Two nights running I've been down at the Albany Beach watching the sunset, early, around 5pm. The sun has been going down right under the Golden Gate Bridge. Last night was better, it was crystal clear, but tonight I got to take a good walk all the way around the bulb, at low tide, no less. I really should do that more often.
The Albany Bulb was a landfill, a dump for construction debris, until 1984 when the dump shut down. During the 1990's it was filled with homeless encampments, which the city of Albany cleaned out in 1999, a big act for a small city and one that caused a certain amount of controversy. But what it left was this amazing slice of anarchy right across the water from San Francisco. It's covered with whatever plants have blown in on the wind, anarchic driftwood art, people walking their dogs, random bits of rebar and concrete sticking out of the anise and broom.
And it's right down the street. And it has the most amazing sunsets. And it's only going to get more popular, so I really should enjoy it now, right? I wonder if I can get Frank to ride down there on his new bike tomorrow night?
In other news, my buddy Scott pointed out that the problem with the mandolin is only a matter of screws and wood. I can do screws and wood. He also gave me some hints as to what was inside the structure of the thing, that there is usually a pine block at the base ready to receive screws and various drilling activities, that was very helpful. So I replaced the puny 1/4" screws with some 3/4" ones, since my investigations showed the pine block was at least half and inch deep. Now it's playable again, yay! We'll see if that holds it, anyway. How long do you think it'll take my two jigs to get together and make a reel?
Screwing around with the new camera last night, the view from our bedroom window, curious to see how this'll look on Vox.
Which one of the long ones is better?
Which of these is the saddest thing (not a red-letter day today):
A kid with a cold?
A dog doesn't want to go for a walk?
A new computer that won't boot?
I knew that was a slippery slope! One day it's flagrantly ignoring the instructions on the ibuprofen bottle and taking THREE instead of two, "Rules are for other people," "I'm in a hurry so I can use the express aisle even though I have sixteen items," "My brother knows somebody who is handicapped so I should be able to park there." The next day it's...
My back (which is better now, thank you), was keeping me from sleeping, so I was getting pretty fried. Taking Anne and Frank to Union Square for a holiday dinner was a decidedly mediocre night (avoid Puccini and Panetti unless you really loud restaurants with borderline ambience and bad, overpriced food), so I came home in a mood so black it made the cosmic background radiation look like a bright summer day. It was an hour before it was time to go to sleep, and I needed entertainment and succour.
Being a Good American, in a situation like that I turn to the Television, all hail Philo Farnsworth! But of course, there is Nothing On. We don't have cable, and even with the recent additional of all the additional extra hidden digital stations, TV programming most nights is enough to make you want to stick your fingers in a meat grinder.
But wait! There's a pile of nicely wrapped boxes under to that pine tree by the sofa. And I know what one of them is already, it's
My dad owns it, I put it on my list, he got if for me (I'd say "Thanks, Dad", but I really hope you don't read this because you're going to disown me after the next paragraph).
I had a need for some mindless television entertainment, mindless but above the "I'd rather spray Lysol in my eyes" level. I had a box of mindless television entertainment sitting under my right elbow. Christmas was still almost a week away, but what did that mean to me? I am now above all rules! Nietzsche's Übermensch is my role now, as I stride across the landscape of human interaction, boldly forging my own morality with every step, the only rules that constrain me are the ones I create myself!
Aaargh! What kind of monster have I become? I opened a Christmas present five days before Christmas! Mea culpa! Eli, Eli lama sabacthani?
But it was good. It was very good. The Atomic Brain, the scientist in the basement of the big house perfecting his technique for brain transplants, the crotchety rich old lady upstairs who wants a new, young body, and the three hot foreign maids provided by the international domestics agency who show up for "interviews."
As far as the title goes, they're using some definition of "classics" I haven't encountered elsewhere--they don't have Forbidden Planet or The Time Machine or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but they do have She-Gods of Shark Reef.
We'll see what tomorrow brings. I'll probably start eating human babies or something.
Don't get me wrong, I love ibuprofen. It's a good friend of mine. But for a while (like most of the last year) I was getting these brutal headaches on the weekends, and two ibu's wouldn't touch them. One day we were going someplace in the car and I was desperate, I got the pill bottle out of Anne's purse and downed two what-I-thought-were regular ibu's. Apparently they were some other brand where you only have to take one pill, so I'd just taken double the regular dose. And my formerly untouchable headache went away in short order.
Hmmm...
Lately, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with our $1,200 European Sleepworks mattress and after four hours my back feels like I've been picking radishes in the San Joaquin Valley, after eight hours I'm crippled for the rest of the day. This morning I was so messed up I was walking down the platform at BART and I swear to God it felt like my legs were two different lengths, like I was walking on a forty-five degree slope.
This afternoon after lunch the back pain was getting so distracting, I finally dug into my desk drawer and swallowed THREE ibuprofens. Guess what? My back doesn't hurt any more.
Now maybe it's not the ibu's, maybe it's this blessed magical Aeron chair (before which I genuflect every day), or maybe it's my natural superhuman recuperative powers (NOT!). But maybe three really does work better than two, maybe the fact that I'm sliding down to the bottom of the alcohol-consumption-by-weight chart the DMV sends every year applies to more than just booze? If it does, what kind of slippery slope will that lead down? Two cubes of sugar for a cup of tea instead of one? Do I get to drive twice as fast as everybody else on the highway? Do I get to have an extra wife?
A morally gravid issue here, I'm not sure I'm equipped to deal with this.
The trouble with vacations is that they're exhausting. Especially if you have kids. Even weekends can leave you feeling like you've been marching with the Confederate troops in 1864.
You have two floating holidays. You must use them by the end of the year or you will lose them. So I took a day off yesterday. Right in the middle of the week. The kid's at school. Told the wife that I'm not at home, not for anybody, not for anything.
Sleep in. Do some meditation. Spend an hour noodling around with Mozart on the piano (so much more fun in the morning when your soul is fresh and virginal than after work when you're beaten down and fried). Went for a hike in the Marin Headlands.
I've been hiking in the Headlands since I moved to The City sixteen
years ago and found out that the city bus #76 ran up there on Sundays. I've seen the hillsides progressively slide into the ocean, I've been going up there so long. For a boy from the arid high plains climate of Denver, they're really the cats pajamas for me. And just outside The City! I love being up there on the sunny summer days, and I love being up there in the rain and the fog and the mud. I love the newts and the hawks and the seagulls and the fog bells and the decaying forts from World War II when GIs would sit on those hills and smoke cigarettes and watch for the Japanese fleet steaming in to attack.
So yesterday, took a leisurely amble around the hills. Nothing too aerobic, no schedule, no time I needed to be anywhere. Took some pictures.
When I didn't feel like walking in the fog any more, I drove into Mill Valley and caught a matinee. Apocalypto. It solidly occupied my attention for two hours, which was all that I asked of it. Good for satisfying an escapist urge if you're anything but a South American native living in the jungle.
Topped it off with a fancy dinner, potato leek soup, gnocchi parmesan, mushroom meatloaf special, and a couple glasses of wine.
Well you how the day after vacation you feel like death and wish somebody would just shoot you? Well today I feel great. I'm going to have to do that more often. Thank god for mandatory PTO days.
Word of the Day. This just came through on a mailing list, I had no idea you could use that word that way:
> If someone can offer Jacqueline a ride from Boston to
> Trenton on Friday, or (even better), a ride from theJacqueline is a delightful traveling companion, and it would be a true
mitzvah to give her a ride in either direction. Wish I were near enough
to help.
I hope I get to do a mitzvah today.
In response to Nick's post about being boggled by our company benefits meeting yesterday, as well as some other stuff I've heard recently, I just have to put some of this in writing.
Kaiser rocks. Here's why:
- It's simple. You go in, you pay your fifteen bucks at the door, and you do your shit. That's it. They don't send you bills, the doctors don't send you bills, seedy clinics in Fruitvale don't send you bills, you never see a SINGLE thing from Kaiser having to do with money.
At our company healthcare meeting the other day, the Kaiser lady spent about ten minutes talking about Kaiser, and much of that was about how nice their current ad campaign is. Then the PPO lady spent the rest of the hour talking about "fifteen percent of your five hundred dollar out-of-pocket maximum for in-network physicians, but with out-of-network physicians there's a five thousand dollar cap under which you get reimbursed fifty percent after you've paid your deductible..." I'm sorry, but does anybody but the PPO lady enjoy worrying about that kind of crap, or even understand it? - It's organized. It's all under one roof. You don't have to schedule an appointment at some seedy clinic in Fruitvale to have blood drawn, and you go trekking all over Christendom to see the next doctor. "Hey, it says you're overdue for a tetanus shot, go downstairs and get one." "You can get your pills at the pharmacy down the hall when you're done here."
- Advice lines. I don't know about you, but I have never, ever gotten sick during regular business hours Monday through Friday. It's two a.m. and you have this horrible pain and you're running a fever. Are you going to pick up the phone and get kindly old Dr. Wilson out of bed? Ha! I'd bleed to death before doing that. But I would call the Kaiser advice nurse on their 1-800 number, I know I'm not getting her out of bed, it's her regular hours. The pediatrics advice line was just invaluable when we had a baby.
- Speaking of babies, if you're in the East Bay, they use Alta Bates for maternity care, birth and all that. Alta Bates is a Cadillac in the world of hospitals. I used to work in a half-dozen different hospitals back in college and I could not imagine a nicer one than Alta Bates .
- I heard it said yesterday that you have to be your own advocate with Kaiser. From what I can tell, that's not any more true with Kaiser than it is with anything else. I have yet to see a healthcare plan that includes a little old Jewish grandmother who comes to your house once a week to see if you're taking care of yourself, "How are you? Have you been eating enough? Did you eat those green vegetables I left you last week? You're looking a little peaked, why don't you lie down while I make you some soup."
That being said, Kaiser is the closest thing I've found to Mom. You go into the building, and you don't come out until you're better. You don't need to hire an administrative assistant to keep track of the details. - Select your own doctor? I don't understand why that's an issue. A doctor is a doctor, and if it's not a doctor, I personally don't consider myself qualified to judge ahead of time. I certainly don't feel the need to go through the phone book and "select my own physician." If I'm sick, I want somebody who's been to medical school to look at me, and I'm not going to schedule a round of interviews first. It's a bonus if they've been vetted at some level by a large organization. If you don't like one Kaiser doctor, just tell them and they'll give you another one.
- Out of area. Why are you freaking out about this one? If you fall into the Grand Canyon, you go to the ER in Arizona and Kaiser pays for it. When and if they can move you into a Kaiser hospital, they will, the same as an out-of-network program.
I've had mostly good experiences at Kaiser, and I've heard of some bad experiences, but I think that's true of any program. I'll tell you though, a couple of years back I had to spend six months on a PPO program, and by the end of the six months I had a stack of paperwork two feet high. I had bills from doctors that said "don't pay this (unless your provider doesn't pay it, that is, in which case you're responsible for it)", and I had bills from doctors that said "pay this immediately" and I had checks from doctors saying "somebody overpaid us, so here's some money back", you get bills from clinics, you get bills from the health insurance company, and statements from people, blah de blah de blah. I swear to god, six months after I left that program I got a check from the insurance company for, I kid you not, ONE DOLLAR AND FORTY-THREE CENTS because they paid some accountant to sit down and sift through the mound of paperwork and pretend to make enough sense of it to rectify it.
As an engineer, Kaiser is in my mind just obviously so much simpler that I find the PPO model positively offensive.
Yes, there's supposed to be a really good meteor shower this weekend, the Leonids. Anne's going to be off hearing Chora Nova, her old choir, that she used to sing with as Cantible but then bifurcated when the Palo Alto half decided they didn't want to drive to Berkeley for rehearsals any more, but me and Frank will be camped out in the back yard. It's nice that's it's early in the evening, too bad that Leo is actually below the horizon for California.
A couple summers ago I got Anne out in the backyard to watch the Perseids, which are in August when it's a little warmer. We were just getting settled in on the grass when Frank appeared, silhouetted in the light coming out from the back door, and asked what the hell we were doing. I guess the sound of us hauling blankets out the back door was just unusual enough to wake him up. So the three of us cuddled up in the dark on the grass to watch the show, which was pretty meagre. Frank would occasionally call out "I saw one", but I'm not completely convinced he had any idea what we were looking for, he was only like three or four.
We're reading Little Town on the Prairie at bedtime. Apropos of Election Day, last night we read her account of the 4th of July celebration. This is in Desmet, South Dakota, circa 1881, a town which two years before had been nothing but a sweeping expanse of open prairie, and now was two or three blocks of hastily built wooden buildings with false fronts.
They had an impromptu 4th of July party in the town. I found this speech notable because, even though it was given by some hick yokel way out in the boonies and is far from being a complete and accurate picture of the whole story, it shows the kind of idealism and naive enthusiastic exuberance people used to be able to express for this country. All the way up through the 1970's, if you watch Schoolhouse Rock you'll see the same kind of thing. But now that words like "patriot" and "freedom" and "clean air" have been coopted by neoconservative doublespeak, and now that American foreign policy is as enlightened as that of 15th century Spain's, well, it's nice to be able to remember that we once were the land of ideals, and we once were a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world.
"Well, boys, " he said, "I'm not much good at public speaking, but today's the glorious Fourth. This is the day and date when our forefathers cut loose from the despots of Europe. There wasn't many Americans at that time, but they wouldn't stand for any monarch tyrannizing over the. ... A few barefoot Americans had to fight the whole of them and lick'em, and they did fight them and they did lick them. Yes sir! We licked the British in 1776 and we licked 'em again in 1812, and we backed all the monarchies of Europe out of Mexico and off this continent less than twenty years ago , and by glory! Yessir, by Old Glory righ there, waving over my head, any time the despots of Europe try to step on America's toes, we'll lick 'em again!"
"Hurray! Hurray!" everybody shouted. Laura and Carrie and Pa yelled, too, "Hurray! Huray!"
"Well, so here we are today," the man went on. "Every man Jack of us a free and independent citizen of God's country, the only country on earth where a man is free and independent. Today's the Fourth of July, when this whole thing was started, and it ought to have a bigger, better celebration than this. We can't do much this year. Most of us are out here trying to pull ourselves up by our own boot straps. By next year, likely some of us will be better off, and be able to chip in for a real big rousing celebration of Independence Day. Meantime, here we are. Its Fourth of July, and on ths day somebody's got to read the Delcaration of Independence. It loks like I'm elected, so hold your hats, boys; I'm going to read it."
Laura and Carrie knew the Declaration by heart, of course, but it gave them a solemn, glorious feeling to hear the words. They took hold of hands and stood listening in the solemnly listening crowd. The Stars and Stripes were fluttering bright against the thin, clear blue overhead, and their minds were saying the words before their ears heard them.
[The Declaration itself deserves to be considered every once in a while. You know, the stated reasons for rebelling against England in 1776 were less than what George W. Bush is trying to get away with today.]
"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Natures' God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happines..."
Then came the long and terrible list of the crimes of the King.
"He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States.
"He has obstructed the administration of Justice.
"He has made Judges dependent on his will alone.
"He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent higther swars of officers to harass our coasts, burnt our town, and destroyed the lives of our people...
"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, destruction and tyranny, already begun with circumnstances of cruelty and perficy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation...
"We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitutde of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare,
"That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved,; and that as Free and Indpendent States, they have full right to levy War...
"And of the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred honor."
No one cheered. It was more like a moment to say, "Amen." But no one quite knew what to do.
Then Pa began to sing All at once everyone was singing:
"My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing..."Long may our land be bright
With Freedom's holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God our King!"
