Soap

I was trolling CNN.com looking for interesting headlines when I came across “Recycling hotel soap to save lives.” Here’s the nutshell:  while hotel guests here in the States throw away slightly used soap without a second thought, there are people in our world dying of poor-hygiene-related illnesses.

Reading on, it seems the Global Soap Project is engaged in collecting and reprocessing used soap for shipment to places such as Haiti, Uganda, Kenya and Swaziland. This is no small thing, since according to CNN.com, more than two million children die each year of diarrheal illness.

Daughter Two has been very involved in the effort to rescue children caught up in war. That’s a noble enterprise, and I am proud of her involvement. But not all of us have the time or passion to take on such a monumental problem.

Soap, on the other hand, I can do. Our practice among the road warriors for my company has been to collect all the unused “complimentary” items and once a month or so we take them to the women’s shelter. We’ll probably keep up this practice, since it’s local and easy to do and has a direct impact on people who need it.

But the Global Soap Project has my attention.

Between doing yard work and heading across the street for soup with the neighbors this evening, I took a luxurious shower in a private room with an exhaust fan and all the usual amenities. I shaved lest I look grisly and used anti-perspirant lest I smell grisly and put on fresh clothes, the second full set of the day.

And kids in this world are dying for lack of a bar of soap.

Damn…

Where is Brer Michael?

Back soon - thinking up some really cool posts.

Change of scenery

Our offices are now firmly situated in our new digs.  We’re a couple blocks from Pike Place Market, near the library, a block from the monorail and less than that from the transit tunnel and light rail.  But convenience isn’t why I like the location.

There’s a park across the street, between us and Westlake Center. All day long, there are people walking and sitting and talking and in many cases, just strolling. They don’t have the driven sense of purpose of the folks on Queen Anne. They seem more involved in the air around them. And there are some real characters. My favorite for now is the guy with a battery-powered amplifier who preaches on the corner totally oblivious to the fact that absolutely nobody is paying the slightest attention.

I chatted with a TSA canine cop who was working a beautiful dog. I joked about learning to dance with another walker when we almost ran headlong into one another.  I located the intersection where my Dad pulled a guy out of a burning pickup after an accident fifty-some years ago.

When Christmas time comes, we’ll be able to gaze out our fifth-floor windows onto the lighted park and Bon Marche / Macy’s. There are five good bookstores within as many blocks. It’s a real walker’s paradise.

I’m not a fan of big cities. But if I have to be in one, Seattle is my first choice. And Westlake isn’t a bad place to work.

Mass murder

A new record for a single guy killing innocents. The fact that he decided to kill is on him. The fact that he was able to kill so many because of the firepower he possessed is on all of us, especially those of us who support groups like the NRA.

The fact that the victims have been compared to “Hitler Youth” is on Glenn Beck and every single person who supports him.  

My new office

We’re moving our offices tomorrow. So today, I had to pack mine up into those big mover bins with numbered labels so that everything that started in my old office will wind up in my new office.

I can’t wait for my new digs! I'll have a little conference table for creative meetings and a projection screen for when I need to preview a new course. Plenty of shelf space for my reference books and lots of blank wall space so I can use stickies to story-board my lesson plans.

They’re giving me an annual Metro pass so I don’t have to drive to and from work and I won’t even have a transfer. And I can ride light rail right from work to the airport.

The new office is in the downtown core, so there are about a hundred cool places to eat within easy walking distance.  And the Pike Place Fish Market (yes, that one!)is just a couple blocks from my bus stop, so I can grab dinner on the way home.

A-a-a-and, it’s only on floor five (I NEVER go above seven!) and there’s a coffee shop right in the lobby. I am really looking forward to this new office.  I already have a space picked out for my ceramic gargoyle!

Of course, if I had known when I was young that I’d grow up to be excited about this sort of stuff, I’d have just cut my wrists.

Recycling

I’m sorting through all the stuff we collected while Daughter Two conducted her college search and application process. It’s funny how this stuff held our daughter, my wife and me rapt just a few months ago. Now, none of it elicits any reaction other than a slight shiver when I recall all the work and worry that went into supporting her decision process.

Washington and Lee University is a beautiful place and a good college and offered her a full ride plus stipend. It also turned out to be a place – according to the current students- where there’s little to do in the evening but study or go to drinking parties. And lots of pearls and popped collars.  Just months ago we held our breath waiting to hear from W&L but now, into the basket it goes.

WA State is a good school but didn’t offer much money and even current scholarships are falling to the state’s budget cuts.

Rose Hulman is one of the top engineering schools in the country and she loved the time she spent there during a summer program. But it’s in Terra Haute, not really a place where she’d want to live for four years. And it’s straight engineering without much liberal arts breadth to speak of.

Harvey Mudd is also a great school, as is Lehigh. The both made it into the final three. But they just couldn’t unseat MIT.

Daughter Two spent four days and three nights at MIT and within the first few hours, she knew these were her people. This was the place she wanted to live for four years and these were the people with whom she wanted to live and learn and grow.

And we agreed. The excitement she conveyed made it the winner, hands down.

She applied to thirteen colleges, was accepted to eleven, and gathered information on dozens of others. We collected two file drawers of brochures, letters, and internet printouts. We spent uncounted hours (especially Daughter Two)  poring over web sites, messaging with current and past students, making lists and more lists.

I would have thought it would be difficult to let go of all this stuff but now that the time has come, I find it liberating, emptying file folder after file folder into the recycle basket. Some few pages containing personal information are shunted aside into a separate pile but even those will soon be fed into the shredder’s maw.

I’m discarding the physical evidence of a lot of effort and concern by three of us over the course of about eighteen months. And I don’t regret so much as a single flick of the paper-recycling wrist.

As I’ve said before and will say again, life is good. And this is one of the good days.

Believing

It’s  an odd thing to be the nonbeliever in the crowd. People jump right from “you don’t believe…” to “…therefore, you are an atheist.”  And by that they mean, an anti-theist.

Which I’m not.

I have nothing agin’ your religious beliefs, so long as you don’t try to force-feed them to moi. We could have a heated argument about the separation of church and state, but I find it tiring these days. People inevitably make the specious argument that the founding patriarchs were believers and therefore, the country was founded on their beliefs.

(I want credit for the mother perfect paragraph I deleted here, lest I be accused of arguing the argument I told you I wouldn’t argue.)

Anyway, and back to the point, I’m not an anti-theist. I don’t deny the existence of a supreme being. And given the facts that: a) I have seen many evidences of the existence of evil; and b) that if there wasn’t some equal and opposite mojo going on, we’d all have ended up like  Cedric Diggory by now, well, there must be something going on.

I just don’t find it likely that a supreme entity such as many of you envision is truly envisionable. Not by the likes of us, at any rate.

I don’t think it’s a good use of time to try to figure out the unfigurable and define a god to whom we can then direct worshipful gazes. Which is not to say I don’t care about good and evil and all that. Majored in ethics, did I. The ongoing attempt to design philosophical tools that will allow us to determine ultimate good and ultimate not so good is fascinating to me. I don’t toe to anyone’s particular mark, but I do like to think and argue about the various constructions. Don’t get me going on Utilitarianism. Talk about your slippery slopes! I’m more of a Categorical Imperative guy, I suppose. Until something more compelling comes along.

I guess the when it comes right down to it, I’m Lucasian. I have this gut feeling, inchoate and certainly unprovable, that we’re all linked somehow in a huge cosmic web. When someone kicks off or changes direction and does something evil, boing-ing-ing - it moves the center of the web a bit off center. Humans spend their lives trying to regain and maintain that center.

We all need to feel that we understand – something. But I’m not sure which something that is.

For now, I’m sticking with Lucas.

The Force be with you.

The checkstand

One of my friends posted a Facebook comment recently in which she celebrated the Albertsons food chain’s decision to remove self-checkout from its front end service mix. Several of us cheered the news and it got me to thinking.

It’s been presumed since the dawn of the industrial age that the phrase “does the work of x humans” signaled a step forward. In one important way, that has proved true. The ability to put some of the most menial, repetitive work onto the backs of machines freed humans to specialize, which in turn fostered our ability to provide more than just the basics of food and shelter. Specialization is a good thing. I get that.

But the more we specialized, the fewer hands we had available to do the everyday work of providing for our own subsistence and the more we were encouraged to find ways to supplant human labor with more efficient equipment and methods. In order to make best use of machines, we needed to standardize parts and processes. And the more we did that, the easier it became to design machines to make more and more of the parts and the fewer humans were needed and…so it went. Machines and standardization are co-dependent, so to speak.

The trouble is that we’ve reached the point at which the balance between the need for efficiency and human needs has been upset. Or more accurately, the balance between competing human needs has gone all catawampus. We need to be able to produce enough of everything to fill everyone’s needs. But we also need to be able to distribute those things equitably.

The whole point of banding together into family groups, tribes, regional and eventually national entities was to provide a framework within which people could provide for themselves and each other. By massing together we could more efficiently deploy our resources and even allow for specialties and sub-specialties that could never have existed when each family unit was primarily concerned with provision of rudimentary shelter, food and self-protection.

I understand the profit motive and typically, machines cost less to operate than do human employees. But it’s not about the machines, is it? Isn’t it still and always about the people?

Ultimately, I can’t say that store clerks are the right place to draw the line. I can say that I don’t necessarily find self-checkout more convenient and I certainly don’t find it more pleasurable.  I enjoy the banter in the checkout lane and I like that the person behind the POS machine knows the answer to all the what-ifs.

I could go on about the fallacies of utilitarian ethics and economics and perhaps I will in a future posting. But I sense the end of this post, because we’ve walked our way around to my central argument. It’s this:

I like people working the cash register. I like the banter, the comments on the weather and the ability to seek help from a person with more answer options than a drop-down list. The human interaction isn’t a sidelight to the service; it’s an integral part of the service. I like the people at our Albertsons.

I like the tiny older woman with the German accent who is always so cheerful. I like the brash, big-haired, bossy gal who likes everyone but would never admit it. I like the guy who looks like John la Roquette and chooses wine for me to surprise Mary and I wonder how his recovery from a knee replacement is going. I like the Ukrainian guy who started as a cart runner with an impassable accent when the girls were little and is now the assistant manager.

I really like the Chinese guy who laughs when I spend several minutes pondering before giving in to the inevitable and asking for my standard pint of chow mein.  And the butcher who smiles as soon as she sees me and asks if I’ve remembered my list this time or if I need to call my wife?

We do need to work toward efficiencies that will allow is to help feed the world, not to mention the poorest family in our own town.  But that’s not what self-checking is about. Self-checking is about saving money at the cost of making us a little less human.

It’s not a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

Interns

We have four interns working in our office for the summer. I’m working with one named Patricia this week and next. Our project is lesson planning and development of a course that was requested by one of our clients.

I had already done an initial outline, performed some primary research, talked to a bunch of my reliable sources and conducted a focus group of end users. I had loads of “starting” information but hadn’t actually framed the course. So today, we sat in a conference room with a laptop projector and I droned through what I have so far. It’s possible that some parts of my presentation were other than riveting.

Ahem.

Once she quit snoring, Patricia started making some great suggestions. Considering that the target audience for this training is likely to be closer to her age than mine, it probably can’t hurt that she’ll keep me from making any geezer errors.  

I’m really looking forward to the next week. New blood and so forth.

Sniff!

The road ahead

The space shuttle Atlantis blasted off on the final mission of a program that started before my daughters were born. Long before they were born. Before I was married, even. Okay, before a lot of stuff.

I grew up with the space program. And I know it’s a heart tugger for a lot of you to see manned space travel from Cape Canaveral coming to an end. I have to admit the videos of space vehicles riding their tongues of flame are stirring.

As I’ve said before, I grew up watching the NASA grow up. It was a fascinating show from start to…

There’s the rub. The finish? Not entirely – we’re still training and sending people up in Russian vehicles. Which by itself is a major victory. Considering the fact that in my lifetime the idea of Russians orbiting over our heads struck fear into the hearts of Cold War Americans, it amazes me that we share our programs now more or less seamlessly.

It’s been a long time since Americans collectively held their breath as a rocket reached for the heavens. While tragedies reminded us that the program has not been without its risks, the edge-of-the-seat wonder has long since dissipated. But that’s not a reason to stop, assuming we were getting good bang for the astronaut buck.

I’m not going to propose the end of space exploration; it’s in our nature as humans that our reach must exceed our grasp.   But reaching out these days need not include sending humans outside our atmosphere.

I’m going to be riding the bus to work for the foreseeable future. This is both a cost-saving and an ecology-preserving move on the part of my company. It’s a change I support. There’s no good reason to haul two tons of pickup with me twice a day as I teeth-grit my way through traffic. There’s just no value add to hauling Detroit around with me.

The International Space Station is a great and wondrous thing and I support crewing it while it lasts and wringing all the knowledge we can out of its unique experimental environment. It’s up there and we shouldn’t waste the opportunity it represents. Sunk costs, future value, etc. If that means paying to play, sending our astronauts up in someone else’s ride, so be it. Cheap at half the price.

What I’m less than enthralled with is the idea NASA proposes of building a next-generation crewed heavy lift vehicle. I believe there’s plenty of basic research to be conducted making best use of machines – those we have in hand and those we’ll invent. There’s no good reason to make our exploration phenomenally more expensive just so we can have a human on hand to pose for the camera. We can do more good work with less money and spend the savings on – I dunno – education?

Any future space program need not be constrained by the need to protect and nurture human occupants in our space vehicles. We should concentrate on the science instead of the Buck Rogers. Because just as I have no arguable need to carry a truck with me everywhere, our space explorers need not be burdened by taking human flesh along for the ride.

My old car

There was an article making the Internet news rounds tonight about “10 Cars That Never Die.”  I half expected to see my 1973 Toyota Corolla on the list. Now that was a great car!

June, 1973. I was in the Navy but home on a 30-day leave. My ’68 GTO had given up the ghost in spectacular fashion and I needed a more reliable vehicle. Plus, I was going to be out at sea for an extended period and my bro would be able to use the car while I was gone. By the time I got back home, he would have the money saved for his own sled and any bugs in the Toyota would be known. Win-win, as they say.

So, I got this little Toyota. It was a five-speed manual with the stick on the floor and it ran smooth as grease so long as you didn’t grind the gears. It fit my lanky corpus like a glove.

Okay, so it wasn’t the most elegant ride. It was a god-awful orange color and shaped like a half-squashed beetle. But it ran well and forever on very little gas. And the front seats reclined all the way, which came in handy one time when I was between situations, so to speak. I slept in it more than once. Make that much more. I used to love parking on the cliffs above the beach at Santa Cruz and just snoozing away.

That car saw me through four girlfriends and three jobs. It survived my brother and his friend Greg rolling it on its side and me rebuilding the engine using those little number tags because I had no real idea what I was doing. It survived me and then my brother and then me again and then my friend Bill and then who knows who as its primary operator and took all we could dish out. Last time I knew its whereabouts, it had WAY over two hundred grand on the odometer.

I think my old Toyota should have made it into the article. I wonder where it is now.

I like things that work well. I really loved that little car.

Bloggus Interruptus

Okay, so enough with the pollen! Argh!
I'll be  back with you all manana. Promise!

Dog baths

Daughter Two and I bathed the dogs today. Neither of them particularly enjoyed the process. Zoey was freaked the moment the water hit her. She was probably still a bit flipped out from the incessant fireworks in our neighborhood last night.

Odin was simply bored with the process and not happy with being wet. On the other hand, he seemed to enjoy being scrubbed. He’s always liked having human hands on him.

Once done, they both pranced and primped. They knew they were newly lovely and they milked it. Among other things, dogs are shameless self-promoters.

(Can you tell when I don’t have anything important about which to blog?)

Fireworks

It’s July 4^th and I’m sitting in our family room watching fireworks from various time zones with Mary and Daughter Two. And the dogs.

Odin and Zoey are petrified by the booms and whistles. Or more accurately, Zoey is terrified. I think Odin views them as more of an affront than an assault. At any rate, they don’t like it when the neighbors start setting off their pyrotechnic toys, especially the ones that make big booms.

Truth be told, I really don’t like them, either.  They’re illegal for good reasons associated with fires and injuries and breaching the peace. But I’ve learned that trying to put a stop to it is like playing an infinite game of Whack-A-Mole, and just pisses off the people who’re setting them off, most of whom are half in the bag.

So here we sit trying to reassure the dogs that their world is not coming to an end and watching the big, high angle shows on the tube. And I got to thinking.

This holiday ostensibly celebrates the birth of this nation. A worthy event to celebrate, I’m sure we can agree. As I’ve written before, I feel pretty lucky concerning the where / when into which I was born.

By this time next year, we’ll be embroiled in a national election cycle, either confirming the current administration or choosing a replacement. You may believe you can deduce from my posts here which side of the line I’ll come down on but don’t bet money just yet. In at least two of the last six national elections, I switched horses within the last two or three months before the big day.

The thing is, national elections bring out their own brand of fireworks. This one has the potential to turn ugly. The issues that have been simmering now threaten to boil over. Issues that get to the core for many people, such as the relationship or not between church and state, who gets to count as a whole citizen, whether immigrants are as welcome as they once were, what is the role of government, and whether we look to the precise wording of the constitution or try to divine intent and apply it to current realities. We live under the protective reach of this great formative document that was designed to be instructive of our responsibilities to each other, protective of our individual and collective rights, and sufficiently elastic to accommodate societal evolution.

Our arguments should revolve around how we live together under this umbrella but lately has become an exercise in trying to say who gets to hold the umbrella. The rhetoric I’ve been hearing too often marginalizes opponents, not for being misguided, but as being undeserving. We too often leave the other guy without a place to stand.

The problem with the noisy and dangerous fireworks is simple to resolve. We stay in our house, have the hose and extinguishers handy, and load up Odin and Zoey on doggy downers. We can turtle our way through this, because we have to be able to live with our neighbors in the morning. It may hurt our pride, but we really lose nothing by just hunkering down and waiting it out.

We won’t have that option with a national election. If we turn our cheeks, we may well end up with horrid leadership and the erosion of our Bill of Rights. We’ve no choice but to engage.

I just hope we can do so in such a way that we can still feel like neighbors in the morning.

My holiday wish

I haven’t drunk any alcohol in over twenty years and haven’t been alcohol impaired in over thirty. I’m not a twelve-stepper and I don’t picket bottle shops. I just don’t drink alcohol.

Not to worry – I don’t feel deprived. In fact, there are certain advantages to being the teetotaler in the group. I always have a duty driver with me. Namely, me.  And I never have to worry about what I might have said that was out of line. Well, actually I do, but that has more to do with my social inadequacies than any alcoholic haze.

I’m fortunate in that the folks I hang with don’t include any heavy drinkers. I suppose that’s largely a matter of self-selection. If you’re not one for bar-hopping or wine tasting, I guess you just don’t fall in with folks who enjoy those activities.

This isn’t to say evil spirits have never passed over my lips. I drank some with my buddies in the Navy and occasionally after. There were a couple or three epic episodes in my past of which I’m not real proud. And I can’t say I ever enjoyed the mornings after nights of imbibing.

So, we’ve established that while I don’t drink, that’s not to say I’m Mr. Pure. I’ve made my share of dumb decisions. I’ve had experience with being out of control, albeit years in the past.

I’ve also had experience with the results of other people’s overdrinking. Specifically, in 1980 I was hit by a drunk driver. Don’t know how fast the guy was going. A cop had just started out after him. The cop was just topping 100 and still losing the race when the guy and his crew truck hit my VW Rabbit from behind and threw it with me inside clear across a four-lane intersection. We ended up on top of a retaining wall in front of a Taco Bell on the far side of the intersection.

At first, we thought I’d been miraculously spared serious injury. My driver’s seat and rear half of the car radically deformed, absorbing a lot of the force. I thought I’d dodged a bullet. Then, the seizures began. 

I’d be going about my business and the next thing I knew, I’d be coming to with people bending over me. One time, I was talking to a friend on the phone and said some incoherent stuff that caused her to go next door and back-call my employer on a second phone so they’d know to come to my office and check on me. Another time, some poor schmuck minding his own business feeding the ducks at Lake Vasona Park was treated to the sight of me hitting the ground and bouncing around in the goose grease.   I lost track of the ambulance rides I took over about a four month period. I became a connoisseur of the Emergency Departments at Good Samaritan and Los Gatos Community Hospitals.

I had every neurological test then available. The doctors talked about my brain being badly shaken during the accident. They thought they understood the damage but couldn’t give me a firm prognosis and I had to wonder if I would ever be right again. I was embarrassed when I lost control because, well, I lost ALL control. I became a master at hiding my condition from family and my closest friends. Which, yes, was stupid looking back but you had to be there. I just didn't want to be asked any more frightening questions for which I had no answers. Or perhaps I was just afraid of the answers.

Over time, the seizures became less severe and more infrequent.  I came to be able to recognize when one was imminent and get into a sitting position in time to avoid new bruises. Eventually I was able to reliably drive a car again. It had become a real pain to ride a bike to work the days I couldn’t cadge a ride with a co-worker.  I had my last seizure about a year after the “accident.” For years I wondered when they might resume. And I still wonder how many years might have been shaved off my back end.  

I was incredibly lucky. I lived and went on to have a wonderful family. A friend of mine wasn't so lucky. He lost his son to a drunk driver. Just about at the age my daughters are now. The prognosis on a father’s grieving never improves.

Daughter Two is leading a conference session for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Seabeck this weekend. Tomorrow, I’ll be driving her home seventy miles in holiday traffic. This means that some significant percentage of the drivers sharing the road with us will have had a drink or two. Or more. Or much more.

I’ll be alert for impaired drivers but the truth I learned the hard way is that you can never know which driver is going to be the one who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Which one is going to swerve in front of you or fail to brake when traffic suddenly stops in front of you?

I am so tired of hearing people say they drink “but not to excess.” If you’re going to drive, any alcohol intake is excessive. Forget measuring blood alcohol content. Because for me, it’s not the drunk who commits the crime. It’s the guy or gal who, stone sober and with car keys in pocket or purse, takes that first drink.

Please, don’t drink or toke and then get behind the wheel. Have a great holiday weekend. And please survive it.

Barbecue at the Simases

I sat this evening in our good friends’ garden and thought about how lucky I am. It’s a very nicely laid out and mature informal garden around a nicely kept lawn. The temperature was perfect and we enjoyed easy conversation.

We raised our children largely together, volunteered for many of the same PTA functions, fretted together over teachers and homework loads and who was free to chaperone the next field trip. We haven’t always agreed on everything except that we all had our kids’ interests at heart.

And now the last of the kids are going off to college and we’re able to just enjoy each others’ company without the need to discuss this or that bit of drama from the school board or whether it’s better to spread out the AP courses or save them for the upperclass years.

And this evening, all I had to do was enjoy their company and their backyard on a beautiful evening. I’m really starting to enjoy the empty nest thing.