Fiendish Glee Club

As I am wont to do on occasional occasions, I'm sweeping in to update the 'hood on things going on in my world.

Exciting news: I have a new title. I am now a Triathlete. I finished the Seafair/Benaroya Research Institute sprint-length triathlon on July 20th. My time was not stellar, but I was not going for stellar, I was going for "finished and didn't die." I can report that open-water swimming in a large crowd is a colossal pain in the ass, and that I may never be a good runner, and that the triathlon committee will be hearing sharp words from me about the lack of bathroom facilities in the transition area, given how hard it is to run when you have 20 ounces of Gatorade in you looking for a way out.

I must also report the sad news of Clio's passing over the Rainbow Bridge. At the ripe age of 17, after sharing fully half of my lifetime, she decided that eating was not something she wanted to do any longer. She remained sweet and affectionate to the very end, and went on her own terms, and while the loss is palpable it is also a natural part of life, and I am so glad that I had so many years with her.

Ham, now 14 pounds, rules the roost unopposed for the time being. He seems not too bothered by the disappearance of his torment target, and maybe he is more sociable, but that'd be hard to judge given his propensity for flying-leap-to-headbutt greetings. He spends his days watching "kitty TV" - the various wildlife visible and smellable through the screen door of my porch slider.

Work is fabulous and my young boy is faring passably, attending a sports camp during the day that you'd think would wear him out but rarely does.

I'm a huge fan of Wii Fit. It makes me do stretching and strength training and yoga that are not part of my triathlon-training regimen, and it's well worth the price of admission.

In a little more than a week I'll be off to Montana for the annual two weeks of wilderness. This year we're hitting Glacier National Park as part of our travels, and I haven't been there since I was a child. I'm totally excited. It's like two weeks of deep renewal.

In closing, I recently saw Andrew Bird and Josh Ritter play at the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle. They are both amazing artists, and I submit to you two gorgeous tracks for your enjoyment, with a nudge to pick up their albums via mp3 from Amazon if you're so inclined, because they're really worth owning and loving.

My favorite Andrew Bird

04 - Fake Palindromes

Andrew Bird

Josh Ritter

04 - The Temptation of Adam

Josh Ritter

Thanks to those who replied to my question a while back about whether people read stuff about politics.

As a volunteer for a campaign, it's a big part of my life right now. But I'm not one of those aggressive people who gets in people's faces. So in respect for those who aren't big fans of the subject or whose opinions differ, you can find me on the Barack Obama website or in blog form at Daily Kos.

When the primary season is over, you'll see more of me in my non-campaign-volunteer form. :)

I've been doing a fair amount of blogging lately, but obviously it hasn't been here.

It's not that I don't like the peeps here. I like y'all a lot.

I just sort of wonder whether this is the place for me to talk about the things that are on my mind lately -- politics and our culture and my upbringing and what I need to learn how to change so that I teach my son better lessons than the ones I was taught or the ones I learned by myself.

So there's the question. Do people read that stuff, or do they want to skip over it? The common silence on such posts in the past is what led me to have those conversations in places where there seemed to be more reception for it.

When you travel, do you use a guidebook so that you're well prepared, or do you go without much prior knowledge so that you're surprised?
Submitted by Jack Yan.

Within the US, I wing it. I am a huge fan of the "we have 12 days, let's get in the car and see where we end up" brand of road-tripping, complete with stops at every largest ball of twine, insect circus, and interesting-looking side road.

Outside of the US, I like to be prepared in terms of having my lodging and transportation pre-arranged and ideally pre-paid. However, I did follow the "road trip rules" on my first trip to Peru, where I knew I wanted to see the Nazca Lines and I started out in Lima. I rented a car and, accompanied by a local, started driving south. Didn't have lodging arranged, didn't have tickets to anything, asked at the hotels about the tour companies they recommended, stopped off at lots of random things we saw along the way. It was fabulous.

Going without a guidebook or without doing any research is dumb, though, internationally. Mostly because it'd be dumb to get home and find out you were 50 feet from something awesome that you didn't know you should see. :)

Show us the ugliest thing you own.

Uglymug

Of course, I mean to call attention to the big stone guy sticking his tongue out, and not to They Might Be Giants, who are delicious.

I'm done being grouchy.

I'm done being negative.

I've vented my spleen about the things that have made me upset during this presidential campaign so far.

Now I'm looking forward.

If I had a chance to choose my own boss, I'd choose someone I believed would work for me, in the sense that he or she would have not only my best interests and my well-being in mind, but also my opinions. I'd choose someone who understood that his or her subordinates determine the measure of success. I'd choose someone who expected me to participate, to use my brain, to put forth effort, and would reward me for all of that by going to bat for me. I'd choose someone who made our company look good, who knew how to ask questions, who had opinions I agreed with but who also demonstrated the ability to learn.

I wouldn't choose someone who had everything written in stone in terms of what was going to happen, and who was unrealistic about the fact that consensus was required in order for those plans to be implemented. I wouldn't choose someone who listened only to the board members of the corporation, and not to the employees. I wouldn't choose someone whose years of experience were entirely in the boardroom and never on the factory floor.

All of us in the United States of America have a chance this year to choose our next boss. That's my perspective. Whatever you do in this election, please think about it in terms of yourself and your hopes. Don't be beaten down by the last 12 years. We are a nation of voters without power, but many of us remember what it was like to have power.

Don't compromise.

Show us love.

palabras del amor

Left: "Love is like light."

Right: "I am yours as my body belongs to the earth that awaits it."

Inspiration

Accidentally captured while photographing the tilework in Miraflores's Parque del Amor.

Dear Hillary,

18 months ago I remarked to a friend that while it sounded enormously appealing, I didn't think we'd have a woman and a black man vying for the Democratic party nomination in the 2008 election. To tell you the truth, calling such a scenario "appealing" was both prejudiced and self-serving. As a white woman, I consider it a measure of our society's progressiveness in general that we now see a woman and a black man vying for the Democratic party nomination. It feels good to be on that train. But I don't really know what it's like to be a minority in this country. I'm just along for the ride.

18 months ago I had strong misgivings about you personally. I didn't like you. I didn't understand why you stayed with a man who had lied to you and cheated on you. Your move to New York and your run for the Senate there seemed calculated to give you maximum political exposure. I began to wonder if you'd stayed with Bill in a kind of devil's bargain: you would support him in the public eye and soften the blow to his legacy in history, and he would be your cheerleader, your highest profile supporter, your link to those who remembered that Bill did great things while he was president, as president. And you could keep his name.

Then you came to speak at my place of work. I didn't get the impression from hearing you speak that I liked you any more as a person, but you said things in that room that day that echoed my own personal opinions. It wasn't that I was convinced by the things you said to adopt them as my own positions. You were saying what I had been saying. I felt like you got it. And I went back to the people I'd talked with before about you, and I said to them:

"You know how we think Bill was a good president and did right by our country, even though he cheated on his wife and lied about it to Congress? Remember how we felt like his personal life wasn't really the business of Congress in the first place, and it seemed unfair to mire his presidency in that when he had been doing so much good? Well, maybe it's time to remember that you can dislike someone personally and still believe they can do a good job."

It was an uneasy bargain I made with myself: because you talked about things that I believed in, I was going to tell the part of me that disliked you to take a seat. I felt like I owed it to you.

But the bonds of obligation are not as strong as the bonds of respect.

And I wish you'd afforded me, and many other hundreds of thousands of voters, a little respect.

Your campaign staffers are constantly making the news with nasty, underhanded remarks about your opponents. Sometimes you fire them. Sometimes, when it's your husband, you can't fire him (too late, you had your chance). Your halfhearted apologies regarding the things that these staffers say never get nearly as much attention as their attacks. Surely you could keep them under control -- if you really wanted to. But I don't think you want to.

You have dismissed the voters in dozens of states where you assume you will lose to Barack Obama, not deigning to appear in their locales or try to get your message out to their voters. You and your aides have stated publicly that you will take the nomination with the votes of Superdelegates, saying they should vote for who they think will be the best president and not in line with their constituency. You encourage divisiveness between Democrats (the citizens) and Democrats (the politicians). You are turning voters in a dozen states into the disenfranchised people you claim you will represent, because you are ignoring them and telling them they don't matter, they aren't important, you don't need them anyway -- but they need you.

Your campaign staffers -- and you -- discount Barack Obama's victories in caucus states by calling the process undemocratic. Then, with barely a pause for breath, you declare that you will fight to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida after those states knowingly moved the dates of their primaries and agreed to pre-defined penalties issued by the party for such a move. What of the voters who stayed home in Florida and Michigan because you and Senator Obama were not supposed to campaign there, and it was well-known their votes wouldn't count? Why aren't you campaigning for a repeat of the primary vote in those states if the delegates are going to be seated? But you don't want that -- you simply want the delegates, because you don't have enough of them.

I take great offense, not easily forgiven or forgotten, at being told I don't matter as a voter. But I take greater offense at being told the election will be decided without me, and that you as a candidate are not asking us, the people, to elect you -- you are telling us, the people, how it's going to be.

I've lived in that country long enough. I will fight tooth and nail not to live in it any longer.

I wish I could have voted for the first woman to run for president in the United States. But of course, to hear you tell it, you don't need me.

Show us your favorite arts & crafts project.

A box full

1 comment

I think if you click on the picture it will link to the original post where I detailed how we made these. The boy and I are going to do them again this year for Valentine's Day.

I don't know how it happened, but Ham's new nickname is "kitterpuss."

Go on, say it out loud.

I think it's just self-defense to use diminuitive names for something as huge as he has become.

The waiting is the hardest part.

Please note, that is a king-size pillow.