Life as a Spectator Sport

Merry Christmas to all, and apologies for waiting so long between posts. This has been a particularly hectic and chaotic month, between getting ready for Christmas, adapting to new methods for the inspections, trying to keep an increasingly distracted thirteen-year-old at his books, and dealing with another round of car problems. It wasn't that I had no time at all to write--the problem was mostly a lack of energy for anything beyond coping with the crisis of the moment.

.We did manage to have a spectacular Christmas tree this year, the biggest and best decorated of my whole life. My camera couldn't get a really good shot of it--if I used the flash, the light washed out the lights on the tree, and if I didn't use it, the image was color-shifted toward the yellow end of the spectrum. But you get the idea.

I had the insane idea of making stockings for Shelley and Nick, and in spite of the fact that I really did not have time for this, managed to make a couple of very nice ones, in coordinating candy-cane striped material with red piping on the cuffs and their names written in glow-in-the-dark fabric paint. I also made a stuffed fabric manger scene, and a tapestry tote bag for Kate. Shelley was so impressed with the tote that she allowed as how I could make one for her too. She said it would be convenient to have a bag with shoulder straps to carry into the truck stop shower rooms instead of the back pack that she uses now. So I'll find some nice sturdy canvas and make one for her some time after Christmas. She made out like a bandit this year—a big mallet with which to bash her truck brakes when they freeze up; a nice lineman's tool with heavy-duty pliers, knife blades, a can opener, a saw blade, and several sizes and types of screwdrivers; a soft fluffy bathrobe to wear in the shower rooms; a big Stanley thermos, and various other accoutrements of truck-driving life.

Shelley got home on the 22nd and will leave some time tomorrow, probably about the same time that I leave to inspect a store in Richmond and then go on to Alexandria to spend the weekend with Kate. This is the longest that she has been home since she began driving, and although I know she has enjoyed being here, she is also ready to get back on the road. Nick will go with her for a while, giving Kate and me a few days together by ourselves and giving Clarence and me a few more days, at least, of relative peace and quiet. Nick isn't a noisy child at all—he's got to be the best behaved thirteen-year-old I've ever known—but any household with a child in it has to be focused mostly on the child. I was used to a schedule in which I was focused on my inspections and on the other computer work I do, with Clarence pretty much looking after himself. I can't do that with Nick in the home, and while I very much enjoy being with him on a full-time basis, it will be a treat to have this time when I can take care of my own obligations without concern for how they affect him.

Digital submission of the inspection materials has turned out to be not so much a decrease in the amount of work to do as a shift from one type to another. The costs are definitely less, with no film to buy and then to process, no binders and photo sheets to purchase, no shipping to pay for. But there is still a lot of copying (and my blasted copier just ran out of toner--a $130.00 purchase that I can't afford right now). There is a lot more time at the computer, as the floor plans must now be done on some kind of graphics program, and the digital images must be resized and converted to jpegs. It will all sort itself out as the contractors and the field offices become used to the new methods, but at the beginning there is, if not a learning curve, at least a period in which new habits must be formed and new procedures refined. I have a 5 store package to do for the Towson, Maryland, office and a 21 store package to do for Charleston, so I'll be on the road probably the whole time Nick is gone, to get those finished before he comes home.

Off now to do laundry and get ready to leave first thing in the morning

Monday, December 08, 2003

I've added the Toledo Blade newspaper website to my list of political sites. I don't know anything about the paper other than the columns I've been reading lately, but I applaud their courage in asking difficult questions and their persistence in finding out the answers to many of them. This is the kind of investigative reporting newspapers used to be known for. Oh, and one other thing in their favor: my partner Kate grew up in Toledo, the daughter of a union worker in the years when Toledo used to be a steel town (and the US used to be a steel exporter).

And I took off the Amish Tech Support site, as another day's reading makes it plain this is not primarily a political site. I enjoyed reading today's posts, agree with all of them or not, but it doesn't belong where it is, so it has moved down to the "Other" section. In the interest of fairness, I then moved "Buttermilk and Molasses" up to the political section. The amount of political content in John's blog has gradually increased, and I think he deserves more exposure.

The Toledo Blade is currently running a series of articles about Ohio Congressman Mike Oxley, a key player in the deregulation of American corporations. A short excerpt:

Over the veto of President Bill Clinton and the objection of SEC Chairman Levitt, 230 Republicans in the House were joined by 89 Democrats in passing a law that made it much harder for investors to prove they were defrauded by corporations, Wall Street firms, and auditors.

Investors who had filed a lawsuit used to be able to review a firm's records to find proof of fraud - a key step to getting back the money they had lost. But the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 changed the rules: Investors now had to establish they had been defrauded before gaining access to corporate records - a burden critics said was impossible to meet in most cases.

And even if investors met that challenge and won their lawsuits, the new law made it harder for them to collect on their losses.

Supporters of the new law, including Mr. Oxley, argued that many of the lawsuits had little merit, and only the lawyers were getting rich. But San Diego securities lawyer William Lerach cautioned Mr. Oxley during one hearing about what would happen.

"While you claim to be taking a swing at the lawyers, you are going to end up hitting your constituents in the nose," Mr. Lerach testified in 1995.

Seven years later, a congressional investigation identified the 1995 litigation reform law as one of the culprits in the Enron collapse.

We hear a lot nowadays about increased secrecy in government. Looks to me like the process started earlier than most of us realized, with publicly traded corporations. An oft-repeated question, in various forms, is, "If you have nothing to hide, why be afraid of government scrutiny of your life?" Perhaps our largest corporations should take that question to heart. If you have nothing to hide from your investors, from the folk who sank their life savings into your company, why do you need to hide your records?

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

There's some kind of profound irony in the fact that for the first time in weeks, I actually had some time for my own pursuits and could update the blog if I wished, and Blogger had disappeared into the ether. Turns out it was only for a while, and here we are again.

Isolated tidbits . . .

. . . growing up in a family of professional musicians, one of my greatest desires was to go to Interlochen, not just to one of the music camps or seminars, but to actually attend the academy. I sent away for a brochure and planned a curriculum and spent hours daydreaming. Way too expensive, of course, and I would only have been able to attend for my senior year anyway, as I graduated the year after the academy was established. But I've never forgotten that secret longing. Today I discovered that they have streaming classical music audio, and I'm sitting here listening to a Norwegian Gregorian Chant Mass, the Mass of the Golden Ring. Fantastic. Remember NetRadio and all the others who used to offer vast selections of music online? They are no more, but Interlachen remains. Go, listen, and support them.

. . . "You never make anything new any more!" Nick grumbled last night as we sat down to Spanish Rice. I responded with a blank look and something on the order of "Huh?" and he explained that when I first moved in with him, everything I made for dinner was something new that he hadn't eaten before. Now, that's not exactly true, because Shelley had long ago prodded me for recipes for spaghetti, Spanish Rice, meat loaf and other classics of the childhood dinner table, and I know she prepared them for Nick, but it was true that I'd made a lot of other dishes too.

"Every time I sat down to eat, it was a surprise," Nick said. "Now you don't surprise me any more."

I didn't tell him that I had planned a pork roast for dinner today, along with a hot pot of vegetables--turnips, carrots, onions, brussels sprouts and cabbage--steamed and then roasted briefly in the pan drippings from the roast. He was nicely surprised.

I've surprised myself by the amount of cooking I've done. I always enjoyed cooking, but like most people, I find it very difficult to come home from working all day and immediately set to in the kitchen. I need to unwind, sit on something besides the seat of a car, listen to something other than highway noises. "What's for dinner?" does not normally fall in the category of what I want to hear. So it's been something of a revelation to me that I could walk in after six hours on the road and head for the kitchen. I'll be the first to admit that a good slug of something alcoholic is my immediate goal, but once that's out of the way, dinner is likely to follow. Now if I can just figure out how to work off the ten pounds I've added recently . . .

. . . I'll forgo the weekly political rant for a change, but in the gradual move toward greater political content, I've added another sub-section to the sidebar, for blogs with political content and for a list of books I'm reading. Wish I had time to write personal reviews of the books, but that is far beyond what is possible with my current obligations. For the moment, the links are to the Amazon listings for the books.

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RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email to liz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, Democrat, Christian. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT' "If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart. THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3 KNITTING BLOGS Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits FINISHED PROJECTS -------FINISHED IN 2006------- Peruvian Cap Tutti-Frutti Socks Shelley's Socks Carol's Socks -------FINISHED IN 2007------- Chain Link Socks Baby Surprise Jacket Valerie & Friend Baby Bonnet Rainbow Baby Socks Girls Pixie Hood Mitred Square Heart Red & White Socks Coffee Cup Pot Holder Nubbins Dishcloth Garterlac Dishcloth Suede Booties Kate's Socks Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap Half Thumbless Mittens Red Mittens for Akkol -------FINISHED IN 2008------- SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE -- Blogs and websites -- Causubon's Book Club Orlov Food Storage Made Easy From the Wilderness In the Wake Listening to Katrina Survival Topics The Modern Homestead The Oil Drum Notes from a Hillside Farm -- Mailing Lists -- 12vdc Power Living on the Land Rainwater Refrigeration Alternatives Old Ways of Living POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES The political sites have moved BOOKS I'M READING How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising ARCHIVES February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002