Blogs vs. Facebook

I find I spend a lot more time these days on Facebook than I do here, but I'm not sure if you took the total amount of time I spend on FB now it is much different from how much I used to spend working on posts. I think that the arrival of my daughter, plus work, plus another commitment that takes a ton of time, have combined to make my schedule way more fragmented than in the past.

Anyway, I have a couple of ideas of how to reenergize this blog, one of which is to recycle some content I've generated in another context. The next post is a good example :)

We only work when we need the money

Every month, payroll passes out a little sheet for managers so they can see who has taken how much vacation, and how much each person needs to take by the end of the year. The latter is on account of our company's policy that half your earned time off is "use or lose," presumably to prevent workaholics from cashing out six months of pay after taking no time off in their time at the paper.

The way I figure it, you need a couple of weeks off, minimum, if you're going to go anywhere of consequence. But time off is accrued starting Jan. 1, so people who plan to take longer vacations almost always need to wait until late spring or early summer to hit the road.

You will be astonished, I am sure, to hear that every year, lots of people go on vacation later in the year rather than earlier. And every year, around Jan. 2, managers say, "OK, make sure you sign up for vacation early so we don't wind up with everyone wanting to take time off at the same time at the end of the year."

Is it possible that a competing system might result in a different pattern? I can think of two that don't involve cracking down on when people take time off:

• Reorganize the year so that summer and fall's good traveling weather is not followed by holidays everyone wants to go home for.

or

• Change the accrual calendar to July 1-June 30.

My bet is the first of those two options is more likely to happen than the second.

Notes from time off

Usually, a week off means a week away, but we're spending this one here, in sunny Walla Walla (highs in the 80s, lows in the 50s, arid :).

Usually, a week off also means a week of contemplating work a bit, but between lazing about, watching movies, some incompetent fishing and lots of exploring with my best friend from high school (damn! that's a long time!), I haven't done much thinking on it, except when talking it over with him and the butterfly lady.

That's OK, though. Maybe it is just because I don't usually take the vacations you just hang out on, as opposed to, say, going on some adventure in the mountains or overseas.

Well, whatever. This isn't a really deep post, is it?

The Wild Life

OK, so Lulu called me out (nicely, though): I mostly do not have a wild & crazy existence. The butterfly lady and I have our nest here in a quiet town and a couple of dogs that take up a lot of our time. We spend a lot of time just hanging around, which suits us.

This doesn't mesh with the expectations of many of my past acquaintances and friends, who expected me to... what? In college, I was named most likely to be involved in a scandal of some sort. And although I have not been apprehended in connection with any known criminal conspiracies, it is possible that career path might have been expected by certain of my potential associates.

Hey, I don't mind. And on a somewhat more exciting note, the butterfly lady & I did score tickets for a Regina Spektor show in one of the larger cities in our area in April. Maybe that's a start :)

Busy weekend

When the butterfly lady and I lived in Walla Walla the first time, we had a medium-size apartment (square footage? who knows, but it was a pretty large two-bedroom type), and we had a fairly large amount of stuff. When we moved to New Hampshire, we shipped our books and carried everything else with us in our car and a 5-foot-by-8-foot U-Haul trailer.

Before we moved, we got rid of a hell of a lot of stuff. We didn't even take a bed, just a futon.

The place we moved into in New Hampshire also had two bedrooms but was much smaller, so we had to get rid of a lot more stuff. Yet, when we moved back, we had to rent a truck, a fairly large one at that, to haul all our stuff, even though we got rid of a lot of . Our apartment didn't grow in the intervening years, but it sure seemed that way on moving day.

Now we have a house, and we spent the weekend doing spring cleaning (the weather was decidedly vernal over the three-day) until all hours of the night. Fun, but not exactly relaxing.

Accomplished:

• Got a router/wireless base station - Now the smartypants doesn't have to hook the damn ethernet cable to her laptop just to go online. That's only been two years in coming.
• Assembled a photo album/organized old letters - Doesn't sound like much, but now all that stuff is way more organized and takes up way less room. I should have done this when space was at a premium.
• Bought a couple of organize-y drawer things for the butterfly lady to use in the closet - Hey, I didn't have to do much except take out my toolbox, aka wallet.
• Weeded out a bunch of junkola - Like my father, I looked at my late uncle's (his brother's) house - overrun with stuff, and when I say overrun, I mean stuffed to the gills - and thought, "If that runs in the family, it isn't running with me."
• Wove a lot - The warp I'm working on is nearly done, but I've got a couple more behind it...
• Made clam chowder - How is that spring cleaning? Well, it helped me reorganize some bacon, clams, potatoes and milk that were cluttering the place up, and we were able to put a fair amount of it "away."

maybe there were some other things, too, but my brain is full.

A great movie

The butterfly lady and I watched The Tunnel the other night, a movie I picked out on a whim from Netflix.

I think I was predisposed to enjoy it, having been waaay into German/East German history and dynamics when I was in high school.

Whatever. The Tunnel was great, one of the best/most entertaining movies I have seen in quite a long time. It sure as hell beat Babel and, to pick another non-random example, Crash.

I wish more action/adventure/suspense movies were this good.

In the studio

Here's my/my mother's loom Marigold complete with the warp I put on the other day.





As you might surmise, this warp produces garments that have strips of regular cloth with web-like parts in between. For an idea of what I mean when I say "web-like parts in between" take a look at the snazzy items at left.

Tangled webs

Other people's weekends appear to have been more fun, but mine was at the very least eventful.

The butterfly lady and I did the usual weekend things, buying dog chow (and a water cooler-style water dish for the thirsty piggies), going to a movie ("Babel" - I'm not sure what to say about that one) and having a nice dinner (A dish of my own design and some pinot noir).

I also put on a warp. It is beautiful and will no doubt result in a lot of easily sold garments, but for reasons apparently too arcane to explain, the process was absolutely damned maddening. I did not document with video or stills: You would have seen a lot of pictures of me frowning, or heard angry grumbling. Maybe that would have been funny, though.

Nine fucking hours. For which, I admit, I am paid. Even so, if I was the pull-out-my-hair type, I would have.

Ah yes, art is so soothing.

Amusing T-shirt

For once, an airplane magazine had something cool, a bit about a cool T-shirt site...

I like this one below, and if you click on the image, you will be rushed off to the site to enjoy the full-size image, a penguin holding a ruler...

Christmas in SoCal

Being as Mama has a new small person in her household (my niece!!!), the butterfly lady, my mother and I all headed down to southern California for the Winter Seasonal Holiday Celebration.

Several things occurred:

• Winter Seasonal Holiday Celebratory Commemoration gifts were exchanged.
• Soon-to-be in-laws were met (see below).
• Mama's super-cool boyfriend proposed to her!
• Disneyland was visited.
• A Le Conte's thrasher and Nuttall's woodpecker were observed (it is getting hard to see life birds, so two in one day is a big deal to me).
• Sentences with too many passive constructions were formed.

Anyway, we are returned from traveling abroad and have only to bail B I Double G and Pig out of the clink to complete the holiday thing.

I hope all your Christmases were the best they could be...

Games & fun

The butterfly lady and I are pretty much kids: We stay up late, we eat ice cream a lot (and we have to remind ourselves to eat salad), we have an ever-growing family of stuffed critters (they would be displeased to be referred to as teddy bears), we play games pretty much daily, the list goes on.

So, which games, you ask?

Scrabble. An old friend calls the two of us the Loyola-Marymount of Scrabble.
Super Scrabble. What better way to keep up the run-and-gun than a game that lets you double (or better) your best scores? The manufacturer says the game lets you "play words you once could only dream about." I have to admit, I have had Scrabble dreams.
Boggle. Noisy word fun!
Tangrams. We just got a set for two players - fun! You can play here and here, too.
Cards. We pretty much play only rummy and double solitaire (an OK explanation of the game is here, but it doesn't do much to capture the intensity of the game), and we used to play cribbage a lot.
Mah Jongg. We have a little problem here, which is a lack of a third (or a third and a fourth), so we just play rummy against the day we find a Mah Jongg-playing pal or two...
Abalone. The butterfly lady groans whenever we see this game - she seems to think I have some sort of unfair advantage at it.
Go. Ditto, but she did give me our Go board as a present, and it is the star of the animation at the bottom of this page.

I guess this makes us pretty much word and logic nerds. :)

Geez, louise

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild - or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I was hoping for the King of Cups, but alas...

Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful for peace and love, especially when they prevail.

CSI: Miami

Maybe the CSI stands for Curiously Short of Interesting.

Assorted thoughts collected while watching an episode of the show last night:

• If you're going to have a show about a murder, have a show about a murder. If you want one about a terrorist plot to blow up a nuclear power plant, have a different show. If you insist on having both in one show, maybe an hour's not long enough to, say, develop anything.
• Nobody who really does a job has to define all the tools they use.
  "Quick, Officer Smith, get your shotgun!"
  "I have retrieved my shotgun, which I use to fire shells!"
• If a truck carrying 10,000 pounds of plastic explosives leaves the docks at noon, what will its location be at 3 p.m.? If you said just outside the nuclear power plant, but close enough to intercept before it does any harm, you are correct.

Watching the show would have been a huge waste of time if it hadn't led to a half-hour of hysterical laughing and fake dialogue at bedtime.

Emmylou Harris sings my favorite song

She said in a documentary that because she was the first non-Townes Van Zandt person to do "Pancho and Lefty" she thinks of it as her song.

An unusual attack ad

Visa's current ad campaign, Life Takes Visa, is visually interesting, sometimes silly and usually clever.

Its newest TV component, "Transactional Fluidity," takes a swipe at cash, which strikes me as an atypical target for an attack ad. The 60-second spot is a highly choreographed play in a deli, where everything works like clockwork, including the Visa-swiping customers. That is, until one person pays with cash, throwing the finely tuned dance into disarray.

Besides villifying cash, the ad suggests to me that if you really want to be just like everybody else, you should use a Visa card.

Only weirdos and iconoclasts use cash, eh? Well, I'm ever in the deli in the Visa ad, I'm paying with pennies.

Visa says that what its new campaign "is really about are the people who stand up to life’s challenges, laugh at its jokes, savor its sweetness and continue down its unpredictable path."

I'm not sure how that statement fits with making an enemy out of cash, which the ad protrays as severely uncool. But the ad does fit with somebody else's agenda.

Earlier this year, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson claimed that the "cash economy" is the No. 3 problem facing the American taxpayer. As I wrote in January, Olson alleges that the failure of taxpayers to report income from the cash economy costs the nation $100 billion or more each year, which she says translates to about $2,000 per taxpayer.

I'm not saying Visa and the IRS are in cahoots, but I'm pretty sure that if using cash makes both of them mad, I'm happy to slap down the dollar bills.

A piece of animation

I put this together while living in the Granite State...

Performance art?

The massage lady's latest project:

Your shoes are tied!

My father sent me this excellent link to Ian's Shoelace site, which caused me to relace my shoes. My Dr. Martens only have three eyelets, so I chose riding-boot lacing because... Oh, I don't have any reason, I just thought it would be fun.

Now, I need some shoes with more eyelets!

The bead game

While watching television late one night in the Granite State, the butterfly lady and I stumbled on "The Bead Game/Histoire de perles," showing on public television. The film, which can be viewed here, has this synopsis, provided by Canada's National Film Board:

"In this fascinating, innovative exercise in animation, thousands of beads are arranged and manipulated, assuming shapes of creatures both mythical and real. They continually devour, merge, and absorb one another in explosions of color. The theme is one of aggression and inevitability, but any conclusion is left to the viewer."

This is well worth watching.