I'm not one to blog, but...

And now back to the good stuff...

2012-01-13T14:30:00.003-05:00

So in my previous post, I probably under-emphasized the fact that, after a long run of bad luck, my life has gotten much, much better in the past year and a half.

Here are the highlights:

In June 2010, we adopted a beautiful baby girl, who brings sunshine into our lives every single day.

Last May, just as we were starting the process to adopt again, I was surprised to discover that I was pregnant. We had a few scary moments along the way, but our son was born in November, healthy and perfect. He was very small (3 lbs) at birth, but he has been making good progress at catching up to the size he ought to be!

(That's a standard-hospital-issue pacifier in his mouth, by the way. I realize it looks a little strange because he's so tiny!)

I still love my job-- I get to work from home, I have a flexible schedule, and I really enjoy what I do.

Depression is a Lying Bastard

2012-01-13T14:30:00.000-05:00

So in case you haven't noticed, it's been awhile since I've written anything here.

I could say that life has been busy, but the truth is much more complicated than that. The reason why I stopped writing is because life got very, very hard for a long, long while. And then, even after things started to get better, I felt like somehow I wasn't entitled to just pick back up where I left off without giving some sort of explanation about where I'd been.

It feels dishonest to only write about good, happy, strong stuff, while sweeping sadness and weakness under the rug. And the honest truth is that I suffered from clinical depression for about a year. It makes me uncomfortable to admit to that, because I like to think of myself as a strong person, and there is absolutely nothing that feels weaker or more worthless than Depression.

In my head, I always think of it as Depression, because it really is totally different than the "I'm feeling depressed because I hate my job" sort of thing that everyone experiences. Depression means crying every single day. It means stumbling through life in a haze. It means not being able to focus on anything. Except, of course, when you're lying awake at night, tormented by horrible, evil thoughts.

I read something recently that challenged me to see my experience with Depression in a new way:

"When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker…but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand."

This post made me realize that damaged relationships are a sort of comorbidity of Depression and that I won't be fully recovered until I repair the friendships that got injured along the way. I'm making this my New Year's Resolution.

I also need to take a moment to say that I will forever be grateful to my wonderful husband, who never, ever stopped fighting for me:

"I celebrate the fact that you may not understand the battle, but you pick up the baton dropped by someone you love until they can carry it again."

I want to believe that my Depression was an isolated event, a single episode, which only happened because I was absolutely battered by wave after wave of horrible, traumatic bad luck. I hope that's the case, because it would make me relatively lucky. Depression is more typically an illness that comes and goes throughout a person's life. And maybe mine is only in remission, and I'll experience it again someday.

I worry about that, especially in the past few months. I've been afraid that I might suffer from Postpartum Depression, and I became even more apprehensive after having an emergency c-section and delivering a tiny preemie who had to spend a couple of weeks in the NICU. When you combine physical trauma, emotional stress, hormonal fluctuations, and sleep deprivation, it creates really fertile ground for Depression to take root.

Fortunately, after several weeks spent "waiting for the other shoe to drop" I'm finally starting to breathe a little easier. It looks like I'm going to be OK.

I'm a survivor.

A Love of Books

2008-11-20T17:30:00.001-05:00

As I've mentioned before, I participate in a tutoring program at my church. This is my 5th year with the program, and my 4th year with the same student. J---- and I were paired up together when she entered the program as a 3rd grader, and now she's in 6th grade. Time flies!

Her birthday was on Sunday, so Monday night after tutoring, I took her out for dessert to celebrate. And Teller's managed to out-dessert the ultimate dessert-atarian! She was overwhelmed by the richness of their Molten Chocolate Cake with raspberry sorbet.

It was a Good Time.

I like to give books to J---- as birthday and Christmas gifts. Mostly I've been giving her the books that were my favorites when I was her age. First, I gave her the Chronicles of Narnia books, and last year, I gave her Anne of Green Gables. So this year, Anne of Avonlea was one of the books that I bought for her.

I also found a recommended reading guide, which was really helpful. Since J---- has read all of the new Nancy Drew books from her school's library, the guide book suggested Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach. I also picked out a jewelry-making instruction book / kit that looked fun.

(And because I think that it's really important to teach kids about money, I also bought Complete Idiot's Guide to Money for Teens. But that's a tutoring/mentoring aid, not a birthday gift. J---- usually finishes most of her homework before tutoring, and she doesn't really need to work on basic math or reading skills, so we're going to devote part of each tutoring session to reading this book and talking about money.)

This year, I decided to include a letter with J----'s gift. I thought I ought to share it here, in honor of all of the people who gave me books when I was a kid:

Dear J----,

I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I buy books for you as birthday gifts and Christmas presents. The first reason is that I’m your tutor, so I think it’s good to give you gifts that are at least somewhat educational. But that’s kind of a boring reason.

The other reason is because I love books. I have always loved to read, and that’s something that I want to share with you too. (When you love something, like reading or skiing, of course you want to share those activities with people that you care about!) Many of the books that I have given to you are books that were given to me by people who loved me.

My step-mother gave me the Chronicles of Narnia books when I was a little girl, because she also loved those books when she was younger. I’ve read them dozens of times, and I still re-read them every couple of years, because C.S. Lewis’ stories are more than just fairy tales. He was a very wise man who wrote some important books for adults, but adults can also learn from the stories that he wrote for little kids.

I bought you the Anne of Green Gables books because my grandmother bought those books for me. My grandparents used to go to Prince Edward Island for their vacation every year, and my grandmother bought the books for me while she was there. My grandmother loved history, especially the history of the United States and Canada, and I remember her house was filled with books. One of her hobbies was studying genealogy, and she discovered that she had an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War.

So these books are a sort of heritage that I want to pass on to you. In addition to being great stories, they remind me of people who loved me. And I hope that when you think about these books, you’ll also remember that I gave them to you with lots of love!

Who lets these people write for the New York Times?!?

2008-11-16T10:30:00.001-05:00

How High Gas Prices Can Save the Car Industry offers this ridiculously naive proposal for bailing out the automotive industry:

"One way to do that would be to establish a price floor of $3.50 per gallon on gasoline. If the price drops below that, as it recently has, the federal government would impose a variable tax to bring the price up to $3.50. If the price goes above $3.50, then the tax disappears. The money raised by the variable tax would be used, at least in the short term, to provide loan guarantees to the auto companies. (To ease the burden of higher gasoline prices on low-income taxpayers, some of the revenue would be provided to them as tax credits or vouchers.)"

I don't need a degree in business or economics to know that this will never work. Gas stations compete on price. If you artificially prevent them from doing that, then why should they make any attempt to keep their prices down? If there's no competition from the gas stations across the street, then of course they're all going to set their prices at $3.50 a gallon, and the government will get nothing.

Let's assume for just a minute that the government has the authority to determine exactly how much profit that each company is permitted to take, as a percentage of their revenue. (We'll ignore for now all the reasons why this is a colossally bad idea.) Here's the problem: The government can't force a company to keep their overhead costs down. Only competition can do that.

And that's exactly what's happening to the automotive industry right now.

Big, Bad Bailouts Revisited

2008-11-14T20:15:00.002-05:00

Another article on the bailout debate:

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.

If ever the market has rendered a just verdict, it is the one rendered on G.M. and Chrysler. These companies are not innocent victims of this crisis. To read the expert literature on these companies is to read a long litany of miscalculation. Some experts mention the management blunders, some the union contracts and the legacy costs, some the years of poor car design and some the entrenched corporate cultures.

There seems to be no one who believes the companies are viable without radical change. A federal cash infusion will not infuse wisdom into management. It will not reduce labor costs. It will not attract talented new employees. As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic wittily put it, “Working for the Big Three magically combines vast corporate bureaucracy and job insecurity in one completely unattractive package.”

Generation Y is excited about this election because their votes helped put Obama into the Oval Office. On one hand, this is a great thing, because now they're no longer feeling disenfranchised by the election process. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that what they're about to experience is disillusionment.

In my opinion, it doesn't really matter who's elected as President, and it doesn't really matter who's elected to Congress. At this point, they're all equally bad. The only thing that Republicans and Democrats work together on is spending money that this country doesn't have, and Obama isn't going to be able to turn things around overnight, even assuming that he wants to. Maybe that sounds horribly jaded, but let me explain where I'm going with this.

As I've said before, "People do what you pay them to do." And our politicians aren't getting paid to represent the best interests of our country. (Well, they are, but not really.) Instead, their re-election campaigns are financed by lobbyists for special interest groups like the automotive industry, the pharmaceutical industry, tobacco companies, and teachers unions.

Now I do think that lobbyists have the potential to serve a valuable purpose. They can do research, and gather facts, and present logical arguments for new legislature. I don't have a problem with companies paying lobbyists to present their case to Congress. But I strongly object to the fact that lobbyists spend millions and millions of dollars to buy the votes of Senators and Representatives. How can politicians possibly put the best interests of America over the special interests of industries when their careers are being funded by lobbyists?

So until we have real campaign finance reform, all we're going to get is more of the same-- Our government will continue to fork over money to the industries that provide the biggest kick-backs.

Big, Bad Bailouts

2008-11-13T21:00:00.004-05:00

I just got home from another trip to the Rust Belt. Living in Cincinnati, I don't feel like we're experiencing a true recession. (For sure, the parking lot at the mall is crammed full on Saturdays.) But up in Saginaw, you get the feeling that the recession is firmly entrenched.

My company has several customers in the automotive industry-- Not the Big Three automakers, but their sub-tier suppliers. So in the past few months, I've had the privilege of meeting lots of intelligent, hard-working engineers who work for these companies. These are people who get excited about designing steering columns, seat adjustment mechanisms, and wiring harness connectors. And ultimately, all of their livelihoods are controlled by the "leadership" at GM, because when GM stumbles, every sub-tier supplier also takes a financial hit.

That's the tragedy of the latest bailout debate that is currently being discussed in Congress. In essence, it comes down to this: How many millions of people should lose their jobs because GM's management has been willfully stupid for the past 20+ years?

General Motors could make money only by selling big, gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s and trucks. Therefore, instead of focusing on making money by innovating around fuel efficiency, productivity and design, G.M. threw way too much energy into lobbying and maneuvering to protect its gas guzzlers.

(And here's another reason why I equate SUV's with being willfully stupid.)

I am NOT in favor of bailing out GM. Frankly, I think they probably deserve to go under. But I also believe that if that happens, thousands of hard-working engineers will lose their jobs, and it will be an enormous blow to our (already wounded) economy. I don't know what the right answer is.

Confessions of an Undecided Voter

2008-11-05T21:30:00.001-05:00

I was one of the Undecided Voters. I went into voting booth on Tuesday still unsure about who I was going to vote for, so I skipped the first question and filled out the rest of my ballot. Then I came back to the big decision. I seriously considered voting for the Libertarian Party of Ohio. (But I didn't.)

I still don't know what I would do if someone came up to me today and said, "You are responsible for casting the deciding vote. You alone have the power to decide who becomes the next President of the United States." I'd be in trouble. I really don't know if I would decide for Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin. In fact, if I had the power to do it, I would probably go back to the old method of picking the top candidate from one party as President and picking the top candidate from the other party as Vice President. I'd actually feel pretty good about that, except that I'd have a hard time deciding which of them should be Thing One and Thing Two.

In the end, the matter was decidedly settled by many people who are clearly more decisive than I am. (Despite the fact that Time magazine just published an article about how the Cincinnati area is a Republican County, the vote went to Obama by more than 5 percentage points-- 52% to 47%.)

The point is of this blog posting is that I'm not an Undecided Voter because I haven't given it serious thought. In fact, I'm probably guilty of over-thinking the whole situation.

Here are some of the reasons for my quandary:

I'm mostly a Republican.

I believe that "Government is the least-efficient way to do just about anything," so obviously I believe in minimizing government programs and reducing taxes. I believe that our healthcare system is broken, but I don't think that socialized medicine is the best fix. I'm generally anti-abortion, although I can also see that sometimes painful decisions have to be made between the lesser of two evils. I wish that the Republican party would focus more on environmental issues and stop pandering to lobbyists for big industries, but overall, I'm much more of a Republican than a Democrat.

The Republican Primaries

Early in the primaries, I was pulling for McCain. I liked the fact that he was an advocate for immigration reform. I agreed with most of his decisions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Democratic Primaries

I really don't like Hillary Clinton, so I thought that the Democrats made a good choice when they (finally) picked Obama.

The Presidential Debates

When I watched the debates, I thought that Obama had more poise than McCain, and his statements were more coherent, but when I thought it over later, I agreed with more of John McCain's positions on the issues.

Sarah Palin

When they introduced her, I had doubts about her qualifications. Two years ago, Sarah Palin was mayor of a township the size of my hometown, which is actually a village, technically. But I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Then I watched the Vice Presidential debate, and I was appalled by her cutsey-ness.

Ultimately, it comes down to this-- As a woman, I am offended by the fact that John McCain picked an under-qualified woman and expected us all to jump for joy over the blatent tokenism.

The McCain Campaign

I grew increasingly cynical about McCain's campaign strategy, which seemed to consist exclusively of making up pseudo-facts about Obama's voting record. I think McCain has some good ideas, but I'm baffled as to why he never took the time to explain them in a rational manner.

The Phone Calls

Because we live in a battle-ground state, we have been receiving 4-5 election-related phone calls every day for the past week. I work from home, so I was extremely annoyed by the constant distractions. By Monday, I was ready to scream, "I'M NOT VOTING FOR ANY OF YOU!!!" (But most of the calls were pre-recorded messages, so it wouldn't have done any good.)

The Dream

I participate in a tutoring program for kids from Cincinnati Public Schools. On Monday night, all of the students were really excited about the election. It's so cool to be able to tell these kids, "You can grow up to be anything you want to be, if you're willing to work to make it happen." Barak Obama is exactly the kind of role model that these kids need to see, and I'm proud to live in a country where part of Martin Luther King's dream has finally come true:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Even if Barak Obama were to accomplish nothing else in his career, that's a truly awesome legacy.

Thoughts from this week...

2008-10-24T15:00:00.002-04:00

I spent most of this week at our company summit meeting at Lake Monomonac, in Winchendon, MA. (It's near Leominster, which is pronounced Lemon-ster.) We're a small "virtual" company-- a total of just 8 employees, and we all work from home. Up until now, I had only met 3 of my coworkers in person, so I got to meet the other 4 this week.

I started calling our meeting a retreat, because the cell phone reception was pretty sketchy, but I'm pretty sure that our retreat didn't cost $440,000 because we were staying at my boss' 3-BR / 2-Bath lake cottage and one of my coworkers brought his camper. (Wall Street should take business frugality lessons from us!)

The Tip of the Iceberg

I know that our software does some complicated engineering analysis, but this week I realized that the expression "tip of the iceberg" is a gross understatement. I would guess that probably 99% of the software is "underwater" or behind the curtain of the user interface.

Maybe that's true of every product to a certain extent. I'm sure that surgeons never stop to think about all of the analysis and testing that go into the development of the devices that they use, which is what I used to work on.

But this week I realized that now I'm on the other side, sneaking a peak at what's happening behind the curtain, and I'm feeling a little sheepish because I'm out of my element. I have written computer programs to crunch data through equations, but I am not a programmer.

My coworkers spent several hours talking about graph theory, Dinic algorithms, valency, and supernodes. They did their best to explain some of these concepts to me, but I still have only the foggiest clue of what those terms really mean.

Airport Aggravation

Am I the only one who feels bullied by airports that don't offer free WiFi access?

I mean it's bad enough that you're holding me hostage for hours with crummy overpriced food, uncomfortable seating, and noisy announcements repeated over-and-over-and-over again. (Most airports banned smoking decades ago. Do we still need announcements to remind people of this fact?!?) Couldn't you please just let me check my email and surf the internet for an hour for free, to help take my mind off of how tired and miserable I am?

I really don't feel like I'm being unreasonable here.

I suspect that most people are like me-- They boot up their computer to see if there is a free connection, but when they find out that they have to pay for access, they just shut everything down again. (I actually use my iPod touch to test the waters first, so I don't have to deal with the hassle of waiting for my computer to boot up.) Because it's not worth paying $8-10 just to get online for 45 minutes. And if the cost isn't really the issue, then there's the hassle of having to submit the credit card charges for reimbursement on an expense account.

I just wonder how much revenue is actually being generated by the exclusive partnerships between airports and the internet service providers for "pay by the hour" access?

On that note, I just have to say that Dayton is a nice little airport. Free WiFi access, reasonable parking, quick security lines, and much cheaper flights than Cincinnati. I just wish they were closer to my house. I had to get up at 2:45am on Monday morning so that I could leave my house at 4am, and I was still a little bit rushed catching my 6:10 flight. So my busy week got off to a very early start!

I'm a Mac

I love these commercials, and I think The Bean Counter is especially great.

Maybe it's just fun to cheer for the underdog, but seriously, Microsoft has made themselves such an easy target with Vista...

You know you've really screwed up when you have to disguise your product as something else (i.e. the "Mojave" commercials) in order to get people to even consider taking a look at it.

My coworkers (i.e. brilliant software developers) have struggled with serious problems installing Vista on their computers, so I have a hard time believing that Vista is ready for prime-time.

Quoi?

2008-10-14T14:00:00.001-04:00

Tell me how this makes sense:

The government put itself four-square into the country's banking business Tuesday, resorting to what President Bush conceded was the unwelcome choice of a partial nationalization in order to loosen paralyzed channels of credit.

...

Nine major banks will participate initially including all of the country's largest institutions, he announced, in a move that sent stocks soaring on Wall Street.

Some of the nation's largest banks had to be pressured to participate by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who wanted healthy institutions that did not necessarily need capital from the government to go first as a way of removing any stigma that might be associated with banks getting bailouts.

...

Executives of the country's biggest banks were summoned to a remarkable meeting at the Treasury Department on Monday to be briefed on the plan. Paulson basically told the bank CEOs that they had to accept the government stock purchases for the good of the U.S. economy.

...

After the purchase of preferred stock in nine large banks, the new program is expected to be expanded to many others. Among the initial banks participating will be all of the country's largest institutions, including Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley, said one official, with each institution expected to receive billions of dollars in return for the sale to the government of preferred shares.

The advantage to the taxpayer is that if the rescue plan works, then the shares can be sold for more than the government initially paid, providing a profit on the transaction.

I just don't understand why we're buying shares in banks that aren't even in trouble. I really thought the whole point of a bailout was to rescue the financial institutions that are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, not to invest in a private industry for the fun of it.

These organizations systematically destroyed their own reputations and undermined our entire economy, and we're stuck bailing them out. And now they're going to divert extra money to "remove the stigma" from their failure?

Seriously?

And then there's that tiny little word "if" hidden in the last paragraph:

...if the rescue plan works...

And what if it doesn't?

Does anybody know where I can find Galt's Gulch? I'm ready to move!

You know you're an adult when......you suffer through a Thirtysomething Crisis.

2008-10-13T10:30:00.000-04:00

I spent an hour or two on the phone with my friend J---- last night. She's having a Thirtysomething Crisis. She loves her job, but she's also under more stress than any human being was meant to carry. Having been through this sort of thing myself, I can empathize completely with what she's going through, so we both wound up sniffling and crying while we were talking on the phone.

I have several friends who have suffered through this type of crisis in the past couple of years, and I can only wonder why Life has chosen to haul off and punch us in the gut at this particular age.

It can't be called a Midlife Crisis, because we're only in our thirties. And it's not an Existential Crisis, because it's NOT triggered by a search for significance, but rather by an external voice telling us that we're failing at the one thing that we thought was our purpose in life.

Being an adult is really hard sometimes.

The Joy of Skiing

2008-10-05T10:30:00.001-04:00

They've implemented a new online registration process for getting season passes at the ski area.

You know, when you put it this way it doesn't sound like fun at all:

I am aware that the sport of skiing/boarding/sliding involves numerous risks of injury or death, including, but not limited to, injury due to loss of control; falls; the failure of skiers/snowboarders/sliders to ski/ride/tube within their own abilities; use of ski lifts; collisions with or falls resulting from trees, rocks, lift towers, fences, snowmaking equipment, snow vehicles, signs, other skiers/snowboarders/sliders and other manmade or natural obstacles.

[I have to say that the bit about "failure of sliders to tube within their own abilities" is especially ridiculous. You sit on a tube, and gravity does the rest. How is there any skill involved in that?]

I understand that I may encounter obstacles that are inherent in the sport, including but not limited to, bare spots, variations in snow, ice and terrain including bumps, moguls, terrain features, stumps, forest growth and debris, rocks, and other slope hazards or obstacles whether they are marked or unmarked, manmade or natural, or a result of slope design or modifications. I understand and agree that ------- ----- ------ shall have no duty to warn me of or to remedy any natural or manmade risks, dangers or hazards.

[I'm only surprised that they didn't mention any other natural hazards, like running into a deer, for example... which actually happened to someone at our ski area.]

I agree that, as a skier/snowboarder/slider, I have responsibilities to myself and to others to ski/ride/tube safely and in control.

[I'd guess that 90% of all injuries in skiing and/or snowboarding happen because people ignore that one little sentence.]

I also understand and agree that it is important to my safety to pay attention while loading, riding and unloading ski lifts, and I agree that I will not attempt to load, ride or unload a lift unless familiar with the proper way to do so.

I understand that I am voluntarily choosing to participate in the sport of snow skiing/boarding/sliding at ------- ----- ------ with knowledge of the aforesaid risks of injury or death involved and hereby expressly agree to accept and assume all such risks of injury or death associated with the sport of snow skiing/boarding/tubing.

As lawful consideration for being permitted by ------- ----- ------ to participate in the sport of snow skiing/boarding/tubing, I hereby agree to release from any and all legal liability and agree not to sue or make a claim against, and to indemnify, defend and hold harmless ------- ----- ------, all of the owners, officers, members, agents and employees for any and all claims for damage, injuries, death to myself or any person or property, including all defense costs, attorney's fees, and other expenses of any type, caused by or resulting from my participation in the sport of snow skiing/boarding/tubing or other alpine activities while on the premises, whether such costs, damage, injury or death was caused by their negligence or from any other cause.

I authorize ------- ----- ------ Ski Patrol to administer treatment in the event of an injury to myself or to the the minor for whom I am signing.

And that's why they pay us the big bucks!

Oh, wait...

Actually, we're a volunteer patrol, which means that we don't get paid.

But our ski area gives us free family & guest passes, they offer discounts on food & gear, and they pay for first aid supplies and equipment for the patrol, which more than most other ski areas do for their patrollers. We pay for our parkas and our annual membership fees to National Ski Patrol, but we get to ski for free, we have lots of fun, and we help people.

Seems like a good deal to me!

Random Vices

2008-10-02T22:15:00.005-04:00

Random thoughts on the Vice Presidential debate tonight:

Isn't "a team of mavericks" an oxymoron?

When did candidates start referring to their opponents by their first names during debates? I'm hearing a lot about "Joe believes X," "Barak voted for Y," and "John's plan is Z."

You know that there has been a major upheaval when a Republican candidate starts talking about big, bad corporations (specifically, Banks and Oil Companies) taking advantage of average people. I really thought that was a Democratic platform...

Quality of Life

2008-09-28T15:00:00.009-04:00

I've been doing a lot of blogging recently, when I really ought to be doing real work. But I've got something personal to share, so I hope you'll stick with me here...

In the past few days, I have been processing through several seemingly disconnected concepts, and they just kind of congealed into a consistent theme this morning.

Here are the three motives, and also two figures that fill the spaces in between them:

Motif - The Giant Pool of Money - How the Subprime Mortgage Crisis became the Global Financial Crisis.

Figure - United States of Appetite - "Is the middle class ensnared in a culture of consumption?"

Motif - Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey

Figure - Between the Scary and the Monastery - "We don't need to live through a disaster to know there's a more human way to live."

Motif - Quality - "The race for Quality has no finish line--so technically, it's more like a death march."

A Global Financial Crisis has occurred because the world no longer has faith that America can make good on its debts. And I'm starting to think that they're absolutely right not to trust us--As a country, we are upside-down, deep underwater, drowning in debt, and it's entirely possible that we can't be resuscitated. As this article in Time magazine puts it:

Japan and Germany make cars. Saudi Arabia pumps oil. China supplies the world with socks and toys and flat-screen TVs. What does the United States produce? Lots of stuff, but in recent years this country's No. 1 export--by far--has been debt.

When you look at things this way, it becomes clearer what the frenzy in New York City and Washington is all about. There are major quality issues with our nation's flagship product.

I'd like to hope that we're just facing a mild recession, but realistically, if we're going to prevent a profound Depression, we have give the rest of the world a reason to have confidence in us. We need to pay back our debts (personal and national) and start living within our means.

So while today's crisis management makes a certain amount of sense, returning to the borrow-and-spend status quo afterward seems like a disastrous idea. If the U.S. is to have a future as an economic power, its long love affair with borrowed money has to end.

And so our race for a bigger and better Quality of Life has become a death march.

Two weeks ago, we had a huge windstorm in Cincinnati. Most areas lost power for days. But I've heard a lot of people talking about the good things that came out of it--Neighbors got to know each other; families played games together; we were all forced to slow down and interact with people, instead of wasting all of our free time in front of televisions and computers.

Maybe McMansions, SUVs, and HDTVs aren't the secret to happiness after all.

I believe that there's a better way to live.

About two years ago, I lost my job, and we lost 50% of our household income. I immediately rushed into another job, earning less than half of what I had been making.

It was not a good job. It was juvenile and frustrating, but I stuck to it. It took a couple of other life crises to bring me to the point where I was broken enough to quit.

The thought of being unemployed terrified me. I was afraid of fighting with my husband about money, I was afraid of losing our house, and I was afraid that my career was in a downward spiral, circling the drain. My sense of self-worth was totally tied up in the idea of earning a six-figure income.

I have to believe that the past two and a half years have been God's way of showing me that that's not what my life is supposed to be about.

You know what? Saying "God has a Plan" is just too glib, too simplistic. These two and a half years have been SO hard. I had been worried about a financial crisis, but I wound up in a crisis of faith.

I felt like every single time I got back on my feet and started moving forward, another door would be slammed in my face. I said that to my husband several months ago, and a few of weeks later, I found a couple of quotes from C.S. Lewis saying exactly the same thing:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, 'So there's no God after all,' but, 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'

He's talking about the death of his beloved wife. I was grieving for my personal goals and dreams. (How crazy is that?) Fortunately, the story doesn't end there:

Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: You are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

The analogy is perfect. You have to be so exhausted, so very nearly dead, that you stop struggling and go limp, and that's when God can finally start to turn things around. That's exactly what a crisis of faith feels like.

So in the meantime, my husband and I had to cut back on ways that we were spending money. We had to give up going to Hawaii and the ski trips out West that we had been doing every year. We ate out less, and we didn't buy new clothes. I started getting books from the public library, instead of spending hundreds of dollars at Barnes & Noble. My husband deferred a lot things that he wanted to do--taking a sabbatical to finish the basement, buying woodworking equipment, purchasing an HDTV, etc.

But here's the crazy thing: We didn't really miss most of those things. And we didn't fight over money, and we didn't have to sell our house. (My husband deserves full credit for that, because he's the one who insisted on using conservative estimates for our income when we first established our budget for building the house five years ago.)

And three months ago, I wound up with a job that is a hundred times better than anything I could ever have imagined. I'm only earning about a third of the salary that I was making before, but I'm not wasting my life feeling tired, and anxious, and stressed out all the time.

I'd love to say that the story ends here. "And we lived happily ever after." But that would be glib and simplistic too.

I still have hopes and dreams that may go unfulfilled. I still struggle with thoughts like, "God, if you love me, why won't you give me the one last thing that I so desperately want?" I still have bouts of self-pity and depression. And it's still really hard for me to accept that I'm not the One in control of the Plan for my life.

So I guess you'll just have to stay tuned...

The How's & Why's of the Financial Crisis

2008-09-27T17:45:00.002-04:00

There's a fantastic story on NPR about the process that caused the current credit crisis. I highly recommend reading the entire transcript, or you can go to this website and click on the "Full Episode" link to listen to the piece online.

In a nutshell, here's how it goes:

1. The "Global Pool of Money" essentially doubled from 2000 to 2006. Global investors were looking for safe ways to make a reasonable profit on investing this money. Since the US government was keeping interest rates low on treasury bonds, these investors started looking for other places to invest that money.

Adam Davidson: How does the world get twice as much money to invest? Lots of things happened, but the main headline is all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich making TVs and selling us oil: China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. Made a lot of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses-- real math geniuses-- looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this money. There's twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments. So, that global army of investment managers was hungrier and twitchier than ever before. They all wanted the same thing: A nice low risk investment that paid some return...

Think how attractive a mortgage loan is to that 70 trillion dollar pool of money. Remember, they're desperate to get any kind of interest return. They want to beat that miserable 1 percent interest Greenspan is offering them. And here are these homeowners, they're paying 5, 7, 9 percent to borrow money from some bank. So what if the global pool could get in on that action?

2. Banks and mortgage brokers discovered that they could bundle mortgages together and sell them as securities.

Adam Davidson: There are problems. Individual mortgages are too big a hassle for the global pool of money. They don't want to get mixed up with actual people and their catastrophic health problems or debilitating divorces, and all the reasons which might stop them from paying their mortgages. So what Mike [Francis] and his peers on Wall Street did, was to figure out how to give the global pool of money all the benefits of a mortgage-– basically higher yield-- without the hassle or the risk.

So picture the whole chain. You have Clarence. He gets a mortgage from a broker. The broker sells the mortgage to a small bank, the small bank sells the mortgage to a guy like Mike at a big investment firm on Wall Street. Then Mike takes a few thousand mortgages he’s bought this way, he puts them in one big pile. Now he’s got thousands of mortgage checks coming to him every month. It’s a huge monthly stream of money, which is expected to come in for the next thirty years, the life of a mortgage. And he then sells shares of that monthly income to investors. Those shares are called mortgage backed securities. And the 70 trillion dollar global pool of money loved them.

3. The demand for these mortgage backed securities became huge, and brokers got creative in finding ways to supply Wall Street with new mortgages.

Alex Blumberg: So Wall Street had to find more people to take out mortgages. Which meant lending to people who never would’ve qualified before. And so Mike noticed that every month, the guidelines were getting a little looser. Something called a stated income, verified asset loan came out, which meant you didn't have to provide paycheck stubs and W-2 forms, as they had in the past. You could simply state your income, as long as you showed that you had money in the bank.

Mike Garner: The next guideline lower is just stated income, stated assets. Then you state what you make and state what’s in your bank account. They call and make sure you work where you say you work. Then an accountant has to say for your field it is possible to make what you said you make. But they don’t say what you make, just say it’s possible that they could make that...

Then the next one came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. You just have to have a credit score and a pulse.

Alex Blumberg: Actually that pulse thing-- Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

4. The mathematical models for the mortgage-backed securities said that they were safe, but the models were based on historical data, from previous decades when banks didn't give mortgages to people who couldn't afford them.

Adam Davidson: As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that foreclosure rate is generally below 2 percent. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate may go to 8 or 10 or 12 percent. But the problem with is there were all these new kinds of mortgages, given out to people who never would have gotten them before. So the historical data was irrelevant. Some mortgage pools, today, are expected to go beyond 50 percent foreclosure rates.

Alex Blumberg: To be fair, they knew there were risks. But investors have a system to assess those risks. They’re these special companies. Credit rating agencies. Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, Fitch. Their job, their main job, is to assess risk for Wall Street and the global pool of money. They rate every kind of bond according to its risk. Triple A is the safest, then there’s double A, single A, all the way down to single B and below. And that’s all most investors look at-- the letter grade. They trust the credit rating agencies. And these agencies blessed most of these mortgage-backed securities. Gave them AAA ratings, which means they were considered as safe as a US government bond. This was the magic of this whole system. You could take a pool of thousands of risky mortgages, and create a security that was called money-good, as safe as any investment out there. At least that's what people thought. But now we know those agencies relied on the wrong data. That same historic data that had nothing to do with these new kinds of mortgages.

5. And as if the mortgage-backed securities weren't risky enough, someone found a way to integrate even more risk into them by creating something called a Collateralized Debt Obligation.

Alex Blumberg: Let’s translate some of that. A mortgage-backed security, you remember, is a pool of thousands of different mortgages. These are all put together and divided into different slices. Jim [Finkel] used the word tranche. Tranche is just French for slice. Some of these slices are risky, some are not. OK, a CDO is a pool of those tranches. A pool of pools. And Jim and most companies like his weren’t buying the top-rated tranches-- the safest ones, the AAAs. They were buying the lower-rated stuff. The high-risk stuff. Jim’s company was buying tranches that came from Glen Pizzolorusso’s company. The guy who hung out at nightclubs with B-list celebrities. The guy who said he was selling mortgages to people who didn’t have a pot to piss in.

Adam Davidson: There's another term the industry uses, no joke, they call these lower-rated tranches toxic waste. They're so high-risk, they're toxic.

Alex Blumberg: So, a CDO is sort of a financial alchemy. Jim takes that toxic stuff, these low-rated, high-risk tranches, puts them all together. Re-tranches them, and presto: He has a CDO whose top tranche is rated AAA, rock-solid, good as money. If this seems too good to be true to you, you're in good company. Guys like billionaire investor Warren Buffet said the very logic was ridiculous. But back in 2005, 2006, the global pool of money couldn't get enough of these things. And the CDO industry was facing the same pressures everyone else was at every other step of this chain-- to loosen their standards; to make CDOs out of lower and lower rated pools.

6. From 2003 to 2006, more people were qualifying for bigger mortgages, and the increased demand for housing drove prices up, creating a bubble.

Alex Blumberg: The problem was that even though housing prices were going through the roof, people weren't making any more money. From 2000 to 2007, the median household income stayed flat. And so the more prices rose, the more tenuous the whole thing became. No matter how lax lending standards got, no matter how many exotic mortgage products were created to shoehorn people into homes they couldn't possibly afford, no matter what the mortgage machine tried, the people just couldn't swing it. By late 2006, the average home cost nearly four times what the average family made. Historically it was between two and three times. And mortgage lenders noticed something that they'd almost never seen before. People would close on a house, sign all the mortgage papers, and then default on their very first payment. No loss of a job, no medical emergency, they were underwater before they even started. And although no one could really hear it, that was probably the moment when one of the biggest speculative bubbles in American history popped.

7. And now that the bubble has burst, no one wants to take a risk on any mortgage-backed securities.

Alex Blumberg: Tonko Gast estimates that most of AAA rated mortgage-backed CDO's that the industry created since 2006, are now worth less than half their value. Some are worth close to zero. But remember to all the investment managers in the global pool of money who bought them, AAA meant safe as government bonds. AAA was called a cash equivalent, money in the bank. It's as if the global pool of money put trillions of dollars in a savings account, came back one year later, and found out that half was gone. Put another way, it's as if the global pool of money thought it was putting trillions of dollars in a savings account, but really, half of it was going into a furnace. The money is gone, burned up, never to come back. And that's what's led to the new term you've been hearing.

Adam Davidson: Maybe you've noticed that the press and others don't call it a sub-prime housing crisis as much anymore. They call it a credit crisis. The global pool of money still has no idea how much money they lost. How much went into the furnace. And because of that, they’ve totally changed their thinking. They used to be obsessed just with getting some profit, trying to make a slightly higher interest rate return. Now the global pool of money has the exact opposite obsession. It wants no risk whatsoever. It just wants safety. Suddenly, those US government treasury bonds-- still near historic lows of 1 and 2 percent-- are beautifully attractive. Because they're safe. They won't blow up like sub-prime CDOs did. The global pool of money is avoiding anything with even the slightest hint of risk and that affects everybody, no matter who you are. It's harder to borrow money to buy a house, or build a factory, or bring your country boldly into the 21st century...

This freezing of credit all around the world is something new, the world has never seen anything on this scale. When the crisis hit, last August, central bankers and finance economists couldn't figure out how bad things might get. There was this question people would ask: will things get like the 1930s or the 1970s? There was real fear that, just like in the '30s, hundreds of banks would collapse, there would be massive unemployment, there was talk of a new Great Depression.

So that's how we wound up here...

(Thanks to E!! for pointing me to Culture11, where I found the link to the NPR story.)

Facts of the Debate

2008-09-27T10:30:00.005-04:00

So I watched the Presidential Debate last night. (Mostly for lack of anything better to do.)

Debates are known for being full of facts. Unfortunately, facts aren't the same as truths. Here are some basic truths:

All politicians have voted to raise taxes at some point or another.

All politicians are in the habit of spending more than the amount of revenue coming in.

The only way to get funding approved for their pet projects is to approve funding for everyone else's pet projects.

Everyone supports the troops and wants to bring them home as soon as possible. (Definitions of ASAP vary wildly.)

No one is especially happy with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Iran, or North Korea.

McCain claimed that he would try to eliminate wasteful spending by the government. I'm all in favor of that. Obama claimed that he would continue Bush's tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 per year. I'm all in favor of that too.

Like Obama, I think we should make changes so that more people have access to affordable health insurance, but I strongly agree with McCain that the government (aka the least effective way to do almost anything) should not be in charge of our healthcare system.

Overall, the debate included a lot of senseless bickering, accusations, and half-truths being thrown around at random, which doesn't help resolve anything. In a nutshell, the debate was exactly what I was expecting it to be.

*sigh*

I was kind of hoping for something different.

Wind Power

2008-09-20T22:00:00.001-04:00

Here's a short list of things I've seen in the past week, in approximate order:

Tornados of mulch, accompanied by the sensation of being inside a very dusty hairdryer

Traffic lights bouncing like popcorn

Our patio furniture sliding around the deck

Trees split in half down the middle, trees broken off at the trunk, trees uprooted from the ground, trees covering houses, tree limbs everywhere

Lots of houses with siding and roof shingles ripped off

Broken power lines, draped across streets and lawns like bedraggled party streamers

A couple of street signs bent over and/or uprooted from the ground

Gas stations with cars lined up around the corner

Mounds of tree limbs piled up along every street, waiting for the city trucks to come turn them into mulch

The official weather report and some photos can be found here, and there are plenty of other photos here.

Some basic stats about the effects that the windstorm had on Cincinnati:

By Sunday night, 90% of the greater Cincinnati area had lost power-- More than 700,000 homes and businesses.

By Monday night, that number stood at around 580,000 homes and businesses without power.

On Wednesday night, more than 15% of the homes and businesses in the Cincinnati area still did not have power.

All of the Cincinnati Public Schools were closed for at least 3 days. Some schools were closed for the entire week.

As of Friday afternoon, 5 days after the storm hit, 125,000 homes were still without power.

Whoever thought we'd spend a week recovering from Hurricane Ike?

Math, in the Blink of an Eye

2008-09-16T10:30:00.004-04:00

As someone who has studied a lot of math, I find this article intriguing.

Be sure to check out the fun little "blink and you'll miss it" counting test that is referenced in the article.

I believe that our ability to do math probably involves several different areas of the brain. I can do calculus, but for me, it mostly just involves following the rules. On the other hand, anything involving geometry has always been very intuitive for me-- I can easily visualize Statics, Kinematics, and Dynamics problems in 2-D, or even 3-D.

SIDEBAR: For the non-engineers in the audience:

Statics = How loads are distributed through (hopefully) non-moving objects like bridges.

Kinematics = How mechanisms (like levers and gears) move.

Dynamics = How things accelerate and impact other things.

My master's thesis involved developing a computer program to calculate the forces and moments generated at the shoulder due to dynamic, 3-dimensional arm movements.

But I can't do basic math in my head to save my life.

My husband can do all sorts of calculations in his head, while I'm lucky to be able to add one two-digit number to another. An average fifth grader could easily beat me in a multiplication time-test.

It only makes sense to say that there must be several different types of "math" which are processed by different areas in the brain. Surely everyone has strengths and weaknesses in different areas.

Unfortunately, lots of kids get turned off by math at an early age. (I hated math in 4th & 5th grades.) Maybe there are people who would have discovered an unexpected gift for calculus, but they gave up after struggling through algebra and geometry? It makes you wonder...

Hurricane Ike

2008-09-15T22:00:00.002-04:00

We got pounded by the remnants of Hurricane Ike yesterday. We had virtually no rain, but a furious windstorm all afternoon, which brought down trees all over the city. As of last night, 90% of the greater Cincinnati area was without power, and the statistics haven't improved radically today.

Frankly, I'm not sure why Cincinnati isn't being mentioned on the national news, except that it may be just too hard to explain how a hurricane can do so much damage in the Midwest.

Obviously, we're pretty happy to have power back on at our house, but there are still plenty of other areas that are waiting. (We lost power from 2:30pm yesterday afternoon until about 3:30pm today.)

Digression...

In Hamilton Country, the "tornado" sirens are activated anytime there's a Severe Thunderstorm Warning in our area. The sirens are also activated if the conditions are upgraded to a Tornado Watch or a Tornado Warning.

Now you might be asking, "How do you figure out what the sirens mean?"

Well, we turn on the TV (assuming that we still have electricity) to see what the weathermen are saying.

You might say, "But if it's a Tornado Warning, that means that you should be heading for the basement. IMMEDIATELY."

That's a very valid point, and I have no good answer to that, except to say that it would be extremely silly and pointless to run to the basement every time the siren goes off.

You might suggest, "Maybe they should only activate the 'tornado' sirens if there's actually a Tornado Warning."

Another very valid point. Hamilton County says that the sirens are meant to act as a warning that conditions aren't safe outside and people need to seek shelter indoors.

Here's my thought: If there's thunder and lightening and a torrential downpour outside, I would hope that people would have enough sense to come in out of the rain. (And if not, they're probably good candidates for a Darwin Award, and who are we to interfere with their destiny?)

Now returning to the main topic...

So yesterday, we had a swirling, howling windstorm. Gusts were frequently in the 60-80 mph range. I was outside for maybe 20 minutes of it, and let me just tell you that the flying dust and debris alone were potentially blinding, literally, not to mention the risks of being injured or killed by falling trees and limbs.

The storm went on for five hours, and the emergency sirens were never activated.

Donald Miller - To Own A Dragon

2008-09-13T22:45:00.002-04:00

Today I read To Own A Dragon by Donald Miller, the author of Blue Like Jazz.

It's an awesome book. Wonderful in every sense of the world. The first three chapters blew me away. Funny, profound, and beautiful prose.

Here's a paragraph that I can especially relate to:

I say this because there aren't many pleasures I enjoy more than sleep. I sleep till I am done, normally, and haven't set an alarm in years. I'm not lazy, mind you, I just find it odd anybody would program a machine to wake them. God made the brain so it would wake on its own, and as a follower of Jesus, I am a strict adherent to His system. Call me a fundamentalist if you want.

The book was written for guys who have grown up without fathers, but everyone should read this book-- If you had a difficult relationship with your father, if you have a friend who has grown up without a father, or if you are in a position to be a mentor to a fatherless child, then you will be inspired by this book.

In addition to being a great author, Donald Miller is also a founder of The Belmont Foundation. Their goal is to establish long-term mentoring relationships for fatherless boys.

In the United States, there are more than 11 million children being raised by a single parent. Of those, roughly 85% are being raised by single mothers.

According to the information in the back of the book, children from fatherless homes account for:

85% of all youths in prison (20X the average)

71% of all high school dropouts (9X)

63% of youth suicides (5X)

They're also 20X more likely to show behavior disorders and 9-10X more likely to wind up in a chemical abuse center or state institution.

Mentoring can change these odds dramatically.

Seven Years

2008-09-12T11:30:00.000-04:00

First off, let me just say that I don't agree with most of the things that Ann Coulter says. Ditto for Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, etc. As a general rule, I have a strong distaste for shock-jock mentality, including inflammatory news and radio programs on both sides of the political divide.

That being said, I have to admit that Ann Coulter's column for 9/11, BUSH 7, TERRORISTS 0, raises some pretty good points:

As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.

If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

...

The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.

That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again--

I respect politicians who are willing to take a stand on an issue because they firmly believe that it's the right thing to do, even though I may disagree completely with their opinions.

I believe that both Obama and McCain meet this criteria. I may not agree with either of them on every issue, but I do believe that they're both trying to act in the long-term best interests of our country. (And the reason why I have never had any respect for either of the Clintons is because they constantly pursue only their own short-term self-interests.)

So given the fact that I actually respect both of the Presidential candidates, I just wish that they would campaign based on a constructive dialog about real issues. It would be nice to see candidates demonstrate this kind of dignity all the time, and not just on momentous occasions.

Obama is not a celebutant, and owning a CrackBerry isn't a prerequisite for being a good president. That's just silliness. Why can't they see that these kinds of snide attacks are demeaning to both the attacker and the attackee?

Evolution of English

2008-09-07T18:00:00.000-04:00

The pastor at my church is notorious for accidentally using non-words during his sermons. Or, to put it another way, he's very adept at constructing new words.

(It all depends on your point-of-view about the evolutionary nature of the English language.)

So today, he came up with the word "correlarities." As in,

correlarities
noun: Things that tend to be associated with each other.

Obviously.

What's not so obvious is why this word doesn't already exist. It's a pretty useful word, and its construction is consistent with other "real" words. So why not?

Several years ago, I met a student from Germany who just raved about how much he loved the flexibility of English.

"You're free to turn any noun into a verb, and any verb into a noun. You can say something like, 'This book is a real page-turner,' and you know exactly what that expression means. If you wanted to say something like that in German, it would be 14 syllables long!"

The Importance of Mentoring

2008-09-06T10:30:00.001-04:00

From a Newsweek article called The Trouble With Boys:

One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a single question: does he have a man in his life to look up to? Too often, the answer is no. High rates of divorce and single motherhood have created a generation of fatherless boys. In every kind of neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing number of boys--now a startling 40 percent--are being raised without their biological dads.

Psychologists say that grandfathers and uncles can help, but emphasize that an adolescent boy without a father figure is like an explorer without a map. And that is especially true for poor boys and boys who are struggling in school. Older males, says Gurian, model self-restraint and solid work habits for younger ones. And whether they're breathing down their necks about grades or admonishing them to show up for school on time, "an older man reminds a boy in a million different ways that school is crucial to their mission in life."

In the past, boys had many opportunities to learn from older men. They might have been paired with a tutor, apprenticed to a master or put to work in the family store. High schools offered boys a rich array of roles in which to exercise leadership skills--class officer, yearbook editor or a place on the debate team. These days, with the exception of sports, more girls than boys are involved in those activities.

In neighborhoods where fathers are most scarce, the high-school dropout rates are shocking: more than half of African-American boys who start high school don't finish. David Banks, principal of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, one of four all-boy public high schools in the New York City system, wants each of his 180 students not only to graduate from high school but to enroll in college. And he's leaving nothing to chance. Almost every Eagle Academy boy has a male mentor--a lawyer, a police officer or an entrepreneur from the school's South Bronx neighborhood. The impact of the mentoring program, says Banks, has been "beyond profound." Tenth grader Rafael Mendez is unequivocal: his mentor "is the best thing that ever happened to me." Before Rafael came to Eagle Academy, he dreamed about playing pro baseball, but his mentor, Bronx Assistant District Attorney Rafael Curbelo, has shown him another way to succeed: Mendez is thinking about attending college in order to study forensic science.

Images of God

2008-09-03T11:30:00.002-04:00

Wow.

I have to say that I love reading absolutely every article that Rabbi Marc Gellman writes.

Here's a quote from his article on prejudice that was just published in Newsweek:

A story: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was walking down the street one day trailed by many of his students. Suddenly he stopped, looked across the street and asked his students, 'Who is that walking there across the street?'

They looked and said to him, 'Rebbe, it's no one. That's just Moshele, the water drawer, walking across the street. He's nobody.'

Reb Nachman shouted at them, 'You are no longer my students until you can look across any street and see any person and say to me, 'O that is the image of God walking there'.'

Talk about a challenge...

We all have prejudices. We all devalue other people for various reasons.

I'm not prejudiced against John McCain because of his age, or Barak Obama because he's black, or even Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. (I don't respect her, but it's for the very same reason that I don't respect her husband, so clearly it has nothing to do with her gender.)

However, I am quick to pre-judge the people in the cars in front of me. Clearly, he's a jerk for changing lanes like that. Obviously, she's an idiot for talking on the phone and not paying attention to where she's going. And surely I'm not seeing them as being made in the image of God.

The Rust Belt

2008-08-26T20:56:00.007-04:00

I spent 5.5 hours in the car today, and here are two things that I realized along the way:

I established a new personal benchmark for the western-most point that I have driven to. And I'm really not all that far west-- I'm in Chicago. (But until today, the farthest west that I had ever driven was Indianapolis, which is a scant 1.5 hours from Cincinnati.)

I've been here a couple of other times, but I've always flown before. Ditto for every point west of here.

I have a special place in my heart for Rust Belt cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. (I'm sure it stems from the 5 years I spent in Cleveland.)

There's just something unique about Rust Belt cities-- They're unpretentious, but they have a sort of sturdiness and just a hint of swagger to them. They have a confidence that comes from knowing their purpose:

They make stuff.

These cities weren't built on marketing, finance, government, entertainment, or tourism. They were built on a foundation of manufacturing. And even though the foundations have crumbled in some areas, the Rust Belt cities retain the special traits that they developed along the way. They're still proud of their solid work ethic, and they've accumulated a rich cultural diversity from centuries of immigration. In my opinion, these are some of the best qualities of America.

Demotivational Favorites

2008-08-24T17:30:00.006-04:00

Saw this comic in the newspaper today, and it reminded me of something that my friend T would say.

It's also a very appropriate introduction to some of my favorite posters from Despair, Inc.

Motivation - I wonder if they have motivational posters in India?

Government - Or, as I like to say, "Government is the least effective way to do just about anything."

Beauty - Because everyone knows at least one person like this.

Pressure - Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.

Teamwork - My all-time favorite, and so completely relevant to being on ski patrol.

Destiny - For Hubs, because I know he's reading this!

P.S. Their t-shirts are also brilliant.

An Age of Lies

2008-08-23T14:00:00.004-04:00

So let me make sure I've got this straight...

Over the course of 25-30 years, Mao's lies caused the deaths at least 40 million of his own people and now we're supposed to be shocked by the idea that the Chinese government might have fibbed about the ages of their Olympic Gymnasts?

OK, that's what I thought.

A pig-lizard kind of day...

2008-08-20T19:00:00.002-04:00

I love Galaxy Quest. It's such an underrated classic. There are so many great quotes that it's hard to pick a favorite. But today, I'm going to have to go with the pig-lizard scene.

For those of you who haven't seen the movie, Tim Allen's character is on an alien planet, about to get killed by a rock monster, while the rest of his crewmates have returned to the ship. They want to rescue him by teleporting him up to the ship, but they've never used the equipment before. So they decide to see what happens if they teleport the pig-lizard animal that was used as bait for the rock monster...

From Wikiquote:

[Fred has tested the "digital conveyor" teleportation device on a pig-lizard that was chasing Jason Nesmith, but the pig-lizard has been horribly mutilated by the process.]
Jason Nesmith: [over the comm] What was that?
Alexander Dane: Uh, nothing.
Jason Nesmith: I heard some squealing or something.
Gwen DeMarco: No, everything is fine.
Teb: [cheerfully] But the animal is inside out.
[Gwen quickly tries to cover Teb's mouth]
Jason Nesmith: I heard that! It got turned inside out?
[The pig-lizard bursts, spattering the area with gore. Some of it lands on Teb.]
Teb: [unphased] And it exploded...
Jason Nesmith: Did I just hear that the animal turned inside out and then exploded!?!
Gwen DeMarco: [distressed] Um... hold, please.

So I've been working on a kinematic model for several weeks now. It's supposed to be a sales demo for a potential customer. They provided me with CAD files and information on their spring properties, etc. For some reason, I just haven't been able to get realistic results from the model.

After several rounds of back-and-forth with the Design Engineer, I finally learn that they're in the middle of changing vendors, and the information that I've been given is a mish-mash of data from the "old" design and the "new" design. So I've spent most of today rebuilding the model. When I tried to delete one of the "old" components and replace it with the "new" component, the model turned inside out.

And then it exploded.

And of course, as I was in the middle of making the change, I thought to myself, "I should really make a back-up file, in case this doesn't work correctly." The problem is that I had that thought just one minute too late. So I lost several hours worth of work, and now I get to do it all over again.

And it's my own damn fault.

Pandora's iPod

2008-08-06T17:15:00.000-04:00

This is brilliant.

I got it on my iPod touch, but it's also available on your computer. Now I've just got to figure out how to get it in my car!

Working from Home

2008-08-03T20:45:00.002-04:00

Back in June, I started working for a small engineering software company.

Really small. I am Employee #7.

My salary is much lower than what I was earning at my Corporate job, by a factor of about 1/3. But there are some key benefits that are worth far more than money ever could mean to me:

I'll own a stake in the company, and I can see how my hard work will contribute to the company's success.

I have the rare privilege of doing meaningful work for an ethical manager.

After my own work experiences and witnessing all the struggles that several of my friends have gone through in the past few years, I started to believe that good jobs just didn't exist. So now I'm especially grateful to have a job where my boss respects me and I actually enjoy the work I'm doing. I get to do real engineering, without the paperwork and bureaucracy and politics that consumed 80-90% of my time at my previous jobs.

I get "six or seven weeks" of vacation!!! (My boss wasn't worried about the details when he offered me the job.)

When I was working for the big Corporation, I had to use some of my precious vacation days to run errands or even to take a nap. Now that I have a flexible work schedule, I have no real need for six or seven weeks of vacation. My husband gets four weeks, so that's pretty much the upper limit for us to travel anyway. The real beauty of the whole situation is that I'm free from the stupid pettiness of tracking and hoarding half-days of vacation.

I get to work from home!!!

In fact, the company has no central headquarters. Everyone works from home, and we're scattered across the country-- Massachusetts, Ohio, Iowa, and Colorado. (Future-Employee #8 lives in California.) We communicate with each other mostly by email and IMs, and our weekly staff meetings are on IRC. Sure, there are times when it would be easier if we could communicate face to face, instead of using GoToMeeting. But the upside of working from home is that there are fewer distractions-- no coworkers talking on their speakerphones, no need to trek to various ends of the building several times a day, and no mandatory meetings consuming 10-20 hours every week. I feel far, far more productive than I ever did living in cube-land.

SIDEBAR: In my not-so humble opinion, cubicles may be one of the most evil, demoralizing inventions of all time. And don't even get me started on the new trend toward lower walls...

I've got to tell you, I really LOVE working from home. There are too many benefits to list them all, but here are some of my favorites:

I finally have an office with a window and a door. It's comfortable in a way that a cubicle could never, ever be.

I get to bring my dog to work with me. She naps under my desk while I'm working.

I sleep an hour later every day, and now I don't wake up every morning feeling like I've been hit by a truck! (I never realized how chronically sleep-deprived I really was.)

I can wear comfortable clothes, and I don't have to put on make-up or do my hair if I don't feel like it.

I eat healthier food for lunch, because now I'm not choosing between fast food or the cafeteria. There are no french fries in my kitchen, so I don't have to deal with that temptation at lunch time!

I have the flexibility to volunteer more of my time for things I feel passionate about (like getting 60 inner-city kids organized to go to camp) and I can go to yoga classes in the middle of the day. In fact, I usually work at my church on Thursdays-- Free coffee, free wireless, and free yoga!

In thinking about working from home, it occurred to me that for thousands of years, people worked in or near their homes. Whatever their trade or profession might be, they worked within walking distance of their homes. For many workers, it was normal to go home in the middle of the day for lunch and maybe even a siesta. So why on earth did we ever accept that a "normal" day should include an hour or more of road-rage and 8-10 hours spent sitting in a cube?

In the immortal words of Peter Gibbons:

We don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.

Generation X turns to Generation Y and says, "Quoi?"

2008-07-24T10:00:00.002-04:00

Great article in Newsweek: When Should Parents Stop Paying the Rent?

According to Wikipedia, Generation X includes people born between 1965 and 1980. Generation Y covers the years between 1980 -1994.

Sometimes a few years make all the difference. I am clearly a Gen Xer, while my younger sister (1980) and brother (1981) fit the Generation Y profile.

The difference being: My peers don't have parents subsidizing their lifestyles. Instead, Gen Xers are overwhelmed with debt-- from credit cards, mortgages, car payments, and the last few years of payments on our student loans. A completely different form of financial irresponsibility.

I blame it all on the Baby Boomers.

Nerds & Geeks

2008-05-24T14:00:00.002-04:00

There's an Op-Ed article in The New York Times that begs the question: What's the difference between a nerd and a geek?

According to the article (and my dictionary), "nerd" was originally used for someone who was book-smart but lacking in social skills, while a "geek" was just socially inept. But the author suggests that the terms have shifted somewhat in recent years, and based on my personal experience, I have to agree.

My spin on the difference between the two is that a nerd is intelligent but boring, and therefore often solitary. A geek, on the other hand, is smart and yet "differently abled" in the social arena. i.e. Geeks have passions, which they share with other geeks. It's just that our areas of interest are not the same as mainstream culture.

Regardless of the subtleties, it's obvious that the guy who wrote the article knows my husband:

At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades. The word described a high-school or college outcast who was persecuted by the jocks, preps, frat boys and sorority sisters. Nerds had their own heroes (Stan Lee of comic book fame), their own vocations (Dungeons & Dragons), their own religion (supplied by George Lucas and “Star Wars”) and their own skill sets (tech support)...

Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

Today, my husband and 4 of his friends are camped out in our kitchen, playing BattleTech for 8 or 10 hours. My husband is wearing the t-shirt that I gave to him for Christmas:

'Nuff said.

Correlation, or Causality?

2008-05-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

(Just wanted to share another brilliant gestalt from indexed!)

100th Post

2008-05-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

According to Blogger, this is my 100th blog post.

That's a pretty big milestone, so I guess I should mark this occasion by writing something significant. I should expound on some important humanitarian topic, or summarize what I've learned about Life, the Universe, and Everything, or maybe talk about how blogging has changed the world.

But instead, I think I'll quote from my very first blog post:

So here I am. Now what?

Because, after all, that quote is as true today as it was 3+ years ago. I still have no idea why I'm writing this blog. It's certainly not to attract mass readership, since I suspect that only 3 people in the world (counting myself) read what I write here.

And that's OK.

What I have discovered along the way is that I write for myself. I use this blog to recognize wonders and celebrate special occasions, to mark moments in time, to mourn losses and vent frustrations, to clarify my own thoughts, and to integrate interesting ideas from other people into my own perspective. Sure, there are times when I want to share these things with other people, but those moments are the exception rather than the rule.

I think that most bloggers, if we're being honest, would have to admit that, at its heart, blogging is a self-centered activity. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Dang. I just realized that I really screwed up. I was intending to make fun of the "100th Post" milestone by writing something short and flippant.

Oh, well, maybe next time...

Education is a Passport

2008-05-19T13:30:00.003-04:00

Don't get me wrong— I like Cincinnati, and I think it's a great place to live. But to make my case today, I'm obligated to present some unpleasant facts about our city:

Crime - Cincinnati is significantly worse than the national average for almost every type of crime. We have more prisoners than we have jail space, so we farm some of them out to another county. We don't trust our local government to spend money effectively, so we vote (repeatedly) against a tax levy to build a new jail.

When police patrol high crime areas, people complain that innocent people are being harassed or harmed by the police. When police don't patrol high crime areas, people complain that the city doesn't care about victims in poor neighborhoods.

Poverty - Cincinnati has been ranked as the 3rd poorest big city in the United States, with 28% of its residents living in poverty. We have a higher percentage of people living in poverty than Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago. Two-thirds (66%) of the students in Cincinnati Public Schools are classified as "economically-disadvantaged."

Racial Issues - Cincinnati is a black and white city; African-Americans aren't really a minority group here. The racial breakdown for people living in the city of Cincinnati is approximately 43% African-American and 53% white. In Cincinnati Public Schools, 75% of students are African-American or multi-racial, and 21% are white.

However, Cincinnati neighborhoods are generally segregated by race, and in this instance, separate is clearly not equal: The median incomes for Mt. Adams, Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout are roughly ten times the median incomes for Winton Hill, the West End, and Over-the-Rhine.

Traffic - OK, so I'll admit that, in the grand scheme of things, traffic is not one of the most significant problems that Cincinnati faces. In fact, it's way down at the bottom of the list, in tiny print. It's easy to get frustrated by traffic, but we really ought to be ten times more frustrated by the tremendous waste of human talent that is embedded in all of the statistics about poverty and crime in Cincinnati.

A few years ago, I happened to overhear a local talk-radio program. The hosts and the callers were bemoaning the problems with Cincinnati. I don't remember if they were talking about poverty, or crime, or racism, or some combination, but I do remember thinking, "Yeah, so you've got a strong opinion and a loud voice, but what are you DOING to make things better?" At that moment, I became 100% convinced of one thing:

An opinion is worthless unless there are actions backing it up.

I believe that you shouldn't complain about a problem unless you're willing to be part of the solution. (Admittedly, I fail to live up to this belief on a regular basis, but nevertheless, there it is.) It's both arrogant and irrelevant for me to take part in intellectual debates about all the things that are wrong with Cincinnati, unless I'm actively trying to do something to make things better.

So what are some potential solutions for crime, poverty, and racism? And how can we participate in those solutions?

We can expect our government to solve these problems. They'll continue to hire more police officers, build more jails, and lock up more people. They'll pass out more welfare checks, subsidize more housing, and pass more laws and quotas for affirmative action programs. We participate in this solution by paying taxes and complaining about how much money is being wasted. Because this method has worked so well in the past...

We can hope that non-profit organizations will scrounge up money from somewhere, so that they can pay their employees to solve these problems. Our participation could consist of [grudgingly] allowing our employers to withhold a pittance from each paycheck as part of their corporate United Way goals, or maybe we send a check to a particular agency once a year. The NPO's build lots of roads paved with good intentions, which certainly help lead some people out of poverty. Yet somehow the statistics continue to show that a little bit of ground is lost each year.

We can try to influence the hearts and minds of adults who have given up on all of their personal dreams, who don't have hopes for their kids, and who don't see any point in trying to improve their neighborhoods and communities. I believe that this approach could work, but personally, I haven't seen very many opportunities to get involved in this way.

We can step up and get involved with kids and try to change the path of their lives, so that they grow up to help solve problems, instead of following the statistical trends for crime and poverty. We tell them that education is important, and we show them where it can take them.

Working with kids just seems like the most obvious choice for me. At the very least, it's a solution that I can easily participate in— I can personally effect change by getting involved in a kid's life, and I can encourage other people to do the same. Even if we don't see 100% improvement, we will certainly see some progress in every kid, and that's just got to be better than doing nothing at all. And it's easy to get involved in these sorts of programs. Here are three examples I can recommend:

Whiz Kids Tutoring

Cincinnati Youth Collaborative

Big Brothers Big Sisters

So if you agree with my conclusion, please don't use "But I don't know how to get involved" as an excuse. Contact one of these agencies and they'll quickly get you hooked up with a kid. I promise, it's easier than you think.

This is a long post, and I've been working on it for about a month now. An article on thug culture got me thinking about what I wanted to say, and then I stumbled across some quotes from Bill Cosby's speech on the 50th anniversary of Brown V. Board of Education:

I mean, this is the future, and all of these people who lined up and done, they’ve got to be wondering what the hell happened. Brown V. Board of Education. These people who marched and were hit in the face with rocks and punched in the face to get an education, and we got these knuckleheads walking around who don’t want to learn English.

I know that you all know it. I just want to get you as angry as you ought to be.

When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that‘s not my Brother. And that’s not my Sister. They’re faking, and they’re dragging me way down because the state, the city, and all these people have to pick up the tab on them, because they don’t want to accept that they have to study to get an education...

...I’m telling you Christians, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you hit the streets? Why can’t you clean it out yourselves? It’s our time now, ladies and gentlemen. It is our time. And I’ve got good news for you. It’s not about money. It’s about you doing something that we ordinarily do— Get in somebody else’s business. It’s time for you to not accept the language that these people are speaking, which will take them nowhere. What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?

In addition to giving several speeches along these lines, Bill Cosby has written a book with his friend Alvin F. Poussaint, who is a Psychiatry Professor at Harvard Medical School. The book is called Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors. I picked it up at the library last week, and I think it's very good. Not funny, but definitely honest and challenging.

The book contains a quote from former Cincinnati mayor Dwight Tillery:

The high school graduation rate in Cincinnati for black males is 25 percent, compared to 43 percent for white males.

Those numbers shocked me, so I did a little bit of research and found out that there's been some significant progress for Cincinnati Public Schools in the past 7-8 years. According to the latest data, the overall four-year* graduation rate has increased from 51% in 2000 to 79% in 2007.

[*NOTE: Four-year graduation rates don't reflect kids who drop out before 9th grade. Tillery's statistics are specific to males, and they may or may not include boys who never made it to high school.]

While a 20% drop-out rate leaves plenty of room for improvement, Cincinnati Public Schools (and the Gates Foundation) deserve credit for the overall progress that they've made in a relatively short period of time. They also managed to eliminate the gap in graduation rates between blacks and whites, which is a huge accomplishment.

Bill Cosby's book also includes this quote from Malcolm X:

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

I think that's a great metaphor. What happens if you arrive somewhere new and different without a passport? Customs agents will turn you around and send you back where you came from.

Many of the kids in the Cincinnati Public School system know all about poverty, violence, and drugs, but they don't know anything about the world that exists outside their neighborhoods. They may sense that there is a gateway out there, but they also know that there are guards who are waiting to turn them away at the door. They need a passport to get through.

What we can do for kids is show them views of the big world that's out there waiting for them: interesting jobs and careers, opportunities to travel, healthy communities, stable families, comfortable homes, and financial security. And then we show them how to get a passport that will open doors for them: learn how to study, stay in school, work hard, develop technical skills or earn a degree, start a career.

I believe that education is a passport into a world of opportunity, and I believe that every kid needs someone who can show them how to get that passport.

Told You So...

2008-05-16T09:43:00.003-04:00

I said it before, and I'll say it again: Suing the American Red Cross for using the Red Cross trademark is a stupid move.

Ordinary People

2008-04-16T18:00:00.000-04:00

Another fantastic example of "lead by example" comes from this column in Newsweek, by Rabbi Marc Gellman:

All over this country ordinary people are simply deciding that they don't have to be rich to do good. These low-key philanthropists, some moved by their faith, others moved by an equally powerful secular compassion, are changing the moral landscape of America in ways that the movers and shakers and talking heads who fill the airwaves cannot yet comprehend.

My goal is to be this kind of ordinary.

...small things with great love...

Geese and Swans

2008-04-12T15:00:00.003-04:00

Maeve Binchy is one of my favorite authors. Her books aren't deep or philosophical or challenging. They're human and uncontrived, so they feel true and real. Reading her books makes me feel like I'm sitting down for a cup of tea with my mom and one of her friends, and they're telling the life stories of people that they've known for years. (Except that all of the people in her books live in Ireland.) So if you're looking for an enjoyable book to read, I would suggest The Cooper Beech, and if you like it, move on to The Evening Class, Scarlet Feather, Quentins, and Tara Road.

Here's what she has to say about her childhood:

And even though I was fat and hopeless at games, which are very unacceptable things for a schoolgirl, I was happy and confident. That was quite simply because I had a mother and a father at home who thought I was wonderful. They thought all their geese were swans. It was a gift greater than beauty or riches, the feeling that you were as fine as anyone else.

"They thought all their geese were swans."

How great is that?

Fauxnancial Vocabulary

2008-04-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

I know I said that I was going to stop talking about personal finance and the economy, but this article was just too good not to share. Here are new vocabulary words for our new economy:

Narcicession - An economic phenomenon characterized by consumers who believe that basic economic principles apply to other people, in other countries, and other eras, but not to them.

Denialation - A period following a narcicession, when consumers fail to understand why their net worth and standard of living are falling.

Fauxnancier - An investing genius who knows way more about making money than you or I do, except he doesn't, actually.

Can'titative analyst - A mathematical whiz who can't explain where several billion dollars suddenly disappeared to.

Masters of the Puniverse - Investment bankers who used to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and now must get by on a few million.

Magicware - Sophisticated software that analyzes complex investment vehicles and makes risk disappear.

Auditarium - Soundproof room at banks where auditors are quarantined.

Benopoly - An economy in which only the Federal Reserve holds risky securities.

Econogloss - Presidential pronouncements that paint the economy as stable. Must be reapplied frequently.

Mortgage breaker - A lending institution that peddles mortgages designed to self-destruct.

Homeblower - A consumer who thinks that financing a house with a mortgage requiring 60 percent of his monthly take-home pay will work out, somehow.

More Lanes, More Parking

2008-04-11T09:30:00.002-04:00

They're planning to add a 3rd exit lane to the Fields Ertel exit.

The solution is not more lanes. The solution is optimizing traffic lights.

Cincinnati tends to use traffic lights like airlocks. Light A turns red, and traffic backs up all the way to Light B and beyond. Light B turns red, and Light A turns green, releasing the traffic in the airlock. It stays green for awhile even though the airlock is empty. When Light B turns green, and the traffic behind it starts moving, Light A turns red again.

Examples of airlocks can be found all around Fields Ertel and Mason Montgomery area. The whole area is just one gigantic, grid-locked parking lot. There's simply nowhere for cars coming off of I-71 to go when they reach the end of the exit ramp. Adding more parking on the exit ramp isn't going to solve the problem.

The interchange of Reed Hartman and I-275 is another perfect example of an airlock system. When I lived up on Fields Ertel, I used to take Reed Hartman to get to work everyday. And every morning, I would wait through 8-10 light cycles to cross over I-275. (I had plenty of time to count them, as I sat there for 20 minutes drinking my coffee.) They attempted to "fix" that interchange by doubling the number of lanes, at a cost that would probably boggle my mind if I knew what it was. Reed Hartman now has EIGHT lanes, but traffic still doesn't flow across I-275-- There are just twice as many cars parked in the airlock now.

Traffic planners in this city seem convinced that the purpose of traffic lights is to stop traffic, but really, the purpose should be to optimize the flow of traffic. When I was working on my thesis up in Cleveland, I had to drive across town to Metro Hospital every day. I could drive on Carnegie Avenue all the way from I-90 to Cedar Hill (a distance of over 3 miles through a densely urban area) at nearly 50 mph without stopping for a single light. The lights had been optimized to move traffic out of downtown as quickly as possible during the 4:30 - 6pm rush hour, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it's simply amazing to see what happens when lights are used to keep traffic flowing.

Thousands of cars sit idling at lights all over Cincinnati right now. Starting and stopping burns much more fuel than keeping cars moving. Think of how much gasoline usage and auto emissions could be reduced if traffic planners just eliminated airlocks and optimized lights to keep traffic flowing.

Education Prognostication

2008-04-09T15:00:00.001-04:00

I believe that home-schooling will continue to gain momentum in the next five to ten years. My prediction is that home-schooling families will form co-operative groups where one parent teaches Math and Science, another parent teaches English and Social Studies, and yet another parent teaches Art and Music, for example.

And we'll look at them and wonder why it costs $13,000 for each child in public schools, when families can do it for less than $500 per year.

Financial Literacy

2008-04-09T10:00:00.007-04:00

OK, one more rant on personal finance and then I'll stop. Maybe.

Newsweek published an article called Clues for the Clueless about trying to improve financial literacy in America. The article opens with this question:

It is, or at least it should be, a simple question. You have $200 in an investment that's earning 10% a year. Assuming you let the money grow, how much would you have at the end of two years?

Here's how American adults answered that question:

18% said $242.

34% said $240.

48% had no clue.

Extrapolating from those results:

Fewer than 1 in 5 adults grasp the basic principles of compound interest. In terms of financial "literacy" we can assume that this group can at least read street signs and newspaper articles.

1 in 3 understand how to calculate simple interest, but they don't understand that there's a difference between simple and compound interest. This group has learned the alphabet, and maybe they can work their way through Dr. Seuss books.

Roughly half of all American adults don't understand simple OR compound interest. They don't understand sales tax, let alone credit cards and mortgages. Financially, they're completely illiterate.

And we wonder why our country is having economic problems? Who would ever suspect that big companies might try to take advantage of an ignorant group of consumers like this? Big companies always act in the best interests of their customers. Because that's their job, right?

Oh, wait, I forgot... The primary responsibility of big companies is actually to return huge profits to their investors. And investors really don't care what happens to customers, as long as people keep buying what the company is selling. It reminds me of the line from Casablanca: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" "Here are your winnings, sir." "Oh, thank you very much."

The problem with the system is that regulators assumed that banks would want to protect themselves and act in their own long-term self-interest. But corporations generally set up employee metrics that reward short-term behaviors, and people generally figure out ways to achieve their metrics. (i.e. People do what you pay them to do. That's the double-edged sword of metrics.) In this case, individuals within the banks recognized that they could best advance their careers by creating complicated, high-risk mortgages and bundling them as securities, and they also realized that they would be promoted and out-of-sight by the time the long-term effects came back home to roost.

SIDEBAR: Speaking of "creative" financing... We have an acquaintance who has recently gotten into the consumer finance industry. He mostly works with people who are on the verge of bankruptcy due to credit card debt and/or "unconventional" mortgages. Recently, he was telling us about a potential client who had a less-than-interest-only mortgage. Here's how it worked:
The guy bought a house for $280,000 with essentially no down-payment. He pays the bank something like $2,000 per month, which is actually less than the interest being accrued on the loan. At the end of 30 years, he has to make a "balloon payment" to the bank of $320,000.

Does it make any sense to deliberately create a situation where someone is perpetually upside-down on a 30-year mortgage? (Yes, the house will probably be worth much more than $320,000 at the end of 30 years, but he's still going to be in serious trouble if he tries to sell the house after only 5 years.) How is it even a mortgage? It looks suspiciously like a love child begotten when Luxury Rental Property went out slumming and had a one-night stand with Payday Loans.

So anyway, back to the Newsweek article...

Financial pros have fretted for decades over our ignorance about money. It's not that Americans' financial knowledge has declined, but that the need for it has increased. Until 30 years ago, people shopped mostly with cash, relied on company pensions for retirement and bought houses using fixed-rate mortgages. Today's world of credit cards, 401(k)s and exotic mortgages require more-sophisticated consumers, but there are few mechanisms to aid this transformation. Some high schools offer courses that teach students how to balance a checkbook or follow the stock market, but only 18 states require personal-finance instruction, and some principals resist adding the topic to schedules already crowded with really useful classes, like trigonometry.

I'm an engineer, so yeah, I actually do think that trigonometry is useful. I also think that American high schools need to be pushing more math, not just making substitutions, if we hope to compete with the rest of the developing world. But in the grand scheme of things, I do believe that a class in personal finance is more important than trigonometry or pre-calculus for the vast majority of high school students, especially for students who hate math and don't plan on pursuing any sort of higher education. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, "If you don't understand math, people will cheat you and take advantage of you. And you won't even know that they're doing it. You'll just know that you're always broke, and you always will be."

Here's the next frustrating bit from the article...

Class and culture also play a role in financial-phobia. When Laureen Hudson, a 39-year-old technical editor, ponders why so many of her friends are clueless about money, she recalls how her crowd of left-leaning humanities and science majors held particular disdain for business students, who always had their noses in The Wall Street Journal. "It's considered noble to ignore money, and it's considered grubby or lesser to concern yourself with finance," she says.

I believe there's a special place in hell for people who choose willful ignorance. (In this case, it's called bankruptcy court.)

I've finished my rant, so I'm going to conclude with this brilliant gestalt from indexed:

As the saying goes, "A picture is worth 1,000 words." Or, in this case, a graph...

Happy, Happy Day!

2008-03-21T18:00:00.002-04:00

My all-time-favorite restaurant is finally opening a location in Cincinnati!!!

When I lived in Cleveland, I got hooked on the food from a little Lebanese/Mediterranean restaurant called Aladdin's Eatery, and I have missed it terribly ever since I moved to Cincinnati. For the past 10 years I have been whining about how much I miss Aladdin's. Anytime we are anywhere near Cleveland, I try to arrange a detour so that we can eat there, but that only happens every couple of years, and it just isn't enough.

So today, my husband and I were on our way up to Jungle Jim's, when I happened to spot the Aladdin's logo on a new shop front along Union Center Boulevard! It made my day! Heck, it made my year!

Now, if they would just open an Arabica coffee house, my life in Cincinnati would be complete!

Fake Plastic Fish

2008-03-12T11:00:00.003-04:00

I just stumbled across a blog called Fake Plastic Fish - "They're cute, and if we don't solve our plastic problem, they could be the only kind we have left." It caught my attention because my sister also writes a blog about issues related to our oceans.

What I find interesting is that this woman is not trying to change the entire world, she's just trying an experiment to see if she can eliminate plastic waste from her own life. Her blog is well-written, honest, and open-minded. If she took a tone of "Everyone should be doing this" then I would probably be turned off by the whole concept. But instead, she writes from the perspective of "Here's what I'm trying to do, and how I'm going about doing it." And I find myself inspired and challenged by her lead-by-example attitude.

I'm really intrigued by her list of changes and sacrifices that she's made to reduce plastic waste. It made me think deeply about how very, very difficult her quest actually is. In fact, most of the plastic sources she mentions are in products that I would never think about: return mail envelopes, frozen vegetable boxes, feminine hygiene products, etc. (Not to mention that virtually every product comes wrapped in some sort of plastic film.)

This concept hits especially hard because a bunch of news stories came out on Monday, disclosing that traces of pharmaceutical drugs and hormones are present in most cities' tap water, regardless of the source-- reservoirs, rivers, aquafers, and even well water.

A friend of mine from ski patrol works for the EPA, and last year he told me that virtually all of our food and water sources are contaminated with traces of hormones and plastic compounds. He said that most of their efforts at the EPA are focussed on trying to figure out which chemicals are actually harmful, and at what concentrations, because there's simply no way to eliminate them from our food. Most of the chemicals are very stable, so they don't break down over time, and they can't be filtered out of our water supplies. Disturbing and depressing.

Who would do that to a child?

2008-03-11T09:30:00.003-04:00

This morning, I stumbled across this article about the long-term effects of giving children bizarre names. This section made me laugh, because it's so completely true:

“Today it’s all about individuality,” Mr. Sherrod said. “In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still try.

“I can’t tell you,” Mr. Sherrod said, “how often I’ve heard guys who wanted their kid to be able to say truthfully, ‘Danger is my middle name.’ But their wives absolutely refused.”

A few years ago, my husband came up with "Perry Winkle" as a name for one of our future kids. He thinks my infatuation with the color will get me to buy into his goofy suggestion, so he brings it up frequently, hoping that he'll eventually wear me down. But he is tragically mistaken in this belief. I would never do that to a little boy. (Although I could totally see myself succumbing to the temptation of naming a girl Violet or Lavender.)

I will grant you this: Punny and unusual names give other people something to talk about. I know I've had numerous conversations with friends, exchanging anecdotes like "I knew a kid named Dusty Hall" and "I went to school with a guy named Joe Blow, Jr." Of course, the African-American community has also contributed greatly to the list creative and unique names, including kids named Uneek, as a matter of fact.

My personal favorite comes from my high school English teacher. (Her name, incidentally, was Sharon Stone.) She swore that a family of three kids went through our school with the names Jack Pine, Douglas Fir, and Merry Christmas Tree. (At least those kids had the option of playing it straight by simply keeping their middle names under wraps.)

I'd love to get some comments on this-- What are some of the best/worst names you've ever encountered personally? (I'm not asking for urban myths about ignorant parents naming babies after diseases or anatomical terms.) I'll start the ball rolling by saying that I had a friend in high school named Scott Crabbs, which seems innocent enough until someone asks, "Who's Scott Crabbs?"

Snow Geek

2008-03-08T10:30:00.005-05:00

My husband is a geek. (That's not an insult-- He's proud of it!)

He's on the phone with his dad right now. They're curmudgeoning together about the stupidity of the news broadcasts. (It's how they bond.)

Changing the subject, he says, "Have you noticed how every surface is covered with a perfect, three-dimensional parabolic arc or dome? I just think that's really cool!"

When we first woke up this morning, he called me over to the kitchen window to point out the dome of snow on the post-light in front of our garage.

SNOWMAGGEDON!

2008-03-08T10:00:00.003-05:00

Channel 5 News is using "SNOWMAGGEDON" as a sub-title for their news stories. I kid you not.

We're under a Level 3 snow emergency, and the news is devoting their entire broadcast to providing helpful tips and critical information such as:

Police can give you a ticket if you are out driving without a really good reason, so stay home if at all possible. Unless you need to get groceries, or you want to take your kids sledding, or you're planning to run some errands today...

If you are going to drive somewhere, file a travel plan with somebody so that they can tell authorities where to start digging. Pack an emergency kit in your car, including an ice scraper, a blanket, a bottle of water, a cell phone, a brightly colored rag to tie to your antenna, several bags of sand, road flares, an avalanche beacon, a month's supply of food, water-proof matches & firewood, self-contained breathing apparatus, and a team of sled dogs. If you get stranded, stay in your car, because you could get disoriented by the vast expanse of white and wind up walking in circles for hours, until you eventually freeze to death.

Road crews are not using salt on the roadways, because it wouldn't be effective for these types of conditions. (i.e. It would be pointless to create a big slushy mess on top of packed snow. They know what they're doing, so please don't call and complain.)

Everything in the greater Cincinnati area is closed, but just in case you have any doubts, we're going to list every school, business, store, charity, and government agency, one by one, across the bottom of your screen.

[Repetition of the above, ad nauseum]

The White Death

2008-03-07T17:00:00.005-05:00

We're having a blizzard! Or, more technically, Cincinnati is under a Blizzard Warning until tomorrow afternoon.

When we woke up this morning, we found just a light dusting of snow had fallen overnight. We haven't had any really heavy snow showers, but it's been coming down in a steady flurry all day long, so we now have about 6 inches in our back yard, with plenty more on the way. The weathermen are breathlessly predicting 11-15 inches, which is a huge amount of snow for a city so close to the Mason-Dixon line.

Bella has been loving every minute of it. One of her favorite toys is a open-mesh ball made from a foam-rubber material, like Crocs. When she takes it outside, it fills up with snow, and then she brings it back inside and scatters snow all over the place. (I don't mind snow on the floor much-- It's an improvement over her normal habit of bringing sticks into the house and turning them into mulch all over the carpet.)

She's clearly one of the few souls who enjoys snow as much as I do. Everyone else around here views it as a dreaded plague!

Consume-Less Challenge

2008-03-05T11:30:00.005-05:00

So, back to the Consumed series...

Normally, our small group meets on Friday nights, and we take turns hosting at our respective homes. We have dinner together from 7-8pm and then start our discussions around 8-8:30. Since my husband and I were supposed to leave for a vacation last Friday, we rescheduled the meeting for Wednesday night last week. Our friends' R & B offered to host everyone at their house in Villa Hills, KY. We had a very nice meal together, and then we cleared the table and moved into the living room to start our discussion. As I was setting out the homemade cookies that I had made, I realized that I hadn't brought the materials for the group discussion. (The materials for each week are sealed, and we're not supposed to open them in advance, so I had no idea what we were supposed to discuss.) I felt so irresponsible-- I was so focussed on providing dessert that I forgot the whole point of why we were getting together that evening.

I placed a couple of desperate phone calls to folks who are on staff at the church, and I was lucky enough to get in touch with one of the guys who works on the Facilities team. He wasn't working at the church that evening, but he's a host for a group too, so he had the materials with him at home, and he read the topics for discussion to me over the phone while I took notes, so I was able to redeem my stupid mistake.

Here's the challenge that was described in the group materials:

What if we could do with less? What if we could simplify our lives by letting go of behaviors that consume us? What if we could better appreciate the things that are free? This is the Consume-Less Challenge - A week to see what it's like to live differently, spend differently, rest, re-prioritize, and maybe discover something you've lost.

Our group had to commit to one of the following levels:

1. Use cash for every purchase. No exceptions.

2. Use cash for every purchase AND eliminate that one thing that consumes your time that you wrote about in your [personal study] guide this week. It could be anything from channel surfing, to driving all over the city, to finding the best sale. But don't quit taking care of your kids or doing regular work and school stuff. This isn't a doctor's note, wise guy.

3. Use cash for everything; eliminate that one thing that consumes your time; AND borrow, barter, or just receive one thing you need or want. For example, cook someone's dinner all week in exchange for landscape help. Need a suit? Borrow your friend's. Need a ride? Carpool. Have extra tickets to a game? Give them to someone in your group, and now they've got free entertainment.

4. Use cash for everything; eliminate that one thing that consumes your time; borrow, barter, or just receive one thing you need; AND don't buy anything except groceries and gas.

5. Eliminate that one thing that consumes your time AND don't buy anything at all. All week. Reduce, reuse, reclaim. (Congratulations on being so hardcore. Now go make sure your Prius isn't double-parked.)

Our group chose to commit to Level 2, although R & B have decided to try to fulfill Level 3 as well. (We tried to imagine what we would have to do for Level 5. Everyone agreed that we had enough food in our pantries to ensure that we would have plenty to eat, but not being able to buy gas for our cars would be a major problem for most of us.) I think we're going to have lots to talk about this week, and I'm looking forward to hearing about everyone's experiences.

The church is open to the public everyday, and volunteers make sure that free coffee is always available. Yesterday, the building also served as a polling site for 6 precincts in Cincinnati, so I volunteered to help keep the coffee flowing for all the people coming to vote. I asked some of the other volunteers what levels their groups had committed to, and one of the women said that her group had opted for Level 5. I'm intrigued.

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

2008-02-29T18:30:00.001-05:00

I've been teaching a class at UC for 8 weeks now, but I'm still not officially an employee yet. I thought things moved slowly in big companies, but university bureaucracy takes it to a whole new level. Hopefully, I'll eventually get paid for all the time and effort I've put into this class-- I've certainly enjoyed the intellectual challenge, but not enough to do it for free.

Since the Adjunct Instructor position makes me a public employee of the state of Ohio, I had to fill out a Declaration of Material Assistance Form to ensure that I'm not a terrorist. The DMA form references the Department of Homeland Security's list of official terrorist organizations as designated by the U.S. Department of State.

OBVIOUSLY, I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of any terrorist organizations, and I would not knowingly give material aid to any terrorist organizations. Duh.

I find it surreal to think that our federal and state governments have developed a two-page form to seriously ask the following questions:

For each question, indicate either “yes,” or “no” in the space provided. Responses must be truthful to the best of your knowledge.
1. Are you a member of an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
2. Have you used any position of prominence you have with any country to persuade others to support an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
3. Have you knowingly solicited funds or other things of value for an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
4. Have you solicited any individual for membership in an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
5. Have you committed an act that you know, or reasonably should have known, affords "material support or resources" to an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
6. Have you hired or compensated a person you knew to be a member of an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List, or a person you knew to be engaged in planning, assisting, or carrying out an act of terrorism? Yes No

Who in their right mind would answer "YES"?!? Correction: Who in any state of mind would say YES to one of those questions?

Oh, wait, here's the kicker:

I hereby certify that the answers I have made to all of the questions on this declaration are true to the best of my knowledge. I understand that if this declaration is not completed in its entirety, it will not be processed and I will be automatically disqualified. I understand that I am responsible for the correctness of this declaration. I understand that failure to disclose the provision of material assistance to an organization identified on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List, or knowingly making false statements regarding material assistance to such an organization is a felony of the fifth degree. I understand that any answer of “yes” to any question, or the failure to answer “no” to any question on this declaration shall serve as a disclosure that material assistance to an organization identified on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List has been provided by myself or my organization. If I am signing this on behalf of a company, business or organization, I hereby acknowledge that I have the authority to make this certification on behalf of the company, business or organization referenced above.

"I guess I have to be completely honest, because I'm providing my signature at the bottom of the form." Everyone knows that terrorists prize their personal integrity enough to disclose their secret plans for destroying Western Civilization.

Unfortunately, my sense of mischieviousness is just enough to tempt me to check one of the "Yes" boxes, because I'm curious to see what would happen. Can you imagine the conversation with the government agents assigned to the case? "Which terrorist group did you provide with material support or resources? What kind of material support did you provide?" "Oh, I'm not telling you that. You'll have to figure that out on your own." (Fortunately, my senses of rationality and self-preservation are powerful enough to overwhelm my sense of mischieviousness and kick its butt.)

I shouldn't even joke about this sort of thing, least of all on a website. The government will probably be monitoring everything I write from now on, tapping my phone lines, and doing background checks to determine if any of my acquaintances are suspected terrorists.

(For the record, just in case any government agents ARE reading this, the whole "BP Refinery" thing was a JOKE. Besides which, my only involvement was reading the email sent from K.E. to A.N. Yes, I served as a personal reference for each of them when they applied for Top Secret security clearance, but I've already explained the whole situation to two different NSA agents, so it's time to let it go already.)

Seriously, I'd like to know what group of people sat in a room together and decided that this form was a good idea. How many hours have been wasted creating it, revising it, publishing it, training people on it, distributing it to all state-controlled Human Resource departments, getting employees and organizations to fill it out, and filing it away??? And who's really intent on destroying Western Civilization?

Capitalism & Consumption Factors

2008-02-23T08:00:00.003-05:00

To continue on the Consumed theme, here's a couple of great quotes from a blog posting by Greg Boyd:

It’s hard to deny that capitalism is the best economic system around. It creates wealth far better than feudalism, communism, socialism or any other system one could name. But for all its advantages, capitalism has one major drawback that [Christians] need to be concerned about: It needs people to stay perpetually hungry for more. If Americans as a whole ever followed Paul’s instruction to be content with basic food and clothing and not pursue wealth (1 Tim. 6:6-11), the system would come to a grinding halt. The undeniable truth is that capitalism runs on greed.

For example, Americans enjoy a lifestyle that is about four times the global average. Yet we on average spend 97 to 98 percent of our wealth on ourselves – despite the fact that close to a billion people live on the threshold of starvation with 40,000 dying each day of issues related to poverty, malnutrition and preventable or treatable disease. This is greed. We are hoarding resources while neighbors lack adequate food, shelter and medicine.

As Jenn pointed out in her comment yesterday, economists estimate that people in developed countries consume 32 times more natural resources than people from undeveloped countries. The looming crisis comes from the fact that a lot of undeveloped countries are developing, and starting to catch up with our consumption factor. There are 2 billion people in China and India who are eager to live the same sort of lifestyle that we currently enjoy:

But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?

No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

...which is just fancy economist-speak for "Money doesn't buy Happiness."

What I find most interesting about this topic is that Christian evangelists, economists, ecologists, and environmentalists are beginning to find common ground.

Consumed Economy

2008-02-22T11:00:00.015-05:00

Every year, our church dedicates February & March to a 6-week-long special event. They encourage everyone to join a small group, they distribute study materials for each group and each individual, and they use the weekend services to set up the topics for individual study and group discussion each week. This year, approximately 40 other churches in the Cincinnati area have joined in as well.

This year, the theme is Consumed:

"Bombarded with the promises of savvy marketers and easy credit, we’re offered beauty, significance, security, and happiness in just six easy installments and low, low monthly payments. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, we often feel like we never have enough. But there’s another way. There’s freedom to be had in a more open-handed approach to our time, money, and possessions. In that freedom, we can discover what it means to be consumed with the One who designed us to be so much more than a cog in a consumer-driven economy. And that will change everything."

They've been planning this event for several months, and it couldn't be more timely-- It seems like every news story in the past couple of weeks has declared that the American economy is sliding into recession. Everywhere I look, I see indications of how unhealthy and toxic our consumeristic culture really is. Here are some things that have made me think deeply about this topic this week:

A quote about the definition of the word consume:
"If you go back to [early dictionaries] of the English language, to consume meant to exhaust, to pillage, to lay waste, to destroy. In fact, even in our grandparents' generation, when somebody had tuberculosis, they called it 'consumption.' So up until this century, to be a consumer was not a good thing; it was considered a bad thing." --Jeremy Rifkin, American economist and founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends

(I've always been vaguely uneasy with the "consumer" title. It makes me feel like a parasite. Now I know why.)

A blog discussion about the "prosperity gospel" that is being taught by some misguided churches.

A group of friends who are starting a charity and asking Americans to use their tax rebates to build wells in Africa to save thousands of lives.

An editorial column in the New York Times that suggests Go on a Savings Spree as a way to save the economy from recession:
"Some research suggests that asset-holders behave more responsibly and are more civic-minded than those without wealth. After all, they have a stake in the future of the economy and their community... My own research suggests that having savings and investment equity is one of the best predictors of whether someone’s children will attend and graduate from college. Investing motivates people of all income levels to defer gratification and become knowledgeable about the economy and society."

An article in Newsweek explaining Why Americans Are Going Broke.
"If consumers actually saved money and paid off their debt, could it hurt the U.S. economy?"
"One reason we have all these problems is that we are supposed to. It drives our economy. If everyone had no debt and was into saving, then our economy—as it is designed today—would not be performing as well as it should, according to economists. But I think we have to ask: Would we as citizens be happier? I argue that we would."

A strange and thought-provoking article in Newsweek that documents a correlation between the prevalence of payday lenders (i.e. predatory lending) and the amount of political influence that conservative Christian groups have in certain areas. ("Things that make you go Hmmmm....")

Meanwhile, the government continues to tell us that the most patriotic thing we can do for our country is to spend money as fast as we can. It's our duty as Americans.

(For the record, I don't believe that the tax rebate checks will stop a recession. People aren't going to be spending them the way the government hopes-- I expect that the majority of average Americans will simply use the checks to help relieve some of the debt that they're already in. Even assuming that some folks actually spend the money on new purchases, most of those items will probably have been manufactured overseas, which isn't going to help the American economy. IMHO, If they really want to help the economy in the long term, they should be reducing the national debt and/or investing more in education so that we'll have a skilled work force for the future. But unfortunately, no one ever asks me!)

Everyone has a different spin on how the tax rebate checks can be put to best use. So the question is, what are YOU going to do with your tax refund check? Pay down some debt? Spend it? Invest it? Save people's lives? Comments are welcome!

Vote!

2008-02-13T13:30:00.001-05:00

Forget Billary vs. Obama vs. McCain vs. Huckabee... The best candidate is clearly Dave Barry.

Entitled Brats

2008-02-10T22:30:00.001-05:00

Your indulgent parenting is spawning a generation of entitled hipster brats.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

What amazes me is that this little bit of common sense is no longer common:

Greg Ramey is a child psychologist with nearly 30 years of experience counseling families and children at Dayton Children's in Dayton, Ohio. He says the biggest change he's seen is that parents no longer want to act like parents. "Over and over, I see parents who try to be their kids' best friends," he says. "That's a flashing red light. Our kids don't need to be our buddies. They can like us when they're 30. Mostly what kids want is for a parent to be in charge."

Think about what the phrase "spoiled rotten" really implies. Would you want to be around a person whose character is atrophied, rancid, or decayed? Neither would anyone else. How have we come to view Indulgence = Love and Discipline = Abuse, when in fact the opposite is true?

Sour Apple

2008-01-18T13:30:00.000-05:00

I got an iPod touch for Christmas. It's very clever product, but I was baffled as to why Apple would ship the iPod touch without at least the same Mail application that comes standard on the iPhone. The Mail application works on both devices, and there are some brilliant hackers out there who have made it possible to break into the operating software and install the iPhone applications on the iPod touch, so that it will run Mail, Maps, Weather, Notes, and Stocks. Obviously, most customers would rather NOT jump through these hoops, but these applications are useful enough to entice hundreds (if not thousands) of iPod touch owners.

So why would Apple not ship the iPod touch with these applications?

As it turns out, it's because they decided to develop a marketing strategy called "Gouge the Christmas Customers."

Today, less than a month after Christmas, I received an email from Apple, advertising these five applications, which will now come standard with all new iPod touch devices.

However, existing owners will have to pay $20 to download these applications.

I'm very disappointed in Apple. This decision represents a shameless abuse of loyal customers, and Apple is generating far more ill-will among their customer base than they are generating revenue for the company. It's a colossally stupid move from a company that should know better.

The Front of the Class

2008-01-11T13:00:00.000-05:00

I got a new title this week: Adjunct Instructor.

On Tuesday night, I started teaching a Mechanical Engineering course at a branch of UC. It's a Dynamics class with 16-17 students, and it's offered specifically for Electrical Engineering Technology majors. I bet my husband that I would be the only woman in the room, and of course I won the bet. (EE is probably the MOST male-dominated of all engineering fields.)

Since I had general anesthesia for the procedure on Tuesday, my husband had to drive me to the class. I lectured for about 45 minutes, but I was still a bit loopy, so I figured it was OK to end the class early. I don't think they'll hold it against me!

Done!

2008-01-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

It's taken more than two months now, but I have apparently completed every single test that my team of doctors could think of-- I've had approximately 20 vials of blood drawn, I went through a very unpleasant x-ray procedure, and we wrapped it all up with outpatient surgery on Tuesday this week-- and I'm finally DONE!!!

The final consensus seems to be that there's nothing seriously wrong with me, or at least nothing that can't be counteracted by appropriate medications, so that's a huge relief.

As it turns out, I have two different genetic issues that both relate to blood clotting. MTHFR mutations can cause clotting, and I also have another condition that prevents clots from breaking down. (My official diagnosis is that I am compound heterozygous for MTHFR and I am 4G/4G homozygous for PAI-1, which stands for Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor.) So now I'll be taking 8 pills/day, but eventually I should be able to drop down to just 4 pills/day, and that doesn't seem so bad.

Income

2007-12-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

This week I earned my first income for my new business, and in fact, "the check's in the mail" as of this moment!

Which is not to say that the business is profitable, since I haven't yet covered the start-up costs for hiring a lawyer, filing the paperwork with the state, or buying a laptop, but it's certainly a step in the right direction!

I am going to be partnering with an engineering software company to provide customer training and consulting services, and this week I traveled up to Detroit to help with an on-site training class for the first time. They're expecting to have 8-12 training sessions coming up in 2008, so I'm hoping that this will become a regular source of income!

Don't be a BLY

2007-11-29T18:00:00.000-05:00

A busy day... I spent a few hours meeting with three of my friends to discuss stuff related to their jobs/businesses. During yoga, a guy in my class appeared to have suffered a heart attack, and I helped convince him that his symptoms were serious and that he needed to go see a doctor immediately. I also had to go get blood drawn for one more test. (Let's see, this makes the 4th time I've gotten stuck in the arm in just 4 weeks. I'm not really enjoying this mutant thing, and neither is my insurance company.)

I arrived at the testing lab at 3:30, and sat in the unattended waiting room for 15 minutes before someone came out to see why I was there. I presented my script for the testing, and she immediately starting looking for reasons why she couldn't draw my blood, mostly because she said that the office closes at 4pm. (Nevermind that the company's brochures and the signs in the waiting room all state that the office hours are 7:30 - 4:30.) First of all, she looked in a reference manual and found that one version of the test required fasting for 12 hours. I told her that my doctor's office hadn't mentioned anything about that. She double-checked the book and found out that there was an alternate version of the test which didn't require fasting. She called my doctor's office, probably hoping that they wouldn't answer, but they did. They said that I didn't need to do the fasting version of the test. Finally, she settled on the idea that the sample would require "immediate" processing, and the next courier pick-up wouldn't be until 7pm, so she said I'd have to go to a different office to have the blood drawn and collected in a timely fashion. It didn't seem worth having a debate about the definition of "immediate" processing, so I got directions to the other office and went on my merry way.

Things got even more aggravating on my way out of the parking lot. When I came to the end of my row of parking spaces, I was preparing to turn right, into the exit lane for the parking lot. As I was glancing over my left shoulder, checking for cars moving toward the exit, I heard a car horn and instinctively slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting a very expensive Mega-SUV, driven by a woman with an attitude as big as her vehicle. (She had just turned right into the parking lot from the street.) She was actually in MY lane, but apparently it's MY fault that her Land Yacht is way too big to navigate a normal turning radius. Obviously, I must be the idiot in this situation, because she actually rolled down her window to scream obscenities at me.

So the moral of the story for today is: Don't be a Bitch in a Land Yacht.

(Thanks for letting me vent.)

It's Official: I'm a Mutant.

2007-11-21T14:00:00.000-05:00

More specifically, I found out yesterday that I have compound heterozygous (C667T and A1298C) mutations for the MTHFR gene. These mutations cause a thrombophilia (blood clotting) disorder. So now I've got follow-up appointments with a whole host of doctors, including a hemotologist and an endocrinologist.

There are a couple of reasons why finding out that I have this mutation is actually good news:

It explains the significant medical issues that I've had this year, which have caused anxiety, depression, and grief for both me and my husband. So as weird as this may sound, it actually comes as a huge relief to have some sort of definitive diagnosis, because now we have hope that things can be better in the future.

The condition is treatable, and the treatment is pretty simple and very effective-- I'll just have to take baby aspirin and extra supplements of folic acid, B6, and B12 for the rest of my life. (I may also need heparin injections, but not all the time.)

By finding this out now, I can significantly reduce my risk of having a thrombosis, stroke, or heart attack later on in life.

Since it's an inherited condition, my family can be tested for it as well. And if turns out that some of them are "mutants" too, then they can also reduce their risk of having thromboses, strokes, or heart attacks.

Smart

2007-11-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

SmartCars are coming to the USA!

I've been fascinated with SmartCars since I saw them in Italy a couple of years ago. When I first saw them zipping around the streets of Rome, they reminded me of the Friends episode where Rachel adopts a hairless cat, and Joey just keeps saying, "It's not a CAT!" Because, really, a SmartCar is not a CAR. It's more like a Vespa built for two, or a golf cart on steroids.

I think a big part of their appeal is that they're just so darn happy...

Obviously, SmartCars are meant for urban life. Since they're only as long as a normal car is wide, they can park in a parallel parking space with their nose against the curb. To really appreciate their size, you have to see them in context. This SmartCar is parked next to a Nissan Micra, a sub-compact economy car:

But don't underestimate their ability to get-up-and-go! We were doing 145 kph (90 mph) on the Autostrada when a SmartCar strolled past us. (I suspect that many Italians have found ways to circumvent the speed-limiting controller.) SmartCar convertibles are also available, and they also make a snazzy little Roadster.

I've been rabidly anti-SUV for more than 10 years now. (There are so many good reasons why I hate SUVs that I'm not even going to begin to list them here.) So I'm not even upset about gas prices jumping above $3/gallon. I'm just glad that people may finally be thinking more seriously about buying smaller cars! Happy day!

Lunacy & Conspiracy

2007-09-24T18:00:00.000-04:00

So the question is: How on Earth did a raving lunatic wind up in charge of an entire country? (Show of hands: Who thinks it's a good idea to change a country's time zone by 30 minutes with only a week's advance notice? I don't see any supporters...)

A few weeks ago at my church, I met a woman from Venezuela. She loves her country, but she doesn't believe that she'll ever be able to go back there, because Chavez is dangerous, and the destruction and chaos that he is creating will probably last for decades. I have to admit that I had a little trouble understanding her heavily-accented English, so I'm a little sketchy on all of the details, but apparently, she believes that the reason that Chavez is still in power is because he gives huge "donations" to Jimmy Carter's charity, which co-incidentally is also responsible for certifying the election results in Venezuela.

According to the Hugo Chavez article in Wikipedia, the Carter Center continues to validate all election results, despite recurring evidence of fraud:

General elections were held on July 30, 2000. Chávez's coalition garnered two-thirds of seats in the National Assembly while Chávez was reelected with 60% of the votes. The Carter Center monitored the election; their report stated that, due to lack of transparency, Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE; "National Electoral Council") partiality, and political pressure from the Chávez government that resulted in early elections, it was unable to validate the official CNE results. However, they concluded that the presidential election legitimately expressed the will of the people.

Finally, after opposition leaders submitted to the CNE a valid petition with 2,436,830 signatures that requested a presidential recall referendum, a recall referendum was announced on June 8, 2004 by the CNE. Chávez and his political allies responded to this by mobilising supporters to encourage rejection of the recall with a "no" vote.

The recall vote itself was held on August 15, 2004. A record number of voters turned out to defeat the recall attempt with a 59% "no" vote. The election was overseen by the Carter Center and the Organization of American States, and was certified by them as fair and open. European Union observers did not attend, saying too many restrictions had been placed on their participation by the government.

Other critics, including economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Roberto Rigobon of MIT, called the results fraudulent, alleging there were "very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and alleged electronic voting machines had been reconfigured to allow results to be altered remotely. In response, the Carter Center consulted with Professor Jonathan Taylor, an independent statistician from Stanford University and Professor Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who both initially concluded that the actual results are within the predicted range and do not of themselves prove fraud. Subsequently, however, the Carter Center admitted Taylor had "found a mistake in one of the models of his analysis which lowered the predicted number of tied machines, but which still found the actual result to lie within statistical possibility."

The opposition also cited an exit poll which implied the actual results were the opposite of those reported. "Massive fraud" was alleged and the conclusions of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter were questioned.

Chávez again won the OAS and Carter Center certification of the national election on December 3, 2006 with 63 percent of the vote, beating his closest challenger Manuel Rosales who conceded his loss on December 4, 2006. After his victory, Chávez promised a more radical turn towards socialism.

Here are some other interesting quotes from the Wikipedia article on the Carter Center, criticizing its involvement in the Venezuela elections:

Carter's "continued international work certifying election results has provided essential political cover to anti-democratic forces in the region. Indeed, it might be said that over the past four years, Jimmy Carter has been the most visible and arguably most influential U.S. leader in Latin America."

"The [Hugo Chávez] regime delayed and obstructed the recall referendum process at every turn. Once the regime was forced to submit to such a referendum, moreover, it used a fraud-filled voting process to ensure victory. The government did everything—including granting citizenship to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme and 'migrating' existing voters away from their local election office—to fix the results in its favor. The outcome was then affirmed and legitimated by ex-President Jimmy Carter’s near-unconditional support."

"Jimmy Carter ignored pleas from the opposition and publicly endorsed the results, despite the fact that the government reneged on its agreement to carry out an audit of the results. Carter’s actions not only gave the Venezuelan regime the legitimacy it craved, but also destroyed the public’s confidence in the voting process and in the effectiveness of international observers."

So I guess the reason why Chavez is still creating havoc in Venezuela all comes back home to roost. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I'm certainly not going to donate any more money to the Carter Center. It's a shame that a noble charity that could potentially help thousands (if not millions) of people from around the world would stoop to participating in such a blatent corruption.

(The woman from church also alleged that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton have accepted "campaign contributions" from Chavez, but I'm not sure how to determine if that's true or not. I wasn't planning to donate any money to them anyway!)

Do-voila!

2007-09-10T19:00:00.001-04:00

Last week, I filed the paperwork with the IRS and the State of Ohio, and my new company officially exists now.

Yesterday, I registered my domain name and a friend of mine coached me through getting the domain and email services set up on his server. (Thanks Bakaitis!) I don't have a website yet, but at least I'm heading in that direction.

Today, I made my first sales call, to set up a demonstration of the software for a potential new client on Monday, October 1st.

One of my husband's friends is working on developing a logo, and I'm looking forward to seeing his concepts tomorrow night. Once that's done, I'll be having some business cards printed right away!

Next week, I'm going to be attending a conference with the software company that I'm partnering with. They'll be using the conference to introduce my company as their "Sales and Implementation Partner" for the United States. (They're based in Switzerland, so I'll be responsible for helping them develop a client-base here.)

After several weeks of waiting, I'm excited that things are starting to move!

Negation & Aggravation

2007-09-04T17:30:00.000-04:00

The short-sighted managers, directors, and lawyers at The Company (name has been withheld to protect the ignorant) have decided that my husband (S) and his friend (M) cannot take part in our new business venture. To make matters worse, they sat on their conflict-of-interest disclosures for 8 weeks before coming to this decision.

Apparently, The Company feels that the best way to ensure company loyalty is to prevent their employees from participating in any outside work activities, which is a completely asinine conclusion. According to them, M and S are critical to the success of their current project, and they're afraid that this business opportunity might be a "golden parachute" that would provide them with a means of escaping from their current positions.

M and S never intended for this to be an either/or situation. They thought that they'd be able to use their experience and knowledge to do some consulting work, while continuing to work full-time in their current jobs. They both enjoy their work, and they're earning a lot of recognition for their efforts. But by preventing them from participating in our new business in their free time, The Company is forcing them to choose between their current jobs and a potentially even better opportunity.

When my husband received the bad news today, he was almost angry enough to quit on the spot. Unfortunately, that isn't a possibility, simply because we need the practical benefits of a stable salary and affordable health insurance-- the "golden handcuffs" of Corporate America.

But M's wife has a successful career of her own, so they have the financial flexibility for him to work for a start-up company. Added to that, The Company's HR department has been unhappy with his telecommuting status, and they've been telling him that he needs to move back to Cincinnati (which isn't possible because of his wife's work) or face complete derailment of his career. So now he has plenty of incentive to leave his current job ASAP, and I predict that our new company will pick up enough business to make it possible within the next 6-12 months.

What The Company doesn't realize is that they have effectively eliminated all of the influence that they would have otherwise had over what my new company can do. In their conflict-of-interest disclosures, M and S had voluntarily proposed that our new company would not do business with any of The Company's competitors, which basically would have eliminated the entire consumer products industry in one fell swoop. They also specified that our new company would not earn a commission from any sales that we might coordinate between our software partners and The Company.

As an independent entity, I am free from those restrictions-- I can work with any company in any industry, AND I'll collect my standard commission for any new software that The Company purchases.

Home Economics

2007-08-23T16:00:00.001-04:00

Every day it seems that there's a new story about how home foreclosures are increasing, resulting in widespread implosions of real estate "bubbles" and threatening the overall health of the American economy. Earlier this year, there were Congressional Hearings on the business practices of "payday loan" and credit card companies.

It starts to sound like the downfall of the American economy will ultimately come about simply because the majority of Americans are bad at math.

Before I start down that path, let me just say that, in my opinion, most credit card companies are sharks and many of their "business practices" are nothing more than heinous usury. (And the payday loan companies are at least ten times worse.) I also know that many home mortgage refinancing companies are doing some pretty shady things. Agents will promise certain terms over the phone, but then at closing, the paperwork will show a different interest rate or hide a boatload of closing costs that are being rolled into the loan, and desperate people will go ahead and sign on the dotted line.

Maybe these things should be illegal, but ultimately, I believe that educating consumers about their tricks and traps is probably a better solution than passing more federal regulations. If people would recognize how they're getting ripped off and start talking about it, then these companies would gain or lose business based on their reputations. Right now, no one is willing to step up and announce that, "My credit card payment was due on a Sunday. I mailed it on a Tuesday, it arrived on Friday or Saturday, but the credit card company didn't apply the payment until Monday. They charged me a $39 late fee and raised my interest rate by 5% just because they don't process payments on weekends." Or "Company A pulled a bait-and-switch on my refinance deal, and I wound up paying $5000 in closing costs."

The bigger problem is that most people don't even know it's happening. They don't understand how to calculate compound interest, and they're too intimidated to ask questions about the paperwork at closings. As my friend Tracie says, "Life's hard[er] for stupid people." She used to work in the mortgage industry, so she knows exactly how people get ripped off by hidden closing costs and the sky-high interest rates that are charged for having bad credit.

Exhibit A: When my brother-in-law got divorced, he agreed to buy a house in certain neighborhood so that his son could go to that school system. My ex-sister-in-law couldn't figure out why he couldn't afford to buy a house worth more than $125,000, because she thought that house payments were basically just the value of the house divided by the number of payments, plus maybe a hundred dollars to cover the taxes and 6% [simple] interest.

She's never learned anything about mortgages because her parents actually bought her a huge house and put into a trust fund for her. The problem is that she and her brother are eventually going to inherit a multi-million-dollar company from their parents. When they inevitably run it into the ground, dozens of their employees will lose their jobs, and the economy will bleed from one more small cut.

Most college students wind up buying a new car within a year or two of graduating. But I wonder how many of them actually understand what it means to be "upside down" on a car loan? Every year, credit card companies send dozens of pre-approved applications to every college freshman. Their goal is to make sure that they all walk of of school with $5,000 - $10,000 of credit card debt. Students might be somewhat troubled by the fact that they're so far in debt when they're not earning anything, but the credit card companies hope they they'll build up a tolerance to it until they reach the point where they're comfortable carrying $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 worth of debt for decades. They might look around and see that all their friends have roughly the same income and debts, so they think they're doing OK, but actually they're just all broke together.

Exhibit B: I had a credit card in college, and initially I paid it off every month, but in grad school, my rent was actually more than my income. (No one told me that I would be taxed on the total value of my research grant. The majority of stipend wound up being withheld in order to cover the taxes from my tuition reimbursement. That's not meant to be an excuse-- It's just an example of a lesson learned the hard way.) So I wound up charging my groceries and living expenses on my credit card, and when I graduated, I had $5,000 in credit card debt on top of my $20k in student loans. I wasn't terribly worried about paying it off, because I was making more money than most of my friends from college. After I bought my house, I slid much further into credit card debt, and I started to lay awake at night, wondering how I would ever pay it all off. I didn't get out of credit card debt until I had been out of school for 5 years. (I'm still working on the student loans, but the end is in sight!)

My parents never talked to me much about budgets, credit cards, or mortgages. I remember my mom briefly listing all of our monthly expenses once, when my sister was complaining about why she couldn't buy all of the stuff that her friends had. When I graduated from college, my dad put $1,000 into an IRA for me, and he walked me through the calculations on how much it could grow by the time I wanted to retire. When I started working, he encouraged me to put 6% of my salary into my 401k, because he knew the company was doing a 75% match. But my dad learned a lot about investing from his dad, and I suspect that most parents never take the time to explain these things to their kids.

Maybe parents don't teach their kids about budgeting and investing because they feel like they're not practicing what they preach, or maybe it's because they simply don't understand the principles well enough to explain it.

Kids (and adults) can't see the value of Algebra or Geometry, let alone a reason to learn exponentials or compound interest. But no one can truly avoid learning about "the most powerful force in the Universe." If kids don't learn how to do the math while they're young, they wind up figuring it out in the school of hard knocks.

I tell the little girls that I tutor, "It's really, really important to be good at math, because otherwise, for your entire life, people will cheat you and take advantage of you. And you won't even know that they're doing it. You'll just know that you're always broke and you always will be."

I think it's time to start requiring a home economics class as a requirement for graduating high school. Obviously, it shouldn't be the traditional Home Ec of sewing, cooking, and all that antiquated stuff. Instead it should cover things like:

Monthly Budgets - How much do utilities cost? How much does a typical car cost, including the loan payment, insurance, and repairs? How much do people pay for childcare? What about groceries and eating out at restaurants?

Credit Cards - Suppose you buy a computer for $1000, and you start making payments of $100 each month. For a given interest rate, how long will it take before it's paid off? What will happen if you're late? How much will you wind up paying for the computer? Repeat the same calculations for rent-to-own furniture.

Mortgages - If you buy a house for $200,000, how much will it wind up costing every month? How much will you pay over 30 years? What happens if you make an extra payment every year?

Investments - The company you work has a 50% match, and the average rate of return is 7%. If your salary is $50,000, and you invest 5% of your income, how much will you wind up with when you retire?

Taxes - Given a W-2 form and a couple of 1099's, fill out a 1040-EZ tax return. (This skill is important so that people don't fall prey to tax refund loan companies, which are just as bad as the payday loan companies, IMHO.)

So here's my final thought for today:

What do you think?

More Malcolm Gladwell

2007-08-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

I was going to include this list as part of my last post, but it started to get kind of lengthy, so I decided it deserved its own posting. Here are a couple more New Yorker articles from Malcolm Gladwell that I found interesting:

Big and Bad - How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.
This should be required reading for anyone who currently owns or is thinking about buying an SUV. And when you're done reading that, you also need to see this for further proof that bigger is not better. (Did I mention that I drive an Integra?)

The Risk Pool - What's behind Ireland's economic miracle—and G.M.'s financial crisis?
Gladwell uses the sociological concept of "dependancy ratios" to talk about the rise and fall of national economies and why GM is bankrupt while Toyota is thriving. (Here's another interesting article by Herbert Meyer that also talks about demographics and population distributions and why they're really important.)

The Talent Myth - Are smart people overrated?
This article talks about the "rank and yank" system that McKinsey put into place at Enron, where employees were ranked into three categories: "The A's must be challenged and disproportionately rewarded. The B's need to be encouraged and affirmed. The C's need to shape up or be shipped out."
An employer really wants to assess not potential but performance. Yet that’s just as tricky... Studies show that there is very little correlation between how someone’s peers rate him and how his boss rates him... You can grade someone’s performance only if you know their performance. And, in the freewheeling culture of Enron, this was all but impossible. People deemed “talented” were constantly being pushed into new jobs and given new challenges. Annual turnover from promotions was close to twenty per cent... How do you evaluate someone’s performance in a system where no one is in a job long enough to allow such evaluation? The answer is that you end up doing performance evaluations that aren’t based on performance.

Enron may be dead now, but that performance rating system is still alive and well at many other corporations-- GE, J&J, and P&G are just some of the examples that I can name off the top of my head. And other companies continue implement these systems, despite the fact that they have caused many lawsuits and have been widely criticized by business experts.

Gladwell specifically mentions P&G as an example of a company that doesn't have a "star system," but I disagree with that statement. P&G believes in hiring smart, talented people from some of the best schools in the country and assimilating them into the P&G culture. (They even administer personality tests as part of the hiring process.) And P&G's philosophy of "Up or Out" is well known around Cincinnati. It's especially emphasized in their Marketing division, which is viewed as the most important branch of the company. But even in Engineering, employees are expected to be constantly striving toward an ultimate goal of moving into upper management, and their loyalty to the company will be questioned if they say that they'd prefer to stay in a technical role. P&G may not technically use an "A-B-C" system, but that's only because they prefer to use "1-2-3" instead!

Malcolm Gladwell and Cesar Milan

2007-08-14T09:00:00.001-04:00

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article about Cesar Milan, aka The Dog Whisperer.

What I like about Gladwell's writing is the way that he synthesizes information from many different fields. For this article, he brings in an anthropologist, an ethologist, an expert who studies dance and movement patterns, and a psychotherapist who works with autistic children to help explain why Cesar is so good at working with "bad" dogs. Here's a section of the article that I found especially interesting:

...Before [the dog] fought, he sniffed and explored and watched Cesar—the last of which is most important, because everything we know about dogs suggests that, in a way that is true of almost no other animals, dogs are students of human movement.

The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees—an animal that shares 98.6 per cent of our genes—the chimps couldn't get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won't.

"Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species," Hare explained. "So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to coöperate with them. They don't get it: 'Why would you ever tell me where the food is?' The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want. "Dogs aren't smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. "Dogs are really interested in humans," Hare went on. " Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball."

A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward—even a quarter of an inch—means nonthreatening. It means you've relinquished what ethologists call an "intention movement" to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he'll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it. Breathing even and deeply—rather than holding your breath—can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. "I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like," the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. "A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that's a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go."

Gladwell also wrote a follow-up posting in his blog about the New Yorker article, to address some of the criticism that Cesar receives from other animal behaviorists.

And despite all his talk about dominance and being a pack leader, what is striking about Cesar viewed in full context (and this is one of the major themes of my article) is how paradoxically gentle he is. That's why, in the piece, I compare the way he relates to troubled dogs with the way movement therapists work with autistic children.

J&J vs. ARC

2007-08-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

My sister sent me an email about this lawsuit, and I had to investigate it.

I'm still stunned.

Basically, Johnson & Johnson is suing the American Red Cross over the use of the red cross symbol, which has been used by both organizations for over 100 years.

I know enough about intellectual property law to know that J&J doesn't have much of a chance of winning this lawsuit. If they're lucky, it will simply be dismissed before they both spend many millions of dollars on legal fees. If it goes to trial, there's a decent possibility that J&J could lose their rights to the trademark altogether. And even if they win the lawsuit, they'll probably lose much more in the court of public opinion.

Last week, J&J announced major layoffs, and now they've decided to attack a federally chartered charity. Taken together, these seem like bad PR moves for a company whose marketing campaigns proclaim it to be a bastion of ethics and family values.

I had thought about putting in my 2 cents worth on the layoffs last week, but then I decided it wasn't worth it. But in light of this new development, I'm going to go ahead and give vent to I wanted to say, which isn't about J&J specifically, so much as it is about the stock market in general:

I will never understand why Wall Street rewards companies for laying people off. It just doesn't make sense to me that a company should say, "Due to mismanagement and bad planning, we're failing to achieve our financial goals. So we've decided that the easiest way to still make our numbers is to eliminate employees." (They never decide that maybe the officers and upper management need to take pay cuts or something crazy like that.) And investors say, "Oh, that sounds like a great plan! I'm sure the company will be much stronger after it shoves a bunch of employees out the door (along with all of their knowledge and experience) and decimates the morale of the remaining employees."

Superheroes

2007-08-10T20:00:00.000-04:00

Who's your favorite superhero? Why?

I used to think I didn't have a favorite superhero, but then I realized that Hermione Granger would qualify. She does have magical powers, after all...

I think she's one of the best female characters to appear in a novel since Jane Austen died. She's obnoxiously smart, unflinchingly loyal, tactlessly honest, and unpredictably fiesty, all rolled into one.

It's Just Stuff

2007-08-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

Two weeks ago, a house fire made the news here in Cincinnati. It was news-worthy for two reasons:

1. Eleven firefighters were injured while fighting the fire.

The fire was so big that 10 or 12 fire departments from different areas of Cincinnati were called in for support-- It was classified as a four-alarm fire. A couple of my friends are firefighters, and they know a some of the guys who were involved, so they heard a bit more about the fire than just what was reported on the news. Apparently, a group of firefighters had gone inside the house, to try to fight the fire on the third floor. (Most of the water from the hoses outside wasn't getting through the slate roof.) Luckily, they were in the process of retreating to the second floor when the flashover occurred. After the explosion, most of the firefighters were able to get out of the house on their own, but two guys got lost inside, and several other firefighters went into the house to find them and bring them out. One of the guys had gotten stuck to the floor because his gear melted. A total of eight firefighters wound up being hospitalized because of their burns.

Firefighters do this kind of stuff every day, and we don't thank them nearly enough!

2. The house was located in Indian Hill, the most prestigious area in Cincinnati.

And it wasn't so much a "house" as it was a "historic mansion." It was built in the 1920's by the Kroger family. According to the news, it was one of the most valuable properties in Indian Hill. Again, I have some inside information, because I've been there a few times-- The owner is one of my dad's college buddies, and he's hosted several reunions for the "Bishop Street" gang.

Photo from the Cincinnati Enquirer

The house wasn't just huge, it was beautiful-- a work of art. The foyer looked like something out of Gone With the Wind. It had a marble tiled floor and a big sweeping staircase, and there was room enough to stash a grand piano out of the way in a corner of it. I have no idea how many bedrooms there were in the house. I tried counting once, but I wound up getting lost, and I'm not sure I found them all. The bedrooms that I saw were all furnished with gorgeous antiques, and the rest of the house also contained some unusual stuff-- several old phonograph machines (the kind that used wax cylinders), rare books, etc. In a nutshell, the house and most of the things in it are simply irreplaceable. That kind of craftmanship doesn't exist anymore.

The news crew, with their typical sensitivity and tact, interviewed him that night. Now keep in mind, his house was still burning at the time. As nearly all of his personal possessions were being destroyed right there in front of him, this is what he said:

"There's a lot of stuff in there, but, oh well, it's just stuff."

Frankly, that amazes me. I think it's a truly awesome attitude, and I don't know how many people could take that point of view, under those circumstances.

Now of course, you can say, "Yeah, but it's not like he's going to be out on the street. He's got insurance. He can buy new stuff." And I'm sure that's very true. But my impression of him has been that he's the type of guy who's pretty fond of his toys. (And he has a lot of toys. What you can't see in the news photos is the huge garage on the property, which is separate from the house. In it, he has an amazing car collection that has to be worth millions of dollars. Remember that car in Ferris Bueller? He has two Ferraris like that one, in red and black.) And he keeps his extensive gun collection in the basement of the garage. Because that's where the shooting range is. It even has moving targets, like the police training facilities you see on TV. (I got to shoot a Tommy Gun there-- It was COOL.) So you can imagine how big the garage must be.) OK, so maybe I'm wandering a bit off topic here, but the point I'm trying to make is that he has lots of stuff. And it's the kind of "stuff" that almost anyone would love.

My step-father has a few unique sayings that have been etched into my psyche over the years:

Life's not instant pudding.

(I was 25 before I realized that no one else in the world has heard of this expression.)

Just remember-- You can be dead right.

(He said this a lot when I started driving.)

It's just stuff. It doesn't love you back.

Most often, when he says this, he's referring to cars. (In fact, he hates cars, and that feeling does seem to be mutual.)

To a certain extent, I think the concept has rubbed off on me a bit, I don't want to own a car that's so nice that I won't feel comfortable lending it to a friend. I like my car-- It's been very reliable, it gets decent gas milage, it's fun to drive, and it's small enough to get into just about any parking space. (For the record, I have a 2001 Integra.) But if it got stolen or wrecked tomorrow, it wouldn't phase me all that much.

But my house burning down... ...that would be really, really difficult for me. In all honesty, I love our house. And the thing is, it's only a couple years old-- It could easily be rebuilt. We don't own any priceless antiques. I only own maybe a half-dozen pieces of jewelry that have any sentimental value at all. But I really like a lot of my stuff. Maybe I even love some of it.

I don't think I'd be able to stand there and say, "Oh, well, it's only stuff."

Preacher's Gift

2007-08-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever felt like your job has taken over your soul, and your life is spiraling out of control?

You're not alone.

Please set aside 40 minutes, and listen to this.

Eurogames

2007-08-06T15:00:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, a couple of our friends introduced us to a game called Carcassonne. Through that game, we discovered that a revolution has taken place in the past 10-15 years, and the heart of the revolution is in Germany.

Dozens of new games are introduced in Europe every year, and they're generally much more interesting and challenging than anything you'll find in stores here in the US. Forget games like Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. Eurogames are about strategy, not random luck or obscure knowledge. Many of the creators of these games have become so well-known that the game companies advertise their new games by issuing press releases like this:

Los Altos, CA; Paris, France - January 29, 2007. Days of Wonder, a leading publisher of top-quality board games, today announced their newest game, Colosseum™, designed by critically acclaimed game designer Wolfgang Kramer and Markus Lübke.

There's a whole Eurogame sub-culture-- Go to Board Game Geek and see for yourself. As a proud member of that sub-culture, here's a list of Eurogames that I can recommend...

Board Games:

Carcassonne - by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede

Ahhh, the gateway drug! This game is fairly easy to learn, and it's sort of like working a puzzle, only you're doing it in competition with other people. While we were on vacation this summer, we taught this game to my grandparents. My 84-year-old grandfather (who loves puzzles) won every game.

There are also a few expansion sets that you can buy for Carcassonne, which subtly change the mechanics of the game. I recommend Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders. Or you can just skip a step and buy the Big Box.

Settlers of Catan - by Klaus Teuber

This game became so wildly popular that it spawned a whole series of expansions, extensions, and spin-offs. I like this game a lot, but the learning experience is a little tougher than Carcassonne. The game board is made up of tiles, which are shuffled and dealt so that the map is different every time you play the game. Each player gets to place two settlements during the first two rounds of the game, and your success in the game depends a lot on the locations of your first settlements. The unfortunate thing about playing the game for the first time is that you won't understand enough about how the game works to make good decisions about where to place your first settlements. But you'll enjoy the game a lot more the second time you play it! What I like is that there are a lot of different strategies that can win the game-- It's not just about who can build the most settlements and cities.

El Grande - by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich

While Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan can bring out a little healthy competition in some people, El Grande is an all-out melee. This game involves a lot of strategy and planning, and yet every plan that you start to execute is instantly obliterated by every other player at the table.

We have a friend who has been nicknamed Glinda (the Good Witch) because she is the epitome of sweetness and light. When we sat down to teach her this game, my husband said, up front, "This game is all about scheming, back-stabbing, and sabotage." She said, "Oh, I'm probably going to lose. I'm never any good at stuff like that."

Yeah, right.

She kicked our butts, and she did it with a smile on her face!

Puerto Rico - by Andreas Seyfarth

The downside to this game is that it takes awhile to set it up, and it also takes a decent amount of time to explain the rules to new players. But the upside is that once you start playing, you're going to have a good time. (Plus you get to say, "P'whertow R-r-rico!") Like Settlers of Catan, there are a lot of different ways to win, so you can experiment with a new strategy every time you play.

Ticket to Ride - by Alan R Moon

Like Settlers of Catan, there are several different versions of this game available. (We have TTR: Europe.) This is probably the simplest of all of the Eurogames that we've played, and it's one of the easiest to learn, so Ticket to Ride may eventually replace Carcassonne as the game of choice for introducing our friends to Eurogames. On the luck vs. strategy spectrum, Carcassonne and TTR are weighted a bit more toward luck, while the other games listed above are almost pure strategy.

Tigris & Euphrates - by Reiner Knizia

We've only played this game once so far, and it made my head swim. The rules aren't terribly complicated, but the mechanics of the game really challenge your mind. To say that it's complicated is an understatement. Reiner Knizia is a mathematician and one of the more famous game designers. (Lost Cities and Lord of the Rings are two of his other games.) There are certainly plenty of Tigris & Euphrates fans out there, but I wouldn't recommend this game to a newbie.

Lord of the Rings - by Reiner Knizia

This game is really unique because everyone works together to try to beat the game. Or rather, you're trying to beat the odds, which are stacked heavily against you. Beware of the Mines of Moria!

Card Games

Lost Cities - by Reiner Knizia

This is a very simple and elegant two-person card game. And one of the best things about this game is that you can play it online!

Citadels - by Bruno Faidutti

This is one of my all-time favorite games. It only takes a couple of rounds to get a feel for how the game works, and the mechanics are very well-balanced so that there are pros and cons for every character and every strategy. And it's a very portable game. You can easily make room for it in your bag, so you can take it with you when you're travelling, and you don't need a big table to play it.

NOTE: If you buy Citadels, I recommend getting the character cards laminated. They get handled a lot during the game, and they can start to wear out. Plus, it's makes it easier to keep them from getting mixed in with the other cards.

Where can I buy Eurogames?

I linked everything to Funagain Games because they've got a really great website-- They include photos, summaries of the rules, and magazine reviews for almost all of the games, and they allow customers to write their own reviews. (I'm amazed by how much thought and effort people put into their reviews.) Their prices are pretty fair, and they've got an excellent selection.

and Time Well Spent
As far as I can tell, these two companies generally have the best prices, and we have a couple of friends who have recommended them. I haven't bought anything from either company yet, simply because I feel a certain amount of loyalty to Funagain Games. (As I said before, I like their website, and they also have a "frequent buyer" program, and I'm a sucker for that sort of thing.)

They carry some of the more popular games, and of course their selection is growing all the time. But games at Amazon are generally more expensive than at Funagain Games or Fair Play Games.

So go have some fun!

Frustration & Faith

2007-08-04T23:00:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to write up this posting for quite awhile now. (My first attempt was back in January.) I think that there are two reasons why it's taken me so long to get around to it:

I needed to dedicate a fairly sizeable block of uninterrupted time to doing it. (i.e. You may notice that this posting is rather long.)

I think I needed to be ready to let go of it. What I'm trying to say is that I couldn't write about all of this while I was in the midst of it. But now I feel like I'm ready to mark a moment, kind of like a memorial, and move on from here.

In the past year and half, I have had to really struggle through some serious questions about who I am, how I define my self-worth, and what my purpose is. Throughout this period, I've had a playlist on my iPod called "Frustration & Faith." Now, as a general rule, I don't look to pop music for philosophy or counseling, but these songs either say how I was feeling, or they say things that I needed to believe in. And somehow I just feel like I should share this...

Bad Day - by Daniel Powter

When things at my job were at their absolute worst, this song seemed to be on the radio every single time I got into the car. And since I had literally a 5 minute commute each way, it also seemed like something more than coincidence. The song is actually way too upbeat to describe how I was really feeling-- I think the only lyrics that specifically applied to me were:

You're faking a smile with the coffee to go
You tell me your life's been way off line
You're falling to pieces every time

That part reminds me of going to get coffee in the cafeteria at work every morning with my friend Gus, which was invariably the high-point of my day. The rest of the day was always miserable.

Meant to Live - Switchfoot

Maybe we've been living with our eyes half open
Maybe we're bent and broken
Broken

We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside

We want more than this world's got to offer
We want more than the wars of our fathers
And everything inside screams for second life

Tell Me Who I Am - Steve Manuel

Cause I know I'm not the sum of what everybody says
And I'm not a magazine, or what my body image is
I've got to be more than my job
I've got to be more than my address
More than living to get by
Or trying to impress...

Out Is Through - Alanis Morissette

My tendency to want to run away feels natural and
My urgency to dream of softer places feels understandable

The only way out is through
The only way we'll feel better
The only way out is through
Ultimately

The Beautiful Letdown - Switchfoot

It was a beautiful letdown when I crashed and burned
When I found myself alone, unknown and hurt
It was a beautiful letdown the day I knew
That all the riches this world had to offer me
Would never do

In a world full of bitter pain and bitter doubts
I was trying so hard to fit in, to fit in,
Until I found out
That I don't belong here
I don't belong here
I will carry a cross and a song where I don't belong
But I don't belong

Martyrs & Thieves - Jennifer Knapp

And I know they are wrong
When they say I am strong
As the darkness covers me

So turn on the light
And reveal all the glory
I am not afraid
To bear all my weakness
Knowing in meekness
I have a kingdom to gain

Maybe There's a Loving God - Sara Groves

I wrote a previous post about this song, and it just continues to be a favorite of mine.

In the Palm of Your Hand - Alison Krauss

I'd rather be in the palm of Your hand
Though rich or poor I may be
Faith can see right through the circumstance
Sees the forest in spite of the trees
Your grace provides for me

Faithful to Me - Jennifer Knapp
This simple, acapella song was a late addition to this list...

All the chistles I've dulled carving idols of stone
That have crumbled like sand 'neath the waves.
I have recklessly built all my dreams in the sand
Just to watch them all wash away.

Through another day, another trial,
Another chance to reconcile
To One who sees past all I see.
And reaching out my weary hand
I pray that You'd understand.
You're the only one who's faithful to me.

Word of God Speak - MercyMe

I'm finding myself at a loss for words
And the funny thing is: It's okay.
The last thing I need is to be heard
But to hear what You would say

I'm finding myself in the midst of You
Beyond the music, beyond the noise
All that I need is to be with You
And in the quiet hear Your voice

To Be Free - Steve Manuel

You can live by the book, but it's slavery
You can try, try hard, to do right
I would pray that I would be given bravery
Just to live out my heart in the light

I want to be free
I want to know life
I don't want to live afraid to die
I just want to kill the fear in me
I want to let it go
I want to be free

Open Your Eyes - Snow Patrol

My bones ache, my skin feels cold
And I'm getting so tired and so old
The anger swells in my guts
And I won't feel these slices and cuts

Get up, get out, get away from these liars
Cause they don't get your soul or your fire
Take my hand, knot your fingers through mine
And we'll walk from this dark room for the last time

This Is Your Life - Switchfoot

This is your life
And Today is all you've got now
And Today is all you'll ever have

Don't close your eyes

This is your life
Are you who you want to be?
This is your life
Is it everything you dreamed that it would be
When the world was younger
And you had everything to lose?

Perimeter of Me - Dividing the Plunder

Well, I'm frightened by how easy it can be to live so long
Going from one thing, to the next thing, to the next,
'Til months have gone
And you realize you have really not done anything at all
At night you fall asleep believing you've just climbed
So you could fall

And I don't believe that "Who I Am" is something I can find
It's whatever I create with what I do with all my time
It's who I choose to love with all my heart, and strength, and mind
And whether I believe that what I have is really mine

Giving In - Steve Manuel

No more fighting, please
No more pointing at me
No more mourning who I'd hoped I'd be
No more defending
None of this wishing I was right
No more concessions to my appetite

I'm giving in, I'm giving up
I won't let my pride into it
And like cool wine poured from a crystal cup
I'm giving in
I'm giving up

Better Days - Robbie Seay Band

Wherever your are, breathe out, and breath again
And know that life is hard, but it's worth breathing
Listen to me now, for Love, oh Love
Is waiting for you, just to say:
Here come better days

The Long Day Is Over - Norah Jones
To me, this song is just a promise of something to look forward to-- That no matter how bad things get, there will eventually be an end to it, and a well-deserved rest. A feeling of coming home.

Blog Consolidation

2007-08-04T11:54:00.000-04:00

Since Blogger is now offering the "Label" feature, I've decided to consolidate my three blogs down to just this site. My other two blogs were:

YKYAAW... - Dedicated to those moments when Reality smacks you across the face, and you realize that you ARE, actually, an Adult...
...whereas the rest of the time you just feel like a kid who happens to have had more than 18 birthdays and is pretending to fit into adult society.

Wonder - verb 1. to speculate or be curious to know about something
2. to be in a state of amazed admiration or awe, especially at something very beautiful or new

I've moved all of my old posts here from the other two blog sites, and tagged them accordingly. Thanks for reading!

Business Structures 101

2007-07-23T21:30:00.000-04:00

After all of this research, it looks like the structure that will fit our business model better is an S Corporation rather than an LLC.

It all has to do with the fact that we want to get paid wages for the number of hours that we spend working for the business. As it turns out, the IRS is very sensitive to LLCs that make "special allocations" to give profits to members in ways that don't simply represent their ownership interest in the business.

The IRS guide says, "The rules governing partnership allocations (IRC section 704(b) and its accompanying regulations) have been criticized as being some of the most difficult and complex."

Oh, yippee, sign me up for THAT!

So instead, we're going to be an S-Corp, which allows its shareholders to be treated as employees, and it has certain tax advantages over the two LLC models as well. (You don't have to pay the 15.6% self-employment tax on profits.)

Because I'm sure you were dying to know!

You know you're an adult when......you start your own company

2007-07-18T21:00:00.001-04:00

This week, I'm in the process of filing out the paperwork for our LLC. The three of us (myself, my husband, and one of his friends from work) will be providing sales support, customer training, and consulting services on behalf of two software companies that make special engineering applications. For right now, I will be the only one working full-time for the new company, since they're both keeping their corporate jobs, but they'll also be doing some part-time consulting work and providing their expertise with one of the software applications.

There are lots of things to learn about starting a new company. Today I put together a summary to explain our options to my partners. (Yes, of course, I could explain this all to my husband without typing it up, but our other partner lives in New Hampshire.) And they say that the best way to learn something is to synthesize it, so I guess I'm benefiting from this experience as well.

Here's what I've learned so far this week:

LLC's have a choice between being taxed as a Partnership or as a Corporation.
- Partnership - The IRS default is for an LLC to be treated as a Partnership for tax purposes, which is also referred to as "pass-through" taxation. As far as taxation goes, this is pretty straightforward. The owners of the LLC simply pay personal income taxes on whatever money they receive from the business. They still have to file tax forms for the LLC every year, including Schedule K-1 forms, which summarize the profits (or losses) for each member, but the LLC doesn't actually pay any taxes to the government.
  
  In this model, owner-members of the LLC are not considered employees, and they do not receive a salary or wage. Instead, they generally get paid by receiving their share of the profits, based on the amount of capital that they have invested. Members can, however, create "special allocations" in their operating agreements, to redistribute profits in ways that are different than just the percentage of the business that they own, but they have to be able to convince the IRS that there are legitimate business reasons for doing so. We're planning to do a special allocation because we all want to get paid a fee based on the number of hours that we work for the company, but beyond those fees, we plan to split the profits equally, because we're all contributing equal amounts to get the business off the ground. My next step will be to check with a lawyer to make sure this is all legit in the eyes of the IRS!
- Corporation - The downside to this option is that the tax situation gets more complicated. For this structure, it is assumed that the active members receive salaries from the business, and that a significant amount of the profits will be reinvested in the business from year to year. The business writes off the member's salaries as an expense, so the business isn't taxed for that amount, and the members pay personal income tax on their salaries. That's simple enough. But when it comes to the profits, things get a bit more convoluted. The LLC pays taxes at a corporate rate (just 15% for up to $50,000) on all of the profits generated by the business, and then individual members pay additional taxes (aka "double taxation") on the profits or dividends that they receive.
  
  So essentially, if you're reinvesting most of your profits, you might save money by being taxed at a reduced business income rate rather than paying taxes at the personal tax rate. (With pass-through taxation, you wind up paying taxes at the personal tax rate on profits that you never really received because they were reinvested in the business.) The good news is that you can change from Partnership to Corporate taxation at any time, by filing a simple form with the IRS, but the BAD news is that you're not allowed to convert back to Partnership taxation for at least 5 years. So generally, most LLC's don't make the change until they're well established and making a significant profit from year to year.

Management Methods - LLC's have a choice between Member-Managed or Manager-Managed.
- Member Management - Most LLC's are managed by all of their members, and this is exactly what we want to do. The key requirement here is that all of the members (owners) play an active role in managing the business. Otherwise, everyone's share in the business could be considered a "security" (i.e. an investment, like stock, where you expect to make a profit based on other people's efforts) and then you might have to file for an exemption with the SEC. Or, worse yet, you might not get an exemption and you'd have to comply with all of the disclosure requirements.
- Manager Management - This structure allows an LLC to be managed by a) a subset of the LLC members; b) a mixture of some members and some non-members; or c) a person (or group) who isn't a member. In the case of Option A, an LLC could be managed by two members who work in the business full-time, while three other members (who aren't interested in actively managing the business) just invest money and hope to make a profit. Option B - An LLC receives some capital from an outside investment group, and, in exchange, that group asks to have one of their partners or employees involved in running the business. Option C - The owners of an LLC hire a CEO to manage the business on their behalf.
  
  In the case of Manager Management, the shares in the company will certainly be considered securities, but there can be some tax advantages for the non-managing members. Members who are managers of an LLC have to pay self-employment taxes, including the full tax amounts for Social Security and Medicare. (If you're an employee of a corporation, your company pays half of these taxes for you.) Non-managing members get to skip these.

P.S. I am not in any way an expert on this subject, and I am certainly not offering any legal or tax advice here. I just thought that this was sort of interesting, in a convoluted sort of way, and since I had already done the work, I thought I'd share it, in case anyone out there is interested in learning something new. Or not.

God Hates Shrimp

2007-07-14T13:45:00.000-04:00

I probably shouldn't be doing this, but it's just too good not to share...

My sister has a science blog that discusses ocean ecology and overfishing. In her most recent posting, she had a link to the God Hates Shrimp website.

Yep. It's true. Shrimp are an abomination. So are lobsters, crabs, scallops, and clams. Roadkill is also verboten, and, as my friend Tracie likes to point out, we're also not supposed to boil a goat in it's mother's milk. (See Deuteronomy 14:21. In fact, you might want to glance through all of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy before you start making any plans for dinner.)

But wait, it gets even better! From that website, you can find a link to this website, which you can bookmark under either "Irreverent" or "I'm SO going to Hell for this..."

Of course, don't forget to check out the link to Real Church Signs.

And so my work here is done. Have fun, and don't get into too much trouble!

P.S. My sister's blog is called Shifting Baselines. I think it's informative and entertaining, so I recommend checking it out once in awhile. And in all seriousness, please spend a little bit of time exploring the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website and their Pocket Seafood Guides. If you're going to eat fish, pick something like Tilapia and not Orange Roughy or Chilean Sea Bass.

Life, in a Nutshell

2007-07-14T12:00:00.001-04:00

I realize that it's been a very long time since I've posted anything on this blog, and there are some very good reasons for why I haven't been writing. This past year has been extremely difficult, and it seems like most of the things that have happened were just too personal and too emotionally draining to try to share on a blog. But since these things were major events in my life, I would have felt dishonest if I had continued to write about trivial stuff, pretending that everything was OK and normal when it clearly wasn't.

So here's the (simplified) update of everything that has happened in the past year:

Jobs - I no longer work for a Fortune 50 company, and I hope that I never will again. For awhile I worked part-time for a small company (~20 employees) and that was a learning experience too. After that, I took some time off. Now I'm working on starting up my own LLC. I'm really, really excited by the idea that I'll be working for my self, from my home. I'll have a hard-wall office with a door and a window-- the dream of every cube-dweller-- and I'll also have the option of working from my back deck or pretty much anywhere else I want to be. There's no dress code, I can bring my dog to work with me, and I won't have to worry about what my boss will think if I have to go to a doctor's appointment or if take an hour and a half to have lunch with friends.

My self-confidence was really shaken by losing my "dream job" last year, but I've come to realize that I am an intelligent, responsible, hard-working, talented engineer, and so I deserve something better than being treated like a replaceable cog in a corporate juggernaut that grinds out far more bureaucratic sludge than productive results. I hate corporate politics, and I hate that my roles have been defined and my worth has been determined by managers and directors who are inept at best. (I won't even try to describe the worst bosses... I know. You know. We'll leave it at that.) I know that I can be far happier and more productive working for myself, and I now I see that my true "dream job" is SO much bigger than anything that could fit into a 6x6' cubicle.

Pets - I am no longer the proud parent of a tubby tabby and a cross-wired wiener dog. We still have the dachshund, but my sweet fuzzy cat was stricken by cancer at Christmas time, and she died in March. At the same time, I suffered through a difficult health issue of my own, and I wound up depressed. I tried some medication, but the side effects seemed as bad as the symptoms, so I quit my job and got a puppy instead.

Her name is Bella. The rescue folks told us that she was a Border Collie / Golden Retriever mix. Now that she's grown up a bit, we think it's more likely a that she's a Border Collie / Labrador Retriever mix, since she looks just like a small black lab, but with white toes. We've been talking about getting another cat, but I think we'll probably wait until Bella settles down a bit.

Travel - I have done a quite a bit of traveling in the past six months or so.

In February, we did our annual ski vacation in Tahoe. There couldn't be a better group of friends to ski with, but things went badly for me at the end of the trip, so the memories of this trip aren't as fond as they have been in previous years.

At the end of April, I tagged along on my husband's business trip to Zurich, so I got to wander around the town while he was working. I really enjoyed Switzerland, and since my new LLC will be partnering with a software company there, I hope that I'll be able to go back again.

In June, we went back to Longboat Key for a week with my mom's extended family. This year we got to spend time with my mom, my grandparents, my grandmother's sister, her three daughters, two of my aunts, two of my uncles, two of my cousins, and one of my cousin's kids. The weather was nice. I got to feel tall for a week. It was a good trip.

So that's my life, in a nutshell. Now that things are looking up, I have a feeling that I'll be writing more often. Not to mention that now I'll be able to blog from work without having to worry about getting busted by my boss and I can blog about work without violating any stupid corporate policies!

Geek Life

2006-11-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

This is easily the funniest "experiment" ever captured on video by a couple of geeks.

Granted, the Honda "Cog" commercial was more elegant and professional, but when it comes to pure, unpolished geek panache, it's going to be hard to top EepyBird.

...BUT...

The guys at Mythbusters (aka the best show on television) are going to try! And I'm sure it'll be great! Sunday, November 26th @ 9pm.

Did you ever wish to be a Hobbit?

2006-09-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

Last night, I discovered this link for a housing development in Bend, Oregon. If you're a fan of Lord of the Rings, it's like an invitation to come live in your own personal fairy tale...

Now, if you could really have the lifestyle of a Hobbit, I'd say it sounds pretty good. You've got the quaint village, a comfortable home with cozy chairs around a fireplace-- But it all wouldn't be complete without plenty of visitors, good books, and second breakfasts!

Remembering 9/11

2006-09-11T22:30:00.000-04:00

Five years ago today...

It was a clear, sunny day. I was running late for work. (It was a particularly unhappy period for me at work. I hated getting up in the morning, so I was almost always late getting to work.) I was walking in from the East parking lot, and Angie, my director's admin, was walking in at the same time. I remember her saying, "I just heard on the radio that someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center." And my first thought was, "Oh, some daredevil screwed up trying to pull a stunt with his Cessna." I didn't really think any more about it. I got to my cubicle, logged in to check my email, and started working. A little while later, Debi, the girl in the cube next to me, got a phone call from her boyfriend. When she hung up, she said, "Oh, my God. Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center." "Yeah, I heard that." "NO, I mean another plane." "What kind of plane? Like a Cessna, right?" "I don't think so. I think it was a big plane."

Immediately, we started checking the internet, but it was so overloaded that we couldn't get through to any of the news services. Another co-worker of ours, Craig, already had a CNN window open, so we crowded around his computer to read the news. The internet was completely bogged down, so no pictures would download on the web page, just these sketchy, distracted news bites that seemed to contradict each other every time we refreshed the page. There weren't any details, and the main facts didn't seem to make any sense.

Later in the morning, I was supposed to have a meeting in another part of the building, so I wandered over to the team area. Someone had rigged up a TV there in R&D, but it didn't have an antenna, so the reception was awful. There were snowy images of the towers burning, and the news factoids scrolling in the ticker along the bottom of the page were confusing and contradictory. People were speculating about what they would have to do about the buildings, after the fires were put out. Would they be able to repair them, would they have to demolish all the floors above the fires, and rebuild them? Some people thought they would have to be torn down completely, eventually. I don't remember anyone suggesting that they might collapse.

After awhile, it just seemed like there was no new information coming out, so we had our meeting briefly. At that point, things were still surreal and bizarre, not really tragic.

We came out of the meeting, and someone said, "One of the buildings fell down." "What do you mean, it fell down? It fell over?" If it withstood the impact of the plane, why would it suddenly fall over later? "No, it came straight down." "What? How?" "Oh, there it is, they're replaying it now." Except it wasn't an instant replay. It was the second tower coming down, live, and in slow motion. The footage must have been shot from a news helicopter that was flying over the Hudson, because the view panned back until the Statue of Liberty was in the foreground, with what should have been Manhattan behind it, except the entire borough was completely engulfed in a billowing sandstorm. It was a profound image, and I'm still surprised that I have never seen it replayed in any of the memorial news coverage. I remember thinking, "Right now, at this moment, thousands of people are dying." It was so obvious, and yet so impossible to comprehend.

The rest of the day unfolded in a blur. They set up a large television in the cafeteria, and people wandered in and out all day, in a sort of daze. Everytime I ran into people in the hallway, they told me different news reports. Some turned out to be true and some turned out to be false, which only added to the confusion. I remember hearing that malls and shopping centers were attacked, then later I heard that authorities were telling people to stay away from malls and shopping centers because of the possibility of bombs. I heard that there were several other planes hijacked, and that they had struck the White House, the Capitol building, and the Pentagon, and that there were planes heading for other major cities, including Cleveland and Chicago. The Sears Tower was evacuated, and so were other skyscrapers all over the world. I remember hearing that fighter jets were being scrambled to take out those other planes. I heard that key government members were being evacuated from Washington, and that the President had been removed to "an undisclosed location" via Air Force One. Later I heard that United 93 had actually passed over Cleveland airspace as it turned around to head back toward DC.

Of course, there were lots of rumors and conspiracy theories that circulated that day and in the following days. Some people believed that United 93 had actually been shot down by fighter jets, but that the government was using the "heroism" angle to cover it up. There were reports that the four planes had been sold out, and then most of the tickets were cancelled just before 9/11. People said that the terrorists bought extra tickets to ensure the planes would be mostly empty so that they could control the passengers more easily. Some stories claimed that more teams of terrorists had been planning to take part in the plot, but that they were apprehended at the airports, and the government was questioning them secretly. Maybe it was just crazy conspiracy theories, or maybe it was all true. I have no idea.

Locally, there were fears of other terrorist acts. The P&G headquarters building downtown has twin towers, so people wondered if it might be a target. My roommate was evacuated from her office because it was next to the Federal building downtown. The mosque up in West Chester had 24-hour police protection for months, due to bomb threats.

For three days, there were no planes. At the time, I was in the middle of my training for ski patrol, so on Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was out at the ski area, which is on the final approach path for CVG airport. Normally, when we went outside on the deck, we would see dozens of planes preparing for landing, but that week, there was only darkness overhead. On Tuesday night, 9/11, we did see one plane off in the distance, and we realized that it was a fighter jet from Wright-Patt. On Thursday a large search-and-rescue team was deployed from the air force base to help with the efforts at the World Trade Center.

My church was meeting in a school building for services on Saturdays and Sundays. They had just purchased a big-box hardware store, but the construction and renovation had barely begun. They scrambled to set up a prayer event for Wednesday night, and dozens of people turned up. It was probably the first church service held in that buliding.

Many, many people leaned into their churches, and American flags appeared everywhere. Everyone wanted to do something to help, but unlike most natural disasters, there were very few injured survivors who needed rescue or relief. Blood donation centers wound up turning people away. People were shocked and wounded, but resolved.

The Gift of Glide

2006-09-10T21:00:00.000-04:00

I went roller-blading with my friend yesterday. As we were taking off our skates, she said, "Sometimes I wonder if God chuckles to himself and thinks, 'Well, I never expected that they would do THAT.'"

(Yeah, yeah, I know. He's omniscient. Humor me for now.)

I believe that God has given us some great gifts. The greatest and most important has to be Free Will, but there's also Creativity, Problem-Solving, Communication, Empathy, etc. I also think that one of those gifts is the love of Glide.

Unlike birds or dolphins or cheetahs, we're not engineered to be especially graceful or efficient in our movements. But despite our awkwardness, we, as a species, have this incredible urge to create new forms of movement that are faster or more elegant. We don't create these things out of necessity-- We do it for recreation, for enjoyment, for pleasure. We have created bicycles, skates, slides, sleds, skis, snowboards, wakeboards, sailboards, hang-gliders, parachutes, and trampolines because we love the sensation of movement. It gives us a rush. It makes us happy. It provides a feeling of wonder and adventure.

Do you remember being a little kid at recess? Do you remember swinging as high as you could, until you were even with the bar at the top of the swing set? Do you remember hanging off the side of the merry-go-round? Do you remember doing penny-drops or cartwheels? Did you learn how to spin on roller skates or do stunts on your bike? I don't remember much about elementary school, but I remember these things. I also remember learning to do back-dives and back-flips, and I remember doing crazy jumps off the diving board with my cousins-- over and over and OVER again. Of course we remember the things that we love.

My sister has severe brain damage. She can't talk or understand even basic words. She can feed herself, if you don't mind a huge mess, and she can walk, but clumsily and not very far. She absolutely loves to swing or spin. It makes her happy and it calms her down when she's upset. Our love of movement is basic and intrinsic.

In college, I rode my bike everywhere. It was partly a matter of convenience, but mostly I biked because it was just more fun than trudging along on foot. I loved riding with no hands, and I gradually mastered using my balance to turn so that I could ride the whole way to class without touching the handlebars. I love skiing because of the speed and the swooping sensation. It's like dancing with gravity. I love scuba because it's like flying, slowly, without wings. Everything is more graceful underwater.

So, yeah, I think God looks down at all the crazy, creative things we do, and says, "I'm glad I gave them Glide. That was GOOD."

Bearcat

2006-08-28T21:00:00.000-04:00

I registered for classes on Friday. Actually, I tried to register for classes on Friday, but I wound up registering for a class on Friday, which I wound up dropping on Sunday so that I could change to different class. Anyway, the point is, starting September 20th, I'm going to be taking classes at University of Cincinnati, which means that I can now (if I so choose) call myself a Bearcat.

Life has a funny way of throwing you curve balls. When I was in high school, I considered applying to UC, but then I visited CWRU and discovered Biomedical Engineering, so I gave up on my plans to study Architecture. (Actually, I was considering Architectural Engineering, which is somewhat different-- Less emphasis on funky-looking buildings, more emphasis on buildings remaining standing over the long haul. As a campus, UC seems to prefer "funky-looking" over "remaining standing" so I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed that program anyway.)

Luckily, UC has a branch campus just a mile from my house, so that's where I'm going to be taking classes. I took Friday afternoon off of work to go register for classes, and the process was pretty much what I expected it to be:

ENROLLMENT: "Are you matriculating into a program of study, or just taking classes? Fill out this form and turn it in at Station 4."

STATION 4: "Here is your temporary ID number. You can use it to register for classes on-line. You can use the computers over there if you want to register now."

WOMAN WITH THE DESK CLOSEST TO THE COMPUTERS, aka FLIBBERTIGIBBET: "No, that's not a valid student ID number. You can't use that to register on-line. Well, yes, it's a temporary ID number, but I just heard that those numbers don't become active in the computer system for 24-48 hours. Oh, I see. Well, since the class has just one opening left, I suppose I can help you get registered now. Fill out this form and give it back to me."

FLIBBERTIGIBBET, TAKE 2: "The computer is saying that both of those classes are now full, so someone else must have registered for that Biology class in the last few minutes. You can either try to register for different sessions, or you can try to get the professors to sign an override form. OK, well, write those other class numbers on the form, and give it back to me."

FLIBBERTIGIBBET, TAKE 3: "I can register you for the Sociology class, but the Biology class is full. Well, they might be willing to give you an override, but that's really up to them. I can't make any promises. The contact information for professors is on-line. Do you know the One Stop website address? Well, here it is. Go to this menu, then this menu, then this menu, and there they are. No, I don't think they'll be in their offices this afternoon, given that it's a break period between Summer and Autumn terms. Ok, well, good luck."

BIOLOGY PROFESSOR'S OFFICE: "Do not enter. This building is closed for renovation."

SOCIOLOGY PROFESSORS'S OFFICE: "I am out of the office until sometime in September. If you need to reach me, leave a voicemail message."

Getting shut out of classes completely is a new experience for me, and I realized how lucky I had been to go to a smaller school, where registration was fairly easy, or at least I don't remember ever having to get an override from a professor at Case. On the other hand, I entered Case a year after Adelbert burned, so all of the student services had been farmed out to various buildings around campus. There was always a run-around at the beginning of the year that went something like, "Go to Baker to pick up the course listings. Go to Building A to register. You can't register because you haven't paid all your tuition up front. If your parents are paying on an installment plan, you have to get a memo signed by the Cashier's Office in Building B. Go back to Building A to register. Go to Building C to sign up for points for your food plan, but only during the right hours. Go to Thwing to buy your books." So at least at this branch of UC, everything was located in one office, which made the experience relatively painless, and Flibbertigibbet was friendly and helpful.

SIDEBAR: I can't remember the names of the buildings that housed Registration and the Cashier's Office now. I just went to CWRU website to check the map of campus, and those buildings are no longer there. (I think they may have been two ends of the same building, but I clearly remember that you had to outside to get from one place to the other.) Baker building is gone now too, which is not such a tragedy, because the buildings weren't anything special-- Baker in particular was blight in a circa-1960's "modern" style --and they obstructed the views between Case quad and the classic (and proudly rebuilt) Adelbert Hall, not to mention foot traffic from North campus. But it does make me feel a bit older to know that places that I remember are now gone forever.

Anyway, I left voicemail messages for both professors, but then later on I realized that there was another Biology class that (a) sounded more interesting to me, (b) wasn't full and closed, and (c) might fulfill my prerequisite requirements for Ethics as well as Biology, so I signed up for that one instead. And it sounds like the professor is going to let me into the evening session of the Sociology course, so all's well that ends well.

And now I'm a Bearcat, just like my husband, my dad, and several of my friends. Life's funny sometimes.

Now is the time in skiing when we dance...

2006-08-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again...

Every year, toward the end of summer, it hits. A feeling of lethargy, ennui, and wistfulness. I feel altogether tired of the relentless, oppressive heat and humidity of summer. Vacations are over, the pool is closed, so what's the point of this sticky, nasty weather hanging on? I'm eager for the cool crispness of fall, for evenings when you can see your breath while you look at the stars, and for the enchantment that comes from lighting a fire outside on the deck, and staring into the flames while spending time with good friends.

But above all, I'm anxious for winter. I'm not alone in this. I guarantee that if you ask any die-hard skiier, they'll tell you the same thing. We all suffer from feelings of unrest and yearning at this time of year, and there's a ritual that we perform in honor of the change of seasons. Every year, in this time period between the end of August and the beginning of October, I find myself drawn to my ski gear, down in the basement. I drag out my boot bag, and pull everything out of it. I fondly try on my gloves, which conform softly to my hands after years of use. I pet my warm fuzzy neck gaiter, and try on my favorite ski socks. And then I put on my boots, and buckle them up, and tromp around the house for a little while, just wishing, wishing, wishing that ski season wasn't still 3 months away.

I know I'm not alone in this.

Corporate Culture

2006-08-19T19:00:00.000-04:00

One of my new co-workers sent around an email that I think neatly summarizes the difference between my old job and my new job.

It has been brought to management's attention that some individuals throughout the company have been using foul language during the course of normal conversation with their co-workers. Due to complaints received from some employees who may be easily offended, this type of language will be no longer be tolerated. We do however, realize the critical importance of being able to accurately express your feelings when communicating with co-workers. Therefore, a list of "TRY SAYING" new phrases has been provided so that proper exchange of ideas and information can continue in an effective manner without risk of offending our more sensitive employees.

TRY SAYING: I wasn't involved in the project.
INSTEAD OF: It's not my ----ing problem.

TRY SAYING: Perhaps you should check with...
INSTEAD OF: Tell someone who gives a ----.

TRY SAYING: You want me to take care of that?
INSTEAD OF: Who the ---- died and made you boss?

TRY SAYING: I don't think you understand.
INSTEAD OF: Shove it up your ---.

I'm not going to include the whole list, because I'm sure you can see where this is going. The point is that at my old job, I would mostly hear stuff from the "TRY SAYING" list. At my new job, I think I've heard every single thing on the "INSTEAD OF" list, and I've only been there for three weeks now. That being said, here are a few "INSTEAD OF" sayings that are special favorites among my new co-workers:

TRY SAYING: We'll have to discuss that.
INSTEAD OF: NO! That's bull----.

TRY SAYING: He's not familiar with the issues.
INSTEAD OF: He's got his head up his ---.

TRY SAYING: Excuse me, sir?
INSTEAD OF: Eat ---- and die.

TRY SAYING: I love a challenge.
INSTEAD OF: This job sucks.

Internally, people at my old job might have been thinking the "INSTEAD OF" stuff, but they would very rarely say it out loud. Although I don't swear much myself, I'm not easily offended by people who do, and I'm finding it kind of refreshing to hear people say what they're really thinking, instead of shrouding everything in layers of corporate euphemisms.

For example, I can't tell you how many times I heard something like, "We need to address some of the opportunities for improvement." No one would ever say that a project or product line had problems. Management might acknowledge "issues" or even "challenges" but they generally prefered to use the term "opportunities," even when describing situations that were completely FUBAR.

Of course, at my old job, people would probably have gotten in some fairly serious trouble for even forwarding an email like this around.

Tales from the Flip Side

2006-07-31T20:30:00.000-04:00

Well, I started my new job today, and I suspect that, if nothing else, it may provide for some interesting blog fodder. I base this suspicion on the fact that my new co-workers spent the morning "planning a coup" because of some remarks made by our new boss, who's only been with the company for three weeks. I don't know if they'll actually carry out their plans or if it's just wishful thinking to add a little drama to life.

I had lunch with another guy who is working the same sort of gig that I am (i.e. hourly pay, working 4 days/week) but he's only been there for two weeks now, so neither of us are really sure what we've gotten ourselves into. I think we're both hoping that we'll have the advantage of observing the drama with some detachment because, for us, it's just a JOB, not a career.

At any rate, it's going to be a major change to go from working for a company with >1,500 employees in Cincinnati (and >150,000 world-wide) to a company with 15 employees. (And that's counting me!)

More causual? YES. I finally get to wear jeans to work! Woohoo!

Less bureaucratic? Oh, you'd better believe it.

More flexible? Yes, BUT...

...the question becomes: Which is better-- a rubber band or an iron chain? I think it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

What I did over my summer break...

2006-07-29T23:00:00.000-04:00

It's been a long while since I've written anything here. There's a really good reason for that. First of all, this spring has been a really rough period for me at work, and I was working crazy long hours. That came to an abrupt end in June, but I've been waiting to write until I got some things resolved...

Not everything is resolved yet, but maybe that's just how life goes.

So here's what I did over my summer break:

Went on vacation. We spent a week at Longboat Key with my mom and my sister. We also had a sort of progressive familiy reunion with my aunts & uncles, cousins, and cousins' kids. (Three of each, as it turns out.) The first tropical storm of the season made the first half of the week pretty rainy, but at least it was restful. And we got to go snorkeling with manatees, which was pretty dang cool.

Lost my job and found a lawyer.

Mourned the loss of a good friend, who died while scuba diving in Mexico. We don't know what happened, and it will never make sense to me. We miss him.

Had several job interviews and worked out a win-win situation with one of them. Starting Monday, I'll be working about 30 hours a week, which will keep me busy (but not too busy to pursue other opportunities) and keep some money coming in while I figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I may find another job, I may go back to grad school for my PhD, I may go to school to do something completely different, maybe a Physical Therapy program. Only God knows...

Speaking of Physical Therapy, I've also spent a couple of days observing at the Sports Medicine / Biodynamics Lab at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. (One of the prerequisites for applying to PT programs is to spend 50-80 hours observing/volunteering in a PT setting.) It's been interesting, and I'm learning lots of new stuff along the way.

Painted the kitchen / dining room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. (OK, I'm still working on the 2nd bedroom and the bathroom, but they'll be done soon.)

Played a lot of Sudoku and Lost Cities. What can I say? I'm hooked.

You know you're an adult when......you hire a lawyer.

2006-07-13T22:30:00.000-04:00

The negotiations are still going on, so I can't discuss any details here. But it's definitely an adult moment when you go downtown and sit across the desk from someone to discuss legal issues. It's also one of those moments where you think to yourself, "I never imagined I'd be doing this. This is not in my plan for how my life was supposed to turn out." But you find yourself doing it because it seems like it's the only way to get someone to acknowledge that the situation is just completely and utterly not right.

(PV31W and I have both experienced this particular YKYAAW moment.)

Weather Reports

2006-04-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

So, you might be wondering to yourself, "What's the weather going to be like this weekend? Is it going to be sunny, or is it going to rain?"

And the weather-people collectively answer, "Yes."

As I was reading the weather forecast for the next few days, it brought back memories of my high school Chemistry/Physics teacher. ("Mr. Todd, am I supposed to add this chemical or that chemical to my solution?" "Yes.") But the weather-folks here in Cincinnati seem to want to keep all their options open, just in case it's not an exclusive either/or situation:

Friday - Intervals of clouds and sunshine with a shower or thunderstorm; breezy and very warm (78/59)

Saturday - A blend of sun and clouds with a thunderstorm possible; very warm (78/58)

Sunday - Clouds and sun with a couple of showers and a thunderstorm; warm (76/53)

So I guess that we can expect that it's going to be sunny, cloudy, rainy, AND stormy this weekend.

Life Wounds

2006-03-29T22:45:00.000-05:00

Ok, I originally thought that my most recent post belonged only on my "You know you're an adult when..." blog. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that it belongs here too.

This is me. This is who I am at this moment in time.

So, rather than duplicate it all on this blog, you can find the original posting by clicking here:
You know you're an adult when...
...you get your dream job, and then someone tells you that you've failed completely at it.

Coincidentally, two of my best friends in the world have gone through similar experiences in the past six months. It's like a virus, or the Gen X version of a (pre-mature) mid-life crisis. (Who has a mid-life crisis at the age of 32?!?) I won't say that misery loves company, because I wouldn't wish this experience on anyone. But I will say that I take courage from the fact that I'm not alone. They're both surviving, improvising, adapting, and possibly even overcoming, so I have hope that I might too.

One of my friends has a saying, "Life is hard for stupid people." That's a basic truth. Stupid people make bad decisions, which put them in difficult situations, from which they have fewer options and make even worse decisions. I've been hearing her say that for years, and the whole time, I've been smugly relying on a theory implied by the inverse of that truth, which is, "The smarter you are, the easier your life should be." And then, suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the theory, and I have been decimated to find out that being smart isn't enough. Oh, and by the way, working hard, having good intentions, and desiring to be productive and successful aren't enough either.

Life is hard.

Life is certainly not fair.

(Actually, in the grand scheme of things, that might be a good thing. "Fair" isn't all it's cracked up to be.)

...I'm not seeing any upside to the "Life is hard" thing, though...

You know you're an adult when......you get your dream job, and then someone tells you that you've failed completely at it.

2006-03-27T22:45:00.000-05:00

NOTE: This entry was originally posted in a different blog, but after Blogger added the label feature, I decided to consolidate everything here.

WARNING: This entry isn't going to be a light-hearted as the other postings on "YKYAAW..."

I have three blogs, and they fall into three distinct categories:

My day-to-day blog - Also includes travel and vacation stories.
(It's now out-of-date by 2.5 vacations, but that's not really the point right now.)

Wonder - Thoughts about philosophy and religion.

YKYAAW - This blog was originally conceived as a pseudo-ironic look at how a person occasionally (and unexpectedly) realizes that he or she is actually becoming a grown-up, even though he or she may really feel like a little kid just pretending to fit into adult society.

Unfortunately, the subject matter at hand fits most closely into the YKYAAW category. And so, instead of some light anecdote, you're going to get a full dose of reality here. Ready?

I have worked at the same company for the past eight years. Within the first year of starting work, I knew that I wanted to be a Design Engineer in R&D, and for almost six years, I pursued that goal relentlessly. A year and a half ago, that dream came true, and I finally, officially became a Senior Design Engineer. In January, I received my first performance appraisal-- which was basically, in a nutshell, "Your performance is completely inadequate, you're on probation, and you have 90 days to convince us not to fire you." Two years ago, I got the highest rating possible (reserved for just a handful of people in the entire company) and a huge bonus. So this was a shock, to put it mildly.

Since then, I've gone through several of the 5 stages of coping with catastrophic news:

Denial & Isolation - Yep, been there, done that.

Bargaining - I'm trying to figure out if making contingency plans for a lawsuit falls under "Bargaining" or "Denial"

Anger - Oh, yeah, I've definitely fallen down hard right in the middle of this one.

Depression - Plenty of this one too.
I cry...a lot. If you count the days when I break down sobbing vs. the days that I just manage to hold on by my fingernails, I'm probably averaging about 50/50.
And I'm really tired, all the time. Of course, lying awake all night thinking about work will do that to you. And even when I am asleep, I still can't escape from those thoughts-- On Saturday night, I had a very disturbing, very realistic dream about running away from my life.

Acceptance - I didn't think I was here yet, but last night I found myself filling out an application to go back to school for an entirely different career, so maybe I'm starting to dabble in this one.

(Oh, and I also think that Humiliation, Frustration, and Overwhelming Indecision need to be added into the middle of that list as well.)

Sometimes, it feels like it takes every bit of courage I've got just to get out bed and go to work. I wake up with a headache that starts in the muscles on the sides of my skull, and by the time I swipe my badge and walk in the door to my office, I feel like I'm carrying a 25 lb lead weight in my stomach. By 10am, the headache has encompassed my entire scalp, and my throat is sore because I forget to swallow when my jaw is continuously clenched. By 4pm, I'm mentally & physically exhausted from the stress, and I still have a few more hours of work ahead of me.

I am trying to keep some sort of perspective. Certainly, things could be worse. No one in my family is sick or dying, my husband is a source of strength, and we have enough savings to survive for awhile if I do lose my job. But I've been looking, and I'm just not seeing the silver lining here, or even the light at the end of the tunnel.

I feel wounded.

Broken.

And I'm starting to wonder if courage even means what I've always thought it means. Because right now it just feels like a word that describes a lack of any better options. What are my options? Should I fight? Should I quit? Right now I don't even know which option is fighting and which one is quitting.

The thing is... it's still my dream job. I can't think of anything else that I would rather do. I love being an engineer, and I thought I was good at it. Certainly, it's a huge part of my identity, which is exactly why this ordeal has made a such deep wound that hurts all the way down to my core.

What I'm wondering now is... Will it heal? Soon? Eventually? Or do I need to cut it out like a disease and throw it away? How deep will the scars go? How long will it take for them to fade?

How obvious is it that I'm broken?

You know you're an adult when......you buy a house.

2005-10-31T08:30:00.000-05:00

From PV31W:

Shopping for a house is fun.
Buying a house is not fun.

Envisioning one's stuff in the purchased house is fun.
Actually moving the stuff is not fun.

Dreaming of decorating a house is fun.
Actually handing over the cash required is not fun.

Getting a paycheck is fun.
Working for the Man is, well, not so much fun...

Even More on the Importance of Philosophy...

2005-10-19T22:30:00.001-04:00

I just finished reading a short book called Light in the Shadow of Jihad. In a reference to Jefferson's great statement in the Declaration of Independence...

We hold these truths to be [sacred] 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 happiness.

...this is what Ravi Zacharias has to say:

That one sentence sets America apart from most of the nations of the earth. Our value is not derived from government benevolence or from the mercies of democracy. Democracy and individual dignity derive from the transcendent reality of a Creator. Take away the Creator, and we are at the mercy of the powers of the moment.

This is vital to our understanding for the future. We can debate from now till the end of the world whether America is a Christian nation. The certainty is this: America was not founded on an Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist worldview, however valuable some of their precepts might be. If we do not see this, we do not see the fundamental ideas that shaped the ethos of the American people. In that sense, bin Laden has a better understanding of us than we have of ourselves. Only within the Christian framework could a nation have been conceived that recognizes that God Himself has bestowed intrinsic dignity upon us. We are not the result of natural causes, but of a supernatural one. We are individuals with dignity in essence; and freedom, even with its risks, has been endowed upon us by our Creator.

The book also includes an interesting quote from George Washington's farewell address:

Of all the disputations and habits that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness-- These finest props of duties of men and citizens... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on the minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience, both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

What Has God Made Oprah Good At?

2005-10-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

MSNBC is doing a series of articles called When Women Lead and one of the articles includes an interview with Oprah Winfrey that I thought was pretty interesting:

Success is a magnifying glass on your personality. Who you are just becomes more intense. The real beauty of having material wealth is that you don't have to worry about paying the bills and you have more energy to be concerned about the things that matter. How do I accelerate my humanity? How do I use who I am on earth for a purpose that's bigger than myself? How do I align the energy of my soul with my personality and use my personality to serve my soul? My answer always comes back to self. There is no moving up and out into the world unless you are fully acquainted with who you are. You cannot move freely, speak freely, act freely, be free —unless you are comfortable with yourself.

So, you might be asking, what is her purpose that's bigger than herself?

Right now, I'm incredibly excited about my work in South Africa. I'm going to change the future for thousands and thousands of girls because I'm going to give them an education. I'm going to go out into the villages, into the rural areas, the forgotten places, and find the girls who have the potential to excel and be leaders in the world. I'm going to create a leadership academy. I believe that the future of Africa depends upon the future of its girls and women. That's the only thing that's going to turn that continent around.

I feel blessed to have a platform that allows me to reach millions of people every day with my show and my magazine. I'm often inspired by the work we do. Recently on our show, I asked viewers to help me track down child predators. Within 48 hours, we had captured two of the men we featured. As a victim of child molestation, this was big for me and for millions of others. When you can use your voice in a way that really speaks to people, it resonates. Whether it's a school or a book or just an idea. That's what fun is. That's what living really is. Living with a capital L.

I think that Oprah has figured out what God has made her good at.

What Has God Made Me Good At?

2005-10-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

Rabbi Gellman has written another great article called What God Made Us Good At, which has provided me with lots of things to ponder this evening...

Some extraordinary adults remember what all ordinary children know: the key to life is to love what God made you good at and to do what you love.

Knowing what God made you good at has nothing to do with the job you work at to pay the rent. So when you know the secret of doing what you love, it does not necessarily mean that you will get a job doing it. There are not that many paying jobs for good listeners or good fight-enders or good takers of things apart or good bedtime-story readers or loyal friends or good feelers of the kinship of sorrow. Occasionally you can snag a job doing exactly what God made you good at-- —I thank God every day that this happened to me, but that is the life equivalent of winning the lottery. The odds on this happening are very long.

Actually, fortunately for me, there are paying jobs for "good takers of things apart" and I happen to have one. I'm an engineer. I get paid to put things together, take things apart, and even to break things!

So for those of you who feel trapped in jobs you hate, or in classes where you are being forced to study subjects you hate, take hope from this secret of life. Your schoolwork or your job or your obligations to make lunch for the kids every single day need not stop you from doing what you love today. Your life is not only your job or your grade in school, or your family obligations. Your life is fuller than that, broader than that, thicker than that, more soaring than that. Your life is doing what God made you good at. If even part of what God made you good at is used in your job, hooray, but the odds are that what you are good at spills over past your job and into your life. And no matter how crappy part of your life is, the other part, the part where you do what you love, can be glorious.

I've been there too, trapped in a job that I hated, which was literally giving me ulcers. Fortunately for me, at the same time, the rest of my life was being filled up with things that I loved-- ski patrol training, learning to SCUBA dive, and falling in love with my future husband. (And yes, I believe that God was looking out for me through all of that.)

During one of my ask-the-rabbi sessions with the fourth grade, one girl asked me, "“I don't know what God made me good at. How can I find out?"” My advice to her is my advice to you if you don't know. First, ask your parents. They know you best, though they are not always honest. They sometimes will tell you with all the love in their hearts, "“Honey, God made you good at being a sports agent."” If they tell you that, then go ask your friends. They don't know you as well as your family, but they're more honest. If family and friends do not tell you clearly what they think God made you good at, then ask yourself this question: "When am I most happy?"” The times you are most happy are the times you are doing what you love and what you love is always what God made you good at.

So, as I've already said, I enjoy my job. But here's the "million-dollar" question: If I won the lottery, would I still go to work at the same job every day? In all honesty, probably not. I like the challenges though-- I like trouble-shooting, finding a root cause, analyzing data, evaluating potential solutions, and proving that everything works. (However, I'm not such a big fan of the more difficult challenges of getting out of bed early in the morning and arriving at work by 8am. Oh, and I loathe reviewing patents.) And unfortunately, it's just not the type of job that you can do as a part-time volunteer. It's more of a 40-hour-work-week-salaried-position thing. So I'm not sure what I would do.

What about you? What would you do if you won the lottery and never needed to worry about another paycheck?

Now, my other main love (after my husband & family & friends) is skiing, and not just skiing (although that, in itself, would be enough to qualify as an obsession) but ski patrolling too. I've already described some of the things that I love about skiing in a previous post, so I'll just add a couple more things that I love about ski patrolling:

Patrolling requires many of the same skills that I use in my particular field of engineering-- It provides lots of opportunities for problem-solving, risk analysis, and decision-making, and it requires a good understanding of how the human body is supposed to work and what can go wrong. There are lots of questions that must be answered in just a few minutes time: What is the main problem/injury? What is the worst-case scenario? How can we safely get an injured person into the toboggan? Transferred to a bed in the aid room? Out of the aid room and into a car? (Oh, and as a bonus, we also get to make splints out of bubble-wrap, cardboard, and duct tape, which are 3 items on the Top 10 list of favorite engineering materials.)

But there are also things that I enjoy about patrolling specifically because it's different from my day job:

For one thing, it's very physical-- Skiing with a loaded toboggan is tough enough, but there's also a lot of dragging (the toboggan) and lifting (injured people) and carrying (first aid packs & signs & power drills & gear) involved. It's definitely the opposite of a desk job!

Patrolling also involves a lot more interpersonal skills than engineering does. (Insert engineering joke here. The one about the boy and the frog princess would work in a pinch.) I am a pretty introverted person by nature, but I am forced to quickly overcome that when I'm working with someone who is injured. And this may sound crazy, but it seems like we usually see the best side of people when they're injured and vulnerable. Last year I met a 13 year old who had severely dislocated his finger at the top of the hill, and yet he managed to walk all the way down on his own, cradling his hand with his opposite arm. He was obviously in a lot of pain, but he was a really, really brave and patient. If I had met him under "better" conditions, I might have only seen him as a crazy little hoodlum, but instead I got to see him as a trooper.

There's also a tremendous amount of teamwork and camaraderie within the patrol. We're all volunteers, so everyone is there because they love patrolling, not because of a paycheck. We spend a lot of time training together and working together and skiing together, and that provides a very powerful sense of community, which I believe is a critical part of God's plan for our lives.

So there's two of things that I love and that I'm good at-- Engineering and Skiing. Are there others? Maybe, probably, hopefully. I love spending time with my husband and hanging out with my friends. I love reading and learning new things. And when I pause and consider that everyone on Earth has different skills and different passions, it makes me wonder what could be accomplished if more people started applying those skills to the things that they were passionate about. There's a lot of hope rolled up into that thought. How could we change our cities? How could we change our country? How could we change our world?

Instead of ending with my own rambling, I'd rather leave you with Rabbi Gellman's (far more eloquent) conclusion...

This is what it means to be made "“in the image of God,"” (Hebrew: b'tzelem elohim.) Obviously being made in the image of God does not mean that we have a big toe just like God has a big toe. It does not mean that we are all powerful or all knowing or all good because God is all powerful, all knowing and all good. So what does it mean? The Hebrew word tzelem comes from the root word "“tzel"” which means "“shadow"” and so, we are all God's shadows. But because God has infinite attributes it stands to reason that God has infinite shadows and this means that each of us shadows a different part of God... ...Being God's shadows perfectly explains to me how we are all different and how we are all the same. God's shadow falls across our wounded world through an infinity of differently blessed lives; each shadow bearing equally the holiness of the Creator, but each shadow bearing a unique shape meant to be discovered and used to find happiness, fix the world and please God.

God gives each of us unique blessings and thus unique destinies. That is what it means to say we are all made in the image of God or to say that we all stood at Sinai. And we are all standing at Sinai right here and right now. God is looking at you, just you, to ask you, "“Did you discover what I made you good at? Are you working at what you love? And are you helping those who have not yet discovered the shape of their spiritual shadow to do what I made them good at doing?"

...God is actually speaking to you, just you, to teach you the secrets of life. God is speaking to you, just you, to lead you to the place of green pastures and still waters where you need not be afraid. God is speaking to you, just you, to teach you how every day your blessings exceed your burdens. God is speaking to you, just you, to tell you that life is too short not to do what you love...

The Nature of Triage

2005-09-03T23:00:00.000-04:00

Check out this article by Rabbi Marc Gellman, who is one of my all-time favorite columnists. His articles are always articulate, profound, and inspiring.

In our ski patrol training, we are trained in triage, but it's one of those skills that you really hope that you will never have to perform. It is a terrifying responsibility, and the people who are making the tough calls about who to evacuate first deserve our support and recognition for their efforts and their courage.

As I see the news coverage of the hurricane this week, I have been frustrated and outraged to hear stories about people shooting at and threatening MedEvac helicopters, police, and other rescue personnel, because every helicopter that gets pulled out of service, and every police officer who turns in his badge, and every National Guard who is assigned to protect agaist looters, murderers, and rapists is one less resource that is available for the people who most desperately need immediate help to ensure their health and survival. It breaks my heart to think that people who legitimately need aid are being deprived of if by the selfish and criminal acts of others. I have also been frustrated by the lack of evidence of people stepping up to help each other, rather than just demanding to be helped by government agencies. Maybe that's happening, but it's sure not making it into the news, and it's rapidly eroding my faith in humanity.

But I think that Rabbi Gellman says it best:

The reason for triage decisions is the fact of limited resources. Now there is much to say about why lifesaving resources are limited in this catastrophe, but only a fool or an abject ideologue cannot grasp the fact that when the strongest possible storm hit the most vulnerable possible city, death, devastation and chaos were sure to follow in its wake no matter what the preparations for the storm. Yes, more could have been done, and nothing I say or believe ought to be construed in any way as justifying any possible malfeasance of what public officials could have or should have done ahead of this killer storm. I am particularly bewildered and outraged at the length of time it has taken to get food and water to the starving, suffering people in the convention center. As I write this on Friday, they are still in harm’s way and still suffering from the lack of the only lifesaving resource that should never be rationed and that is hope. It is a disgrace that even in the context of necessary triage decisions, they still wait in fear, hunger and thirst way too long for the time of triage to end.

However, in the end I simply refuse to blame the rescuers more than the storm that caused the need for rescue. It is not merely naive but profoundly foolish to have expected that 100,000 troops with water and food and patrol vehicles and helicopters and busses and trains and showers and shelters and electricity and bulldozers and levee-repair crews and mobile kitchens and tent cities and psychological services and identity checkers and employment services and construction crews and electrical linemen and mechanical and structural and civil engineers and architects and water-control experts and animal-removal experts could have all been set up somewhere out of the storm path but close enough to swoop in and pluck the soaking victims out of harm’s way despite the collapsed bridges and levees the minute the winds stopped blowing and minute the tide subsided without missing a heartbeat. Where have we gleaned the arrogant belief that if we suffer from a natural disaster, it must always somebody’s fault? We must all face the grim but inescapable fact that there are some times and some places where the need you face is simply greater than the resources you have at that moment or even days after that moment or even weeks after that moment, and thus agonizing decisions must be made. Triage is a way to make those decisions on the allocation of scarce lifesaving resources that does not stop the tears, but at least it stops the feeling that you did not just throw up your hands and give up.

In medical triage training, there are actually four color-coded levels that are assigned to victims of a disaster:

Green - The "walking wounded" who are affected, but who are at least capable of temporarily taking care of themselves.

Yellow - Those with significant, but not life-threatening, injuries.

Red - People with life-threatening injuries who need immediate attention to ensure their survival.

Black - People who are dead or likely to die even with aggressive medical attention. Resources are not be assigned to these victims, because you are more likely to have an impact on the outcome of the critical "reds" and "yellows" with limited resources.

If a triage system works effectively, it allows aid to reach the critical "Reds" first (i.e. premature babies and hospital patients and the people trapped in their attics surrounded by toxic water) then the "Yellows" (i.e. sick and disabled, young children and babies) and finally the "Greens" (i.e. the thousands of people who will need help rebuilding their homes and lives in the coming months). In the case of this hurricane, many of the the "Greens" are folks that self-evacuated before the hurricane hit, but there are also lots of able-bodied people who just no longer have access to any means of transportation. In triage, it is often necessary to ask "Green" patients to help provide assistance with the "Yellows" and "Reds", and I suspect that in this case there are plenty of people who could be helping their fellow evacuees instead of complaining about why no one is helping them.

I also think that anyone caught committing a crime that injures or endangers other people or causes precious resources to be diverted away from true victims of this disaster-- by threatening rescue workers, destroying property, looting (of non-survival-essential goods), murdering, or raping-- should immediately be designated as a "Black" level for triage, meaning that no resources whatsoever should be wasted on evacuating them. They should be left in the flooded city to fend for themselves without food, water, or shelter. If triage is an efficient way of administering aid, it may also be an efficient way of administering justice.

Brunelleschi's Dome

2005-05-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that there are a lot of great things to see and do in Florence, but we came for one reason-- to see the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, also known as Il Duomo. The church is one of the jewels of the Italian Renaissance, and is a wonder of architecture of any age. It was, and still is, the largest masonry dome ever built-- bigger than the Pantheon, the US Capitol building, and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It may very well be the largest dome that will ever be constructed using bricks and mortar, since modern buildings with large open spaces are built using steel and lighter space-age materials.

The dome was engineered by one man, Filippo Brunelleschi, and he also created several new types of construction equipment that were essential for building the dome. Like the Roman Forum & the Sistine Chapel, I became interested in seeing this landmark because of a book-- In this case, the book is Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King, who is also the author of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. I highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest at all in architecture or engineering.

One of the things that I found interesting is that, during the Renaissance, Italians had a very low opinion of the "flying buttresses" prevalent elsewhere in Europe. They viewed the buttresses as a sort of ugly scaffolding technique. And actually, that's exactly what they are-- Well, ugly is up for debate, but they're definitely a structural crutch. The Gothic style was focused on bringing lots of natural light into buildings, primarily by creating high, vaulted ceilings and adding lots of windows. But high walls filled with windows would not have been strong enough to resist the outward thrust created by the arches that were used to construct the roofs, so flying buttresses were added to help provide extra resistance against that thrust. (As walls get taller, they also become less capable of resisting outward thrust.) While Italians did incorporate Gothic-style arches and windows into their churches, they resisted using flying buttresses, making their great churches significantly different from the cathedrals of England & France. (In this case, they did wind up having to implement a different sort of crutch. In the photos below, look for the black iron bars running across the vault. These tension members were added (per Brunelleschi's suggestion) after the main vault was completed, because the walls started to show signs of outward movement.)

Brunelleschi's challenge was to create a massive, octagonal, Gothic-arch-style dome that could be supported by the walls of the church. Fortunately, he happened to be a genius capable of the task, and so his dome still stands today, an architectural masterpiece in the heart of Florence.

The facade of Santa Maria del Fiore - Every inch of the marble is either intricately carved or inlaid with green or pink marble accents. Up close, the elaborate carvings look like they're made from confectioner's icing and twisted sticks of hard-candy.

We started our day by checking out of our hotel and reclaiming our car so that we could stash our luggage in its trunk. Then we had to find a place to park the car, which took a while. After that, we set off on foot for the Piazza della Duomo. We stopped at a pastry shop along the way, and sat on a bench outside the church to eat our breakfast. When the gypsies and the Asian-scarf/shawl-vendor-ladies became too much of a nuisance, we decided to get in line. We weren't really sure what we were getting in line for, but that's what you do when you're a tourist in Italy... When you arrive at some famous, amazing site, you get in line. Sometimes it works out the way you were expecting, and sometimes it doesn't. I mention this because a couple of young Italian women approached us while we were in the line, and this is how the conversation went:

Woman #1: "Parlate Italiano?"
Me: "No. Inglese."
Woman #1: *Something in Italian*
Me: *Shrug* "Sorry, I don't know."
Woman #1 to Woman #2: "Como dite i biglietti?"
Woman #2: "Tickets"
Woman #1 to Me: "Si. Tickets?"
Me: "I hope so!"

I'm not sure if she was asking, "Is this the line for tickets?" or "Do you know how much the tickets cost?" It didn't really matter. Even though they hadn't gotten any coherent answers, they shrugged, and got in line with the rest of us tourists, and we all wound up inside the church.

Interior of the church, facing toward the entrance.

Interior of the church, facing toward the dome.

Interior of the dome.

As it turns out, admission to the church itself is free. You do, however, have to pay a fee of 6 Euros (and get in a different line) to go up into the dome. But it was well worth the price, even after factoring in the 463 steps to the top. The climb starts off with narrow stone stairs enclosed between stone walls. The straight staircases change to very tight spiral staircases, twisting upward inside the church walls and into the drum that supports the base of the dome. The drum has two walkways that overlook the interior of the church...

(Sorry about the glare-- They've got plexiglass up along the walkway (presumably so that people can't drop things) and the sunlight from the circular windows in the drum is reflecting off the plexiglass.)

There are actually two massive octagonal domes, with a hollow cavity between them. The lower dome is what you see from inside the church, and the outer dome is the roof that you see from the outside. Both domes were built in rings, without any framing or scaffolding, supporting their own weight as they grew upward. They are capped by a lantern (a tall cylinder with windows) which allows sunlight to illuminate the church through the top of the dome.

At the base of the dome, the steps become integrated into the surface of the inner dome. They follow a path tangent to the circumference of the dome, slanting at odd angles as they wind upward through the irregular cavity between the two domes. The last set of steps turn toward the center of the dome, climbing directly up the surface of the inner dome.

Finally, there is a stone ladder leading up through the outer dome, so that you escape the cave-like cavity and arrive, blinking in the glare of the sun, at the pinnacle of the dome. From the ledge surrounding the lantern you can see all of Florence stretched out below you, a lake of orange tiled roofs surrounded by the green hills of Tuscany.

Roma to Firenze

2005-05-24T12:00:00.000-04:00

We checked out of our hotel in Rome, took the train to the airport, and picked up our rental car. After a few minor detours, we wound up on the Via Cassia, on a quest for "a city on an island in the middle of a valley" called Bagnoregio. On our map of Italy, the city seemed to be near a large lake, so that description seemed to make sense, although we weren't able to find the city as we drove along the edge of the lake. It wasn't until we decided to start heading toward the A1 autostrada that it all became clear...

Bagnoregio is a walled city on a hill in the middle of a valley. Since we had a long drive still ahead of us, we decided not to back-track to see the city, but we stopped to have a snack and view it from a distance.

We continued on the A1 through Umbria and Tuscany to Florence. I had three small maps at Florence at my disposal, but none of them seemed to feel that street names would be at all relevant or helpful, so we wandered our way into the general area of town where I thought our hotel would be, and then we stopped and asked for directions at a little restaurant called Mr. Kebab. The guy behind the counter didn't recognize the name of the street that our hotel was on, but another woman in the restaurant did, and she said that we were very close-- less than three blocks away. She began giving me directions on how to walk there, but I told her that we had a car, and that changed everything. Sure, we were only three blocks away, but we literally couldn't get there from where we were. She indicated that we should drive south-west, away from the direction that the hotel was in, off the edge of the map, then turn north and go for several blocks until we hit a major street, then turn east and drive along the front of the old fortress for about a kilometer, then turn back south-west in the hope of getting to our hotel from that direction.

Florence is a rabbit warren of one-way alleys, all running off at acute angles, all partially clogged by parked cars, motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles. To make things more interesting, many of the piazzas are completely blocked off for cars, so the predominate mode of transportation is on two wheels-- mostly motorcyles & scooters, with an occasional bicycle. The main streets are perhaps the same width as a major six-lane road in the U.S., but there are no lane lines, and therefore no lanes of traffic, just a pile of cars maneuvering for position, with scooters and motorcycles swerving insanely in between. At a stop light, the flow of traffic resembles a landslide grinding to a halt, with cars tumbling into position like boulders, and scooters flowing into the cracks like smaller debris.

Needless to say, we wound up completely lost, and I was worried that someone was going to wind up dead-- either a scooter was going to get crunched by our car, or my husband was going to have an aneurysm. So we stopped and asked for directions again, this time from a Dutch or German guy who was walking his bike home and was extremely suspicious of approaching our car. We showed him where we wanted to be on our map, and he showed us where we actually were, and now those two spots were further apart than when we asked for directions the first time. While it was helpful to at least know where we were, he couldn't tell us how to get to our hotel, at least not by car.

We eventually figured it out and found our hotel, which wasn't exactly as advertised... It was in a old building which could have been quite nice, but the rooms were bleak at best, and there was no safe to put our valuables in while we went out to dinner, which wouldn't have been so bad if the door to the room had been secured by an actual lock system from the 20th century, instead of a skeleton key from the 1800's. There was also supposed to be a phone in our room, but when we asked at the desk, the guy told us that there was a pay phone outside on the street. (Maybe he guessed that the reason that we wanted the phone was so that we could make arrangements to check into our next hotel in Pescara a day early so that we wouldn't have to spend another night there!)

The hotel also advertised free parking, but they only meant that there was on-street parking available in front of the hotel. As we walked back from dinner, we became somewhat suspicious about the lack of cars on the street, so we studied the parking signs for clues. Based on my first French lessons from many, many years ago, I guessed that the signs were indicating that parking was not allowed on the street from midnight to 3am on Wednesday mornings, and it happened to be a Tuesday night. (I'm not sure what the Italian word for Wednesday is, but it resembles Mercredi, so there I am, thinking, "Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi... Oh, wait, I think the sign says Wednesday!") We checked with the guy behind the desk, and he confirmed that if we left the car there overnight it would certainly be towed, so we had to pay an extra 20 Euros to have someone from a garage come pick up the car and park if overnight.

And so we went to bed with not-so-fond feelings for Florence...

Vatican, Take II

2005-05-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

We headed back to the Vatican again this morning, this time with a slightly better game plan. The guide who gave our tour through the Forum yesterday (Gastone) also conducts tours through the Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica, so we got an early start to meet up with his group. It turned out to be a pretty good tour, although we didn't spend a whole lot of time in the Vatican Museums.

(To be fair though, there's no way you could even begin to see it all in one day, and honestly, I don't think we could have handled a much longer tour. The museums were really crowded, so there was a lot of shuffling and standing, which was hard on our (already tired) feet. And, since my husband and I both grew up in Ohio, (and not in say, Beijing, New York, or Rome, for example) we haven't developed a high tolerance for being bumped and jostled for hours on end.)

The line for the Vatican Museums stretched out for a couple of blocks around the city walls, and while we stood in the line, they passed out radios with headsets, so that Gastone could speak quietly into his microphone, and we didn't have to be clustered all around him in the museum. To keep us entertained, he gave a little background history on Michelangelo, Pope Julius, and the Sistine Chapel. (If you want to know why the Sistine Chapel is so acclaimed as a work of art, I recommend reading Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King.)

Our tour took us through areas of the Museum dedicated to Renaissance art-- statues, tapestries, and paintings-- on the way to Raphael's rooms and the Sistine Chapel.

Raphael's fresco The School of Athens featuring great geniuses in philosophy, art, and science.

After seeing Michelangelo's work on the Sistine chapel, Raphael added a new figure to his work, front & center, beneath Plato & Aristotle. The "pensieroso" figure sitting by himself on the steps, writing, is supposed to represent Heraclitus of Ephesus, a solitary genius with a bitter temperament, but it is said to resemble Michelangelo, and people believe that Raphael added it to his work as a (grudging) tribute to Michelangelo.

The guards in the Sistine Chapel seem to get a kick out of enforcing all of the rules, which seem to be oriented around preventing you from appreciating Michelangelo's work... You can't sit down on the steps to look up at the ceiling, and you're also not allowed to stand in any one place for very long. Talking is strictly forbidden, even whispering. (But the guards continuously say "SHHH!" at 90 decibles, and they also come up behind people and clap loudly to make them move, because that's not distracting or annoying!) You are also not allowed to take photos or video, even without a flash. They say that 10,000 people a day go through the Sistine Chapel, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect that you could experience it in a relaxing environment.

St. Peter's Basilica is exactly what everyone says it is-- immense. I guess I had expected that it would be a reverent, awe-inspiring environment, but it's like most other places in Rome-- crowded and chaotic. Unfortunately, the idea that kept coming into my head as we stood in the basilica was the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the merchants in the Temple. While no one was selling anything, it just doesn't even remotely feel like a religious experience.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad that I got to see the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's, but I don't think I would want to go back and see them again unless I knew they wouldn't be horribly crowded. I just don't know if that's ever possible!

Tomorrow we'll head back to the airport to pick up a rental car, and then we'll leave Rome for Florence. We're planning to make a day of it, taking the scenic route and maybe stopping in one or two of the smaller towns.

Ciao!

Tired Feets

2005-05-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, we set off for the Vatican. But before getting on the Metro, we decided that we'd better ask what time it stopped running, so that we would know when we needed to start heading back to our hotel. We were told that the B line runs until midnight or 12:30, but the A line stops at 9pm everyday. When we said that we had been surprised by that, they explained that there was work being done on the lines at night. Aha! (Of course, in my world, that information would have been posted in big bold letters on large signs posted all over entrances and exits of the metro stations, but, fortunately or unfortunately, this is not my world.)

As it turns out, we arrived at St. Peter's as the pope was giving the Sunday blessing from the Papal Apartment. We saw his arm through the window, but from where we were standing, we couldn't see much of anything else.

OK, I take that back, we had a pretty good view of what had to be at least 100,000 people standing in St. Peter's square. The square itself is immense, and it was literally packed with people-- It was well beyond the scope of any stadium or arena that I've ever seen.

We tried to go into St. Peter's Basilica, but they were playing a little trick on the tourists by rerouting the lines mid-stream, so that the line that we were standing in wound up emptying back into the square without getting anywhere near the entrance to the church. Rather than getting into another line that might also get rerouted, we decided to go to the Vatican Museum, which, as it turns out, is closed on most Sundays, except on the Sundays when admission is free, and the other Sundays when it isn't closed or free. I'm not sure how you're supposed to know the schedule in advance, but that's how it is...

...So we hopped back on the Metro, changed lines at the Termini station, and headed to the Colosseum. To avoid the long, long lines for for tickets, we joined a guided tour, which turned out to be pretty good.

They also included a tour of the Forum area, which was even more interesting. One of the main reasons that I've wanted to come to Italy for so long was to see where the Roman Empire began. Some of my favorite books are the First Man in Rome series by Colleen McCullough. She does a fantastic job describing what life was like in the last years of the Republic. The books tell the stories of Sulla, Gaius Marius, Julius Caesar, and Augustus with great detail and accuracy, especially Caesar's military and political career. So I really loved seeing the ruins and imagining how it would have looked 2000 years ago.

The tour wound up on the Palantine hill, and we wandered around for a while up there. It's a relaxing, peaceful break from the crowds and noise and heat of Rome-- It's easy to understand why so many "palatial" homes have been built there over the past two millenia.

From there, we walked down to Circus Maximus, and caught the Metro back up to the Colosseum. (OK, it's only one stop, but every little bit helps when you've been walking all day! And it was essentially free since we bought three-day metro passes when we first arrived in Rome.) We found a pizzeria for dinner, and then headed back toward the Forum to see it all again at sunset. The gates were already closed, but we were able to stand and look out over everything with the full moon in the background, which was a very different experience from walking down through it the valley in the heat of the afternoon sun.

As twilight set in and the lights came up on all of the monuments and ruins, we walked back to the Metro station.

We returned to our hotel and collapsed to rest our tired feet!

A Great Start

2005-05-21T12:00:00.000-04:00

Our trip to Italy got off to a great start...

We were scheduled to fly overnight from Cincinnati to Amsterdam on Friday night, then on to Rome on Saturday. As we were waiting to start boarding our flight, they announced that it was overbooked and they were offering $400 travel vouchers to anyone willing to take a different flight. I said (jokingly) to my husband, "I'd be glad to get bumped if we could get on the direct flight to Rome instead of flying through Amsterdam." (I spent many, many hours searching the internet before I booked our tickets, and I couldn't get tickets on that direct flight to Rome for anywhere near a reasonable price.) My husband, not knowing how long the odds were against us, said, "Well, you should go tell the gate agents that." And so, after a little more consideration, I thought, "What the heck? They'll probably tell me that the Rome flight is full, or that it's already departed, but I may as well ask anyway..." As it turns out, I was almost right on both counts, but as my step-father always says, "Almost only counts in horse-shoes and hand-grenades."

I went up to the counter and told the gate agent that we would be willing to take a bump IF she could get us on the direct flight to Rome. She immediately started to work on it. (Delta's computer system apparently makes this very complicated-- It involves a lot of typing, printing things, and talking on radios.) While I was standing there waiting, I thought, "I wonder if we could upgrade our new tickets using SkyMiles? I suppose I may as well ask..." And the gate agent said, "There aren't any seats available in Coach, so I'm putting you in Business Class." So, armed with our new boarding passes, I rounded up my husband and told him the good news as we hustled down to the other gate, where they were waiting for us to board.

We wound up flying directly to Rome (cutting 4 hours off of our travel time) in the lap of luxury, plus we each got the $400 travel vouchers (which, all things considered, we would have been perfectly willing to waive), and they even managed to redirect our luggage so that it arrived in Rome with us!!!

So we arrived at the airport in Rome on Saturday morning, bought train tickets to Termini Stazione, and then walked a couple of blocks to our hotel, which is quite nice. The lobby is simple but elegant; the stairs and hallways have white marble floors, and there's a nice little terrace area overlooking a small courtyard. We rested in our room for a couple of hours, and then took the Metro to the Spanish Steps, and wandered our way down to the Pantheon by way of the Trevi Fountain.

View from the top of the Spanish Steps on a Saturday afternoon...

The Trevi Fountain - Triton's Chariot is pulled by two "Sea Horses"

One horse represents calm seas...

And the wild horse represents stormy seas...

All three piazzas were crowded and busy, packed with not just with tourists, but also with Romans hanging out with friends. (The Pantheon is truly awesome. Pictures don't do it justice-- It's just amazing to consider that it has been standing for over 1500 years, and I really doubt that we could replicate it today, even if we tried.) We had a nice leisurely dinner in the Piazza della Rotunda, and then walked back to the Spagna metro station, again by way of the Trevi Fountain, where we got some gelato and threw coins in the fountain.

View of the Pantheon from our dinner table...

Trevi Fountain at night...

The only glitch came when we entered the metro station and found that they were locking the gates. I don't understand why the metro should stop running before 9:30 on a Saturday night, particularly in a city where most people don't even begin eating dinner until 8 or 9 at night. But apparently, that's just how it is. We stopped and asked two police officers for directions, and they didn't seem at all surprised that the metro was closed. After listening to them bicker with each other in Italian over which way to tell us to go, we decided to trust our instincts (and our guide book) and start walking. We walked for a few blocks, then decided to take a cab back to our hotel.