Whirlwind

I've made it to the AVS conference. There was one lady still lingering at the registration desk when I squeaked in at 5:05 who was able to find my materials and get me sorted for my class tomorrow. I'm excited for the class. I agitated for it quite a bit and it paid off. Now to find out if I can learn anything useful!

Not sure yet if I should take the light rail or a taxi to the airport tomorrow. Class ends at 5, my flight is at 7. It took 35 minutes to take the bus to the train to my stop. I don't know how horrid wednesday evening security is at SJC, but by the cattle corral it looked prepared to house a small town at any given time. After my wait at the courthouse clerks office yesterday, I'm none to keen to stand in another line like that. But hey. There's one flight leaving later if I need it, and I'm not sure how many people will be grabbing taxis, or if the taxis will move any faster in rush hour. Ok, now that that worry is vomited out to the world, I can stop it festering.

It was kind of funny. I stopped at the info desk at the airport to ask how long it would take a taxi to get me to the Convention Center (not the Civic Center! - apparently I stop paying attention after "C") and she saw my back pack and bright orange courier bag and maybe thought I was a budget traveler. So I spent $2 and 35 minutes to get here (and yay, they have free email stations!), had a lovely chat with a now-student-former-airman on the train, and I feel less trapped by circumstances because I know how the public transit works.

I have a weird relationship with public transit. I've used it all over Europe, but I don't usually like taking it by myself for routine trips. I resented every moment I spent commuting on the T, so I didn't spend many moments commuting on the T. If I ride with someone, its GREAT! If it gets me somewhere novel once or twice, I'm in! But if it takes 3X as long as an easier option? I'm out. But I did realize today that I do like *knowing* how the system works. Don't know if that's because I like systems or if that's because I like options, but either way, I feel somehow more lighthearted, less trapped, and less dependent having taken the light rail option. So whichever way I use to make my escape tomorrow, I'm glad I tried it.

Scratch That

EDITED: Nuts. For those who saw the original title, I'm a month and 1 day late. I'm a maroon. For some reason December-1 = 9 in my noggin, rather than 11. Either way 9NOV9 entertained me. But damn, I can't even count anymore. Basic math? Fuggedaboudit. Ahrenius equations, those I can do.

So sue me, I'm backdating this because I had a ton of running around to do yesterday. It was The Day of Bureaucracy here. I spent most of monday waiting for people to sign off on a document they'd approved last friday. I spent an hour and twenty minutes in line to turn in my traffic school paperwork. (Twenty minutes would have been reasonable, forty acceptable due to the lunch hour, but to have hundreds of people in line for an hour over that is not helping make the economy more productive. You've got 11 windows; open more than 4!) Then I printed out some documentation I need to revise and... bureaucracy.

Tuesday I'm flying to San Jose for a training class on wednesday. I'll be back in about 30 hours; such are the joys of business travel. The car will be getting a new clutch while I'm gone. The labor is covered under the warranty as is the cheapest clutch part (throwout bearing) so I just have to pay for the consumables and I won't have to worry about my clutch for a while. Then, the warranty is done with. I'm at 50K miles on my "new" car! So far so good. I still love it. I hope they can get it back together...

The Good Stuff

New Shoes!!
Went shopping with a friend on Saturday, and on my own on Sunday. Managed to replace both my brown and black work shoes in short order. I got black Clark heels and black flats on sale, then used my Kohls cash to buy full price sketchers. The cool thing about the sketchers is that they're the exact same design as the shoes I totally wore out, but a darker brown, which was what I was searching for having decided a darker hue would match more of my stuff. Also at Kohls, using the "free money" I got during my shopping spree a couple weeks ago, I got 2 pairs of fun heels. One for me and one for a friend - total cost for both was $20 :) Funnily enough the ones for me are technically 2 sizes too small, but fit the bottom of my foot great.

Potential new friends:
On the way back from shopping, I took the northerly route and stopped for cheap vietnamese food and a cheap movie. The only flick I felt like seeing was Whip It (yes, again) so I dropped the $3 and went in. There was a while before it started and I was one the first two people there. So I got chatting with the other lady and then her friends. We seem to have similar taste in shows so I suggested they could email me if they didn't mind me tagging along to the next twilight movie or seeing Puppet Up. Here's hoping.

Traffic School
I'm done, I'm done! Well, technically I'll be done tomorrow when I turn in my paperwork, but jeez it has been a long time dealing with this. It's done before the busiest holidays at least.

Quotidian Quotes

While doing everyday, average things, I ran across three quotes today that impressed or entertained me enough to write them down, which is not so usual.

"While making decisions, one must be both a citizen a consumer."
It was from NPR about choosing what fish to eat or not eat, but I think it speaks to a larger sentiment about why sometimes "market forces" aren't the best answer for solving problems. Because "the market" doesn't always, or even generally, reward citizen behavior in the short term. We find that treating people and our environment better improves things in the long term, but those EPA regs and code updates can be a PITA today. A 20 year homeowner has a different payout on the geothermal home heater than a house flipper does.

"He knows when to turn the lightsaber on"
David Plouffe on the Daily Show, responding to Jon Stewart's crack about Obama being a Jedi knight, as a response to Obama's conservative, measured (perceived slow) steps.

Nuts, there's another one, but it'll have to wait until I check my post-it board at work. (When at a loss, there's my perennial favorite of Beavis saying, "Yeah, I'm gonna get me some N-m-Ns and spank my monkey".) EDITED to add the quote in question:
"The old tunes, played more loudly, are all that's needed."
referencing the assumptions made to direct political strategy of right-wing Republicans. Unfortunately, IMHO, this strategy can work pretty effectively in the short and mid-terms. It's only when the response falls outside the "did not/did too" level of interaction that this starts not to be true, and that has been something most Democrats don't seem to grasp. So I liked the quote but the explanation is depressing. Back to thinking about, "I wish I was a baller/ I wish I was a little bit taller/ I wish I had a phone and a girl/ I could call her." which was the video B&B were critiquing that generated the N-m-Ns quote.

The Decider

good things today

Instead of waiting until the last minute, before lunch I prepared both my (very quick) power point slides for tomorow morning's presentation. This gave my boss an opportunity to give them the once over and tweak any awkward phrasing to be more politic, even though she was in meetings most of the day. And the documents that get signed off after the presentation? Also good to go and submitted before 5pm, so I'm not here late because I have to be, but because I'm surfing the web *just long enough* that I will make it to yoga at 7:30.

On another project that has annoying complexities, it's been a struggle to figure out how to route a particularly pesky procedure through our tracking system. Most of the options involve way too much work, so the project is lingering and is not something anyone wants to do. I sat down with some people today and hammered out a reasonable solution that will be both quick to implement and not too terrible to live with. We can always change it later, but I think it's the most gain for the least pain. Having a solution has already reduced my stress level. Yay! Decision made!

I'm feeling appreciably better today, even after deciing to go back for allergy shots yesterday. (I skipped twice in october due to flu shot and illness. Usually I don't skip.)

I'm on track for visiting friends in Boston! Through some fluke email search I ran across a listing I'd made about a year ago of all the people I miss pretty regularly. It hasn't changed much and brough tears to my eyes, so even though a weekend trip the week before a holiday might seem odd and rushed, it'll be good. I decided to go, bought the ticket, and now it's a done deal.

I really like my shirt combination today. I bought some heather-type-purple jobbie made of very thin knit at Anthropologie recently. It's got a floppy cowl neck and flared sleeves.
Like this only more purple. The sleeves and neck look great on me, but the belly region is a disaster. This is ok as I bought it to layer with. I totally love it.
I unconventionally paired it with brown slacks and a rust orange short sleeve Vera Wang number (from recent Kohls shopping extravaganza, though it must be last season's because I can't find a picture anywhere) and a simple silver herringbone necklace (gold would have been better but I don't have a gold necklace in that style) and my usual rings. I love this outfit. I'm not sure how it looks to anyone else, but to me the colors compliment rather than clash, and the flared sleeves are fun. Their length extends the wearable days of the smaller shirt. I think I'll keep it as an outfit.

Time for yoga!

You Say Potato

With the troop levels in Afghanistan partly dependent on a stable Afghan government, there was lots (and lots) of jabber on the news today about how the Karzai regime and Afghans in general need to "be free of corruption" in order for the government to work. Am I the only one who finds this to be utterly ridiculous as a near term goal?

Wikipedia, for one source, goes into the many, many paths of political corruption and reminds us "In some nations, corruption is so common that it has gained normative status." meaning that pretty much all transactions occurring between two (or three) parties are contingent upon bribery, nepostism, cronyism, graft, kickbacks and the like. Forgive me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Afghanistan one of those places that literally functions on the extra cash being funneled under the table?

When we ask for them to remove "corruption" from their government, who is defining the corruption? If the transaction involves a "normative" level of extra-legal grease that is so routine that it occurs when one buys coffee or fixes a bicycle, why would someone think it was odd to also require it for drawing government forms or getting a job? Now don't think that my incredulity here is in some way condoning corruption as a way of life or governing. I think removing corruption is a fine goal and especially necessary if the repressed and minorities have any hope of living a decent life. But I think corruption is defined much like pornography and speeding: anything more than what you do is illicit and crazy; anything less is amateur if not obstructionist. Corruption is a moving target. One could discuss its removal day in, day out for years but unless specific rules are laid down (fishing licenses cost $35, no more, no less, yes for you too), investigated, enforced, and treated seriously, it'll be business as usual.

Add to that, changing a normative behavior generally takes a generation. In the case of countries where the average age of the populace is less than 15, there's a hope this could cycle faster than ours where the average age is over 30 and a large number of voters are over 65. But it's not going to happen this year, next year, or during our next political cycle. And making demands for reform to happen now, Now, NOW! just strikes me as being infantile and pandering. But I guess jabber about setting up incentives to strive for measurably reduced corruption years from now doesn't lead the infotainment headlines. And may not even be something we ever have any say in, if the government actually resumes autonomy.

Goes Wriggling through the Grass

I'm not sure if I slept too much or if I needed to sleep too much but my weekend has been lousy with a lot of sleep. To counter the slugs, I went on my usual hike. (The hike which I skipped for most of the summer due to snakes - saw a teeny tiny rattler today who took his own sweet time getting off the trail.) I climbed for 15 minutes, including stopping to breathe and chat about snakes with fellow hikers, and reached my lowest elevation yet for that milestone but was still plenty ready to turn around and head back, being totally winded.

I was reading some stuff online and came across a really concise definition of buffers in the blood and cells, and how we alter the acid/base levels in either. The bit that interests me most is this: when the acid levels from lactic acid get too high, we breathe harder. It mentions breathing harder after climbing several flights of stairs, but even living in a 4th floor walkup, I was often feeling winded after one or two flights, even when in shape. My mom is that way too. We also tend to build muscle really easily. So I wonder if my heavy breathing is more from making more lactic acid than I ought to, or from being astoundingly out of shape. Or a combination of both. Anyway, it's something I'm ruminating on.

Also, it has occurred to me that it's been a while since posting my happy items. Here are some recent ones:

• The local mechanic found something to fix while my car is still under warranty, and the look-see only cost about $20.


• I have a job with sick days. My vacation might not be as advertised, but the job pays the bills and doesn't force me to work when sick.


• I seem to have avoided the worst of the plague going around. I'm sick, and it appears to be lingering, but I can still breathe (mostly), and talk, unlike many of my colleagues who have gotten clobbered by this thing and have gone hoarse from a sore throat and/or coughing. Me, I'm mostly feeling stuffy (helped by sinus rinse) and sleepy (helped by sleeping), and thus that I'm not living up to my potential ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and goshdarnit, people like me" or "being sick is not vacation"), but it's clear I'm getting off easy.


• It looks like I will be able to see friends AND family this november
  
• One more- I don't think it can be overstated how much better life is with in-unit laundry.