Or not.
My whole day was all about seeing an all-female production of 1776, which was originally written for all men except for two women (Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson). Took light rail, met Janice at the theater, The Theatre on San Pedro Square is cleverly hidden behind Peggy Sue's, it's a very comfortable 300-seat venue with great sight lines.

I got what I expected - a very talented group of women acting and singing their hearts out but utterly failing to convince me that they were the Founding Fathers. A large part of it was they were not in costume. Another chunk was there was no set. The furniture was decidedly not period.  

The cast was miked, but the sound system was not surround or even true stereo so there was no audio clue where the person was on stage. Music was electronic, and the sound booth did a horrible job of balancing it, so I often couldn't hear the words. They had this obnoxious church bell effect which was rung at what appeared to be random times, and also tolled as each delegate came up to sign the Declaration. It drowned out the roll call.

Well worth going to for the level of talent and the novelty.

---

Janice gave me a ride home. It's been raining and blustery on and off all weekend.

I took down the flag pole with the US and Thai flags, because it is rude to fly national flags in this weather. Makes it harder to find my house, though. Maybe I'll get another pole and put up my old obsolete Coast and Geodetic Survey flag. That was designed to fly on ships in all weather. CG&S was absorbed by NOAA in the late 60s. I got the flag because I worked in a NOAA warehouse as a summer job when they decided to toss the old flags. I can't find an image of this one online, it has a yellow sinusoidal projection of the globe in the center, the ones I'm seeing online have simply a triangle, or the NOAA bird inside a blue circle inside the triangle.

But imagine this, in yellow in the center:



Domino has been a nudge all evening. Well, during dinner, which was two courses. Corn chowder then I finally dug the last two sourdough English muffins out of the freezer and nuked them with margarine and swiss cheese. Dessert was sliced banana under chocolate ice cream with sprinkles. And a heart-shaped shortbread cookie half dipped in chocolate.

Tivo supplied the entertainment, I watched two episodes of TMZ and the latest Shark Tank. The latter lived up to its name, the final presenter had The Next Great Smartphone Thing™, and all the sharks were jumping each other to make a better offer. Better for them, not for the presenter. He finally took the highest $$ bid which also meant giving up the most equity.

Also spent some Quality Time programming the Tivo to record the gold medal rounds of the sports I really want to watch. Luge, skeleton, speed skating short distances. Unfortunately that will mean a lot of FF-ing through biathlon (yawn) and figure skating (WTF, judges?).

Put out the garbage/recycling. One of the many things one gives up owning a home is the luxury of taking stuff out to the dumpster whenever one wishes, and not paying attention to what day it is. Except now that I think about it, the dumpsters were full most of the time.

Did look at prices for Nissan Leaf. $30k. I probably can't afford that, unless I can get $15k for the Corolla.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Maybe BASFA

My formative years were spent as a Conservative Jew with Orthodox leanings. Jesus and Christmas had no place in our home or our culture. We had neighbors who did celebrate, but there were enough practicing Jews on our block that nobody expected us to murder a tree and put it in our living room.

I have since given up Judaism, because it makes as little sense as any religion. Less than most. But I still am offended that after 2,000 years of war, people expect me to accept that they believe Jesus was the Messiah and came to bring Peace on Earth™.

The best three winters of my life were spent in Thailand in the mid-70's, where there were zero signs of Jesus. With the advent of the western tourist boom and pandering to them, one cannot escape Christmas there anymore. :-(

I posted this graphic on FB,
( Read more... )
and got tomes written against it by some of my friends.

One rant was from a friend who is extremely close to his family both emotionally and physically. He says it is un-American to work on this holiday, which one should spend with family. Others claim that it is slavery to force workers to work on this holiday.

But here I am with no family nearby, an atheist who objects to the religious roots of this holiday, who has in the past been forced to take the day off without pay (contractors don't generally get paid if they don't work) when there is work to be done. Silicon Valley is also packed with people from other countries who are fine with working on a day which means nothing to them, and who want to shop.

The irony of stores being closed on this day is this is the day when the most people need to do some last-minute shopping for food and related things because the tradition demands big dinners with lots of guests.

No one is a slave in this country. No one is forced to work for a company which requires them to work on Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Divali or Yom Kippur. When I moved to Seattle in 1965 it was illegal for stores to be open Sunday. There were plenty of people who wanted to work on Sunday, some so they could earn extra $$ and some so they could take a weekday off, but most who did not fear the Christian god's wrath. Somehow, the economy didn't collapse when that law was overturned, nobody was struck by lightning inside an open business.

And yes, rich people get richer when their business is open on a holiday. But so do their employees.

At the mfg office for my 10 am appointment, I said maybe give me 15 minutes slack. I was there on time, she was 20 minutes late. I guess that's fair enough.

Dozens of pieces of paper to initial and sign,

some to do with state regulations about what needs to be inspected, which were already covered in the initial purchase document, most about the requirements of the mobile home park. The second one is they wanted me top bring my actual Social Security Card. A copy of my driver's license was fine, but they also needed my SS card, not a copy. Absurd, because the SS card says on it clearly it is not to be used for ID. No worries, I knew exactly where it was. I have a file folder toward the back of the top file drawer with all kinds of cards, and I had put it there the last time I traveled, along with my SCUBA card, since there was not reason for me to be carrying those around.

Instead of going straight home, I drove through the mobile home park, checked out the outside of the clubhouse and then went home.

Took all the cards out of the folder - there are about 200 of them, most of them bundled in a sort of category order with rubber bands. For example, all ID cards (old drivers licenses, AAA cards, high school ID, CNN and Direct TV contractor badges, etc.) which is where I expected to find it. Nope. Next most likely was one of the loose ones, because those are mostly still active, like library cards, a BART ticket, Starbucks card, CHM membership card. Nope. Checked all the bundles. Checked everything again. Did I shred it? I know I thought about doing that.

So, in a semi-panic because I need this in hand before I can make an appointment for an interview at the park, I look up SS online, fill out the form for a replacement card, find the address off the nearest office, and make plans to go there Tuesday (Monday is a Federal Mistake Holiday), and wait a week for the card to be mailed to me. I need my passport or birth certificate for that.

Those are in the top of the 4 small fireproof boxes in the bedroom closet. I open it up, pull out the current passport (it's on top of all the others dating back to 1975) find the envelope with two certified copies of my birth certificate, and as I am putting the envelope back, there is my SS card. Whew.

Next on the list is a letter from my apartment manager saying I pay the rent and don't throw heavy metal band parties in the room, or set fire to things. Walk to the apt. office, the nice lady says I can print that online. But no, what I can print out online is a for to fax to Corporate requesting they send the info. And the link is broken. I call the office, get voicemail, leave a message.

Also need an employment verification letter. I'll have to ask how to get one Monday, because I don't think I actually got one, what we got was email confirming we were now employees of the new company at the same job title, manager and salary as we had before the acquisition. I fired up VPN to the corpnet, but didn't see a way to ask for that letter on the HR pages. Kind of ridiculous, since they also want my last paystub. To me that's all the proof of employment they need.

So, things will be delayed a bit. I wanted to have the interview this Thursday, because I'm planning to work from home and avoid the bogus earthquake drill. Been through two of the largest ones in US history, don't need to fake it. And with the A's out of the World Series race, we're not due for another one.

Watched the UW-Oregon game until it was clear my home team was going to lose. Heated up some honey glazed wings and baked beans (the former to help reduce the clutter in the freezer).

So, out on the patio for some gardening. All the plants I had planted in the planters are dead and dried up. They were dead first, I just didn't pretend they would resurrect with the overnight temps dropping as they have been. So, three planters' worth of dirt & dead plants into a big black trash bag. I was hoping to save 1/4 of the 4th, the catmints plant, but it was also dried up. I did pull it out, dried branch by dried branch, took it into the kitchen and stripped off the leaves & seeds, and put that all in a ziplock bag. Spilled a little on the floor. Kaan did some excavating - the stuff turns him on. Later Domino also sniffed around.

Put the big bag by the door, washed my hands, and went back out on the patio to read the two very heavy texts from the park. The lease itself was pretty straightforward, much didn't apply to me because it talked to people moving a home in or out of the park. You would think they would have split out those pieces. The rules of the park, an "attachment" almost as thick as the lease, was also pretty clear. And there's a showstopper. It says there is a limit of one cat per household. WTF? It requires the cat to be indoors at all times, no cat doors. Every apartment which allows cats allows two. Part of the reason to buy my own home was so I could have more than two if I want. But just one? Insane. I'll see if they can come around to my POV at the interview. Unfortunately, part of my argument is Domino is about 18 years old, and probably won't be around much longer. I am disappointed that when I showed the rep videos of the cats this morning she didn't mention this possibility.

Reading took till it was time to scoot. Met Janice and a long time friend of hers from CO Springs at the newest Starbucks. Nice chat, mostly about techie stuff. Friend asked me if she could import from a USB drive to a smartphone. I was not sure, it sounded feasible with the right cable.

Home, dinner was some assorted dim sum, also a freezer item but it didn't free up any space because I only used half the items in the tray.

Watched some of the Cal-UCLA and WSU-OSU games.

Tried to rig up a USB drive to my phone using a USB hub and a standard phone cable, but the phone only saw the charging part, not the data connection. Online research says I need a USB On The Go (OTG) cable, which is basically the connections I did with the hub but in a single small cable. Other comments sounds like most phones have to be "rooted", that is, hacked to give root access, which is something I won't suggest anyone to do. As techie as I am, it's not something I'm very interested in doing myself. I'll look into that more just for curiosity's sake.

Mail had only 2 items, a letter from the company with the PIN number to use to enroll in the employee stock purchase plan, which they were supposed to have gotten to me 2 weeks ago. The window closes on the 27th. And a coupon from Toyota reminding me my next scheduled checkup is coming up. 5k miles or 6 months. They are 1800 miles and 1.5 months early.

Plans for tomorrow:
11:45 am showing of Gravity 3D. Theoretically IMAX is a higher resolution experience, but the local IMAX theaters give me vertigo, without a movie showing.
Football
Catch up on Tivo.

Interesting day at work. Some of us spent a lot of time talking about how to better coordinate the three databases we have to work with. We have one to track automation stuff, another for test cases, and a third for bugs. We own the first two, engineering owns the third. Apparently we will be migrating to a single one which will do the work of all three. Or that's how I think they said it will work.

Lunch was a place in the Rivermark megastripmall (the one where 6,000 customers vie for 120 parking spaces) called New Jersey Mike's Subs. That was a mistake. I went in there expecting a NJ style hero sandwich, and was especially looking for Italian Sausage, but they didn't have that. I ordered a grilled Reuben sub to eat there, and got something on very soft, slightly warm bread with 900-island mayonnaise. It wasn't horrible, but I left some over. The antidote was across the street at Prolific Oven, a very chocolate covered cream puff. Expensive, though. I'm guessing that in 5 years the price has doubled.

I also peeked in at Game Stop, looking for a stand for the Nexus, but they had nada. And the guy working there had no idea what they had in the way of first person shooters for PC or Wii. They had Doom 3, but wanted $30 - it's online for half that.

Straight Home after work, sat on the patio with the cats, doing stuff on the laptop.

Looked for ways to see tomorrow's sailboat races, but the cruise companies all wanted $250 and up, and the seating areas are all out where it's hard to get to by public transport. And the only seats worth taking pictures from were $100.

Dinner was swedish meatballs & klondike bars. I watched the latest Who Do You Think You Are? and was flabbergasted that Chris O'Donnell had no idea why it was anything special that his 4x great grandfather would have been the Lt. in charge of the cannons at Fort Sumter in September 1814. And he had no idea why the Star Spangled Banner was written.  The park ranger who explained it was way over the top over-acting, but he did a great job of building the story up.

Dinner done, next on Tivo was the Seahawks - Packers game. Kaan jumped up on my lap and wedged himself between my arm and my body, and stayed there for the whole hour it took to FF thorough the game. Tivo cut it off with 5 minutes left on the game clock, but I already knew the final score. It was not as impressive a win as last week, but the 2nd string QB was amazing. The game was called by the Green Bay announcers, but they gave Seattle players the credit they were due. Unlike the Denver announcers last week.

Plans for tomorrow:
Take the litterbox clumps out to the dumpster
Fry's, buy a copy of Doom 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4
Starving musician to buy a less cumbersome music stand and ask if they might be interested in buying my baritone horn when the summer is over
If I don't find the stand I want, there's also Guitar Center and West Valley Music.

Woke up to KOMO news at 7 am, which is 10 am DC time, which is when Supreme Court decisions are usually handed down. DOMA came first. As usual, they mis-reported it as being struck down when they really left it mostly intact, except for the handful of states where gay marriage is legal.

Switched to DC's WNEW news station for more educated commentary, and waited for the Prop 8 decisions. Again, mis-reporting that it was struck down when what they really did was refuse to hear the case on a technicality. Switched to the local news, got educated California commentary which explained that (a) Supreme Court decisions don't take effect until 25 days after and (b) there is still a stay in effect against overturning Prop 8 which won't be lifted until those 25 days are over, and maybe not then. In the good news side, Gov. Brown has told all the county clerks to start printing up new marriage license forms.

And last night's brave stand by Texas  Sens. Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte, backed by a packed peanut gallery, has to do it all again because the Putzoner has called a special session.

So that's how my day started.

Tried again and failed again to connect to the company VPN, but started early enough to not be late for work.

 Took on a particularly challenging bug fix verification because I own the feature it is about. I needed to borrow a pair of machines with a particular setup, and the engineer who loaned them to me last time let me use them during my lunchtime. But they were not the same pair, and didn't work. He fixed that, and then fixed some files which delayed testing again, so what should have been a 20-minute test took 2.5 hours. But no worries, late "lunch" at Starbucks, complete with much eye candy. Not much left to do back at work, but the day was almost over.

Called the car audio place and made an appointment for Saturday morning to have the backup cam re-attached directly to the in-dash unit now that the firmware has been upgraded.

Called the nails place and made an appointment for tomorrow lunchtime.

Straight home, thinking of going out later, but the patio and Kindle beckoned, and the new flower pots needed watering.

Online, ordered 10 packets of Domino's favorite dental treats from Petco. Half the price of Amazon.

Frozen spaghetti & meatball low-cal dinner, bananas & whipped cream w/cinnamon and nutmeg for dessert.

Watched an episode of Restaurant Stake Out.  Scheduled Tivo to record the next Crossing Lines because three diverse friends have posted good things.

Fired up the VPN again, and when it failed I phoned Motorola support, since we are still on their network even after a year of being owned by Google and then sold to Arris. Turns out they have switched to a very new and vastly improved product from Juniper called Pulse which the support guy installed for me via remote desktop. Impressed at how efficient he was.

Email from Petco, confirming my order, but ship-to was my last year's address. Went to their page, fired up chat, the supportless person said there was nothing she could do because the order had been processed. I pointed out it won't actually ship until tomorrow. She suggested I have UPS hold it for me. I suggested I can stop payment on the order. She didn't reply to that after 3 minutes, so I ended to chat and gave her all 0's in the survey.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Nails
Band practice or NASA event? Hmmm.

lisa_marli re-posted on FB a graphic purporting to show a teacher doing school work on hs own time, and a diatribe caption about how teachers do that. And she commented that she used to help grade his class' work because he taught accounting, and she is good at accounting. I will tease her here instead of there and mention that my father once taught Werner von Braun's undergrad classes as a TA, and graded those class papers, but I never learned any astrophysics or orbital/celestial mechanics. But that's just a tease because by the time I was old enough to learn that stuff, he was an engineer and all his work was top secret, so even if he wanted to he couldn't teach it to me. And he didn't want to.

But it got to thinking about my grade school teachers. I am going to try to remember them and say a smidge about each one.

Kindergarten: Name??? Blonde, young, was insulted that I could recite the alphabet before she taught it to us.
1st Grade: Miss Moshey. She had taught German to US soldiers during WWII. Her favorite phrase was "mach schnell, bitte". She was horribly strict for a 1st grade teacher, but eminently fair. Here is an example:( Read more... )

2nd Grade: No idea.
3rd Grade: Another blonde. She tried to reason with me that the baby Mom was pregnant with might not be a girl. I was certain it would be. My sister was born two weeks after school ended for the Summer, and I had to wait for months to nyah nyah nyah the teacher.
4th Grade: no idea
5th Grade: Mr. Costa. Science teacher at heart, he had the best field trips, and supported my science fair entry. His tests were easy for me, I kept getting 110% (there was always a bonus q). He also change my life for the worse by assigning me to a different 6th grade class from all the others just because I hit a bully with a rock while we were filing back to class from recess.
6th Grade: Mr. Egger. Total jerk. Did not deserve to be teaching. When I corrected him in class for his WRONG definition of vapor, by reading it out of the big dictionary, he took my report card, slapped an overlay strip and made all my grades D or worse. My parents complained to the principal, and he did not get re-hired the next year. Irony, he went to a high school elsewhere in the district, where he taught science. The next time I saw him was in 8th grade, he was judging the science fair. :-(

---

It was also Nurse Appreciation day/week/eon. My appreciation for nurses started in college when I shared a house with a bunch of fellow folkdancers, and one of them was dating a nursing student who was living in a houseful of nursing students, and I dated one of them and hung out with all of them. They all had stories about how a nurse had saved their lives, and inspired them to become nurses.

I have never been sick or wounded enough for nurses to have done that for me, but I saw them in action when my folks were in hospice care at a nursing home. There were two kinds of nurses - the basic RN, who saw his/her job as helping and old person live; and the hospice nurse, who saw his/her job as helping the old person die. Mom's hospice nurse was a total drag. Mom and Dad both had two or three basic RNs who were wonderful.

I'm going to post where I stand and why, and leave it open to comment, but I'm not going to reply to any comments.

Why:
Three of my grandparents were kicked out of Russia (for being Jews) around the beginning of the 20th century, the fourth was born soon after the boat docked in NYC. Their parents had gone through a lot of crap to get them here legally. There was a quota on how many Jews the US allowed in. All my grandparents learned to speak English with only a hint of an accent, three of them through night school. My parents sounded like the native New Yorkers they were. I had to fix my accent when we moved to Seattle, but that's another story. My father was saved from having a foreign accent by the fact that his Russian father married a Hungarian, and the only language they had in common was English. My mother's first language was Yiddish, but you couldn't tell from her unaccented English.

I was born on Manhattan Island, which was purchased legally from the local Native tribes. One man's trinket is another man's treasure. None of my family was even remotely involved with stealing land from the natives. So don't be playing that card on me.

Ever since living in Thailand, I have wanted to return there to work, but the process for getting a work visa is pretty similar to the one for the USA - you need a company to sponsor you. Unlike the USA, only a child of a Thai citizen can obtain citizenship, just being born there doesn't hack it. Only a citizen can get a free education. Christian mission schools tend to fill that gap. Most of the illegals I know from the US/Europe/Australia either have no family, or have left them home.

What:
Giving a pathway to citizenship to people who come here illegally rewards them for breaking the law. I think those who came here illegally should be told to go back to their homelands, and be given the opportunity to apply for visas. If they have children under 18 who are citizens, those children should go with them.

For those who say there is no way to enforce this - it's pretty much the same way you would offer a path to citizenship. If you believe the government can process 12 million applications for amnesty/citizenship, then you also must believe the government can process 12 million exit visas.

Which, of course, they can't.

Lunchtime today there were two cars parked side by side. One had a couple of pro-choice bumper stickers and the other had a couple of pro-life ones.

I see both their points. And I see flaws in their black/white argument.

I don't believe a woman has a right to unilaterally decide to have a child. Such a decision imposes heavy monetary obligations on the father, and often on both of the prospective parents' parents. Deciding to have a child who will not be entirely wanted is not such a good thing. For those who give their unwanted children up for adoption, the foster care system in this country is bankrupt, and foster children are more likely to go to prison than not.

OTOH, I believe a child's life starts at conception. From that point on, there is potential for life. From that point on we are talking about killing.

But if killing an embryo saves the mother's life, sure. My definition of saving a mother's life includes saving a too-young woman, or a rape victim, from having to raise an unwanted child. In many, maybe most, cases a seriously deformed baby will be unwanted.

But my bottom line on this is it is not something for the government to decide.

Three teenagers get drunk at a party. Two of them beat up the other one. Will the police drop the under-age drinking charges against the one who was beat up?