping to make Philly to Indianapolis if 9 hours. No such like. So I got a Super 8 for the night, which was at least clean (although it took me a bit to locate the extra TP roll, which was *very* irksome, but in fairness it was in plain view - just on a rack a fair bit above my eyesight.) And they used a regular sheet instead of a fitted sheet on my bed, and the threadcount on the sheets must have been as low as it is possible to get, because they were a bit like sandpaper. But it did have Nick at Nite so I got to watch Fresh Prince of Bel Air reruns, and it had a pool which opened at 6:30am, so I got up at 9 and took a dip in the pool before showering, heading to Mass, and getting back on the road at noon. So not so bad.
The final days in NYC were quite pleasant; I went to see the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, a life-long dream (although Les Mis is my all-time favorite) and I had a pleasant final few days at work; one of the associates - he's actually a temp - gave Melissa and I hugs good-bye before he went on vacation and said he was going to miss us, which made us feel very good. It would have been wierd if John, the other male associate, had done that, but Oba never felt like our boss, just like a bud, so it was cool. And the two female associates took us out to lunch, which was enjoyable. And my housemate and I were both packing up Wednesday and Thursday, because she's moving in two weeks, so that was also amusing. Plus I got seven or eight bottles of nail polish from her. She had tons, but never wears it anymore, and was going to throw them away if I didn't want them. I rarely wear the stuff, but she had some excellent colors, so it was too much to resist.
And then visiting with Tom and Katie on Friday night, which was fun; Tom and I had a five hour conversation, waning into the wee hours of the morning. There's only one other person that I can have those type of conversations with, a friend from home, and I don't talk to her very often, so it was sort of balm to the mind for me.
And now I'm home, home home. And the car has been unloaded and the stuff crammed into my room for five weeks.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Cornell's new password policy is 4NNoy1ng^10
So the whole law school thing is beginning to feel real finally. I went up to Ithaca this weekend and found this great little one bedroom apartment in a very convenient location on State - right next to a bus stop, actually. In fact, I've barely moved from where I was in undergrad; my landlord said his tenants do their laundry in the Valentine facilty because it's so convenient. I'm hyped about having my own place. For the first time I'm living with just me myself and I. No more roommates fussing about dirty dishes if I have a busy week. No more turning the TV volume way down low because the housemate is asleep. No more trying to get roommate permission if I want to have somebody come over. It's great!! And it's a partially furnished apartment; specifically there's a double bed which looks in pretty good shape. Since the bed was the most expensive piece of furniture (I'm dumping my current mattress in the trash on the way out - it was a freebie and isn't worth paying to move) I'm feeling pretty well set up. And the current tenant may be willing to part with his futon and coffee table cheap, I'm told, which would be great, since they are also fairly nice pieces.
I also went through the process of activating my net ID tonight. Cornell's done changed things quite a bit in the two years I've been gone. For instance, on-campus residences still have "free" internet access, but they are limited to 2 GB of traffic per month. And above that they bill you per MB. Ouch! I mean obviously they're trying to stop the trafficing of copyrighted material, which I can understand. Still, it seems like 2 GB is not that much . . . . even if you downloading a lot of illegal stuff. But I don't really know. Stuff on the cornell network, including email, is not included in that 2 GB.
In order to activate your netID you have to read through their policies, and take a little quiz at the end. Apparently Cornell owns their email infrastructure now, and they put out this spiel that they respect the rights of all individuals, but they also have to comply with the law, and while they will not monitor your traffic w/o reason, they also will not guaranty the privacy of whatever is on their system, including emails.
It was interesting though - you could tell that the policy probably had two main parties giving very vehement input about it: the laywers and the tech guys. Or at least their university equivalents. Because the whole 2 GB thing, and Cornell's other warnings, is clearly aimed at curbing pirating. However, there is another section of the policy that basically makes failing to adequately secure your computer as bad an offense as pirating things. I can understand the logic in that - failing to adequately protect against viruses endangers the whole network, not just one dumb user.
Still, I think they took the adequately securing your system thing one step too far with their new netID password policy. The rules are something as follows:
**Must include at least 3 of the 4 following things: Upper case, lowercase, symbol, number and be at least 8 characters long
**Must not have in any part of it your netID or ANY word which would appear in the dictionary
** simple L33T (or however you spell that) substitutions are insufficient.
They suggest taking the first letters of the words in a line from a poem and then mixing it up for instance. Now, while I grant that many people are not as secure as they should be w/ their tasswords, and that by adhering to the above rules it certainly seems like you would get pretty darn secure passwords, it seems a bit overboard. I mean, I had to type my password down in a file anyway, to make sure I could remember what it was after I set it! Now that's not particularly secure, is it?
And the simple l33t substitutions not working gets me too. As an example, I tried something similar to, oh, let's say "har3mRy&". And that was not secure enough. However when I changed the word to something like h4r3m&ry and that was okay. ("Harem" btw. I'm not fluent in l33t - I don't think that's even how you spell it actually it looks wrong.)
I mean, okay, so you can write computer programs to count on the leet substitutions I guess . . . but I was just thinking yeesh, if I had read this policy as a freshmen I think I would have been so intimidated I never would have touched a computer.
Anyway, I am very glad I'm not living on campus after all, because the whole 2GB thing really turns me off.
So the whole law school thing is beginning to feel real finally. I went up to Ithaca this weekend and found this great little one bedroom apartment in a very convenient location on State - right next to a bus stop, actually. In fact, I've barely moved from where I was in undergrad; my landlord said his tenants do their laundry in the Valentine facilty because it's so convenient. I'm hyped about having my own place. For the first time I'm living with just me myself and I. No more roommates fussing about dirty dishes if I have a busy week. No more turning the TV volume way down low because the housemate is asleep. No more trying to get roommate permission if I want to have somebody come over. It's great!! And it's a partially furnished apartment; specifically there's a double bed which looks in pretty good shape. Since the bed was the most expensive piece of furniture (I'm dumping my current mattress in the trash on the way out - it was a freebie and isn't worth paying to move) I'm feeling pretty well set up. And the current tenant may be willing to part with his futon and coffee table cheap, I'm told, which would be great, since they are also fairly nice pieces.
I also went through the process of activating my net ID tonight. Cornell's done changed things quite a bit in the two years I've been gone. For instance, on-campus residences still have "free" internet access, but they are limited to 2 GB of traffic per month. And above that they bill you per MB. Ouch! I mean obviously they're trying to stop the trafficing of copyrighted material, which I can understand. Still, it seems like 2 GB is not that much . . . . even if you downloading a lot of illegal stuff. But I don't really know. Stuff on the cornell network, including email, is not included in that 2 GB.
In order to activate your netID you have to read through their policies, and take a little quiz at the end. Apparently Cornell owns their email infrastructure now, and they put out this spiel that they respect the rights of all individuals, but they also have to comply with the law, and while they will not monitor your traffic w/o reason, they also will not guaranty the privacy of whatever is on their system, including emails.
It was interesting though - you could tell that the policy probably had two main parties giving very vehement input about it: the laywers and the tech guys. Or at least their university equivalents. Because the whole 2 GB thing, and Cornell's other warnings, is clearly aimed at curbing pirating. However, there is another section of the policy that basically makes failing to adequately secure your computer as bad an offense as pirating things. I can understand the logic in that - failing to adequately protect against viruses endangers the whole network, not just one dumb user.
Still, I think they took the adequately securing your system thing one step too far with their new netID password policy. The rules are something as follows:
**Must include at least 3 of the 4 following things: Upper case, lowercase, symbol, number and be at least 8 characters long
**Must not have in any part of it your netID or ANY word which would appear in the dictionary
** simple L33T (or however you spell that) substitutions are insufficient.
They suggest taking the first letters of the words in a line from a poem and then mixing it up for instance. Now, while I grant that many people are not as secure as they should be w/ their tasswords, and that by adhering to the above rules it certainly seems like you would get pretty darn secure passwords, it seems a bit overboard. I mean, I had to type my password down in a file anyway, to make sure I could remember what it was after I set it! Now that's not particularly secure, is it?
And the simple l33t substitutions not working gets me too. As an example, I tried something similar to, oh, let's say "har3mRy&". And that was not secure enough. However when I changed the word to something like h4r3m&ry and that was okay. ("Harem" btw. I'm not fluent in l33t - I don't think that's even how you spell it actually it looks wrong.)
I mean, okay, so you can write computer programs to count on the leet substitutions I guess . . . but I was just thinking yeesh, if I had read this policy as a freshmen I think I would have been so intimidated I never would have touched a computer.
Anyway, I am very glad I'm not living on campus after all, because the whole 2GB thing really turns me off.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
"I cannot in good conscience support such discrimination."
So I told my landlady almost a month ago that I would be moving out on July 2nd - well over a month's notice. Now there's no lease on this apartment - there's not even a written agreement. Everything is verbal. She has a 2nd floor apartment and a 3rd floor apartment, but she essentially rents each room separately. My housemate Brenda has been here about 4 years and had 3 or 4 roommates. I myself found the place by checking postings on craigslist. Zophie, the landlady, is a nice older lady, and I've enjoyed living here, so I offered to help them find a renter by posting the room on craigslist. They agreed.
I had oringally posted the ad with Brenda's email and Zophie's number, but since most people seemed to be emailing Brenda (who wasn't communicating with Zophie) rather than calling, and Zophie was annoyed with Brenda for other reasons, Zophie requested that I take Brenda's email off the posting and just put up the phone number for herself and her son's cell.
Well, since there's no lease and it's not like Brenda is responsible for the 2nd 1/2 of the rent if the room doesn't get rented, I figured that was pretty reasonable. So I did so. But I guess people were still responding to the old posting w/ Brenda's email, or else she'd already arranged things, because Thursday night a very nice black lady comes and looks at the apartment. She had made the contact through Brenda, who apparently hadn't informed Zophie. So the potential renter sees Zophie in the yard as she comes up and introduces herself.
The next morning as I'm getting ready for work, Zophie and her son come up to talk to me. Brenda had already left for work. Basically Zophie expressed her frustration with Brenda, saying that it was not Brenda's place to rent, and no matter how nice that "colored" lady was, she wasn't going to rent to her. So far I just figured Zophie's reason was because she was upset Brenda hadn't gone through her, which I could understand. But then Zophie launches into this discussion about how it's her apartment and she wants to rent, and how these two "colored" girls at one point came and looked at the apartment, and they said they liked it and they wanted it, and Zophie was like "what going to do?" and so "I double the rent." And apparently after Zophie doubled the rent on the girls, they *still* wanted the apartment. So Zophie told them it wasn't going to be ready or something, in order to not have to rent to them.
At a couple points Zophie's son tried to interrupt her, and say something more vague, like "It's just better if mother chooses, because there are all kinds of people who might rent."
Anyway nothing much happened of the conversation; I told them I would repost the ad that day on my lunch break. But the more I thought about the conversation the more it bothered me. I mean, was there really any other way to interpret what she was saying? Her first statement about not renting to the "colored" lady that came thursday to look at the apartment I could excuse away as being annoyance with Brenda rather than prejudice, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to explain the doubling the rent story.
So I wrote Zophie a brief note, saying that due to her two statements ...........and....... I felt that she was discriminating against African Americans, and that such discrimination was against the law, and that I was under no obligation to help her, and could not in good conscience support such discrimination, and therefore I would not be posting the ad online. I dropped the note in Zophie's mailbox immediately before leaving for the weekend - I admit I was a bit of a chicken and didn't want to confront or be confronted by Zophie.
I've had pangs of doubt this weekend when I think about it, a little anxiety in wondering about Zophie's reaction, I guess because I just don't want to believe what I heard. I want to have misinterpreted something. But I don't think I did. The only explanation I can come up with for Zophie's behaviour relies on another ethnic type-casting on my part: Zophie is a Polish immigrant, still speaks with a very heavy accent, so perhaps in Poland their population is not as heterogenous and therefore they weren't taught that racial prejudices are bad.
I feel a little embarrassed about that explanation - as reasonable as it seems - because it seems like what I'm trying to do is say "she's not really an American, American's aren't bigoted like that." Which as much as we'd like it to be true, isn't entirely true. I can think of born-and-bred red blood Americans at home who make the comment "There are blacks, and then there are niggers." Which I suppose is a rather offensive way of trying to say that it's about how somebody acts (and maybe dresses) rather than the color of the skin . . . but it still has some racial prejudice in there.
So yeah, sort of a rather unpleasant look at the problems still facing our country today.
So I told my landlady almost a month ago that I would be moving out on July 2nd - well over a month's notice. Now there's no lease on this apartment - there's not even a written agreement. Everything is verbal. She has a 2nd floor apartment and a 3rd floor apartment, but she essentially rents each room separately. My housemate Brenda has been here about 4 years and had 3 or 4 roommates. I myself found the place by checking postings on craigslist. Zophie, the landlady, is a nice older lady, and I've enjoyed living here, so I offered to help them find a renter by posting the room on craigslist. They agreed.
I had oringally posted the ad with Brenda's email and Zophie's number, but since most people seemed to be emailing Brenda (who wasn't communicating with Zophie) rather than calling, and Zophie was annoyed with Brenda for other reasons, Zophie requested that I take Brenda's email off the posting and just put up the phone number for herself and her son's cell.
Well, since there's no lease and it's not like Brenda is responsible for the 2nd 1/2 of the rent if the room doesn't get rented, I figured that was pretty reasonable. So I did so. But I guess people were still responding to the old posting w/ Brenda's email, or else she'd already arranged things, because Thursday night a very nice black lady comes and looks at the apartment. She had made the contact through Brenda, who apparently hadn't informed Zophie. So the potential renter sees Zophie in the yard as she comes up and introduces herself.
The next morning as I'm getting ready for work, Zophie and her son come up to talk to me. Brenda had already left for work. Basically Zophie expressed her frustration with Brenda, saying that it was not Brenda's place to rent, and no matter how nice that "colored" lady was, she wasn't going to rent to her. So far I just figured Zophie's reason was because she was upset Brenda hadn't gone through her, which I could understand. But then Zophie launches into this discussion about how it's her apartment and she wants to rent, and how these two "colored" girls at one point came and looked at the apartment, and they said they liked it and they wanted it, and Zophie was like "what going to do?" and so "I double the rent." And apparently after Zophie doubled the rent on the girls, they *still* wanted the apartment. So Zophie told them it wasn't going to be ready or something, in order to not have to rent to them.
At a couple points Zophie's son tried to interrupt her, and say something more vague, like "It's just better if mother chooses, because there are all kinds of people who might rent."
Anyway nothing much happened of the conversation; I told them I would repost the ad that day on my lunch break. But the more I thought about the conversation the more it bothered me. I mean, was there really any other way to interpret what she was saying? Her first statement about not renting to the "colored" lady that came thursday to look at the apartment I could excuse away as being annoyance with Brenda rather than prejudice, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to explain the doubling the rent story.
So I wrote Zophie a brief note, saying that due to her two statements ...........and....... I felt that she was discriminating against African Americans, and that such discrimination was against the law, and that I was under no obligation to help her, and could not in good conscience support such discrimination, and therefore I would not be posting the ad online. I dropped the note in Zophie's mailbox immediately before leaving for the weekend - I admit I was a bit of a chicken and didn't want to confront or be confronted by Zophie.
I've had pangs of doubt this weekend when I think about it, a little anxiety in wondering about Zophie's reaction, I guess because I just don't want to believe what I heard. I want to have misinterpreted something. But I don't think I did. The only explanation I can come up with for Zophie's behaviour relies on another ethnic type-casting on my part: Zophie is a Polish immigrant, still speaks with a very heavy accent, so perhaps in Poland their population is not as heterogenous and therefore they weren't taught that racial prejudices are bad.
I feel a little embarrassed about that explanation - as reasonable as it seems - because it seems like what I'm trying to do is say "she's not really an American, American's aren't bigoted like that." Which as much as we'd like it to be true, isn't entirely true. I can think of born-and-bred red blood Americans at home who make the comment "There are blacks, and then there are niggers." Which I suppose is a rather offensive way of trying to say that it's about how somebody acts (and maybe dresses) rather than the color of the skin . . . but it still has some racial prejudice in there.
So yeah, sort of a rather unpleasant look at the problems still facing our country today.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
"Can I have a beer? It's for my hair."
That has to be one of the oddest requests I've ever gotten - Brenda wanted to use one of my old Oktoberfests (I've got 2 left that have been in the back of the fridge since I burned out on the brew last fall). She claims they're great for her hair - but it has to be flat and stale, so she opened it up and left it on the counter until morning. *shakes head*
Ah, good ol' Sam Adams. Soooo much better on tap though than in a bottle. You can't really get it in mid-Missouri. When I ask, they think I'm crazy.
And that actually is just serving as a poor bridge to talking about my visit home.
Which was quite nice. I got a lot of nephew time in . My sister picked me up at the airport, and then she and my nephew Noah and I headed over to the hospital to see my brother-in-law, who had a diabetic episode the weekend before and had been admitted. So that afternoon my sister and her husband were talking a lot with the doctor, learning the nitty gritty about his condition, and learning how to give Matt his insulin shots - this is the first he's learned he's diabetic. I'm not crazy about needles, and Noah the 2 1/2 year old has a lot of energy and can be a bit disturbing, so Noah and I wandered the hospital while Matt was learning about his disease.
It was fun actually. It's the first time I've had a chance to spend one-on-one time with Noah when there weren't other sisters around oohing and ahhing. My old children's museum training kicked in. We were nominally looking for the mythical "children's table of toys" in the ER, but we never got there. Noah enjoyed pressing the button in the elevator (just the one, not all of them), and we wandered into the cafeteria and "counted" the cars in this painting on the wall, and I got him to "count" in Chinese with me. I use quoatations because he hasn't gotten one-to-one correspondence down, to use the lingo. In other words, he just knows numbers as this sequence of words, he doesn't really understand that "one" means one thing. But that's normal at his age. So he picked up the sequence of words in Chinese pretty darn well - he mimiced my tones perfectly w/o a pause. He did have trouble with the word for 5, which is "wooo". He couldn't purse his lips to get the "ooo" sound.
We had fun crawling around and looking under chairs in the deserted waiting room - Noah discovered that when he peeked under one chair, he could see me peeking under the other chair at the end of the row, and that made him giggle. And we played with hopping and jumping a bit instead of walking. His coordination isn't that good yet. Later after my parents got there, all of us went out to the hospital's rock garden, and while they all sat on benches and talked, Noah and I played some more. He was scrambling around a bit on the rocks - well not really scrambling, but slowly picking his way across. I was 1/2 afraid his mother was going to be like "Cecelia, you shouldn't let him do that" but perhaps I'm just paranoid. I was ready to catch him if need be. in fact up in the hall I had a nice catch; I was sitting on the floor spread-eagled, and Noah came toward me, only he didn't realize my leg was in the way and tripped. But I neatly caught him before he fell.
I like horseplaying a bit with him - very gently, since he is still a toddler. But I think it's an important part of every child's development. I think especially with the first child parents tend to be afraid to do stuff, because they're afraid they child is so delicate and are terrified of him getting hurt. Not my sister so much - Noah has a knack for getting places he shouldn't and so she knows he's a tough little guy. But like parents I saw at the children's museum. It's so important for a child to be able to explore, learn, and yes, maybe get a little hurt. It's vital to letting them grow up with a sense of self-confidence and self-reliance. When a parent is hovering over them every second, "no honey you might hurt yourself", they lose a lot of opportunity. I mean of course I'm not advocating carelessness either - it's good to let your child try, while being close by to help if it gets too bad. It's a balance, of course. :-D
And to top it all off, Noah has learned my name, sort of. I told my sisters that they should call me "Aunt Celia" to their sons, instead of "Cecelia" which is a bit too much to handle. Noah has trouble with "L" sounds anyway, so it comes out this warbled "Seya" but that's good enough for me. ;-)
Alex is adorable too, and I don't mean to give him the short shift, but this is really long already, so I'll have to leave gushing about him for another time.
That has to be one of the oddest requests I've ever gotten - Brenda wanted to use one of my old Oktoberfests (I've got 2 left that have been in the back of the fridge since I burned out on the brew last fall). She claims they're great for her hair - but it has to be flat and stale, so she opened it up and left it on the counter until morning. *shakes head*
Ah, good ol' Sam Adams. Soooo much better on tap though than in a bottle. You can't really get it in mid-Missouri. When I ask, they think I'm crazy.
And that actually is just serving as a poor bridge to talking about my visit home.
Which was quite nice. I got a lot of nephew time in . My sister picked me up at the airport, and then she and my nephew Noah and I headed over to the hospital to see my brother-in-law, who had a diabetic episode the weekend before and had been admitted. So that afternoon my sister and her husband were talking a lot with the doctor, learning the nitty gritty about his condition, and learning how to give Matt his insulin shots - this is the first he's learned he's diabetic. I'm not crazy about needles, and Noah the 2 1/2 year old has a lot of energy and can be a bit disturbing, so Noah and I wandered the hospital while Matt was learning about his disease.
It was fun actually. It's the first time I've had a chance to spend one-on-one time with Noah when there weren't other sisters around oohing and ahhing. My old children's museum training kicked in. We were nominally looking for the mythical "children's table of toys" in the ER, but we never got there. Noah enjoyed pressing the button in the elevator (just the one, not all of them), and we wandered into the cafeteria and "counted" the cars in this painting on the wall, and I got him to "count" in Chinese with me. I use quoatations because he hasn't gotten one-to-one correspondence down, to use the lingo. In other words, he just knows numbers as this sequence of words, he doesn't really understand that "one" means one thing. But that's normal at his age. So he picked up the sequence of words in Chinese pretty darn well - he mimiced my tones perfectly w/o a pause. He did have trouble with the word for 5, which is "wooo". He couldn't purse his lips to get the "ooo" sound.
We had fun crawling around and looking under chairs in the deserted waiting room - Noah discovered that when he peeked under one chair, he could see me peeking under the other chair at the end of the row, and that made him giggle. And we played with hopping and jumping a bit instead of walking. His coordination isn't that good yet. Later after my parents got there, all of us went out to the hospital's rock garden, and while they all sat on benches and talked, Noah and I played some more. He was scrambling around a bit on the rocks - well not really scrambling, but slowly picking his way across. I was 1/2 afraid his mother was going to be like "Cecelia, you shouldn't let him do that" but perhaps I'm just paranoid. I was ready to catch him if need be. in fact up in the hall I had a nice catch; I was sitting on the floor spread-eagled, and Noah came toward me, only he didn't realize my leg was in the way and tripped. But I neatly caught him before he fell.
I like horseplaying a bit with him - very gently, since he is still a toddler. But I think it's an important part of every child's development. I think especially with the first child parents tend to be afraid to do stuff, because they're afraid they child is so delicate and are terrified of him getting hurt. Not my sister so much - Noah has a knack for getting places he shouldn't and so she knows he's a tough little guy. But like parents I saw at the children's museum. It's so important for a child to be able to explore, learn, and yes, maybe get a little hurt. It's vital to letting them grow up with a sense of self-confidence and self-reliance. When a parent is hovering over them every second, "no honey you might hurt yourself", they lose a lot of opportunity. I mean of course I'm not advocating carelessness either - it's good to let your child try, while being close by to help if it gets too bad. It's a balance, of course. :-D
And to top it all off, Noah has learned my name, sort of. I told my sisters that they should call me "Aunt Celia" to their sons, instead of "Cecelia" which is a bit too much to handle. Noah has trouble with "L" sounds anyway, so it comes out this warbled "Seya" but that's good enough for me. ;-)
Alex is adorable too, and I don't mean to give him the short shift, but this is really long already, so I'll have to leave gushing about him for another time.
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