Transplanting a Seattleite

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Today's activities include: groceries by car, up too early, Applebee's
A. woke up before 7 a.m. I really hate when that happens. We had to go downstairs, because she was crawling and banging on the window and making trouble and we didn't want to wake up T. We went grocery shopping at 8 a.m., when Roche Bros. opened. We took the car, because I wanted to get a whole bunch of stuff and didn't think I could get it on either bike. Also, up before 7 a.m. on a Sunday is just demoralizing.

I took her for a walk in the stroller later and she took an hour nap, and then I took an hour or so nap with her later in the afternoon. We all went to dinner at Applebee's later on, which went a whole lot better than I expected it to.

Not a whole lot of excitement, otherwise. T. was reasonable on the horse, apparently.

remember crazy guy shot the cyclist?
http://www.thesunnews.com/news/local/story/1176408.html

Backstory: firefighter (not on the job) shoots at dad of a family out riding bicycles. The firefighter thought that the dad was endangering the son's life by his route choice. Firefighter shot at dad as dad was walking away; bullet hit helmet but did not hit dad's head.

Ex-firefighter has pled guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and is now Doing Time.

So the next time you're thinking, There Ain't No Justice, well, just this once, maybe there was a little.

ETA:

Slightly better coverage. 120 days. Grand jury wouldn't indict on attempted murder because it was impulsive.

http://www.examiner.com/x-7204-Tulsa-Alternative-Transportation-Examiner~y2009m11d19-Former-North-Carolina-fireman-pleads-guilty-to-shooting-at-cyclist

ETAYA:

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20091119/NEWS01/91119061

That's much better coverage. Guy was out in 2 days on $200K bond, so maybe there isn't even a little justice. Here's hoping he stays unemployed a long, long time -- he was fired about 2 weeks after the incident.

Today's activities include: Julie's for lunch, Children's Museum
I took A. in the stroller down to Starbucks for coffee (for me, not here! Geez. I'm not that slacker a parent.) and then to get a few things at Roche Bros. We went home, and she fell asleep on the way so we hung out in the driveway. I put blankets over the stroller to keep the wind off, and read a little bit.

Later, A. and I went to Julie's Place for lunch. They are now open in their expanded place, but their food remains the same tasty, simple and inexpensive fare it has been all along. Best of all, NOT crazy portions.

We took the Townie, and went from there to the Children's Museum, where we played on the train a little, and then of course the water table.

R. put her down for her second nap, where she still is, but not for long.

Yesterday R. and I went to Koreana's for lunch. We got bento boxes with short ribs in one and bulgogi in the other, and a little sushi on the side. I missed my afternoon walk with M., which is sad, but lunch in Boston does not happen very often these days. R. took T. in to school in the Fit because it was pouring, but it cleared up by the afternoon so I got him on the bike. The Fit had a nail in a tire; the lovely mechanics a block or so away fixed it right up for us. No damage had occurred to the rim from driving on it somewhat flat.

nashua derailment of unit coal trains
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/News/440096-196/critic-says-poor-rail-line-maintenance-is.html

I don't think I blogged about this earlier, even tho R. and I have been discussing it as he turns up articles about it. I commented to him right at the beginning, look at the color of the rails! And besides, it's probably owned by Pan Am. Sure enough, _owned by Pan Am_, and under a slow order of _10 mph_!

It'll take ten or twenty more years than it should to get this thing upgraded, largely because Pan Am is a recalcitrant bunch that doesn't play well with state governments.

atlantic article about "orchid gene"
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene

Basically, those gene combos that lead to problems (depression, ADHD, blah, blah, bleeping, blah) in kids and adults are _really_ modulated by raising.

It's an interesting article, and I would urge anyone reading it to _finish_ it, particularly the stuff at the end about Dunbar number, because it is at that point that they quit being so focused on the mum-kid dyad, and start looking at how that relationship is modulated by the larger group, that larger group's ranking within the whole society, and the size of those groups. There's a weird argument for suburbia buried somewhere in there, but why get into it. I mean, really.

In any event, I, personally am utterly riveted because I think this is the moment where Belsky's revived career is about to jump something-or-other again. Previously, Belsky shot himself in the foot by switching from a pro-care-by-others message to an anti-care-by-not-the-mother message. That is, he went from telling everyone it was okay to put the babies in group care from birth to saying things like, more than 20 hours a week with anyone other than the mother (including fathers, grandma, etc.) for the first year of life was trouble, and group care was awful. (These are oversimplifications. But not by a lot.)

It looks like this time, he's going to take the guilt-release-valve of bad-genes, and turn it instead into something like this: you had a kid who could have been a superstar, but because you are a crap parent, your kid will be in and out of very bad places, instead. (Never mind that the parents had the same set of genes, odds on, and parenting advice when they were kids was really creepy in the US.) This should do wonders for his career.

Today's activities include: walk, walk, walk, walk, bike, sleep
I visited my friend A. today and we walked to Camp Tevya and then up and down that section of rail trail. Very wonderful conversation. Then back home, to walk around the neighborhood with M. Then pick up T. and walk around the school. Then come home and walk around the neighborhood. Then bike to get groceries.

Then sleep. Yikes.

Still More Sanity About Cancer
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/health/17cancer.html

Gina Kolata continues to cover the whole cancer screening thing with great skill. In this outing, she covers the latest recommendation out of the US Preventive Services Task Force, which is a reversal of their recommendation in 2002 for women in their 40s to get mammograms every two years. The new recommendation is to start at 50.

This is really great, and here's why: it's an example of how we can save money AND treat people better. The risks associated with screening are substantial (starting with the risks of unnecessary treatment, continuing through the added doses of radiation, and then sliding through all the anxiety from there) and the benefits so tiny as to be difficult to measure. If you know someone whose cancer was detected and treated early as a result of a mammogram screening, the odds are fantastically good that that treatment wasn't necessary.

Predictably, people who benefit from mammograms (that is, the people who make money off of them) aren't happy about this and are sticking with the old recommendations.

Great quotes:

From Dr. Berg, the chairman when they issued the recommendation to do screenings starting at 40:

"Different women will weigh the harms and benefits differently, Dr. Berg noted, but added that even for women 50 and older, “it would be perfectly rational for a woman to decide she didn’t want to do it.”"

From a statistician who worked on the data recently:

"Of course, Dr. Berry noted, if the new guidelines are followed, billions of dollars will be saved. “But the money was buying something of net negative value,” he said. “This decision is a no-brainer. The economy benefits, but women are the major beneficiaries.”"

This is going to be a tough sell. No one wants to think they had a double mastectomy for no damn good reason. That said, the numbers involved do not apply to women who have BRCA1 or 2.

Today's activities include: children's museum FAIL, groceries, nanowrimo
Wait, haven't I had this day already?

The Children's Museum is closed on Monday, so I took A. on the bike to the grocery store instead. I got time to write for the first time in about four days, once B. had arrived and T. was in school. I was a little sad, because T. was in school and then B. picked him up and I didn't go get him until after I got out of book group. This was nice, in that I got to attend book group for the first time without a child since A. was born. It was a downer, in that I didn't see T. for almost the entire day, and didn't see a lot of him on Sunday because he did a lot with R. instead. Hopefully, we'll get to go do fun stuff on the bike tomorrow.

I also call Cedarworks to ask for the part that wasn't shipped correctly for the playset. Hopefully that will arrive soon. I still need to figure out whether I'm going to cancel the stroller order and order something elsewhere or what. Maybe tomorrow.

And I suspect no one has gotten the mail yet today.

_The Summer Book_, Tove Jansson
Brookline Public Library adult book group selection for November; meeting is tomorrow/Monday and _I actually finished the book_! Shocking.

What's even more impressive: I really liked it. It was short -- well under 200 pages. Sophie (6) and her grandmother are the two protagonists. Grandmother's son and Sophie's father is in the background throughout, and a few other characters make occasional appearances. A series of vignettes, almost short stories, spread from April through August on the small islands of East Nyland, which is in Finland, but the characters all speak Swedish (this is in translation). There is a tremendous amount of detail about the little critters, plants, weather, boats, house and cottage, etc. Grandmother isn't well. Sophie's mother died at some point before the start of the book (as did grandfather, but the implication is that was probably before Sophie was born). Sophie's mother's death is handled even more elliptically than Bambi's mother's death: Sophie has a bed to herself because her mother died, which tells us that this family, like Swedish families to this day, enjoyed some form of a family bed.

Grandma, in her younger days, lobbied hard for children like her (girls) to be able to be Scouts, but didn't have her child(ren) be Scouts. One of the many entertaining episodes is when Sophie sleeps out for part of the night in a tent her Papa put out in case they had too many visitors and he couldn't stand it any more. When Sophie comes in for the rest of the night and chats with grandma, grandma is finally able to remember some details from her own sleeping-in-tents days, which she had been sad to lose in her memory.

Sophie's and grandmother's arguments are great: they're believable, rather than cute, and they provide a lot of suspense. What if something happened to one of them while they weren't getting along? And that's always a real chance, given grandma's frailty and the potential for falls, drowning and sudden storms. Sophie is always aware of death: she comes to hate small creatures because they die so easily, and when grandma helps her build a model Venice in the swamp and a storm wipes out a family there, Sophie responds as if her mother has died all over again.

I was reminded of Italo Calvino's _Invisible Cities_, in the structure of the book, and some aspects of the prose. But where Calvino gets a big bang out of a combination of a lot of abstraction with few well-placed details, Jansson's book is the inverse: a wealth of detail, and the odd juxtaposed abstraction. I sure liked _Invisible Cities_ when I was in college, even tho it hasn't completely stood up over the succeeding years. I suspect I'll just like Jansson more and more over time.

yeah, don't read this if you're already having a bad day
Don't say I didn't warn you.

R. and I were discussing the Fort Hood shootings. I was annoyed that commentators (and not just right wing ones, either) were pushing to label this "terrorism", when it seemed pretty obvious even before details came out that this was a disgruntled employee type incident, in which some guy who has trouble getting along with others/in life finally spews rage in the form of bullets around anyone who had the misfortune to be near him when he went off. Regrettable, and sometimes preventable, but not terrorism.

I was also annoyed because commentators were making out like this was somehow scary. Certainly, if you were there, but it's not like this doesn't happen a lot, and it isn't like this kind of thing is particularly new. He tossed off the UT sniper, who I had never heard of, so off I went to read about Mr. Whitman and his many victims. It would be _really_ easy to speculate based on some details that other people were maybe contributors to Whitman's Big Pool of Rage (lots of Catholics and Boy Scouts, in one case, a two-fer in the form of a Boy Scout Leader who went to seminary and remained a close friend. Maybe that should be "friend"?). Of course, they might not have been. From there,
it was one jump to the Bath School Massacre (holy moly, I'd never heard of that one) and then, predictably, wikipedia has a summary page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school-related_attacks

It goes way back (first one is Lenape warriors attacking colonials in 1764), but #5 really caught my eye. I would bet dollars to donuts I'm related to that guy. Here's a little contemporary coverage of what happened to him:

http://manitobia.ca/cocoon/launch/en/newspapers/TMT/1903/01/20/7/Ar00703.xml/Olive?query=henry

*sigh*

I didn't really _need_ a reminder that it's important to not get too crazy mad, but I suppose this qualifies as yet another one.

Today's activities include: grandma visit, varicella shots, playset assembly
C. arrived last night after T. (and A. and I, for that matter) had all gone to bed. And yet, before 11 p.m. T. got to see her in the morning before school. The rest of us hung out together. C., A. and I went to the Children's Museum down the road apiece. C. has been storing her bike here, so we rode our bikes over. We had an uneventful trip out, but on the way back, C. had to brake sharply when attempting to cross at the unpleasant intersection of Prospect and whatever that is. Her brakes were in the wrong spot and she was trying to signal and she went over. I don't think I have ever seen as perfect a fall in my entire life. I'm pretty sure K., my martial arts instructor, would have been impressed as well. Completely unhurt, other than a scuff on her shin. Her face didn't even get close to the ground.

I felt _horrible_ that that happened to her on an outing I arranged, but she was very kind about it.

We continued home and arrived safely. R. adjusted her handlebars and where the brakes were so there will not be a repeat of this incident.

The playset arrived earlier in the week, but we only recently got the dining room table moved out of the dining room and into the other half of the living room. Today, I laid out the alphabet/number/shapes playmat, and R. started assembling the playset while the rest of us went to the Children's Museum. We helped out intermittently upon our return, taking a break for an early lunch (takeout from Benjarong). C. left just before I went to get T. on the bike, and while at the preschool, I remembered I should have picked him up in the van while on the way to the doctors to go be the last shot appointment of the day for A., T. and I. Oh, well. I called to ask R. to get A. packed up and ready to go, and off we went. T. needed one for preschool, and I had tested no immunity a while back, so I figured we should all just get the shot at the same time, thus avoiding the so-small-it-might-be-more-theoretical-than-real risk of one of us picking up a case from T.'s response to the shot.

horrifyingly bad coverage of the house health care bill
http://www.womensenews.org/story/commentary/091112/ageist-health-reforms-can-be-lethal

I've attempted twice to unsubscribe from Women's E-news, which I have received as e-mail for years, and generally been happy with as they cover women more than anyone else. They have always had a sickening tendency to believe whatever the hell the medical establishment in this country says, right down to negative commentary on breastfeeding and midwifery (altho more recently they have been improving).

But this was so bad I was shaking I was so mad. The idea that it is unfair to older women to pay more for health insurance, and that older women and younger women should be charged the same as that is more "fair" is just another transfer of wealth from younger people to older people. And it's not like we haven't already seen a shitload of that in our country.

She also mischaracterizes the expected savings in Medicare, in a way that makes her sound more like a Fox News pundit than a writer for Women's E-news. And then she has the gall to suggest that "hospice for all" would be a disaster. Well, it _would_ be for the hospital administrator who raised that prospect. For the rest of us? She thinks she can can predict your age based on how you wanted to be treated when you are elderly.

This is _exactly_ the kind of crap that causes women of a certain age to predict that, "oh, your biological clock will start ticking". Bullshit.

Both my attempt to unsub using the unsub e-mail on the e-mail, and the unsub e-mail on the website have failed. So I'm going to use what platform I have. Don't trust that woman. And question that source. It's so much more shocking when the sewage is being spewed by a source that was once worth patying attention to.

ETA: Would it be _so freaking hard_ to advocate a progressive income tax to pay for this program? There is already stuff in every bill to provide assistance in paying premiums to people who are poor, supposedly the category she is most worried about. Funding that assistance is a valid issue. Why transfer wealth from all the young women who are almost by definition poor? Why not pick on high income people specifically?

remember that stinky turd about oklahoma students?
Nate Silver followed up on it:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/real-oklahoma-students-ace-citizenship.html

Really cool stuff. Read the whole thing, it's totally worth it.

Today's activities include: children's museum FAIL, groceries, nanowrimo
I took A. to the Children's Museum, forgetting that they weren't opening to the public until 11:30 a.m. this morning. D'oh. A. was mad, so we stuck around and she played in the fenced front yard for a while.

B. tried to take her to music class at 10:30. That too failed, because A. fell asleep in the car and then stayed asleep for two and a half hours. Double d'oh. They went to lunch afterwards.

I picked up groceries at Roche Bros on the bike by myself (much easier that way), and then later went to Idylwilde with T. to get some other things. So that was three trips on two bikes, one bike in two configurations (with and without trailabike), ignoring the fourth trip to pick T. up at the school. Once again with my chorus of I'm-so-tired-and-eating-everything-in-sight. Good thing I keep buying more groceries.

Nanowrimo continues apace. I failed to write yesterday, because T. wasn't in school, so I had A. while T. hung out with B. I doubled dipped, today, so I am once again caught up, for suitably silly definitions of caught up. In any event, I just broke 40K words. It is very, very stream of consciousness.

In other excitement, the postal carrier delivered a box requiring a signature. Yes, the box from A'dam containing two voetenzak (probably twee voetenzaken, but don't hold me to that). I Wanted Them and I Got Them. What does this mean? I now have the equivalent of a stroller muff for each of the Bobikes fore and aft on the Townie. Hopefully, pictures will one day occur.

_Kris Longknife: Undaunted_, Mike Shepherd (kindle)
I am not at all certain which number this is in the series. Maybe 7?

This is a really odd series, and it isn't getting any less odd as it goes along. The likelihood of it ending prior to the author's death seems to also be declining as major new story arcs keep getting added. I would say you wouldn't be able to make sense of this starting in the middle, except for that fact that the Human-Iteeche war that is several decades in the past of this series was, if I correctly understand things, covered in another series written by the author under another name, Mike Moscoe. I haven't read those books, so, *shrug* who knows what you really need to make sense of a trashy novel anyway?

In this outing: Kris is scouting outside of the territory of whatever they're calling what her Grampa Ray is King of. She has aboard The Wasp scientists, a judge, her bodyguard, a bunch of marines, her assistant Abby, Abby's young relation and who could forget, a Really Smart Computer named Nelly. While hopping through wormholes that they can detect now but other people can't, they run across a Peterwald (long standing feud between the Longknifes and the Peterwalds, and the Peterwald territory is experiencing a bloody not-quite-civil war of its own) shooting (unsuccessfully) at an Iteeche (opposing side in a war decades ago). The Peterwald may be missing the Iteeche, but it's hitting The Wasp and upsetting Nelly who has been showing signs of Real Sentience. Nelly is worried about that young relation of Abby's.

Anyway. Long, long story, basically, the Iteeches want to talk, but only to Grampa Ray (negotiator in the peace). Kris gets to figure out how to get a delegation of Iteeches led by one she calls Ron back to Ray without starting a war. She succeeds, message is delivered, and smacks of a Jack Campbell Lost Fleet device: unknowns are disappearing Iteeche scout ships. Ray isn't particularly interested, and instead sends Kris and The Wasp with the Iteeches to Planet Texas (not called that; called Texarkana) to figure out a way to solve a long-standing dispute between the City Folk and the Ranchers. She does, also getting bombed along the way (not her fault this time), and after Fixing the Planet, is not told not to come back! Wow! That's a first!

Actually, the body count in this book is unusually low for a Kris Longknife novel.

Kris' next assignment is to go out and try to deal with all the people bleeding out of Peterwald space in an effort to escape the chaos, and keep the pirate activity down and limit the spread of colonies outside the defined area so they won't infringe on, say, Iteeche space, and restart that war. Kris' recognizes the importance of this assignment, but is starting to ask a _lot_ of questions about just why she's always being parked out in the back of beyond and only brought in to fix major problems. She engages in a spot of treason before tackling the next assignment; she's also fuming about Ray and Trouble's failure to step up and help out the Iteeche. Ron, by contrast, does not seem so perturbed.

Will I read more? With gusto! Next one is due out late in 2010.

Today's activities include: bank, children's museum, consignment shop
I love that consignment store.

Veteran's Day means no school, so B. had T., and I had A. all day. We started by going to the Children's Museum, this time _with_ a change of clothes so when she (predictably) got soaked at the water table (those aprons are waaaay too big for her), I could change her and we could see the rest of the place. We rode the bike instead of taking the stroller this time; much easier. I am lazy.

After we got back, we took the van part way to Concord to go to the bank, but she fell asleep on the way so I turned around and we hung out until she woke up and then we went back. When I got there, I thought, crap, it's Veteran's Day, but they were open so that worked out anyway.

After lunch, I called the consignment shop to find out if the knock-off wooden balance bike had a price yet. It did, so A. and I took the bike (these were all on the Townie) to West Acton to get the other bike. While we were there, we also bought T. a puzzle, A. two more pairs of shoes (too big for her, but very cute), and a Backyardigans book. Which reminds me: I want to get the Noisy Jungle Babies books for A. They have them at the Children's Museum and A. seems to like them. We got everything home, without losing so much as a binky. You may not be impressed, but I am.

No writing today, but I read a few highly interrupted pages of _Getting There_, which isn't much as history, but is moderately entertaining. It's yet another example of not-nearly-enough-coverage of how the government in the US took over the operation of the railroads during US involvement of WWI.

Speaking of transport and government policy, Oberstar voted for the Stupak amendment on the House's version of the health care bill. I'm not a single issue voter, except when I am, and right at the moment, I do not care that Oberstar helped get bike paths and so forth money from the gas tax pot o' gold. I'm just feeling very cranky that he voted for the Stupak amendment.

again with the tired
Picked T. up at the school, went home, got my wallet, took T. to Roche Bros. Came back home, unloaded the groceries. Took T. to the playground where he refused to get off the bike (all of this by bicycle). Continued to the consignment shop, where they were processing a balance bike they'd just gotten in. Yum. Waiting to hear what the price is. Continued to Idylwilde, which was closed. Continued past Idylwilde, at which point T. started leaning forward and trying to extract a diaper from the panniers that are attached to the rear rack. Told T. we'll change him at Papa's work. Get to Papa's work, call papa, papa takes T. in for a diaper change. Ride the bike home with T.

Also, really hungry. These are all short rides. I do not understand.

a bit more about nanowrimo
I hit this point today where I realized, I really want to write something seriously long form about policy and politics. Like, take my 2 page personal platform, completely rework it to reflect my current thinking, and then run it out to about 2000 pages. Or so.

I had so many ideas bouncing around in my head, I thought I'd post a brief summary as a private post on LJ. Ouch. It is not brief. :l

Today's activities include: more bicycling, writing, groceries, cooking
I made a very tasty stir fry today and got the fried tofu almost exactly right. We have a wok ring. I should probably get a wok. I don't think I want to argue with R.'s rolled steel wok; he'll probably decide I destroyed the seasoning on it or something.

I picked T. up at the school, and then later I took him to Idylwilde. Where it turns out they stock Stonyfield Farms Frozen Yogurt Gotta Have Vanilla. Previously, we had to go to the Groton Shaw's to get that, since Roche Bros. didn't carry it, and we hadn't found it at either the Acton or the Littleton Donelan's either. This is extremely exciting. As, of course, is all the wonderful produce at Idylwilde, like lacinata kale, which I've now forgotten to buy twice.

I'm up to 30083 over on the not really a novel memoir that I'm doing for NaNoWriMo.

Best of all, T. and I finally got to _go inside_ at the model railroading center. The hours are interesting: evenings MWF and then all day Saturday. We headed out on the bike to get there around 7. T. lasted about ten minutes, but it was an extremely on task 10 minutes of him pushing the button to make the biggest gauge train go around and watching it go, and occasionally trying out the other buttons to do the other gauges. The guy running the place was very, very sweet. If you have a yen for the model railroads (or not so model railroads -- they have videos), I highly recommend a visit. I'm very tempted to go back and check the stock out. He carries used stuff you can't buy new anymore.

Yeah, okay, I'm going to keep resisting that temptation.

more NYT rail coverage: incrementalism vs. new right of way
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/11/06/06greenwire-stimulus-sparks-scuffle-among-high-speed-rail-16795.html

It looks like the incrementalists are attempting to freeze the high speed dedicated right-of-way new technology crowd out before the debate gets underway. The incrementalists are (probably rightly) concerned that if the rail community does not present a united front, other modes and rail skeptics in general will leap on the disunification as an excuse to not put any money into anything rail related. The incrementalists are accustomed to making do with dribs and drabs; they are more dedicated to not losing what they have than they are worried about failing to get everything they could possibly get.

Nothing unreasonable going on here -- altho it would be nice if we could actually have the France/Japan vs. Germany argument in a less dilute form. Both approaches can (and have) worked, altho if you genuinely want to take mode share away from airlines, dedicated works better than incrementalist (because you get higher average speeds along with the likely higher max speed). Either approach will take mode share away from asphalt/single passenger car, thus improving things from a cost and/or climate perspective.