03.08.06
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts at 7:51 pm by ducky
Today, as I walked to class, the rain turned to white stuff. I thought it was snow, but it was actually very small hail.
It was really miserable today — cold, wet, clammy, more cold, more wet, more clammy. The rooms I had my classes in were dry but cold, and my jeans took a long time to dry out as well. All day it rained, and pretty hard, too.
It reminded me a bit of Illinois, where I grew up and got my first two academic degrees. In late February, we’d have a streak of really nice weather, and everybody would start to get giddy at finally being done with winter. Then, after everybody took their winter clothes home over Spring Break, just as the daffodils would start to bloom, we’d get another snowfall. Everybody would get really depressed at the seemingly interminable winter.
This happened regularly enough over enough years that even as dense as I am, I learned that it always snows exactly once after Spring Break. So in late February, when everybody else would be dancing about, I’d still be casting suspicious gazes at the sky. I didn’t trust Mother Nature to keep up the good weather.
Sure enough, the week after Spring Break, it would snow.
While everybody else would be morose about the return of bad weather, I by contrast would be greatly relieved. Finally! The last snow! I could relax and look forward to the oncoming beautiful weather.
So today, even as I looked at the white precipitation in the palm of my glove, I was happy. I don’t know the Vancouver weather patterns, but I convinced myself that this was the “one last snow after Spring Break.”
I was relieved.
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02.17.06
Posted in Maps, Random thoughts at 10:38 am by ducky
I’ve found some interesting things with my maps.
It is easy to find:
I was also surprised to see
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02.07.06
Posted in Random thoughts at 12:15 am by ducky
The title of the last post reminded me that I’ve been curious about something for a long time:
Is there alphabet soup in places that don’t use the Latin alphabet?
Fortunately, I live at Green College, home to many well-traveled people. I asked our internal mailing list, and presto! I had an answer: no.
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02.03.06
Posted in Random thoughts at 7:52 pm by ducky
There is a blog I read, dooce, that is about a particular woman’s day-to-day life. It’s very well written and very funny, but I sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable reading it. I can feel somewhat voyeuristic, reading about her toilet habits and husband and two-year-old daughter Leta.
I realized that dooce gives the same sense of intimacy and familiarity that soap operas, comic strips, and sports do. The same characters appear, over and over again. I get to know their quirks and fears, hopes and dreams, endearing and annoying traits. That familiarity wins my affection.
It is probably evolutionarily favorable to come to like people I see regularly. The people who liked their neighbors probably got more cooperation and less conflict than those who didn’t, and so they survived preferentially to become my ancestors.
Given that there was no Friends , Family Circus, or ESPN when my ancestors were busy doing most of their evolving, it probably is not surprising that I didn’t evolve to have different reactions to fake characters and real ones. (The Media Equation reports some fascinating experiments that show that people relate to even non-living things as if they were humans to a surprising extent.)
Gossip seems to be one important way that people interact and develop intimacy. There’s even a Gary Larson cartoon that shows one gorilla grooming the other while saying something like, “And then Betty said to Nancy…”
I heard a theory once that gossip magazines exist to fill the need for intimacy that living in small communities used to fill. Once, when you and I both lived down the street from crazy old lady Wilson, we would bond while gossiping about her. Now we don’t have crazy old lady Wilson to talk about, but we might both watch Survivor. We can bond over ruminations about who is going to get voted off the island next.
Dooce, for me, is reality TV without the TV.
And what makes me uncomfortable is realizing that Leta is Truman of The Truman Show.
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08.12.05
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:38 pm by ducky
My pet peeve is Web sites that ask for a credit card number, then yell at you if you put in spaces in the number.People, please. Look at your credit card. It has spaces in it. They are there for a reason: it is far, far easier to visually parse the credit card number. This makes it easier to eyeball it and make sure that I got it right.
I get really annoyed at Web sites that tell me that I can’t have spaces in the number.
People, please. Can you see that there are spaces in the number? Good. Then take them out! Computers are good at that. It’s one line of perl code. It.Is.Not.That.Hard. Don’t make me take the spaces out myself.
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07.30.05
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:53 pm by ducky
There are interesting race conditions when moving. You need to get everything out, but you need some of the stuff in order to get out. You also need some stuff just to live.When do you sell the bed? If you sell too soon, you won’t have anything to sleep on. If you sell too late, there’s always the danger that you won’t get rid of it. (Even if you negotiate with the buyer, the buyer might flake out.)
When do you pack the towels? Presumably you will want to take showers after the truck leaves, unless you are going to leave the second after the van moves.
Moving the second after the van moves is a compelling idea, but nicer in theory than in practice, since it is far easier to clean once all the boxes and furniture are out. Moving also creates its own schmutz. The movers left behind some tape, some box sheddings, and also some muddy footprints that I needed to clean up.
The van left on Tuesday at about 3 PM. Jim thought we would leave Tuesday afternoon. We left our house at 11:30 PM on Thursday, and we didn’t even get very far — we spent the night at a friend’s about twenty miles away. It was important to Jim that we sleep somewhere besides our home. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It might be a very small step to San Carlos, but at least it’s a step.”
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07.29.05
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:50 pm by ducky
Packing is a pain. It is time consuming to fill the boxes, but even more time-consuming to pack them well. You really would like things that are used together to get packed together. Unfortunately, you also must put things together such that they fit in boxes well. This is why my long T-square ended up in the same box as my long dresses.We have the additional constraints that
- It is not a local move. We couldn’t just deal with the odd-shaped things by a few more trips in the car, perhaps with someone holding it on their lap.
- We are only planning on being in the dorm for a year, so we will want a bunch of stuff in a year. This meant we couldn’t just torch it all.
- We don’t know how much stuff will fit into our dorm room. This means that we will need to be able to decide that we really do want the table runners, or perhaps the framed print of Nu descendant un escalier. That means we have to be able to locate the table runners and the framed print. That meant that we really did want to take extra time to inventory each box as we packed it.
Finally, there is the issue of just not seeing things that you need to pack. For example, after the crew finished loading up the truck, I went back inside, wiped my feet on the small klim right inside the door, looked down, and cursed. That rug was “just a part of the furniture” and so I didn’t see it.
Sigh.
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07.28.05
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:48 pm by ducky
It took us far longer to move out of our house in Palo Alto that my beloved husband thought. He’s an optimist, so that’s not surprising. But it took even longer than I thought it would take.The thing that took the most time was getting rid of stuff. Partly there were the emotional issues associated with getting rid of things. Just about everything that left our house felt like a failure: “Oh yeah, I was going to make that airplane model, but I never got around to it. Oh yeah, I was going to repair that soap dispenser but never got around to it. Gosh, I really liked going to the batting cages, but I don’t think my repetitive strain injury is ever going to be better enough that I’ll feel comfortable taking this bat to the cages again.”
A friend told me that I had the wrong attitude. He said, “You need to look at everything and marvel at how full and rich is that you didn’t need to do whatever that thing represents. You never finished that model because you were busy working on marriage. You never repaired the soap dispenser because you have the financial resources that you could get a new one.”
It’s also hard for me to throw things away because of the guilt of consumption. When my garbage can is only half-full on garbage day, I can feel good that I am living relatively lightly on the earth, but when I have bags and bags of trash, that illusion is shattered.
As a result, I — we — worked very hard to distribute our worldly possessions. We tried very hard not to just take things to the dump.
- We sold many of our books on Amazon. We put 330 books up for sale and sold 100 of them for a net profit of around $600. On the one hand, that sounds great. On the other hand, it took a lot of work to catalog the books, describe their condition, set a price for them, weigh them, affix labels and postage, and take them down to the post office. I estimate that took about 60 hrs, or about $10 per hour. That’s not awful, but it’s not great, either. Furthermore, if we had just taken them down to Friends Of The Library, we could have written them off as a donation. If we are in the 30% tax bracket and we only sell 30% of our books, it ends up being a wash.
- We sold a few things on Craigslist. This worked really well for some things, but really poorly for others. We were unable to sell our speakers, microwave, and bread maker, for example. (It is a pretty stunning example of how wealthy our society is at how little money you can get for things that didn’t even exist when I was born.)
- We gave away a lot of things on Palo Alto Freecycle. For some things, Freecycle was wonderful. For example, we were able to give Jim’s Japanese construction boots — with a split between the big toe and the rest — to someone who really wanted them. On the other hand, there were several times when someone spoke for an item, kept promising to come over tomorrow for sure… but tomorrow never came.
- I finally decided that in terms of getting rid of stuff easily, I just couldn’t beat taking stuff out to the curb with a “FREE” sign on them. It took a few days for some of the things to get gone, and some never went, but it certainly didn’t take a lot of work.
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06.07.05
Posted in Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:56 pm by ducky
My mother has cancer. Sort of. On one of the three different oncologists that she visited, the one I escorted her to, was adamant that it was not cancer, it was neoplasty. Whatever.You’ve never heard of it. It’s called Pseudomyxoma Peritonei, commonly known as “Jelly Belly” or PMP. (Read about Pseudomyxoma Peritonei at wikipedia — they do a better job than I would at explaining it.) It is very, very rare — only 300 to 1000 cases in the US per year — so frequently mis-diagnosed. It’s so rare that there are only about six doctors who specialize in PMP in the US.
For Mom, it might have been an accident that they found it. She had stabby pains on her left side that her local doctors diagnosed as diverticulitis. As part of that diagnosis, she got a CT scan which showed the mucous. Maybe the stabby pain was a node of mucous bursting, maybe it was diverticulitis, but it is certain that she was fortunate that her local doctors recognized it.
Mom looks fine. Mom feels fine. Being a cancer patient has not become a dominant part of her self-identity, and I actually rather doubt that it ever will, except for perhaps the period while she’s recuperating at home after her surgery later this summer.
I am in denial about it — not in denial that it exists, not in denial that it needs to get treated, not in denial that the surgery recovery is going to be massively uncomfortable, unpleasant, and inconvenient, but in denial that there could be any possible long-term prognosis besides “just fine”.
Denial is a very comfortable place to be, and I plan on staying here as long as possible.
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01.02.05
Posted in Random thoughts at 10:52 am by ducky
Right before we left to go to visit our moms for Christmas, I put my beloved husband’s beloved fifteen year old Honda Civic station wagon in the shop. The shop informed me that the car needed US$2500 worth of repair, which is more than we think the car is worth. And while the car might have been beloved by my beloved husband, it was NOT beloved by me. It had no power steering and took more physical exertion to shift than I thought was necessary. It also didn’t have air conditioning, a fact which bothered some people who are not as enamored of our scents as we are. Thus on Friday we looked at cars and on Sunday we bought one. Now, lest you think us hasty, we have had a line item in our long-term budget for two years that said we were going to buy a car in December 2004. We had money sitting in our checking account ready to go spend on a car.
What we wanted
We had a hard time getting around to actually making the purchase because we couldn’t find the perfect car. What we really wanted was a 2005 Honda Civic hybrid station wagon that got 60 miles per gallon. Alas, that car doesn’t exist at the moment.
Our most stringent criteria were that it had to be comfortable for me to drive and Jim had to fit in the back seat. We also wanted enough cargo space to carry supplies for parades and rallies, so wanted a small hatchback.
What we bought
The car we eventually bought was a blue Mazda 3 hatchback. This car is a bit taller than our old one, so Jim fit. The seat goes up and down and the steering wheel tilts and telescopes, so I was able to get comfortable in it easily. It’s got lots of cargo room.
What I like
I hadn’t bought a car in a long time, and I was impressed by how much better cars are now (aside from the gas mileage, which seems to have gotten worse). I realize partly we got more because we paid a little more, but they weren’t always expensive things. These things were new to us:
- Storage cubbyholes everywhere. I didn’t count, but there are at least four cupholders, while none of our previous cars had any. There are two storage bins in the floor next to the spare tire. The ashtray converts to a sunglasses holder when you throw out the insert. The center armrest has not one, but two cubbies. There are two cubbies above the wheel wells in the trunk.
- There is a button on the dash that you can push to brighten up the dash. On our old car, if your headlights were on, it assumed it was night and that everything can be dim. That isn’t always true when it’s raining, so that button is nice.
- At the top-center of the windshield, there is a patch — perhaps part of the antenna system? — that is mostly opaque. It is right in the spot that is not covered by the sun visors, so I expect that driving in sun will be more comfortable.
- We got an automatic transmission, but they make it easy to get the benefits of a stick without having to deal with a clutch: you can put the transmission into a mode where you can bump up or down the gear easily.
- Electric and automatic everything — standard. Power windows. Power door locks. Cruise control. Power window adjusters. Fog lights. Rear window wiper. (These existed before, but were higher-end features.) LED (plasma?) indicators and gages.
- Safety. With the options we got, we got ABS brakes and six airbags. All five seatbelts are three-point belts.
- Sound system controls on the steering column.
- Air conditioner with coolant that won’t destroy the ozone layer.
It also feels much more zippy than our old Honda. Not only is it not fifteen years old, its engine is 53% bigger. Yes, I understand that is part of why the mileage isn’t as good as we’d like, but it drinks only 16% more gas, not 53% more gas.)
What I don’t like
It’s gas mileage isn’t as good as we would have liked, but that seems to be in part a function of the times we live in. I would have liked it if it had a aux input jack to the stereo (so that I could plug in an MP3 player), and when I open the door, rain dumps down. Those seem like minor issues in the grand scheme of things.
What else we looked at
We really wanted to like the hybrids. Alas, the Prius just doesn’t fit me right. We rented a Prius last year for a week in an attempt to figure out how to configure it to make it comfortable for me to drive. We failed. The Honda Insight is only a two-seater, and thus inappropriate for our current family of three. We tried the Honda Civic hybrid, but my six-foot-tall beloved husband bumped his head on the ceiling when sitting in the back seat. The only other hybrid is an SUV, and we aren’t emotionally prepared to get an SUV.
We looked at both the Scion xA (which was too small for Jim) and the Scion xB (which had great headroom and cargo room, but which looks like a hearse to me). We looked at the Toyota Matrix, which Jim really liked. Alas, it didn’t fit me in the same way that the Toyota Prius didn’t fit me. (Not surprising.)
Where we bought
We bought at Oak Tree Mazda. John Kapelowitz spent quite a lot of time with us and gave us a very thorough, informed tour of the car. Jim got a few quotes over the Internet, including one from Oak Tree and one from Menlo Mazda that was lower. We went back to Oak Tree because we want bricks-and-mortar dealers to keep existing. Touching cars is very important in the purchase process, and we wanted to respect the cost they carry for inventory and sales. We also wanted to reward John for the nice service he gave us. Greg Kimberley dealt with all the paperwork. It took a surprisingly long time to get the car, even paying cash, but it was a painless experience. The Internet quote we got from Oak Tree was very reasonable, and he didn’t try to pull any sort of bait and switch, or any sort of heavy upselling. Because we paid cash, perhaps they figured we were savvy enough that they wouldn’t be able to mess with us… or maybe they were genuinely nice.
Bottom line
I’m pleased. It’s a fun little car and driving it doesn’t make me ache!
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