Health Insurance, or not

From the Wall Street Journal, of all places!

Congressional investigators have discovered that large health insurers in every region of the country are relying on faulty databases to underpay millions of valid insurance claims.

In a report released Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee said insurance companies nationwide have failed to provide consumers with accurate or understandable information about how they calculate “reasonable” or “customary” charges for out-of-network care.

And frankly it's not just out-of-network care, trying to gain any understanding over what is/isnt covered, and marrying charges against treatments against insurance payments is a titanic headache: I would regard myself as well-organised and well-read, but this is a task that has repeatedly defeated my best efforts.

The sooner the government revised the healthcare system (or actually, creates one), the better.

We have been spending part of our weekends looking at houses around Little Rock, mostly open houses of course: however, in the last few weeks we've been skipping that, as it's been too hot and humid to stomach it, even for relatively short exposures dashing to/from houses on show.

However, we had been ruminating over various ideas, and one that Cat suggested, seemed worth checking out a bit more, which is the idea of settling a bit further out of town, trading some commuting time for cheaper price and more land/privacy. I had a look on craigslist.com, and spotted one that looked very appealing - 22 minute drive to my office, 4 bedroom, on 4.5 acres of land.

We drove out on Sunday, and wow - now I see why a friend of mine calls it liarslist.com ... lets just say, if that was 4 acres, then we're currently living in Buck House: and I can't believe they could have squeezed 4 bedrooms into a house that small (we didn't get out of the car). Rather than privacy, it offered neighbours crowding up with a perfect oversight over the yard.

We haven't given up on the idea, but I'll be taking the ads with a good grain of salt in future.

In fact, we are thinking more and more, that if my firm accedes in my taking my job with me, we will shift to somewhere else, anywhere where the firm has offices and a spare desk to house me. As I'm already working remote from the client site, it would seem to make no real difference where I work from, and there may well be quite a few more desirable options - somewhere out of the south, is I think what we need.

Not that it will necessarily be great elsewhere, but the mulish intransigence of the racist, sexist conservatives (of both political parties) is at times quite overpowering, and constantly wearing. I think what outrages both of us most - but of course, in the nature of it, Cat runs into most commonly - is what I can only call an Alpha-male dickheadedness: a man in a position of petty power, who will throw his weight about and attempt to bully his customers into submitting to his dictates in order to prove his superiority and Alpha-ness.

As you can imagine, that goes over like a Lead Zeppelin with Cat: I must admit, I've been very proud of her recently, as she has stopped biting back, getting equally angry, and having loud flaming rows. Instead, she has been able to hold her temper, and instead just withdraw and not engage with this bullshit. Of course, this sometimes means we don't buy something quite as we'd planned, but that's nothing compared to preserving her (or our) integrity and sense of selfworth.

It just amazes me, how often this sort of thing seems to emerge - and presumably this technique works for these dickheads, at least often enough that they continue to use it (assuming, of course, that they ever realise that there are alternatives, which is moot). But it's not just Cat, we've both encountered it, at AT&T, Best Buy, Bale Honda (a particularly loathesome sales manager), Borders, just to rattle off the first few that popped into my head.

I suspect we'll encounter some of this anywhere we go, in the States: I think it's some sort of aggressive male-reinforcing bullshit that just gets sucked up & repeated. It's impossible to imagine an English manager acting like this (but then it's impossible to imagine an American manager pulling the usual English passive-aggressive rubbish.

Still, both this, and the overt racism and sexism that both genders evince fairly constantly here, might well be less prevalent outside the South - and Arkansas is pretty much the most backward part of the States (well, yeah, Mississippi and Alabama might push it to a draw there). We can but hope :)

Jeanne

Funny, with Shirley's death (and stirring memories of Kay's in turn), I'd been meditating about fatherhood, and what it does: but now my focus has unsurprisingly changed to motherhood, or at least my own beloved mother: she's just had a nasty fall, broken her femur in 3 places, and at her age, that's pretty serious (well, almost anything is, to be sure), and worrying.

And what can I say about her? I mean, everyone loves their mother, deserving or not, but I think few have been as lucky or blessed as I have, with my mother. For me, it feels very much like all the things I'm proud of in myself, the best parts of me, all stem from her example and her guidance, whether it's the creative spark, the moral values, the sense of fair play, or the human decency to always reach out a hand to the broken and damaged. Certainly no child of hers would ever entertain the idea that women are lesser, or second-class, or weaker than men, for so much as a second.

What can I say? I love her entirely, and miss her, always.

And when I think of some of the mothers of friends I have known, it's easy to see my luck: none of the shrewishness, wild ill-temper, manipulative headgames, or clinging possessiveness that seems to have been quite common. In fact, I can only think of two other mothers who I'd regard as highly, Anne & Marika (and of course, that's from the outside of the family circle, so very secondhand valuation).

For now, I'll just think on her, and hope the pain is moderated properly, and the care is gentle and precise. I would pray, but that seems a stretch of hypocrisy I can't really manage.

child molesting freak show shell of a human

Things are quieting down, so time for a 2nd post today

So, Michael Jackson's dead ... and yet Keith Richards (and all of the Rolling Stones*) are still alive - how is that possible? Another paedophile, gone to rot in the ground, I suppose.

And yet ... what a blazing genius - a perfect showman, without peer, a poseur nonpareil, a wonderful voice, a passable talent for songwriting, all burnt and sacrificed on the bonfires of the Bitch Goddess, Fame. To quote one of my favourite writers:

Michael Jackson should have been a well-respected pop/R&B star who made his money but lived a fairly normal life of fading from the pop scene and into the vaults of those cherished by pop music amateur historians. Instead, he became a grotesque figure of how much fame can destroy a person. Like Cintra Wilson said in her book A Massive Swelling: “And who has provided us with more evidence that Big Fame will fuck you, fuck you, fuck you in the head until there’s nothing between your ears but a sour, translucent jelly?”

And of course the media are gorging themselves sick on him, one last time before the carcass decays too far. That kinda makes my blood boil - haven't you made enough money off him already? Trying not to think about how quietly Duke Ellington and the immortal Louis Armstrong were let slip when they died - after all they only, yanno, invented a whole branch of music - but of course, they were old unsexy black men, whereas Michael was ... well, what in gods name was he by the time he died? It defies definition.

And poor Farah Fawcett, what a crummy day for her to die: never a great talent, but a reliable actress who I thought played her limited hand extremely well, and then showed peerless courage and determination in her very public struggle with cancer, and in showing it to the public as a cautionary tale. Rest easy, blonde fae.

The Secret Life of Cats

OK, just a short one - today is my day off, but I got phoned at 10 and asked to help out with work - the other local DBA had been up all night on a problem and needed to crash out: so now I'm knee-deep in Priority One problems (just waiting for a job to finish while I bash this out).

Anyway, while going to answer the phone, I pass through the wargames room (3rd bedroom, notionally), and there is Brandy, sitting at alert, on the middle of the wargames table, peering out the window (half the table is covered by Cat's current quilting project, but she's on the bare half). Now, I've never seen her up there before - Midnight occasionally, to catch very early morning sun, but I thought it was too far for Brandy to jump with her big tummy :)

When I pass back through, to go get dressed, Midnight is now up there, in about the same position, and Brandy has shifted onto the quilting, and is now busy trying to stare into a cupboard by sheer willpower.

Coming back again to get back to work, and now they're both on the quilting, sitting at extreme alert, almost side by side, and peering out the window.

And now, when I check, they have moved to opposite corners of the table, and are both curled up asleep (Brandy with her paws covering her eyes, as it's quite bright :)

What other strange things do they get up to when I'm at work or asleep? (well, there's Brandy's nightly promenade of triumph with her victory toy, but that I'm used to).

Little Rock

I should try and give you some idea of what Little Rock is like, as much as I can. It's a bit more than 500,000 people for the Greater Little Rock area - roughly the same as Greater Wellington (i.e. Wellington, the Hutt, and the Gold coast area).

Like Gaul*, it's divided into three, no four parts: the city centre, West Little Rock, North Little Rock, and South Little Rock - east LR doesn't really exist as it's just a river port plus some industrial parks, trailing off into rice paddies & commercial fish ponds . The whole city is quite hilly by European standards (nothing like as hilly as Wellington, but far from flat, too): not big hills, but a lot of (200-300 foot) ridges, on both sides of the river.

The city centre feels pretty gutless and empty - literally, not as a metaphor for courage. There are half a dozen highrises: I work on the 8th floor of the largest (by far), a 46-story behemoth, I would guess none of the others rise more than 20 or 25 stories. The rest of it consists of the Capitol (a miniature imitation of the DC Capitol), and a lot of 2/3 story commercial buildings. What makes it feel gutless is the almost total absence of shops, of any sort. There are a few food shops & takeaway places, to feed all the office-dwellers and other denizens of these mysterious buildings - most are unlabelled, or at best bearing obscure modest signage giving little or no hint of purpose.

Other than that, there are a lot - and I mean a ton - of empty shop slots: this is not due to the recent downturn, most of them have been like this since before we arrived, and many for quite a few years, judging from the neglect. There are also a few bars, but those are scattered around the periphery of the city proper: oh, and there's the River Market (positioned beside the Arkansas River, open on Saturdays), which has a couple of small attached streets of restaurants and bars, which I think supports a fairly peppy nightlife in the evenings (not being drinkers, we haven't really investigated).

It certainly feels weird, driving through the city area in the weekends - except near the River Market, it feels very much like driving through Wellington at 8 a.m. on Christmas morning - empty to a fare-thee-well, echoing streets, whispering pavements.

West Little Rock is where we live: the area extending west, but south of the Arkansas river. The piece of it closest to the city centre is full of old houses of great character (but usually small), dating from 80 or more years ago I would guess: then bit next to the river (on a high ridge) is a series of suburbs where the prices are sky-high (well, by local standards), with a lot of pseudo-mansions - and real ones - and quite a number of interesting, quirky boutiques & small shopping centres, not to mention my favourite cafe.

After that, the West trails off into an apparently endless series of middle-class, moderate suburbs, 3 or 4 bedroom bungalows & split-levels, usually brick, on polite wellscrubbed sections, interspersed with shopping strips (what they call strip-malls) full of chain-shops, looking more or less identical. Oh, and not a sidewalk or pavement to be seen - the developers seemed to deem it an unnecessary expense sometime in the 60s, so they simply don't exist: if you want to walk along, you have to walk on the verge of peoples' lawns. Not exactly characterful, but pleasant and anodyne. Yes, this is us, at the moment :)

Oh, and I should mention, you are not permitted a fence on the front of your property that exceeds waist height (the rear yard can have a privacy fence up to 7' tall, and many do).

Separating WLR from South Little Rock is a motorway (the I630), which forms a fairly solid demarcation. SLR is still suburbs, but generally poorer - more timber construction, often smaller sections, less fencing (and most of that chain-link). Interspersed amongh those are pockets of real, well, poverty and neglect, of a quite shocking level - many houses burnt out, or boarded up, or just quarantined behind police-tape, and most of the rest looking semi-deserted and neglected. If there's a pattern to them, I haven't detected it - I expect it is dictated by some underlying pattern of resources, but I guess you'd have to live there for quite a while to become aware of it.

More alarmingly, from what little I've observed in the last 12 months, those pockets of, well, obviously drug-dealers & users, seem to migrate around SLR, which must make the rest of the inhabitants feel a bit desperate: like waiting for a tornado to destroy your neighbourhood property values, without having even a shelter to hide in.

SLR seems (to a very casual observation) to be primarily non-white: but don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say there is segregation in housing, it's much more just an effect of class, and as always in America, non-whites are shoved down the economic ladder. I haven't seen any signs of overt racism in the housing market, unless I'm missing the nod&awink signals - which is quite possible of course.

The Arkansas river itself is quite substantial - I would guess about twice the width of the Hutt, and deeper& stronger: it's used quite a lot for barge traffic, as it feeds into the Father of Waters, and reaches up into the Plains quite a distance.

North Little Rock is across the Arkansas River from the city centre, and extends up the bank opposite WLR. It is more or less the lower middle-class & working class area: there's a very noticeable rise in the presence of gunracks on trucks, not to mention Confederate flags, beer emblems and faded McCain/Palin stickers. I did contemplate renting here at first, as prices are obviously cheaper, but the longer commute times, and the overall feeling of, well, conservativism (and the enormous, staggering number of gigantic, lavish, over the top expensive churches), really deterred both of us.

Well, not sure that really gives you a good idea of what it's like here, but so it goes.





*Asterix the Gaul joke :)

Friedrich der Groesse

Wow, it's sure soupy today: we had tropical downpours yesterday, and this morning more heat, so all that rain is evaporating. When I was looking out the back yard this morning at 6:30, it looked like fog, but no, just evaporating moisture. When I got out of the car to walk to the office at 7:30ish, my glasses completely fogged up by the time I'd stood up: not sure what the temperature was at that point, I think around 84C.

It prolly won't go over the low 90s, but with 80% humidity to go with it, makes it a mad dash just to get to the car. Still, if last year is to judge, it will pass off in afew weeks in favour of higher temperatures but much lower humidity.Thank goodness for air conditioning in the meantime.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Courtesy of my birthday, I'm reading through Chris Duffy's Frederick the Great: A Military Life, which is utterly fascinating (well, for wargamers, anyway). Duffy is perhaps the preeminent historian of the 18th & 19th century in military areas, and has long made a speciality of Frederick, so this is both animated and quite specific, with endless details apparently at the authors' fingertips, and - as always with Duffy - written in a lucid, flowing prose that is a positive pleasure to read.

What I'm finding particularly illuminating is to compare Frederick with Napoleon: both came to command of an army quite young, with no experience under fire and little other military education except some practice with drill, and voracious reading of military history on both their parts.

With Frederick, once he launches into the 1st & 2nd Silesian wars, you can visibly see him learning, groping for the practicalities of strategy and grand tactics piece by piece: writing up his own critiques after each campaign, with a list of his mistakes and what to learn from them, and also his opponents' clever moves, and what they showed: how to defend a river line from in front, rather than behind; the sensitivity to scouting; the importance of little-wars and the support of civilian populace; the disadvantages of the direct approach; the whole headache of lines of communication and the war of depots.

I can see how, by the time of the Seven Years War (16 years later), he had turned into a general of great ability and vision, but in these early campaigns, he is clearly starting no better than most of his contemporaries, except perhaps in the measure of his determination and ruthlessness: although after a couple of years, he is also clearly improving far past them.

The comparison I still find startling is, Napoleon takes charge of his first army, apparently already knowing all of these things. How, why? Their education seemed very much on a par - Nappy, obviously, has the advantage of reading the history of Fredericks' wars, but that is not so illuminating or astonishing as to provide a key to unlock all the secrets of generalship. Is it just a matter of inherent talent and penetration, perhaps? It certainly can't be determination and energy, as both seemed to exhibit more-or-less identical monomania on the reading matter.

It's hard to think of any other general who emerged, so instantly fully-formed. -
Alex the Axe Murderer? Well, yes, in the tactical sense - a brilliant leader of men and tactician, but he never seemed to learn any strategic lesson except one: make a dash at the enemy army and beat them. If he'd run into a Fabius, or even a competent general willing to put reliance on his fortified cities, he would I think have come a cropper comprehensively.
Wellington, again, you can watch him grope his way towards strategic understanding through his Indian campaigns (altho he astonished Europe by apparently emerging fullyformed, this is just because India didnt count, to them).
Rommel? Again, his concepts in WW2 clearly stem from the lessons he learnt fighting in Italy in Big One, as a relatively junior officer.
Conde? Again, a tactician, without the strategic grasp to win wars rather than just battles.

Hannibal? Ah. There, the lack of knowledge fails me - I don't think I've ever seen a comprehensive military (or other) biography of him: I suspect adequate resources are lacking.

Of course, the depressing side of Nappy is watching him deteriorate and lose much of his ability with age and indulgence - something he only regained, rather too late, once he was again hardpressed.

Enough blithering for today - work calls

Periodicity

Well, having maundered on previously about how bleak the restaurant business looks here, I have to say that this last weekend kinda revised things - both the cafe's we visited for brunch over the weekend were busy, and Mimi's (last night) was so full we had to wait for a table.

mind you, after saying a 5 minute wait, we wound up waiting 25 minutes: then, after ordering, we waited a full hour, then walked out without ever seeing any of the food we'd ordered. So if they were busy, I guess it was an unanticipated rush. Oh .. of course, I've just realised Sunday was Fathers Day, so lots more people out doing ritual celebrations (or is it ritual sacrifice, haha)

So maybe that was just a temporary bobble.

It does make me wonder how things are going elsewhere in the world, though. I know from Sarah's comments that Chicago doesn't seem to be much touched, but both New York and DC seem to be hit very hard (per other blogs), and Glynn says west London is suffering a real rash of closing shops, both chains and boutiques. Grim times all over, I guess.

We took the weekend very quietly, otherwise: it was Cat's menses, and in the last couple of years these seem to have been hitting her harder and harder, to the point of writing off at least one day each time to total pain/disability.

Times like this, being a woman just doesn't seem like fun at all: so many of the women I've known seem to have crushing, appalling periods (probably none as bad as Rosemary's, but mostly pretty bad), and it just seems so ... cruel, I guess. Thirty or forty years of that and -then- you get to deal with menopause (and .. menopause? you mean it's gonna start again? ).

Never mind, at least women get to spend some of their time not awash with hormones, unlike men, who seem to always be on a hormone high (or low, depending on your viewpoint). And, yanno, external genitalia aren't the worlds greatest invention either (he said, crossing his legs nervously).

Enough of that for the day. I was going to write something about anger, but that'll keep for another time.

Hands

Well, I had something of a shock on Friday afternoon. I'd better preface this a bit:

We had an announcement from the company a while ago that it was intended to off-shore a proportion of the US jobs to our Indian subcompany, in order to reduce the cost of support, and offer cheaper contracts*: however, it was stipulated that this replacement would be done by natural wastage (i.e. people resigning or moving), and there would not be lay-offs made to cause this.

As part of taking on Indian contractors & getting them up to speed, we had a contractor join us: he came over to the US for a couple of weeks on-the-spot training, then went back to India, where he is working Indian hours (i.e. from midnight-ish onwards, on our clock). As we didn't have anything like enough work to justify another team member, we were told this would just be a small part of what he is handling, & it was implied he would work on other contracts. This seemed a good idea, as it meant we had someone who could handle out-of-hours emergency calls without one of us getting dragged out of bed at 4 a.m.

However, on Friday, one of our DBA's was laid off, officially for 'financial considerations', and the Indian contractor moved into that slot.

On one hand, this seems like an egregious violation of the company's policy, and, if not illegal, certainly unethical on the face of it.

On the other hand, we all know the person being replaced has been recalcitrant and unwilling to cooperate or share knowledge, or really be helpful to newer team members or the team manager, so you have to wonder how real the so-called financial considerations are, or whether it's just a polite way of avoiding the truth: someone simply no longer willing to do the job.

On the third hand, do I really want to trust working for a company that would do this (although it is true, I have no idea whether the person concerned may have had warning(s) about this beforehand)?

On the fourth hand, who am I kidding? Trust? Trust any employer in this market? It's not New Zealand, there's no presumption of fair play here, and people would just look at you as though you grew a 2nd head if you talked otherwise.

Well, something to mull over I guess. I haven't said (& wouldn't suggest), but it seems to me the guy concerned could appeal to our company's Ethics Committee about this, and have a good chance of having his appeal upheld - assuming that the company actually says what it means about its' Ethics which ... well, let me only say, it turned out to be incredibly flexible when I relied on it in the UK.

Persia

Well, the more I watch the events in Teheran - inasmuch as we get to see anything of them - the more depressing it seems.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful that the people are demanding some real democracy: with any luck, in time that might lead them in the direction of more freedom, which would be a tremendous blessing.

But, when I see the people who are likely to benefit, it's a whole other story, as they say. Mousavi is a moderate, but only by comparison to the alternatives: by any external measure, he's still a mullah, repressive & torture-happy, just a bit less bat-shit crazy when it comes to external affairs, and better trained in buttering up foreign opinion. Ayatollah Montazeri, who appears to be trying to stir things up from within the religious power structure, is as thorough-going a bloodstained tyrant as Khomeini ever was, and his ally Rafsanjani is (merely) a plutocrat who wants better access to western luxuries, it seems.

And of course the current bunch, Ahmadinejad & co, are quite quite crazy.

Still, I suppose someone less elitist and more actually democratic might emerge from the scrum, if it goes long enough - look at how the French revolution evolved.

Of course, the real problem is, there's no real signs of disaffection in the police/military, which is really the sine-qua-non for a successful modern revolution - look at the Ukraine, Russia, & most of East Europe at one point or another.

And look at China after Tiananmen Square for what happens when there isn't a disaffected power structure. Uggh.

Still, so far, the powers that be don't seem to have exerted their military power to suppress the protests, so it's impossible to say for sure - maybe there's more disaffection than is obvious to us, or maybe the Supreme Leader (Khamenei) is losing his taste for bloodshed: and faltering determination at the top is just as lethal as disaffection in the military (and we're back to Louis XVI & the French Revolution again).

Of course the problem with that is, look how the French revolution evolved - first more democratic, then democratic tyranny, then massive bloodshed, then reaction into military tyranny. Oh goodie, just what we need in the middle east, another tyranny looking to foreign wars to curb the popular dissent.

Maybe I'm just being too pessimistic: after all, we've been blessed by quite a few miraculous liberations in the last quarter century, even if we totally squandered the possibilities of some of them (hello, Russia & Bill Clinton, I'm looking at y'all) - when I consider the freedom and hope in eastern Germany, and the liberation of Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Roumania, Bulgaria, and - most miraculously - the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which I never thought would be pried out from Russia's hands, there must be some cause for hope. So maybe, maybe, maybe, it'll come out right, somehow.

[Later Update] So it appears I was too optimistic about Khamenei, his dander is up and he's committed to the current fraud. Terrifying.

[Heartrending Update]

From NIAC, a translation of a blog post:

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

* * * * * * * * * * *

The one thing about the whole situation that I find completely outrageous, is the rank and rancid Republicans here, criticizing Obama for not speaking out strongly in favour of the protestors, as - how did one put it last night? - 'representative of the US, the symbol of liberty and fairness in the world.' How stupid can you be? Doesn't he get it that the US is not a symbol of liberty, or of anything but rank oppression, in the Middle East?

And of course he does get it, he's just playing this for domestic political advantage - he's one of the many demented fools that - until last week - were urging the bombing of Iran in order to eliminate it's possible future nuclear facilities (despite Pentagon planners pointing out that this is impossible, short of a prolonged nuclear barrage over the bulk of Iran, which would also, yanno, destroy all its oilfields).

It's one thing I do find quite alarming, that the right here view everything solely through the prism of domestic advantage, and are so bitterly furious at losing power, as though they had a divine right to it, that they will resort to any craziness to criticize the current administration. It is a common occurrence to hear Obama reviled as a tyrant by radio talkback hosts here, and much worse than that - and that's even if you steer clear of the real crazies, who claim he's a muslim, or he isn't an american, or ... eh.

I think being in Arkansas, and immured in the middle of these people, is having a detrimental effect on our tempers, if nothing else.

Anyway, back to it - more next week

Waterloo Day

Seems funny to reach Waterloo day, & not have any wargames planned: huh, when I think about it, not even any Napoleonic soldiers here, if I wanted to do a refight. Of course, I unloaded my huge Nappy collections before we left NZ (which helped pay for the move, of course), and haven't really replaced them, having failed to find any large number of Nappy players in the UK (and the few small groups I found, playing strange and demented scales and rulessets - Napoleonic skirmish with 54mm figures, for Davout's sake!)

Oh well, I progress with my project of getting all my unpainted lead at least based, undercoated, and given a brown wash. Overall I'm delighted with the look this produces, and it does feel enormously better than having them just stuck in piles, in cardboard boxes lying around everywhere. However, with the advent of the hot and sticky weather, it has been slown down a bit - both because of technical issues with the ink washes in this heat, and because the humidity is so debilitating.

I expect this to pick up now, as we've reached the point where the air conditioning is going on pretty much fulltime - we try to put this off, both to acclimatise and to keep the bills down, but as it gets hotter, there comes a time to just be realistic, and rely on the blessings of technology! Once it's regularly over 90F, that seems to be our current sticking point (so to speak). Judging from last year, the next 6 weeks will get hotter & hotter, with the humidity only starting to diminish in August, but as we go from airconn'ed house to airconn'ed car to airconn'ed office, it isn't too hard to put up with.

And speaking of which, whoever has control of the office temperature this year, is taking a very different approach to last year, I'm happy to say: last year, I was cooking at the office every day, as they kept the temperature very hot (80ish) to keep costs down (I assume). This year, it's positively chilly in the office: I havent measured, but I would guess around 65F, so it's always quite pleasant to walk out of the office into a wall of hot air (at least for the first 30 seconds).

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was going to expound on the situation in Iran, but it's too depressing & I'll put that off til tomorrow, I think - besides, Thursday is my busy day at work, so best to clear the decks and get ready for the change requests.

Meditations on music (1)

Jim Morrison & the Doors are still one of my favourite groups, and I still find a lot to enjoy, and to think about, in their songs - the nonlinearity and powerful imagery, the simple hypnotic rhythms, the occasional haunting melodies.

When Oliver Stone produced his film of the groups' rise and demise, I was fascinated when I watched it - as someone who was too young to have been there, it seemed to me that he captured the spirit and feeling of the times very vividly, even if he exaggerated the monstrosity of the depravity of Jim in the later stages of his career (as the surviving group members all insist). In some ways, I think - of course he exaggerated it, the whole Doors thing was about the exaggeration of emphasis, and how more appropriate to tell the tale.

Despite the fascination of watching it the first time around, it took me a long time before I brought myself to watch it again, because the end of the story is so ugly, and because the actor (Val Kilmer) did such a spectacular job of providing a charming, empathic, winning picture of Jim in the first two-thirds of the movie, that to watch him fall apart so completely, so self-destructively, was just too painful to sustain.

I seem to have developed a way around this now: I simply stop watching after two-thirds of the movie. A cheat, I suppose, to leave the story incomplete, but I know what's coming, and why suffer through it again? I'm not some neophyte that needs to learn the moral of the tale, after all. (and why watch any of it? well, because it is a lyrical, romantic, winning tale up to that point, and gives me great enjoyment).

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the cross fire of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger,
You legend, you martyr, and shine!

Hmm, I seem to have wandered off course somewhat.

Our House

Meh, well so much for the TV repair. They turned up, they did their thing, and lo & behold, the problem returned last night, after they'd gone of course. Often the way with intermittent faults, of course :(

Anyway, just for something different, I've finally gotten around to downloading some pix from our camera, so here's a few views of our current house - it's a 3 bedroom brick bungalow, very ordinary in appearance (the whole subdivision still looks almost identical, 40 years after building). The nicest part of it by far is the deck, and the back yard heavily treed, and the brook running down the rear of the property (imagine, Brookside drive is actually beside a brook! will wonders never cease :)

I should apologise in advance for the crappy photography - I'm never going to make a decent photographer, it would appear. If I can persuade her, I'll try to get Cat to take some (she really is good at it), and post those, to give a much fairer look at the place

First (and best), the back yard, from our deck,
looking left. On the other side of the fence are
our neighbours Tom & Holly, and their four
(four) loud dogs! Fortunately neither Midnight
nor Brandy seems to have the slightest clue
that they're meant to be scared of this noise.









And from the Deck looking right - you can more or less see the fence & gate, beyond which is our creek. There is a public easement on the other side of the fence, then a substantial ditch holding the creek. When we get torrential thunderstorms, it gets quite full, and when really prolonged and extreme, it will rise almost to the base of the fence - but that still leaves a vertical rise of 7 or 8 feet before it would begin to threaten the house with flooding, so I'm not too concerned.




.
Somewhat later in the day, and trying to give a better idea of the size of the deck - we've found it large enough for 4 people, chairs, table, and barbeque grill, without any problem.











And (on a different day, hence the change of light), this is the back of the house from the deck. There is a separately fenced dog run, which oddly seems to be a common feature in rental properties in Little Rock: not so much use to us, of course.









From the deck you enter the house by sliding doors, into a large kitchen/dining area. In the foreground you can see part of the (moveable) island that is used to demarcate the boundary. Not seen to the right is a wall with a bunch more cupboards, so the place is wellfound for storage. Oh, and just visible on the bottom left is a dishwasher, a common (and delightful) feature here of course.






This is a rather odd view of the dining room - which, as we don't entertain much, Cat has also used as her auxiliary sewing area (that's a sewing desk, far left, and a computer desk being used as flat-surface area, far right). The back door out to the car is on the right, and the entryway to the lounge is visible on the left.








The lounge - this makes it look longer and skinnier than it really is. We've divided it into a TV-area (with painting table), and a computer area, not visible from here. That's the front doo in the rear of the picture, with optional cat huddled on a coffee table in front of it.









The lounge, looking towards the dining room this time, with blurry computer desk & chairs - when we play on the PCs together, we can sit face to face, for maximum convenience :)

Oh, plus lazyboy for His Lordship beside the painting table, in the foreground !








And this is the treadmill stationed behind my lazyboy, in theory so I can get exercise while watching TV - but for most of the day, it provides a cat-supervision platform, where they can either keep an eye on us or stare out the window at the passing birds.










The spare bedroom (or part of it, it's actually quite a bit larger than this makes it look), complete with queen size bed for any visitors (hint, hint), and optional cat curled up on the bed (when we have visitors who are allergic to cats, they will of course make a point of BOTH sleeping on the bed, given a half chance).







Partial view of the 3rd bedroom, dedicated to my wargames (all the storage racks). In the foreground is part of my 8x6 table, which rests on bookcases for a convenient place to keep most of my books.










The master bedoom - my side, with bedside table - Brandy's favourite early-morning perch for staring out windows, as there are bushes right outside that birds nest in.











Master bedroom, again, trying to show the width (and with optional cat on the bed of course). On the left are a stack of pieces of furniture that Cat has refinished with leather, turning them from cheap MDF to an elegant imperial purple. The door almost visible in top left is to the master bathroom.










The rather cramped master bathroom - I didnt take a picture of the main bathroom, which is on the other side of this wall.














Oh, and a somewhat old picture of us - my hair is much longer than that at the moment: in fact I'm way overdue for a cut, as the weather is getting so uncomfortably warm.









More tomorrow

Tuesdayitis

Well, not so much to say today - yesterday got wrapped up again in a continuation of the problem from Sunday, so for once a busy busy day (altho not as bad as poor S, who got back from holiday yesterday, joined me on the problem, and then got stuck with it til 1 a.m this morning, when it finally got fixed .... not actually our problem of course, but everyone always points at the database first, whenever anything goes wrong: this is like a law of nature, in NZ, the UK and here, because it's big and identifiable, and it's the endpoint of most systems, so a natural target).

I still have quite a few problems with the systems here - the Texas ones in particular - as they belonged to a (now-defunct) firm that has been bought out more than once, before winding up as part of our current client: as a result they are exceptionally old and cranky by IT standards. The worst of it, tho, is that when they got set up, whoever did it followed none of the standard procedures and layouts, and did some frankly, really weird things in the setup.

As a result, whenever I have to troubleshoot, it's always an adventure trying to find out where everything is - I am gradually getting it all documented for my own purposes - the previous DBAs did have it documented in a fashion, but I've had endless grief trying to find this and understand it when in an emergency.

The usual IT stuff, grumble grumble moan about your predecessors and the network group :)

On the bright side, the TV repair guy is due today - it will be nice to have this reliable again. For the last 3 weeks, we can watch about 90 minutes' worth of TV before it gets 'warm' and then starts giving everything a neon-green overlay. After that, you can carry on watching, but it's pretty damn surreal. It's sorta OK for stuff that isn't too visual & depends more on the talking (like most news & news analysis, things on the history channels, stuff like that), but most drama & comedies are just ... too strange.

Mind you, I caught the last half of 2001: a Space Oddyssey, and it made more sense than before :)

Cat is going through her phone book, advising everyone of her new mobile phone number, as we got around to dumping our AT&T phones & picked up new ones from a company that doesn't charge us a daily $1 just to have the phone service. Which reminds me, I must email y'all with our mobile numbers, and the new landline number as well (just trying to cut AT&T out of my life as much as possible, which brings a smile to my face all in itself).

We're also trying to come to grips with the medical insurance/ medical bills system here, which is just horrible. I mean, we have what is called good coverage, courtesy of my employment contract, but the simplest of things, like trying to match bills against insurance claims & trying to find out what we need to pay, is just an endless paperchase, with numerous complicated phone calls to the insurance company. Oh well, welcome to Capitalism in the worst way - free enterprise it definitely aint.

Enough griping for one day, I'll get back to work!

What sort of one-star hotel is this?

I tell ya, this place is the pits. Ya go to the smorgasbord, and it's always outta Tuna! Then you complain and complain to the waiters, and it's days before they put out any more, and meanwhile you have to put up with dry food.

Then there's the service: my sister keeps getting locked out, through no fault of her own, cause they run this place like a prison.

And ya wouldn't believe what ya have to go through to get a drink!

- Brandy
Colonel, retd

Oh Duh

And with all that wittering on, I forgot the best news - we got letters on Saturday, giving us a date of July 14th for our next (I think final) interview with USCIS, for getting our green cards!!

Bit of a bust

Although that title is a bit misleading: Friday certainly went well, we went out to a new place - well, new to us - Acadia, which is located up in Hillcrest (one of the posh bits of town, occupying one of the hills). The restaurant is quite lovely, with a series of outdoor decks spilling down the side of the building, woven amongst several trees, with the whole decorated with fairy lights all over. The inside looked pretty impressive, but we - of course - chose to sit outside.

And we had been granted a great night for it, neither too hot&sticky, nor rainy - the rain threatened a few times, but never actually delivered. I don't know how busy it usually is (when I first spotted it 12 months ago, it was packed out), but on Friday they managed to fill all the outside tables (6 or 7), but there was noone seated inside (I guess at least 12 tables), so I guess they are hurting as much as any restaurant.

Amazingly, the restaurant actually lived up to the location, for once - so many restaurants with spectacular locations or views seem to use those as an excuse to be ordinary, or worse. Here the service was impeccable, and the food both interesting and delicious. I had possibly the best Caesar salad I've ever tasted, and a nicely-done breast of duck on the strangest casserole I've ever encountered - more like shredded potato with bacon and mushroom, quite delicious. Cat's scallops were also, she said, delicious (I declined the offer of a taste, feeling about shellfish as I do).

We also had several glasses of dessert wine with our meal (having long abandoned any pretensions to 'good taste' in wine, and all that wine-bluff stuff, we now just drink what we like, and the hell with developing our palates). Of course, this wasn't actually the wisest of choices, as I wound up paying for it the next day.

Sadly, in my case it seems high-sugar alcoholic drinks exact a disproportionate revenge the next day, so I spent most of Saturday feeling quite hungover and ill. Mind you, as Cat got me DVDs of The Sopranos, I could just sit & watch some of those and vege out, which kinda fitted in with my capabilities for the day.

Sunday, unfortunately, I got a phone call at 8 a.m. for work, and had to spend the day in a mixture of working, and waiting for others to fix things so I could do another step. This staggered on until 6:15 p.m., in a most frustrating fashion. If I could have just done my bit, it would only have amounted to a couple of hours of actual work, but of course, things don't work like that.

We did get out at one point to look at an Open Home nearby - someone had gone the extra mile and delivered flyers in all the letterboxes inviting people to come and see it, and find out about 100% financing and 'buying the house at less than market price'. I have to say, wow - what a con job. The couple had obviously bought the place to do a quick flip - tidy it up, give it a quickie facelift, and then sell it for a profit. Talk about bad timing for that manouevre!

The job that they had done was so obviously a completely superifical one, done to the lowest standards - a nasty mid-brown mushroom paint job, the cheapest of carpets, missing handles, and so on. Not that there weren't some nice points to the house, but overall a fairly cramped 3 bedroom house with a nice lounge & no dining room. Then there was the price - $181,000. At that point I just about laughed out loud, as it is so completely unreasonable in the current market. For less than this ($179k), I saw a -very- nicely finished 4 bedroom place with office, playroom and large fully-landscaped & fenced yard, in a nicer part of town ... and that was 2 months ago, so if it's still on the market it's price will have fallen.

I mean, seriously, house prices are just in free-fall all over the US. I'm quite happy to hold off buying for another six months, as I think they'll just keep falling for at least that long. Around then, we can start looking at foreclosures, as these are usually so much cheaper: true, the banks can be harder to negotiate with than private owners, but they are also not emotionally invested, and once the property has been on the market for a while as a foreclosure, you can use the same sort of pressure on the bank - i.e. show them how much they are losing each month it doesn't sell, as a persuasion to cut the price for a certain sale. Or so the theory goes, anyway ...

Oh well, on the brighter side, the 2nd series of True Blood has just started on TV, so we were agog to see that. We were riveted by the first series, so much so that we went and bought all the books the series is loosely based on, and devoured them in short order. I have to say, the books are actually less substantial & thoroughly thought-out than the TV series (which is already deviating a fair distance from the underlying source). Of course, the TV series is made by the brilliant Alan Ball (of Six Foot Under fame), which is why I gave it a look in the first place, & it's not surprising that it is rife with so many levels of meaning and subtext.

Birthday time again, redux

Well today has dawned bright and sunny. Prolly get to hot and humid later - that's the weather pattern we seem to be in, at the moment - but then that's what the air conditioning is for.

I cant recall if I've blogged about my work hours, so if this is a repeat, sorry: When I started here, I'd come from working 9 day fortnights (8.5 hours a day) in the UK, and so I asked my boss of the time (Doug), whether that was available here. He said sure, altho - of course - it's 9 hours a day here as they usually work 80hour fortnights. So, I work all of week one, and take every 2nd Friday off: and I work from home on Mondays, and on the Fridays that I don't have off.

However, the DBA who preceeded me here (John), keeps forgetting about this. It's been happening for a year, so I'm starting to think it's not an accident that he keep scheduling appointments & other issues on the Friday I'm not working.

I had planned to ask for leave, to cover my birthday, as I always do, but when I checked the calendar, my birthday fell on a rostered day off, so I thought, great, no need! Steven (the new DBA) then asked if he could take the day off, & that seemed fine - we don't really overlap and John would be here to cover any issues.

Then, yesterday, John sends out an email announcing he wouldn't be at work until late morning on Friday, because he's got a doctors appointment. Hmmf. No real way of saying no - he wasn't asking, he was telling - so, here I am, working from home this morning. I wouldn't mind too much, except I was aiming to sleep in :(

Oh well, so be it. John is old & cranky at the best of times, approaching retirement age and very resentful of having to leave PNM and join SAIC - I think it was a contract condition of SAIC that PNM provide one of their experienced DBAs, if they took the contract - and, given that they had 11 friggin' DBAs, I would guess the resentment stems from actually having to, yanno, do some work for a change: plus, I'll admit, production DBA is the least exciting bit, as you don't get to help out with the coding and design, just implementation.

Even so, he needs to rise above it: all he's doing is spreading his misery, and acting fairly unprofessionally. It's a shame, because when he forgets to be resentful, he's actually quite amiable & pleasant, with a quirky sense of humor. Oh well.

It does remind me tho: after 7 years under Graham the Engineer, and his high standards, I'm actually quite shocked at the lack of professionalism and competenece I keep encountering over here - to quite a frightening extent. I know standards have been falling in IT for the last 25 years, as numbers expand (and intellect decreases), but geez, how do some of these buffoons manage to get out of bed and get dressed each day? I keep looking at their shoes to see if they can tie their own laces yet (mostly, no, they depend on velcro'd sneakers).

Let me provide an example (a rant I already had at Ray):
On Monday I got contacted by 3 new consultants hired by our client firm, to do some programming & set up a new software application for them: they couldn't connect to the (existing) databases on 2 servers, so there must be something wrong with the servers (of course).

After much fussing about, we determined there's nothing wrong with the databases or the servers, and it must be their connection file that had errors, so I forwarded them a copy of the master connection file, and forgot about it.

On Tuesday they reported that that wasn't working either, they still couldn't connect to the databases, and there MUST be something wrong with the databases, and WE"RE WASTING THEIR TIME AND THE COMPANY'S MONEY so do something about it. Well, after having to verify (and print off a copy for the IT manager) to prove there was nothing wrong with the databases, I tried to analyse what was wrong, and it turned out that they couldn't even connect to the servers or see them on the network at all. Fine, a network problem, I turned it over to Networks to fix it, and forgot about it.

Wednesday I was of course off on leave, driving to Memphis & back.

This morning, I get a phone call SCREAMING that I still hadn't fixed it and my databases weren't working right and I have to fix it RIGHT NOW!

The databases, of course, were fine. I talked to the Network guy, who thought he'd fixed it yesterday (but hadn't of course) ... it turns out that these turkeys were set up on their own (non-company) PCs, and had no connection of any sort to the Clients network. How they thought they could connect to secured databases on our network, I have no idea - magic wands, perhaps, or ESP.

Anyway, it turns out that the network guy yesterday sent them the VPN software, so they could connect via the Internet, except ... they're running 64bit VISTA and the VPN software only runs on 32bit ... which he had explained to them already.

How this is my fault, I have yet to hear, but no doubt they will try to blame me.

What -really- bothers me is, these guys are supposedly IT professionals with tons of experience, and yet it's quite clear that they have not the slightest idea of how networks are meant to work, or simple network connectivity, or even really how O/S's work.

Talk about doomed projects.

End of rant

Well, enough blither - one more phone conference, then John should be here, & I'll be able to hand over and shoot off to the Satellite for latte's and brunch :)

Travelled!

Well, that was a fairly low-key trip, all things considered. I drove us to the edge of Memphis, then turned driving over to Cat - on the theory that she's more experienced at American city driving, and I'm better at reading maps - which I guess worked out, as we got to the places we aimed for with a minimum of confusion and no real delay.

The actual USCIS thing was short & very easy: fill out a form, wait a couple of minutes, get digitally fingerprinted (no ink, no mess! god bless technology), have your signature & picture taken, that's it. Not sure what comes next, I think it will be back to Memphis for an actual interview face to face... but as we did this twice with our L-visas (once in London plus again in DC on entering the States), then maybe that step gets skipped?

We stopped at a Bennigans (at last, somewhere where they haven't been shut down!), and had Monte Cristo sandwiches, I think the high point of the week for Cat - she had been really longing to try one again. Having had a bite of hers (cold) last time, I was quite keen to try one myself, but I have to say they are much nicer once lukewarm or cold - when new-cooked and hot, they are not so great.

Cat had been feeling pretty low and out of sorts all day, so we cancelled the tourist stuff for the day: after all, it's only a 2 hour drive, if we fancy a daytrip any weekend, it's an easy reach, so we drove back slow & easy.

The traffic was moderate going both ways (well, by UK motorway standards - very heavy by NZ standards!), and man, were there a lot of 18wheelers & lorries on the road. I must say, tho, that the US truckers seem a lot more professional and courteous than the ones you encounter in the UK (most of course being EU-based): they stick to the speed limits much more, give you space to pass & are quite happy to pull over a bit to help, and (most of all) dont play Block The Traffic by occupying all the lanes & travelling at the same speed, the way so many truckers in the UK always delight in doing. Given that the Interstate we were on is only 2lanes each way, that would have been quite easy to do, but while the truckers would overtake their slower brethren & caravans, (and the occasional slow car), they were fairly careful to pull over immediately after, and to not let a buildup of delayed cars occur at all.

Two other differences I noticed in the open-road driving: one was the recurrence, indeed almost prevalence, of enormous peels of rubber - blownout 18wheeler tires, I assume. This despite passing at least 3 workcrews at different points, tidying them up & collecting them. Compared to the UK/EU motorways, there seemed to be a huge number of them: I guess the profit margin thing here (or the less stringent inspection regime?) drives the truckers to try and eke out every
last mile from their tires.

The other big difference was the absence of the usual stream of broken-down or burnt-out cars dotting the side of the motorways. I think in the whole journey, we saw 2 breakdowns, and in both cases they were obviously being attended to (if not necessarily fixed). I would guess, driving a similar distance in the UK (say up to Birmingham and back, we would expect to see at least 20 breakdowns of various ages, plus another 6 or 8 burnt-out cars ... each way.

I think that this is caused by the American love for (and dependence on) their cars, in a way that has never even penetrated in the UK, where car maintenance seems to be considered optional - to the point that simple things like oil & filter changes are considered an unneeded expense, or an occasional opportunity to be robbed blind by the mechanics.

Of course the UK mechanics truly are a band of ruthless cowboys, and as a class are quite piratical and utterly untrustworthy (with quite a few honorable exceptions, I'll freely admit).

Even so, it was always an occasion for mirth on our parts over the sheer volume of breakdowns we would see on the English motorways, and we would speculate on the underlying thought processes, or lack thereof. It's not as tho cars are cheaper in the UK, after all - quite the reverse. Still, it was very pleasant to not see the same littering the sides of I40 yesterday.

Cat disagreed with my guess of the cause, pointing out the number of cars we see in Little Rock with astonishing dings and dents, and quite commonly missing windowscreens - replaced with clear plastic & duct tape: but I dredged up the analysis I'd read a few months ago, about the effects of poverty on car ownership in the US as the cause of this.

Briefly, the bottom slice (12%? 15? 18? I forget) has such poor creditworthiness that they cannot get car loans at anything like reasonable terms, so - as they still need cars, public transport being a bit of a joke in almost all of America - they are reduced to purchasing wrecks: played out cars at the end of their useful lives, costing $500-$1000 typically, i.e. the sort of amount they can buy for cash (or buy on horrible credit terms & afford the monthly payments) ... and expected to last only months, perhaps a year if you're lucky.

Of course, in straitened circumstances like that, it is essential to get every last possible mile out of their investments, to delay the next purchase as long as possible: hence driving them in quite unsafe conditions, provided they still actually can move, and don't get stopped/ticketed too often to make them financially viable (fortunately there are very few police assigned to traffic duties so that is a low risk).

The irony of it is that, between the repeated purchases, and the price of those repairs that seem worth the cost, they could in many cases afford the payments on a much better quality of used car, but having been judged and found wanting by the Creditworthiness Judges (ha), they aren't given that access. Makes you think it might be something the government could address .. like so many things involving the Credit Rating gestapo.

Enough rambling for the moment :)

A true american hero

"Colleagues called Stephen T. Johns "Big John," for he was well over 6 feet tall. But mostly friends recalled the security guard's constant courtesy and friendliness.

"A soft-spoken, gentle giant," said Milton Talley, a former employee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Johns was killed yesterday in the line of duty -- shot, authorities said, by an avowed white supremacist who entered the museum with a rifle. (...)

"There are no words to express our grief and shock over these events," the museum said in a statement, describing Johns as "an outstanding colleague who greeted us every day with a smile."

Johns, a 1988 graduate of Crosslands High School in Temple Hills, lived in an apartment in the Temple Hills area. Friends said he had a son."

What greater heroism than to give your life, to deny a lunatic with a gun from access to hundreds of school children & unarmed tourists behind you?

More later.

Travelling

OK, feeling a bit excited today - we're off to Memphis on a day-trip tomorrow.

We're going to Graceland, Graceland
Memphis, Tennessee ....

(Paul Simon)

Funny how some places are just, what's the phrase, 'storied in myth and legend' - in the case of Memphis, apparently 899 different songs!

Long distance information
get me Memphis Tennesse

(Chuck Berry)

Of course, we're not exactly going for romantic or enchanting reasons - in fact, it's just a visit to the nearest USCIS (Citizenship & Immigration Services) office, in order to get our 'biometrics' recorded ... i.e. fingerprint, retina scan, not sure if there's anything else. Just the next in many steps of getting our status adjusted from temporary visa-holders to green-card permanent residents (i.e. able to come & go at our pleasure).

Then I'm walking in Memphis
walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale

(Marc Cohn)

Of course, we're keen to press on with this, both because it will permit Cat to seek paid employment once she's shifted off her L2-visa, and because the banks & credit card companies here will (by and large) not offer any credit of any sort to temporary residents. I say by and large, because I did get approved for a Mastercard which (by accident I think) didnt ask or check my residency status: but then, it has a ceiling of $500.

Handy's cast in bronze
And he's standing in a little park
With a trumpet in his hand
Like he's listening back to the good old bands
And the click of high heeled shoes
Old Furry sings the blues

(Joni Mitchell)

Once we have green cards, we can do things like shift our UK credit-card debt (run up by the move over here) to a low-interest bank loan, so we can get it paid off in a couple of years (at worst), rather than paying the weasel-strangling interest rates the credit-card companies charge: and contemplate getting mortgage approval & go looking for a repossessed house to snap up at bargain prices. Lord knows, there are a ton of those around at the moment - over 800 in the Little Rock area, and it's one of the least-affected areas. It must be utterly ghastly in parts of Florida & California, and I know bits of Ohio & Michigan have whole suburbs where all the houses are either in repossession, or simply abandoned. Scarey, scarey stuff.


Lets go to memphis in the meantime baby
Memphis in the meantime girl

(John Hiatt)

But still and all, it's nice to look forward to a day-trip: it's only a 2-hour drive from Little Rock, so we're planning to go fairly early, and take time to pass by Graceland (neither of us is a big enough fan of Da King to pay actual cash to go in, I think), visit old Beale Street & look at the Daisy, & of course WC Handy's statue (damn, just writing the name makes Bing's version of St Louis Blues echo in my head), and anything else that might spring to eye :) Oh, plus have a look for gaming shops: if there are any that run weekend games, then a 2hour drive might be worth making once a month or so, just to get some gaming opponents.

So, prolly no blogging tomorrow if we're going to make an early start.

Birthday time again

Well, a pretty quiet weekend: Cat was very withdrawn and silent on Saturday, but came out of it overnight and was much more positive on Sunday, fortunately: I think she was just feeling lonely and a failure on Saturday, something all too easy to slip into here for her, between the having to make new friends, deal with how weird this place can be, and not being allowed to work - which definitely robs her of a lot of feeling of validation and purpose.

Yesterday we went to Denny's for breakfast (Cat's favourite) - as we're regulars there, we always get exceptionally well-treated, and several of the waitresses have adopted Cat in particular as a person to cherish - one of the shift managers, Carol, is becoming a good friend, someone we always spend half an hour talking to when we go there.

Of course, tipping lavishly and still being regulars when their trade is shrinking at an astonishing rate, doesn't exactly hurt our reception either :)

Wandering off on a tangent for a moment: tipping. I always used to tip in NZ, 5 to 10 percent, and the same in England, but after finding the derisory wages paid to waitstaff here, I've made sure I up that to 20-25%, or more if the service is exemplary: in NZ & the UK, tipping was just a luxury for the staff, to reward particularly good work, but here it is a raw necessity just to earn a living wage. I may have blogged this before ... and I daresay I will again, it still appalls me (and at some level, just shocks me: why is the union not sticking up for them? Oh right, the Americans have been sold a bill-of-goods telling them that unions are a bad thing and destroy the economy. Slick, slick, evil work, there).

Howsoever, and returning to topic, we had a congenial and pretty lazy Sunday: Because I knew it's something she really wants to see, I had suggested going to see the Duck Parade through the Peabody (google ducks peabody hotel little rock to find more about this), but she got it into her head that she wanted a whole 'afternoon-tea-at-the-Ritz' experience, and this is something that just flat does not translate to American at all. I tried talking to the hotel about it (it is the toniest hotel in town after all), but they just could not comprehend, or adjust to the idea at all - the best they could do was to offer appetizers from their Steak Bar , not quite the thing. The whole idea of small sandwiches seems to be beyond the grasp of anyone here, ditto for small savouries ("but why wouldn't you want big ones instead").

Aaaaanyway, I thought it'd be much better to let the idea slide, rather than taking to something bound to cause a massive failure to meet expectations, and just leave her feeling isolated, alienated, and generally sad.

For dinner we went out, quite late by Little Rock standards (i.e. 8pm), to Mimi's Cafe - a chain that tries to deliver an approximation of New Orleans: sadly (or perhaps not, given my intolerance for hot spices), it's mostly in the decor, the food is mostly fairly bland american: quite palatable and pleasant, but nothing exceptional. Perhaps I do them a disservice, they do offer Jambalaya (with tomato sauce, uggh), and Blackened fish, so there are a few strands of Orleannois there. Still, it made for a congenial meal, complete with cocktails, and we both managed to leave the table without feeling bloated & like we'd eaten too much - primarily by leaving half our meals on the plate, of course.

Which is something I'm not sure I have remarked on before: American food, in addition to being staggeringly oversweet (even the things you dont think have any sugar in them, do), comes in amazing, appalling, titanic quantities. I mean, really, more is not always better. Of course, the temptation is always to clear your plate (like we were told as kids, hahah), but it's something we're slowly learning not to do, because of the extremely unfortunate effects it has on our digestion, and of course on our weight.

And lest you think I exaggerate, really, no: most of the restaurant meals here are collossal - a full (large) plate of salad with (sweetened) mayo or dressing (and usually cheeses), followed by a full plate of whatever you ordered - and in both cases I mean, full, as in you can't see any of the plate except the rim. This is, I guess, why Americans habitually ask for doggie bags (now they seem to be simply called home-boxes) to take away the excess, because the meals are so big that almost noone could actually finish them. This is a habit we may have to acquire, to help avoiding this issue (of course, almost all the things we order, taste like rubbish when reheated or cold, so all we are really doing is changing the location where the food is thrown out).

Anyway, work calls, so more idle rants tomorrow.

Terrorism & martyrdom

After the killing of the heroic Dr George Tiller last week, I've been pondering abortion (again).

Mostly, I've always just been grateful not to have to make a personal decision about it, but I've always been basically pro-choice: as a man, it's not something I will ever have to confront viscerally (so to speak), and what right do I have to make a moral choice for another person? Is a damp squib of cells a person with rights? at what point does it become one? Unless you buy into some ridiculous religion, there's no definitive answer to those questions, that I can see: so let any woman who needs to, make her own decision.

Plus, on top of that, there are the (realpolitik) social effects of abortion or its' suppression: the real-world effects of the legal position, either driving abortion underground (as it's not something that has ever been successfully suppressed, just somewhat reduced), so that nice middle-class girls get safe, illegal abortions, and poor working-class girls mostly get dangerous, homemade abortions, or things that supposedly produce abortions but fail.

Whereas permitting abortion, judging over the last 40-odd years, seems to have led to a lower population, fewer unwanted & tormented children, and a lower overall crime rate - and I don't mean just because abortion isn't classed as a crime.

I might have more sympathy for the anti-abortion side of the argument if I saw any evidence that they were seriously concerned with the welfare of babies, rather than being totally committed to the control of women and the destruction of feminism (or rather, the feeble shards of feminism that are all that seem to exist in the USA). But as they oppose sex education and readily-available birth control, their rank, indigestible hypocrisy is evident. And as for more expansive and generous ideas, from something as simple as Plunket Nurses, to financial support & subsidies for pregnant or nursing women, well, those aren't even thought about (by either side, alas - and I will admit that politically they are so far out of reach that you may as well suggest giving each newborn a piece of Mooncheese).

* * * * *

And once I started reading about Dr Tiller, it brought home something else to me. I hadn't really read about late-term abortions at all, and I guess had passively accepted the lunatic anti-abortionist assertions, that late-term abortions are of viable babies and it's just lazy women who didn't get an abortion soon enough that seek them out.

Then I started thinking about it, and the implausibility of that stuck: how many women are willing to go through 20 or 25 or 30 weeks of increasing discomfort and unpleasantness, only to terminate 'on a whim'?

Then I read about what the law actually requires: namely, that a late-term abortion will only be granted for medical necessity: now, that is a term that could be subject to abuse and manipulation, and I guess a few times it has been: but the doctors who have the steel and determination to perform this procedure, despite the horrific warfare of terrorism being waged against them, are not likely to be easily swayed, duped, or induced into that.

And then I read about some of Dr Tillers' actual cases. Fox News, and that terrorist pig Bill O'Reilly, trying to make it sound like he was aborting healthy, viable babies all the time. That's not what I read - When you're carrying a fetus with a tumor bigger than its head, or its brain formed on the outside of its head, or it has no face, no chance of ever taking a breath, or it died and is in your body right now putrifying, Tiller was the only guy within hundreds, or thousands, of miles who could help you.

And this is the man that got viciously assassinated. I don't know where he found the guts to carry on, after being harassed for so many years, bombed, shot, but he clearly had a determination to help women who needed it, that I could only class as saintly.

Tooth hurty

Well, Cat had to go back to the dentist yesterday for her permanent crown - to a tooth (in case you envisaged her in a tiara!) - and she was fairly freaked about the prospect, so I went with her, & to drive her home. Just as well, as, while the process went painlessly, she was quite quite stoned on all the anaesthetics, and would have been a total menace behind the wheel.

Of course she spent all last night suffering as the numbing wore off, and the pain bit, but it seems to have largely passed off overnight, except for the usual bruises on nerves, where the injections went in, and so on.

It did make me ponder childhood dentistry tho - particularly those dreadful clinics we got dragged off to, in intermediate school, where the trainee dental nurses got to practice on us. With old, blunt, slow drills, and no anaesthetic, and partly-trained nurses - jesus, what on earth were they thinking? (the great They, who make decisions, in this case). It must have traumatised a generation of kids about going to the dentist - I know we were all utterly petrified of it, and passed around horror stories in whispers: and Cat has similar memories (and even worse experiences than our stories!)

And that made me ponder and curse the name of Robert Hall, the dentist I was next sent to. I didn't realise it at the time, but his technique had an enormous flaw: after injecting anaesthetic, he never waited for it to take effect, so the pain was always intense. Of course, I didn't realise that he should have waited, having never had it before, so I went through school thinking that anaesthetic was pretty useless and hardly numbed the pain at all. Imagine my surprise when I first used another dentist and got properly anaesthetised!

I wonder, in retrospect, if Hall treated all his patients like this: I suspect not, I guess that he only did this to kids, that he was impatient and just wanted them out of the way & out of his surgery as fast as possible. Even so, what a f****** butcher.

Snakes! Snakes! We gots Snakes!

Well, one, anyway - Cat came in from her morning coffee on the deck, to hide from it: she saw it snaking (ha) around the house foundations heading for the neighbours property. About three foot long, medium grey with a pink/orange colour under the jaw, she said.

Midnight, who always goes out with her, was of course alertly watching, and decided to go snake-hunting, following it under the gate into the front yard, where we stopped her & demanded she go back inside, for fear she'd go playing in the traffic - the snake had already disappeared then, so I didn't get to see it myself.

I should perhaps explain that, after 8 years in an apartment, Middie has decided that she is a Mighty Hunter, and will stalk anything ... badly. Of course as it's daylight and she's pitchblack, she stands out like a beacon against the grass colours. Still, this is better than Brandy, whose idea of hunting seems to be to hold her mouth open and expect birds to fly into it.

When I think about it, it's surprising that it's taken a year to see our first snake here - America is full of weird creatures, most of who we haven't seen anything of, yet: the ticks & leeches (which Arkansas is famous for) are something that grosses us both out, but again, we haven't ventured into hiking into the wild (or even the long grass really) so no sign of them yet.

Well, back to herding the wild electrons

Maundering

I spent too much of yesterday & last night, thinking about the women in my life: starting from Shirley (naturally enough) but considering most of them, and realising how damaged they all were, from their childhoods. There's a temptation to think that I only choose damaged women, either from lack of confidence or from broken-wing syndrome, but actually I don't think that's it, because it extends to women I've only known as friends, or even in some cases just acquaintances, and they all seem to be damaged.

Not all in the same way, for sure, but far too many are broken in such similar ways: and almost all looking for a father-figure, to make it right, or (as Shirley) to repeat the same pattern of damage, it seems.

I suppose the same is true of men (like I care): and lo, there are both Paul and I, hitched to strong, bighearted blondes :) Which doesn't really bother me as I don't see it as broken so much as a point of healing. I figure everyone is condemned to either seek out their mother/father, or seek out the diametric reverse, there doesn't seem to be much escaping from that.

But looking at Shirley's history (and Kay's, and Amanda's, and Michelle's, and Linda's, and ...well, you get the idea), & the cycle seems to be, to pick up with someone like dear old Dad, endure a repeat of the same treatment (whether beatings, being ignored, being manipulated, or whatever), breaking up messily and at great length, then - immediately! - stumbling into the next iteration of the same cycle: and despite my efforts, I've never really been able to help any of them break out from this vicious circle.

Depressing thought, really.

Thank god Cat went looking for the opposite of her father, for that matter.

But it also makes me wonder if this is an artefact of our generation - at some level, I can't see it, why would it be so unique? On the other hand, where the women are reacting to distant/absent fathers, does this mean that our generations' fathers were more distant and less involved than their parents in turn? I suppose there's some plausibility to that - until I think of Victorian childrearing & realise that parenting in the 20s & 30s & 40s must emerge from that hideous pall. So, no, we must all go through this I guess; although prior to the 60s I guess it just wasnt really discussed openly.

Oh well, enough blithering for the day

Eh, Monday

Well, we had pretty good weekend - Ray came over from Oklahoma City for the weekend, so we dined out a lot, stayed up waaay too late talking every night (I'm definitely too old to stay up til 3 a.m. now ... so is Ray o'course :), much jawing about wargames and roleplaying, and carefully tiptoeing around political subjects*, and played a game of Flames of War, which Ray had seen played but hadn't tried before.

The game went about as they usually do: too much static armour sitting around engaging in shooting contests while the infantry cower in terrain or dig in around objectives. It was a draw in the end, as we both managed to make several rolls to keep our shattered platoons from breaking & sweeping away the whole army.

Dining out was interesting - almost everywhere we went, business appeared to be sharply down - the only place that wasn't true was Bossa Nova, a Brazilian place we like to frequent for Sunday brunches: it was only about 40% full, but that is how it has been for the last 12 months. Everywhere else (Red Lobster, Satellite Cafe, Mimi's Cafe, & Outback Steakhouse), where we would expect to have a 10-20 minute (or more) wait for seats, we were seated straight away, and none of them were more than half-full. For Outback (which we went to on Saturday evening at 6, prime dining time for Little Rock), I was just astonished: last time we went there on a Saturday, we had a 45 minute wait and it was packed the whole time - this time it was barely a third full.

I guess it's a sign of how badly the depression is biting, even here in the heartland where supposedly we are much less affected than California, NYNY, or Chicago/Ohio. I thought people might be 'dining down' & going to cheaper places, but apparently not - even Denny's Diner & IHOP continue to be nearly empty, and the fastfood places are all looking empty all the time too - the Wendys, BK & MacDonalds that we'd drive past, last year would usually have a long queue at the drive through, but now the carparks seem empty & you hardly ever see a queue.

Bad times all around: Thank god my job relies primarily on an electricity/gas company, who are fairly unlikely to go out of business.

Well, back to work



*Ray is a die-hard Republican who seems quite blinkered when I try to discuss anything of this nature with him: he either cites spurious evidence or simply replies that the democrats are even more corrupt, depending on the subject. About the democrats, he sometimes has a point, I must admit, but I wish I could persuade him to at least doubt some of the so-called evidence the Republicans drum up on other subjects (the economy, for one). Oh well, we just agree to disagree, and doubtless he feels the same way about me :) Fortunately, we share an enormous amount of overlap in terms of wargaming and roleplaying games, amongst other things.