Be careful what you wish for

I admit I do love to collect old adages, whether or not I believe in their truthiness.  I am quite sure I was still in middle school when I saw the flawed premise in "it is always in the last place you look".  & as for "if it's not one thing, it's another" well, duh.

There are a few I do come close to believing though.   "A penny saved is a penny earned" is still mostly solid, so long as you do not consider a penny in the stock market to be a penny saved, but shocking number of people DO think of the market as a big piggy bank.  & while it is not true that "you cannot cheat an honest man", it is a helluva a lot easier to cheat a dishonest one.

Which brings me to a long time favorite:  "Be careful what you wish for (because you just might get it)".   I am genetically related to a person who wished long & loud & hard that his children would just all go away.  & none of us have spoken to him for years; some of us are closing in on the end of the third decade of not speaking to him.  I have no idea how this worked out for him, but I for one am very happy with his wish fulfillment.

"Be careful what you wish for"  is also good business-planning advice.  I remember when it was possible to be in another room, far away from the television & not be able to tell from the jump in volume when the program had cut to commercial.  People who remember him fondly mostly remember Ronald Reagan for his pro-humanitarian activities: negotiating with Iranian hostage-takers, trading arms for drugs in Latin America, & busting the air traffic controllers union right here at home.  You could also remember him as the guy who removed any volume regulation from the segue between programs & their sponsors.  I am sure the advertisers thought this was all their wishes rolled into one --- until it turned out the blast was so obnoxious that people who had never used a remote control before learned how to work that mute button.  Nowadays, even the technologically delayed (hi Mom) routinely record their programs & speed through those commercials like they were never there.

There are other collective wishes that backfired big-time.  One of my favorites is the increase in anal sex among teenage girls who identify themselves as christian & want to  stay "technical virgins" until marriage.  Bill Maher calls this thinking outside the box.  I admit that christians often have me flummoxed but I think I am safe in saying that they never expected to have to include anal penetration on list of what exactly constitutes sex with their abstinence directive.  As one Catholic friend expressed it " I just cannot picture Father standing up at CCD & saying " 'this mean up-ay the utt-bay' although I would pay to see it ".  She was speaking in a different context, but I think it still holds.

Another favorite that really needs a footnote is "the squeaky wheel gets the grease".  I once worked with a programmer who waited until a project was at a particularly delicate stage (timewise, skillwise) & then started tossing out new demands.  I admit I was very aggravated to have to give in (which I did, completely without grace) & he made a big show of telling the entire staff meeting that it was the squeaky wheel etc.  When things flattened out a bit & I had some breathing space, I made a big show of introducing him to the new wheel.  He somehow never saw the next step in the squeaky wheel gets the grease ... until the driver is in a position to deal with the squeaky wheel, permanently.  If that old wheel wanted back on the wagon, well, he would have to work long & hard (& cheap) to convince me he is worth replacing a perfectly good, brand new wheel that is not squeaking.  I think that metaphor has just completely run its course.

Of course I like to keep my eyes open/ears up for the next "be careful what you wish for" moment.  I am seeing it in the Tea Party movement: we want to make a lot of noise & garner some attention to our causes which are...looking more & more like just a list of complaints without much in the way of suggestions, frankly.  They got the publicity wish & now experiencing the maybe we should have thought this thru some more follow-up.   I also see the wish part in parents first "I cannot wait until this baby is OUT OF ME & I don't have to carry this weight around" (every new mom I know has said this at least once).  As for the dads:  "I hope he starts walking soon" or "she'll be so much more interesting when she can talk".  

I think another big one is right around the corner though.  I know a lot of people who usually tread the straight & middle have shrugged their shoulders over Arizona's decision to further marginalize their undocumented workers (setting aside the anxiety they are causing people who might look undocumented but have every right to be here).  Not to take a giant leap over human right violations, etc., I wonder what Joe Q. Moderate is going to do when there is a fraction of who there used to be to harvest & processing his food.  & that fraction expects to be paid minimum wage, by the hour, not pennies for piecework.  I am quite certain, the guy who sneaks across the border to live in horrible conditions just to send money back to his family a few months a year is a much less expensive & much more reliable worker than the guy who will likely be replacing him.  Because there is one demographic for whom this law is likely to be very very good:  parolees.

Getting it all done

Last week Tallgrass Prairie Studio posted a spring to finish challenge.  Alas I could not get organized enough to even make a list of what I want to do & by when.  This is in large part because of my complete inability to close the door on any project without opening several more doors & even a few windows.  I tried, I honestly tried to at least take a moment to see where I stand.  It turns out, I am standing in a hole.

It begins & ends with my workroom.  Oh no, don't look at it.  Just trust me when I say I could easily star in an entire season of hoarders.  Every few ...... years I DO get everything organized & sorted (it is always so delightful to find that new, old stuff!) but I just cannot work that way.  I really need to stare at things while I think about them.  I cannot say to myself, there is that object, folded away in that box that just needs a binding; I need to see the object all mashed up in a basket & the binding, sewn but not pressed, hanging from the lamp.

This is not limited to my current workroom (which is mine, all mine & no one else's d*mn business, so there!).  I had this problem professionally as well.  In the days when I had an office, it was a very bare office (because I cannot hang a picture to save my own life), with a great big formal desk, deliberately big enough for several people to use as a work table & credenza with all kinds of filing drawers & a snazzy upholstered chair for me & two more for whomever might need to work with me & floor-to-ceiling shelves along one entire wall & all the things that are supposed to be prized above rubies in the office real estate stakes.

What can I say.  The shelves I used, but this business of putting books right side up, with all the spines going in one direction never really caught on with me.  It was hard to get to the chairs because they usually had half unpacked boxes of paper files, old floppy discs, newer-but-not-new hard disks, disk drives that had been ripped out of confiscated machines & then wired to whichever monitor/tower combo was closest & left sort of hanging there.   The desk drawers were mostly empty except for a few pens, pencils & packages of steno pads (I have a teeny-tiney OKay, great big but manageable spiral notebook addiction); I preferred to keep everything in piles on the desk top. & the end tables.  I did not mention the little tables that had been artfully placed around the room for lamps & coffee cups.  They had to be removed to clear floor space because it turns out I would much rather have stacks & stacks of CAFRs (think phone books-old style everybody listed at least once + yellow pages in the same cover phone books).  They make pretty good plant stands, side tables, etc. & it does not matter if they get coffee rings or anything as they will all be recycled in the end.  Also, they can be an interesting way to wile away a dull afternoon.

SIDEBAR:   CAFR stands for Comprehensive Annual Financial Report & is a kind of state of all things money for government units like cities, counties, states, etc.  I used to request them from the 50 largest cities in the country, all the state capitals, any potential client, every current client, etc. every year as a matter of course.  These were the old days when they were unlikely to be on-line & I was not joking when I said they were fun.  The year The Firm was released, the City of Memphis had color photos of all the major players having meet&greets with local politicians in the center of their CAFR.  It was while cruising Las Vegas' CAFR that I learned they amortized the city-owned cemetery plots.  If you do not think this is fascinating, next time you are having cocktails with a real estate attorney, work it into the conversation, trust me, it will cause a stir.

The short version is on my best day, my office looked like a tornado had gone through & then made a few return visits to specific points.  It made my boss insane (when people came to the office, he would either close the door or move a very large potted plant smack in the middle of the doorway).  But there was no denying I was productive.  At the end of any given project when I did clean everything up & pack it away, the room was so shiny it hurt my head & I could not work.

Now I suffer (enjoy!) the same state in my workroom.  This means I do get things done the way I want to.  It also means I cannot make a list of what I want to complete & have any faith that it is complete accurate, feasible.  I admire people who can, but I wouldn't want to be them.

George, slayer of dragons

We have arrived to that most esteemed personage George, patron saint of England & other places, too, & other afflictions (if you think being English is an affliction) & other things besides (more on that later).

The calendar is very clear, George was certainly a man who truly lived & died, doing G*d's work, but this whole dragon stuff is patent nonsense. How credulous people are, believing in something so completely implausible as a dragon. & as for that business of saving the king's daughter, that belongs in a Once Upon A Time story. & converting Libya! Converting Libya to what, I ask you.

Let me tell you what it really takes to get tapped for sainthood:
-It helps if you are born poor.  Or rich.   Or both.

-You should also try to live somewhere no one else does.  Or where everyone else does.  "Urban Hermit" is what you want to aim for.  Allowances could even be made for "Suburban Hermit".

-Be mythical.  This is a tough one, but if JFK can do it, why can't you?  JFK isn't a saint?  When did that happen?  What about Abraham Lincoln?  George Washington?  Not even Catholic?  Thomas Jefferson -- not even christian? Well, I am appalled.  How did this country ever happen without a saint?

Enough of that, let's get back to Saint George.  After we take away all that silliness about dragons & maidens & Libya we get....a guy.  In Palestine, probably.  Before Constantine, maybe.  & he was tortured & beheaded.  The rest of the details are fuzzy.  Fortunately, the crusaders were almost sure about the Palestine thing & they were able to surmise he was martyred by his fellow Palestinians.  & why would they do this horrible thing, well, because he was christian (why else).  That was all they needed really, to adopt George as their own, making him the patron saint of knights, crusaders, archers, & horsemen.  In a move I refuse to believe is a coincidence, he is also invoked against herpes, syphilis & leprosy.  

On a lighter note, he is also the patron saint of the Boy Scouts (must be that chivalry thing, because it sure wasn't "Be Prepared" or we would not be looking at herpes & syphilis as well), the Romanian Army (he is right there in their coat of arms, communism be damned), shepherds & sheep (which seems almost a conflict of interest but maybe that's just me) & irony of ironies:  Palestine.  I wonder if they know.

It's Earth Day....again

So another Earth Day is here.  Much harder to miss this time around.  I don't know about where you live but where I live there are a number of events planned. My favorites are the anti-Earth Day rallies.

For myself, I plan to spend Earth Day at the Herbarium where I have been slowly working my way through an out-of-date filing system (think index cards), cross-referencing specimens & updating everything in a new computer database.  This has less to do with Earth Day then it does with Thursday.  This is what I do most Thursdays.

In previous posts, I have been quick to point out the corporate sponsors, so this time I thought I would let you in on who is sponsoring the Earth Day network, some of them might surprise you.  NASA caught me by surprise, but they really should not have.  When I think about NASA I usually think about giant explosions needed to lift massive machinery & personnel out beyond, well, the earth.  It is easy to forget that the earth is a planet & there are a lot of other planets.  Some of them might even have clues about how to make things better here.

Scientists often get bad press from both sides of any issues:  they love & want to help animals, they want to torture animals & study the impact; they spend money in pursuit of information that will be years & years before it is useful, they did not do the kind of research we really could have used like whatever it would have taken to be on the way to curing cancer (because if they did,  we would not still have cancer, right?); they live in a rose-colored never-never-land that is completely out of touch with how real people live, they are completely corrupt & taking advantage of guileless taxpayers.  Scientists get it coming & going.  Lately they get it from swathes of people who really like their lives just as they are, despite their bitching to the contrary, & don't want to make any changes that might not make them happy.

I do not remember when exactly, it was sometime between 1998 & 2008, if that helps, but there was some discussion among physicists about how to better acquaint the average person with what it is exactly a physicist does.  A was one of the people talking about it & he thought that rather than spending actual cash dollars on a  "physics is good & good for you" type ad campaign, they should take their promotions budget & make SchoolHouse Rock style vignettes, although to be fair I do not think he used the word "vignettes".  This was actually a compromise idea from his original "Let's call NOVA"  which was itself a scale back from "how can a room with this many jews not have a single person who knows Steven Speilberg"?

I do not know what the physicists did with their promotions budget in the end.  I can tell you they did not hire private yachts for illegal fishing trips or host bondage parties.  I doubt they even went anywhere special to have their meeting; even when they do, they tend to miss the point of the locale.  Physicists like to tell stories about how the last time they met in Las Vegas, the hookers went on vacation.  & A's former roommate, also a physicist, once  missed his flight to a national meeting, caught another routing through a different airport &  knowing he had a tight connection was very impatiently waiting for the airline staff to work their way to him & let him know what gate, etc. when he decided instead to follow all the guys with pocket protectors.  Guess who made his flight, no problem.

Maybe some one did call NOVA.  There certainly has been an adjustment to the science:engineering ratio (all to the good from my point of view) in more recent programming.  How much good it might do, though....  Earlier this month a program about plants which included a UF researcher & was filmed, at least in part, in the Herbarium (I recognized the cabinets) did not help the Botany Department one iota.  That is because there no longer was a stand-alone Botany Department at UF; it had already been folded into Zoology, among other cuts to earth education. 

Happy Earth Day.  & many more.

Baby. it's cold outside (not really)

As this posts, last call has been called for the Floral Sunny Lanes block swap & we are moving on to the last of the six month-3 block set:  Baby Snowballs.

You can find the directions here.  If you would like to swap, the best thing is to join the FaceBook Quilt Block Swap Group.  Like I said, this is the last of a set of three, but three more blocks will be posted around the time this block gets swapped.

Not a whole lot more to say about this, really.  Come on down & swap! You make five blocks, you get five back.  You have the option of including a 6th block that goes to the group member making a quilt for an organization in her neck of the woods.  Previous quilts have gone to Project Linus in PA & TX, Quilts of Valor, it's an eclectic mix.  The April blocks are intended for the Prudence Crandall Center in New Britain, CT.  These are going to a group in Port Ste. Lucie, Fladidah who make quilts for brand new people.  You know, babies.