The Wild Winds of Fortune

Few people participated in the poll, but those who did said they wanted to see a picture of the corset.  This is not a good picture of me, although it does show the corset well.

The corset is fun: it makes me feel very Belle Watling-esque.  I’m not sure where I’ll wear it, though.

Cut for bandwidth.

In 28 years of driving, I have had three tickets: one for hitting an [illegally] parked car*, and two for rolling stop signs.  I have never gotten a speeding ticket from either Highway Patrol or local cops.

Until tonight.

Coming off a hill heading south into Redding, California, I was tagged doing 86 in a 65 mph zone. Considering I was actually doing ninety higher up, it was a fair cop.

Damn.  That’s over $200 down the drain.

On the other hand, 28 years without a speeding ticket is not too shabby.


*My explanation to the judge that my car had slid on gravel, and that had the other car not been illegally parked to begin with I wouldn’t have hit it, totally failed to fly.

I accompanied the Resident Shrink from the Bay Area to Oregon this weekend, so she could attend a memorial service for a friend.  We drove over to the Central Valley and up, rather than the longer, more scenic, coast route.

This time of year in this part of California, the hills are golden brown.  A little rain has fallen, meaning the hills are not quite so dry, but they are not yet the verdant shade of green they get later in the season.

We went through Vacaville.  Vacaville is not the most liberal place in the world; when people talk about how liberal California is, they are not talking about Vacaville (or much of the Central Valley, either). 

Coming into town on I-580, we saw a single word burned into the golden grass on a hillside:

OCCUPY

Even in the most unlikely places, you can find harbingers of unrest.

Oregon in the fall is almost inexpressibly beautiful. 

It can be difficult sometimes to find real, honest-to-goodness facts on the Internet.* Here are a couple of places I like:

First and foremost: Politifact.com, and Factcheck.org.  These two important sources are decidedly non-partisan, taking on statements from all parts of the political spectrum.  They usually agree, but not always, showing that no matter how thorough you are, factuality is a matter of analysis, and so it is important to read the full report on any statement.

For the more outlandish claims that often circulate in email and on Facebook: snopes.com, specifically the political pages.  The most recent issue I used Snopes for was the “Congressional Reform Act of 2011.”

For number crunching and various other analysis Nate Silver’s Five-thirty-eight blog at the New York Times is usually trustworthy.

Are there any places you go to check facts?

*There is a reason teachers tell their students they can’t use Wikipedia for research papers.

I went on vacation yesterday.  I stupidly left my prescription meds on the dining room table.  Oops.

The meds cost me $10 with insurance at Walgreen’s.
An online pharmacy sells a thirty-day supply of the same meds for $37.
When I called Walgreen’s to replace them, they quoted me a “cash price” of over $500 for the same thirty-day supply of meds.  A three-day supply was $59.

What the hell?

I ended up going to Target and getting two days worth of meds for $22.  That is more than half what the online pharmacy charges for a thirty day supply.

I don’t know about you, but I see something very wrong with this picture.

ETA, the Basque terrorist organization fighting for an independent Basque state, has declared a cease-fire.

This has happened before, though.  I am not holding my breath to see if this one holds.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
 Henry David Thoreau.

 It is October.  Correction: October is over halfway gone.

October is usually a very good month.  For some reason this October is different.  The weather has been good, the sky that intense blue it becomes in Northern California between Labor Day and the first serious rain.  We have gotten rain, but not a lot.  

The days are shorter, and for the first time in forever I find this disquieting rather than comforting.  The darkness does not bother me; the increasing sense of the passage of time does.

More and more people are dying from natural causes who are my age, or only a little bit older.  Steve Jobs was the same age as my older sister — and younger than my eldest sister and my older brother. Yes, he died too young, but still…

When you spend years doing what I have the last two decades of my life, the metaphorical songs you sing are quiet ones: lullabies and campfire ballads, songs to lend strength to legs too wobbly to walk, to help minds exploring new horizons, and comfort hearts learning to heal from breaking.  Songs of love and encouragement, songs of lessons to be learned and fears to be faced, until the time when your voice ceases and those to whom you sing pick up their own song.

I have always encouraged my sons to have their own voices.  I have never been under any illusion that I am anything more than a steward, raising them to be unique and valuable people.  Perhaps as a result, I have three sons who are as different from each other as they are from me.  I am, I think with some justification, proud of this and of them.

But the songs, my songs,are becoming fainter and fainter.  I do not know where new ones will come from, what they will sound like.  I am not alone in this, many other mothers face this every year.  Given the economy, many other women and men are as well:  careers they held for years go away, and they are faced with people telling them they are too old to adapt.*

Had I not made the choices I did, to stay at home rather than continuing to work, I would not be facing this dilemma now.  I know that the circumstances of my family made staying home the best thing for everyone, but I still sometimes wonder “What if?”**

I feel like I am whining.  There are so many people who have it so much worse than I.  There are many families which would, for whatever reason, be better off with a stay at home parent, but where economic necessity forecloses that option.  There are many women who would love to stay home with their kids who can’t because they need a job to feed and house themselves and their families.  I was lucky enough to have a husband who is well-employed and where doing the best thing for all of us was a viable alternative.

Still….

I am having a hard time finding my new voice.  It scares me that I might end up being one of those people Thoreau wrote about.


* I was in a workshop for “older workers seeking employment.”  The teacher said “In [Silicon] Valley, if you are over thirty-five, you belong in this class.”

** I have read posts online by women who claim that any woman who does not continue to work after her children is born is irresponsible.  I generally think this is just another volley in the mommy wars, and usually have no truck with it.  Every family’s situation is unique to that family (and not, as Tolstoy wrote, merely unhappy ones).  Very occasionally, though, I wonder if they might have a point.

Depending upon who you look at, and what years they give, I’m a Baby Boomer.  I never really felt like a boomer, though, and according to at least one authority I qualify as a Gen-Xer.

In any case, I thought this piece (“Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It”) was sad, true, and very funny.

The comments are well worth reading, too, if for no other reason than seeing the snippy Gen-Yers show up.  Personal favorite: “Do you know where to find some Ecstasy and a reliable babysitter?”

Edited to add: the comments have turned political, predictable, and boring.  Too bad.

Before the date changes, I just want to observe that today is the 22d anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. 

I was a 3L at Stanford.  My first words to the Rocket Scientist when he got home were not “Thank God you’re okay!” but “We are moving the hell out of this fucking state.” 22 years later, we’re still here, even though we did take a year off to live in Northern Virginia.

Quite frankly, I can live quite well without experiencing another of that magnitude, although I know given the way that geology runs around here that’s not realistic. I’m just waiting for the Hayward fault to slip any day now.  I sincerely hope it waits until the state gets the seismically upgraded new Bay Bridge completed.