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Wired

July 01, 2009 - View Single Entry

The sun came out a couple of times but mostly it's been an unbelievably dark and rainy, not to mention thundery and split-with-lightning, day, so in between editing I've been catching Quicken up with my checkbook and paying some bills. Being less than impeccable about entering debit-card transactions in my checkbook, I've recently got myself into the habit of skimming my bank transactions online to see if I missed anything or got any numbers wrong.

My bank listed two transactions that I hadn't recorded yet in either Quicken or my checkbook: two deposits on June 29. I yelped. I'd hoped they were coming, but it was a fingers-crossed kind of hoping. Nearly all my income arrives in the form of checks. These two deposits arrived by wire, from Norway. I know this is old hat to some of y'all, but I'm thrilled. I send out an invoice with my bank info on it and money arrives in my account. How cool is that? What's really cool is that my bank doesn't charge a fee the way it does to cash or deposit a check from another country, even if the check is in U.S. dollars.

Maybe I'll celebrate by catching up on my damn estimated tax payments.

June License Plate Report

June 30, 2009 - View Single Entry

June's haul: South Carolina, Idaho, Nevada, and Oklahoma, bringing the YTD total to 37. At long last the East Coast is filled in. The West Coast bloc is moving eastward.

Several of the no-shows usually appear sooner or later. A few of them hardly ever do. You know who you are!

Not Dead Yet

June 28, 2009 - View Single Entry

Strange dream: I was looking after a red dog. The dog looked part Lab, part golden, part Irish setter, but the red was closer to the red of Clifford the Big Red Dog. The dog belonged to a woman I worked with in my M.V. Times days but rarely think of and even more rarely see now. (I don't believe she actually has a dog.) The dog was hit by a car and killed on State Road, between the Stoney Hill Road on one side and Buttonwood Farm Road on the other -- the place where Allie, Travvy, and I often cross these days. I didn't see the accident but I knew the dog was dead because there was a big red stain in the road, and the red of the stain was exactly the same as the red of the dog.

I didn't know how to tell the owner that her dog was dead. I called her and someone at her house said the dog had come out of surgery and was doing well. It had been picked up by an ambulance and taken to the hospital. It dawned on me that the stain I had seen on the road was nowhere big enough to have been a dog.

Dog Demo

June 27, 2009 - View Single Entry

The sun came out! It stayed out nearly all day!! In the middle of the day it was actually hot!!! Well, OK, it wasn't hot by summer standards, but by the standards of the last six weeks, it was very, very warm. You could practically see blades of grass reaching toward the sun, growing before your eyes. (Did someone say that watching grass grow is boring?)

Trav and I participated in a demonstration of the educational, rather than political, kind. The reborn Martha's Vineyard Animal Shelter, which has taken up the mission abandoned by the Massachusetts SPCA when they decided to close its Vineyard shelter, was holding a low-key meet-and-greet informational gathering at Sunset Park, near Oak Bluffs harbor (and right across the street from Our Market, my favorite purveyor of beer). Karen Ogden, our instructor, was giving an introduction to her "positive reinforcement" training methods and to "Rally O," Rally Obedience, which is what Travvy and I have been learning. He's pretty quick at learning the commands, and he's gradually developing the ability to focus in the presence of ever greater distractions, so I figured this experience would offer some serious practice in that department. It did.

The gathering was 12 to 2 p.m., the hottest part of a very warm day and not ideal for a heavy-coated Alaskan malamute, even one who has pretty much finished blowing his winter undercoat. We arrived around 11:30 a.m. with a bottle of water, a water dish, a mat, and and a well-stocked "bait bag," all in a canvas satchel. The distractions started as soon as we got out of the truck. Travvy immediately spotted two miniature horses and a full-size pinto, not to mention half a dozen dogs, all leashed, of course. Managing both Travvy and the satchel was a challenge. Karen had staked out plenty of space in the shade next to Sunset Lake and set up a ring with orange snow fencing. The rest of our classmates, dogs and people, were already settled in. They've all got dog show or trial experience, so the little enclosure next to the ring had the feel of a campsite set up by campers who know what they're doing: Sochi the golden retriever was in his crate, working on a Kong filled with chicken salad; Willow the Aussie was in his crate, which was draped with a space blanket for better shade.

The quarters were close, and Trav was keyed up but mostly under threshold. A few times he went over, usually because I wasn't paying close enough attention to what he was paying attention to, and lunged at another dog with a great Wooo! of challenge or warning. When we went into the ring to do our practice run, Sailor, a statuesque Great Dane who is just a year old, was still standing close to the "gate." I should have asked his handler to move and waited till they were out of the way. Passing that close to another dog put Travvy over the top: he lunged and wooo'ed and I had to drag him out of reach. By the time we got to the Start sign, however, Travvy was focused on me again. I thought back to our first Rally class, when Trav's mind remained out of his body for most of the hour, and was much encouraged. We had a good run, too, barring one pause to sniff an interesting smell on the grass.

We hung around a little while longer, but Trav was keyed up and it was hot in direct sunlight (Trav snoozed in the shade of Karen's truck), so we decided to quit while our brains were still engaged. We got a nice purple ribbon for participating which I now seem to have lost so I can't tell you what it said on it, but maybe it'll turn up.

Imagine

June 26, 2009 - View Single Entry

Check out Sara Robinson's great article on AlterNet: "We've Been Trapped Inside a Bad Health Care System So Long, We Don't Even Know How Much We're Missing."

The title says plenty, but the article says even more. It addresses what I think is the huge, huge, huge problem in the United States: that in so many ways we're collectively so demoralized and depressed that we can't imagine anything better. I'd love to see this article used as a starting point for consciousness raising (CR) groups. Consciousness raising works. It was the power behind the women's liberation movement -- and when CR started to falter, so did the women's movement. Without CR, the women's movement is just treading water. Organize a CR group, or a one-shot discussion! Meet in your kitchen or on your back porch, eat pizza and drink beer and talk about Sara Robinson's article! If imaginations aren't used, they atrophy, and the result is chronic depression. Forget treadmills; give your imagination some exercise!

In my late 20s and early 30s I worked for a big nonprofit. I liked the work and I liked my co-workers, but the corporate climate was just horrible: in most departments, as soon as you got a step or two above the staffers who did the actual work, you were dealing with incompetence and egomania on an organization-wide scale. By the time I left, my colleagues and I were having two or three drinks at lunch two, three, or four days a week because it was the only way we could deal with the extreme incompetence of our department head, which was being ignored by all the higher-ups. Most days I was biking to and from work, about 10 miles each way. I could gauge my stress level by how fast I made it home at the end of the day: the usual ride was a shade under 60 minutes, but when I was really furious I made it in 45.

That was my first and last big corporate job. Ever since I've worked for very small businesses, or combined two part-time jobs into a full-time week, or been (as for the last 10 years) self-employed. My health insurance coverage most of this time has been either useless (major medical only) or non-existent, but I've loved my jobs, been able to move on when I stopped loving them, made adjustments as necessary, and lived (so far) a pretty good and useful life. My health has been excellent -- something I attribute partly to "good genes" and partly to not having to deal with day-in, day-out stress for years on end.

Given my family history and my own temperament, I suspect I would have become a full-blown alcoholic in time, or sunk into serious depression. Minimizing my exposure to pharmaceutical ads and most science reporting in the mass media ("Study links eating spinach to rare form of cancer!") has helped a lot. I eat sensibly, but I sure don't make a fetish of it, and no way would I *ever* give up chocolate or beer. ;-) I do believe that the stress of living a life where uncertainty is constant and real satisfaction or happiness is a foreign concept helps cause or exacerbate many, many health problems.

What if we could take or leave jobs without thinking about health insurance? What if we could receive treatment for serious conditions and get on with our lives at the same time? What if a parent's health emergency didn't lose his kids their chance to go to college? It really is hard to imagine, but if we can't imagine it, we'll never get angry at how badly we're being rooked.