More Than I Can Say

I have a lot I'd like to blog about. I haven't finished the OWS writeup. The presidential primary is turning out to be far more entertaining than I had thought it would be. There's a bunch of political theory bumping around in my head waiting to be turned into words. There's more good stuff for online security and Teh Dumb that surrounds the glorification of hacktivists. But there's just more out there to talk about than I have the energy to cover.

My company has entered its death spiral and the daily up and down from that is consuming most of my mental energy. I come home drained. My off-hours are now filled with preparing for the job hunt. That gets launched in March. Until that gets sorted out, there won't be too much on the blog. I may get bursts of inspiration, but a post or two per month is probably all that's going to happen.

Anglachel

A Long, Nasty Year

This year started out badly and didn't get a fuck of a lot better. I started with a compressed nerve in my neck, swiftly followed by my mother's death and went on to weeks of persistent illness. I feel like I've been sick the entire year. Now, at the end of December, the compressed nerve is making a comeback. Oh frabjous day...

The company I work for is being dissolved by greedy ideologues who declare - without a scrap of evidence - that outsourcing of course is more economical than having people directly on staff.  The multi-million dollar contracts will be signed sometime in April and then all staff are simply waiting to be absorbed by the IT Borg Services company slurping up their section of the operations or else get laid off. I'm going to take advantage of some job placement training that's due in January/February, then I'm going to start looking. I don't fancy waiting around to be fired. My manager, whose pretty cool, knows what I'm doing and said she'll help with my resume, send me job leads and even do practice interviews if I'd like.

I keep up with the news but have resisted the urge to comment. Pretty much everything I said back in 2008 about the wrong track the respectable people on the Left were determined to take has come true, not that they appear to notice. The Boyz of the Blogz continue to be as shallow, narcissistic, clueless, and self-congratulatory as ever, no matter how many times the Incomparable One and the Shrill One smack them upside the head.

My political perspective doesn't align with most other blogospheric positions, left or right. I am unimpressed by the street rebellions (though I agree with Eric Hobsbawm that it is like 1848 all over again), rolling my eyes at the wasted opportunities of the Occupy movement, and deeply cynical about the antics of hacktivists, from Julian Assange to Lulzsec to Anonymous. A customer of the company the Spousal Unit works for got attacked by Anonymous a while back and it was days of effort to keep the little fuckers from bringing down the site. No, not amused by these hooligans whatsoever.

I watch an allegedly liberal intelligentsia unable to escape its collective fantasy that anyone who rejects Obama can only be doing so because they are racist, not because the guy is to the right of Richard Nixon. No, I won't be placated by the knowledge that the Right is worse - shitty governance is shitty governance even if the choice is that or obscenely shitty governance. It's bad and sad when you realize Nixon would be an improvement.

In the absence of material improvements to living conditions brought about by the Long Recession (which, truth be told, really started when Reagan took office), increasing numbers of people will vote their resentments. If it won't get better, you might as well make other people hurt. The high-minded left doesn't want to consider that the dumb-shit cop who pepper sprayed the protesters at UC Davis is a perfect representative of the portion of the 99% who must be wooed away from the reactionary right if any high-mindedness is to have an actual effect in the world. That's the deep failure of the left in this country since LBJ.

So, that's been this year for me - pain physical and emotional, job stress, and political estrangement.  Instead of blogging, I've been watching old TV shows on Netflix, reading books, cooking lots of amazing things, tracking local food prices, trying to exercise, visiting with my dad, seeing my friends and generally have this thing called a life.

It's kind of nice.

Anglachel

Slowly Returning

Life slowly returns to normal.

I've been watching a lot of stuff from Netflix - on demand and DVDs - as I've been wading through my  emotional detritus these last two months. I cam across a very interesting British detective series I recommend to anyone. It's called Life on Mars and has two very short (by US standards) seasons of eight episodes each. The basic premise is a contemporary police detective, Sam Tyler, is involved in a car accident. He wakes up in 1973, still a police detective in the same city. Much psychopathy ensues. The first season deals with a specific problem from Sam's past (which is the series' present) while the second season tries to provide a satisfactory explanation of what the hell is happening. It is a brilliant bit of story telling.

Rest in Peace Linda Ingrid

My mother died in the early morning of Wednesday, January 26, 2011. It was not a peaceful death, but it came swiftly that morning. She was not religious and rejected most solace as various diseases slowly disintegrated her mortal form starting in her mid-twenties. She had a bleak and unromantic view of life.

Ralph Stanley's a capella version of "O Death" from O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a song she would (grimly) appreciate:

O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
My mother came to my bed
Placed a cold towel upon my head
My head is warm my feet are cold
Death is a-movin upon my soul
Oh, death how you're treatin' me
You've close my eyes so I can't see
Well you're hurtin' my body
You make me cold
You run my life right outta my soul
Oh death please consider my age
Please don't take me at this stage
My wealth is all at your command
If you will move your icy hand
Oh the young, the rich or poor
Hunger like me you know
No wealth, no ruin, no silver no gold
Nothing satisfies me but your soul
O, death
O, death
Wont you spare me over til another year
Wont you spare me over til another year
Wont you spare me over til another year


For the first time in forty-five years, she is not in pain. Death, you are a bastard.

Anglachel

Edit - Thank you to all of the well-wishers. Be assured I am reading every comment.

Leave of Absence

I'm dealing with a family medical crisis at present. It may end tomorrow, it may be months. It will be a while before I do any serious blogging.

My thanks to those who know what's up and have sent their good wishes.

Anglachel

Good Thoughts

Thanks to everyone for all of the warm wishes and helpful advice.

I've been to the doctor and there don't appear to be any complications like a growth or bone damage (I was in a minor car accident not so long ago), so rest and physical therapy will be the course of action.

Anglachel

The New Year

I've been unable to post recently due a severely pinched nerve in my neck that has rendered any motion in my left arm and hand excruciatingly painful.

In lieu of posts from me, and probably a far better exchange, I recommend reading the articles of the most recent New York Review of Books. The edition is solid from top to bottom. Among my favorites:

• Where do we go from here? Paul Krugman and Robin Wells repeat the call for a primary opponent to Obama, providing the political and economic rationale for it to happen. Their theme of delinking is one I have tried to work with recently, but have been held back by the nerve problem.
• Why Wikileaks Changes Everything - Christian Caryl delves into many of the same themes I raised early on, particularly the political implications of the indiscriminate release of government data. I particularly like the evaluation of Assange as an incoherent twit, which has been my estimation all along.
• The Concealed Battle to Run Russia - Amy Knight makes excellent use of some leaked diplomatic cables in her review of a book on Russian politics. You want a picture of a truly criminal state? Cheney could only dream of this level of power.
• The Beleaguered Cambodians - Margo Picken provides a look at another criminal state. This one goes into the ways in which imperial & colonial powers have abetted a local elite to rob the nation blind. 
• China: From Famine to Oslo - Perry Link discusses two new novels by Chinese writers in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo. As with the articles on Russia and Cambodia, the author goes into life in a repressive, authoritarian state, discussing the reality of life for people who truly are oppressed, spied upon, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by their governments, and how they respond to this condition. These articles individually and together serve as a useful corrective to the denizens of the Left blogosphere wringing their hands and bemoaning the horrible, horrible behavior of the US Gubmint against Our Hero Julian and who might just be coming after poor little ME next! Get a grip, people.
• Curveballs - Joseph Lelyveld's review of Bush's account of his administration. Cool, almost cold, it eviscerates W's self-exculpation. The final paragraphs on exchanges between W and Bush 41 are particularly good.
• No Thanks for the Memories (access for NYRB subscribers only, but first few paragraphs are available) - Gordon Wood provides a much needed counterpoint to professional liberal pundits' mocking dismissal of the Tea Party by talking about the difference between fact and meaning in cultural memory.

Anyway, I hurt and don't know when that will change. I hope your new year is starting out better than mine.

Anglachel

In Search of the Ordinary

I've been really busy the last few days at work and haven't had any energy to blog. I still don't have much.

My evenings lately have been spent watching re-runs of Dr. Who. It is great fun, what with constantly saving damsels in distress and entire civilizations and foiling the bad guys.

I can see the appeal.

Mostly I've sat in wonder at the explosion of ever expanding hysteria among what were once reasonably intelligent blogs. I can't even begin to address these things because the fundamental assumptions underlying the arguments simply aren't rational. They have bits of fact, threads of insight, and an overwhelming body of self-referential reasoning. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's observation in Gravity's Rainbow:

If there is something comforting--religious, if you want--about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

I feel caught between a faith that cannot see its lack of foundation and a determined cynicism that will not allow foundations to be laid. Faith and anti-faith denying a place to reason.

Apocalypse is so much easier to conceive of than the ordinary.

Anglachel

iPad Review

I was at lunch with a customer yesterday and she pulled a 3G iPad out of her purse to show it off. I've read various reviews (glowing and critical, serious and silly) about the device, so was curious to see for myself.

Overall: Meh.

Specifics:

1. It was a lot heavier than I had thought it would be. I nearly dropped it when she handed it over because I had anticipated it weighing half the amount it does. The reviews I had read led me to believe that it was light, but could end up feeling heavy if you held it for a long time. I found I had to hold it very firmly and use more hand, wrist and arm strength to move it than I do with other objects that size. It is a very dense device. This would become tiring for me to hold up for more than a few minutes.
2. Finger goo. (Note that this is not so much a criticism of the iPad as an expression of my distaste for touch screen devices as such.) I like clean display screens. I compulsively wipe my desktop monitor screens and my laptop. I'm someone who hates cell phones because the display screens end up getting coated with finger prints, dirt, sweat and oils from people's faces, and bits of gunk from pockets and purses. I won't use other people's cell phones except in emergencies and I won't use my own if there is a desk phone nearby. The first thing I noticed about the iPad screen was the finger prints smeared all over it. Ewww, just ewww.
   
3. Screen glare. The finger prints were so noticeable because of the highly reflective screen. This sucker is shiny. I am not a big fan of the "wet look" on display screens, preferring a more matte surface, but shiny is OK as long as it doesn't obscure the image. We were inside, with low ambient light, six feet away from a window, with no direct sunlight. I could barely make out the images on the screen due to the glare. It took a lot of turning and repositioning of both myself and the device to find an angle and lighting condition which made the screen readable. In contrast, my Blackberry phone only needed a small tilt away from the window to be completely readable.
   
4. Jumpy screen. As I struggled to find a good lighting angle, my efforts were complicated by the screen flipping around to adjust to the orientation of the device. The angle I needed to get the right lighting resulted in the device flipping into upside-down landscape mode without warning due to tiny changes in my hands. Then I would have to move it significantly to get it back into right-side up portrait orientation, which led to screen glare, which made the finger prints stand out, etc....
5. Navigation/Interface. Jakob Neilson's write up on the inconsistency of the interface and the lack of conventional cues on how to interact with the device are right on the money. One app worked by me tilting the iPad around to "move" stuff on the screen, like one of those closed plastic boxes with BBs in it that you tilt and turn to try to get all the BBs into holes in the bottom of the box. Another had me tapping the screen as a simulacrum of the object in the picture. This reminded me of the horrible days of early Web design when users would see a picture of something, like an office, and click on the picture to interact with the site, everything image mapped and utterly inaccessible - design as metaphor. Other apps had symbol images instead of text on buttons, and there was no way to get pop-up or tool-tip text to know what would happen if I tapped the button. There is no equivalent of mouse hover or right-click, and no way to tab through as with a keyboard. The flip side of "intuitive" interfaces is that they are opaque to the user. If I'm playing a game like Myst (anybody else remember that game?), the mystery of the interface is part of the game. On a productivity app, not so much.
   
6. Awkward size. It is too big/heavy to hold with one hand and not quite big enough to cradle comfortably in my left arm while using my right hand to poke at it. The holding is made more difficult by the jumpy screen and the glare. I think the only good way to hold it for long periods of time is either to prop it up on a desktop (using the optional dock/stand or one of the carry cases that also props it up) or else to sit with your legs pulled up and the device resting against them. On a netbook/laptop, the "stand" is built in plus you get a real keyboard. On a hand-held device, it is easy to support with one hand and interact with the other. Some devices can be held and manipulated in one hand (Blackberry). So, I have lost the portability of a small device and the power and input options of a slightly larger device.
   
7. Small and dim images. This one surprised me more than it should have, I think, and perhaps would not have been so dramatic if I had a netbook. I expected a better image. I found myself squinting and having to bring it closer to my face to make out details on the screen. This would probably have been less of a problem without the screen glare and finger prints (I did surreptitiously wipe the screen a few times to clean it up), but the colors did not pop the way I thought they would, the images were not crisp, and the overall screen size felt cramped. I kept wanting to click a magnify button. Oddly enough, I don't have that sense when working with my Palm T|X or my Blackberry 8830. Their screens are bright, crisp and don't seem cramped, even at their small sizes.
8. Single-tasking/single-button. Some people think this is a big draw-back on the device, some people don't care. My Palm and my Blackberry are single-tasking devices and I haven't found this to be a problem with them, so was not expecting to find this to be a problem with the iPad. Wrong. The screen was large enough that I felt like I should be able to have multiple windows open. The single button at the bottom of the bezel was not an obvious way to change apps - the owner had to show me how to use it. I disliked having to click that and then touch the screen again to get another app vs. being able to use buttons on the Palm or Blackberry to swiftly flip around without changing my grip on the device. I had to either lay the iPad on the table or start juggling it from one hand to two, which then started new rounds of stabilize-the-screen-orientation.
   

I was not able to check the internet connection because the owner had not yet set up her account.

Overall, I was not impressed. It was awkward to handle, opaque to navigate, and visually merely adequate. The apps she had downloaded were mostly games, which are not the kind of things I do with computers. (Though I do admit to having a big weakness for Age of Empires.) None of the non-game apps showed off made me go wow. I would like to try using the device again in different lighting conditions (for example, a brightly lit office with no windows nearby) and to do some web browsing.

It does not fit the way I use my electronics at all. I program stuff, I create stuff, I multi-task, I use keyboards, buttons and styluses (styli?) very effectively. I want my devices to do work. I don't do a lot of passive consumption (20 years without a TV in my house) and the only hip part of my life are the real things attached to my fat butt. Thus, iPad is not a product for me.

Anglachel

Good Eats

Someone (Sha, I think) asked for recipes. OK, here's what I cook a lot of:

Crock Cooked Beans for Two

Start at 8:00 PM. Take a cup of dry beans of some pinto-ish variety (pintos, anasazis, something mottled, you get the picture). Rinse and soak until the next night.

At 8:00 PM the next day, pour yourself a glass of Two-Buck Chuck from Traders or pop open a bottle of beer you bought on sale at the IGA. Miller's good. Drink as you cook. Also have a spousal unit, congenial family member, a friend or two, and/or whomever is in the house come and hang out. Give 'em a beer. Make 'em chop stuff.

Drain and rinse beans and put into a medium or bigger crock pot. Pour in liquid to cover and turn on "High". Chicken stock is good, water is good. Add a splash of wine or beer if you like, right from the glass/bottle, but not too much.

Take a sausage, whatever kind you like (I like Louisiana hotlinks or spicy Portuguese linguica best), slice it into 1/4 thick rounds and pan fry on medium heat until browned and the fat is rendered. Put sausage in crock. Do not drain fat from pan unless really excessive.

Chop up a whole bunch of garlic cloves, as many as you like. I usually add about 6 cloves. If you have some bell peppers in the fridge that need using, chop them too, but not more than two. Chop up a big yellow onion (sorry VL, I *love* onions). Toss these into the pan with the sausage fat and cook on low to medium heat until they soften and the onion begins to change color.

Chop up all the old tomatoes you have sitting around and throw them in the pan. I usually have three to five in the vicinity. Or use a can of tomatoes, whatever size and chopped/unchopped status is on hand. Do you have some tomato paste that needs using? Spoon in some, maybe a tablespoon or two. Add two or three whole chipotle peppers, being sure to get a good spoon of the adobo sauce.

While that simmers, mix spices. Here's what I did tonight: 1 tsp coriander, 1 tblsp cumin, all the chili powder left at the bottom of the jar (about 1/2 tsp), 1 tsp pasilla chili powder, 1 tsp new mexico chili powder, 1/4 tsp cayenne, 1+ tblsp dried oregano. Toss spice mix on top of vegetables and stir to incorporate. If stuff is sticking, add a little water or a splash of whatever you're drinking, but only enough to control sticking.

As soon as spices are mixed, dump into crock. Use a little liquid to loosen up anything stuck to the bottom of the pan and put that in, too. Stir to mix ingredients.

Cook overnight. If you have a really good crock pot, cook on low. If you have a crappy crock pot, cook on high. It just needs to be hot enough to gently bubble all night.

In the morning, turn off crock, lift crock out of cradle (if your's works like that) and/or let it sit with the lid off while you get ready for work. I don't like putting the crock into the fridge, so I pour the mixture into a different bowl, put that in the fridge and soak the crock so stuff doesn't stick all day. The mixture may be dry across the top, so be sure to stir the dry stuff down into the wet stuff.

When you get home from work, take it out of the fridge and let it warm up a bit. Ladle out what you're going to eat that night and warm it up on the stove or in the microwave. Add salt as desired. Serve with whatever starch accompaniment you like best (rice, potatoes, tortillas, corn bread, etc.) or have on hand to make the proteins complete. If you want to get fancy, add some sour cream, avocados, tomatoes, diced peppers, green onions, stray vegetables from the back of the crisper you need to use, etc. as condiments.

Should be enough left over for lunch a few days later.

The chipotles are expensive per can, but a little goes a long way and they keep forever in the fridge. The sausage doesn't have to be great, it just has to be strong flavored. It's best if it is pork, but follow your dietary/religious bliss. The rest is cheap and crock pots are very fuel efficient cookers. Double or triple recipe as desired. Scale chili heat up or down according to your taste.

Anglachel

Note to Self

Do not under any circumstances give in to the temptation, no matter how good it smells, to lick the chipotle chili adobo sauce off your fingers after dropping the chopped up bits into the bean mix.

You know how it will end.

Anglachel

Backed Up

Hey kids,

I'm glad people are enjoying the recent posts, but keep expectations in line.

You'll be seeing some occasional posts here, probably in bursts as something in the news catches my attention, but I'm not returning to the almost daily blogging I was doing last year. My life is pretty full right now and I'm doing my best to keep any one thing from dominating. And, given the pathetic performance of the current administration, it's going to be a long four years. I gotta pace myself.

On the non-political front, we're finally getting the trim painted on Casa Anglachel week after next, so I should have some photos to share, and we're entering Apocalypse Season here in Southern California. Recently I saw a fire map for the City of San Diego, marking areas within the city limits that are considered high risk zones for wild fires. Yup, we're in one of those zones.

Anglachel

17 Years

It's a grey day here in San Diego, just like it was in Puyallup seventeen years ago when I turned the live-in into the spousal unit.

How will we celebrate? Well, he has to go pick up the laundry and I need to put gas in the car, plus there's a checkbook to balance, a garden to weed, dishes to wash and a floor to be swept. Tonight, it's spaghetti with friends as we admire how big their baby boy is getting.

Yeah, it's good.

Anglachel

What I Did on My Winter Vacation

Yes, I'm back. Not that I ever left, mind you, but I am back to do some blogging.

After the intense blogging of last year, I needed a break. My life was out of balance, so I did a lot of other things, very non-blogging, non-political kinds of things like watch a bunch of movies and TV shows I'd missed the first time around, collect a whole new set of recipies, put in herbs, walk all over the neighborhood, and build a few web sites.

I've also had my raise from last year rescinded in a company wide pay cut and am waiting to see what other measures may be needed to keep the company afloat. We have a good CEO and an excellent senior team who are working their butts off to keep everyone employed with benefits that are more than just window dressing.

I had a round with the flu a few weeks back, maybe even swine flu (I do live in San Diego), but have finally shaken that. The whole famn damily is doing well. Last week, we put geraniums into pots and put them on the front porch. The bright red blooms are neon against the yellow stucco.

So now I'm back to put blogging into the mix once more. Fewer posts, without a doubt. My goal is to keep up the political theorizing I began last year about the shifting cultural and political alignment of the nation, and how the netroots, even with Facebook and iPods thrown in, will not rescue the Republic.

Anglachel

Reasons to be Thankful

Good thing we weren't planning any big holiday celebration today.

We've had record breaking rain the last 24 hours around these parts which is fantastic for reducing wildfire dangers but sadly has turned the Casa Anglachel basement into a swimming pool. There's a leak in a wall and seepage in spots in the foundation. We knew we would have some long term issues when we bought the place. The house is more than 80 years old. We've been doing drainage work and it's better than last year.

I am thankful that the problems aren't worse, that we have a roof over our heads, food in the fridge and a furnace that works, and that we have some savings to get us through the rainy days.

Anglachel

Light on Blogging

Not that there isn't plenty to comment on, but dear friends have just given birth to a big baby boy and we're running errands for them in between cooing over the sproglet.

I'm stunned and saddened by the news of the death of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones. She was one of the best people in national politics. This is a loss for the nation.

I'm also waiting for someone, anyone, (Bueller?) among the Obamacans to recognize that they are combatting arguments that are not being made by the Republicans and letting through the really harmful stuff without even noticing it is being done.

For example, take Karl Rove's pronouncement about Hillary being the obvious and best choice for Obama's VP. Good ole' Turd Blossom - listen carefully to what he says but never trust his motives. With his promotion of Hillary, he:

• Made a very cogent and reasonable argument in support of a strong candidate based on a non-partisan and unvarnished evaluation of Hillary's considerable capabilities.
• Attached the Rove name to Hillary just when it would behoove the Republicans to have the CDS Obamacans go into hissy fits over that association.
• Praise Hillary and make the Republicans look more sympathetic to those of her supporters who are swing voters.
• Revived the "assassination threat" meme obliquely by describing a situation in which Obama has been killed or incapacitated.
• Drew attaention to the fact that Hillary is ready and raring to go as President, the most qualified person out there, while Obama suffers by comparison.

Obama is not being attacked on race or nationalism issues, as you would think from the kinds of responses coming out of his camp. He is being attacked on competency and readiness questions, and is being feminized by the Republican attacks. Obama is being called less ready than a woman to lead the country, he is being compared not to any old celebrity but specifically vapid and vain party girls, and his much vaunted judgment is being mocked as shallow, uninformed and dangerous to national security.

People who can be moved by simple appeals to racism/jingosim/xenophobia need no convincing when it comes to Obama. Those votes are already gone. What the Republicans are successfully pursuing are the people in the middle whose hearts do not go pitter-pat over narratives of hopey-changey. They want to have a solid reason to vote for someone. Obama is not offering solid policy choices, he is getting increasingly whiney and defensive, and McCain is plugging away on national security as his own selling point.

Affirmative action, not race, is the focus of the Republican assault, and the Democrats are letting themselves be railroaded again.

Anglachel

Digging

I fear I am not up to the excellence of the gardening and other creative work to be found at the Mighty Corrente, but I stay busy. Lately, I've been doing a lot of digging.

There are old planting beds along the south wall of the house that haven't had anything new planted in them since sometime in the 70s. It was mostly twigs, dirty crushed white rock and some out of control birds of paradise. Between our grubbing and the construction work, everything except a single shady tree has been removed. We started by digging up, sifting out and washing off the decorative white rock. Then we dug out a 3'x8' nail & glass impregnated patch of weeds near the back steps, just downslope of an old and prolific Meyer lemon tree. While the spousal unit leveled the ground and mortared a row of bricks in place, I sifted the detritus out of the dirt, separating river rock and good fill rubble from metal, glass and other garbage. The dirt itself is building up in a large pile, waiting to be mixed with manure and other amendments when it's time to plant.

The rubble went back to form a drainage layer. On top of that, we mixed some coarse decomposed granite given to us by a neighbor with most of the decorative rock scraped from the old planters and tamped it down into a firm yet water permeable walkway. Water is a big issue in San Diego. We use too much and don't use it wisely. Ironically, during the last drought in the 70s, many people ripped out plantings and paved vast swaths of what used to be lawns, or else laid down mile after mile of black plastic and covered it with crushed rock. This has created a situation both impossibly ugly and water-hostile, as any runoff goes right down the storm drains. The City is in the middle of a water emergency now. Our goal for the house is to put in a landscape with drought tolerant plants and do some aggressive water management, but I get ahead of myself.

The next task was to create a pleasant sitting area near the kitchen in the shadow of the sunroom bumpout. Right next to the sunroom steps, we excavated five wheelbarrow loads of hardpacked dirt and rhizomes from the old bird of paradise plant. That went into a large mound in the backyard. Next, in the wider area, we scraped away the top layer of construction crud (I could probably open a hardware store with the excess nails), weeds and junk. Into a different pile for sifting. The clean dirt underneath we raked and redistributed and made relatively flat.

We went to Home Depot and picked up eight bags of fine bark and two of cocoa bean shells. Back at the ranch, we mixed a quarter bag of cocoa bean shells into the regular bark, and then dumped the mix into the wider area (about 7'x16'). The rest of the bags followed, making a dense, chocolate scented base. Add two old benches we've dragged from apartment to apartment over the last decade and a couple of beat-up tables with uneven legs and we had ourselves a lovely spot for a warm summer evening. Mulched up like that, it keeps in the moisture for the Pittosporum that shades the area.

What's next? Sifting the dirt dug from the hole. I'm about 1/3 of the way through it. Rubble to fill up the bottom of the hole, then mix up a nice planting mix with the clean dirt and other stuff. For next to the stairs, probably some salvia - purple and dusty green against the saffron colored walls should be nice. Further along, in the part we haven't excavated yet, I'm planning an herb garden. The sitting area will get some colorful pots and plants.

Anglachel

Better News

My cat is still missing, but I got some good news today on something else. My sister-in-law delivered a healthy baby boy early this morning, so I am once again an auntie. Mom and baby are doing well, according to the whole famn damily.

Hopefully pictures and a name soon to follow.

Anglachel

Feeling Like a Zombie

Nope, still not dead, though I'm feeling a bit like a zombie.

I've been inundated with technical support work the last few weeks (including conducting a 7 hour technical support call that wore out seven people on two continents before an elusive bug was finally cornered and exterminated) and have just wrapped up five straight days of repairing the damage of a malicious SQL injection attack on a site I support, plus armoring the place up against an expected second round.

In my spare hours, I've been working out my frustrations by digging up rocks in my yard. It becomes mindlessly soothing after a while, and make me nice and tired for a good night's sleep.

With John Edwards in the news these days, I have been reflecting on the theme of "Two Americas" and have applied a twist that more accurately reflects the two Americas within the Democratic Party - those whose bigotry and biases are excused because they are of the right class and those whose flaws are inexcusable, even when the flaws do not exist.

Let's just say it started with a friend who has gone from being a McCain supporter a year ago to being an Obamacan presently, and who uses very interesting Stevensonian coding to explain away his casual racism.

But at the moment, I'm tuckered out and need to get some sleep.

Anglachel

No Thinks